The effect was to split society in halves, the basis being servile, and the freemen being separated into a series of classes, according to the economic power of the mind. Wealth formed the title to nobility of the great oligarchy which thus came to constitute the core of the Empire. At the head stood the senators, whose rank was hereditary unless they lost their property, for to be a senator a man had to be rich. Augustus fixed $48,000 as the minimum of the senatorial fortune, and made up the deficiency to certain favoured families,[17] but Tiberius summarily ejected spendthrifts.[18] All Latin literature is redolent of money. Tacitus, with an opulent connection, never failed to speak with disdain of the base-born, or, in other words, of the less prosperous. “Poppæus Sabinus, a man of humble birth,” raised to position by the caprice of two emperors;[19] “Cassius Severus, a man of mean extraction”;[20] and, in the poetry of antiquity, there are few more famous lines than those in which Juvenal has described the burden of poverty: “Haud facile emergunt, quorum virtutibus obstat Res angusta domi.”[21] Perhaps no modern writer has been so imbued with the spirit of the later Empire as Fustel de Coulanges, and on this subject he has been emphatic. Not only were the Romans not democratic, but at no period of her history did Rome love equality. In the Republic rank was determined by wealth. The census was the basis of the social system. Every citizen had to declare his fortune before a magistrate, and his grade was then assigned him. “Poverty and wealth established the legal differences between men.” The first line of demarcation lay between those who owned land and those who did not. The former were _assidui_: householders rooted in the soil. The latter were _proletarians_. The _proletarians_ were equal in their poverty; but the _assidui_ were unequal in their wealth, and were consequently divided into five classes. Among these categories all was unequal--taxes, military service, and political rights. They did not mix together. “If one transports oneself to the last century of the Republic ... one finds there an aristocracy as strongly consolidated as the ancient patrician.... At the summit came the senatorial order. To belong to it the first condition was to possess a great fortune.... The Roman mind did not understand that a poor man could belong to the aristocracy, or that a rich man was not part of it.”[22]