If you met a senator, or a person of senatorial rank, in the street, you would know him for such by the broad band of purple which ran down the front, and probably also down the back, of his tunic, and by the silver or ivory crescent which he wore upon his black shoes.  His wife, it is perhaps needless to say made even more show of what is called the “broad stripe.”  If you met a knight, you would perceive his standing by his two narrow stripes of purple appearing upon the same part of his dress.  Each would wear a gold ring; but that in itself would prove nothing, since, despite all attempts at prohibiting the custom, every Roman who could afford a gold ring permitted himself that luxury.

If you entered one of the large semicircular theatres, which are to be described in due course, you would find that the men wearing the broad stripe seated themselves in the chairs which stood upon the level in front of the stage, while those wearing the narrow stripes would occupy the first fourteen tiers of seats rising just behind them.  No one else might, occupy those places.  If some one who had been improperly posing as a knight, or who had been degraded from his rank because he had wasted his credit and his money and no longer possessed either L3200 or a reputation, ventured to seat himself in the fourteen rows in the hope of being unnoticed, he would be speedily called upon by the usher to withdraw.  Snobs occasionally made the attempt, and, at a somewhat later date, we have an amusing epigram of Martial concerning one who repeatedly but unsuccessfully dodged the usher and who was at last compelled to kneel in the gangway opposite the end of the fourteenth row, where it might look to those behind as if he were sitting among the knights, while technically he could claim that he was not sitting at all.

Elsewhere also, as for instance at the chariot-races in the Circus, and at the gladiatorial shows in the amphitheatre, there were special places set apart for the two orders.

Below the senators and the knights came the “people,”—­the “commons,” or “third estate”—­with all its usual grades and its usual variety of occupation or no occupation, of manners and character or absence of both.  With the life of these, as with the life of a noble, we shall deal at the proper time.

So much for the Roman citizen proper.  Other elements of the population were the foreigners.  At Rome these were exceedingly numerous, and the city may in this respect be called—­as indeed it was called—­a microcosm, a small copy or epitome of the Roman world.  Gauls, Africans, Greeks, Jews, Syrians, and Egyptians were perhaps the most commonly to be seen, but particularly prominent were the Greeks and the Jews.  The Greeks were recognised above all as the clever men, the artists, the social entertainers, and the literary guides.  The Jews, who formed a sort of colony in what is now known as Trastevere—­the low-lying quarter across the Tiber—­were not yet the princes of high