Joachim Fernau “Caesar sends his regards”

Eighteenth chapter
If, coming from the periphery of Italy, one approached Rome by land, one began to feel its radiance several hundred kilometers before. The farmhouses kept their gates closed, the estates were guarded, the horses in guarded, hidden areas. Shortly before Rome, the picture changed dramatically. Here, the young, wine-loving Romans came out on wagons or on horseback in a career, cheerful and unoccupied, always up for funny pranks, sometimes kashering horses, sometimes killing a girl in turn, sometimes inspecting the chests and boxes or setting fire to a barn, so that it crackled. The peasants of the area formed protective troops that kept watch in the evening and at night.

The state had become the enemy of the honest citizen. It no longer honored order; it gave all protection to the pathological and called it humane. The decent person was suspect to it as a living reproach and was defamed in order not to be able to become an accuser. The state treasury wasted tax money on the upkeep of the people’s luxury baths and fed the mass of idle proletarians from the cradle to the grave. Inflation was spreading rapidly. A denarius, long since ceased to be made of silver, still had at least the value of a few pennies in the time of Commodus. A hundred years were enough to reduce it to a thousandth part. The state issued this trash money to the officials and employees of the entire empire and forced them to accept it at face value, but as soon as it ran back to him, he himself refused to accept it as counterfeit money. He had become a criminal. Money transactions soon came to a complete standstill, trade with foreign countries ceased, and Rome fell back to the level of payments in kind. Those who had good old money hid it. Everything fled into material assets, into easily transportable ones, into gold, pearls and precious stones.

Source:

Joachim Fernau
Caesar sends his regards
The history of the Romans
Published 1971 by Herbig-Verlag