Of the condition of the people at this early period little or nothing can be known, and to amuse ourselves with idle guesses, would be scarcely better than to turn into a game of blindman's buff the important business of history. We can however state, with confidence, that the earliest Romans had no regular coinage, but were in the habit of answering with brass, in the rudest shape, the demands of their creditors. Servius Tullius is reputed to have been the first who converted the brass into coin, and marked it with the figure of a horse or some other animal,[12] as an emblem, perhaps, of the fact, that money runs away very rapidly.
Among the early Romans, the most honourable occupations were agriculture and war; the latter enabling the citizens to make a conquest of the soil with the sword, and the former teaching them to subdue it to their purposes by the implements of husbandry. Trade and commerce were held in contempt, and left to the plebeians; the patrician considering himself suitably employed only when he was thrashing his corn, or performing the same operation on his enemies.
During the early existence of the city the native artists were few, and the great works of architecture undertaken by the later kings were embellished by foreign talent from Etruria. The writing-master had made so little progress in ancient Rome, that it is doubtful whether many of the patricians could write their own names; and even some of the most distinguished characters of the day were men of mark, not only by their position, but by their signatures.
It is not very gratifying to the friends of education to find that though ignorance was almost universal among the early Romans, there was a wholesome tone of morality among the people, which led them, not only to condemn in their traditions the cruelty and laxity of principle prevailing in the family of their last king, but to pay due reverence to the domestic virtues of Lucretia. The legend of the latter being found spinning with her maids, while the princesses of the house of Tarquin were reeling in the dance, during the absence of their respective husbands, is sufficient to show the estimation in which decency and sobriety were held, as well as the odium that attached to riotous revelry. The patrician youth of infant and unlettered Rome would have been ashamed of those nocturnal gambols which have prevailed among portions of the juvenile aristocracy and gentry in more civilised countries, and in a more enlightened age, when door-knockers, and bell-handles, have been carried off as the _spolia opima_ of some disorderly triumph.