He had staked the mass of his substance on a desperate venture. But time went on and Ptolemy was not restored, and without the revenues of his kingdom he of course could not pay his creditors. At last, at the end of the year 56, Gabinius, then governor of Syria, had pressure put on him by the creditors--among them perhaps both Caesar and Pompeius--to march into Egypt without the authority of the senate. He took Rabirius with him, and, in order to secure the repayment, the latter was made superintendent (dioikaetaes) of the Egyptian revenues[147]. Unluckily for him, his wily debtor did after all turn against him, and he escaped from Egypt with difficulty and with the loss of all his wealth. When Gabinius was accused de repetundis and found guilty of accepting enormous sums from Ptolemy, Rabirius was involved in the same prosecution as having received part of the money; Cicero defended him, and as it seems with success, on the plea that equites were not liable to prosecution under the lex Julia. Towards the end of his speech he drew a clever picture of his unlucky client's misfortunes, and declared that he would have had to quit the Forum, i.e. to leave the Stock Exchange in disgrace, if Caesar had not come to his rescue by placing large sums at his disposal.
What Rabirius did was simply to gamble on a gigantic scale, and get others to gamble with him. The luck turned against him, and he came utterly to grief. There seems indeed to have been a perfect passion for dealing with money in this wild way among the men of wealth and influence; it was the fancy of the hour, and no disgrace attached to it if a man could escape ruin. Thus the vast capital accumulated--the sources of which were almost entirely in the provinces and the kingdoms on the frontiers--was hardly ever used productively. It never returned to the region whence it came, to be used in developing its resources; the idea of using it even in Italy for industrial undertakings was absent from the mind of the gambler. Those numberless villas, of which we shall speak in another chapter, were homes of luxury and magnificence, not centres of agricultural industry. There are indeed some signs that in this very generation the revival of Italian agriculture was beginning, and more especially the cultivation of the olive and the vine; Varro, some twenty years later, could claim that Italy was the best cultivated country in the world.[148] It may be that the din of the "insanum forum" and its wild speculation has prevented our hearing of the quiet efforts in the country to put capital to a legitimate productive use. But of the social life of the city the Forum was the heart, and of any prudent or scientific use of capital the Forum knew hardly anything.