Cicero on the Asian financial crisis

[Michael Pollak]

<quote\>

Businessmen who had invested in Asia . . . were facing ruin.  Cicero had
to explain to this crowd of the urban poor why the reverses of middle
class speculators should matter to them.  He said that Rome's whole system
of credit and finance was directly bound up with money invested in Asia.  
"If that is lost, then our Roman finances too are inevitably involved in
the same process of upheaval and collapse."

<quote\>

A.J. Languth, _A Noise of War_, describing a speech made in 68 B.C.E.