Rome

From The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, Chapter XXVI -- "From Tiberius Gracchus to the God Emperor in Rome":

Another respect in which the Roman system was a crude anticipation of our own, and different from any preceding political system we have considered, was that it was a cash- and credit-using system. Money had been in the world as yet for only a few centuries. But its use had been growing; it was providing a fluid medium for trade and enterprise, and changing economic conditions profoundly. In republican Rome, the financier and the "money" interest began to play a part recognizably similar to their roles today.

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After the fall of Carthage the Roman imagination went wild with the hitherto unknown possibilities of finance...

In this curiously interesting century of Roman history we find man after man asking, "What has happened to Rome?" Various answers are made--a decline in religion, a decline from the virtues of the Roman forefathers, Greek "intellectual poison," and the like. We, who can look at the problem with a large perspective, can see that what had happened to Rome was "money"

// Related post: When in Rome...