On the question of debt. Under most circumstances the senatorial class in particular more or less lived with their debts. They paid off old debts, sometimes by borrowing from their friends, and usually took out new debts on top of that. Cash was not necessarily a plentiful commodity among the landed classes, for whom status was dependent on landholdings, not stockpiles of coin. Senatorial rank was expensive, and it was not necessarily degenerates who ended up in immense debt, though the Roman imagination liked to believe it was so. The aristocrat who found himself burdened with heavy debt more often than not was forced to borrow more, lest his insolvency become known and his reputation--and possibly even his senatorial status--become endangered. The written IOUs between senators and equites and the promissory notes to various moneylenders were a form of unofficial currency in and of themselves, though they had little fixed value, and they were traded and paid off externally. Indeed, a not insignificant part of Republican politics were the favors owed one politician to another, not least of which was assumption of debt. In some cases a lucky debtor might find his debts paid off in full by another, as Catulus tried (unsuccessfully) with Caesar in exchange for his withdrawal of his pontifical candidacy or as Crassus notoriously did in the senate, such that his senatorial "clients" were accused of letting him off the hook when he was implicated in the Catilinarian Conspiracy.

In the most dire circumstances, the law treated debtors differently depending on the period. Should anyone, senator or otherwise, have to default on his debts originally the punishment was debt bondage. By the historical period this had long been abolished, and though a sort of voluntary debt bondage, addictio in which the debtor surrendered himself, through a magistrate (usually the praetor), to his creditor until his debt was deemed paid, still existed it was resorted to rarely. Creditors, after all, wanted cash, not the dubious economic value of an untrained laborer. Moreover, it must have been beyond uncommon among the landed class, for whom we simply don't hear about it at all. The most disastrous outcome of the declaration of insolvency would actually be trial and the order of proscriptio bonorum, the involuntary seizure and auction of an individual's property. This, however, was also relatively rare, though it happened to Cicero's consular colleague C. Antonius in 70. Creditors did not want a debtors property to be auctioned off, since market values at auction were unstable and which could take some time--creditors generally called in their debts because they wanted cash now. To the working farmer this was a disastrous outcome for economic reasons. To the senatorial debtor this was a disastrous outcome because, although one could recover from it (as Antonius did), it nevertheless placed a mark of infamia on one's person, severely restricting political rights until it was lifted. Since this was not a great deal for anyone by a lex Julia de bonis cedendis, of uncertain date, the debtor could declare cessio bonorum to the praetor and be allowed to surrender his property, excepting what the praetor thought was necessary for him to survive, in exchange for the full liquidation of his debt. This prevented the total ruin of debtors and the fear of infamia as well as giving creditors a way of pulling in their debts when they got out of hand. Of course, it was a compromise solution, which did not satisfy everybody--the debtors lost their property and the creditors were now stuck with property that they now had to sell somehow--but it was more fair than previous laws, and vastly more rational, since it crucially allowed cash to remain flowing through the economy.