ockeries re-echoed the scorn of
the victors, but not less the cry of distress from the down-trodden
nations. The position in which matters stood is shown by the anxious
carefulness, which during the ensuing Macedonian war the senate
evinced in the watching of Italy, and by the reinforcements which were
despatched from Rome to the most important colonies, to Venusia in
554, Narnia in 555, Cosa in 557, and Cales shortly before 570.

What blanks were produced by war and famine in the ranks of the
Italian population, is shown by the example of the burgesses of
Rome, whose numbers during the war had fallen almost a fourth.
The statement, accordingly, which puts the whole number of Italians
who fell in the war under Hannibal at 300,000, seems not at all
exaggerated. Of course this loss fell chiefly on the flower of the
burgesses, who in fact furnished the -elite- as well as the mass of
the combatants. How fearfully the senate in particular was thinned,
is shown by the filling up of its complement after the battle of
Cannae, when it had been reduced to 123 persons, and was with
difficulty restored to its normal state by an extraordinary nomination
of 177 senators. That, moreover, the seventeen years' war, which had
been carried on simultaneously in all districts of Italy and towards
all the four points of the compass abroad, must have shaken to the
very heart the national economy, is, as a general position, clear; but
our tradition does not suffice to illustrate it in detail. The state
no doubt gained by the confiscations, and the Campanian territory in
particular thenceforth remained an inexhaustible source of revenue to
the state; but by this extension of the domain system the national
prosperity of course lost just about as much as at other times it had
gained by the breaking up of the state lands. Numbers of flourishing
townships--four hundred, it was reckoned--were destroyed and ruined;
the capital laboriously accumulated was consumed; the population were
demoralized by camp life; the good old traditional habits of the
burgesses and farmers were undermined from the capital down to the
smallest village. Slaves and desperadoes associated themselves in
robber-bands, of the dangers of which an idea may be formed from the
fact that in a single year (569) 7000 men had to be condemned for
highway robbery in Apulia alone; the extension of the pastures,
with their half-savage slave-herdsmen, favoured this mischievous
barba