was essentially the application of the capitalist system to the
production of the fruits of the soil. The description of the
husbandmen, which Cato gives, is excellent and quite just; but how
does it correspond to the system itself, which he portrays and
recommends? If a Roman senator, as must not unfrequently have been
the case, possessed four such estates as that described by Cato, the
same space, which in the olden time when small holdings prevailed had
supported from 100 to 150 farmers' families, was now occupied by one
family of free persons and about 50, for the most part unmarried,
slaves. If this was the remedy by which the decaying national economy
was to be restored to vigour, it bore, unhappily, an aspect of extreme
resemblance to the disease.

Development of Italy

The general result of this system is only too clearly obvious in the
changed proportions of the population. It is true that the condition
of the various districts of Italy was very unequal, and some were even
prosperous. The farms, instituted in great numbers in the region
between the Apennines and the Po at the time of its colonization, did
not so speedily disappear. Polybius, who visited that quarter not
long after the close of the present period, commends its numerous,
handsome, and vigorous population: with a just legislation as to corn
it would doubtless have been possible to make the basin of the Po, and
not Sicily the granary of the capital. In like manner Picenum and the
so-called -ager Gallicus- acquired a numerous body of farmers through
the distributions of domain-land consequent on the Flaminian law of
522--a body, however, which was sadly reduced in the Hannibalic war.
In Etruria, and perhaps also in Umbria, the internal condition of the
subject communities was unfavourable to the flourishing of a class
of free farmers, Matters were better in Latium--which could not be
entirely deprived of the advantages of the market of the capital, and
which had on the whole been spared by the Hannibalic war--as well as
in the secluded mountain-valleys of the Marsians and Sabellians. On
the other hand the Hannibalic war had fearfully devastated southern
Italy and had ruined, in addition to a number of smaller townships,
its two largest cities, Capua and Tarentum, both once able to send
into the field armies of 30,000 men. Samnium had recovered from the
severe wars of the fifth century: according to the census of 529 it
was in a position