f the most esteemed communities of Latium, consisted almost solely
of some genteel families who lived in the capital but retained
their native Tusculan franchise, and was far inferior in the number
of burgesses entitled to vote even to small communities
in the interior of Italy. The stock of men capable of arms
in this district, on which Rome's ability to defend herself
had once mainly depended, had so totally vanished, that people read
with astonishment and perhaps with horror the accounts of the annals--
sounding fabulous in comparison with things as they stood--
respecting the Aequian and Volscian wars. Matters were not so bad
everywhere, especially in the other portions of Central Italy
and in Campania; nevertheless, as Varro complains, "the once populous
cities of Italy," in general "stood desolate."

Italy under the Oligarchy

It is a dreadful picture--this picture of Italy under the rule
of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften
the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world
of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast
was felt on both sides--the giddier the height to which riches rose,
the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned--the more frequently,
amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard,
were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again
from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds
were externally divided, the more completely they coincided
in the like annihilation of family life--which is yet the germ
and core of all nationality--in the like laziness and luxury,
the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence,
the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal
demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property.
Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy,
and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly
with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar
to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state
has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world
in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common
sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch
resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly
the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion
the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middl