of their dignity; they carried away from a villa at Misenum
the very sister of the Roman admiral-in-chief Antonius, who was sent
forth to annihilate the pirates; they destroyed in the port
of Ostia the Roman war fleet equipped against them and commanded
by a consul. The Latin husbandman, the traveller on the Appian highway,
the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae
were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single
moment; all traffic and all intercourse were suspended;
the most dreadful scarcity prevailed in Italy, and especially
in the capital, which subsisted on transmarine corn. The contemporary
world and history indulge freely in complaints of insupportable
distress; in this case the epithet may have been appropriate.

Servile Disturbances

We have already described how the senate restored by Sulla carried
out its guardianship of the frontier in Macedonia, its discipline
over the client kings of Asia Minor, and lastly its marine police;
the results were nowhere satisfactory. Nor did better success
attend the government in another and perhaps even more urgent
matter, the supervision of the provincial, and above all
of the Italian, proletariate. The gangrene of a slave-proletariate
Gnawed at the vitals of all the states of antiquity, and the more so,
the more vigorously they had risen and prospered; for the power
and riches of the state regularly led, under the existing
circumstances, to a disproportionate increase of the body
of slaves. Rome naturally suffered more severely from this cause
than any other state of antiquity. Even the government of the sixth
century had been under the necessity of sending troops against
the gangs of runaway herdsmen and rural slaves. The plantation-system,
spreading more and more among the Italian speculators
had infinitely increased the dangerous evil: in the time of
the Gracchan and Marian crises and in close connection with them
servile revolts had taken place at numerous points of the Roman
empire, and in Sicily had even grown into two bloody wars (619-622
and 652-654;(24)). But the ten years of the rule of the restoration
after Sulla's death formed the golden age both for the buccaneers
at sea and for bands of a similar character on land, above all
in the Italian peninsula, which had hitherto been comparatively
well regulated. The land could hardly be said any longer to enjoy
peace. In the capital and the less populous district