, and he feared his wife and children would
starve.[8-8]

This vigorous peasantry was destroyed by the importation of hordes of
slaves and the purchase of cheap foreign grain. So long as the wars of
Rome were limited to Italy the number of slaves was comparatively small,
but as her armies swept over the Mediterranean countries one after
another and even subdued the wild Gauls and Britains, an unending stream
of captives poured into the city and filled to overflowing the slave
markets. Cicero, during his short campaign against the Parthians wrote
to Atticus that the sale of his prisoners had netted no less than
12,000,000 sestercias. In Epirus 100,000 men were captured; 60,000
Cimbries and 100,000 Germans graced the triumph of Marius; Caesar is
said to have taken in Gaul another 100,000 prisoners. Soon the slave
became the cheapest of commodities, and he who possessed even the most
extensive lands could readily supply himself with the labor requisite
for their cultivation.

Thus thrown into competition with slave labor the peasant proprietor
found it impossible to sustain himself. The grain which he produced with
his own hands had to compete in the same market with that made by
slaves. It must, therefore, sell for the same price, a price so low that
it did not suffice to feed and clothe him and his family. So he was
forced to give up his little estate, an estate perhaps handed down to
him by generations of farmers, and migrate to the city of Rome, to swell
the idle and plebeian population. And once there he demanded bread, a
demand which the authorities dared not refuse. So the public treasury
laid out the funds for the purchase of wheat from all parts of the
world, from Spain, from Africa, from Sicily, wheat which was given away
or sold for a song. This in turn reacted unfavorably upon the peasants
who still clung to the soil in a desperate effort to wring from it a
bare subsistence, and accelerated the movement to the city.

Thus Italy was transformed from the land of the little farmer into the
land of big estates cultivated by slaves. A sad development surely, a
development which had much to do with the decay and final overthrow of
the mighty structure of the Roman Empire. In former times, Titus Livius
tells us, "there was a multitude of free men in this country where today
we can hardly find a handful of soldiers, and which would be a
wilderness were it not for our slaves." "The plough is everywhere
bereft of hono