rosperity.

Falling Off in the Population

With every allowance for the inequality in the political and economic
circumstances of the different districts and for the comparatively
flourishing condition of several of them, the retrogression is yet on
the whole unmistakeable, and it is confirmed by the most indisputable
testimonies as to the general condition of Italy. Cato and Polybius
agree in stating that Italy was at the end of the sixth century far
weaker in population than at the end of the fifth, and was no longer
able to furnish armies so large as in the first Punic war. The
increasing difficulty of the levy, the necessity of lowering the
qualification for service in the legions, and the complaints of the
allies as to the magnitude of the contingents to be furnished by them,
confirm these statements; and, in the case of the Roman burgesses, the
numbers tell the same tale. In 502, shortly after the expedition of
Regulus to Africa, they amounted to 298,000 men capable of bearing
arms; thirty years later, shortly before the commencement of the
Hannibalic war (534), they had fallen off to 270,000, or about a
tenth, and again twenty years after that, shortly before the end of
the same war (550), to 214,000, or about a fourth; and a generation
afterwards--during which no extraordinary losses occurred, but the
institution of the great burgess-colonies in the plain of northern
Italy in particular occasioned a perceptible and exceptional increase
--the numbers of the burgesses had hardly again reached the point at
which they stood at the commencement of this period. If we had
similar statements regarding the Italian population generally,
they would beyond all doubt exhibit a deficit relatively still more
considerable. The decline of the national vigour less admits of
proof; but it is stated by the writers on agriculture that flesh and
milk disappeared more and more from the diet of the common people.
At the same time the slave population increased, as the free
population declined. In Apulia, Lucania, and the Bruttian land,
pastoral husbandry must even in the time of Cato have preponderated
over agriculture; the half-savage slave-herdsmen were here in reality
masters in the house. Apulia was rendered so insecure by them that a
strong force had to be stationed there; in 569 a slave-conspiracy
planned on the largest scale, and mixed up with the proceedings of the
Bacchanalia, was discovered there, and nearly 7000 men