e morning and to have been all sold before
evening--a proof at once how enormous was the number of slaves
delivered, and how, notwithstanding, the demand still exceeded the
supply. It was no wonder. Already in describing the Roman economy
of the sixth century we have explained that it was based, like all
the large undertakings of antiquity generally, on the employment of
slaves.(8) In whatever direction speculation applied itself, its
instrument was without exception man reduced in law to a beast of
burden. Trades were in great part carried on by slaves, so that
the proceeds fell to the master. The levying of the public revenues
in the lower grades was regularly conducted by the slaves of the
associations that leased them. Servile hands performed the operations
of mining, making pitch, and others of a similar kind; it became early
the custom to send herds of slaves to the Spanish mines, whose
superintendents readily received them and paid a high rent for them.
The vine and olive harvest in Italy was not conducted by the people
on the estate, but was contracted for by a slave-owner. The tending
of cattle was universally performed by slaves. We have already
mentioned the armed, and frequently mounted, slave-herdsmen in
the great pastoral ranges of Italy;(9) and the same sort of pastoral
husbandry soon became in the provinces also a favourite object of Roman
speculation--Dalmatia, for instance, was hardly acquired (599) when
the Roman capitalists began to prosecute the rearing of cattle there on
a great scale after the Italian fashion. But far worse in every respect
was the plantation-system proper--the cultivation of the fields by a
band of slaves not unfrequently branded with iron, who with shackles
on their legs performed the labours of the field under overseers
during the day, and were locked up together by night in the common,
frequently subterranean, labourers' prison. This plantation-system
had migrated from the east to Carthage,(10) and seems to have been
brought by the Carthaginians to Sicily, where, probably for this reason,
it appears developed earlier and more completely than in any other part
of the Roman dominions.(11) We find the territory of Leontini, about
30,000 -jugera- of arable land, which was let on lease as Roman
domain(12) by the censors, divided some decades after the time of the
Gracchi among not more than 84 lessees, to each of whom there thus fell
on an average 360 jugera, and among wh