party"
in Rome came to the helm, political sovereignty was declared in
plain terms to be a right which entitled every one who shared in
it to a number of bushels of corn, the hegemony was converted into
a direct ownership of the soil, and the most complete system of
making the most of that ownership was not only introduced but
with shameless candour legally justified and proclaimed. It was
certainly not a mere accident, that the hardest lot in this respect
fell precisely to the two least warlike provinces, Sicily and Asia.

The Finances and Public Buildings

An approximate measure of the condition of Roman finance at this
period is furnished, in the absence of definite statements, first
of all by the public buildings. In the first decades of this epoch
these were prosecuted on the greatest scale, and the construction
of roads in particular had at no time been so energetically
pursued. In Italy the great southern highway of presumably earlier
origin, which as a prolongation of the Appian road ran from Rome by
way of Capua, Beneventum, and Venusia to the ports of Tarentum and
Brundisium, had attached to it a branch-road from Capua to the
Sicilian straits, a work of Publius Popillius, consul in 622.
On the east coast, where hitherto only the section from Fanum to
Ariminum had been constructed as part of the Flaminian highway (ii.
229), the coast road was prolonged southward as far as Brundisium,
northward by way of Atria on the Po as far as Aquileia, and the
portion at least from Ariminum to Atria was formed by the Popillius
just mentioned in the same year. The two great Etruscan highways--
the coast or Aurelian road from Rome to Pisa and Luna, which was in
course of formation in 631, and the Cassian road leading by way of
Sutrium and Clusium to Arretium and Florentia, which seems not to
have been constructed before 583--may as Roman public highways
belong only to this age. About Rome itself new projects were
not required; but the Mulvian bridge (Ponte Molle), by which
the Flaminian road crossed the Tiber not far from Rome, was in 645
reconstructed of stone. Lastly in Northern Italy, which hitherto
had possessed no other artificial road than the Flaminio-Aemilian
terminating at Placentia, the great Postumian road was constructed
in 606, which led from Genua by way of Dertona, where probably
a colony was founded at the same time, and onward by way of
Placentia, where it joined the Flaminio-Aemilian road, and of
Cr