Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886 edition. Excerpt:...but intelligent and active, furnished the numerous frecdmen who became at Rome architects or physicians, teachers or artists, and the friends and boon companions of the nobles. This zone being subjugated and reduced to peace, war no longer obtained captives in it, and it became necessary to seek working people in the second zone, and afterwards in the third. The great slave markets thus fell back with the frontiers. The concession of citizenship to the entire Empire fixed them there, and the barbarians who furnished the supply sold the ruder prisoners whom they themselves had made captive in the heart of the barbaric world. Claudius, Aurelian, and Probus brought in such captives without number, filling the great estates with labourers incapable or dangerous, under whose hands the earth soon ceased to give other than the most meagre harvests.1 The progressive steps of the Roman decline are marked by the constantly lowered social level; it is thus that the Athenian republic was ruined, and the great Roman Empire was to perish by the same causes. Agriculture suffered from an evil of long standing. To the political concentration going on in the city and in the state had corresponded a concentration of fortunes and estates,' or rather the second fact had been the cause of the first, and free labour was disappearing from the country. During thirty years of invasion and civil war, agriculture must support, beside the usual burdens, innumerable requisitions and incessant devastations. Under so many disasters which extensive landowners alone could resist the petty proprietors succumbed. They abandoned their hereditary acres to become colonists, to take as soldiers their share in the immense pillage, or to seek in the cities higher wages and a life...