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bouring regions, hitherto too mild and too moist for the production 
of most cereals, now became adapted for this purpose. With this 
event, the rapid increase of population in Italy happened to 
synchronize. The wants of Rome led to the growth of vast 
quantities of corn. Rich Italians, and more especially the nobility 
of Rome, bought up huge tracts of public land, and vast numbers 
of slaves—a commodity which the wide-spread wars of the Romans 
had rendered cheap. With these they stocked enormous farms, 
working them under hard task-masters, and sending as the fruits of 
their labour cargoes of corn to Rome. 
There existed a condition of things very similar to that in the 
cotton plantations of the Southern States of America, before the war 
between the North and South, and one as profitable to these great 
Roman landowners as it was to the so-called “chivalry” of the 
Carolinas. 
Under this system, however, as in the Southern States, a large 
amount of money was poured into the country, which itself rapidly 
increased in population. Its cities which had hitherto consisted of 
collections of mud cottages and mere booths, or, as the Latins 
called them, magalia, began to be adorned with buildings con- 
structed in stone, in accordance with the rules of Roman and 
Greek Architecture. And it is to this period that the towns belong, 
whose ruins excite the astonishment of recent travellers. 
At some date, not long after the Mahometan Conquest, the 
Bay of Triton finally lost all communication with the Mediterranean. 
The surface for evaporation became less and less ; the southern 
slopes of the Auress Mountains were, in consequence, gradually 
dried up, and ultimately became a desert, with but here and there 
an oasis. Meanwhile frequent droughts extended too to the 
Northern or Mediterranean slopes, and flights of locusts, the 
offspring of the new desert, damaged the crops. The population 
decreased, and when to this we add the bad government of the 
Mahometan Conquerors, we can satisfactorily account for the 
present condition of these regions, and for their change from 
ancient greatness to modern insignificance. 
