The story of Postumius 147 



did not enlarge on this point for nothing. And it is to be noted that 

 in insisting on the respectability of a farmer's life he sees fit to refer 

 to the farmer-consuls of the olden time. He feels, no doubt, that un- 

 supported assertions 1 as to the employment of sons in agriculture by 

 his contemporaries were not likely to carry much weight with the jury. 



After the above considerations I come to the conclusion that Livy's 

 representation of agriculture as a servile occupation in the case of 

 Manlius is a coloured utterance of no historical value. A minute con- 

 sistency is not to be looked for in the writings of an author to whom 

 picturesqueness of detail appeals differently at different moments. For 

 Livy was in truth deeply conscious of the sad changes in Italian 

 country life brought about by the transition to large-scale agriculture. 

 Under the year 385 he is driven to moralize 2 on the constant renewal 

 of Volscian and Aequian wars. How ever did these two small peoples 

 find armies for the long-continued struggle? He suggests possible 

 answers to the question, the most significant of which is that in those 

 days there was a dense free population in those districts, districts 

 which in his own time, he says, would be deserted but for the presence 

 of Roman slaves. To describe vividly the decay of free population, he 

 adds that only a poor little nursery of soldiers is left (yix seminario 

 exiguo militum relicto) in those parts. The momentous results of the 

 change of system are not more clearly grasped by Lucan or Pliny 

 himself. Livy then is not to be cited as a witness to the existence of 

 great numbers of rustic slaves in Italy before the second Punic war, 

 nor even then for the highly-organized gang-system by which an in- 

 dustrial character was given to agriculture. 



One more story, and a strange one, needs to be considered, for it 

 bears directly on the labour-question. The time in which it is placed 

 is the latter part of the period of the Roman conquest of Italy. In a 

 fragment 3 of one of his later books Dionysius tells us of the arbitrary 

 doings of a consul Postumius, a Patrician of high rank who had already 

 been twice consul. After much bullying he made his colleague, a 

 Plebeian of recent nobility, resign to him the command in the Samnite 

 war. This was an unpopular act, but he went on to worse. From his 

 army he drafted some 2000 men on to his own estate, and set them to 

 cut away brushwood without providing cutting tools (az/eu a-i&tfpov). 

 And he kept them there a long time doing the work of wage-earners 

 or slaves (6r)T<v epya KOI OepairovTcov vTryperovvras). Into the tale of 

 his further acts of arbitrary insolence we need not enter here, nor into 



1 Cicpro Sex Roscio 50-1. * Livy vi 12 '5, cf vn 25 8. 



3 Dionys xvu [xvin] 4. L Postumius Megellus was consul 305, 294, 291 BC. The story 

 relates to his third consulship. His earlier career may be followed in Liv ix 44, x 26 15, 

 32 i, 37, 4 6 16. 



102 



