176 Sulla confiscates private land 



Rome attracted by the distributions of cheap corn provided by the 

 Government in order to keep quiet the city mob. But these can hardly 

 have been a majority of the recruits of this class. Probably a number 

 came in from rural districts, hearing that Marius was calling for volun- 

 teers and prepared to disregard altogether the obsolete rules which had 

 on occasion been evaded by others before him. It is perhaps not too 

 bold a conjecture to suggest that the casual wage-earn ers, the mercennarii 

 referred to by Cato, were an important element in the New Model 

 army of Marius. This landless class, living from hand to mouth, may 

 have been declining in numbers, but they were by no means extinct. 

 We meet them later in Varro and elsewhere. And no man knew better 

 than Marius the military value of men hardened by field-labour, parti- 

 cularly when led to volunteer by hopes of earning a higher reward in 

 a career of more perils and less monotony. 



It can hardly be supposed that agriculture throve under the condi- 

 tions prevailing in these troubled years. The tendency must have been 

 to reduce the number of free rustic wage-earners, while each war would 

 bring captives to the slave-market. We can only guess at these 

 economic effects. The following period of civil wars, from the Italian 

 rising in 90 BC to the death of Sulla in 78, led to a further and more 

 serious disturbance of the land-system. The dictator had to reward 

 his soldiery, and that promptly. The debt was discharged by grants 

 of land, private land, the owners of which were either ejected for the 

 purpose or had been put to death. Of the results of this wholesale 

 confiscation and allotment we have abundant evidence, chiefly from 

 Cicero. Making full allowance for exaggeration and partisan feeling, 

 it remains sufficient to shew that Sulla's military colonists were 

 economically a disastrous failure, while both they and the men dis- 

 possessed to make room for them soon became a grave political danger. 

 xThe discharged soldiers desired an easy life as proprietors, and the 

 excitements of warfare had unfitted them for the patient economy of 

 farming. They bought slaves ; but slaves cost money, and the profitable 

 direction of slave-labour was an art calling for a degree of watchfulness 

 and skill that few landlords of any class were willing or able to exert. 

 So this substitution of new landowners for old was an unmixed evil : 

 the new men failed as farmers, and we hardly need to be told that the 

 feeling of insecurity produced by the confiscations was a check on 

 agricultural improvements for the time. Those of the ' Sullan men ' who 

 sold their allotments (evading the law) would certainly not get a good 

 price, and the money would soon melt away. 



It will be seen that the old Roman system, under which the ordinary 

 citizen was a peasant farmer who served the state as a soldier when 

 needed, was practically at an end. Compulsory levies were on certain 



