Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/292

268 continued to exist, if not always to flourish, in the first two centuries of the Republic, and was also largely recruited from populations conquered and absorbed. But during those same centuries we find a process at work which is incompatible with the permanent maintenance of that middle class, and which no legislation seemed capable of effectually checking. The land of Italy is in this period slowly and surely passing into the hands of wealthy Romans, plebeian as much as patrician; and as cattle-breeding pays better than tillage, and winter pasture is needed for the vast herds which occupy the higher lands in summer, the small freeholder of the valleys is gradually got rid of by fair means or foul, and his land absorbed into the great man's estate. Nor is he even maintained as a day-labourer, or allowed, like the Lacedæmonian Helot, to till the land in return for a proportion of its fruits; for all that was needed could be done by slaves at a much smaller expense; and slaves were cheap, owing to the vast number of prisoners taken in the endless wars. Nothing was left for the freeholders of the middle class, who had once been the very marrow of the State, but to take refuge in Eome itself. There they could not be suffered actually to starve, for they were still wanted for the wars; and there, too, they enjoyed the privilege of exercising their rights as Roman citizens. But they no longer represented Aristotle's, and they had no longer the virtues of the agricultural class which he would have encouraged. They were idle and poverty-stricken,