Municipium

The poor man who did so would either involve himself in debt, or be at the mercy of his richer neighbours, whose flocks would overrun his fields, or who might oust him altogether from them by force, and even seize him himself and enrol him as a slave.

the rich man on the other hand could use such land for pasture and leave the care of his flocks and herds to clients and slaves so originated those latifundia or large farms which greatly contributed to the ruin of rome and italy the tilled land grew less and with it dwindled the free population and the recruiting field for the army gangs of slaves became more numerous and were treated with increased brutality and as men who do not work for their own money are more profuse in spending it than those who do the extravagance of the roman possessors helped to swell the tide of luxury which rose steadily with foreign conquest and to create in the capital a class free in name and deed but more degraded if less miserable than the very slaves who were treated like beasts through italy It is not certain whether anyone except a patrician could claim occupation as a right, but as the possessors could in any case sell the land to plebeians, it fell into the hands of rich men to whichever class they belonged, both at Rome and in the Roman colonies and the Municipia, and as it was never really their property, dominium, but the property of the state, it was a constant source of envy and discontent among the poor.

As long as fresh assignations of land and the plantation of colonies went on, this discontent could be kept within bounds.

But for a quarter of a century preceding our period, scarcely any fresh acquisitions of land had been made in Italy, and with no hope of new allotments from

and there in addition to this process of national disintegration the clouds of a political storm were gathering.

The following table will show at a glance the classification of the Roman state as constituted at the outbreak of the social war.

On the one hand, the key waste Romani, which consisted of, number one, Rome, number two, Roman colonies, number three, Municipia.

Roman colonies and Municipia, two and three, being praefectura.