Proscription

There was civil wars after that, too.

There was the Proscriptions, the Second Triumvirate, finally ending at Actium with Antony being defeated by Augustus.

It was literally an entire lifetime of instability, like 40 years or more of not knowing if you were safe in your own lands or in your own home because the power structure kept changing, farmlands and fields being left fallow or with fruit and grain rotting because none of the small farm holders were there to pick and process the food.

This would later be another bone of contention when rich Roman aristocrats bought up much of this land post-Social War and post-Proscriptions, both with Sulla and the Second Triumvirate, and turned them into large-scale latifundia operations, which would run out the small farmers who'd managed to eke out an existence and hold onto their land between wars.

See, what was happening is a lot of people would either be killed in the countryside or driven out of their homes, and then that land would be cheap, and then rich people would buy it up and make super farms, and that is how the latifundias got created.

And then, you know, the price of land would go up to the point where the people who managed to hang on to their land couldn't hold on to it anymore.

But where repose the all-Etruscan three? Dante and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they, The bard of prose, creative spirit, he Of the hundred tales of love, where did they Lay their bones, distinguished from our common clay In death as life? Are they resolved to dust? And have their country's marbles nought to say? Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust? Did they not to her breast their filial earth intrust? Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio buried by the upbraiding shore.

Thy factions, in their worse than civil war, Proscribed the bard, whose name for evermore Their children's children would in vain adore With the remorse of ages.

And the crown which Petrarch's laureate brow Supremely wore, upon a far and foreign soil Had grown: his life, his fame, his grave, though rifled, not thine own.

Boccaccio to his parent earth bequeathed His dust, and lies it not her great among, With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed O'er him who formed the Tuscan siren's tongue? That music in itself, whose sounds are song, The poetry of speech? No: even his tomb, Uptorn, must bear the hyena bigot's wrong, No more amidst the meaner dead find room, Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for whom.