ABSTRACT
THE development of agriculture was very characteristic of the period from the third to the first century and the reasons are clearly seen in the considerations which we have already reviewed. The very expansion of her conquests, by giving to Rome along the whole periphery of empire fertile fields and inexhaustible granaries, brought about in Italy a change in agricultural methods. The tributes in kind which the newly-annexed provinces were called upon to furnish, and which consisted mainly of corn, brought about a practically continuous reduction in the price of grain. When Sicilian wheat was sold by order of the aediles at much reduced prices in the Roman market, the latter was automatically closed to imports from Campania and Etruria, and the peasants of those countries, crushed by the insupportable competition, preferred to discontinue the sowings which had been traditional in the first centuries. Thereupon, the culture of the vine, the production of oil, and horticulture spread over a large area. In the same phase, and through contact with Hellenic and Asiatic civilizations, the simple food requirements of the first ages made way for the development of table luxuries. Senators and equites rivalled one another in sumptuousness, and costly vegetables, fruit brought from Asia, poultry, small birds and fish raised at great expense were served for the first time. Whilst the production of cereals was decreasing under the influence of events, or by reason of the circumstances attending conquest, other forms of production grew up in response to the increased facilities for making profit, and thus became established in the whole of the region bordering on the capital. Nor did the influx of the servile population fail to accentuate this movement, for the rich were able in their villas to employ in raising birds, growing oysters and breeding fish—in short, in all the multiple activities to which they devoted themselves and which were far more remunerative than sowing and harvesting wheat—the labour of the captives whom they bought on their return from the wars. The large staffs which these new enterprises required—the scale was one unknown to the early Romans—were recruited without difficulty in the slave markets held in the large centres of Europe and Asia.
