ABSTRACT
THE problem of feeding the people close-crowded at the foot of the Capitol was at all times one of the gravest with which the magistrates were faced. The maintenance of public order was intimately connected with the management of food supplies. So long as this mob had regular supplies of corn at a low price—even gratis—the aristocracy knew that they had in their hands a serious guarantee against the possibility of revolt, but if corn were lacking sedition might sweep away the whole of established order. The food question was one that called for attention from the earliest times, when Rome was but a small town surrounded by the fields of Latium; it became all-important when Rome was the centre of the civilized world and attracted within her gates the peasants of Italy, the unemployed and the ambitious of the whole of the Mediterranean—and when the cultivation of cereals was abandoned in the Peninsula.
