What blanks were produced by war and famine in the ranks of the Italian population, is shown by the example of the burgesses of Rome, whose numbers during the war had fallen almost a fourth.  The statement, accordingly, which puts the whole number of Italians who fell in the war under Hannibal at 300,000, seems not at all exaggerated.  Of course this loss fell chiefly on the flower of the burgesses, who in fact furnished the -elite- as well as the mass of the combatants.  How fearfully the senate in particular was thinned, is shown by the filling up of its complement after the battle of Cannae, when it had been reduced to 123 persons, and was with difficulty restored to its normal state by an extraordinary nomination of 177 senators.  That, moreover, the seventeen years’ war, which had been carried on simultaneously in all districts of Italy and towards all the four points of the compass abroad, must have shaken to the very heart the national economy, is, as a general position, clear; but our tradition does not suffice to illustrate it in detail.  The state no doubt gained by the confiscations, and the Campanian territory in particular thenceforth remained an inexhaustible source of revenue to the state; but by this extension of the domain system the national prosperity of course lost just about as much as at other times it had gained by the breaking up of the state lands.  Numbers of flourishing townships—­four hundred, it was reckoned—­were destroyed and ruined; the capital laboriously accumulated was consumed; the population were demoralized by camp life; the good old traditional habits of the burgesses and farmers were undermined from the capital down to the smallest village.  Slaves and desperadoes associated themselves in robber-bands, of the dangers of which an idea may be formed from the fact that in a single year (569) 7000 men had to be condemned for highway robbery in Apulia alone; the extension of the pastures, with their half-savage slave-herdsmen, favoured this mischievous barbarizing of the land.  Italian agriculture saw its very existence endangered by the proof, first afforded in this war, that the Roman people could be supported by grain from Sicily and from Egypt instead of that which they reaped themselves.

Nevertheless the Roman, whom the gods had allowed to survive the close of that gigantic struggle, might look with pride to the past and with confidence to the future.  Many errors had been committed, but much suffering had also been endured; the people, whose whole youth capable of arms had for ten years hardly laid aside shield or sword, might excuse many faults.  The living of different nations side by side in peace and amity upon the whole—­although maintaining an attitude of mutual antagonism—­which appears to be the aim of modern phases of national life, was a thing foreign to antiquity.  In ancient times it was necessary to be either anvil or hammer; and in the final struggle between the victors victory