proceeds fell to the master.  The levying of the public revenues in the lower grades was regularly conducted by the slaves of the associations that leased them.  Servile hands performed the operations of mining, making pitch, and others of a similar kind; it became early the custom to send herds of slaves to the Spanish mines, whose superintendents readily received them and paid a high rent for them.  The vine and olive harvest in Italy was not conducted by the people on the estate, but was contracted for by a slave-owner.  The tending of cattle was universally performed by slaves.  We have already mentioned the armed, and frequently mounted, slave-herdsmen in the great pastoral ranges of Italy;(9) and the same sort of pastoral husbandry soon became in the provinces also a favourite object of Roman speculation—­Dalmatia, for instance, was hardly acquired (599) when the Roman capitalists began to prosecute the rearing of cattle there on a great scale after the Italian fashion.  But far worse in every respect was the plantation-system proper—­the cultivation of the fields by a band of slaves not unfrequently branded with iron, who with shackles on their legs performed the labours of the field under overseers during the day, and were locked up together by night in the common, frequently subterranean, labourers’ prison.  This plantation-system had migrated from the east to Carthage,(10) and seems to have been brought by the Carthaginians to Sicily, where, probably for this reason, it appears developed earlier and more completely than in any other part of the Roman dominions.(11) We find the territory of Leontini, about 30,000 -jugera- of arable land, which was let on lease as Roman domain(12) by the censors, divided some decades after the time of the Gracchi among not more than 84 lessees, to each of whom there thus fell on an average 360 jugera, and among whom only one was a Leontine; the rest were foreign, mostly Roman, speculators.  We see from this instance with what zeal the Roman speculators there walked in the footsteps of their predecessors, and what extensive dealings in Sicilian cattle and Sicilian slave-corn must have been carried on by the Roman and Non-Roman speculators who covered the fair island with their pastures and plantations.  Italy however still remained for the present substantially exempt from this worst form of slave-husbandry.  Although in Etruria, where the plantation-system seems to have first emerged in Italy, and where it existed most extensively at least forty years afterwards, it is extremely probable that even now -ergastula- were not wanting; yet Italian agriculture at this epoch was still chiefly carried on by free persons or at any rate by non-fettered slaves, while the greater tasks were frequently let out to contractors.  The difference between Italian and Sicilian slavery is very clearly apparent from the fact, that the slaves of the Mamertine community, which lived after the Italian fashion, were the only slaves who did not take part in the Sicilian servile revolt of 619-622.