The Finances in the Revolution

The financial condition of Rome of course assumed a far worse aspect, when the storms of revolution set in.  The new and, even in a mere financial point of view, extremely oppressive burden imposed upon the state by the obligation under which Gaius Gracchus placed it to furnish corn at nominal rates to the burgesses of the capital, was certainly counterbalanced at first by the newly-opened sources of income in the province of Asia.  Nevertheless the public buildings seem from that time to have almost come to a standstill.  While the public works which can be shown to have been constructed from the battle of Pydna down to the time of Gaius Gracchus were numerous, from the period after 632 there is scarcely mention of any other than the projects of bridges, roads, and drainage which Marcus Aemilius Scaurus organized as censor in 645.  It must remain a moot point whether this was the effect of the largesses of grain or, as is perhaps more probable, the consequence of the system of increased savings, such as befitted a government which became daily more and more a rigid oligarchy, and such as is indicated by the statement that the Roman reserve reached its highest point in 663.  The terrible storm of insurrection and revolution, in combination with the five years’ deficit of the revenues of Asia Minor, was the first serious trial to which the Roman finances were subjected after the Hannibalic war:  they failed to sustain it.  Nothing perhaps so clearly marks the difference of the times as the circumstance that in the Hannibalic war it was not till the tenth year of the struggle, when the burgesses were almost sinking under taxation, that the reserve was touched;(22) whereas the Social war was from the first supported by the balance in hand, and when this was expended after two campaigns to the last penny, they preferred to sell by auction the public sites in the capital(23) and to seize the treasures of the temples(24) rather than levy a tax on the burgesses.  The storm however, severe as it was, passed over; Sulla, at the expense doubtless of enormous economic sacrifices imposed on the subjects and Italian revolutionists in particular, restored order to the finances and, by abolishing the largesses of corn and retaining although in a reduced form the Asiatic revenues, secured for the commonwealth a satisfactory economic condition, at least in the sense of the ordinary expenditure remaining far below the ordinary income.

Private Economics
Agriculture

In the private economics of this period hardly any new feature emerges; the advantages and disadvantages formerly set forth as incident to the social circumstances of Italy(25) were not altered, but merely farther and more distinctly developed.  In agriculture we have already seen that the growing power of Roman capital was gradually absorbing the intermediate and small landed estates in Italy as well as in the provinces, as the sun sucks up the drops of rain.  The government