able to send into the field armies of 30,000 men.  Samnium had recovered from the severe wars of the fifth century:  according to the census of 529 it was in a position to furnish half as many men capable of arms as all the Latin towns, and it was probably at that time, next to the -ager Romanus-, the most flourishing region of the peninsula.  But the Hannibalic war had desolated the land afresh, and the assignations of land in that quarter to the soldiers of Scipio’s army, although considerable, probably did not cover the loss.  Campania and Apulia, both hitherto well-peopled regions, were still worse treated in the same war by friend and foe.  In Apulia, no doubt, assignations of land took place afterwards, but the colonies instituted there were not successful.  The beautiful plain of Campania remained more populous; but the territory of Capua and of the other communities broken up in the Hannibalic war became state-property, and the occupants of it were uniformly not proprietors, but petty temporary lessees.  Lastly, in the wide Lucanian and Bruttian territories the population, which was already very thin before the Hannibalic war, was visited by the whole severity of the war itself and of the penal executions that followed in its train; nor was much done on the part of Rome to revive the agriculture there—­with the exception perhaps of Valentia (Vibo, now Monteleone), none of the colonies established there attained real prosperity.

Falling Off in the Population

With every allowance for the inequality in the political and economic circumstances of the different districts and for the comparatively flourishing condition of several of them, the retrogression is yet on the whole unmistakeable, and it is confirmed by the most indisputable testimonies as to the general condition of Italy.  Cato and Polybius agree in stating that Italy was at the end of the sixth century far weaker in population than at the end of the fifth, and was no longer able to furnish armies so large as in the first Punic war.  The increasing difficulty of the levy, the necessity of lowering the qualification for service in the legions, and the complaints of the allies as to the magnitude of the contingents to be furnished by them, confirm these statements; and, in the case of the Roman burgesses, the numbers tell the same tale.  In 502, shortly after the expedition of Regulus to Africa, they amounted to 298,000 men capable of bearing arms; thirty years later, shortly before the commencement of the Hannibalic war (534), they had fallen off to 270,000, or about a tenth, and again twenty years after that, shortly before the end of the same war (550), to 214,000, or about a fourth; and a generation afterwards—­during which no extraordinary losses occurred, but the institution of the great burgess-colonies in the plain of northern Italy in particular occasioned a perceptible and exceptional increase —­the numbers of the burgesses had hardly again reached the point at which they stood