matters to such a pass, that there was no longer a free farmer there.  It could be said aloud in the market of the capital, that the beasts had their lairs but nothing was left to the burgesses save the air and sunshine, and that those who were styled the masters of the world had no longer a clod that they could call their own.  The census lists of the Roman burgesses furnished the commentary on these words.  From the end of the Hannibalic war down to 595 the numbers of the burgesses were steadily on the increase, the cause of which is mainly to be sought in the continuous and considerable distributions of domain-land:(22) after 595 again, when the census yielded 328,000 burgesses capable of bearing arms, there appears a regular falling-off, for the list in 600 stood at 324,000, that in 607 at 322,000, that in 623 at 319,000 burgesses fit for service—­an alarming result for a time of profound peace at home and abroad.  If matters were to go on at this rate, the burgess-body would resolve itself into planters and slaves; and the Roman state might at length, as was the case with the Parthians, purchase its soldiers in the slave-market.

Ideas of Reform
Scipio Aemilianus

Such was the external and internal condition of Rome, when the state entered on the seventh century of its existence.  Wherever the eye turned, it encountered abuses and decay; the question could not but force itself on every sagacious and well-disposed man, whether this state of things was not capable of remedy or amendment.  There was no want of such men in Rome; but no one seemed more called to the great work of political and social reform than Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (570-625), the favourite son of Aemilius Paullus and the adopted grandson of the great Scipio, whose glorious surname of Africanus he bore by virtue not merely of hereditary but of personal right.  Like his father, he was a man temperate and thoroughly healthy, never ailing in body, and never at a loss to resolve on the immediate and necessary course of action.  Even in his youth he had kept aloof from the usual proceedings of political novices—­the attending in the antechambers of prominent senators and the delivery of forensic declamations.  On the other hand he loved the chase—­when a youth of seventeen, after having served with distinction under his father in the campaign against Perseus, he had asked as his reward the free range of the deer forest of the kings of Macedonia which had been untouched for four years—­and he was especially fond of devoting his leisure to scientific and literary enjoyment.  By the care of his father he had been early initiated into that genuine Greek culture, which elevated him above the insipid Hellenizing of the semi-culture commonly in vogue; by his earnest and apt appreciation of the good and bad qualities in the Greek character, and by his aristocratic carriage, this Roman made an impression on the courts of the east and even on the scoffing Alexandrians.