rolls.  The number of persons settled on the Campanus ager is said[8] to have been 20,000 citizens who had each three children or more.  The land was not distributed by lot, but at the pleasure of the commissioners, each one receiving some 30 jugera.[9] If 20,000 heads of families with their wives and three children in each family were settled in Campania, the whole number of settlers would be 100,000.  This great number could scarcely leave Rome at one time, and we find that as late as 51 the land was not all assigned.[10] While the tenor of the law does not imply that it was the intention to reward military service with grants of land, yet we may be sure that the veterans of Pompey were not forgotten.[11] There are no extant authorities which speak of the settlement of the Campanian land that say any thing about the soldiers settled there, unless it be Cicero.  He speaks of the Campanian territory being taken out of the class that contributed a revenue to the state in order that it might be given to soldiers,[12] and he appears to refer to this time (59).  Mommsen says that “the old soldiers as well as the temporary lessees to be ejected were simply recommended to the special consideration of the land distributors."[13] These latter were a commission of twenty appointed by the state.  Caesar, at his own request, was excused from serving, but Pompey and Crassus were the chief ones, thus furnishing sufficient reason for supposing that the soldier was provided for.  The passage of this bill amounted in substance to the reestablishment of the democratic colony founded by Marius and Cinna and afterwards abolished by Sulla.[14] Capua now became a Roman colony after having had no municipal constitution for one hundred and fifty-two years, when the city with all its dependencies was made a prefecture administered by a prefect of Rome.  The revenues from this district were doubtless no longer needed, as those from Pontus and Syria[15] supplied all the needs of the government, but it is difficult to see what benefit could be reaped from the ejection of the thrifty farmers who, as tenants of the state, cultivated this territory and paid their rents regularly into the state coffers.  Wherever the new settlers were brought in, the old cultivators were turned out.  No ancient writer says anything about the condition of these people.  Cicero, in his second speech upon the land bill of Rullus, when speaking of the consequences that would follow its enactment, declared that if the Campanian cultivators were ejected they would have no place to go, and he truly says that such a measure would not be a settlement of plebeians upon the land, but an ejection and expulsion of them from it.[16]

Did it pay to send out a swarm of 100,000 idle paupers[17] who, for two generations, had been fed at the public charge from the corn-bins of Rome, simply in order that a like number of honest peasants, who had been not only self-supporting but had paid a large part of the Roman revenue, should be compelled to sacrifice their goods in a glutted market and become debauched and idle?