“The Christian emperors could not remedy the growing depopulation of the country any more than their heathen predecessors.  All their efforts only showed the impotence of government to arrest that dreadful evil.  Sometimes, alarmed at the depopulation, they tried to mitigate the lot of the farmer, to shield him against the landlord; upon this the proprietor exclaimed he could no longer pay the taxes.  At other times they abandoned the farmer, surrendered him to the landlord, and strove to chain him to the soil; but the unhappy cultivators perished or fled, and the land became deserted.  Even in the time of Augustus, efforts were made to arrest the depopulation at the expense of morals, by encouraging concubinage.  Pertinax granted an immunity from taxes to those who could occupy the desert lands of Italy, to the cultivators of the distant provinces, and the allied kings.  Aurelian did the same.  Probus was obliged to transport from Germany men and oxen to cultivate Gaul.[13] Maximian and Constantius transported the Franks and Germans from Picardy and Hainault into Italy:  but the depopulation in the towns and the country alike continued.  The people surrendered themselves in the fields to despair, as a beast of burden lies down beneath his load and refuses to rise.  In vain the emperor strove, by offers of immunities and exemptions, to recall the cultivator to his deserted fields.  Nothing could do so.  The desert extended daily.  At the commencement of the fifth century there was, in the happy Campania, the most fertile province of the empire, 520,000 jugera in a state of nature.”—­MICHELET, Histoire de France, i. 104-108.

    [13] “Arantur Gallicana rura barbaris bobus, et juga Germanica
    captiva praebent colla nostris cultoribus.”—­Probi Epist. ad
    Senatum in Vopesio.

Pursued to its very grave by the same deep-rooted cause of evil, the strength of Italy, even in the last stages of its decay, was still prostrated by the importation of grain from Egypt and Lybia.  “The Campagna of Rome,” says Gibbon, “about the close of the sixth century, was reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness, in which the land was barren, the waters impure, and the air infectious.  Yet the number of citizens still exceeded the measure of subsistence; their precarious food was supplied from the harvests of Egypt and Lybia; and the frequent repetitions of famine betray the inattention of the emperors to a distant provice.”—­GIBBON, vil. viii. c. xlv. 162.

Nor was this desolating scourge of foreign importation confined to Italy; it obtained also in Greece equally with the Ausonian fields, the abode of early riches, opulence, and prosperity.  “In the later stages of the empire,” says Michelet, “Greece was almost entirely supported by corn raised in the fields of Podolia,” (Poland.)—­MICHELET, i. 277.