But this corruption affected hardly more than the nobles of Rome and the upstarts.  In the families of Italy and the provinces the more serious manners of the old time still prevailed; but the discipline of the family gradually slackened and the woman slowly freed herself from the despotism of her husband.

FOOTNOTES: 

[133] Another version is that he was sitting at the hearth roasting turnips.—­ED.

[134] 232 and 234 are both given as the date of Cato’s birth.  The latter is the more probable.—­ED.

[135] Nearly all Romans of Cato’s time were husbandmen, tilling the soil with their own hands.—­ED.

[136] This taste for useless magnificence is exhibited in the stories of the Thousand and One Nights.

[137] Cato the Elder had a horror of the Greeks.  He said to his son:  “I will tell what I have seen in Athens.  This race is the most perverse and intractable.  Listen to me as to an oracle:  whenever this people teaches us its arts it will corrupt everything.”

[138] “Schola,” from which we derive “school,” signified leisure.

[139] Also to write and reckon, as previously stated.—­ED.

CHAPTER XXIII

FALL OF THE REPUBLIC

DECADENCE OF REPUBLICAN INSTITUTIONS

=Destruction of the Peasantry.=—­The old Roman people consisted of small proprietors who cultivated their own land.  These honest and robust peasants constituted at once the army and the assembly of the people.  Though still numerous in 221 and during the Second Punic War, in 133 there were no more of them.  Many without doubt had perished in the foreign wars; but the special reason for their disappearance was that it had become impossible for them to subsist.

The peasants lived by the culture of grain.  When Rome received the grain of Sicily and Africa, the grain of Italy fell to so low a price that laborers could not raise enough to support their families and pay the military tax.  They were compelled to sell their land and this was bought by a rich neighbor.  Of many small fields he made a great domain; he laid the land down to grazing, and to protect his herds or to cultivate it he sent shepherds and slave laborers.  On the soil of Italy at that time there were only great proprietors and troops of slaves.  “Great domains,” said Pliny the Elder, “are the ruin of Italy.”

It was, in fact, the great domains that drove the free peasants from the country districts.  The old proprietor who sold his land could no longer remain a farmer; he had to yield the place to slaves, and he himself wandered forth without work.  “The majority of these heads of families,” says Varro in his treatise on agriculture, “have slipped within our walls, leaving the scythe and the plough; they prefer clapping their hands at the circus to