y so,
but the Romans even settled themselves permanently there, and in order
to the suppression of piracy in its chief seat, the Rugged or western
Cilicia occupied strong military positions--the first step towards the
establishment of the province of Cilicia, which thenceforth appears
among the Roman magistracies.(7) The design was commendable, and the
scheme in itself was suitable for its purpose; only, the continuance
and the increase of the evil of piracy in the Asiatic waters, and
especiallyin Cilicia, unhappily showed with how inadequate means
the pirates were combated from the newly-acquired position.

Revolt of the Slaves

But nowhere did the impotence and perversity of the Roman provincial
administration come to light so conspicuously as in the insurrections
of the slave proletariate, which seemed to have revived on their
former footing simultaneously with the restoration of the aristocracy.
These insurrections of the slaves swelling from revolts into wars--
which had emerged just about 620 as one, and that perhaps the proximate,
cause of the Gracchan revolution--were renewed and repeated with dreary
uniformity. Again, as thirty years before, a ferment pervaded the body
of slaves throughout the Roman empire. We have already mentioned
the Italian conspiracies. The miners in the Attic silver-mines rose
in revolt, occupied the promontory of Sunium, and issuing thence
pillaged for a length of time the surrounding country. Similar
movements appeared at other places.

The Second Sicilian Slave-War

But the chief seat of these fearful commotions was once more Sicily
with its plantations and its hordes of slaves brought thither from
Asia Minor. It is significant of the greatness of the evil, that
an attempt of the government to check the worst iniquities of the
slaveholders was the immediate cause of the new insurrection. That
the free proletarians in Sicily were little better than the slaves,
had been shown by their attitude in the first insurrection;(8)
after it was subdued, the Roman speculators took their revenge and
reduced numbers of the free provincials into slavery. In consequence
of a sharp enactment issued against this by the senate in 650, Publius
Licinius Nerva, the governor of Sicily at the time, appointed a court
for deciding on claims of freedom to sit in Syracuse. The court
went earnestly to work; in a short time decision was given in eight
hundred processes against the slave-owners, and t