r 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