e especially needed in
hay harvest or vintage; or debtors who give their labour as payment
for what they owe (obaerati).[342] Varro too, like Cato, recognises
the necessity of purchasing many things which cannot well be
manufactured on a farm of moderate size, and thus the landowner may in
this way also have been indirectly an employer of free labour; but so
far as possible the farm should supply itself with the materials
for its own working,[343] for this gives employment to the slaves
throughout the year,--and they should never be allowed to be
idle.[344]

Thus it is abundantly clear that even in the time of Cicero there was
a certain demand for free labour in the ordinary Italian oliveyard and
vineyard, and that the necessary supply was forthcoming, though the
permanent industrial basis was non-free, and the tendency was to use
slave-labour more exclusively. The rule that the slave cannot be
allowed to be unemployed was a most important factor in the economical
development, and drove the landowner, who never seems to have had any
doubt about the comparative cheapness of slave-labour,[345] gradually
to make his farm more and more independent of all aid from outside. In
the work of Columella, written towards the end of the first century
A.D., it is plain that the work of the farm is carried on more
exclusively by slave-labour than was the case in the last two
centuries B.C.[346]

To this not unpleasant picture of the conditions of Italian
agricultural slavery a few words must be added about the great
pastoral farms of Southern Italy. If a man invested his capital in a
comparatively small estate of olives and vineyards, such as that which
Cato treats of, and which seems to have been his own; or even in a
latifundium of the kind which Varro more vaguely pictures, containing
also parks and game and a moderate amount of pasture, he would need
slaves mainly of a certain degree of skill. But on the largest areas
of pasture, chiefly in the hill districts of Southern Italy, where
there was little cultivation except what was necessary for the
consumption of the slaves themselves, these were the roughest and
wildest type of bondsmen. The work was that of the American ranche,
the life harsh, and the workmen dangerous. It was in these districts
and from these men that Spartacus drew the material with which he made
his last stand against Roman armies in 72-71 B.C.; and it was in
this direction that Caelius and Milo turned in 48