oman rulers had already contrived the pitiless
exploitation of the conquered provinces. The emperors had not abolished,
but organized this exploitation. The more the empire fell to pieces, the
higher rose the taxes and tithes, and the more shamelessly did the
officials rob and blackmail. Commerce and industry had never been a
strong point of the domineering Romans. Only in usury they had excelled
all other nations before and after them. What commerce had managed to
exist, had been ruined by official extortion. Only in the East, in the
Grecian part of the empire, some commerce still vegetated, but this is
outside of the scope of our study. Universal reduction to poverty,
decrease of traffic, of handicrafts, of art, of population, decay of the
towns, return of agriculture to a lower stage--that had been the final
result of Roman world supremacy.

But now agriculture, the most prominent branch of production in the
whole Old World, was again supreme, and more than ever. In Italy, the
immense estates (latifundiae) that comprised nearly the whole country
since the end of the republic, had been utilized in two ways: either as
pastures on which the population had been replaced by sheep and oxen,
the care of which required only a few slaves; or as country seats, on
which masses of slaves carried on horticulture on a large scale, partly
for the luxury of the owner, partly for sale on the markets of the
towns. The great pastures had been preserved and even extended in
certain parts. But the country seats and their horticulture had gone to
ruin through the impoverishment of their owners and the decay of the
towns. Latifundian economy based on slave labor was no longer
profitable; but in its time it had been the only possible form of
agriculture on a large scale. Now, however, small production had again
become the only lucrative form. One country seat after the other was
parceled and leased in small lots to hereditary tenants who paid a fixed
rent, or to partiarii, more administrators than tenants who received
one-sixth or even only one-ninth of a year's product in remuneration for
their work. But these little lots were principally disposed of to
colonists who paid a fixed sum annually and could be transferred by sale
together with their lots. Although no slaves, still these colonists
were not free; they could not marry free citizens, and marriages with
members of their own class were not regarded as valid, but as mere
concubinages