y,
the elaborate system of encampment allowed the Romans to combine the
advantages of defensive and offensive war and to decline or give
battle according to circumstances, and in the latter case to fight
under the ramparts of their camp just as under the walls of a
fortress--the Roman, says a Roman proverb, conquers by sitting still.

Origin of the Manipular Legion

That this new military organization was in the main a Roman, or at any
rate Italian, remodelling and improvement of the old Hellenic tactics
of the phalanx, is plain. If some germs of the system of reserve and
of the individualizing of the smaller subdivisions of the army are
found to occur among the later Greek strategists, especially Xenophon,
this only shows that they felt the defectiveness of the old system,
but were not well able to obviate it. The manipular legion appears
fully developed in the war with Pyrrhus; when and under what
circumstances it arose, whether at once or gradually, can no
longer be ascertained. The first tactical system which the Romans
encountered, fundamentally different from the earlier Italo-Hellenic
system, was the Celtic sword-phalanx. It is not impossible that the
subdivision of the army and the intervals between the maniples in
front were arranged with a view to resist, as they did resist, its
first and only dangerous charge; and it accords with this hypothesis
that Marcus Furius Camillus, the most celebrated Roman general of the
Gallic epoch, is presented in various detached notices as the reformer
of the Roman military system. The further traditions associated with
the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars are neither sufficiently accredited, nor
can they with certainty be duly arranged;(23) although it is in itself
probable that the prolonged Samnite mountain warfare exercised a
lasting influence on the individual development of the Roman soldier,
and that the struggle with one of the first masters of the art of war,
belonging to the school of the great Alexander, effected an
improvement in the technical features of the Roman military system.

National Economy--
The Farmers--
Farming of Estates

In the national economy agriculture was, and continued to be, the
social and political basis both of the Roman community and of the new
Italian state. The common assembly and the army consisted of Roman
farmers; what as soldiers they had acquired by the sword, they secured
as colonists by the plough. The insolvency of the middle c