fficials, policing them, pretending to rule over them. To do this
soldiers were marching on foot into regions that lay thousands of miles
from the mother city. To be sure, they marched over Roman roads and
bridges so well constructed that some of them are still being used at
the present day.

But the excellence of Roman engineering could not match up to the
implacable limitations of time and distance. Nor could they overlook the
need for building the physical structure of Roman economy as they
advanced into enemy territory. Equally decisive were the political
consequences of the property confiscation and forced labor required to
establish and maintain Roman power and enrich greedy Roman officials and
their lackeys and overseers.

Rising overhead costs, with no corresponding growth of income, an empty
treasury in Rome, and a persistent policy of fleecing the provinces to
pay for the normal costs of bureaucracy, plus its extravagances and
excesses, could lead to only one possible outcome. Higher taxes and more
ruinous levies in the newly conquered provinces could not fill the
insatiable maw of deficit spending.

Inflation was the immediate result, accompanied and followed by the
debasement of currency and new expropriations of private property.
Government expenses consistently exceeded income. The situation was
aggravated by the growth of parasitic elements which persistently
produced little or nothing and as persistently multiplied their luxuries
and extravagances. The parasites grew richer. The impoverished masses
suffered the normal deprivations of poverty plus the weight of steadily
rising over-head costs. As Roman authority extended farther from its
center, the chasm between its income and its out-go widened.

Slave labor aggravated the situation. There was a time when Roman
farmers and craftsmen did their own work. That time ended with the
enslavement of war captives who swamped the labor market. Like any
parasitic growth, slavery and forced labor destroyed the fabric of a
largely self-contained economy based on peasant proprietorship.

Roman economy was honey-combed with problems created by deficit
spending, currency devaluation and exploitation. At its base was a
foot-loose urban proletariat made up largely of refugees from a
countryside given over increasingly to the employment of military
captives as slave labor. The city masses at the outset were extensively
unemployed. Increasingly they became unemployabl