class was filled with a positive enthusiasm for new and improved agricultural methods. The great work of the Carthaginian Mago was translated by order of the senate.[185] Few of the members of that body would have cared to follow the opening maxim of the great expert, that if a man meant to settle in the country he should begin by selling his house in town;[186] the men of affairs did not mean to become gentlemen farmers, and it was the hope of profitable investment for the purpose of maintaining their dignity in the capital, not the rustic ideal of the primitive Roman, that appealed to their souls. But they might have hoped that most of the golden precepts of the twenty-eight books, which unfolded every aspect of the science of the management of land, would be assimilated by the intelligent bailiff, and they may even have been influenced by a patriotic desire to reveal to the small holder scientific methods of tillage, which might stave off the ruin that they deplored as statesmen and exploited as individuals. But the lessons were thrown away on the small cultivator; they probably presupposed the possession of capital and labour which were far beyond his reach; and science may have played but little part even in the accumulations of the rich, although the remarkable spectacle of small holdings, under the personal supervision of peasant proprietors, being unable to hold their own against plantations and ranches managed by bailiffs and worked by slaves, does suggest that some improved methods of cultivation were adopted on the larger estates. The rapidity with which the plantation system spread must have excited the astonishment even of its promoters. Etruria, in spite of the fact that three colonies of Roman citizens had lately been founded within its borders,[187] soon showed one continuous series of great domains stretching from town to town, with scarcely a village to break the monotonous expanse of its self-tilled plains. Little more than forty years had elapsed since the final settlement of the last Roman colony of Luna when a young Roman noble, travelling along the Etruscan roads, strained his eyes in vain to find a free labourer, whether cultivator or shepherd.[188] In this part of Italy it is probable that Roman enterprise was not the sole, or even the main, cause of the wreckage of the country folk. The territory had always been subject to local influences of an aristocratic kind; but the Etruscan nobles had stayed their hand as long as a free people might help them to regain their independence.[189] Now subjection had crushed all other ambition but that of gain and personal splendour, while the ravages of the Hannibalic war had made the peasantry an easy victim of the wholesale purchaser. Farther south, in Bruttii and Apulia, the hand of Rome had co-operated with the scourge of war to produce a like result. The confiscations effected in the former district as a punishment for