influence over the coast, there were no limits to the extent to which cattle rearing could be carried.[193] It became perhaps the most gigantic enterprise connected with the soil of Italy. Its cheapness and efficiency appealed to every practical mind. Cato, who had a sentimental attachment to agriculture, was bound in honesty to reply to the question "What is the best manner of investment?" by the words "Good pasturage." To the question as to the second-best means he answered "Tolerable pasturage." When asked to declare the third, he replied "Bad pasturage." To ploughing he would assign only the fourth place in the descending Scale.[194] Bruttii and Apulia were the chief homes of the ranch and the fold. The Lucanian conquest of the former country must, even at a time preceding the Roman domination, have formed a connection between the mountains and the plains, and pasturage on a large scale in the mountain glades of the Bruttian territory may have been an inheritance rather than a creation of the Romans; but the ruin caused in this district by the Second Punic War, the annexation to the State of large tracts of rebel land,[195] and the reduction of large portions of the population to the miserable serf-like condition of _dediticii_,[196] must have offered the capitalists opportunities which they could not otherwise have secured; and both here and in Apulia the tendency to extend the grazing system to its utmost limits must have advanced with terrible rapidity since the close of the Hannibalic war. It was the East coast of Southern Italy that was chiefly surrendered to this new form of industry, and we may observe a somewhat sharp distinction between the pastoral activity of these regions and the agricultural life which still continued, although on a diminished scale, in the Western districts.[197]