Certainly the great war of which Italy had been the theatre did mark such an epoch in the history of its agricultural life. A lack of productivity began to be manifested, for which, however, subsequent economic causes were mainly responsible. The lack of intensity, which is a characteristic of slave labour, lessened the returns, while the secondary importance attached to the manuring of the fields was a vicious principle inherent in the agricultural precepts of the time.[199] But it is probable that from this epoch there were large tracts of land the renewed cultivation of which was never attempted; and these were soon increased by domains which yielded insufficient returns and were gradually abandoned. The Italian peasant had ever had a hard fight with the insalubrity of his soil. Fever has always been the dreaded goddess of the environs of Rome. But constant labour and effective drainage had kept the scourge at bay, until the evil moment came when the time of the peasant was absorbed, and his energy spent, in the toils of constant war, when his land was swallowed up in the vast estates that had rapid profits as their end and careless slaves as their cultivators. Then, the moist fields gave out their native pestilence, and malaria reigned unchecked over the fairest portion of the Italian plain.[200] One of the leading economic causes, which had led to the failure of a certain class of the Italian peasant-proprietors, was the competition to which they were exposed from the provinces. Rome herself had begun to rely for the subsistence of her increasing population on corn imported from abroad, and many of the large coast-towns may have been forced to follow her example. The corn-producing powers of the Mediterranean lands had now definitely shifted from the regions of the East and North to those of the South.[201] Greece, which had been barely able to feed itself during the most flourishing period of its history, could not under any circumstances have possessed an importance as a country of export for Italy; but the economic evils which had fallen on this unhappy land are worthy of observation, as presenting a forecast of the fate which was in store for Rome. The decline in population, which could be attributed neither to war nor pestilence, the growing celibacy and childlessness of its sparse inhabitants,[202] must have been due to an agricultural revolution similar to that which was gradually being effected on Italian soil. The plantation system and the wholesale employment of slave labour must have swept across the Aegean from their homes in Asia Minor. Here their existence is sufficiently attested by the servile rising which was to assume, shortly after the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, the pretended form of a dynastic war; and the troubles which always attended the collection of the Asiatic tithes, in the days when a Roman province had been established in those regions, give no favourable impression of the agricultural prosperity of the