These movements in Italy were but the symptoms of a spirit that was spreading over the Mediterranean lands. The rising of the serfs only just preceded the great awakening of the masses of the freemen.[263] Both classes were ground down by capital; both would make an effort to shake the burden from their shoulders; and, as regards the methods of assertion, it is a matter of little moment whether they took the form of a national rising against a government or a protectorate, a sanguinary struggle in the Forum against the dominance of a class, or an attack by chattels, not yet brutalised by serfdom but full of the traditions and spirit of freemen, against the cruelty and indifference of their owners. In one sense the servile movements were more universal, and perhaps better organised, than those of the men to whom, free birth gave a nominal superiority. A sympathy for each other's sufferings pervaded the units of the class who were scattered in distant lands. Sometimes it was a sympathy based on a sense of nationality, and the Syrian and Cilician in Asia would feel joy and hope stirring in his heart at the doings of his brethren who had been deported to the far West. The series of organised revolts in the Roman provinces and protectorate which commence shortly after the fall of Carthage and close for the moment with the war of resistance to the Romans in Asia, forms a single connected chain. Dangerous risings had to be repressed at the Italian coast towns of Minturnae and Sinuessa; at the former place four hundred and fifty slaves were crucified, at the latter four thousand were crushed by a military force; the mines of Athens, the slave market of Delos, witnessed similar outbreaks,[264] and we shall find a like wave of discontent spreading over the serf populations of the countries of the Mediterranean just before the second great outbreak in Sicily which darkens the close of the second century. The evil fate which made this island the theatre of the two greatest of the servile wars is explicable on many grounds. The opportunity offered by the sense of superiority in numbers was far ampler here than in any area of Italy of equal size. For Sicily was a wheat-growing country, and the cultivated plains demanded a mass of labour which was not needed in more mountainous or less fertile lands, where pasturage yielded a surer return than the tilling of the soil. The pasture lands of Sicily were indeed large, but they had not yet dwarfed the agriculture of the island. The labour of the fields was in the hands of a vast horde of Asiatics, large numbers of whom may conceivably have been shipped from Carthage across the narrow sea, when that great centre of the plantation system had been laid low and the fair estates of the Punic nobles had been seized and broken up by their conquerors.[265] In the history of the great Sicilian outbreaks Syrians and Cilicians meet us at every turn. These Asiatic slaves had different