publicus constantly increased, and thus a large portion of Italy fell into the hands of the patricians, who frequently withheld from the state the annual payments of a tenth and a fifth, which they were bound to pay for the possession of the land, and thus deprived the state of a fund for the expenses of the war. In addition to which they used slaves as cultivators and shepherds, since freemen were liable to be drawn off from field-labour to military service, and slave-labour was consequently far cheaper. In this way the number of free labourers was diminished, and that of slaves augmented. To remedy this state of things several laws were from time to time proposed and carried, which were most violently opposed by the patricians. All laws which related to the _public_ land are called by the general title of _Leges Agrariae_, and accordingly all the early laws relating to the possession of the public land by the patricians, and to the assignment of portions of it to the plebeians, were strictly agrarian laws; but the first law to which this name is usually applied was proposed soon after the establishment of the republic by the consul, Sp. Cassius, in B.C. 486. Its object was to set apart the portion of the public land which the patricians were to possess, to divide the rest among the plebeians, to levy the payment due for the possession, and to apply it to paying the army. The first law, however, which really deprived the patricians of the advantages they had previously enjoyed in the occupation of the public land was the agrarian law of C. Licinius Stolo (B.C. 366), which limited each individual’s possession of public land to 500 jugera, and declared that no individual should have above 100 large and 500 smaller cattle on the public pastures: it further enacted that the surplus land was to be divided among the plebeians. As this law, however, was soon disregarded, it was revived again by Tib. Sempronius Gracchus (B.C. 133), with some alterations and additions. The details of the other agrarian laws mentioned in Roman history are given under the name of the lex by which they are called. [LEX.]