The great wars which brought glory to generals and wealth and pride to Rome actually made the poor more miserable, for many reasons, and for two in particular. One was the growing number of slaves in the city. After every campaign thousands of prisoners were taken and these prisoners were not given back at the end of the war; they became the slaves of the conqueror. There were so many slaves in Rome after the wars with Sicily, Carthage, Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, that it was by no means easy for the ordinary Roman to get work. The other reason was the difficulty of getting land. Once, before the long wars, Italy had been a country of small farmers and peasants who lived on a little piece of land, sometimes rented and sometimes their own, and cultivated it. There were very few of these happy farmers now. The men had been called away to the wars; many never came back. What happened was this. While the man was away at the wars, his wife, with children to look after, and less strong than he, could seldom cultivate the land fully. Even if she managed to keep the children fed, she had no money or produce over with which to pay the rent. Then the landlord would turn her out and take the plot and add it to his own estate. This was happening all over Italy. If the owner were not turned out, the land went to rack and ruin from neglect. Thus many a soldier, when he did come back, found his home gone. Others, weary, worn, and perhaps disabled after long years of the hardships of war, had neither the strength nor energy to set to the heavy work of digging and preparing land that had been neglected for years. At the same time the common lands, which were supposed to belong to the whole people, who might graze their cattle or cut wood on them, were taken in bit by bit by the big landlords in the war years. Thus men who wanted land could not get it. Big estates grew bigger, and they were run largely by slave-labour. The independent husbandman, who had been the backbone of the Roman army, was vanishing. A few people began, in Scipio’s day, to be worried about this question of the land, because they saw that if the peasants and farmers disappeared, the best soldiers would disappear also.