Admitting that there were “freemen,” their part was evidently secondary, unless in reality they were the new-made “freedmen,” as a scholar has suggested. The predominance of the latter is conspicuous in the old English translation by Sir Thomas North:[183] “_And being landed, proclaimed by sound of trumpet liberty to all slaves and bondmen that would come to him._ So the laborers, herdmen, and neat-herds of all that marsh, for the only name and reputation of Marius, ran to the seaside from all parts.” It appears also in the historic fact, that, when Marius landed in Etruria, there were few or no husbandmen and shepherds already free. They were slaves. According to Plutarch, the first prompting of Tiberius Gracchus to his career as a reformer was observation in this very region. Passing through Etruria, on the way to Spain, he was troubled to find “scarce any husbandmen or shepherds except slaves from foreign and barbarous nations.”[184] Niebuhr, following Plutarch, says that “he saw far and wide no free laborers, but numbers of slaves in chains.”[185] The language is strong,--“far and wide no free laborers.” This was 137 years B. C. Somewhat later, 45 years B. C., Julius Cæsar by positive law required that of herdmen one third should always be free,[186] thus showing that two thirds at least were then slaves. It is only reasonable to suppose, that, if slaves were everywhere at the earlier date, and so numerous at the later date, it would have been impossible at the landing of Marius, 87 years B. C., to form an army of freemen in a few days. Only fourteen years later the gladiator Spartacus called the slaves to his standard, and they came by tens of thousands, so as to stifle the local power; and here again is testimony to their comparative numbers.