The Second Punic War was the beginning of the end of this simple economy. Many small farmers went to the wall, farm labor became scarce because of the heavy casualties in the war. Hence investors often combined many small farms into large estates. At the end of the war, also, commissions were appointed by the State to draw in vast tracts that had been recovered from the Punic occupation in the south, and as colonists did not suffice for the settlement of these tracts much remained public land to be rented out in large estates for grazing. At the end of the war and during the next fifty years, hordes of war captives were brought to the block at Rome: Carthaginians, Iberians of Spain, Sardinians, Celts of the Po Valley, Macedonians, Illyrians, and Asiatics, and also many slaves that Greek owners were glad to sell on an expanding western market. These were bought cheaply, placed on the large estates and on ranches. With cheap labor it was possible to go into olive and vine culture and extensive cattle-raising. And with this capitalistic exploiting the small farmers found it difficult to compete. Many gave up the contest and moved to Cisalpine Gaul or overseas. The middle class of free folk began to dwindle. The few who knew how to adapt themselves to the new conditions acquired estates and lived in luxury. Naturally the hordes of slaves increased rapidly. In the cities also the slaves were increasing and driving out free labor, and they were slaves of foreign stock. Trained up to hard labor and an easy unconcern for morals, these slaves when they gained their freedom got the petty industries and shops in their control, and the citizen poor found it difficult to survive. This was a thoroughgoing social change that progressed silently and steadily through the second century and caused the Gracchi to launch a revolution in their vain attempt to bring back the conditions of a century before. These changes—which in some respects remind us of conditions in our southern states before 1860—necessarily affected artistic production. At dramatic performances on Roman holidays the audience was of course gradually changing in type and quality and by no means for the better. The audiences to which public speeches were addressed—the speeches that had so much to do with shaping Latin prose style—were not the same in Caesar’s day as in Cato’s. And in view of the dwindling of the middle class, the class which usually provides the larger number of authors, we cannot be surprised if the dilettante production of the aristocratic writers and the hack work of servile producers fill a considerable space in the history of the late Republic. It is generally recognized, I think, that in our southern states between 1800 and 1860 literature fared badly, despite the orthodox argument that the existence of slave drudges gave leisure to genius to develop the nobler arts. Parasitic leisure has seldom employed its talents in artistic production.