The Hannibalian war was eminently destructive to the yeomanry and to their small homesteads. Internal domestic economy was shaken from the foundation and almost entirely destroyed; the arable lands were rapidly turned into wild sheep pastures, with wild slaves on them as shepherds; the patricians no longer considered agriculture their first occupation, when they found that the slaves of Sicily, Africa, and afterward Egypt, were able to nourish both them and the people; and any land still in culture, was worked by poor farmers, by colonists and slaves. The term _colonist_, also, now acquired a somewhat degraded signification, for they were now but poor proletarians and plebeians. Now also came into more common use the legal denomination _familia rustica_, or rural chattels; and perhaps at this time, or soon after, originated in Rome the proverb: "_As many slaves, so many enemies._" In the course of the sixth century, U.C., there burst out in great force the antagonism between the free rural laborer and the slave. The struggle for life and death between the large land and slave holders and the yeomanry or freeholders, became more and more active. That which had taken root but slowly in the previous centuries, became strengthened by contact with nations of older and more corrupt civilizations. The influence of Carthage appeared in the rural economy of the Romans, and they began to model their agriculture on the Carthaginian slave husbandry. The book on "Agriculture," written by Magon, a Carthaginian, was translated into Latin by order of the senate. The country was rapidly filled with slaves, and now originated that reckless cruelty in dealing with them which was reflected soon after in the laws. The large slaveholders continually enlarged their estates by buying or seizing under various pretexts the small homesteads. In the times of Publicola and of the Twelve Tables, the small freeholders had been driven to despair by debts and executions; but now they were ruined and utterly destroyed by slave labor. The patricians, who had formerly been mortgagees of homesteads, and for whom the freeholder had worked to quash his indebtedness, now became large planters. Thus in Rome and throughout Italy, as well as in the conquered provinces, the slave tide rose higher and higher. These provinces constituted the estates of the sovereign Roman people; but in their administration the patricians applied the same discipline, the same iron rod that they held over their slaves. They kept the ironed chattels in walled courts and prisons, and it became proverbial that "A good mastiff should show no mercy to slaves"--a proverb still applicable to the bloodhounds of slavery.