In the time of Sylla, Italy contained about thirteen millions of slaves; and slave insurrections, both there and in Sicily, succeeded each other almost uninterruptedly. History has recorded some of them, and immortalized the name of the heroic Spartacus. The insurrection in Sicily also, under Ennus, lasted more than four years, and cost the lives of nearly a million of victims. Slave-breeding was not yet conducted on a large scale. The advice of Cato the Grumbler, was against its permission; and he obliged his slaves to pay him a tax from their _peculium_ whenever they cohabited with the other sex. The large amount of grain imported from conquered countries cultivated by slaves, brought about a competition which soon destroyed the homesteads of the yeomanry, and transformed the fertile Campagna and almost the whole of Italy into a vast cattle pasturage. It has been already mentioned (see "Greeks") that during the post-Alexandrian dissolution of Greece and of the east, Cilician piracy was rampant in the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Until Pompey destroyed this piracy, it had its centres and markets in Crete, in Rhodes, and even in Alexandria; but the principal mart was in Delos, where sometimes ten thousand slaves changed masters in a single day. The Roman merchants were the best patrons of the Cilician pirates; and recent developments show that our slave-planters are again beginning to be willing customers to the Americo-African pirates and slave-traders. In general, wherever the capitalist-slaveholder is permitted to develop his supremacy in a state, both man and society are materially and morally ruined. Thus it was with Rome and Italy at that epoch: and so also, the American slave states move on rapidly in the orbit from which Rome whirled into the abyss. In the Mithridatic and Asiatic wars, Pompey enslaved more than two millions of Asiatics; and according to the census made under him, Italy contained at that time only 450,000 able-bodied citizens capable of military duty, or a total free population of about 2,200,000. It is also asserted that Cæsar enslaved at least one million of Gauls. In the age of Cicero only about two thousand citizens of Rome possessed landed property, but with it they owned legions of chattels; and Cicero--a parvenu without manhood, first the accessory and then the betrayer of Cataline--maintained that only slaveholders could be considered respectable.