It was not that, as Pliny put it in the perpetually quoted phrase,[196] the _latifundia_, the great estates, had ruined Italy and began to ruin the provinces; it was that, first, the fertile conquered provinces, notably Sicily, undersold Italy; whereafter the economically advantaged competition of Egypt, as imperially exploited, and of the African provinces, undersold the produce of most of the other regions, and would have done so equally had their agriculture remained in the hands of small farmers. The _latifundia_ were themselves effects of the policy of conquest and annexation. The theory that "those large pastoral estates, and that slave-cultivation, which had so powerful and so deleterious an influence over Italian husbandry and population, may be principally ascribed to the confiscations and the military colonies of Sulla and his successors," is clearly wide of the mark. So M'Culloch, _Treatises and Essays: Colonial System of the Ancients_, p. 426. No doubt agriculture went rapidly from bad to worse in the convulsions of Sulla's rule, when whole territories passed into the hands of his partisans. These would be bent on the use of slave labour, and would take to the forms of production which gave them the best money return. On the other hand, in an age of chronic confiscation of whole areas, steady men were not likely to be attracted to the land. See Prof. Pelham's _Outlines_, p. 213; Dureau de la Malle, _Écon. polit. des Romains_, vol. ii, liv. iii, ch. 22.