Large capitalistic estates were beginning to arise in Attica in the time of Solon, and were normal in the time of Xenophon.[197] In Carthage, where they likewise arose in due economic course, they do not seem to have hurt agriculture, though worked by slave labour;[198] and, on the other hand, the Roman military colonies were an attempt, albeit vain, to restore a free farming population. In Italy the disease was older than Sulla. When Tiberius Gracchus was passing through Etruria on his way from Spain, fifty years before the rule of Sulla, he saw no free labourers, but only slaves in chains.[199] The true account of the matter is this: that if Italy had not conquered Sicily, North Africa, Egypt, and the other fertile provinces, their competition could not have come to pass as it did; for any imports in that case would have had to be paid for by exports, and Italy had nothing adequate to export. It was the power to exact tribute, or otherwise the appropriation of conquered territory as estates by the nobles,[200] that upset the economic balance. Not merely in order to support the policy of cheap or free food--which was extended to other large Italian cities--but because corn was the staple product of Sicily and Egypt and North Africa, the tribute came in large measure in the form of foods; and in so far as it came in bullion, the coin had to be speedily re-exported to pay for further food and for the manufactures turned out by the provinces, and bought by the Italian rich. Save in so far as rich amateurs of agriculture went on farming at small profit or at a loss,[201] Italy produced little beyond olives and wine and cattle,[202] and ordinary wares for home consumption. Industrially considered, the society of the whole peninsula was thus finally a mere shell, doing its exchanges mainly in virtue of the annual income it extorted from provincial labour, and growing more and more worthless in point of character as its vital basis grew more and more strictly factitious. It would be accurate to say of the Empire, as represented by part of Italy and the capital, that it was a vast economic simulacrum. The paternal policy of the emperors,[203] good and bad, wrought to pretty much the same kind of result as the egoism of the upper classes had done; and though their popular measures must have exasperated the Senate, that body had in general to tolerate their well-meaning deeds as it did their crimes.[204]