The Roman government did not aim at uniformity or centralisation. Augustus and his immediate successors merely transferred to their provincial dominions the typical organisation evolved by the senate for the races and communities of Italy, and the relations of the various communities with Rome were ordered according to their conduct and loyalty by contracts and concessions. Every grade of political rank was represented, from the full rights of Roman citizenship in the colonies and municipia to the Italian and Latin law of the emancipated communes and the status of the subject cities, which last were under the jurisdiction of the local governor in all public affairs, whether administrative or judicial. Even these retained a shadow of self-government and independence in the right of electing their civic magistrates, subject to certain restrictions, in the unhindered continuance of religious and communal associations, and the ownership of municipal property. Thus in all parts of the provinces we come upon evidences of revived prosperity, a well-ordered state of things in legal matters, and a society animated by interests of commerce, industry, and art. Where writers are mute, the splendid monuments of architecture, the remains of temples and public halls, theatres and amphitheatres, baths and aqueducts, bear witness with no uncertain voice. It was otherwise in the capital and in Italy. Here also the monarchy succeeded to the heritage of the republic, but found a condition of social disorder past remedy. Agrarian distress and conflict, which had been at work since the days of the Gracchi, consumed the vigour, prosperity, and vital spirits of the races of middle and lower Italy. The civil wars with their proscriptions and confiscations, the settlement of brutalised soldiers, unfit for agriculture and the labours of peace, in the most beautiful and fertile regions, the cultivation of the fields by hordes of slaves, and the absorption of large districts into private estates or _latifundia_, had almost annihilated the free peasant class of earlier times and had filled the peninsula with an alien population, bound to the soil by no ties of affection or association, linked by no natural piety to the paternal roof or the inherited acres. The honest, industrious, and thrifty peasantry of primitive times had vanished, the ownership of the soil had passed, in part, into the hands of the rich, who transformed the arable land into parks and gardens, groves and fish-ponds, for the adornment of their country-seats, or who, from greed of gain, used them as pasture for their flocks and herds, or as vineyards and olive gardens, with a view to the trade in wool, wine, or oil; in part, they had been assigned to veterans as a recompense for military service. In the places where free peasant families had led a quiet life in numerous villages and homesteads, and had cultivated their cornfields with assiduous industry, might now be seen the dungeon-like lodgings of