and Africa had become Roman provinces, their vast productive capacity
was utilised to feed the great city.

Nor indeed need we be surprised to find that the State has taken over
the task of feeding the Roman population, and of feeding it cheaply,
if only we are accustomed to think, not merely to read, about life in
the city at this period. Nothing is more difficult for the ordinary
reader of ancient history than to realise the difficulty of feeding
large masses of human beings, whether crowded in towns or soldiers in
the field. Our means of transport are now so easily and rapidly set
in action and maintained, that it would need a war with some great
sea-power to convince us that London or Glasgow might, under certain
untoward circumstances, be starved; and as our attention has never
been drawn to the details of food-supply, we do not readily see why
there should have been any such difficulty at Rome as to call for the
intervention of the State. Perhaps the best way to realise the problem
is to reflect that every adult inhabitant needed about four and a half
pecks of corn per month, or some three pounds a day; so that if the
population of Rome be taken at half a million in Cicero's time, a
million and a half pounds would be demanded as the daily consumption
of the people.[55] I have already said that in the last three
centuries B.C. there was a universal tendency to leave the country for
the towns; and we now know that many other cities besides Rome
not only felt the same difficulty, but actually used the same
remedy--State importation of cheap corn.[56] Even comparatively small
cities like Dyrrhachium and Apollonia in Epirus, as Caesar tells us
while narrating his own difficulty in feeding his army there, used for
the most part imported corn.[57] And we must remember that while some
of the greatest cities on the Mediterranean, such as Alexandria and
Antioch, were within easy reach of vast corn-fields, this was not the