burdened with debt, who hastened to squander, in the taverns of Rome, the
modicum of gold which he had received. Often he took the land without
paying anything.[2] An ancient writer tells us of an unfortunate involved
in a law suit with a rich man because the latter, discommoded by the bees
of the poor man, his neighbor, had destroyed them. The poor man protested
that he wished to depart and establish his swarms elsewhere, but that
nowhere was he able to find a small field where he would not again have
a rich man for a neighbor. The nabobs of the age, says Columella, had
properties which they were unable to journey round on horseback in a day,
and an inscription recently found at Viterba, shows that an aqueduct ten
miles long did not traverse the lands of any new proprietors.... The small
estate gradually disappeared from the soil of Italy, and with it the
sturdy population of laborers.... Spurius Ligustinus, a centurian, after
twenty-two campaigns, at the age of more than fifty years, did not have for
himself, his wife, and eight children more than a jugerum of land and a
cabin."[3]

To this masterly sketch quoted from Duruy, we can but add a few facts.
Pliny affirms that under Nero only six men possessed the half of Africa.[4]
Seneca, who himself possessed an immense fortune, says, concerning the rich
men of his time, that they did not content themselves with possessing the
lands that formerly had supported an entire people; they were wont to turn
the course of rivers in order to conduct them through their possessions.
They[5] desired even to embrace seas within their vast domains. We must
here, it is true, make some allowance for rhetoric. So, too, in the
writings of Petronius, some allowance for satire must be made, where he
represents the clerk of Trimalchio making a report of that which has taken
place in a single day upon one of the latter's farms near Cumae. Here on
the 7th of the calends[6] of July, were born 30 boys and 40 girls; 500,000
bushels of wheat were harvested and 500 oxen were yoked. The clerk goes on