2. The fields and pastures were farmed out to publicans.
3. Some of the uncultivated land was resigned to the first occupant, every Roman citizen having the right of settling there and of cultivating it.
Agrarian Laws.—The Agrarian Laws which deeply agitated Rome were concerned with this public domain. No Roman had leave to expel the possessors, for the boundaries of these domains were gods (Termini) and religious scruple prevented them from being disturbed. By the Agrarian Laws the people resumed the lands of the public domain which they distributed to citizens as property. Legally the people had the right to do this, since all the domain belonged to them. But for some centuries certain subjects or citizens had been permitted to enjoy these lands; at last they regarded them as their own property; they bequeathed them, bought and sold them. To take these from the occupants would suddenly ruin a multitude of people. In Italy especially, if this were done, all the people of a city would be expelled. Thus Augustus deprived the inhabitants of Mantua of the whole of their territory; Vergil was among the victims, but, thanks to his verse, he obtained the return of his domain, while the other proprietors who were not poets remained in exile. These lands thus recovered were sometimes distributed to poor citizens of Rome, but most frequently to old soldiers. Sulla bestowed lands on 120,000 veterans at the expense of the people of Etruria. The Agrarian Laws were a menace to all the subjects of Rome, and it was one of the benefits conferred by the emperors that they were abolished.
FOOTNOTES:
[123] Wisps or bundle of hay were twisted around poles.—ED.
[124] Regarding all these Italian wars the Romans had only a number of legends, most of them developed to glorify the heroism of some ancestor of a noble family—a Valerius, a Fabius, a Decius, or a Manlius.