82 Chapter 5Illustration 5.1
Plan of a Typical Villa.This villa at Boscoreale
near Pompeii was the headquarters of a typical
working estate. Wealthy Romans spread their fi-
nancial risks by investing in several such properties
during the later republic. Worked by slaves, this
one produced wine. The existence of a threshing
floor (T) indicates that it was more diversified in its
products than some other farms. Though comfort-
able enough by the standards of the time, the pri-
mary emphasis is on efficiency and practicality.
from the east. Slaves, whether in town or country, con-
sumed little, and citizens who had been driven from the
land consumed less. Most of the latter were destitute.
After 213 B.C., senatorial factions began to distribute
charity among them in return for votes.
Aside from the senatorial elite, only one other
group appears to have benefited from the wars—the
merchants, purveyors, and military contractors who or-
ganized the logisitics of imperial expansion. Most were
men of humble origin, often manumitted slaves who
used knowledge and connections gained from their for-
mer masters to win contracts. They amassed great
wealth in shipbuilding, arms manufacture, and com-
modity speculation and made an effort to acquire es-
tates because land remained the most secure and
prestigious source of income. Others followed the lead
of certain senators and invested their surplus capital in
urban real estate—ramshackle five-story tenements
built to house the growing masses of urban poor. In
later years these people would be known as equestrians,
a separate class with a political agenda of its own.
Roman society had changed beyond recognition in
little more than a century. Though pockets of tradi-
tional life remained, most small independent farmers
who were the backbone of the republic had been re-
duced to dependency. Production was largely in the
hands of slaves, while a few families lived in luxury that
seemed more oriental than Roman. The situation could
lead only to civil strife.Social Conflict: The Reforms of the Gracchi
In 133 B.C., the same year in which Numantia fell and
Pergamum was ceded to Rome, a newly elected tribune,
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, initiated reform legisla-
tion. A member of the aristocracy and a descendant of
Scipio Africanus, he hoped to improve the condition of
landless Romans by redistributing public lands acquired
through conquest. Such properties were to have been
allocated among the citizens as a whole, but families
like his own often had seized them illegally through the