This had already begun to take
place as early as the second Punic war, when the plains of Sinuessa[6] and
Falernia were cultivated rather for pleasure than the necessaries of life;
so that the army of Fabius could find nothing upon which to sustain
itself. Under these influences the plebeians, in 133, had become merely a
turbulent, restless mass, but full of the activity and the energy which
had characterized them in the early centuries of the republic. They were
composed chiefly of the descendants of the ancient plebeian families,
decimated by wars and by misery. They were the heirs of those for whom
Spurius Cassius, Terentillius Arsa, Virginius, Licinius Stolo, Publilius
Philo, and Hortensius had endured so many conflicts and even shed their
blood; but they had become brutalized by poverty, debauchery, and crime.
No longer able to support themselves by labor, they had become beggars and
vagabonds.
[Footnote 1: M. Bureau de la Malle, _Ec. polit. des Romains,_ch. 15, p.
143; ch. 2, p.231.]
[Footnote 2: Plutarch, _Cato the Censor,_6 and 7.]
[Footnote 3: Horace, Sat. II, 7; v. 42-43: "Quid? si me stultior ipso
quingentis empto drachmis, deprehenderis.
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