We may add that Rome, just because it was incapable of a living communal character as a capital, was even essentially inferior to the other municipalities of the imperial period.

The republican Rome was a den of robbers, but it was at the same time the state; the Rome of the monarchy, although it began to embellish itself with all the glories of the three continents and to glitter in gold and marble, was yet nothing in the state but a royal residence in connection with a poor-house, or in other words a necessary evil.
Italy Italian Agriculture While in the capital the only object aimed at was to get rid of palpable evils by police ordinances on the greatest scale, it was a far more difficult task to remedy the deep disorganization of Italian economics.

Its radical misfortunes were those which we previously noticed in detail--the disappearance of the agricultural, and the unnatural increase of the mercantile, population-- with which an endless train of other evils was associated.
The reader will not fail to remember what was the state of Italian agriculture.

In spite of the most earnest attempts to check the annihilation of the small holdings, farm-husbandry was scarcely any longer the predominant species of economy during this epoch in any region of Italy proper, with the exception perhaps of the valleys of the Apennines and Abruzzi.

As to the management of estates, no material difference is perceptible between the Catonian system formerly set forth( 50) and that described to us by Varro, except that the latter shows the traces for better and for worse of the progress of city-life on a great scale in Rome.