Especially was this true of the pastoral districts such as Apulia, the chosen land of cattle-breeding, which is called by contemporaries the most deserted part of Italy, and of the region around Rome, where the Campagna was annually becoming more desolate under the constant reciprocal action of the retrograde agriculture and the increasing malaria.
Labici, Gabii, Bovillae, once cheerful little country towns, were so decayed, that it was difficult to find representatives of them for the ceremony of the Latin festival.

Tusculum, although still one of the most esteemed communities of Latium, consisted almost solely of some genteel families who lived in the capital but retained their native Tusculan franchise, and was far inferior in the number of burgesses entitled to vote even to small communities in the interior of Italy.

The stock of men capable of arms in this district, on which Rome's ability to defend herself had once mainly depended, had so totally vanished, that people read with astonishment and perhaps with horror the accounts of the annals-- sounding fabulous in comparison with things as they stood-- respecting the Aequian and Volscian wars.

Matters were not so bad everywhere, especially in the other portions of Central Italy and in Campania; nevertheless, as Varro complains, "the once populous cities of Italy," in general "stood desolate." Italy under the Oligarchy It is a dreadful picture--this picture of Italy under the rule of the oligarchy.

There was nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich.