Thus continual wars tended to introduce the stability of military powers and the permanence of armies. The same legions had passed ten years in Spain; others had been nearly as long in Sicily; and though, at the expiration of their service, the old soldiers were dismissed, the legions remained always under arms. Hence arose the necessity of giving lands to the soldiers who had finished their time of service; and, in 552, there were assigned to Scipio’s veterans, for each year of service in Africa and Spain, two acres of the lands confiscated from the Samnites and Apulians.[545]
It was the first time that Rome took foreign troops into her pay, sometimes Celtiberians, at others Cretans sent by Hiero of Syracuse,[546] in fact, mercenaries, and a body of discontented Gauls who had abandoned the Carthaginian army.[547]
Many of the inhabitants of the allied towns were drawn to Rome,[548] where, in spite of the sacrifices imposed by the wars, commerce and luxury increased. The spoils which Marcellus brought from Sicily, and especially from Syracuse, had given development to the taste for the arts, and this consul boasted of having been the first who caused his countrymen to appreciate and admire the masterpieces of Greece.[549] The games of the circus, in the middle of the sixth century, began to be more in favour. Junius and Decius Brutus had, in 490, exhibited for the first time the combats of gladiators, the number of which was soon increased to twenty-two pairs.[550] Towards this period, also (559), theatrical representations were first given by the ediles.[551] The spirit of speculation had taken possession of the high classes, as appears by the law forbidding the senators (law Claudia, 536) to maintain at sea ships of a tonnage of more than three hundred amphoræ; as the public wealth increased, the knights, composed of the class who paid most taxes, increased also, and tended to separate into two categories, some serving in the cavalry, and possessing the horse furnished by the State (_equus publicus_),[552] the others devoting themselves to commerce and financial operations. The knights had long been employed in civil commissions,[553] and were often called to the high magistracies; and therefore Perseus justly called them “the nursery of the Senate, and the young nobility out of which issued consuls and generals (_imperatores_).”[554] During the Punic wars they had rendered great services by making large advances for the provisioning of the armies;[555] and if some, as undertakers of transports, had enriched themselves at the expense of the State, the Senate hesitated in punishing their embezzlements, for fear of alienating this class, already powerful.[556] The territorial wealth was partly in the hands of the great proprietors; this appears from several facts, and, among others, from the hospitality given by a lady of Apulia to 10,000 Roman soldiers, who had escaped from the battle of Cannæ, whom she entertained at her own private cost on her own lands.[557]