.

             The financial rewards of successful overseas warfare were used by the elite to acquire land in Italy that became available when the peasant farmers Rome required to man its armies could no longer independently maintain their holdings and sold out, through choice or compulsion, to those with excess capital at their disposal; and in turn the peasants were replaced by the vast numbers of slaves thrown onto the market in the age of territorial expansion. Or rather it might be said that, in a less traditional but perhaps more accurate formulation, the elite gradually came to stock with slaves large holdings of land built up in consequence of the steady decline, but not total disappearance, of the peasantry in order to accommodate the shortage of labor the erosion of the peasantry caused. (Bradley 19).

             Most slaves where in all senses of the phrase, the spoils of war as the standard of the day determined the outcomes of the situation as one were those who's governments had fallen to the great wielded arm of the Roman Empire where rounded up and relocated to wherever the Roman elite needed their labor. There were plenty of people to choose from as Rome was often on the winning end of battle during this and at other time periods.

             But whether at the expense of expropriated peasants or alongside those who remained or both, the slave population engaged in agriculture increased substantially, its numbers fueled by the continuously successful wars of the period. For it was a longstanding convention of ancient warfare, and one maintained by Rome, that war captives automatically fell into slavery. The decline of the Italian peasantry and the growth of slave labor in both arable and pastoral farming thus compounded each other, with incessant warfare acting as the essential fulcrum of change. At the same time, slaves were used as domestics in the urban households of the elite in similarly increasing numbers, providing their masters with entourages and retinues that heightened more and more the latter's social profile.