A History of Rome During the Later Republic and Early Principate. A. H. J. Greenidge
did not doom him to immediate death. He was kept a prisoner at Morgantia, where he died shortly afterwards of disease.
It is said that by the date of the fall of Enna more than twenty thousand slaves had perished.[295] Even without this slaughter, the capture of their seaport and their armoury would have been sufficient to break the back of the revolt.[296] It only remained to scour the country with picked bands of soldiers for organised resistance to be shattered, and even for the curse of brigandage to be rooted out for a while. Death was no longer meted out indiscriminately to the rebels. Such of the slave-owners as survived would probably have protested against wholesale crucifixion, and the destruction of all of the fugitives would have impaired the resources of Sicily. Thus many were spared the cross and restored to their bonds.[297] The extent to which reorganisation was needed before the province could resume its normal life, is shown by the fact that the senate thought it worth while to give Sicily a new provincial charter. Ten commissioners were sent to assist Rupilius in the work, which henceforth bore the proconsul's name.[298] The work, as we know it, was of a conservative character; but it is possible that no complete charter had ever existed before, and the war may have revealed defects in the arrangements of Sicily that had heretofore been unsuspected.
A climax of the type of the servile war in Sicily was perhaps needed to bring the social problem home to thinking men in Rome. Not that it by any means sufficed for all who pondered on the public welfare or laboured at the business of the State. The men who measured happiness by wealth and empire might still have retained their unshaken confidence in the Fortune of Rome. Had a Capys of this class arisen, he might have given a thrilling picture of the immediate future of his city, dark but grimly national in its emergence from trial to triumph. He might have seen her conquering arms expanding to the Euphrates and the Rhine, and undreamed sources of wealth pouring their streams into the treasury or the coffers of the great. If there was blood in the picture, when had it been absent from the annals of Rome? Even civil strife and a new Italian war might be a hard but a necessary price to pay for a strong government and a grand mission. If an antiquated constitution disappeared in the course of this glorious expansion, where was the loss?
But there were men in Rome who measured human life by other canons: who believed that the State existed for the individual at least as much as the individual for the State: who, even when they were imperialists, saw with terror the rotten foundations on which the empire rested, and with indignation the miserable returns that had been made to the men who had bought it with their blood. To them the brilliant present and the glorious future were veiled by a screen that showed the ghastly spectres of commercial imperialism. It showed luxury running riot amongst a nobility already impoverished and ever more thievishly inclined, a colossal capitalism clutching at the land and stretching out its tentacles for every source of profitable trade, the middle class fleeing from the country districts and ousted from their living in the towns, and the fair island that was almost a part of their Italian home, its garden and its granary, in the throes of a great slave war.
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