The dwelling house / by George Vivian Poore.

  • George Vivian Poore
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dwelling house / by George Vivian Poore. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    with the defence of the Empire led to such a merciless taxa- tion of the landholder that in self-defence he was obliged to allow his land to go out of cultivation, and thus escape from the brutal exactions of the tax-gatherer. According to Gibbon, within sixty years of the death of Constantine 320,000 acres of the district of Campania had become barren. Further, there can be no doubt that the Cloaca Maxima and other cloace sent to the Tiber much, if not all, of the organic refuse which should have been returned to the land. Finally, there can be little doubt that the extrava- cant water supply of ancient Rome must have had the effect of causing neglect of local wells, and as the water of the aqueducts was supplied to places in the Campagna as well as to Rome itself, the discontinuance of pumping must have helped to leave moisture in the soil at the same time that an extra supply from a distance was giving an additional quantity to it. As these great works of engineering did away with the necessity of manual labour, and as the barren land stood in no need of husbandmen, it is not to be wondered at that the problem of the unemployed grew urgent in Rome. We hear that in the later days of the Empire the masses congregated at the baths or waited whole days at the doors of the amphitheatre while they were fed with doles of bread or corn supplied from the public granaries. With a dense idle population and with barren and unwholesome surroundings the amenities of Rome as an imperial residence declined, and on this account it was probably that Diocletian seldom visited it; and one cannot but think that the social and sanitary conditions of the capital were among the causes which led Constantine to abandon it in favour of his new city on the Bosphorus. Finally, one is not surprised to hear that when Alaric took the city in the beginning of the fifth century he did so, not by direct assault, but by seizing the huge granaries and
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