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Please note that Mommsen uses the AUC chronology (Ab Urbe Condita), i.e. from the founding of the City of Rome. You can use this reference table to have the B.C. dates
From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson
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Page 15
His house was in the country; in the city he had only a lodging for the purpose of attending to his business there, and perhaps of breathing the purer air that prevailed there during the hot season. Above all, however, these arrangements furnished a moral basis for the relation between the upper class and the common people, and so materially lessened its dangers. The free tenants-on-sufferance, sprung from families of decayed farmers, dependents, and freedmen, formed the great bulk of the proletariate,(13) and were not much more dependent on the landlord than the petty leaseholder inevitably is with reference to the great proprietor.
13. Cf. I. VI. Class of Μέτοικοι Subsisting by the Side of the Community
The slaves tilling the fields for a master were beyond doubt far less numerous than the free tenants. In all cases where an immigrant nation has not at once reduced to slavery a population -en masse-, slaves seem to have existed at first only to a very limited amount, and consequently free labourers seem to have played a very different part in the state from that in which they subsequently appear.
In Greece "day-labourers" (θῆτες) in various instances during the earlier period occupy the place of the slaves of a later age, and in some communities, among the Locrians for instance, there was no slavery down to historical times. Even the slave, moreover, was ordinarily of Italian descent; the Volscian, Sabine, or Etruscan war-captive must have stood in a different relation towards his master from the Syrian and the Celt of later times.
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/rome/1-13-agriculture-trade-commerce.asp?pg=15
