English philosopher and political theorist, Herbert Spencer once said, "Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man." To understand what Spencer meant is to understand the origins and de...
As the empire expanded, farms in Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa supplied Rome with many agricultural products (they worked on small plots). ... The vineyard would consist of the overseer (wife), ten farm-laborers or slaves, one ox heard, a donkey-man, a willow worker, a swine heard (fertilizer), two oxen and four donkeys (two of which were for the mill). ...
Fifty-thousand years ago, in the Stone Age, man wondered from southwest Asia and Africa while hunting game. 10,000 years ago man started to farm the land of Greece while others started to migrate to the new popular land. ... Farmers worked small plots, rotating crops to try to preserve the land's fertility and terracing rocky hillsides to create as much crop area as possible. ...
Slaves were often buried in the familial plots of their masters, and masters would be punished severely for the murder of their slaves. ... Making up the largest percentage of the slave population were the field hands, or familia rustica, who constituted the major work force on the large agricultural and mining farms of the Roman aristocracy. ...