The contemporary world and history indulge freely in complaints of insupportable distress; in this case the epithet may have been appropriate.
Servile Disturbances We have already described how the senate restored by Sulla carried out its guardianship of the frontier in Macedonia, its discipline over the client kings of Asia Minor, and lastly its marine police; the results were nowhere satisfactory.

Nor did better success attend the government in another and perhaps even more urgent matter, the supervision of the provincial, and above all of the Italian, proletariate.

The gangrene of a slave-proletariate Gnawed at the vitals of all the states of antiquity, and the more so, the more vigorously they had risen and prospered; for the power and riches of the state regularly led, under the existing circumstances, to a disproportionate increase of the body of slaves.

Rome naturally suffered more severely from this cause than any other state of antiquity.

Even the government of the sixth century had been under the necessity of sending troops against the gangs of runaway herdsmen and rural slaves.