Editing First Servile War (section)

== Origins ==
Following the final expulsion of the [[Carthage|Carthaginians]] during the [[Second Punic War]], there were great changes in land ownership in Sicily. Speculators from Italy rushed onto the island, buying up large tracts of land at low prices, or occupied estates which had belonged to Sicilians of the Carthaginian party. These were forfeited to Rome after the execution or flight of their owners.

The newly arrived Roman Sicilians exploited their slaves more brutally than their predecessors. According to [[Diodorus Siculus]], politically influential slave-owners, often Roman [[equites]],<ref name="Photius pp. 80">Photius' and Constantine Porphyrogennetos' summaries of Diodorus, quoted by Brent D. Shaw, ''Spartacus and the Slave Wars'', pp. 80–81 and 88–89.</ref> did not provide enough food and clothing for their slaves. [[Macedonia (ancient kingdom)#Conflict with Rome|The Roman conquest of Macedonia]], in which thousands of the conquered were sold into slavery, the slave-dealing of the Cretan and Cilician pirates whose activity was practically unchecked at this time, as well as the oppression of corrupt Roman provincial governors, who were known to organize man-hunts after lower-class country provincials (to be sold as slaves)—all contributed to a constant supply of new slaves at very cheap price, which made it more profitable for their masters to wear them out by unremitting labor, harshness, exposure and malnutrition, to be cheaply replaced, than to take proper care for their nourishment, health, and accommodation.<ref>[[T. Mommsen]], ''The History of Rome'' (Meridian Books, 1958), ch. I. p. 27</ref> Accordingly, the plantation system which took shape in Sicily led to thousands of slaves dying every year of toil in the fields from dawn to dusk with chains around their legs, and being locked up in suffocating subterranean pits by night.<ref>Mommsen, p. 28</ref> For food, the slaves had to turn to banditry to survive.<ref name="Photius pp. 80"/> The [[Senate of the Roman Republic|Roman Senate]] failed to take measures to curb this dangerous tendency, which converted one of the most beautiful and fertile provinces of the Republic into a horrible den of misery, brigandage, atrocity and death.<ref>Mommsen, p. 29</ref>