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"The people enrolled themselves under the banners of the ambitious, in order to obtain by force that which the law refused them, property. A colony was the reward of a victorious legion. But it was no longer the ager publicus only; it was all Italy that lay at the mercy of the legions.
Scotland appeared in the field with a Mercurius Politicus, published at Leith in 1653. This, however, was nothing but a reprint of a London news sheet, and probably owed its existence to the presence of Cromwell's soldiers. In 1654 it removed to Edinburgh, and in 1660 changed its denomination to Mercurius Publicus.
From one of these, in the "Mercurius Publicus" of October, 1661, the following is taken: "His body being brought to the parish of Strood was accompanied from thence to the west door of the Cathedral Church of Rochester by the Prebendaries of the said church in their formalities, with the gentry and commonalty of the said City and places adjacent, with torches before them.
When Samnium and Tuscany were conquered, a third of the lands had been confiscated to the Roman State, under the name of Ager Publicus. Samnite and Etruscan gentlemen had recovered part of it under lease, much as the descendants of the Irish chiefs held their ancestral domains as tenants of the Cromwellians.
The word, which in the 4th century was used for the heavy transport vehicles of the cursus publicus, and also for the animals by which they were drawn, came to mean generally "compulsory service." So angaria, angariare, in medieval Latin, and the rare English derivatives "angariate," "angariation," came to mean any service which was forcibly or unjustly demanded, and oppression in general.
When we consider the general social and economic circumstances of the time, it is possible to imagine that large properties would have grown in Italy, as in Greece, had Rome never possessed an inch of public domain; but the occupation of ager publicus by the rich is very important from two points of view.
Intending to cross the river by the Æmilian bridge, they passed through the Clivus Publicus, going over the Aventine, between the temples of Diana and Mercury. From that height the Apostle looked on the edifices about him, and on those vanishing in the distance. Sunk in silence he meditated on the immensity and dominion of that city, to which he had come to announce the word of God.
The three on the agrarian proposals of Rullus present him to us for the first time as discussing an important question of home politics, the disposal of the ager publicus, a question which had become again prominent owing to the great additions made to it by the confiscations of Sulla.
Accordingly we read in MERCURIUS PUBLICUS that, "The kingdom having for a long time, by reason of his majesty's absence, been troubled with the evil, great numbers flocked for cure.
They were parcels of the ager publicus, land belonging to the State, which, in spite of a law forbidding it, the great lords and commoners had appropriated and divided among themselves. Five hundred acres of State land was the most which by statute any one lessee might be allowed to occupy. But the law was obsolete or sleeping, and avarice and vanity were awake and active.
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