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
The care of the government for the elevation of free labour,
and by consequence for the restriction of the slave-proletariate,
promised fruits far more difficult to be gained but also far richer.
Unfortunately, in this respect there was nothing done at all. In the
first social crisis the landlord had been enjoined by law to employ
a number of free labourers proportioned to the number of his slave
labourers.(17)
Now at the suggestion of the government a Punic
treatise on agriculture,(18) doubtless giving instructions in the
system of plantation after the Carthaginian mode, was translated
into Latin for the use and benefit of Italian speculators--the first
and only instance of a literary undertaking suggested by the Roman
senate!
