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By this time, Rome had perfected a slave-dependent imperialist system, in which Roman and allied armies defeated and enslaved enemies whose lands were then taken by the victors.
Such occupation opened up space in Rome itself and other large cities, for incoming slaves who were put to work in the public lands1 or slave-filled private estates (“latifundia”) now vacated by those who emigrated to the new colonies; in time, these slaves became freedmen — Roman underclass and/or reliable clients of their wealthy patrons — and their sons became the next batch of Roman legionnaires, who then took more land from others and restarted the process.
With coffers filled with booty and plenty of slaves available to work, in this era Rome started construction of the Appian Way – a great highway facilitating the quick transportation of troops between the city and Capua, for the payment of which Rome may have minted its first coins2 – and the Valeria Way, the military road criss-crossing the central Apennines all the way to the Adriatic.
Together with this, other massive works were commissioned that would make the city famous for its engineering prowess: the sixteen-kilometer long Aqua Appia, the first of (eventually) eleven aqueducts ensuring water supply for the city, was built in 312 BC; the first bronze statues were erected in the city honoring the forgotten consul Marcius Tremulus and two famous, rabidly anti-democratic Greeks that important Romans appreciated – Pythagoras and Alcibiades – as well as the famous group of the twins Romulus and Remus with the she-wolf, set up in 296 BC, around the same time as colossal bronze statues of Jupiter and Hercules were placed on the Capitol and the roof of the Capitoline temple; altogether, fourteen temples and shrines opened between 295 and 264 BC3.
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