Virgil, Georgics I 125, says Ante Jovem nulli subigebant arva coloni, Ne signare quidem ant partiri limite campum Fas erat: in medium quaerebant; ipsaque tellus Omnia liberius, nub poscente, ferebat.
"In the time of Saturn," writes the abbreviator of Trogus Pompeius, "was neither slavery nor private property: lands werecommon and undivided: and all men had, as it were, the same patrimony. This was the Golden Age so dear to poesy, the ageof ease and happiness, and universal concord."We evidently have here the popular tradition of a primitive epoch, anterior to the institution of private property.
Plato, in the third book of the Laws, describes well the characteristics of this primitive period, when the pastoral systemprevailed exclusively. "Originally there was abundance of pasture from which men derived their chief means of existence.
They thus wanted neither flesh nor milk." This is the exact image of the Germany of Tacitus' time, and the counterpart ofCaesar's phrase: carne et lacte vivunt . Plato also speaks of the equality of the primitive partition of the land, and heexpresses the idea, common to all the politics of antiquity, that equality of conditions is the indispensable foundation ofpurity of morals, of virtue and of liberty.
We also find in ancient historians passages which shew that, even in the world known to them and contemporary with them,the system of collective property had not entirely disappeared. Diodorus of Sicily tells how the inhabitants of Cnidus andRhodes, flying from the tyranny of the Asiatic kings, arrived in Sicily about the fiftieth Olympiad. They joined theSelinuntians, who were at war with the Egesteans. They were conquered, and quitting Sicily landed in the Lipari Isles, wherethey established themselves with the consent of the inhabitants. In order to resist the Tyrrhenian, or Etruscan pirates, theyconstructed a fleet and adopted a social organization after this manner "They divided themselves into two separate classes: one was charged with the cultivation of the soil of the islands, whichwas declared common property: to the other was entrusted the work of defence. Having thus put all their property into onelump, and eating together at public repasts, the inhabitants of the islands lived in common for some years (? , ); but
