The lack of slaves strengthened for a time the position of free labor in industry as well as in agriculture. But while the resources of the rich were consumed by war and government, the poverty of the poor did not decrease. Wages were from six to eleven, prices some thirty-three, per cent of comparative wages and prices in the United States of the early twentieth century. The class struggle was becoming more violent, for the army, recruited from the provincial poor, often joined in the attack upon wealth, and felt that its services to the state justified confiscatory taxation for donatives, or more direct pillaging of the well to do. Industry suffered as commerce declined. The export trade of Italy fell as the provinces graduated from customers to competitors; barbarian raids and piracy made trade routes as unsafe as before Pompey; depreciated currencies and uncertain prices discouraged long-term enterprise. The extension of the frontier having ceased, Italy could no longer prosper by supplying or exploiting an expanding realm. Once Italy had collected the bullion of conquered lands and grown rich on the robbery; now money was migrating to the more industrialized Hellenistic provinces, and Italy grew poorer while the rising wealth of Asia Minor forced the replacement of Rome with an Eastern capital. Italian industry was thrown back upon its domestic market, and found the people too poor to buy the goods they could make. Internal commerce was hampered by brigands, rising taxes, and the deterioration of roads through lack of slaves. The villas became more self-sufficient in industry, and barter competed with money trade. Large-scale production gave way year by year to small shops supplying chiefly a local demand.
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