End of Punic Wars and Slavery

At the end of the Punic wars, Rome came out with the win in all three of the battles. They burned and destroyed almost all of Carthage, and took the land for themselves to use as farm land. They took 50,000 people as slaves and another 150,000 people that were captured during war. By the end of the second century BCE, there were over 1,000,000 slaves in Italy, which took the spot of all workers on farms. The aristocrats would take the farms and use them for themselves, and because the slaves worked for free, the previous farmers were now jobless. Juvenal the poet stated that Rome "anxiously hopes for two things: bread and circuses." The aristocrats would supply these things to the plebs so that they'd be distracted from the fact that they had no jobs and their life basically is pointless now. Tiberius Gracious recognized that the plebs were fine with that and fought for them, trying to allow them to keep their farms anyway. The plebs only fought in battles for their generals, not for Rome, because the generals would give back some of the spoils to the soldiers.