Like nearly all the peoples of the ancient world, the Romans took slavery for granted. Nothing in Rome’s earlier experience had prepared it, however, for the huge increase in slave numbers that resulted from its western and eastern conquests. In 146 B.C., fifty-five thousand Carthaginians were enslaved after the destruction of their city; not long before, one hundred and fifty thousand Greek prisoners of war had met the same fate. By the end of the second century B.C., there were a million slaves in Italy alone, making Roman Italy one of the most slave-based economies known to history. The majority of these slaves worked as agricultural labourers on the vast estates of the Roman aristocracy. Some of these estates were the result of earlier Roman conquests within Italy itself. But others were constructed by aristocrats buying up the land holdings of thousands of small farmers who found themselves unable to compete with the great estate-owners in producing grain for the market.