BY collecting so many countries which had once been independent and separate states under her political dominion, Rome had not altered the natural laws to which they were subject. By giving all these countries a single, though clastic, administrative organization, she had not changed the nature of the soil or the conformation of the land or the climate. After the victorious city had done her political and administrative work, agriculture, stock-breeding, hunting, and fishing, in other words the flora and fauna, were determined by the same old geographical conditions as before. The crops grown and the animals reared continued to be, for the most part, those characteristic of the Mediterranean region, with those which belonged rather to the Atlantic type in Western and Central Europe and those related to the tropical or desert type in the east and south.
Does this mean that, in the domain of agriculture and stock-breeding, there was no economic evolution, and that all that we have to do is to point out briefly the continuity, the permanence, of previous conditions, as they had existed in Greece and the East in Hellenistic times, in North Africa under the supremacy of Carthage, in Italy, Spain, and Gallia Narbonensis before the establishment of the Empire, and in the north and centre of Europe during the Bronze and Iron Ages down to the Roman conquest? Not at all. The agriculture and stock-breeding of the ancient world were transformed in the first centuries after Christ, and these changes were without exception due to the action of man.
The relative importance of corn and fruit growing and stock-breeding fluctuated in many districts, here in favour of cultivation and there in favour of stock-breeding; the area devoted to one crop or another increased or diminished; the result was a new distribution of the centres of agricultural production. It is probable that in several provinces the forests were considerably reduced. All these changes were directly or indirectly the work of man, some being intended, prepared, and carried through by him and others being the consequences, perhaps not very clearly foreseen, of military conquests, territorial annexations, or political reforms.
Conquests, annexations, and reforms greatly increased the economic field of action. Vast areas, formerly uncultivated or neglected by semi-barbarous populations, began to be made productive. In these districts, as in countries which had been cultivated before, methods of working were improved; more detailed study and intelligent utilization of the soil and climate made it possible to increase the return.
Lastly, under the influence of the institutions and law of Rome, the legal and economic organization of property and the practical organization of agricultural and pastoral labour were perfected. Local diversities in this organization were reduced. The rural economy of the ancients came in the end, after long centuries of divergent customs, to a relative unity in conception and application.
The Roman world did not discover any new crops. Corn, chiefly wheat and barley, the vine, the olive, vegetables round the towns, fruit-trees more or less everywhere, flax here and there, meadows and fodder-plants in damp ground, and flowers and certain luxury-plants in the gardens continued to be grown by farmers and landowners. The papyrus and lotus in Egypt, silphium in the region of Cyrenaica, and the lotus in Tripolitana kept their local importance.
So, too, stock-breeding remained unchanged in its principal forms. Oxen, sheep, and pigs still held the first place, with horses, mules, and asses. Bees and their hives, the many breeds of poultry and their yards, even fish and their ponds were the object of particular care. For some centuries elephants had appeared on the battlefield, not only in the East, but even in Italy, where Pyrrhos had used them against the legions at the beginning of the third century B.C. Under the Empire, Rome did not use elephants in warfare, but they were harnessed to triumphal cars, and above all they appeared in the games of the circus and the combats of the amphitheatre. We cannot speak of elephant-breeding in the strict sense. These animals were chiefly captured wild in Asia and in parts of Africa; but there were depots where they were trained near Rome.1
Camels were used by the Romans for public transport, both in war and in peace, and they also drew cars in the circus.2 The Romans imported them from Arabia and the plateau of Iran, and some may have been bred in Egypt. The camel does not seem to have become acclimatized in Africa before the end of the Empire. Ammianus Marcellinus relates that in 363 Romanus, the Count (i.e., military governor) of Africa, having been begged by the inhabitants of Leptis Magna, a big town in Tripolitana, to protect them against the inroads of desert raiders, ordered them to supply 4,000 camels for the expedition. "The people of Leptis," adds Monsieur Gsell, "did, it is true, declare that they could not supply this number; but they had just been very thoroughly raided. In ordinary times they could no doubt have easily satisfied the demand of Romanus if they had wished."3 The episode shows that camel-breeding was highly developed in Roman Africa, at least in the parts near the Sahara.
Elephants and camels—these are the only novelties which we can find in the stock-breeding of Imperial times. Moreover, these animals were very little used, and the employment of them seems to have been of no economic importance, or, indeed, of an economic character at all.
There being no great innovations in the crops and animals raised, what strikes one when he studies the agriculture of the Roman world in the first centuries of our era is the development which took place in the diffusion and relative distribution of the chief methods of farming and the most widely grown crops. On the one hand, in certain provinces, Africa, for instance, land which had once been entirely left to livestock and nomadic tribes became covered with crops; on the other, in Italy and Greece vast tracts which had once been cultivated were transformed by the misfortunes of the times or by the neglect of the great landlords into pasture, when they were not utterly abandoned. The production of corn, especially of wheat, went down, whereas the vine and olive gained very much ground in the East and West. The result was that there were famines, which led to grave disorders, chiefly in the Greek and Asiatic provinces. The Imperial government could not remain indifferent to these economic happenings. Measures were taken to encourage corn-growing and to stem the advance of wine-growing.1 Furthermore, the exportation of wine had become one of the principal resources of Italy, but in this domain the competition of the provinces became more and more dangerous, and almost disastrous. Domitian tried to remedy both this danger and the consequences of the disfavour into which corn-growing had fallen. Suetonius relates that he issued an edict forbidding the planting of any more vines in Italy and ordering that only half of the vineyards then maintained in the provinces should be allowed to survive. The provincials made such an outcry that the Emperor had to repeal the edict, or at least to restrict the application of it.2 Olive-growing, on the other hand, was fostered in many regions, in Dalmatia, in Spain, in Africa.
The works written under the Empire dealing wholly or in part with agriculture and stock-breeding furnish some kind of evidence, by their character, regarding this development. Of the thirteen books of Columella's De Re Rustica, not one is devoted from beginning to end to corn-growing. Wine-growing, on the other hand, takes up two and a half books, and fruit-trees, including the olive, have a big place, the end of Book III and a great part of Book VI. Livestock in its various forms—large and small cattle, poultry, and bees—occupies four books (VII to X). Book XI, which is written in verse, deals entirely with gardens. In the encyclopædia of Pliny the Elder, corn is treated in detail only at the beginning of Book XVIII, while Books XII to XVII are full of information about trees and tree-growing of every kind. The whole of Book XIV is taken up with the vine, and Book XV with olives and fruit-trees. In the fourth century, Palladius Rutilius Taurus Æmilianus, the author of a treatise De Re Rustica, in which the various labours of the farm are described month by month, observes the same proportion. At intervals he mentions corn-growing—wheat, spelt, barley—and dwells at much greater length on the vine, the olive, fruit-trees, gardens, meadows, and livestock.
There is no doubt, therefore, that the Roman Empire went through what may be called a corn shortage. The shortage was further aggravated by the policy adopted by the Emperors. For the sake of their popularity and indeed of their safety, their chief concern was to keep the capital fed. Accordingly, they forbade the corn of Egypt to be exported anywhere but to Rome, and reserved for the Roman populace the harvests which were gathered on the immense Imperial estates of Sicily, Africa, Spain, and Gaul. The quartermaster's branch of the army appropriated all or nearly all of the output of southern Russia for the feeding of the armies of the East. Local and regional production had to suffice for the feeding of other cities and agglomerations.1
By the side of the cultivated land and pasture, forests took up considerable areas. The conquest of Western and Central Europe put the Romans in possession of well-wooded regions, Gaul, Noricum, Rætia, and in general all the mountainous districts from the Pillars of Hercules to the valley of the Rhine and from the tip of Brittany to the mouths of the Danube. The African Tell was likewise covered with dense woodland. In addition to high forest, there was plenty of coppice on the great estates of the Emperors and wealthy individuals, in the saltus of Italy and the provinces, the organization of which has been revealed by numbers of inscriptions. Wood for house-building, shipbuilding, joinery, coach-building, and cabinet-making was furnished by these vast forests, both to the Imperial government for the requirements of the armies, fleets, and public works and to private industry.2 Characteristic evidence of the importance of the forests and their place in the life of the peoples of the Roman Empire is supplied by the innumerable hunting-scenes sculptured on funerary monuments and represented in mosaics.1 Hunting was practised either as a sport or to capture the beasts needed for the bloody games of the circus and amphitheatre.
River-fishing and, above all, sea-fishing were practised actively in the Roman world. The big rivers, Po, Rhine, and Danube, and the lakes of northern Italy sent their fish to Rome. In the Atlantic, whales and cachalots, sharks, and seals were captured, sometimes at great risk. On the Mediterranean, the tunny-fisheries were perhaps the most profitable and best organized. The countries on the coast of the Euxine, which sent large cargoes of salt fish to Greece, were reinforced in the Roman period by southern Spain, where many ports lived by the salt-fish industry, and the same business had also developed at certain points on the coasts of Sardinia, Sicily, and Tripolitana.2 M. Lafaye has recently shown that in the Roman period, on the coasts of Italy and Roman Gaul, fish-ponds, which were traps for fish rather than mere preserves, were constructed.3 So marine fauna, like terrestrial fauna, had its place in the economic life of the Roman world.
While there was little change in the sort of crops grown and beasts raised, we should note the progress made in the Roman period by agriculture in every direction and in many countries.
Agriculture gained new ground from the forests, the swamps, and the desert. We have not sufficiently detailed and local evidence to estimate the amount of deforestation done at that time. If it is too much to say, as has too often been done in the case of Gaul, that whole forests disappeared, it is at least certain that enormous holes were made in them. What M. Camille Jullian says of Gaul may, I think, be applied to many of the western provinces. "New villas and sanctuaries were built on the fringes of the woods, or even by the side of a spring in a clearing inside, and a building of that kind, which constantly extends its offices, its parks, its meadows, its orchards, and its kitchen-gardens, is a cause of ruin to the forest round it."1 Because later, after the invasions of the fifth century, the forest regained ground over the ruins left by the barbarian hordes, we must not conclude that it had always occupied that ground and had never been expelled from it. In Britain, in the valleys of the Peninsula, where there were so many thriving cities and townships, in Rætia, in Noricum, in Pannonia, in many parts of Illyricum, where the population now for the first time became acquainted with city life, and on the slopes of the African Tell, high forest and coppice had to open out and recede to make room for plough-land, orchards, farms, and country-houses.
The swamps round the towns and in the country were attacked. Drainage-works which carried off the stagnant water made it possible to give them a drier, solider, healthier soil. This work of sanitation was sometimes given to veterans. At the beginning of the reign of Tiberius, one of the ringleaders of the mutiny of the legions of Pannonia roused the soldiers by telling them that the veterans were being given " fields " in the shape of damp marshland and uncultivated hillsides, and were being sent into all kinds of countries—trahi adhuc diversas in terras, ubi per nomen agrorum uligines pallidum vel inculta montium accipiant.2 With reference to Gaul, M. Jullian is inclined to believe that the marshes of the Saintonge, Vendée, and Flanders were partly drained round farms whose centre was on a more substantial island rising above the low ground.3
Lastly, the desert—or rather the land which had hitherto been left untilled because of the climate, conformation, or lack of human labour—even the desert gave place to rich estates scientifically worked. It is true that in certain districts which had once been prosperous and fertile, such as central and southern Italy and most of Greece, much land was abandoned and reverted to waste; but the newly conquered or newly occupied provinces offered the farmer vast areas, previously neglected by man, which were covered with rich harvests for several hundred years. We can best observe the change in North Africa and in Europe.
In North Africa, at the beginning of the Christian era, nomadism prevailed except on the coast and in the seaward valleys of the Tell. Strabo declares that in the interior there was nothing but a succession of mountains and deserts, and that the life of the peoples between Gætulia and the Mediterranean coast was like that of the nomadic Arabs.1 Pomponius Mela, a contemporary of the Emperor Claudius, speaks of barren, uninhabited tracts in Numidia.2 After enumerating the cities lining the coast from the Pillars of Hercules to Cyrenaica, he goes on:
"The peoples who live on the coast have adopted our manners and ways in everything, except that a few have preserved their old language and the gods and rites of their ancestors. Those who live immediately inland from them have no cities, their dwellings are called mapalia, and their life is hard and rude. . . . Further inland, there are still ruder men, who follow their herds as they wander about, go from pasture to pasture carrying their shelters with them, and spend the night where they happen to be when the day ends." 3
A century later, these same regions, which Strabo and Pomponius Mela described as the domain of pastoral nomads, were covered with rich cultivated land and flourishing cities. According to the nature of the soil, the climate, and the water-supply, corn, vines, olives, and fruit had taken possession of the ground. Round the many cities, agricultural life had taken the place of pastoral life. The magnificence of such ruins as those of Sufetula, Thelepte, and Ammædara in Tunisia and of Madaura, Theveste, Timgad, and Lambese in Algeria still bears witness to the wealth which developed in these regions where hitherto nothing had lived but herds of beasts and their miserable owners. Immense olive-groves groves covered the plateaus, and between the towns the country was covered with farms and their oil-presses.
We have less abundant and less detailed information about the progress of agriculture in most of the European provinces. It cannot, however, be denied that agriculture advanced greatly in some parts of Spain, for example the centre and north-west, where city life took the place of the old tribal organization, at least to some extent; in Britain, Avhere many great agricultural estates, farm-houses, and wealthy villas sprang up round the towns; in Belgium, in the Agri Decumates, in Noricum, in the inland valleys of Dalmatia, and all along the Danube from Pannonia to the shores of the Euxine.1 Here the influence of the legions and the work of the veterans seem to have played the chief part. Nor, without doubt, was it by mere chance that the ringleader of the mutiny in Pannonia at the beginning of Tiberius's reign reproached the government with giving the veterans the barren sides of mountains for fields. These regions of Western and Central Europe may not have undergone a change to be compared to that which North Africa presents. But agriculture certainly made great progress there, either at the expense of stock-breeding or by the reclaiming of hitherto unexploited land.
The quality of work, the return, the methods of farming were improved. On observing the contrast which existed recently and still exists in certain Mediterranean districts between the present poverty of agriculture and the undeniable evidences of ancient wealth, some thought at first that natural conditions, particularly the climate, had changed since the beginning of our era; that the rainfall had become less frequent and plentiful. This theory was held for a long time in respect of Africa in particular, and one might be tempted to apply it to many parts of Syria. But further study, inspired by many archæological discoveries and a careful reading of the ancient authors, has shown that this economic decline has everywhere been the doing of man, as was the prosperity of earlier times and as the revival of a wealth which has been eclipsed for many centuries is today and will be more and more in the future.
The climate has not changed perceptibly in any part of the Mediterranean basin. The deforestation from which many mountain ranges have suffered may have accentuated the torrential character of many watercourses, but it does not seem to have had any effect on the frequency, distribution, and character of the rainfall, which chiefly depends on the direction of the wind. What did change, after the fall of the Roman Empire, was the work of man. The economic ruin which long lay on these once flourishing countries was due to the abandonment of the technical methods and processes which were formerly employed.
We cannot say whether the object was attained as a result of co-ordinated research and experiment or by a series of practical shots, but there is no doubt that farmers succeeded, in most provinces, in developing the crops which best suited the natural conditions. It is true that in Gaul wine-growing and olive-growing were subjected to many distractions by Roman legislation, being forbidden towards the end of the Republic in the interest of Italian landowners, authorized, at least in practice, by Cæsar and Augustus, and restricted again (the vine, at least) from Domitian to Probus; but these two occupations, which suited the climate of the country, first developed under Roman rule, and chiefly under the Empire,1 Gaul having previously been almost entirely a corn-growing and pastoral country.2
Perhaps the most characteristic example of the application of intelligent method to agriculture was the incredible development of olive-growing in semi-desert countries, such as the high plateaus of Algeria and Tunisia, the east face of the chain of Lebanon, and the country stretching from Hamath and Homs to Palmyra. The irregularity of the rainfall and the superficial character of the soil, which was chiefly composed of sand and was very pervious, did not allow of the cultivation of plants with short roots, and of corn in particular. On the other hand, since the moisture remained in the lower strata, at a depth varying between about half a yard and a yard below the surface, the growing of trees, whose roots went down far enough, was certain to prosper. The experiment has been made in the gardens round Sfax in Tunisia. "The same soil," M. Paul Bourde writes, "remains barren or is covered with vigorous vegetation with plentiful fruit, according as one sows it with cereals, whose roots, not going below the surface soil, perish in the dryness, or plants it with trees whose roots run deep into the ground. All fruit-bearing species which like dry climates succeed in these gardens and would succeed in the rest of central Tunisia, since the climate and soil there are similar."3 These conditions, which are peculiar to a vast district in North Africa, were observed and turned to account under the Roman Empire. It was by the olive and thanks to the olive that the Byzacene district, described by Sallust as a desert and barren country at the time of the Jugurthine War, became thriving and populous in the first centuries of our era. We can now understand the Arabian historians when they relate that when the first Mussulman conquerors arrived in North Africa one could ride in the shade through an uninterrupted line of villages from Tripoli to Tangicrs.1 That shade cannot have been given by high forest, since an uninterrupted line of villages is mentioned. What there was, was an immense olive-grove.2
The prosperity of olive-growing is also attested by numerous and conclusive indications east of the Lebanon and the Orontes. " While at the present day olives scantily grow only in the valleys of the Lebanon abounding in springs, the olive woods must formerly have stretched far beyond the valley of the Orontes. The traveller now from Hemesa to Palmyra carries water with him on the back of camels, and all this part of the route is covered with the remains of former villas and hamlets. . . . The Austrian engineer, Joseph Tschernik, found basalt-slabs of oil-presses not merely on the desert plateau at Kala'at el-Hossn between Hemesa and the sea, but also to the number of more than twenty eastward from Hemesa at el-Ferklûs, where the basalt itself does not occur, as well as numerous walled terraces and mounds of ruins at the same place; with terracings on the whole stretch of seventy miles between Hemesa and Palmyra."3
It is not a mere chance that we find, in the regulations for the farming of various great African estates, that privileges are granted to farmers who shall plant or renew vineyards, olive-groves, and fig-orchards. The encouragement thus given to tree-growing is explained both by the natural conditions of soil and climate, which were favourable to this form of farming, and by the wish to lessen the danger of a sudden, violent flow of surface-water, which was often disastrous.4
I have dwelt on the very suggestive case of olive-growing, because we have quite explicit evidence of its importance in many provinces of the Empire. One may presume that this case was not unique, that other forms of farming were practised, encouraged, and developed on the same lines, and that in this way vast areas, unsuited to the growing of corn, vegetables, or grass, were none the less made productive.
Another advance in agriculture was made under the Empire by the methodical and judicious use of the water supplied by nature. The part played by irrigation in the fertility of certain districts and the prosperity of certain crops may, perhaps, have been exaggerated. This method of utilizing the water does not seem to have been applied to large areas in any province of the Roman Empire, except perhaps Egypt. No vestige or evidence has been found of any such works in North Africa, the Peninsula, the rich valleys of Asia Minor, or Syria. Wherever it has been possible to follow up one of the many aqueducts or water-conduits constructed in the first centuries of the Empire, anywhere in the Roman world, it has been found to end either in a city or village or in a villa or farm. The water was therefore intended for the use of human beings and livestock. Irrigation was only applied to the growing of vegetables, flowers, and certain trees, and perhaps also to meadows and fodder-plants, round cities and on farms. Pliny has given us a valuable piece of information about the water-system of the African oases. The spring which now supplies Gabes was already the source of the wealth of Tacape in ancient times, its water being distributed among the townspeople at given times of the day—certis horarum spatiis dispensatur inter incolas.1 A celebrated inscription, found at Lamasba, west of Batna, tells us that it was the same on the plateaus of the Constantine district. Here again, irrigation was practised in the immediate outskirts of a city; the actual wording of the regulation allows one to suppose that it supplied, not cornfields, but gardens, orchards, or meadows.2
One must not, therefore, exaggerate the importance of irrigation in agricultural practice so as to give a false impression. This does not mean that the work done by the Romans in this respect did not have a great and beneficial effect on rural economy. By supplying human beings and domestic animals with the drinking-water which they needed, it made it possible to farm regions in which there could have been no settled life or farming without it. Without the tappings of springs, the dams across the rivers, and the huge, solid cisterns and reservoirs, which ensured a sufficient supply of water in every season, the highlands of Tunisia and Algeria and the half-desert fringes of Syria would have remained uninhabitable and would never have known the prosperity of which so many vestiges remain. Irrigation affected agriculture in much the same way as the progress of city life did; it contributed indirectly, but effectively, to extending the areas which could be farmed.
One result of the combination of all the territories conquered and annexed by Rome in a single state was that agricultural property, from one end of the ancient world to the other, received, not indeed a uniform constitution, but characteristics and methods whose diversity was, as it were, systematized. That diversity, with all its delicate gradations, was based on the distinction between the territory of the Roman City and that of the cities, kingdoms, and tribes outside the Roman City, which had been conquered by her or had become her allies. It had important economic and legal consequences.
The Roman soil, ager Romanus, at the beginning comprised only the City's own territory. In the eyes of the Roman law, it alone could be held in complete ownership (ex jure Quiritium), and it was not liable to any tax. In the last century of the Republic (we cannot tell the exact date or circumstances), the whole of the soil of Italy was assimilated to the original ager Romanus, the notion of ager Italicus took the place of that of ager Romanus, and the term jus Italicum designated the legal condition of land in the provinces which was given the privilege of full ownership, the occupiers of which had dominium ex jure Quiritium.
Outside Italy, the ground was, on principle and save for exceptions, of provincial status, that is, it was subject to a tax and did not carry full ownership with it.1
But we should be giving much too simple a notion of the organization of agricultural property in the Roman Empire if we confined ourselves to pointing out this fundamental distinction. There were different categories of land in the provinces. In every region, the Roman State under the Republic and the Imperial government after Augustus had reserved for itself the direct exploitation of certain domains, usually very large, some of which came from the property of kings to whose rights Rome had succeeded, others from the territory of cities which had fought for their independence to the end and had consequently been deprived, to some extent, of their official existence, and others from arbitrary confiscations effected by the Emperors, as was done by Nero in Africa. The greater part of the land in the provinces, in theory the property of the victorious city, had been treated in one of three ways, (i) Some had been allotted to colonists, who were either lumped together so as to form an urban agglomeration or provided individually (viritim). In either case, the conceded land had been officially measured and entered in the survey-register, (ii) Some had been sold by the Quæstors to private individuals. This land usually took the form of very large estates. We know that there were properties of this kind in Africa round which one could not ride a horse in a day. They were independent of the municipal administration, and their owners often went to law with it. (iii) Some was left to its old owners, who had submitted to Rome quickly and had been allowed to keep their cities, villages, or tribal organization. This was the most usual fate of land in the provinces.
We must also give a special place to the territory of cities which, by a somewhat rare favour, Rome treated as allies and not as subjects (civitates fœderatœ). This territory was regarded as being outside the Empire and enjoyed an independence which, however, was more nominal than real.
The legal relationship of the possessors of the soil to these various categories of land was not the same as that of the possessors of Roman or Italian land. Obviously, the State or the Emperor had full and complete ownership of public land, whether it was assigned to the fiscus (that is, to the State) or to the private patrimony of the Emperor, and the owners of these domains did not pay any tax on them. But land in the provinces, whether occupied by Roman citizens or by peregrini, whether comprised in the territory of a city or not, was not susceptible of full ownership, unless jus Italicum was granted. It had to pay a land-tax, unless the Imperial government granted it the privilege of immunitas. Even the land of the colonies, although distributed to veterans who had been given the Roman citizenship or to citizens hailing from Italy, was subject to the same rule; the Gromatici speak of agri colonici stipendiarii by the side of agri colonici immunes and agri colonici juris Italici. The rule was that all land in the provinces, even when possessed by a Roman citizen, had to pay land-tax. The real meaning of the tax was to recall and express the eminent ownership of the State over conquered lands. Exemption from that tax, like the concession of ownership ex jure Italico or Quiritium over provincial land, was an exceptional privilege.
The only land in the provinces to be legally free from this condition was that of the allied cities. It did not pay land-tax to the Roman State, and its possessors had full ownership of it. But they had it in virtue of the law of their own city, not of Roman law. Such land was ager privatus ex jure peregrino.
These legal differences do not seem to have had any very serious consequences in practice. "The jurists," M. Cuq writes, "afterwards tried to define the relation existing between the holders of provincial land and the State which collected the tithe. They said that the State kept the ownership, while the inhabitants of the provinces only had the possession and a sort of usufruct. But in fact, save for the obligation to pay the vectigal, they had all the advantages of ownership. Their right differed from that of full ownership in theory and form rather than in practice and sub stance."1 It is true, but the difference clearly shows the origin and meaning of the land-tax among the Romans. That tax did not represent the contribution of each landowner to the expenses of the State, in proportion to the area, value, and return of his land. It bore witness that in the past the land of which his estate was composed had been conquered by Rome, and that in the present, in theory if not in fact, the conquering State maintained a right over it. Although arising from another origin and founded on a different basis, this conception of the relations of State and individual led almost to the same result as the organization of agriculture in the Hellenistic East.1
The actual forms and distribution of property did not present the same variety as its legal organization. The system of big estates, latifundia, still had an important place in the agriculture of Italy, and under the Empire we find it in many provinces in the East and in the West, in Africa, Gaul, Britain, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. The masters of these vast domains were the Emperor himself, either as head of the government and representative of the State or in his private capacity, or members of the Roman nobility, of Senatorial rank, or again, in Asia for example, sanctuaries, like those of the Mother of the Gods at Pessinus and Ma at Comana in Pontos. Some of these great provincial estates had certainly been formed before the Roman conquest (chiefly in the East); there were some, too, which were formed by the concentration in the hands of the Emperor or wealthy Romans of land which had originally been assigned to the public domain.
Whatever may have been the part played by the big estate in the economy of the Empire, medium-sized and small property were the most widespread forms of possession of the soil. The owners of such estates belonged to the population of the towns, to the municipal middle or working class. We cannot draw up statistics, not having detailed evidence; but from the general information supplied by the authors and inscriptions it would appear that the prosperity of the Empire, at least in its first two centuries, was mainly due to the farming of the small and middling rural property. When these two, in consequence of various political and fiscal circumstances, were abandoned or neglected, the agricultural wealth of the Roman world was attacked in its vitals.
To Imperial domains and private property of various extent and importance, we should add, to obtain a fairly complete picture, common land and also the land left to certain tribes which were still half-nomadic, at least at the beginning of the Empire, in North Africa and several parts of Western Asia.
The methods of farming and the organization of labour to some extent varied according to the various forms of rural ownership.
If we except the Procurators who, in every province or in every administrative district (tractus, regio in Africa, diœcesis in Egypt), supervised the exploitation and conduct of the Imperial domains and had a mainly administrative function, the cultivation of these domains was usually done by tenant farmers (conductores), who dealt with the Imperial Procurator and took land of varying size on lease for an agreed rent, and by cultivators (coloni) who did the actual work; these last had to pay the conductor part of the harvest and do work for him (partes agrariœ, operœ, juga). It is very probable that the coloni were, on most of these domains, native peasants, the former inhabitants of the place or their descendants. The relations between them and the big tenant-farmers were not left to the caprice of the latter. Regulations issued by the Emperor determined the amount of the partes agrariœ and the number and length of the spells of forced labour. One of these regulations, the Lex Hadriana, is mentioned in several inscriptions from Africa.1 Like the conductores and coloni in Africa, the 
and 
in Egypt were the chief factors in the exploitation of the Emperor's property. In the great domains of Asia Minor the organization seems to have been rather different; the colonus or 
dealt only with the collector of his rent, towards whom he had no particular obligation.2 In Italy, the Imperial domains were sometimes worked direct by the government, employing the slave labour of a familia rustica under the supervision of an actor. It was usually so when the domain consisted of extensive pastures, where a few slaves were enough to keep big flocks of sheep.
The big private estate, often formed as the result of an Imperial favour to a high official, a member of the Senatorial order, or a freedman who had managed to secure the confidence of the master of the Empire, might be worked in a variety of ways. The owner might farm it himself. He might leave the management of it, under his own supervision, to a bailiff (villicus), who was almost always a slave. He might lease out all or part to a tenant. Labour was usually supplied, as on the Imperial domains, by local peasants (coloni), free-born cultivators whose rent in kind and in labour was determined by regulations (leges). The inscription of Henshir-Mettish in Tunisia mentions one of these regulations, the Mancian Law, of unknown date and origin, which seems to have served as a model for several similar regulations regarding big African estates. According to the organization and exploitation of the estate, rent, contributions in kind and labour, had to be paid by the coloni direct to the owner (dominus), to the tenant (conductor), or to the bailiff of one or the other (villicus). The formula domini aut conductores villicive is repeated several times on the Henshir-Mettish inscription, a kind of charter of the constitution of a big private estate in Proconsular Africa.1 In Italy, Pliny the Younger had huge estates. According to the circumstances, he leased part of them for a money rent, or he allowed them to be farmed in return for a share of the produce. He speaks in his letters of a procurator, actores, exactor es, and custodes; that is, of a staff whose business it was to supervise the coloni.2. In Egypt, members of the Imperial family, Senators, Knights, freedmen, wealthy Alexandrians, and afterwards, under the Flavians and Antonines, Greeks more or less tinged with Egyptian blood, held the ground in thousands of arourai. The labour for the exploitation of this fertile land was supplied by the Egyptian peasants, whose condition seems to have been no better at that time than in the distant days of the Pharaohs or of the Persian domination.3
Elsewhere, the big estate was worked by free tenants, each farming a small area.4 The great sanctuaries of Asia Minor employed whole armiesof slaves on their domains.5
The small and medium-sized estates, which were always attached to a town, for a long time owed their prosperity to the intelligence and hard work of the municipal middle class. In many provinces of the Empire, the country round the towns was covered with villas and farms, houses for pleasure and buildings for work. The owner of the estate doubtless came and stayed there in the good season, either to enjoy the country life or to supervise the harvest, vintage, olive-picking, and manufacture of wine and oil. A bailiff, a few slaves, and sometimes also free labourers, taken on either by the year or for some particular urgent work, such as the harvest, were enough for the exploitation of these modest estates. Sometimes, too, they were leased for a money rent, or to métayers who paid a proportion of the produce. A few passages in the ancient authors, inscriptions, and mosaics have revealed the character, at once static and dynamic, of the small and medium estate in Italy and in some of the provinces. Horace's villa in the Sabine country " was not merely the little garden of a literary man, a lizard's hole, as Juvenal says. ... It was a real estate, with meadows, fields, woods, and a whole farm, a source of income as well as of pleasure."1 Of the villas excavated round Pompeii, that of Boscoreale was certainly surrounded by a property which was farmed, for its ruins have yielded up presses, underground channels intended to collect the wine, dolia sunk in the ground, apparatus for the manufacture of oil, and the floor where the grain was threshed, and the dwelling-house of the owner and the lodgings of the workers have been identified and distinguished.2 Here, therefore, there were cornfields, vineyards, and olive-groves, and oil and wine were made on the Spot.
For Africa we have several documents which give us a notion of what an estate of average size was like. Near Tabarka, on the shore of the Mediterranean, there is a celebrated mosaic in three scenes, representing a rural property. One picture shows the dwelling-house and park. " The house," Monsieur P. Gauckler writes, " seems to be built on the plan of the modern borj. At the back of a square court is the master's house, a one-storied building flanked by two tall square turrets with pointed roofs, which are connected half-way up by a loggia. In front are the coach-houses and offices. . . . On the left is a barn, surmounted by a dovecote with three windows. In front of the borj is a pond, with ducks and geese playing about on the edge. At the sides and behind is a flowery orchard full of pheasants and other birds." Another of the three pictures deals more specially with the vineyard and orchard and the buildings needed for working them. The third shows us the pastoral part of the estate—sheep, a shepherdess sitting spinning with her distaff, the stables with a horse tied to the door, and the uncultivated hills behind.1
South of Carthage, in the lower course of the Wadi Miliana on the site of the ancient town of Uthina, a mosaic has been found which shows, in several episodic scenes, the chief features of daily life on a medium-sized property. In addition to various hunting-scenes—hunting in the ordinary sense, hunting with the net, hunting with the spear—we see a ploughman guiding a plough drawn by two oxen, a flock of sheep returning to the stall, by the door of which a shepherd is standing, a horse drinking at a trough near a swing-well, a slave leading an ass, perhaps to market in the town, another slave picking olives, a third milking a goat, a fourth playing the flute while watching his beasts. Here corn-growing, stock-breeding, and tree-growing are represented as it were in synthesis.2
In the south of Proconsular Africa, the estate formed by T. Flavius Secundus, doubtless one of the colonists settled by Trajan on the territory of Thelepte, consisted chiefly of vineyards. The irrigation which the owner carried out must have been good for garden produce and trees.3
The life and career of a small landowner in the same province are described clearly in the epigraphic text known as the Inscription of the Harvester of Maktar.
" I was born of a poor family. My father had no income or house of his own. Since the day of my birth, I have always tilled my land; my land and I have not rested. When the season of the year came round when the harvest was ripe, I was the first to cut my stalks. When the bodies of harvesters who hire themselves out round Cirta, the capital of the Numidians, or in the plains overlooked by the Mountain of Jupiter, appeared in the country, then I was the first to reap my field. Then, leaving my country, I harvested for other men for twelve years under a burning sun. For eleven years, I commanded a gang of harvesters and reaped corn in the fields of the Numidians. By my work, having been able to do with little, I at last became the owner of a house and an estate. Today I am comfortably off. I have even risen to honours; I have been inscribed among the Deeurions of my city, and my colleagues have elected me Censor, me who at the beginning of my life was only a small peasant. I have seen my children and grandchildren come into the world and grow up round me, and my life has gone by, peaceful and honoured by all."1
At first a tenant farmer or métayer of modest condition, then a farm-labourer, then a contractor for harvesting, and lastly a landowner—these seem to have been the stages of that hard-working existence. And the case of the Harvester of Maktar was probably not unique or even exceptional in the African provinces.
In Gaul, where the remains of villas and farms are very numerous, medium-sized and, above all, small property seem to have had a considerable place, " especially on the ovitskirts of towns."2 Of the rural life and activity of the Gallo-Romans we have evidence in the rustic calendar represented in the mosaic of St. Romain en Gal on the outskirts of Vienne3 and in various monuments adorned with agricultural scenes or motives—ploughing, vintage, gardening-tools, etc.4
So it was, doubtless, in all parts of the Roman Empire where wealth was chiefly agricultural, in Bætica and eastern Tarraconensis, in Dalmatia, in Asia Minor, in Egypt. The medium and the small property naturally do not take such a place in written documents, legal or epigraphic, as the big private or Imperial estates. What, we know of their importance and the part which they played in the economic life of provinces like Africa, authorizes us to suppose that these were similar wherever municipal life developed, wherever there were many thriving towns.
Lastly, we must mention a special form of occupation and working of the soil—the emphyteusis. " The emphyteusis was an agreement, the principal object of which originally was to bring uncultivated land on the Emperor's private domain under culture. It was afterwards extended to inherited estates, those of churches and private persons. The name of this agreement comes from the obligation imposed on the taker of planting 
or at least improving the ground. ... It was a long-term lease, which had its origin in certain practices which had long been followed in the administration of large estates. In the first centuries of the Empire, the landlords allowed their coloni to occupy uncultivated portions in order to reclaim them. In return, they were given the exclusive enjoyment of the fruits for a certain number of years, after which they had to pay a small rent in kind. Moreover, they were allowed a sort of real right over the thing, which was revocable when they ceased to cultivate the land for two years."1 The most typical case of a deed of emphyteusis in the Early Empire seems to be the decision of Pertinax, which is thus described by Herodian: " Pertinax allowed anyone who could and would to occupy all land in Italy and the province's which was not under cultivation at the time or had never been cultivated, even if it belonged to the Emperor, and he ceded the ownership of it to those who occupied and worked it in this fashion. He granted these cultivators exemption from all taxes for ten years, and guaranteed them the perpetual ownership of the land in question."2 There might be various forms of emphyteusis. The essential basis of the right thus created in favour of the cultivator was the fact that he brought under culture land which had previously been neglected and left unproductive.
In whatever variety of manners property may have been organized and the soil worked, what emerges from the facts at present known is that, so far as the civilization of the time and the historical accidents of the Roman Empire allowed, most of the countries united under Rome enjoyed an agricultural and pastoral fertility which many of them had not known before, which some, such as North Africa and Egypt, have recovered only after long centuries, and for which others, such as Asia Minor, are still waiting.
The share of credit for this happy result which one may fairly assign to the sum of conditions covered by the words Pax Romana is the greater in that the material equipment of agriculture does not seem to have been much improved at the time. For grinding com, the mill driven by beasts (mola asinaria, juinentaria) or even by water (mola aquaria) more and more took the place of the old pestle and mortar. The press and other apparatus for the manufacture of wine were improved. Olive-mills and oil-presses were more workable and gave better results.1 But the real implements of the farmer still had their old shape. Plough, spade, hoe, mattock, pick, fork, scythe, sickle, and pruning-knife were, as the surviving specimens show, just as they had been handed down from generation to generation.2 Nor was there any more change in the methods of stock-breeding; an African mosaic representing shepherds guarding their flocks might serve as an illustration to Theocritos, if not to the Odyssey.
Notes