Chapter 16 — The Exhaustion Of The Soil

CHAPTER XVI THE EXHAUSTION OF THE SOIL

So long as Rome’s capitalistic profits in the provinces were sufficient to pay the bills, there were few Romans who criticized the system whereby provincial industries and commerce were compelled to do the world’s work. Only here and there did men like the Gracchi and Caesar arise who suspected that, after all, the more fortunate lot had fallen to the producing population, and that Italy, by this easy exchange, was in danger of losing her strength through an atrophy of her power to produce. The Gracchi, proud of their native Italic stock almost to the point of race prejudice, bent their energies to save Italy; Caesar, though believing thoroughly in the Italian race, set his heart rather upon the greater task of Italianizing the whole empire. Either policy, if pursued consistently and intelligently for a long period, might possibly have saved Roman civilization. It was the constant shifting from one policy to the other, and the frequent acquiescence in laissez-faire, that abandoned Italy to parasitic futility, ground the East under too great a burden of work, and forced the West finally to find salvation in her own policies.

The collapse of the Italian peasantry, however, was not sudden, thanks to many efforts at recolonization and to the versatility of the native stock in meeting new discouragements with new devices. “Land exhaustion” is always a relative term. Italy[1] is still producing an annual average of twelve bushels of wheat on thirteen million acres—that is, upon about one-fifth of her rock-ribbed land—and largely with methods that differ but little from those employed by Varro.

[1] The Italian census of 1905 gives the following statistics:

Wheat: 12½ million acres (18% of whole); average, 12 bu. per acre. Maize: 4 million acres (6% of whole); average, 25 bu. per acre. Wine: 10 million acres (14% of whole); average, 100 gal. per acre. Olive oil: 2½ million acres (3½% of whole); average, 30 gal. per acre.

Oranges and lemons, which today occupy much space, were not known in ancient Italy. Chemical fertilizers were still but little used in Italy in 1905.

It is difficult to restore from our fragmentary sources the story of the many vicissitudes of Italian agriculture, but a survey of the agricultural history of any modern country will disclose what kinds of revolution the farm population must live through after the first wealth of the soil is drained. In fourteenth-century England,[2] for instance, the soil was thought exhausted and was turned into grazing lands. Food began to be imported. After two centuries devoted mainly to wool-growing, a new mercantilist doctrine advocating a balance of trade induced the government to offer bounties for grain production, and the land, when broken, was found to have recovered its fertility. A half-century later, returning signs of exhaustion were met by more intensive cultivation and more scientific rotation of crops, based largely upon the precepts of Cato and Columella. After the wars of the French Revolution, when low peacetime prices returned, a protective tariff still saved agriculture for a season, until the reform bills and the inpouring of American grain ended the struggle, and sheep and woods returned. The land rested once more, so that it was again ready to provide good crops when the blockade of the Great War created an urgent demand for home-grown food.

[2] See Prothero, English Farming Past and Present, 1912. The student of ancient economic conditions will profit especially from a study of England’s long agricultural history. He will there learn what are the normal vicissitudes through which soil culture must perforce pass. All the Roman provinces flourished for a season through the introduction of Roman methods of farming, which, being thorough, tapped new resources. Consequent exhaustion was inevitable, but the following period was generally devoted to pasturage, which, though somewhat less profitable, gave the land a rest for a new period of prosperity. The temporary abandonment of wheat culture in each case was not proof of reckless exploitation by the sovereign state, as is too often assumed. The owners of land cultivate the most profitable crops possible at all times, whether or not a tithe is imposed.

The vicissitudes of ancient agriculture were not wholly dissimilar. There is little reason to think that the Italian soil would have failed to supply legitimate demands upon it had the versatile native stock been aided over crises by an occasional protective tariff, by a thriving industry that might have occupied idle hands when the soil needed a season’s rest, and particularly by protection from the blight of slavery.

The Gracchi had done much to restore small-plot farming through their wide distribution of thirty-acre lots throughout Italy. Indeed, the text of the famous agrarian law[3] passed ten years after the death of Gaius seems to imply that in 111 B.C. practically all illegally held public land had been distributed. Before Gracchus died, his law was so amended as to permit the sale of the plots, an amendment found necessary in order to make the allotments sufficiently attractive. Indeed, it is probable that the clause stipulating inalienability had been intended to be temporary, effective only long enough to compel the holder to make an earnest endeavor at farming. Even our homestead laws required a few years of occupation and a definite amount of cultivation before a real title to the land was granted. The law of 111 B.C., granting full ownership without payment of rental to the state, was intended to afford relief to many settlers who had failed in their undertaking. But even with its aid, many of the small farmers did not succeed and sold their plots to more enterprising neighbors. Thus the old drift toward the plantation system set in again.

[3] See especially Hardy, Six Roman Laws, pp. 28–40.

The causes of failure were many. The allotments were frequently in strips cut here and there from large holdings; their recipients could therefore not be grouped into villages, as the sociable Italians always preferred to be, and they soon succumbed to the loneliness of isolated farm life and returned to the City. Many, furthermore, had come from the city of Rome knowing nothing of the technique of their new occupation and failed through sheer ignorance. Then, too, the distance from a good market, in the case of many allotments in the interior, made intensive farming of small products unprofitable: cattle can be marketed on the hoof far from the pasture; wine and oil are concentrated products that may be hauled long distances to advantage; but grain is relatively bulky, and vegetables demand quick service. Such were the reasons why the slave-owning landlord of wide fields regained possession of many of the acres that the Gracchi had taken from him. It is significant that a large part of the Cimbric invaders captured by Marius and Catulus twenty years after Gaius’ death were purchased by cattlemen in southern Italy, in the very region that the Gracchan commissioners had allotted to small farmers. They presently made up the army of slaves with which Spartacus threatened the very life of Rome.[4]

[4] Caesar, Bell. Gall. I, 40; Plutarch, Crassus, 12.

Meanwhile, Sulla did something, though unwittingly, to increase the number of small holdings when he confiscated the lands in cities disloyal to him and distributed them as rewards to his soldiers.[5] At least a hundred thousand soldiers were thus settled, chiefly in Etruria and Campania, in both of which regions large estates had been numerous. Naturally, his method was not wholly conducive to the best interests of the countryside. Many good tillers were dispossessed, while not a few of the new settlers were unfit as peasants. Indeed, Catiline’s rebel army formed its nucleus in Etruria out of the two groups: peasants dispossessed by Sulla and Sullan colonists who failed to succeed as farmers. However, there can be little doubt that his colonization decidedly diminished the area of the large plantations. Caesar continued this process, though his chief desire in colonizing was to spread Latinity in the provinces, a policy that quickly bore fruit in Gaul and Spain.

[5] Kromayer, Neue Jahrb., 1914, p. 161.

The triumvirs perhaps wrought more damage than benefit to small-plot farming, for while they settled as large a number of veterans as Sulla, their confiscations were to a great extent carried out in the Po Valley, where agricultural conditions had been unusually healthy. Later, however, Augustus,[6] when he had soldiers to demobilize and settle, made a practice of buying land that was for sale, and then the results could hardly have been undesirable.

[6] Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, ch. 16. He bought land in Italy for 600,000,000 HS, and in the provinces for 260,000,000 HS, according to his own account.

This vast recolonization of Italy, which during half a century placed small lots in the hands of some three hundred thousand new settlers, changed agricultural conditions greatly. It not only displaced very many slaves with working landowners, but it also displaced thousands of the old native freeholders with veterans who, as the armies were constituted after Marius’ day, were apt to be urban proletarians largely sprung from freedman stock. It is doubtful whether Italian agriculture profited much by the change.

Meanwhile, two tendencies toward a healthier situation in Italy became noticeable in Cicero’s day: one toward a replacement of slaves by renters, and a second toward renewed intensive cultivation of the land. The experience of Italian plantations and ranches with the Cimbric captives may account in part for the first. Not only had the number of available farm slaves been diminished by the annihilation of the revolters, but the loss sustained and the danger entailed had served as a warning that immediate profits from slave cultivation might be more than overbalanced in the long run. Caesar indeed passed a law stipulating that at least a third of the farm and ranch labor must be free, a measure that merely expressed a tendency already accepted. Everywhere landlords were endeavoring to find free men to take plots of their land as tenants,[7] and the process had gone so far by Augustus’ day that the word colonus, which had originally meant “tiller of the soil,” had by then acquired the new but generally accepted meaning of “tenant.”

[7] Instances are found in Caes. Bell. Civ. I, 34; II, 56; Colum. I, 7, 4–6; Hor. Epist. I, 14; Seneca, Epist. 123, 2. By the second century, coloni rather than slaves seem to be assumed upon farms, Digest, XX, 1, 32. Varro, to be sure, regularly implies that slaves do the farm work, and for his day his testimony should be accepted as valid, at least for Latium; see Gummerus, Klio, Beiheft V, p. 64.

The second tendency, toward a renewed cultivation of the Italian soil, reminds us of the frequent rehabilitation of farming in England referred to above. The contributing causes are not far to seek. Sicily, which had long served as Rome’s producer of wheat, had overworked its soil through wheat culture. No soil will endure the constant drain of a single crop for two centuries without demanding a respite. During the civil wars, even the amount produced was frequently cut off from Italy, and it is very likely that Italian farmers then discovered that wheat could again be raised profitably near Rome—that, in fact, the land had recovered sufficiently under pasturage to endure a renewed season of cultivation. What contributed to the movement, moreover, was the recolonization of large areas by Caesar and Augustus and the desire of landlords to exchange free tenants for slaves as far as might be. Causes and effects thus interacted. Poor free farmers could best work at grain raising, the land could again bear cereals, and Italy needed cereals produced at home.

Such changes, however, come slowly, and in this case the new culture was destined not to last long. Indeed, the reopening of the seas, the annexation of Egypt, and the development of African grain lands presently checked the progress of Italian agriculture. However, for a generation at least, in the last years of the Republic and during the early reign of Augustus, the western littoral of Italy seems to have enjoyed a very profitable period, when pasturage gave way to a combination of vine, fruit, vegetable, and grain culture that made the region a garden such as the traveler now sees only in Campania.

It would, of course, be wholly erroneous to conclude that the confiscations and redistributions of land and the new distrust of slave culture banished vast estates from Italy. Such an inference is at once proved impossible by numerous references to men like Domitius, who at the battle of Corfinium could promise his army of fifteen thousand men a gift of four jugera each out of his own estates, and who afterward manned a fleet with his own tenants and slaves. Too frequently the confiscated plantations simply passed by forced sale to some adherent of the victorious party; and economic laws that encouraged concentration were never in abeyance. In favorable circumstances, however—and Roman inheritance laws were always favorable to them—groups of small farmers succeeded fairly well in maintaining their position. Of this we have proof in two exceedingly interesting inscribed stones,[8] one found near Placentia in the Po Valley, the other near Beneventum. They are both records of the mortgages secured by farmers from the great imperial fund by which Nerva and Trajan proposed to aid farmers with grants of “rural credits” and, at the same time, to “pension motherhood” by supporting the children of the poor on the interest derived from the mortgages.

Since the farms bear the names by which they were first recorded in the census bureau, probably about a century and a half before, and their ownership at the time of the mortgage record is also given, it is possible to tell in both places how far the process of concentration had gone. At Beneventum, it appears that the plots originally held by ninety-two owners had by Trajan’s day come into the hands of fifty owners, and at Placentia the original number of eighty-nine owners had fallen to fifty. That is not an unreasonably rapid concentration, measured by American experience. Many of the plots were still quite small, being worth only a few hundred dollars each. Very few indeed were large enough to deserve the name of latifundium: only five of the hundred were valued at more than $50,000. But circumstances in both these cases seem to have been favorable to the small farmer, inasmuch as the lands were suitable for grain culture and situated near good markets. If we could recover a considerable number of these illuminating documents—and hundreds of them must have been inscribed throughout Italy—we should be able to decide whether these two give a fair picture of Italian farm conditions.

[8] The so-called tabulae alimentariae, C.I.L. IX, 1455, and XI, 1147, discussed by Mommsen, Hermes, 1884, p. 343. Perhaps Mommsen is too confident of their representative character. It is just possible that the funds spoken of were lent only to the owners of small plots, since Dio (68, 2, 1) vouches for the Emperor’s interest in aiding this class. If this is the case, the inscriptions do not give an adequate idea of the larger estates.

To follow the evolution of Roman agriculture through the succeeding crises, we must turn to the official documents[9] that have been found in the province of Africa, not far from Carthage. It will be remembered that after the Third Punic War Rome assumed possession of the Carthaginian estates, leaving a large part of the Berber peasants in the position of tenants, as they had been under the regime of Carthage. Hard pressed for ready cash, however, Rome sold large tracts outright, apparently to senators and knights who possessed the capital requisite for conducting the expensive irrigated plantations that alone could survive in Africa. The younger Gracchus presently gave about a million acres to colonists in large plots of two hundred jugera, in recognition of the farming methods required there.

[9] These are imperial rescripts engraved on stone, containing the Emperors’ responses to petitions from their tenants in Africa. Six have so far been recovered in fragmentary state here and there in or near the Bagradas River. See Bruns, Fontes, pp. 295–304; Dessau, Inscr. Lat. Sel. II, 6870; and Rostowzew, Gesch. d. röm. Kolon., p. 313 ff., for texts, references, and the most important discussions.

After a century of Roman occupation, the province began to blossom into well-nigh incredible fertility.[10] On his nine days’ march from Lares to Capsa, Marius, as Sallust informs us, had found little but vasta inculta, egentia aquae, infesta serpentibus. Today it may be described in the same words, but by Trajan’s time large cities had sprung up everywhere. The extensive ruins of the cities of that region, recently excavated by French explorers, give grounds for an estimate of their populations. Bourde assigns at least 100,000 souls to Thysdrus, 50,000 to Thelepte, 25,000 to Sufetula, and 12,000 to Cillium, without including the thickly settled peasantry that made these cities possible. The miracle was performed by devising an elaborate system of dams and underground cisterns that gathered and saved every possible drop of rain, and by planting extensive olive and fig orchards and vineyards to use and conserve this moisture and attract more rain. As a result, even the culture of cereals finally became profitable in land that is now considered a part of the Sahara Desert.

[10] Reid, The Municipalities of the Roman Empire, chap. X, especially p. 289.

The documents already referred to reveal the interesting fact that the great Roman planters who accomplished this work employed not slave labor but free tenants. There can be little doubt that they invested heavily in the leaseholds of the native Berbers, whom they gladly employed as tenants. These natives, present in great abundance, were, of course, acclimated, as northern war captives or eastern slaves would not have been. But the documents cited above also prove that many Roman peasants had come to Africa to work as tenants upon these lands. Here we doubtless have a reference to some of the unfortunate Italians who had been dispossessed by the confiscations of the Civil Wars at home and whose lot Vergil so poignantly pictures in his first eclogue:

At nos hinc alii sitientis ibimus Afros, Pars Scythiam et rapidum Cretae veniemus Oaxen.

... En quo discordia civis Produxit miseros!

There is some satisfaction in the thought that these exiles found prosperity in the new land—a wealth of wine, oil, and grain that presently so overwhelmed the Roman market with African shipments that their successors in Italy, colonized by the victors, found themselves hardly able to continue the competition. By the Claudian period, Italian farmers were again raising signals of distress.

The continuing story of African agriculture is fascinating, but we can here only mention the factors that combined to bring on the inevitable day of serfdom. The great landlords, who lived at Rome and managed their estates through procurators, built central villas upon their properties and conducted them on a system not unlike that of the English manors. The tenants were assigned farms from which they paid a third of the produce, plus some six days’ service[11] a year on the manorial lands, which accordingly were tilled for the owner without cost. This device of securing service had probably survived from the Carthaginian regime; it certainly bears the appearance of those oriental feudal practices then still in vogue in Egypt. Later, the system proved to be the entering wedge of a new feudalism, when state paternalism became more interested in producing wealth from the soil than in protecting the toiler.

[11] This exaction of personal service was probably a practice borrowed from Carthaginian serfdom; but it could well be excused as a substitute for the municipal road- and munition-service that citizens of most colonies had to perform and from which these tenants were exempt.

Meanwhile, the tenant was also encouraged to plant unoccupied desert land with olives and vines, being granted from five to ten years’ exemption from rent for such efforts; and thus the area of tillage grew and the plantations of the manors extended. Then came the hard days of Nero’s reign, with their cruel proscriptions and confiscations[12] of large estates, and half of the private plantations of Africa were brought into the imperial domain. Vespasian, the shrewd financier, sent his procurators to organize the public lands and the recently confiscated estates into vast imperial complexes, laying down a definite regulation according to which his agents and the tenants—now imperial coloni—should manage the properties.

[12] Schulten, in Klio, VII, p. 208, points out that several African estates mentioned in the inscriptions bear the names of distinguished nobles proscribed by Nero.

Domitian, possessed by the idea of protecting Italian agriculture, then in deep distress, temporarily checked the extension of African vineyards and olive groves, thus depriving the tenants of a source of profit even at the expense of the imperial domains; but his successors, Trajan and Hadrian, reverted to the more normal Roman policy, which had generally refused to favor Italy at the expense of the provinces. A petition of the tenants in Africa asking for permission to plant new lands was granted, sufficient proof that African agriculture was still in a healthy condition. But presently we find signs of distress even in Africa. The trouble was chiefly that the wealth of the soil, which had accumulated for ages on the surface and had been so successfully tapped by the new methods of Roman farmers, began to show signs of exhaustion. Beneath that thin surface there was only sand; here the remedies of rest, pasturage, and rotation of crops applied in Italy at every crisis seemed to promise little success.

When the African rents due the imperial treasury began to diminish, the emperors and their agents grew anxious, at first inviting the tenants, with tax exemptions, hereditary leases, and outright gifts of land, to break and plant the soil farther into the deserts. But there was a limit beyond which the farmer could not go. Next we hear of complaints and threats from the tenants that, since the imperial agents were doubling the periods of their forced service upon imperial domains, they would be forced to abandon their leaseholds altogether. Finally there came the inevitable decree from the desperate emperor, which forbade the tenants to leave their lands and attached them for life—and their descendants forever after—to their allotments.

The documents relating to Italian agriculture are not so illuminating, but the story was doubtless similar, and similar largely because the oriental practices of feudalism that lived on in Egypt and Africa from a former regime seemed to offer the emperor justification for an easy solution of the difficult situation in Italy. There, too, Nero’s confiscations had accumulated large plantations for the imperial treasury. Perhaps it was with these in view that Domitian undertook to protect Italian farm profits by restricting the provincial production of wine and oil, an idea that was too insular to meet the approval of the province-born emperors who succeeded him. But the population of Italy was visibly dwindling: the stock that now peopled it had neither bodily vigor nor mental energy, and there were no industries at home to support the people while the land might again have a respite as pasture.

Nerva and Trajan, as we have seen, tried to extend rural credits at six percent and to use the proceeds in giving pensions to parents for each child. It has been estimated that a hundred million dollars were taken from the treasury for these funds alone, and in many panegyrics the well-meaning emperors were lauded for having “recreated Italy.” Then the plague swept the land and carried off millions of people. Marcus Aurelius had recourse to the daring expedient of importing thousands of northern war captives as half-citizen tenants of the imperial domains, but they far from filled the void, and it is doubtful whether they made efficient farmers. The years of anarchy, war, and extravagance that followed emptied the treasury and brought on the successive debasements of coinage, which eventually reduced the denarius nearly to one percent of its former value. Not the least disaster wrought by this process was the practical annihilation of the great fund for rural credits instituted by Nerva and Trajan. All credits were now, indeed, little more than figures on paper, hardly worth the effort of collection.[13]

[13] Economists usually assume that the later emperors withdrew the funds, but of this there is no evidence, and withdrawal would have been difficult since the funds had been distributed to the various municipal boards. The complete disappearance of the funds is most readily explained by the dwindling of all trust-fund credits through the astonishing debasement of the denarius. When a credit of a hundred million dollars had sunk to the value of one and one-half million dollars, it was obviously impossible to continue the credits and pensions throughout Italy.

Taxes were confiscatory, and such small farmers as still owned freeholds “commended” themselves and their properties to influential lords who had the power with the emperor to protect their coloni. Tenants of lords who failed to secure relief tried to escape from their contracts. Owners of farm slaves attempted to rid themselves of property so easily taxed. Such were the conditions when Constantine intervened with his decree binding freeholders, tenants, and slaves alike to the soil, and thus legalized the serfdom that was everywhere being adopted.

CHAPTER XVI THE EXHAUSTION OF THE SOIL

As long as Rome’s capitalistic profits from the provinces were sufficient to pay the bills, few Romans criticized the system that compelled provincial industries and commerce to do the world’s work. Only here and there did men such as the Gracchi and Caesar arise who suspected that, after all, the producing population had received the more fortunate lot, and that Italy, through this easy exchange, was in danger of losing her strength as her power to produce atrophied. The Gracchi, proud of their native Italic stock almost to the point of racial prejudice, devoted their energies to saving Italy. Caesar, though he thoroughly believed in the Italian race, set his heart instead on the greater task of Italianizing the whole empire. Either policy, if pursued consistently and intelligently over a long period, might possibly have saved Roman civilization. It was the constant shifting from one policy to the other, together with frequent acquiescence in laissez-faire, that abandoned Italy to parasitic futility, crushed the East beneath too great a burden of work, and finally forced the West to find salvation through her own policies.

The collapse of the Italian peasantry, however, was not sudden, thanks to many attempts at recolonization and to the versatility with which the native stock met new discouragements with new devices. “Land exhaustion” is always a relative term. Italy[1] still produces an annual average of twelve bushels of wheat per acre on thirteen million acres—that is, on about one-fifth of her rock-ribbed land—and does so largely by methods that differ very little from those employed by Varro.

It is difficult to reconstruct from our fragmentary sources the story of the many vicissitudes of Italian agriculture. Nevertheless, a survey of the agricultural history of any modern country will reveal the kinds of revolution through which a farming population must pass after the soil’s first wealth has been drained. In fourteenth-century England,[2] for example, the soil was believed to be exhausted and was converted into grazing land. Food began to be imported. After two centuries devoted mainly to wool-growing, a new mercantilist doctrine advocating a favorable balance of trade induced the government to offer bounties for grain production. When the land was broken again, it was found to have recovered its fertility. Half a century later, renewed signs of exhaustion were met by more intensive cultivation and a more scientific rotation of crops, based largely on the precepts of Cato and Columella. After the wars of the French Revolution, when low peacetime prices returned, a protective tariff preserved agriculture for a time. Eventually, however, the reform bills and the influx of American grain ended the struggle, and sheep and woods returned. The land rested once more and was therefore again ready to provide good crops when the blockade during the Great War created an urgent demand for home-grown food.

The vicissitudes of ancient agriculture were not wholly dissimilar. There is little reason to believe that Italian soil would have failed to meet legitimate demands if the versatile native stock had been helped through periods of crisis by an occasional protective tariff, by thriving industries that could have employed idle hands while the soil received a season’s rest, and, in particular, by protection from the blight of slavery.

The Gracchi had done much to restore small-plot farming through their extensive distribution of thirty-acre lots throughout Italy. Indeed, the text of the famous agrarian law[3] passed ten years after the death of Gaius seems to imply that, by 111 B.C., practically all illegally held public land had been distributed. Before Gracchus died, his law was amended to permit the sale of these plots, an amendment found necessary to make the allotments sufficiently attractive. Indeed, the clause stipulating inalienability had probably been intended as temporary, remaining effective only long enough to compel the holder to make a serious attempt at farming. Even our homestead laws required several years of occupation and a definite amount of cultivation before granting full title to the land. The law of 111 B.C., which granted full ownership without requiring rental payments to the state, was intended to relieve the many settlers who had failed in their undertaking. Even with its help, however, many small farmers did not succeed and sold their plots to more enterprising neighbors. Thus, the old drift toward the plantation system began again.

There were many causes of failure. The allotments were frequently strips cut here and there from large holdings. Their recipients could not, therefore, be grouped into villages, as the sociable Italians always preferred, and they soon succumbed to the loneliness of isolated farm life and returned to the city. Many, moreover, had come from the city of Rome knowing nothing about the techniques of their new occupation, and they failed through sheer ignorance. In addition, the distance from a good market made intensive small-scale farming unprofitable on many allotments in the interior. Livestock can be marketed on the hoof far from the pasture; wine and oil are concentrated products that can profitably be hauled long distances; but grain is relatively bulky, and vegetables demand rapid transportation. For these reasons, the slave-owning landlord with extensive fields regained possession of many acres that the Gracchi had taken from him. Significantly, a large proportion of the Cimbric invaders captured by Marius and Catulus twenty years after Gaius’s death were purchased by cattlemen in southern Italy, in the very region where the Gracchan commissioners had allotted land to small farmers. These captives soon formed the slave army with which Spartacus threatened the very life of Rome.[4]

Meanwhile, Sulla did something—though unintentionally—to increase the number of small holdings when he confiscated land in cities disloyal to him and distributed it as a reward to his soldiers.[5] At least one hundred thousand soldiers were settled in this way, chiefly in Etruria and Campania, both regions in which large estates had been numerous. Naturally, his method did not entirely serve the best interests of the countryside. Many good cultivators were dispossessed, while more than a few of the new settlers were unfit to be peasants. Indeed, Catiline’s rebel army formed its nucleus in Etruria from these two groups: peasants dispossessed by Sulla and Sullan colonists who had failed as farmers. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that his colonization substantially reduced the area occupied by large plantations.

Caesar continued this process, although his chief purpose in colonizing was to spread Latinity through the provinces—a policy that quickly bore fruit in Gaul and Spain. The triumvirs perhaps did more harm than good to small-plot farming, for although they settled as many veterans as Sulla, their confiscations were carried out largely in the Po Valley, where agricultural conditions had been unusually healthy. Later, however, when Augustus had soldiers to demobilize and settle, he made a practice of purchasing land that was for sale, and the results could then hardly have been undesirable.[6]

This vast recolonization of Italy, which over half a century placed small lots in the hands of some three hundred thousand new settlers, greatly changed agricultural conditions. It not only replaced many slaves with working landowners, but also replaced thousands of the old native freeholders with veterans who, given the way armies had been constituted since the time of Marius, were likely to be urban proletarians, many of them descended from freedmen. It is doubtful whether Italian agriculture benefited greatly from the change.

Meanwhile, two tendencies toward healthier conditions in Italy became noticeable in Cicero’s day: one toward the replacement of slaves by tenants, and another toward renewed intensive cultivation of the land. The experiences of Italian plantations and ranches with the Cimbric captives may partly explain the first tendency. Not only had the annihilation of the rebels reduced the number of available farm slaves, but the losses suffered and the danger involved had also provided a warning that the immediate profits from slave cultivation might, in the long run, be more than offset. Caesar, in fact, passed a law requiring at least one-third of all farm and ranch laborers to be free, a measure that merely formalized an already accepted tendency. Everywhere, landlords were attempting to find free men who would take plots of their land as tenants,[7] and by the time of Augustus the process had advanced so far that the word colonus, which had originally meant “tiller of the soil,” had acquired the new but generally accepted meaning of “tenant.”

The second tendency, toward renewed cultivation of Italian soil, reminds us of the repeated revivals of farming in England mentioned above. The contributing causes are not difficult to find. Sicily, which had long supplied Rome with wheat, had overworked its soil through wheat cultivation. No soil can endure the constant drain of a single crop for two centuries without requiring a respite. During the civil wars, even the reduced amount that Sicily produced was frequently cut off from Italy. It is very likely that Italian farmers then discovered that wheat could again be raised profitably near Rome—in fact, that the land had recovered sufficiently under pasturage to endure a renewed period of cultivation.

The recolonization of large areas by Caesar and Augustus also contributed to the movement, as did the desire of landlords to replace slaves with free tenants wherever possible. Causes and effects thus interacted. Poor free farmers could most readily raise grain; the land could again support cereals; and Italy needed cereals produced at home.

Such changes, however, come slowly, and in this case the new cultivation was not destined to last long. Indeed, the reopening of the seas, the annexation of Egypt, and the development of African grain lands soon checked the progress of Italian agriculture. Nevertheless, for at least a generation during the final years of the Republic and the early reign of Augustus, Italy’s western coast appears to have enjoyed a highly profitable period. Pasturage gave way to a combination of vine, fruit, vegetable, and grain cultivation that turned the region into a garden such as travelers now see only in Campania.

It would, of course, be wholly erroneous to conclude that the confiscation and redistribution of land, together with the new distrust of slave cultivation, eliminated vast estates from Italy. Such an inference is immediately disproved by numerous references to men like Domitius, who at the Battle of Corfinium could promise each soldier in his army of fifteen thousand men a gift of four jugera from his own estates, and who afterward manned a fleet with his own tenants and slaves. Too often, confiscated plantations simply passed by forced sale to an adherent of the victorious party, while the economic laws that encouraged concentration never ceased to operate.

Under favorable circumstances, however—and Roman inheritance laws were always favorable to them—groups of small farmers succeeded reasonably well in maintaining their position. We have proof of this in two exceptionally interesting inscribed stones,[8] one found near Placentia in the Po Valley and the other near Beneventum. Both record mortgages obtained by farmers from the great imperial fund through which Nerva and Trajan proposed to assist farmers with grants of “rural credit” while simultaneously “pensioning motherhood” by using the interest from these mortgages to support the children of the poor.

Because the farms retained the names under which they were first recorded by the census bureau, probably about a century and a half earlier, while their ownership at the time of the mortgage record is also given, it is possible to determine in both places how far the process of concentration had advanced. At Beneventum, plots originally held by ninety-two owners had, by Trajan’s day, passed into the hands of fifty owners. At Placentia, the original number of eighty-nine owners had similarly fallen to fifty. Judged by American experience, this was not an unreasonably rapid concentration. Many of the plots remained quite small, being worth only a few hundred dollars each. Very few were large enough to deserve the name latifundium: only five of the hundred were valued at more than $50,000. Circumstances in both cases, however, seem to have favored the small farmer because the lands were suitable for grain cultivation and located near good markets. If we could recover a substantial number of these illuminating documents—and hundreds of them must have been inscribed throughout Italy—we would be able to determine whether these two present an accurate picture of Italian agricultural conditions.

To follow the development of Roman agriculture through the succeeding crises, we must turn to official documents[9] found in the province of Africa, not far from Carthage. It will be remembered that after the Third Punic War, Rome took possession of the Carthaginian estates while leaving a large proportion of the Berber peasants in the position of tenants, as they had been under the Carthaginian regime. Pressed for ready cash, however, Rome sold large tracts outright, apparently to senators and knights who possessed the capital required to operate the costly irrigated plantations that alone could survive in Africa. The younger Gracchus later gave about a million acres to colonists in large plots of two hundred jugera, thereby recognizing the farming methods required in that region.

After a century of Roman occupation, the province began to flourish with almost incredible fertility.[10] During his nine-day march from Lares to Capsa, Marius, as Sallust tells us, had found little but vasta inculta, egentia aquae, infesta serpentibus—“uncultivated wastes, lacking water and infested with snakes.” Today the region might be described in the same words, but by Trajan’s time large cities had arisen everywhere. The extensive ruins of the cities in that region, recently excavated by French explorers, provide grounds for estimating their populations. Bourde assigns at least 100,000 people to Thysdrus, 50,000 to Thelepte, 25,000 to Sufetula, and 12,000 to Cillium, without including the densely settled peasantry that made these cities possible.

This miracle was accomplished by devising an elaborate system of dams and underground cisterns that collected and preserved every possible drop of rain, and by planting extensive olive and fig orchards and vineyards to use and conserve this moisture and attract more rain. As a result, even cereal cultivation eventually became profitable on land now considered part of the Sahara Desert.

The documents already mentioned reveal the interesting fact that the great Roman planters who accomplished this work employed not slave labor but free tenants. There can be little doubt that they invested heavily in the leaseholds of the native Berbers, whom they readily employed as tenants. These natives, who were present in great numbers, were of course acclimatized, as northern war captives or eastern slaves would not have been. But the documents cited above also prove that many Roman peasants had come to Africa to work as tenants on these lands. Here we doubtless have a reference to some of those unfortunate Italians who had been dispossessed by the confiscations of the Civil Wars at home, and whose fate Vergil so poignantly portrays in his first Eclogue:

At nos hinc alii sitientis ibimus Afros, pars Scythiam et rapidum Cretae veniemus Oaxen. ... En quo discordia civis produxit miseros!

There is some satisfaction in the thought that these exiles found prosperity in the new land—a wealth of wine, oil, and grain that soon overwhelmed the Roman market with African shipments so completely that their successors in Italy, settled there by the victors, found themselves scarcely able to continue competing. By the Claudian period, Italian farmers were again signaling distress.

The continuing story of African agriculture is fascinating, but here we can mention only the factors that combined to bring about the inevitable arrival of serfdom. The great landlords, who lived in Rome and managed their estates through procurators, built central villas on their properties and operated them under a system resembling that of the English manors. Tenants were assigned farms from which they paid one-third of the produce, together with approximately six days of service[11] each year on the manorial lands, which were therefore cultivated for the owner without cost.

This method of securing labor had probably survived from the Carthaginian regime. It certainly resembles the eastern feudal practices that were then still in use in Egypt. Later, the system became the entering wedge of a new feudalism, when state paternalism became more concerned with producing wealth from the soil than with protecting the cultivator. Meanwhile, tenants were also encouraged to plant olives and vines on unoccupied desert land, receiving exemptions from rent for five to ten years in return for such efforts. In this way, the cultivated area expanded and the plantations belonging to the manors grew.

Then came the hard years of Nero’s reign, with their cruel proscriptions and confiscations[12] of large estates, and half the privately owned plantations of Africa were absorbed into the imperial domain. Vespasian, the shrewd financier, sent his procurators to organize the public lands and the recently confiscated estates into vast imperial complexes. He established definite regulations under which his agents and the tenants—now imperial coloni—were to manage the properties.

Domitian, preoccupied with protecting Italian agriculture, which was then in severe distress, temporarily restricted the expansion of African vineyards and olive groves. He thus deprived the tenants of a source of profit, even at the expense of the imperial domains. His successors, Trajan and Hadrian, however, returned to the more normal Roman policy, which had generally refused to favor Italy at the provinces’ expense. A petition from the tenants in Africa requesting permission to cultivate new lands was granted, sufficient proof that African agriculture remained healthy.

Soon, however, signs of distress appeared even in Africa. The chief problem was that the fertility that had accumulated for ages on the soil’s surface, and that had been so successfully exploited by the new methods of Roman farmers, began to show signs of exhaustion. Beneath that thin surface lay only sand. Here the remedies applied in Italy during every crisis—rest, pasturage, and crop rotation—seemed unlikely to succeed.

When the African rents owed to the imperial treasury began to decline, the emperors and their agents became anxious. At first, they attempted to attract tenants by offering tax exemptions, hereditary leases, and outright gifts of land to those willing to break and plant the soil farther into the deserts. But there was a limit beyond which the farmer could not go. Next, we hear complaints and threats from the tenants that, because the imperial agents were doubling the periods of compulsory service on the imperial domains, they would be forced to abandon their leaseholds altogether. Finally came the inevitable decree from the desperate emperor, forbidding tenants to leave their lands and binding both them for life and their descendants forever afterward to their allotments.

The documents relating to Italian agriculture are not as illuminating, but the story was doubtless similar. It was similar largely because the eastern practices of feudalism that had survived in Egypt and Africa from an earlier regime seemed to provide the emperor with justification for an easy solution to Italy’s difficult situation. There, too, Nero’s confiscations had accumulated large plantations for the imperial treasury. Perhaps Domitian had these estates in mind when he attempted to protect Italian agricultural profits by restricting provincial production of wine and oil. This idea was too insular, however, to gain the approval of the provincially born emperors who succeeded him.

Italy’s population was visibly declining. The stock that now populated the country possessed neither physical vigor nor mental energy, and there were no domestic industries to support the people while the land received another respite as pasture. Nerva and Trajan, as we have seen, attempted to extend rural credit at six percent and to use the proceeds to provide parents with pensions for each child. It has been estimated that one hundred million dollars were taken from the treasury for these funds alone, and numerous panegyrics praised these well-intentioned emperors for having “recreated Italy.”

Then the plague swept across the land and killed millions of people. Marcus Aurelius resorted to the daring measure of importing thousands of northern war captives as half-citizen tenants on the imperial domains, but they did little to fill the void, and it is doubtful whether they became efficient farmers. The years of anarchy, war, and extravagance that followed emptied the treasury and brought about successive debasements of the coinage, which eventually reduced the denarius to nearly one percent of its former value.

One of the most serious disasters caused by this process was the practical destruction of the great rural credit fund established by Nerva and Trajan. Indeed, all credits had by then become little more than figures on paper, scarcely worth the effort required to collect them.[13] Taxes were confiscatory, and those small farmers who still owned freeholds “commended” themselves and their properties to influential lords who possessed enough influence with the emperor to protect their coloni. Tenants whose lords failed to secure relief attempted to escape from their contracts. Owners of farm slaves tried to rid themselves of property that could so easily be taxed. Such were the conditions when Constantine intervened with his decree binding freeholders, tenants, and slaves alike to the soil, thereby legalizing the serfdom that was being adopted everywhere.

[1] The Italian census of 1905 provides the following statistics:

Wheat: 12½ million acres (18 percent of the total); average yield, 12 bushels per acre. Maize: 4 million acres (6 percent of the total); average yield, 25 bushels per acre. Wine: 10 million acres (14 percent of the total); average yield, 100 gallons per acre. Olive oil: 2½ million acres (3½ percent of the total); average yield, 30 gallons per acre.

Oranges and lemons, which today occupy much land, were unknown in ancient Italy. Chemical fertilizers were still used very little in Italy in 1905.

[2] See Prothero, English Farming Past and Present, 1912. Students of ancient economic conditions will benefit especially from studying England’s long agricultural history. There they will learn about the normal vicissitudes through which the cultivation of soil must necessarily pass. All the Roman provinces flourished for a time after the introduction of Roman farming methods, whose thoroughness tapped new resources. The resulting exhaustion was inevitable, but the following period was generally devoted to pasturage, which, though somewhat less profitable, allowed the land to rest before a new period of prosperity. The temporary abandonment of wheat cultivation in each case was not proof of reckless exploitation by the sovereign state, as is too often assumed. Landowners cultivate the most profitable crops possible at all times, whether or not a tithe is imposed.

[3] See especially Hardy, Six Roman Laws, pp. 28–40.

[4] Caesar, Bell. Gall. I, 40; Plutarch, Crassus, 12.

[5] Kromayer, Neue Jahrb., 1914, p. 161.

[6] Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, ch. 16. According to his own account, he purchased land in Italy for 600,000,000 HS and in the provinces for 260,000,000 HS.

[7] Examples are found in Caes., Bell. Civ. I, 34; II, 56; Colum. I, 7, 4–6; Hor., Epist. I, 14; Seneca, Epist. 123, 2. By the second century, coloni rather than slaves seem to be assumed on farms; Digest, XX, 1, 32. Varro, to be sure, regularly implies that slaves perform the farm labor, and for his time his testimony should be accepted as valid, at least for Latium; see Gummerus, Klio, Beiheft V, p. 64.

[8] The so-called tabulae alimentariae, C. I. L. IX, 1455, and XI, 1147, discussed by Mommsen, Hermes, 1884, p. 343. Perhaps Mommsen is too confident that they are representative. It is just possible that the funds mentioned were lent only to owners of small plots, since Dio (68, 2, 1) confirms the emperor’s interest in helping this class. If so, the inscriptions do not provide an adequate picture of the larger estates.

[9] These are imperial rescripts engraved on stone, containing the emperors’ responses to petitions from their tenants in Africa. Six have so far been recovered in fragmentary form at various places in or near the Bagradas River. See Bruns, Fontes, pp. 295–304; Dessau, Inscr. Lat. Sel. II, 6870; and Rostowzew, Gesch. d. Röm. Kolon., p. 313 ff., for texts, references, and the most important discussions.

[10] Reid, The Municipalities of the Roman Empire, chap. X, especially p. 289.

[11] This requirement of personal service was probably a practice inherited from Carthaginian serfdom. It could, however, reasonably be justified as a substitute for the municipal road and munitions service that citizens of most colonies had to perform, and from which these tenants were exempt.

[12] Schulten, in Klio, VII, p. 208, points out that several African estates mentioned in the inscriptions bear the names of distinguished nobles proscribed by Nero.

[13] Economists usually assume that the later emperors withdrew the funds, but there is no evidence of this, and withdrawal would have been difficult because the funds had been distributed among the various municipal boards. The funds’ complete disappearance is most readily explained by the decline in the value of all trust-fund credits caused by the astonishing debasement of the denarius. When a credit of one hundred million dollars had fallen to a value of one and a half million dollars, it was obviously impossible to continue the credits and pensions throughout Italy.