Chapter 1 — Agriculture In Early Latium

CHAPTER I

AGRICULTURE IN EARLY LATIUM

Italy’s wealth in ancient times, as in modern times, lay in her food-producing soil. Gold was never found in the peninsula, and but little silver. Iron and copper were mined only in a narrow strip of Etruria, too circumscribed to entice many Romans into industry. The commerce of the seas was developed and held by peoples less endowed with productive land, races compelled to trade if they were [OCR unclear: jo mip^^^]. Agriculture was therefore Italy’s industry—in particular, the cultivation of the western littoral, composed of the ejecta of the many volcanoes between central Etruria and Naples, and of the deep alluvial deposits of the Po Valley. It was the hardy farmers of the Roman Campagna who organized the irresistible legions that united Italy and, through the united strength of Italy, the Mediterranean world; and it was the submersion of this stock of farmers that hastened the end of ancient civilization.

The Latin plain in its present conformation is very recent—so recent that the last masses of volcanic ash probably postdate the pyramids of Egypt. The process of formation continued from long before the glacial periods and all through them.[1] More than fifty craters, from which the ash and lava poured, can still be found within twenty-five miles of the imperial city. Long periods of tranquility intervened, when jungles grew up over the temporary surface, only to be buried under a new mass of ashes. The deep cuttings of the railways that run out of the eastern gates of Rome expose repeated layers of black and yellow soil lying between thick strata of tufa and ash; they mark the jungles of former intervals of rest.

The present surface is not old. The mouth of the Tiber has apparently silted in as much alluvium since Ostia lay upon the seashore in Sulla’s day as the river carried down between the last great eruptions and Ostia’s foundation. Though the Sabine hills immediately behind this plain show numerous sites of habitation several millennia old—some being the homes of savages of the Paleolithic age—and though there are traces throughout the peninsula of the earliest Indo-European peoples of the Terramara civilization[2]—the men who, in the third millennium, introduced the use of copper—the oldest graves of the Forum,[3] the Palatine, and Grottaferrata cannot with certainty be placed earlier than the Iron Age, perhaps not more than a thousand years before Cicero. Archaeologists have doubted the accuracy of the reports[4] published by the excavators who, a century ago, claimed that the burial urns uncovered below Castel Gandolfo were found under undisturbed layers of volcanic ash; but Pinza has proved the reports accurate, and his own theory that Alba Longa was buried in the debris of an Alban eruption does not entirely lack plausibility.

[1] A. Verri, Origini e Trasformazioni della Campagna, 1911. For an analysis of the soil, see Boll. Soc. Geol. Ital. 1918, 29 ff.

[2] Peet, The Stone and Bronze Ages in Italy.

[3] Pinza, Monumenti Antichi, XV.

[4] Pinza, Etnologia Antica Toscano-Laziale, pp. 33–74.

The Latin plain is, then, of very recent date, and human cultivation of it is still more recent. It is well known that the volcanic ash that falls from Vesuvius is rich in phosphates and potash, and that a moderate admixture of it in the soil acts as an excellent fertilizer. In fact, the Campanian farmer living in the shadow of Vesuvius is not averse to an occasional eruption, if only the volcano behaves with moderation. The later ash strata of the Alban volcanoes had an abundance of these same constituents, though a large percentage of the original elements has leached out with time. Needless to say, however, the ash alone did not lend itself to cultivation at once, since grain needs an abundance of nitrogenous matter and a more solid soil than the ash at first provided.

Before men could inhabit the Latin plain, we must posit a period of wild growth and the invasion of jungle plants and forests, which could create a sufficiently thick humus for agricultural purposes. Such forests did invade the plain. Not only do all the authors preserve traditions of forests and sacred groves mentioned in the tales of the early kings, but Theophrastus[5] still knew Latium as a source of timber as late as the third century: “The land of the Latins is well watered, and the plains bear the laurel and myrtle and remarkable beech trees. Trunks are found that singly suffice for the keel beams of the great Tyrrhenian ships. Fir and pine grow upon the hills. The Circaean promontory is thickly overgrown with oaks, laurels, and myrtle.” It is interesting to find that the beech then grew on the Latin plains, for now that the Campagna is parched and treeless it has withdrawn to the hills, if not to the mountains.

[5] Theophrastus, Hist. Plant. V, 8; cf. Pais, Storia Critica di Roma, I, 62.

With this growth of timber from a subsoil that had many excellent qualities, a very rich soil was being formed for farming, once the Alban volcanoes should cease pouring out the flames that kept the hill peoples back in fear. There can be little doubt that the region was far from being semiarid then, as it is now. Today the grass parches brown in June, not to revive again until near October, and the wheat is hurried to a premature harvest in the middle of June. But Varro sets July down as the month of harvest in his day, and summer rains are frequently mentioned in the classical authors.

It would be hazardous to assume a theory of “climatic pulses” by way of explanation for this difference, and it is doubtful whether a mere two thousand years in the long recession of the glacial area could cause a perceptible change in temperature. The explanation of the change is perhaps to be found in the almost complete deforestation of Latium and the mountains behind it. There can be little doubt that when the Sabine ridge from Praeneste to Monte Gennaro and the whole Volscian range were thickly forested, instead of being the parched white rocks that now stand out, the cool mountains, when struck by the humid sirocco, caused condensation and precipitation over the plain. In those days, moreover, the areas of forest still standing on the mountainsides and plains retained the water for a long time and afforded a lasting subsoil supply and an abundance of nightly dewfalls. These no longer exist, now that the last rains of spring leap off the bare rocks and flow away at once in torrents.

When, therefore, the early settlers pushed down into the Campagna and burned out “clearings” for farming—indeed, the Terramara folk had then practiced systematic agriculture in the Po Valley for many centuries—they found a soil remarkably fertile, though not yet very deep, and a warmth and humidity that made the harvest rich. As was to be expected from such conditions, the population in time grew dense. There is nothing improbable in the tradition of the fifty villages that Pliny has preserved.

The treasures now being gathered into the museum of the Villa Giulia from the ruins of sixth-century Ardea, Satricum, Lanuvium, Gabii, Praeneste, Nemi, Velitrae, Norba, and Signia speak of an era of prosperity that no one dared imagine a few years ago. The ancient lords of these cities, which became malarial wastes before Cicero’s day, decked themselves and their homes in the gold and precious stones of all the lands from the Baltic Sea to the Mesopotamian Valley. Yet the wealth that made all this display possible did not spring from Latin industry or from commerce directed by Latins, if we may trust the archaeological evidence available. It was the produce of a rich soil, cultivated with unusual intensity, that paid for it and kept alive a thick population such as would probably compare with the swarming tenantry of the Po Valley today.

There are numerous relics of that remarkable agricultural period still to be found in Latium—traces of drains, tunnels, and dams that are all too little known. The modern Italian farmer, who hardly finds his land worth the merest labor of planting and harvesting, fails to see how, in a former day, the owners could have secured returns for such an enormous expenditure of labor. A convenient place to study the intricate drainage system of that time is the district below Velitrae. Here, as De La Blanchère[6] discovered some forty years ago, the ground is honeycombed with an elaborate system of tunnels running down the slopes of the hills toward the Pontine marshes—cuniculi, as he calls them—about three by one and a half feet, cut in the tufa a few feet below the surface and usually along the sides of the numerous ravines.

De La Blanchère was unfortunately misled by the then-prevailing “miasmatic” theory of malaria into believing that these tunnels were cut to drain the soil of pest waters. But they occur only on the slopes, where the land drains all too readily without aid; they do not touch the stagnant Pontine marshes below. However, he also suggested, as a possible theory, what seems indeed to be the explanation. They were apparently cut at a time of such overpopulation that every foot of arable ground had to be saved for cultivation. By diverting the rainwater from the eroding mountain gullies into underground channels, the farmers not only checked a large part of the ordinary erosion of the hillside farms but also saved the space usually sacrificed to the torrent bed. It would be difficult to find another place where labor has been so lavishly expended to preserve the arable soil from erosion. The ground must have been very valuable and the population in great need to justify such heroic measures for the insurance of the annual harvest.

Similar systems are found in the valleys north of Veii and were probably built under similar conditions. Indeed, the remarkable cutting seventy-five yards long at Ponte Sodo, near the citadel rock of Veii, through which the Fosso di Formello has ever since flowed, seems to have been undertaken to save a few acres of the circling riverbed for cultivation. Similarly, the emissarium of the Alban Lake, 1,300 yards long and seven to ten feet high, was cut through solid rock to save a few hundred acres of arable land on the sloping edge within the crater.[7] Even with the tools of modern engineers, that task would not now be considered a paying investment.

Finally, let the student of intensive tillage take a morning walk from Marcellina up Monte Gennaro through the steep ravine of Scarpellata. It is usually dry, but after a heavy rain the water pours down in torrents, carrying off what little soil may tend to accumulate. To save small alluvial patches in the course of this ravine, the ancient farmers built elaborate dams of finely trimmed polygonal masonry that still withstand the torrents. The masonry is largely made of huge blocks weighing half a ton each and is in no way inferior to the magnificent polygonal masonry of Segni’s town walls. And yet one of these dams could hardly save more than half an acre of arable soil.

[6] De La Blanchère, in Mél. d’archéol. et d’hist. 1882; also the article “Cuniculus” in Daremberg-Saglio. He has probably overemphasized the use of these canals in draining marshes and subsoil moisture, and seems also to have included in his discussions some tunnels that are apparently sewage drains belonging to later villas near Rome. The cuniculi of the city are sometimes erroneously brought into the discussion of drains. Many of these were doubtless secret passageways dug to afford avenues of escape or retreat during the proscriptions of the civil wars and during slave uprisings. Antistius Labeo seems to have a reference to the drainage cuniculus in the words: fossa vetus—nec memoriam exstare quando facta sit, Digest 39, 3, 2, 1. Cuniculi have been found as far north as Bieda; see Röm. Mitt. 1915, 185.

[7] Since Roman Veii stood near this Ponte Sodo (Solidum), it is probably this tunnel that later tradition assigned to the sappers and miners of Camillus’s army. The stories of mining operations at the siege of Veii may account for the strange tales that connected the emissarium of Lake Albanus with the Veian siege (Livy V, 15). The Romans do not mention the tunnel that drains Lake Nemi, though it is twice as long as the Alban one. It apparently was cut before the temple of Diana became very important. The Valle Aricciana and the crater lake on the Via Praenestina were also drained at an early date.

It is impossible, after surveying such elaborate undertakings, to avoid the conclusion that Latium in the sixth century was cultivated with an intensity that has seldom been equaled anywhere. When, furthermore, we consider that the tools for tillage were the plow and the mattock, we may be sure that each man’s allotment was very small—doubtless no more than the two jugera that Varro assures us sufficed for the support of the ancient Latin family. It follows that Latium supported a very densely settled population.

With these facts in view, the historian can understand whence came the armies that overran the limits of Latium and overwhelmed all obstruction once they were set in motion; why Veii fell; why the burning of Rome was so quickly repaired; and why Campania called all the way to Rome for aid when threatened by the Samnites. It is very probable that, when the soil began to show signs of exhaustion under the severe strain and of an incapacity to feed the population—which is proved by the desperate methods mentioned above—the growing race found it necessary to seek more room, [OCR unclear: a" ^ w.... Latin tni].

Of the social organization of these early Latins of the sixth century, we have, of course, no contemporary description. The inconsistent conjectures of Roman writers who lived many centuries later, based as they generally were upon institutions that had come into being through the intervening revolutions, provide but uncertain material for history. The safest course is to rely as far as possible upon archaeology, upon the fragments of the Twelve Tables that were written down in the middle of the fifth century, and upon whatever inferences can be drawn from the earliest political institutions and social practices vouched for by trustworthy writers.

Some deductions, for instance, may be made from the presence of the extensive agricultural undertakings already mentioned. These could not have been organized and carried through by small landholders, for the tunnels ran beneath hundreds of individual plots; nor could the primitive democratic communities that we sometimes posit for Latium have provided the initiative and sustained effort that they imply. It is highly probable that these drainage tunnels and dams were undertaken by landlords who owned extensive tracts and who could command and direct the labor of numerous tenants. In brief, they suggest that a villa system not unlike the manorial system of twelfth-century England pervaded Latium at the time. And this inference accords with the evidence available from other sources.

Such a system would explain the Roman institution of clientship as a survival of the personal relationship that in time established itself between the lord and his tenant or serf. The client of those early days had some duties that remind us strikingly of services imposed upon the medieval villein. He was, for instance, bound to make contributions for the dowry of his lord’s daughter[8] and toward the ransom of his lord if the latter was captured in war, and also to go to battle with his lord.

It would also explain the miserable political and social condition of the plebeians at the beginning of historical times. To be sure, the earliest republican laws and the Twelve Tables represent the plebeian as a citizen capable of owning property. But he had little else and occupied the civil position of one who had only recently emerged from a lower status. He had, for instance, no right to hold a magistracy in the state; he had lost the privilege of consulting the gods officially; a plebeian could not marry anyone of patrician blood, for fear that children of such a union might inherit patrician rights; and, since the patrician group in the Senate had the power of veto, his vote had less than full value.

[8] Dion. Halic., Antiq. II, 10, 1.

The villa, furthermore, was recognized in the earliest law, which indeed calls it the hortus, or enclosure, while a manorial system with very small copyholds for the peasants seems to be recognized when the garden plot of two jugera—one and one-half acres—is called an inheritance, heredium.[9] Perhaps, also, we may find a survival of the open-field system in the “strips” in which the land was assigned in Rome’s two earliest citizen colonies, Ostia and Antium.[10]

Whether the peasant of the Latin village of the sixth century had actually fallen into “real bondage,”[11] as had the helot of Sparta, Thessaly, and Crete, we cannot now determine. But it seems clear, at least, that his condition was [OCR unclear: in 1 the viDein of tb< of manure bclurc Uic ', ^ '• *^' * I>CaiEU ^nc] numerous villages of [OCR unclear: sih \g] about the lord’s villas and the community temple must in many respects have resembled, in form and social organization, the medieval manorial villas. An idea of the social contrast between the classes may be gathered by comparing the elaborate jewelry of the princely tombs at Satricum with the meager furniture of the peasant dugout found nearby.[12]

[9] Leges XII Tabularum, VII, 3 (Bruns, Fontes); Varro, I, 10, 2. This is supported by the fact that the surveyors, in plotting out the land for colonies, conserved a two-acre measure in the “centuriation,” and that early colonies granted freeholds of very small plots. At Tarracina (327 B.C.) only two jugera were given; later colonists were given somewhat larger allotments—2½, 3, or 4 jugera—and finally, in the Gracchan days, thirty jugera. Two jugera—about 1½ acres—could hardly have sufficed for the needs of a family. Perhaps an additional portion was assigned as a leasehold from the municipal land. See Kornemann, Pauly-Wissowa, IV, 575.

[10] Laciniis adsignatus, Liber coloniarum (ed. Rud.), 239, 18, for Antium; 236, 7, for Ostia.

[11] This is the view of Neumann, Bauernbefreiung; cf. E. Meyer, article “Plebs,” Conrads Handwörterbuch; Botsford, Roman Assemblies, pp. 16–65.

[12] See Monumenti Antichi, XV, p. 83, and Della Seta, Museo di Villa Giulia, I.

It would be useless to raise once more the old questions regarding a possible anterior “community ownership” and the beginnings of property rights at Rome; nor is there any reason to expect conclusive evidence on these points. The supposed traces of communism[13] at Rome are few. The community pastures and wastes near the Latin cities may or may not be survivals of a more extended communism: a study of medieval institutions has revealed that township meadows have frequently been acquired at a late date. Mommsen, indeed, found it significant that, according to the oldest code, a man’s property reverted to his fellow clansmen if he died intestate and without heirs,[14] but this again may be a relatively late invention of the lawmakers.

However that may be, the laws of private property had developed long and far before the fifth century, when the Twelve Tables[15] were drawn up. Since the Terramare[16] settlements of the Po Valley reveal that the ancestors of the Romans were orderly agriculturists more than a millennium before these laws were written, it is highly probable that the Latin people respected property rights before they settled the plains about Rome.

[13] Mommsen, Röm. Staatsr. III, p. 23; Pöhlmann, Gesch. des antik. Kommunismus, II, 443; Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor.

[14] Leges XII Tabularum, V, 2.

[15] Ibid. V, 3: Uti legassit super pecunia tutelave suae rei, ita ius esto.

[16] Peet, The Stone and Bronze Ages in Italy.

CHAPTER I

AGRICULTURE IN EARLY LATIUM

In ancient times, as in modern times, Italy’s wealth lay in its food-producing soil. Gold was never found in the peninsula, and only a little silver was found. Iron and copper were mined only in a narrow strip of Etruria, an area too limited to draw many Romans into industry. Maritime commerce was developed and controlled by peoples poorly endowed with productive land—peoples compelled to trade if they were to live. Agriculture was therefore Italy’s chief industry, especially along the western coast, whose soil consisted of material ejected by the many volcanoes between central Etruria and Naples, and in the deep alluvial deposits of the Po Valley. It was the hardy farmers of the Roman Campagna who organized the irresistible legions that united Italy and, through Italy’s combined strength, the Mediterranean world. It was also the submergence of this farming stock that hastened the end of ancient civilization.

The Latin plain, in its present form, is very recent—so recent that the last masses of volcanic ash probably postdate the pyramids of Egypt. Its formation began long before the glacial periods and continued throughout them.[1] More than fifty craters from which ash and lava poured can still be found within twenty-five miles of the imperial city. Long periods of quiet intervened, during which jungles grew over the temporary surface, only to be buried beneath a new mass of ash. The deep railway cuttings east of Rome expose repeated layers of black and yellow soil between thick strata of tufa and ash; these layers mark the jungles that grew during earlier intervals of rest.

The present surface is not old. Since Ostia stood on the seashore in Sulla’s day, the Tiber’s mouth has apparently accumulated as much alluvium as the river carried down between the last great eruptions and Ostia’s foundation. The Sabine hills immediately behind the plain contain numerous habitation sites several thousand years old, some of them once the homes of Paleolithic people. There are also traces throughout the peninsula of the earliest Indo-European peoples of the Terramara civilization,[2] who introduced the use of copper during the third millennium. Nevertheless, the oldest graves of the Forum,[3] the Palatine, and Grottaferrata cannot confidently be dated earlier than the Iron Age, perhaps no more than a thousand years before Cicero.

Archaeologists have doubted the accuracy of reports[4] published by excavators who, a century ago, claimed that burial urns uncovered below Castel Gandolfo had been found beneath undisturbed layers of volcanic ash. Pinza, however, has proved the reports accurate, and his own theory that Alba Longa was buried beneath debris from an Alban eruption is not entirely implausible.

[1] A. Verri, Origini e Trasformazione della Campagna, 1911. For an analysis of the soil, see Boll. Soc. Geol. Ital., 1918, 29 ff.

[2] Peet, The Stone and Bronze Ages in Italy.

[3] Pinza, Monumenti Antichi, XV.

[4] Pinza, Etnologia Antica Toscano-Laziale, pp. 33–74.

The Latin plain is therefore very recent, and human cultivation of it is more recent still. It is well known that the volcanic ash falling from Vesuvius is rich in phosphates and potash, and that a moderate amount mixed into the soil acts as an excellent fertilizer. In fact, the Campanian farmer living under the shadow of Vesuvius does not object to an occasional eruption, provided that the volcano behaves moderately. The later ash layers from the Alban volcanoes contained these same substances in abundance, although much of the original material has leached away over time.

Ash alone, however, could not be cultivated immediately, because grain requires abundant nitrogenous matter and a firmer soil than ash initially provided. Before people could inhabit the Latin plain, there must have been a period of wild growth, during which jungle plants and forests invaded and created humus thick enough for agriculture. Such forests did invade the plain. Not only do all the authors preserve traditions of forests and sacred groves mentioned in stories about the early kings, but Theophrastus[5] still knew Latium as a source of timber as late as the third century:

“The land of the Latins is well watered, and its plains produce laurel, myrtle, and remarkable beech trees. Trunks are found that are individually large enough to provide the keel beams of the great Tyrrhenian ships. Fir and pine grow on the hills. The Circaean promontory is thickly covered with oaks, laurels, and myrtles.”

It is interesting that the beech then grew on the Latin plains. Now that the Campagna is parched and treeless, the beech has retreated to the hills, if not to the mountains.

[5] Theophrastus, Hist. Plant. V, 8; cf. Pais, Storia Critica di Roma, I, 62.

As timber grew from a subsoil that possessed many excellent qualities, a very rich agricultural soil was forming, ready for use once the Alban volcanoes stopped pouring out the flames that kept the hill peoples away in fear. There can be little doubt that the region was far from being as semi-arid as it is now. Today the grass turns brown in June and does not revive until nearly October, while the wheat is hurried to a premature harvest in the middle of June. Varro, however, gives July as the harvest month in his time, and classical authors frequently mention summer rains.

It would be hazardous to explain this difference by assuming a theory of “climatic pulses,” and it is doubtful that a mere two thousand years in the long recession of the glacial area could have caused a perceptible temperature change. The explanation may instead lie in the almost complete deforestation of Latium and the mountains behind it. There can be little doubt that, when the Sabine ridge from Praeneste to Monte Gennaro and the entire Volscian range were covered by thick forest rather than by the parched white rocks visible today, those cool mountains caused condensation and rainfall over the plain whenever the humid sirocco struck them. Moreover, the forests still standing on the mountainsides and plains retained water for a long time, providing a lasting supply of underground moisture and abundant nightly dew. These no longer exist, because the last spring rains now rush from the bare rocks and immediately flow away in torrents.

When the early settlers moved down into the Campagna and burned clearings for agriculture—the Terramara people had already practiced systematic agriculture in the Po Valley for many centuries—they found remarkably fertile soil, though it was not yet very deep, together with warmth and humidity that made the harvest rich. As might be expected under such conditions, the population eventually became dense. There is nothing improbable in the tradition, preserved by Pliny, that there were fifty villages.

The treasures now being gathered into the museum of the Villa Giulia from the ruins of sixth-century Ardea, Satricum, Lanuvium, Gabii, Praeneste, Nemi, Velitrae, Norba, and Signia reveal an era of prosperity that, only a few years ago, no one dared imagine. The ancient lords of these cities—which had become malarial wastelands before Cicero’s day—decorated themselves and their homes with gold and precious stones from every region between the Baltic Sea and the Mesopotamian Valley. Yet, if we can trust the available archaeological evidence, the wealth that made all this display possible did not come from Latin industry or from commerce directed by Latins. It was the produce of rich soil, cultivated with unusual intensity, that paid for it and sustained a dense population probably comparable to the swarming tenantry of today’s Po Valley.

Many remains from that remarkable agricultural period can still be found in Latium, including little-known traces of drains, tunnels, and dams. The modern Italian farmer, who scarcely finds his land worth even the minimal labor of planting and harvesting, cannot understand how owners in an earlier age could have earned returns on such enormous expenditures of labor.

A convenient place to study that period’s intricate drainage system is the district below Velitrae. As De La Blanchère discovered about forty years ago,[6] the ground there is honeycombed with an elaborate system of tunnels running down the hillsides toward the Pontine Marshes. He calls them cuniculi. They measure about three feet by one and a half feet, were cut into the tufa a few feet below the surface, and usually follow the sides of the numerous ravines.

Unfortunately, the then-prevalent “miasmatic” theory of malaria misled De La Blanchère into believing that these tunnels had been cut to drain disease-producing water from the soil. But they occur only on slopes where the land already drains too readily without assistance; they do not reach the stagnant Pontine Marshes below. He did, however, also suggest another possible explanation that appears to be correct.

[6] De La Blanchère, in Mél. d’archéol. et d’hist., 1882; also the article “Cuniculus” in Daremberg-Saglio. He probably overemphasized the use of these canals to drain marshes and underground moisture, and he also seems to have included in his discussion some tunnels that were apparently sewage drains belonging to later villas near Rome. The city’s cuniculi are sometimes mistakenly included in discussions of drains. Many were undoubtedly secret passageways dug to provide escape or retreat routes during the proscriptions of the civil wars and during slave uprisings. Antistius Labeo seems to refer to a drainage cuniculus in the words: “fossa vetus—nec memoriam extare quando facta est,” Digest 39, 3, 2, 1. Cuniculi have been found as far north as Bieda; see Röm. Mitt., 1915, 185.

The tunnels were apparently cut at a time of such overpopulation that every foot of arable ground had to be preserved for cultivation. By diverting rainwater from the eroding mountain gullies into underground channels, farmers not only reduced much of the ordinary erosion on hillside farms but also saved the space that would normally have been sacrificed to a torrent bed. It would be difficult to find another place where labor was spent so lavishly to protect arable soil from erosion. The ground must have been very valuable and the population in great need to justify such extreme measures for protecting the annual harvest.

Similar systems are found in the valleys north of Veii and were probably built under similar conditions. Indeed, the remarkable cutting at Ponte Sodo near Veii’s citadel rock—seventy-five yards long and carrying the Fosso di Formello ever since—seems to have been constructed to save a few acres within the curving riverbed for cultivation.[7] Similarly, the emissarium of the Alban Lake, 1,300 yards long and seven to ten feet high, was cut through solid rock to save a few hundred acres of arable land along the sloping edge inside the crater. Even with modern engineers’ tools, such a task would not now be considered a profitable investment.

Finally, anyone studying intensive cultivation should take a morning walk from Marcellina up Monte Gennaro through the steep ravine of Scarpellata. It is usually dry, but after a heavy rain the water pours down in torrents, carrying away what little soil may have accumulated. To preserve small alluvial patches along this ravine, ancient farmers built elaborate dams of finely trimmed polygonal masonry that still withstand the torrents. The masonry consists largely of enormous blocks, each weighing half a ton, and is in no way inferior to the magnificent polygonal masonry of Segni’s town walls. Yet one of these dams could hardly have preserved more than half an acre of arable soil.

[7] Since Roman Veii stood near this Ponte Sodo (Solidum), it was probably this tunnel that later tradition attributed to the sappers and miners of Camillus’s army. Stories of mining operations during the siege of Veii may explain the strange tales connecting the emissarium of Lake Albanus with the Veian siege in Livy V, 15. The Romans do not mention the tunnel draining Lake Nemi, although it is twice as long as the Alban tunnel. It was apparently cut before the Temple of Diana became very important. The Valle Aricciana and the crater lake on the Via Praenestina were also drained at an early date.

After examining such elaborate projects, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that sixth-century Latium was cultivated with an intensity rarely equaled anywhere. Furthermore, when we consider that the farmer’s tools were the hoe and the mattock, we may be certain that each man’s allotment was very small—probably no more than the two jugera that Varro assures us were sufficient to support an ancient Latin family. It follows that Latium supported a very densely settled population.

With these facts in mind, the historian can understand where the armies came from that crossed Latium’s boundaries and overwhelmed every obstacle once they were set in motion. They also explain why Veii fell, why Rome was so quickly rebuilt after it burned, and why Campania appealed all the way to Rome for help when threatened by the Samnites.

It is very probable that, when the soil began to show signs of exhaustion under excessive strain and became unable to feed the population—as the desperate measures described above indicate—the growing population found it necessary to seek more room, and so began the expansion of the Latin tribe.

Of course, we have no contemporary description of the social organization of these early sixth-century Latins. Roman writers who lived many centuries later offered inconsistent conjectures, generally based on institutions that had arisen through the intervening revolutions, and these provide only uncertain material for history. The safest approach is to rely, as far as possible, on archaeology; on the surviving fragments of the Twelve Tables, which were written down in the middle of the fifth century; and on whatever conclusions can be drawn from the earliest political institutions and social practices confirmed by trustworthy writers.

Some conclusions, for example, can be drawn from the extensive agricultural projects already discussed. Small landholders could not have organized and completed them, because the tunnels ran beneath hundreds of separate plots. Nor could the primitive democratic communities sometimes proposed for Latium have supplied the initiative and sustained effort that these projects required. It is highly probable that landlords who owned large tracts of land undertook these drainage tunnels and dams and could command and direct the labor of many tenants. In short, they suggest that a villa system resembling the English manorial system of the twelfth century prevailed in Latium at the time. This conclusion agrees with the evidence available from other sources.

Such a system would explain the Roman institution of clientship as a survival of the personal relationship that gradually developed between a lord and his tenant or serf. The client of those early days had duties strikingly similar to the services imposed on the medieval villein. For example, he was required to contribute to the dowry of his lord’s daughter,[8] help pay his lord’s ransom if the lord was captured in war, and accompany his lord into battle.

This system would also explain the miserable political and social condition of the plebeians at the beginning of historical times. Admittedly, the earliest republican laws and the Twelve Tables portray the plebeian as a citizen with the right to own property. But he had little else and occupied the civil position of someone who had only recently risen from a lower status. He had no right, for example, to hold a state magistracy. He had lost the privilege of officially consulting the gods. A plebeian could not marry anyone of patrician blood, for fear that children of such a union might inherit patrician rights. And because the patrician group in the Senate possessed veto power, a plebeian’s vote had less than full value.

[8] Dion. Halic., Antiq. II, 10, 1.

The earliest law also recognized the villa, calling it the hortus, or enclosure. It seems to recognize a manorial system with very small copyhold plots for peasants when it calls a garden plot of two jugera—one and a half acres—an inheritance, or heredium.[9] We may perhaps also find a survival of the open-field system in the “strips” into which land was divided in Rome’s two earliest citizen colonies, Ostia and Antium.[10]

[9] Leges XII Tabularum, VII, 3 (Bruns, Fontes); Varro, I, 10, 2. This conclusion is supported by the fact that surveyors laying out land for colonies retained a two-acre measure in the “centuriation,” and that early colonies granted freeholds consisting of very small plots. At Tarracina in 327 B.C., only two jugera were granted. Later colonists received somewhat larger allotments—two and a half, three, or four jugera—and finally, in the time of the Gracchi, thirty jugera. Two jugera, or about one and a half acres, could hardly have supported a family. Perhaps an additional portion was assigned as a leasehold from municipal land. See Kornemann, Pauly-Wissowa, IV, 575.

[10] “Laciniis adsignatus,” Liber coloniarum (ed. Rud.), 239, 18, for Antium; 236, 7, for Ostia.

We cannot now determine whether the peasant of a sixth-century Latin village had actually fallen into “real bondage,” as had the helots of Sparta, Thessaly, and Crete. It seems clear, however, that his condition was generally that of the villein [OCR unclear: of manure bclurc Uic ', ^ '• ^ *^' I>CaiEU ^nc]. The numerous villages of small huts clustered around the lord’s villas and the community temple must, in many respects, have resembled medieval manorial villages in both form and social organization.[11] Some idea of the contrast between the social classes may be gained by comparing the elaborate jewelry from the princely tombs at Satricum with the meager furnishings of the peasant dugout found nearby.[12]

[11] This is the view of Neumann, Bauernbefreiung; cf. E. Meyer, article “Plebs,” Conrads Handwörterbuch; Botsford, Roman Assemblies, pp. 16–65.

[12] See Monumenti Antichi, XV, p. 83, and Della Seta, Museo di Villa Giulia, I.

It would be useless to revive the old questions about a possible earlier period of “community ownership” and the beginnings of property rights at Rome. Nor is there any reason to expect conclusive evidence on these issues. The supposed traces of communism at Rome are few.[13] The communal pastures and wastelands near the Latin cities may or may not be survivals of a more extensive communism: the study of medieval institutions has shown that township meadows were often acquired at a late date.

Mommsen considered it significant that, under the oldest legal code, a man’s property reverted to his fellow clansmen if he died intestate and without heirs.[14] But this rule, too, may have been a relatively late invention by lawmakers. Whatever the case, the laws of private property had developed long and extensively before the fifth century, when the Twelve Tables were drawn up.[15] Because the Terremare settlements of the Po Valley show that the Romans’ ancestors were orderly agriculturalists more than a thousand years before these laws were written,[16] it is highly probable that the Latin people respected property rights before they settled the plains around Rome.

[13] Mommsen, Röm. Staatsr., III, p. 23; Pöhlmann, Gesch. des antik. Kommunismus, II, 443; Vinogradoff, Growth of the Manor.

[14] Leges XII Tabularum, V, 2.

[15] Ibid., V, 3: “Uti legassit super pecunia tutelave suae rei, ita jus esto.”

[16] Peet, The Stone and Bronze Ages in Italy.