HISTORY OF PLANTATION IN ANCIENT ROME
This profitable theory, Carthage and the Syracusan tyrant, Hiero, seem to have adopted from the kings of Egypt and Syria who had inherited it from Alexander, as he in his day had adopted it together with his theory of divine rights from the Persian régime. By virtue of it the Carthaginians had imposed in Sicily tithes on grain and fifths on various other products of the soil, while the lands of which they had taken complete possession they rented out to the highest bidder or cultivated as state’s domain.
How far thoughts of transferring this profitable possession to themselves counted with the Romans in inducing them to enter the dangerous hazards of a war with Carthage, we can hardly decide. Polybius states that when the senate hesitated to act, the chauvinists urged the popular assembly to consider the material advantages that would follow, and perhaps it was the tribute which they had in mind. The senate, it must be added, however, acted with reluctance and for two years sent such small forces to the front, that there was apparently on their part no immediate intention of conquering a new province: to them it seemed enough if Messana were protected so that the straits might be kept out of Carthaginian control.
Those who looked for material advantages from a war were never more deluded. A constant struggle of twenty-four years ensued in which Rome drained her resources to the last drop. Every available man was used on land or sea through interminable campaigns till her fields went to waste and debts outstripped the returns of scanty crops. To keep up a fair quota for her army Rome at the end of the war admitted into citizenship the Sabine and Picentine people, running the imaginary walls of her city-state across Italy to the Adriatic.
Rome won in the end, and took over Carthaginian Sicily with most of the lucrative dispositions of the former owner, but she did not for the present evict any of the landholders nor send any colony to the island. The reasons are patent. The drain upon her population had been so severe that it would have been no easy matter to find volunteers for a colony so far distant. Nor could the state have made use of a military colony of the usual type. Nothing but a legion of professional soldiers would serve the purpose since here the conquered were to be kept in subjection as tributaries whether or not they wished it.
The annual tribute that Rome collected amounted to about one million bushels of wheat, which was brought to Rome and sold on the market for the account of the treasury. Since this amount was probably enough to supply at least half the needs of the city of that day, it would be interesting to know what the farmers of the vicinity thought of this competition of the state with their market. Unfortunately our meager sources have left no apposite comment.
It is impossible to believe that if the landowners had seriously objected the urban tribes, being only four, could have out-voted the rural tribes in favor of cheap grain. Since the exaction of tribute in kind continued and so far as we know no effort was made to divert the produce to other markets we may conclude that much grain was actually needed. If so, conditions in Latium had already shifted toward the position they held in Cato’s day when grain culture had given way largely to pasturage, wine and olive-growing. The process, in so far as it was not complete, must of course have been accelerated by the deluge of Sicilian wheat. From that time one province after another was exploited to feed the growing population of the city, and central Italy could never again win the position of a cereal-producing region.
In 232 Flaminius, a bold precursor of the Gracchi, re-asserted the doctrine, adopted after the fall of Veii, that public lands should be employed for purposes of social and economic amelioration rather than rented, as the senate desired, to endow the governmental treasury. The land in question was the Ager Gallicus which Rome took from the Senones when in 285 they attempted to repeat the memorable raid of a century earlier.
At that time the land had been left undivided for want of takers, and had probably been leased in large lots to grazers. As the city grew, however, senators who were in general the class that could carry such investments had naturally found the leases profitable.
But their arguments against Flaminius were not wholly based upon personal considerations. As experienced administrators they saw of course the advantages to the state of having a steady and reliable source of income for the treasury in addition to the realestate tax, and they could question with sincerity the wisdom of a doctrine whose implications would inevitably phrase themselves in the theory that the state owed all its citizens a means of livelihood.
How severe the demands for new distributions may have been we cannot conjecture, but it is quite possible that in the years of casting up of accounts after the long Punic war, many peasants lost their properties in the mortgages incurred while they had been in foreign service.
At any rate the contest was a bitter one before Fla-minius finally secured a majority vote in the tribal assembly for his proposal. Polybius,2 writing later when the city was drifting toward the Gracchan maelstrom, and adopting the interpretation of the law as he found it in the aristocratic writer, Fabius, cynically remarks that this was the beginning of Rome’s downfall, and he adds, what seems to be an echo of senatorial invective, that it was the cause of the Gallic wars of the Po valley that followed.
Later writers generally adopted this verdict, for the effective historians of the republic who have put the stamp of their own bias upon republican history were nearly all members of the aristocracy. And this is the reason why the whole career of this original though over-impetuous leader3 is everywhere stained with whimsical accusations. An important immediate result of this law was that Rome again turned her surplus energies to land development, although the opening of a rich province outside of Italy should have attracted attention to the profits of commerce and industry.4
The Second Punic War which was fought on Italian soil wrought terrible havoc upon the chief industry of the people and thereby accelerated the processes that we have already noticed. For more than twelve years the battle lines swept back and forth over the villages and fields of central and southern Italy. Cities surrendered to the seemingly stronger contestant for self-protection, only to be sacked in vengeance when captured by the other. Whatever contestant retreated, grainfields were burned for military reasons, vineyards and orchards cut, and the cattle driven off. The inhabitants who escaped scattered to the four winds, many abandoning Italy permanently for Greece.
Many of the famous cities of Magna Graecia came out of the war with a few hundred famine-ridden weaklings huddling together along the ruins of the city walls. The vigorous part played in the Second Punic War by Marseilles suggests the inference that economic causes were far more important in bringing on the conflict than Livy supposed. Marseilles had had many trading-posts on the coast of Spain whither her merchants had attracted the products of the whole peninsula. Obviously, when Hamilcar and Hannibal marched northward from New Carthage cross-cutting all the old trade routes Marseilles found that Spanish products began to flow southward toward the Punic ports rather than eastward.
And since Carthage whenever possible monopolized the commerce of her possessions the success of Carthage in Spain would obviously result in the complete exclusion of Marseilles. It is therefore very likely that it was Marseilles that first tried to check the Carthaginians, and failing this, did her utmost to excite the Roman Senate to activity in her favor by exaggerating the reports of Punic designs against Rome. The Ebro treaty and the Saguntine alliance may well be the results of Massiliot diplomacy.5
After the war, came problems of reconstruction which were of course far beyond the resources of the enfeebled and debt-burdened state. The few men who could be induced to consider new allotments in colonies were gathered together and sent to frontiers demanding immediate protection. Thus Cremona and Placentia were repeopled as a bulwark against the Gauls, and a few hundred citizens were found for each of several ruined harbors of the southern coast, now exposed to raids and invasions.6 Even for these southern points the requisite three hundred citizens could not always be supplied, so that Thurii and Vibo were settled as Latin colonies, and non-Romans were also included in some of the others.
Vast areas of devastated lands at less vital points could obviously not be cared for at present. These the state took possession of, partly because they were without claimants, partly, in accordance with the new theory of sovereignty recently adopted in Sicily, because they were forfeited in title to the conqueror.
What was to be done with these vast areas, aggregating a total of perhaps two million acres,7 at least half of which was arable? Obviously the state pursued what seemed to be a reasonable policy in offering it in large lease-holds to Romans who had the capital requisite to make use of it. By this method at least there was some hope of redeeming the land, for with the scarcity of settlers and the lack of capital available for buying it outright, the only other alternative would have been continued desolation and consequent lawlessness and brigandage.
Under the law public lands could be thus leased in blocks of five hundred jugera per holder, or a thousand jugera for citizens having two children. Intensive cultivation to be sure was out of the question in such blocks, for labor was scarce and with the means of transportation then available grain could not profitably find good markets.
But the land could at least be turned into ranches since cattle raising might be conducted with the aid of a few slaves and the product be brought to market with little difficulty. Even on these terms much land found no renters, and the censor’s bureau seems, pardonably if not wisely, to have permitted enterprising renters to exceed their allotments of the legal five hundred jugera if they so desired, and in many cases also to have connived when such renters let their cattle graze on less desirable lands lying unleased in the vicinity.
Thus large tracts of public lands which for the time being were not otherwise of any service, came in time to be enclosed in the original holdings without good and legal title. It was a procedure which has found many parallels in the land-record offices of our own Western states. Here as there the practice was not only excused but even encouraged by public opinion, since those nearby saw nothing but advantage accruing from what is popularly called the “development of natural resources.”
Later after the population had grown and prospective settlers were clamoring for new allotments, a reaction set in demanding the “conservation of natural resources,” and some of the officials were thrown into prison for permitting what public opinion had heartily approved of. Needless to say, when Rome recovered from the dire effects of the war, when the population began once more to increase and fill up the interstices, though this required more than one generation, it was found that the state’s hasty liberality had been imprudent in its failure to impose due restrictions.
Ranches had spread over lands fit for agriculture; slaves imported from the East were thriving where citizen-soldiers should be growing up for service in time of need;8 territory that might have been available for colonization by Rome’s overflow of children was found occupied, and capitalistic farming, which even under normal conditions outstrips small-lot culture, had been entrenched by a state act. After such leaseholders had established a further equity on unreclaimed possessions by many investments and improvements, a demand on the part of the tribal assembly for a return to the theory of Flaminius might well precipitate a very dangerous revolution. The germs of the Gracchan sedition were inherent in the inadequate reconstruction policy adopted after the Punic war.
A brief account of the agricultural methods in use upon a moderate-sized plantation may serve not only to describe Rome’s chief industry but to illustrate an ordinary Roman’s methods of dealing with practical problems. We are fairly well informed about agricultural practices by the instructive, if garbled, treatise written by Cato9 in the second century B.C., the somewhat longer work written by Varro a century later, and the full and charming treatise of Columella composed in the first century A.D.
Valuable data are also found in Vergil’s Georgics and in Pliny’s encyclopaedia. Since the orthodox system was already in vogue in Cato’s day, and later works reveal merely an extension of the system with a few changes adapted to new needs we may, if some caution is used, supplement Cato’s account by use of the two later authors. In speaking of the plantation system in Italy we do not mean to imply an approach to the capitalistic methods found in the “bonanza” wheat-farming of our Western states, where success has depended upon the extensive use of labor-saving machinery capable of being employed upon level areas of rockless loam.
Italian agriculture, even when specializing in cereals, continued for obvious reasons to use the methods of intensive farming. In the first place even before Cato’s day the need for fertilizing had become imperative in central Italy, and manure was not to be secured in unlimited quantities nor applied without much labor. Secondly central Italy has little land suited to the use of machinery. When the landed proprietors of Latium to-day employ large gangs of laboring men, women, and children to spade, hoe, and cradle the grain by hand it is not wholly due to lack of intelligence and capital. The wooden plow, the exact counterpart of the one described by Vergil is still used in various parts of the Campagna, where there is need of a modest implement that is willing to dodge stones and slip harmlessly along the surface if the soil is thin. Such plows cannot turn the soil; hence cross-plowing, hand work with the mattock, and reharrowing are necessary.
All this means that in the several processes of soil-preparation an abundance of laborers was required, and since they were at hand they were also used for the harvest and the threshing, where machinery might have been invented to do the work more quickly. In a word the methods employed on the grain plantations were quite the same as those of the small plot; the difference between the two lay largely in the consequences to society in that latifundia substituted a herd of slaves for citizen farmers.
The typical villa was a large rambling structure containing granaries, wine presses, and vats in one part, the working quarters of the slaves in the other, and a second story comfortably fitted out to receive the master when he had time enough from affairs of state to take his brief vacations in the country. The management of the estate, which probably consisted of a compact farm of from 100 to 300 acres, was entrusted to a reliable slave “vilicus” and his wife.
If ordinary farming was attempted, a troup of forty or fifty slaves was not too large. The farmer usually specialized on one crop, the purpose being to produce a handsome clear profit for the owner’s account from a large bulk of one product, besides devoting some portion of the ground to various side products which would keep the slaves alive and meet the simpler needs of the villa.
A typical wheat plantation would engage a large band of slaves. In the autumn there would be plowing and cross-plowing, a slow process, for oxen walk very leisurely and insist upon resting frequently; but the ancient thought as did Walter of Henley, that the ox was preferable to the horse, being “mannes meat when dead while the horse was carrion.” Indeed cattle-raising produced milk and cheese and beef besides draft animals for the plow, and if the beast plodded slowly, slaves’ time was after all not expensive.
A second or even a third plowing was necessary with the poor instrument used, and if the soil was a meadow just broken the turf had to be crushed with a mattock wielded by hand. Then the land was contoured10 as it still is to-day, with gullies about twelve feet apart in order to keep the roots out of standing water during the long rainy season of winter, which threatened to rot the grain. All this required slow hand labor. In the spring when the rains ceased and the scorching Italian sun began to bake the ground, bands of slaves came out to weed and to hack11 the ground between the plants so as to break up the capillarity near the surface and prevent the subsoil moisture needed for the roots during the dry month before harvest from evaporating. At harvest, as is often done to-day, the tops were cradled and hauled to the granary first, and then the rest of the stalk at a second cutting.
The straw served as thatch for the slaves’ huts, as litter for the cattle (with an arrière pensée on the compost heap) and also to some extent as fodder. Finally the threshing was done by means of flail and winnow. The slaves had to live, and might as well be kept busy. The labor of fertilizing12 the field could of course not be neglected. So important was this item that the keeping of cattle was largely justified on the score of the manure; one head provided for half an acre of ground. In the Republic no chemical fertilizers were known, but in the Empire the use of chalk and lime was introduced from Gaul.
To provide the running expenses of the villa, to keep the slaves occupied between regular tasks, and to make use of waste products, some subsidiary crops might be cultivated. A row of willows13 in the marsh supplied twigs from which slaves wove baskets during rainy weather; a grove of elm and poplars furnished wood for the kitchen fire, for the villa’s pottery where wine and grain jars were made (volcanic alluvium makes fair redware), for the lime kiln, and provided leaves for the cattle. The slaves had of course a garden plot for cabbages, turnips, and other cheap vegetables. Pigs might be kept if oaks were near; they grew rather thin on mere kitchen leavings, weeds, and roots, and to bring a good price they needed a modicum of acorns. Sheep cropped the rough land an3 the olive orchard, and produced work at the loom for the slave women who were too old for heavier work. If the master was enterprising he might raise fowl also. Varro14 knew a farmer who sold home-grown poultry and fish for $25,000 a year, and another who raised thrushes by the thousand which brought him fifty cents a piece. Pea-hens were worth several dollars each and brought good profits.
In general, however, the landlord insisted upon the use of his land for the particular purpose to which it was adapted. A self-sufficing “home economy” did not satisfy the capitalist, who looked upon his farm not as a home but a source of income. If it suited his ledger best he was even willing to send the slaves’ food and clothing15 out from the city to his farm.
Wheat-raising could of course not be continued for several successive years without exhausting the soil; hence when it was the staple product, rotation of crops relieved the strain. The portion used for wheat one year would be sown with rye, barley, or oats the next,16 and every third or fourth year beans, peas, alfalfa or some other leguminous crop that brought back nitrogen to the soil was substituted. Sometimes green crops of this kind were plowed under to enrich the soil, or instead the ground might be allowed to stand fallow for a year as rough pasture (seeding was too expensive), and the sheep turned in to graze.
It must not be supposed that any large portion of the western Italian slopes continued cereal culture regularly into the first century. Obviously even with cheap slave labor, when provincial dues came into Rome in the form of sea-borne grain, expenses often threatened to overbalance receipts. When in Augustus’ day Dionysius came to Rome he says he found the whole country a garden; but he was a Greek accustomed to a land of limestone rocks. What Dionysius probably saw was an unusual number of vineyards and orchards of olives, figs, apples, peaches, plums, cherries, and almonds, many of which, as in Campania to-day, admitted some cereals and vegetables between the rows.
These combination orchards and gardens are possible in the bright sunlight of Italy where lighter crops actually benefit from shade. The elms,17 poplars or fig trees were set out in rows about forty feet apart and on these the vines were trained. The fig trees justified themselves in their fruit as well as in propping the vine. Poplars and elms were liked because they did not shade too heavily and their leaves were pruned for fodder. Thus by planting grain and vegetables between the rows of elm-propped vines, the farmer found that the smaller plants thrived better, he enjoyed the advantages of a diversified crop, he did not have to wait for a return on his capital until the vines were full grown nor suffer a complete annual loss when hail ruined his crop of grapes.
Often sheepraising was combined with olive production since sheep could pasture on the grass that grew between the trees, but it proved possible also to raise cereals in the olive groves.
Where land was rich and irrigation was feasible, as in Campania,18 a constant succession of grains, legumes, and vegetables, three crops per year, could be produced between the rows of vines.
There however Vesuvius had fertilized the soil with a beneficent rain of rich volcanic detritus and the streams of the Apennines supplied an abundance of water to the very level plain; but Latium and Tuscany were not similarly blessed. On the whole the Roman farmer seems to have been very skilful in the use of manures, nitrogen-producing legumes, and in the proper rotation of his crops; he also proved through the centuries versatile enough in shifting the emphasis between cereal culture, grazing, and fruit raising so as to permit his tired land periods of recovery. it is very doubtful whether it was the native farmer who deserves the blame for the failure.
Notes
1. I have attempted to sketch the political aspects of Rome’s conquest of Sicily in the Cambridge Ancient History, vol. vii, (forthcoming). See Carcopino, La Loi de Hiéran and Rostowzew, Stud. Röm. Kol. (but I find no evidence that the Romans during the Republic considered stipendiary land as Roman public land).
2. Polybius, II, 21, 7; the sentence probably belongs to a late revision of his work by the author. See also Cicero, Cato Maj. 11, and Brut. 57. The tract is sometimes called Ager Gallicus et Picenus because the Picentines seem to have possessed it before the Gallic invasion. On the law of Flaminius, see Cardinali, Studi Graccani, and Münzer art. Flaminius in Pauly-Wissowa.
3. It was Flaminius who built the via Flaminia, which served both as a military road towards Gaul, and a highway of the colonists to Rome. The man’s interest in industrial questions is revealed in his support of the lex Metilia de fullonibus regulating the fullers’ gilds (Pliny, XXXV, 197) and in his approval of the Claudian law which prevented senators from engaging actively in foreign commerce. The second great playground of Rome, the Circus Flaminius, built by him, attests his interest in the urban populace.
4. Since Claudius and Flaminius saw fit to prevent senators from engaging in maritime commerce, we may infer that some at least were entering this field at the time.
5. Frank, Roman Imperialism, 121 ff.
6. The maritime colonies, planted apparently in view of a possible invasion of Antiochus in Conjunction with Hannibal, were Sipontum, Croton, Tempsa, Buxentum, Salernum, Puteoli, Liternum, Volturnum, Thurii and Vibo. Citizens of Fregellae are known to have shared in the colonization.
7. Beloch, Bevölkerung der Griech. Röm. Welt.
8. Appian, Bell. Civ. 1, 7, states that the squatters preferred slave to free labor both because slaves could not be levied for the wars and because there was profit in their offspring.
9. The orthodox theory that Cato’s book is an abstract of Mago’s large work is not probable. Africa demanded “dry-farming,” Italy did not. I have here used imperial writers only on technical points where old methods continued. Cato wrote at the beginning of olive and wine culture; Varro has an added interest in orchards and cattle raising; Columella comes at the beginning of a reaction against slave labor, but in general the methods of intensive capitalist farming persist. See the excellent study of Roman agriculture in Heitland, Agricola.
10. Plowing: Columella, II, 4, 3; Fairfax Harrison, The Crooked Plow, Class. Jour. XI, 323; Contours: Varro, R. R. I, 29 (quo pluvia aqua delabatur); Col. II, 4, 8; 8, 3.
11. The hoeing was done two or three times: Cato, R. R. 37, 5; Pliny, XVIII, 184; Col. II, 11, 2. The Italians continue the practice, but I have never seen it done in America in the case of wheat.
12 Fertilizing. See art. Düngung in Pauly-Wissowa; The Greeks and Romans were skilful in the use of nitrogen-fixing legumes and clovers; Cato, 37, 2; Columella, II, 15; XI, 2,44; Pliny, XVIII, 134; Varro, I, 23, 3; Alfalfa (medica) came to be thoroughly appreciated in the early Empire. Vergil, Georg. I, 215, and Varro, I, 42, both mention it, while Columella, II, 10, 25, is very enthusiastic about its power to enrich the soil. Servius, in commenting on the Vergilian passage, says that in his day it covered the whole of Venetia. Its importance as a fertilizer has hardly been appreciated by Simkhovitch in his article on Hay and History (Pol. Sc. Quart., 1916).
13. Cato, I, 7, gives his preferences of products on the farm in the following order: (1) vinea (if the quality is good), (2) hortus (if one can irrigate), (3) salictum—apparently for basketry in fruit-bearing countries, (4) oletum, (5) pratum, apparently for fodder, (6) grain, (7) timber for fire wood, (8) arbustum—probably a combination of orchard and garden, (9) oak forest for timber and swineraising. Pliny however (18, 29) quotes Cato as advocating cattle raising above all. How, Class. Rev. 1920, 178, suggests that Pliny is here referring to a conversation reported by Cicero, de Off. II, 89. Cato apparently had Latian and Sabine conditions in mind when he advocated grazing.
14. Varro, R. R. III, 2, 14–17.
15.Cato, 135. Many of the things that slaves could make at the villa, such as rakes, mattocks, wine jars,baskets (Varro, I, 22) and even slaves’ clothing, Cato apparently bought in the city.
16. Pliny, H. N. XVIII, 187; Columella, II, 9, 4, and II, 12, 7–9.
17. See art. Arbustum in Pauly-Wissowa; Varro, I, 7, 2; Pliny, XVII, 202; Columella, II, 9; V, 9, 11.
18. Strabo, IV, 3.
By Tenney Frank in the book 'An Economic History of Rome'-Second Edition Revised- Batoche Books Kitchener, 2004 (Originally published in 1927)- p. 52-60- Edited and adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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