The Organization of Estates

The strategies that Roman landowners followed in managing their wealth had to be adapted both to the geographical conditions affecting agricultural production and the overall climate for investment in agriculture in the Roman Empire. Perhaps the greatest boom in agriculture, in Italy at least, occurred during the last two centuries of the republic and the first century ce, when an increasingly wealthy upper class invested its wealth in land and was able to make great profits by supplying agricultural products to the growing urban population in Rome and other Italian cities. These landowners developed the so-called villa system of agriculture, characterized by intensively cultivated estates that produced wine and other cash crops. This type of agriculture was associated especially with coastal regions of Italy, which provided easy communications by sea with urban markets (Morley 1996: 129-38). The labor force on these estates consisted primarily of slaves, under the supervision of a bailiff, or vilicus, who was often also a slave. These estates were compact in size, comprising at most several hundred hectares. The wealthiest landowners might possess numerous compact estates, often located in diverse regions within Italy. This pattern of ownership lessened the landowners’ exposure to the substantial risk posed by the irregularity of rainfall in Roman agriculture. Estates like the Villa Settefinestre at Cosa in Etruria, the most carefully excavated Roman estate, typically included a residence, the pars urbana, that served to accommodate the owner during visits to the estate (Carandini 1989). These villae became increasingly luxurious over the course of the late republic and the first century, and the lines between the economic and social function of an estate could become blurred. The pars rustica of such an estate would commonly include pressing facilities and buildings that could accommodate a substantial labor force of slaves.

The landowner’s profit from this type of estate depended on concentrating the efforts of the slave staff on the cultivation of cash crops, especially wine and olive oil. At the same time, the slaves could be kept fully occupied throughout the agricultural year by producing most if not all of the food that the estate consumed; in this way the estate remained largely autonomous. Because of the seasonal nature of agricultural labor, it was not economical to maintain a slave staffthat could perform all ofthe labor on the estate throughout the year. Instead of carrying the expense of keeping slaves who would not be fully employed, landowners would recruit additional labor at the harvest and other busy seasons from nearby small landowners or even tenants. Thus in coastal Italy, at least, an area with probably the largest concentration of estates owned by the upper classes, small-scale peasant agriculture remained a basic feature of the economy throughout the early imperial period (Rathbone 1981).

Slaves were often maintained under conditions that were extraordinarily cruel by modern standards. Many agricultural slaves, called vincti, were kept in chains and housed in slave-barracks, or rather jails, called ergastula. These were dimly lit buildings that provided slaves with basic shelter and few comforts, if any. At the same time, slaves were subject to violent punishment if they shirked their labor (Bradley 1994). Because the profit of the villa depended on maximizing the effort extracted from the slaves, estate owners were concerned to keep their slaves busy throughout the year. The Roman agriculture writer Cato, a senator writing in the second century BCE, exemplifies this attitude in his prescriptions for the estate owner’s correct management of his slave labor force. In Cato’s view, when rainy weather or storms made it impossible to undertake normal agricultural duties, the slaves were to be kept busy by working indoors on such tasks as cleaning storage jars, sweeping out the villa, moving grain, carrying dung out to the dung heap, cleaning the seed, repairing ropes, and mending clothing. Even on holidays, the slaves were to be kept busy by cleaning ditches, repairing roads, and cleaning up the gardens and other farmland. When the slaves were sick, they were not to be given their normal food ration. The point is that slaves represented a commodity, one that entailed a fixed cost to the landowner (Agr. 2.3-5). Some slaves kept under these conditions might be worked to death.

In the empire, it seems likely that the exploitation of slaves was modified somewhat as they became more expensive. The end of the republican wars of conquest reduced the importation of large numbers of slaves into Italy. As a consequence, agricultural slaves were increasingly bred on Roman estates. However, it remains a hotly debated topic to what extent slave breeding met the Roman Empire’s demand for slaves. Some of the demand for slaves was met by imports from outside the empire. Within the empire, exposed children might be raised as slaves, and others might be sold into slavery (Scheidel 1997; cf. W. V. Harris 1999). The agronomist Columella, writing in the first century CE, offered special incentives to female slaves who produced offspring (Rust. 1.8.19); Columella may have been imitating the emperor Augustus’ marriage legislation, which offered privileges to women who produced three children. But we should not exaggerate the improvement in the situation of slaves. Pliny the Younger, as we will see, did not maintain chained slaves, but he was aware that this practice was still common in Italy (Ep. 3.19.7).

In his recommendations about the proper treatment of slaves, Columella indicates that the relationship between landowner and slave was in essence one of exploitation, no matter how kind the landowner might seem. Columella exhibits a seemingly more humane attitude towards slaves than Cato, but at the same time his concern is still to maximize the effort that could be obtained from them:

As regards other slaves these precepts are generally to be preserved, and I do not regret maintaining them, namely, that I speak on rather familiar terms more often to the country slaves than to the household slaves, as long as they have not comported themselves badly, and, since I understand that because of this friendliness on the owner’s part their perpetual labor is lightened, I might sometimes joke with them and permit them to joke more. I now often follow this practice, that I deliberate about some new tasks with them as if they were more experienced, and through this I learn the nature of each one’s mind and how intelligent it is. Then I see them more willingly approach a task that they think they have been consulted about and that they think has been undertaken on their recommendation. (Rust. 1.8.15)

Columella’s seeming friendliness towards his slaves was all part of a general policy to manage slaves with a system of rewards and punishments. He still kept slaves in chains, and fair treatment of slaves was recommended only in order to avoid making his labor force intractable through the excessive cruelty of their overseers (Rust. 1.8.16-19).

Since the villa system generated enormous wealth for some landowners, it is noteworthy that it was not exported to the provinces in the early empire. In fact, the villa system in Italy declined rather precipitously beginning in the late first century CE. To be sure, the success of the classical villa system seems to have been the product of a particular set of circumstances: an increasingly wealthy group of landowners, rapid expansion of the urban population in Rome, and the creation of new markets, most notably in Gaul. These particularly favorable circumstances could not endure indefinitely. In the late first and second centuries, the villa system underwent a substantial transformation, with the compact villas in many locations giving way to larger estates cultivated less intensively. This transformation has been interpreted as a sign of a major crisis in Italian agriculture, for which several explanations have been offered. One explanation is that it was no longer profitable for landowners to maintain large numbers of slaves in the face of competition from provincial landowners, especially in Gaul and Spain. Indeed, imports of wine into Rome from Gaul and Spain increased in the early empire, while Spain also became one of the empire’s leading suppliers of olive oil. At the same time, we should not overstate the nature of the crisis, especially the extent to which the transformation of the villa system impinged on the fortunes of upper-class landowners (Morley 1996: 135-42). In the early empire, the rapid growth of Rome as a consumer city ended, while the class of elite landowners spread outward from Italy to the western and then to the eastern provinces.

The emerging class of elite provincial landowners derived its income by supplying what was by the second century ce a more stable but still considerable urban market for the same agricultural products that their Italian counterparts had produced through the villa system in the late republic. Often it was small-scale tenants cultivating farms within larger estates who produced these cash crops. The estates of upper-class landowners in the Roman Empire varied considerably from region to region in their composition and organization. Italy in the early imperial period is famous for its extensive estates, or latifundia. In fact, estates that we might characterize as latifundia consisted of numerous much smaller farms, or fundi, that might not even be contiguous. Such estates grew over time as their owners purchased or inherited individual small farms. This is the pattern of landownership revealed by the famous alimentary table from Veleia in northern Italy, which records the properties pledged by landowners in the town to support a program to provide food for children (De Neeve 1984: 224-30).

The case of Pliny the Younger sheds light on the patterns of upper-class land ownership in Italy. Pliny derived his income from estates in two locations, his home town of Comum in northern Italy, and the Umbrian town of Tifernum Tiberinum. At the latter location, Pliny’s estate consisted of a number of individual farms that he describes as scattered among parcels belonging to an adjacent estate whose purchase he was considering (Ep. 3.19.1; De Neeve 1990: 373). These estates were under the management of employees called actores, who were probably either slaves or freed-men of Pliny. These actores, in turn, reported to Pliny’s business managers, or procurators. A slave-labor force under the supervision of the vilici may have worked some of the land on Pliny’s estate, but the bulk of Pliny’s land was leased out to tenants, who cultivated the individual fundi.

The juxtaposition of large estates and a small-scale peasant agricultural economy is even more likely to have characterized other regions of Italy and the provinces. During the early imperial period the western provinces, especially Spain, southern Gaul, and Africa provided fertile recruiting grounds for the Roman elite, contributing large numbers of families to both the senatorial and equestrian orders. This development was surely a product of the development of the agricultural economy in these provinces, with a class of large landowners exercising an increasing dominance in the rural economy. Early imperial Gaul saw a distinct transformation in the countryside, as numerous dispersed villas gradually supplanted nucleated hilltop settlements. These villas were decorated on a scale not seen before in Gaul, and they indicate that the wealthier landowners in Gaul were adopting a basic Roman cultural form. The Gallic villas, however, were often modest in size, in some regions ranging from 50 to 100 hectares (Woolf 1998: 142-68). The evidence for these villas is largely archaeological, and we have very little information as to how they were cultivated, whether by slaves, tenants, day-laborers, or some combination of all three. Recent archaeological work in Africa confirms the impression offered by inscriptions and literary evidence that this region of the Roman Empire also saw the growth of substantial estates, often devoted to the cultivation of olives as a cash crop (D. J. Mattingly 1988c; M. De Vos 2001: 21-9).

Some parts of the empire saw the development of large private estates comparatively late, as in Egypt, where such estates began to appear in the second and third centuries (Rathbone 1991), or Palestine, where large estates apparently only formed in the third and fourth centuries (Z. Safrai 1994: 322-64). In these areas, the absence of large landowners could mean that other institutions played a significant role in setting the conditions under which agriculture was practiced. In Egypt, agricultural land in the Nile valley and Fayum was often divided into relatively small parcels, separated by embankments that were designed to capture the Nile flood. Grain was the usual crop in such land. Land not reached by the Nile flood needed to be irrigated artificially. Often irrigated land was devoted to orchards and vineyards. Much of the land was privately owned, but the state also maintained control over a great deal of land in most if not all nomes (administrative divisions). This circumstance, in all likelihood, promoted greater equality of land distribution, since state land in Egypt was customarily leased out in small plots to individual cultivators, who enjoyed security of tenure and could often pass their cultivation rights on to their heirs (Rowlandson 1996: 70-101). Egyptian agriculture required the continued maintenance of irrigation dikes and drainage canals to make sure that the flood reached all the land that had to be irrigated and also that the water could be drained to allow the sowing of the crop. This work was organized communally at the village level, and under Roman rule the state imposed the task of maintaining the irrigation facilities on the farming population as a liturgy. Thus most male peasants in Roman Egypt were required to provide five days of labor each year working on the dikes and canals (Lewis 1983: 107-33). In the more intensive agriculture of Egypt, wheat yields were substantially higher than elsewhere in the empire, on the order of perhaps 1,000 kg/ ha (Rathbone 1991: 242-4, 465).

On occasion, documentary papyri make it possible to examine the pattern of landownership to a degree of detail not possible elsewhere in the Roman Empire. In an analysis of landholding in the Hermopolite nome in the fourth century, for example, Roger Bagnall concludes that the majority of landowners owned plots of land between ten and 50 arourasin size (10 arourasis approximately 2.5 hectares, an amount of land probably sufficient to support an individual family). Only a few villagers might own land in excess of this amount, but the wealthiest landowners in the village were probably residents of the nome metropoleis. These landowners did not own land in the village on a larger scale than the largest landowners among the villagers, but in all likelihood such landowners had holdings in many villages at the same time, so that their level of wealth probably exceeded that of even the very wealthiest villagers (Bagnall 1992). This pattern of landownership seems to have been approximated in other areas in Egypt. One location that has been subject to recent study is the city and surrounding territory of Oxyrhynchus (Rowlandson 1996: 102-38). The Oxyrhynchite nome had a population on the order of 100,000120,000. There too, the vast majority of landowners had relatively modest holdings of 5-50 arouras, while a much smaller number of landowners had 500 arouras or more of land (c.125 hectares).

The village also provided the organizational framework for larger estates in Roman Egypt. The private estates that developed typically consisted of a variety of individual parcels scattered among other lands in a village. There is little evidence for the use of slaves in agriculture in Egypt, certainly not in the way in which slaves were employed in Italy. Often tenancy provided the means for the owners of scattered parcels, like the urban landowners at Oxyrhynchus, to generate an income from such lands. But as the largest landowners gained control of increasingly large holdings, they began to realize some economies of scale. In the second and third centuries, some estates had a central facility, or epoikion, that housed workers on the estate and might also include facilities for pressing grapes and olives (cf. Banaji 2001: 174-6 for epoikia in late antique Egypt). The best attested of these estates is the one belonging to Aurelius Appianus, a third-century landowning magnate from Alexandria. The organization of this estate is attested in great detail by the Heroninos archive, a collection of some 450 documents, including drafts of monthly accounts and correspondence associated with the working of the estate. The Heroninos archive takes its name from the manager of the division, or phrontis, of the estate located at the village of Theadelphia (Rathbone 1991). These divisions consisted of numerous individual parcels cultivated with wheat, fodder crops, and vines. At the level of the village divisions, the labor on the individual parcels was supplied by a small number ofpermanent workers, supplemented by numerous workers hired from the village on a daily basis. Presumably these workers were recruited from smaller landowners and tenants working in the village, as well as from the landless rural population. Some parcels whose cultivation could not be integrated into the village division were leased out to tenants. The central management of the estate, to which the individual managers reported, maintained control over key resources, such as draft animals, and it supervised the workers who managed these resources. This system of centralized management made it possible to keep the costs of production in the individual divisions under control by sharing centrally-maintained resources that the individual divisions would otherwise have to duplicate.