Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic

Sec. 9 —Latifundia.

"After having pillaged the world as praetors or consuls during time of war, the nobles again pillaged their subjects as governors in time of peace;[1] and upon their return to Rome with immense riches they employed them in changing the modest heritage of their fathers into domains vast as provinces. In villas, which they were wont to surround with forests, lakes and mountains... where formerly a hundred families lived at ease, a single one found itself restrained. In order to increase his park, the noble bought at a small price the farm of an old wounded soldier or peasant burdened with debt, who hastened to squander, in the taverns of Rome, the modicum of gold which he had received. Often he took the land without paying anything.[2] An ancient writer tells us of an unfortunate involved in a law suit with a rich man because the latter, discommoded by the bees of the poor man, his neighbor, had destroyed them. The poor man protested that he wished to depart and establish his swarms elsewhere, but that nowhere was he able to find a small field where he would not again have a rich man for a neighbor. The nabobs of the age, says Columella, had properties which they were unable to journey round on horseback in a day, and an inscription recently found at Viterba, shows that an aqueduct ten miles long did not traverse the lands of any new proprietors.... The small estate gradually disappeared from the soil of Italy, and with it the sturdy population of laborers.... Spurius Ligustinus, a centurian, after twenty-two campaigns, at the age of more than fifty years, did not have for himself, his wife, and eight children more than a jugerum of land and a cabin."[3]

To this masterly sketch quoted from Duruy, we can but add a few facts. Pliny affirms that under Nero only six men possessed the half of Africa.[4] Seneca, who himself possessed an immense fortune, says, concerning the rich men of his time, that they did not content themselves with possessing the lands that formerly had supported an entire people; they were wont to turn the course of rivers in order to conduct them through their possessions. They[5] desired even to embrace seas within their vast domains. We must here, it is true, make some allowance for rhetoric. So, too, in the writings of Petronius, some allowance for satire must be made, where he represents the clerk of Trimalchio making a report of that which has taken place in a single day upon one of the latter's farms near Cumae. Here on the 7th of the calends[6] of July, were born 30 boys and 40 girls; 500,000 bushels of wheat were harvested and 500 oxen were yoked. The clerk goes on to say that a fire had recently broken out in the Gardens of Pompey, when he is interrupted by Trimalchio asking when the Gardens of Pompey had been purchased for him, and is informed that they had been in his possession for a year.[7] So it appears that Trimalchio, in whom Petronius has personified the pride, the greed, and the vices of the rich men of his time, did not know that he was the possessor of a magnificent domain. In another place Petronius causes Trimalchio to say that everything which could appeal to the appetite of his companions is raised upon one of his farms which he has not yet visited and which is situated in the neighborhood of Terracina and Tarentum, towns[8] which are separated by a distance of 300 miles. Finally, led on by his immoderate desire to augment his riches and increase his possessions, the hero of Petronius asks but one thing before he dies, i.e., to add Apulia[9] to his domains; he, however, admits that he would not take it amiss to join Sicily to some lands which he owned in that locality or to be able, should envy not check him, to pass into Africa[10] without departing from his own possessions. All this has a basis of fact. Trimalchio would never have been created, had not the favorite freedmen of Nero crushed the people by their luxury, debauches, and scandals.

But the condition of society pictured by Seneca and Petronius is that of the first century of the Christian era and might not be taken to represent the condition of affairs in the second century B.C., had we not some data which go to prove the concentration of property, the disparity between classes, and the depopulation of Italy within the same century as the Gracchi. Cicero was not considered one of the richest men in Rome, yet he possessed many villas, and he has himself told us that one of them cost him 3,500,000 sesterces, about $147,000.[11] Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, had a country residence in the vicinity of Micenum which cost[12] 75,000 drachmae ($14,000); Lucullus some years afterwards bought it for 500,200 drachmae ($100,040). According to Cicero,[13] Crassus had a fortune of 100,000,000 sesterces ($4,200,000). This does not astonish us when we see upon the via Appia,near the ruins of the circus of Caracalla and but a short distance from the Catacombs of St. Sebastian and the fountain of Aegeria, the still important remains of the tomb of Caecilia Metella, daughter of Metellus Creticus and wife of the tribune Crassus, as the inscription testifies. It is a vast "funereal fortress" constructed of precious marble, and which gives us the first example of the luxury afterwards so common among the Romans. Then, too, we remember that Crassus was wont to say that no one was rich who was not able to support an army with his revenues, to raise six legions and a great number of auxiliaries, both infantry and cavalry.[14]

Pliny confirms this statement concerning Crassus, but adds that Sulla was even richer.[15] Plutarch gives us fuller details and also explains the origin of the colossal fortune of Crassus. According to him Crassus had 300 talents ($345,000), with which to commence. Upon his departure for the Parthian war in which he lost his life, he made an inventory of his property and found that he was possessed of 7,100 talents, $8,165,000, double what Cicero attributes to him. How did Crassus increase his fortune so enormously? Plutarch says that he bought the property confiscated by Sulla at a very low figure. Then, he had a great number of slaves distinguished for their talents; lecturers, writers, bankers, business men, physicians, and hotel-keepers, who turned over to him the benefits which they realized in their diverse industries. Moreover, he had among his slaves 500 masons and architects. Rome was built almost entirely of wood and the houses were very high, consequently fires were frequent and destructive. As soon as a fire broke out, Crassus hastened to the place with his throng of slaves, bought the now burning buildings—as well as those threatened—at a song, and then set his slaves to work extinguishing the fires. By this means he had become possessed of a large[16] part of Rome.

Some other facts confirm that which Plutarch tells us of Crassus. Athenaeus[17] says that it was not rare to find Roman citizens possessed of 20,000 slaves. At the commencement of the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey, the future dictator found opposed to him, in Picenum, Domitius[18] Ahenobarbus at the head of thirty cohorts. Domitius seeing his troops wavering, promised to each of them four jugera out of his own possessions, and a proportionate part to the centurians and veterans. What must have been the fortune of a man who was able to distribute out of his own lands, and surely without bankrupting himself, about 100,000 jugera?

[Footnote 1: Cicero says these exactions were common and that the provinces were even restrained from complaining. Verres apologized for his exactions by saying that he simply followed the common example. In Verrem, II, 1-3, 17.]

[Footnote 2: "Parentes aut parvi liberi militum, ut quisque potentiori confinis erat, sedibus pellebantur." Sall., Jugertha, 41. Horace, Ode II, 18.]

[Footnote 3: Duruy, Hist. des Romains, II, 46-47.]

[Footnote 4: "Sex domini semissem Africae possidebant." Hist. Nat., XVIII, 7.]

[Footnote 5: Seneca, Epist., 89.]

[Footnote 6: Petronius, Sat., 48: VII. calendas sextilis in praedio Cumano, quod est Trimalchionis, nati sunt pueri, XXX, puellae, XL; sublata in horreum, ex area, tritici millia modium quingenta; boves domiti quingenti... eodem die incendium factum est in hortis Pompeianis, ortum ex aedibus nastae, villici.]

[Footnote 7: Quid? inquit Trimalchio: quando mihi Pompeiani horti emti sunt? Anno priore, inquit actuarius. (Ibid. 53.)]

[Footnote 8: Vinum, inquit, si non placet, mutabo; vos illud, oportet faciatis. Deorum beneficio nōn emo, sed nune, quidquid ad salivam facit, in suburbano nascitur eo quod ego adhue non navi. Dicitur confine esse Tarracinensibus et Tarentinis.]

[Footnote 9: Quod si contigerit Apuliae fundos jungere, satis vivus pervenero, (Ibid. 77.)]

[Footnote 10: Nunc conjungere agellis Siciliam volo, ut quun Africam libuerit ire, per meos fines navigem. Sat.,48.]

[Footnote 11: Ad Fam., V, 6: "quod de Crasso domum emissem emi eam ipsam domum H.S., XXXV."]

[Footnote 12: Plutarch, Life of Marius.]

[Footnote 13: De Repub., III, 7: Cur autem, si pecuniae modus statuendus fuit feminis, P. Crassi filia posset habere, si unica patri esset, aeris millies, salva lege?]

[Footnote 14: Cicero, Paradoxia, VI.]

[Footnote 15: Pliny, Hist. Nat.,XXXIII, 10.]

[Footnote 16: Plutarch, Crassus, c. 1 and 2.]

[Footnote 17: Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae,VI, 104.]

[Footnote 18: Cæsar, Bell. Civ.,I, 17.]