Until recently this was a question that was not asked. It was not asked because there was a prior question that was asked, and that received a negative answer: Did peasant proprietors survive in significant numbers in the late Republic or early Empire?

The consensus of opinion has been that they were always to be found, but that they were relatively few. As the traditional rural economy of which they had been the characteristic feature gave way under the impact of new economic forces, they became a residual phenomenon. Moreover, this development had already occurred by the late second century BC.

It is to be noted that peasant proprietors, small farmers working the land they owned, rather than free cultivators as a whole, have usually been the object of inquiry. The roles of tenancy in the late Republic and of wage labour in all periods have rarely been positively evaluated. Again, the idea that small owner-cultivators, tenant-farmers and day-labourers were overlapping categories in ancient Italy has been little developed in the scholarly literature.

The literary sources for Roman agrarian history are largely responsible for these prevailing attitudes. They have long monopolized the attention of ancient historians, despite their more or less obvious inadequacies. The supposed rout of the free peasantry in the second century BC is grounded in the accounts of the Gracchan crisis of Appian and Plutarch and the even briefer generalizations of Sallust.

I present in this paper a summary view of the condition of the peasantry under the Romans rather than case studies of particular peasant communities. I have two reasons for doing so. Firstly, because regional differences within the Roman empire were so extensive, the most reliable generalizations that can be made about peasants concern the effects on them of the policies and actions of ruling groups, both imperial and local. Secondly, given the largely static technological conditions which prevailed in the Roman world, we can assume that these policies and actions constituted the most significant source of change in social and economic circumstances on the land.

This is not intended as a comparative study. Nevertheless I will make some attempt to apply to the ancient world (for this purpose it seems appropriate to consider Greece as well as Rome) recent theories on the proper classification of societies and economies. Thus we will consider briefly the applicability of current definitions of ‘peasant society’ and ‘peasant economy’ to the Graeco-Roman world.

To judge from the relevant literature, any attempt to apply the label ‘peasant economy’ to the ancient world would be misguided. It is assumed that Rome is to be classed as a slave state. Many Greek states are ruled out of consideration for the same reason. All Greek states fail to meet a requirement of size.

INTRODUCTION

The theme of decline and fall remains irresistible to historians of the Roman Empire. No one who has tangled with the issue can be unaware that the decline of the aristocracy of the cities was closely bound up with the decline of the Empire at large.

The main outlines are well known and uncontroversial. The members of the local councils of cities, that is, the decurions or curiales, bore the brunt of the financial burdens of the imperial administration. At one time, local office carried sufficient prestige and privilege to compensate for the expenditures it entailed. By the fourth if not late-third century, however, because of the mounting costs of government, external interference in city administration, and a decline in local prosperity, it had lost its appeal. In the early Empire service in the local council of a city was both voluntary and sought-after; by the fourth century, it was compulsory, to be evaded if at all possible. Faced with the flight of decurions from their cities, the central administration sought to block the escape-routes, both by restricting the entry of decurions into other professions or occupations, including the clergy, the army and the imperial administration itself, and by forcing sons to follow fathers into local government. This policy pointed to the eventual transformation of the local government. This policy pointed to the eventual transformation of the local aristocracy into a hereditary order.

The Roman lawyer Gaius wrote that the fundamental social division was that between slave and free (Inst. 1.9). This doctrine is unexceptionable, but it does not advance us far towards an understanding of the structure of society or the character of the labour force. Moreover, it must not be taken to imply that the slave-free division was clear-cut. Among workers there were numerous groups or categories of those whose positions, defined not in purely juridical terms, but in terms of obligations, privileges and degree of subjection to another's power, fell somewhere between the chattel slaves of the ranches and mines and the free peasant proprietors and self-employed artisans. For present purposes we may relegate to the back-ground those intermediate groups whose situations were not significantly better than those of the bulk of the servile labour force: for example, the tied coloni of the late empire (described as servi glebae in Cod.Iust. 11.52.1), and debt bondsmen, who existed in every period, not least the late Republic (Varro, Rust. 1.17.2) and early Empire (Columella, Rust. 1.3.12).

The classification of some groups of workers is by no means a straightforward procedure. Finley, reviving a thesis of Fustel de Coulanges, has suggested that a significant proportion of the free tenant-farmers of the Principate (and late Republic) were de facto bondsmen. Again, the position of the freedmen, an important element in the urban labour force, was ambiguous.

The history of childhood in European history takes off in the early modern period, around the sixteenth century. Historians of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages have until recently shown little interest in the topic, largely because their preoccupations have traditionally been different. Shortage of evidence is not an adequate reason or excuse for this neglect. The reconstruction of infant life in early modern Europe is admittedly also a hazardous business. Indeed, Peter Laslett opted to study household size and composition because of the lack of data on infancy. His forthright criticism includes both primary sources (such as personal diaries) and secondary sources (such as advice literature): ‘It is well known how intractable the analysis of any body of documents of this kind can be; so untidy is it, so variable, so contradictory in its dogmas and doctrines, so capricious in what it preserves and what it must leave out’ (Laslett (1977) 66). Linda Pollock is perhaps more representative of early modern social historians in her willingness to work with the sources, while admitting their deficiencies: ‘We still know little about how parents actually reared their children’ (Pollock (1983) 203, 212, 234).

For antiquity, scattered literary discussions and references, though different from the early modern diaries, serve a similarly limited purpose. Between the literary texts, and such diverse sources as papyri recording wet-nurse contracts in Egypt, stone epitaphs for dead infants, and skeletal remains, we do not lack II information (of variable quality and quantity, to be sure) on parent-child attitudes, birth rituals, the treatment of babies, feeding patterns, and the nutritional status of infants.

The text of all but two of the sixteen papers assembled in this volume has been reprinted unchanged except for the correction of a minor inaccuracy, the revision or removal of obsolete references to forthcoming research, and the exclusion of illustrations from the final chapter. Two pieces (chapters 5 and 13) are published here in English for the first time and differ in points of detail from the original French versions. A number of inconsistencies have been removed from the references to modern scholarship, all of which have been consolidated into a bibliography at the end of the volume. New material has been confined to the addenda that conclude most of the chapters. These supplements offer concise overviews of pertinent research undertaken subsequent to the publication of a particular essay. Although I have reviewed a wide range of recent scholarship, and in some cases also referred to forthcoming publications, the addenda are not intended to be exhaustive. Special attention has been devoted to contributions which respond to and elaborate on the original articles. As a consequence, individual addenda vary greatly in length, therein reflecting trends in recent scholarship as well as the limits of editorial competence. For the same reasons, four chapters did not seem to require any addenda.

The completion of the addendum to chapter II has been greatly facilitated by the generosity of Graham Oliver, Ronald Stroud and Michael Whitby who made their work accessible in advance of publication.

Strabo called Mediolanum (Milan) an and classed it above all other cities in the region of Cisalpine Gaul, with the exception of Patavium (Padua). Patavium in its prime, the Augustan period, could register five hundred equestrians in a census, a number equalled only by Gades (Cadiz) among cities in the West. The presence of so many equestrians indicates a substantial population-base. Cisalpine cities as a whole impressed Strabo as being larger and richer than those of the rest of Italy.

Thus, if Strabo is any guide, Mediolanum was already in his time (the beginning of the Principate), an important city, perhaps not far behind Patavium in size. Moreover, the fortunes of Mediolanum, unlike those of Patavium, were not on the wane. No contemporary of Augustus could have forecast that Mediolanum would be chosen as a seat of emperors in the fourth century. But seen in the light of the city's development in the early empire as an administrative, cultural and economic centre, this was a logical choice.

In this study of Mediolanum I discuss economic activity, aspects of social structure, and the relation between them. It does not need demonstrating in detail that the principal economic asset of Mediolanum, like that of most ancient cities, was its rural hinterland. But closer investigation of possible secondary economic activities of the city and in particular its trading links with other cities in the region and beyond is required.

THE DOCUMENT

This is an agreement made in ad 459 between an association of builders in Sardis and an official, called in the document magistrianos kai ekdikos. If, as is likely, this man is the equivalent of the defensor civitatis known from the early fourth century, then he was the top city official, who may also be regarded as a minor imperial functionary.

According to the preamble (lines 9ff.), certain private employers, ergodotes, have filed complaints with the defensor to the effect that men who contract to do building jobs leave them unfinished and obstruct their employers in some way unspecified.

The association concedes that these practices are injurious to employers and agrees that they will be stopped, provided that employers are ready to pay for jobs (lines 20ff.).

The document then spells out procedures to be followed in certain circumstances:

First (lines 23ff.), if a job is abandoned by someone, a substitute will be furnished from within the association – provided that the man being replaced is himself a member of the association. Second (lines 31ff.), in the event of obstruction by the original craftsman or a substitute, misthoi (presumably ‘compensation’, though ‘pay’ is a more natural translation) will be furnished (‘by us’ is restored). Third (lines 39ff.), the employer, it appears, is expected to give twenty days grace to a craftsman who stops working because of illness (in other cases seven days grace is considered appropriate, lines 37ff.).

INTRODUCTION

This paper focuses on broad structural developments affecting the agricultural economy of the Roman world in late antiquity, with special reference to levels of production and productivity. My general aim is to encourage or provoke economic historians of antiquity into taking a greater interest in the subject than they have done in recent years. In particular, I would welcome the considered thoughts of our honorand on the subject. Harry Pleket has recently published full and illuminating studies of the land in the early Empire, but he has not, as far as I am aware, applied the full armoury of his intellectual skills to the study of late antique agriculture.

I favour a broad approach because I think this is the best way of setting up a dialogue with historians of other periods, and, in particular those historians with a comparative bent. Ancient historians should be making a contribution to comparative historical scholarship.

I would like to make it more difficult for comparative historians to pass over Roman history altogether, or, insofar as they recognize the existence of Roman history, to leap from the Principate to the early Middle Ages, passing over, in the process, a whole period of history, one which happens to be quite as long as the period of the Principate. I want at the same time to challenge the tendency of comparativists to adopt without much question the traditional view of late antiquity as a period of decline.

INTRODUCTION

To inquire into the yield of the land in ancient Greece is to pursue a phantom. We need to know, essentially, production totals, area under cultivation, sowing rate for the major crops, in the various regions of Greece, over an extended period of time – in the course of which the natural and social environment did not stand still.

The data do not exist. This is not only because of the disappearance of private records and public documents and the non-survival of treatises of agronomy – we have several such treatises from Italy and are not much wiser for that on the issues in question. The ancients were uninterested in assembling the data we require. Worse still, they lacked key economic concepts like productivity, that is, the ratio of output over input. Or so it would seem.

What can be done, given this evidential blackout? A study of yield-related concepts would have value, in introducing us to the mentality of landowners from antiquity. There is scattered information for farming practices bearing on yield. We can also ask how far comparative evidence can fill the information gap. These matters are discussed in reverse order below.

But I begin by considering one direct piece of ancient evidence for yield, the First Fruits inscription from Eleusis dated to 329/8, IG II2,1672. I have previously discussed this inscription without, however, facing possible objections to its use for the purposes in question.

A scholar is formed by his or her teachers. I am an eternal student. When my capacity to learn from colleagues and students (especially from students) has gone, retirement will be overdue.

J. J. Nicholls, a modest man and an admirable teacher, introduced me to ancient history. He was learned in the history of the Roman constitution, and an appassionato of Cicero's De republica. My Oxford history tutors were G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, of New College (which I entered in 1961) and C. E. ‘Tom Brown’ Stevens of Magdalen, the former a passionate polemicist, the latter an outrageously eccentric genius. I was Fergus Millar's first graduate pupil (from 1963). He set a high standard and a fast pace. The fruit of a month's hard labour would come back to me the next day together with pages of hand-written addenda and corrigenda. The atmosphere was friendly and supportive. I watched Ronald Syme work magic on inscriptions copied from stone, turning them into living Romans. He passed on to me one of his honorary doctorates and much more. Peter Parsons was a witty guide to the society of Oxyrhynchus for a term. P. A. Brunt, Martin Frederiksen and Tony Honoré were willing and formidable critics of my early work. George Cawkwell, a benevolent and charismatic giant, was my host when I took up a Junior Research Fellowship at University College, and encouraged and watched over my first efforts at teaching undergraduates.

127. KUAMOS HELLENIKOS. Vicia Faba Bean

The Greeke beane is windy, flatulent, hard of digestion, causing troublesomme dreames; yet good for the Cough, & breeding flesh being in ye midst of hott and cold. Being sod with Oxymel, and eaten with the shucks, it stayes dysenteries and the fluxes of the Coeliaci, and being eaten it is good against vomiting. But it is made lesse flatulent, if the first water in which it was sod be cast away: but the green is worse for ye stomach and more windie. But the meale of the beane being applyed as a Cataplasme, either by itself or with Polenta, doth assuage the inflammations that comme of a stroake, & makes skarrs to be of one colour, & helps swelling and enflamed duggs, & doth extinguish milke. But with Hony and the meale of Foenigraec it doth dissolue ye Furunculi and the Parotidae, and ye bluenesse vnder ye eyes; with Roses, & franckincense, and the white of an egge, it doth represse the Procidentias Oculorum, & their Staphylomata, & ye Oedemata. Being kneaded with wine it helps the suffusions & stroakes of the eyes. And being chewed without the Huske it is layd on the forehead as an acollema for fluxes. Being sod in wine it cures ye inflammations of ye stones. And being applyed as a Cataplasme to ye place where the Pubes growes in children, it keeps them impuberes a long tyme; & it cleanseth ye vitiligines, but if the shucks of them be applyed as a Cataplasme, it makes ye haire that is extirpated to grow starveling and thinne.

How classical Athens was fed is not a matter of marginal importance. Nothing less than the material base of a brilliant civilization is at issue. The subject gains additional interest from the apparent fact that Athens’ food needs far outstripped the capacity of its home territory to satisfy them.

However, any attempt to discover the extent of Athens’ dependence on external sources of supply in any particular period is hindered by the lack of precise and detailed information pertaining to land under cultivation, population level, food consumption rate, yield, and sowing rate. Absence of data has not deterred scholars in the past from attempting to calculate the relative importance of home-produced and imported grain, and for better or for worse their conjectures underpin current conceptions not only of the food supply policy of Athens but also of Athenian foreign policy in general over several centuries. Thus the pessimistic conclusions of Gernet, Jardé and Gomme (to cite only the most influential of those twentieth-century scholars who have worked on this topic) provide basic support for the doctrine that Athens’ dependence on imports for ‘by far the greater part of her corn supply … led almost inevitably to naval imperialism’, and also the more radical thesis that Athens relied on foreign grain as early as the turn of the seventh century BC, well before the era of ‘naval imperialism’.

Hunger has always been part and parcel of the human experience – in archaic Greece, late medieval Italy, Tudor England, Stalinist Russia, and present-day Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Indeed, hunger, undernourishment, malnutrition rather than famine, is the scourge of the developing nations today. In the Third World, hunger is endemic and universal. In the words of the famine theorist Amartya Sen:

When historians of the Roman economy write of investments in land, they normally have in mind rural property. The role of investment in urban property in the economy is seldom discussed. Moreover, what littlè has been said on the subject suggests that its significance is inadequately understood.

The standard works on economic history might be expected to place urban property firmly in its economic context. Tenney Frank recognizes the following sources of income for wealthy Romans in the late Republic: commerce and trade, provincial investment and money-lending (Pompey, Brutus, Atticus), managing and enlarging an inheritance (Atticus, his landowning and industrial concerns, inter alia), dealing in real estate, the legal profession, acting, and provincial government. Urban rents are not on the list. Rostovtzeff writes of the local aristocracy of Italian cities in the first century BC in the following terms: ‘Most of them were landowners, some were owners of houses let at rent, of various shops; some carried on money-lending and banking operations.’ Here acknowledgement is made of the relevance of urban property to the matter of the sources of wealth of the propertied class. But the reference is an isolated one. When, for example, Rostovtzeff enumerates those investments supposedly favoured by the new rich, the items mentioned are rural property, money-lending and Italian industry. Either it is by a mere oversight that urban property is omitted here, or we must conclude that in Rostovtzeff's view urban property was not taken at all seriously as an economic investment.