Much of the information about the real property of the Roman aristocracy in the Late Republic has already been carefully collected and listed. This chapter does not aim at any sort of completeness; it attempts to make some points, hitherto insufficiently stressed or entirely neglected, about the attitudes which the senatorial class held to its estates, what types of property it preferred (or was permitted) to invest in, and how it assisted its dependants to invest; with the little that can be said about prices and their variations, and about dealers in real property.

From the corpus of Cicero's letters we get an impression of the Roman upper class as not only deeply concerned with real property, its main form of investment, but indeed feverishly engaged in property deals. This impression may not be wholly misleading, in spite of the fact that Cicero and his brother Quintus were, for most of the period covered by the letters, rising in the social and economic scale, and thus particularly prone to buying or considering buying property. One must recognize that there were a number of reasons for a hectic turnover: one, obviously, the civil wars and proscriptions of the 80s and 40s, with, in between, the comparative frequency with which senators succumbed to prosecutions leading to exile and, if not always to the confiscation of their estates, at any rate to the need to make new dispositions of their property (or at long last to pay their creditors).

As might be expected in the case of an army for which relatively little documentary evidence survives, it is possible to reconstruct the Seleucid military hierarchy only in its upper ranks, going no lower than the commanders of the independent contingents. Nothing apart from their ranks (which presumably were equivalent to those used in other Hellenistic armies) is known about officers of lower grades; no data are available on their identity, descent, nationality, and system of promotion. This is in contrast to the relatively abundant information on the Ptolemaic army supplied by Ptolemaic documents. Nevertheless, the little we do know about the cadre of the high-ranking commanders may contribute to our understanding of the reasons for the superiority of the Seleucid military organization over the Ptolemaic system.

The supreme command in the main campaigns was usually held by the king himself: Seleucus I at Ipsus, Cyrrhestica, and Curupedion; Antiochus I against the Galatians; Antiochus III against Molon, in the Fourth Syrian War (Seleucia, Porphyrion, Rabatamana, Raphia), against Achaeus (Sardis), in the expedition to the upper satrapies, in the Fifth Syrian War (Gaza, Panion), and in the Roman war (Thermopylae and Magnesia); Antiochus IV in his expeditions to Egypt and to the east; Demetrius I against Alexander Balas and Antiochus VII Sidetes in his campaign against the Parthians. In exceptional cases, when the terrain prevented him from fighting among his cavalry Guard, we find the king content to direct operations from behind the front line, or on its periphery, as at Porphyrion, Seleucia, Rabatamana, Sardis, and the Elburz.

To limit disappointment the reader is asked to bear in mind the genesis of the contents of this chapter. The task set by the seminar was, in the context of discussions about the movement of land (or dispersal of land, or the ‘market in land’), to see whether anything in the classical Roman legal sources had any socio-economic interest or bearing on those discussions. What follows is the carrying out of that task. It therefore has no particular thesis or structure; whether it has much or any interest or bearing of the kind sought, the reader must decide. It is also sternly confined to the subject in hand: it is about classical Roman law and the sale of land. It does not deal with rules of conveyance except as related to sale, and it does not deal with rules of sale except as related to land. There is a rough division into two parts. Part I examines some sets of legal rules related to the sale of land: Part II examines the principal Titles about sale in the Digest and the Code, to see what part land plays in them.

The first rule worth a mention is one to whose economic significance attention was drawn long ago by Jonkers. It was a legal obligation upon guardians not to leave any spare capital of their wards unproductive: they had to do with it one of two things – either faenus exercere or fundos comparare.