4 Military Service. Land-tenure 



only concern them at moments when serious distress or disorder 

 compels attention. Rhetoricians and poets are doubtful witnesses. 

 Like the orators, they use their matter freely and with much colouring 

 for their immediate purposes. But they are not, like forensic orators, 

 in direct contact with practical emergencies. The questions arising out 

 of Vergil's Georgics are problems to be discussed by themselves. 



The contribution of encyclopaedic or occasional writers is in some 

 cases of value. I will here only name the elder Pliny and Apuleius. 

 Books of travel and geography, for instance Herodotus and Strabo, 

 give stray details, but generally in reference to distant countries, mostly 

 in the East and so hardly within my subject, save for purposes of com- 

 parison. There are however two topics with which I am not directly 

 concerned, but which it is impossible wholly to ignore in speaking of 

 ancient agriculture. First, the relation of military duty to landholding 

 [the farmer as citizen soldier], and mercenary service [the rustic as 

 volunteer for pay]. This has been so fully treated in modern hand- 

 books that I need say little about it. Secondly, the various conditions 

 of tenure of land. That rustic life and therewith rustic labour were 

 directly and deeply affected by varieties of tenure, needs no proof. The 

 cited opinions of Roman lawyers in the Digest are the main authority 

 on points of this kind, and stray references elsewhere serve to illustrate 

 them. In conclusion I have only to insist again on the fact that we 

 have no direct witness of the labourer's, or even the working farmer's, 

 point of view. The evidence all comes from above; and therefore 

 generally gives us a picture of conditions as the law meant them to be 

 and presumed them normally to be. How far the practical working 

 corresponded to the legal position, is only to be guessed with caution 

 from the admissions involved in the elaboration of legal remedies ; and, 

 in the case of imperial coloni, from the unique evidence of the notable 

 African inscriptions. 



It is I trust after the above considerations not unreasonable to 

 devote no special chapters to certain writers whom nevertheless it is 

 often necessary to cite in notes. Diodorus, Livy, Athenaeus, Macrobius, 

 Gellius, Palladius, are cases of the kind. Stray references in their works 

 are valuable, but there is nothing to require a treatment of them as 

 several wholes. Even Livy is chiefly useful as handing down remains 

 of past tradition : hence he (and Dionysius and Plutarch with him) 

 have a leading place in the introductory chapter on early Rome. So 

 too the writers of the so-called historia Augusta and the laws of 

 the Theodosian and Justinian Codes find their place in the notes to 

 certain chapters. On the other hand (to omit obvious cases) Euripides, 

 Xenophon, the younger Seneca, Martial, the younger Pliny, Apuleius, 

 Ammianus, Symmachus, Apollinaris Sidonius, need careful treatment 



