Rome, state of the evidence 131 



ROME EARLY PERIOD 



XX. THE TRADITIONS COMBINED AND DISCUSSED. 



When we turn to Roman agriculture, and agricultural labour in 

 particular, we have to deal with evidence very different in character 

 from that presented by the Greek world. This will be most clearly 

 seen if we accept the very reasonable division of periods made by 

 Wallon in his History of Slavery the first down to 201 BC, the end of 

 the second Punic war, the second to the age of the Antonine emperors, 

 200 BC to the death of Marcus Aurelius in iSoAD, and the third that 

 of the later Empire. For of the first we have no contemporary or 

 nearly contemporary pictures surviving. Traditions preserved by later 

 writers, notes of antiquaries 'on words and customs long obscured by 

 time and change, are the staple material at hand. Even with the help 

 of a few survivals in law, inference from such material is unavoidably 

 timid and incomplete. In collecting what the later Romans believed 

 of their past we get vivid impressions of the opinions and prejudices 

 that went to form the Roman spirit. But it does not follow that we 

 can rely on these opinions as solid evidence of facts. An instance may 

 be found in the assertion 1 that a clause requiring the employment of 

 a certain proportion of free labourers to slaves was included in the 

 Licinian laws of 367 BC. This used to be taken as a fact, and inferences 

 were drawn from it, but it is now with reason regarded as an 'anticipa- 

 tion/ transferring the fact of a later attempt of the kind to an age in 

 which the slave-gangs were not as yet an evident economic and social 

 danger. In the second period, that of Roman greatness, we have not 

 only contemporary witness for much of the time in the form of refer- 

 ences and allusions in literature, but the works of the great writers on agri- 

 culture, Cato Varro and Columella, not to mention the great compiler 

 Pliny, fall within it, and give us on the whole a picture exceptionally 

 complete. We know more of the farm-management and labour- 

 conditions in this period than we do of most matters of antiquity. The 

 last period sees the development of a change the germs of which are 

 no doubt to be detected in the preceding one. The great strain on the 

 Empire, owing to the internal decay and the growing pressure of 

 financial necessities, made the change inevitable ; economic freedom 

 and proprietary slavery died down, and we have before us the transition 

 to predial serfdom, the system of the unfree tenant bound to the soil. 

 The record of this change is chiefly preserved in the later Roman Law. 



1 Only in Appian civ I 8 2. The provision is ascribed by Suetyw/ 42 to Julius Caesar. 

 The two writers were contemporary. Whence did Appian get his story? 



92 



