praedia Caesaris 207 



favoured metropolitan land. But the great landowning nobles no longer 

 ruled it and the Provinces also. No dissembling could conceal the truth 

 that their political importance was gone. It may be 1 that some of the 

 great landlords gave more attention to their estates as economic units. 

 It is much more certain that large-scale landholding abroad 2 was more 

 attractive than that in Italy. It was not a new thing, and under the 

 republican government great provincial Roman landlords had enjoyed 

 a sort of local autocratic position, assured by their influence in Rome. 

 But an emperor's point of view was very different from that of the old 

 republican Senate. He could not allow the formation of local princi- 

 palities in the form of great estates under no effective control. These 

 landlords had been bitter opponents of Julius Caesar: Augustus had 

 been driven to make away with some of them: the uneasiness of his 

 successors at length found full vent in the action of Nero, who put to 

 death six great landlords in Africa, and confiscated their estates. Half 

 Africa, the Province specially affected, thus passed into the category 

 of Imperial Domains, under the control of a departmental bureau, 

 and later times added more and more to these praedia Caesaris in 

 many parts of the empire. 



The convenient simplicity of having great areas of productive land 

 administered by imperial agents more or less controlled by the officials 

 of a central department, into which the yearly dues were regularly paid, 

 cannot have escaped the notice of emperors. But the advantages of 

 such a system had been a part of their actual experience 3 from the first 

 in the case of Egypt. Egypt too was the special home of finance based 

 on a system of regulated agriculture and hereditary continuity of occu- 

 pation. In particular, the interest of the government in the maintenance 

 and extension of cultivation was expressed in minute rules for land- 

 tenure and dues payable, and the care taken to keep the class of 'royal 

 farmers' in a prosperous condition. Thus there was recognized a sort 

 of community of interest between peasant and king. That middlemen 

 should not oppress the former or defraud the latter was a common 

 concern of both. Now in the Roman empire we note the growth of a 

 system resembling this in its chief features. We find the tillage of 

 imperial domains 4 carried on by small farmers holding parcels of land, 



1 See M Weber Agrargeschichte pp 243 foil. 



2 The estates of Atticus in Epirus are a leading case of this. Horace epist I 12 refers to 

 those of Agrippa in Sicily. Such cases have nothing to do with emigration of working 

 farmers, in which I do not believe. Surely Greenidge History p 270 is right in saying that 

 the Gracchan scheme of colonization was commercial rather than agricultural. Also the 

 municipalities, beside their estates in Italy, held lands in the Provinces. See Tyrrell and 

 Purser on Cic ad/am xin 7 and n. In general, Seneca epist 87 7, 89 20, Florus II 7 3. 



3 We may perhaps carry this back into the time of the Republic. See the references to 

 the royal domains of Macedon, Livy XLV 18 3, and with others Cic de lege agr II 50. 



4 See the chapter on the African inscriptions. 



