Tenancies ignored 233 



with by Augustus in country districts. Parties of armed bandits in- 

 fested the country. Travellers, slaves and freemen alike, were kid- 

 napped and ergastulis possessorum supprimebantur. He checked the 

 brigandage by armed police posted at suitable spots, and ergastula 

 recognovit. But it is not said that he did away with them : he cleared 

 out of them the persons illegally held in bondage (suppress?). Not 

 only is rustic slavery in full swing in the treatise of Varro : some 80 

 years later the ergastulum is adopted as a matter of course by Colum- 

 ella, and appears as a canker of agriculture in the complaints of 

 Pliny. The neglect of rustic industry is lamented by all three writers, 

 and to the testimony of such witnesses it is quite needless to add 

 quotations from writers of merely literary merit. There is no serious 

 doubt that the reconstruction of agriculture on the basis of small 

 farms tilled by working farmers was at best successful in a very 

 moderate degree ; and this^for many a long year. Organized slave- 

 labour remained the staple appliance of tillage until the growing 

 scarcity of slaves and the financial policy of the later Empire brought 

 about the momentous change by which the free farmer gradually be- 

 came the predial serf. 



Another point to be noted in the Georgics is the absence of any 

 reference to coloni as tenants under a landlord. Yet we know that this 

 relation existed in Cicero's time, and tenant farmers appear in Varro 1 

 and Columella 2 . Vergil, but for a stray reference in the Aeneid, might 

 seem never to have heard of the existence of such people. It is easy 

 to say that the difference between an owner and a tenant is a dif- 

 ference in law, and unsuited for discussion in a poem. But it also 

 involves economic problems. The landlord wants a good return on his 

 capital, the tenant wants to make a good living, and the conditions of 

 tenancy vary greatly in various cases. The younger Pliny 3 had to deal 

 with awkward questions between him and his tenants, and there is no 

 reason to suppose that his case was exceptional. Surely the subject 

 was one of immediate interest to an agricultural reformer, quite as 

 interesting as a number of the details set forth here and there in the 

 Georgics ; that is, assuming that the author meant his farmer to be 

 economically prosperous as well as to set a good example. It may be 

 argued that the operations enjoined on the farmer would greatly im- 



century AD, Spart Hadr 18 9 ergastula servorum et liberorum tulit. Perhaps the ergastula 

 in Columella I 3 12 refer to the same practice. 



1 H Blumner in Muller's Handbuch iv 2 2 p 543 says that Varro does not refer to the 

 Kolonat als Pacht. But that sense seems clearly implied in I 2 17, n 3 4 in lege locationis 

 fundi. In I 16 4 it surely includes tenants, even if the application is more general. In II 

 praef 5 colonus is simply = ara for, opposed to pastor. 



3 Columella I 7. 



3 Pliny epist ill 19, ix 37. 



