Farms large and small 297 



including some of the rich plain of the Po. The latter would naturally 

 attract capital more than the former. I have more than once remarked 

 that in the upland districts agricultural conditions were far less revolu- 

 tionized than in the lowlands. This seems to be an instance in point: 

 but the evidence is not complete. There is nothing to shew that the 

 estates named in these tablets were the sole landed properties of their 

 several owners. Nor is it probable. To own estates in different parts 

 of the country was a well understood policy of landlords. How we are 

 to draw conclusions as to the prevalence of great estates from a few 

 isolated local instances, without a statement of the entire landed pro- 

 perties of the persons named, I cannot see. That writers of the Empire, 

 when they speak of latifundia, are seldom thinking of the crude and 

 brutal plantation-system of an earlier time, is very true. Those vast 

 arable farms with their huge slave-gangs were now out of fashion, and 

 Mommsen points out that our records are practically silent as to 

 large-scale arable farming. We are not to suppose that it was extinct, 

 but it was probably rare. 



The most valuable part of this paper is its recognition of the vital 

 change in Italian agriculture, the transfer of farming from a basis of 

 ownership to one of tenancy. The yeoman or owner-cultivator of olden 

 time had been driven out or made a rare figure in the most eligible 

 parts of Italy. The great plantations, which had largely superseded 

 the small-scale farms, had in their turn proved economic failures. Both 

 these systems, in most respects strongly contrasted, had one point in 

 common : the land was cultivated by or for the owner, and for his own 

 account. But the failure of the large-scale plantation-system did not 

 so react as to bring back small ownership. Large ownership still re- 

 mained, supported as it was by the social importance attached to 

 land-owning, and occasionally by governmental action directed to 

 encourage investment in Italian land. Large owners long struggled to 

 keep their estates in hand under stewards farming for their masters' 

 account. But this plan was doomed to failure, because the care and 

 attention necessary to make it pay were in most cases greater than 

 landlords were willing to bestow. By Columella's time this fact was 

 already becoming evident. He could only advise the landlords to be 

 other than he found them, and meanwhile point to an alternative, 

 namely application of the tenancy-system. It was this latter plan that 

 more and more found favour. The landlord could live in town and 

 draw his rents, himself free to pursue his own occupations. The tenant- 

 farmer was only bound by the terms of his lease; and, being resident, 

 was able to exact the full labour of his staff and prevent waste and 

 robbery. The custom was for the landlord to provide 1 the equipment 



1 Mommsen op cit p 410. See index under instrumentum. 



