358 Condition of coloni. Tax-free Italy 



efficiency. But it is rash to infer much from a single case: and the 

 African Severus may have followed an exceptional policy in his native 

 province. It is when we look back from the times of the later Empire, 

 with its frantic legislation to bind coloni to the soil, and to enforce the 

 cultivation of every patch of arable ground, that we are tempted to 

 detect in every record symptoms of the coming constraint. As yet the 

 central government had not laid its cramping and sterilizing hand on 

 every part of its vast dominions. Moreover the demands on African 

 productivity had not yet reached their extreme limit. There was as 

 yet no Constantinople, and Egypt still shared with Africa the function 

 of supplying food to Rome. Thus it is probably reasonable to believe 

 that the condition of the working tenant-farmers was in this age a 

 tolerable 1 one. If those on the great domains were bit by bit bound 

 to their holdings, it was probably with their own consent, so far at 

 least that, seeing no better alternative, they became stationary and 

 more or less dependent peasants. In other parts of Africa, for instance 

 near Carthage, we hear of wealthy landowners employing bodies of 

 slaves. Some of these men may well have been Italians: at least they 

 took a leading part later in the rising against Maximin and the eleva- 

 tion of Gordian. 



In connexion with the evidence of this group of inscriptions it 

 may be not out of place to say a few words on the view set forth by 

 Heisterbergk, that the origin of the later serf-colonate was Provincial, 

 not Italian. He argues 2 that what ruined small-scale farming in Italy 

 was above all things the exemption of Italian land from taxation. 

 Landlords were not constrained by the yearly exaction of dues to 

 make the best economic use of their estates. Vain land-pride and 

 carelessness were not checked: mismanagement and waste had free 

 course, and small cultivation declined. The fall in free rustic popula- 

 tion was both effect and cause. In the younger Pliny's time good 

 tenants were already hard to find, but great landlords owned parks and 

 mansions everywhere. In the Provinces nearly all the land was sub- 

 ject to imperial taxation in kind or in money, and owners could not 

 afford to let it lie idle. The practical control of vast estates was not 

 possible from a distance. The direction of agriculture, especially of 

 extensive farming (corn etc) from a fixed centre was little less difficult. 

 There was therefore strong inducement to delegate the business of 

 cultivation to tenants, and to let the difference in amount between 

 their rents and the yearly imperial dues represent the landlord's profit. 

 Thus the spread of latifundia swallowed up small holdings in the 



1 See de Coulanges pp 140-4, where this view is more strongly expressed. 



2 Die Entstehung des Colonats pp 70 foil, citing especially Frontinus Gromat I p 35 and 

 Columella in 3 u. 



