Taxation ruins the coloni 393 



lands of the emperors, especially in Africa, were the most signal cases. 

 But the great private Possessor could not secure to his domain the 

 various exemptions 1 that emperors conferred on theirs. He had to 

 collect and pay over 2 the dues from his estate, as a municipal magistrate 

 did from the district round his town-centre. But he had a more im- 

 mediate and personal interest in the wellbeing of all his tenants and 

 dependants, whose presence and prosperity gave to his land by far the 

 greater part 3 of its value. 



That territorial magnates should be free to build up a perhaps 

 dangerous power in various corners of the empire by gathering de- 

 pendants round them, could hardly be viewed with approval by the 

 jealousy of emperors. Not only was the system of letting land in 

 parcels to tenants spreading, but the power of the landlords over them 

 was increasing, long before Constantine took the final step of treating 

 them as attached permanently to the soil. Whether they were the 

 landlord's free tenants who had gradually lost through economic weak- 

 ness the effective use of freedom ; or small freeholders who had found 

 it worth their while to part with their holdings to a big man and be- 

 come his tenants for the sake of enjoying his protection ; or former 

 slaves to whom small farms had been entrusted on various conditions ; 

 they were in a sort of economic bondage. Doubtless most of them lived 

 from hand to mouth, but we have no reason to believe that poverty, 

 so long as they had plenty to live on, was the motive 4 that made them 

 wish to give up their holdings and try their luck elsewhere. It was 

 the cruel pressure of Diocletian's new taxation, and the army of officials 

 employed to enforce it, that drove them to despair. A contemporary 

 witness 5 tells us, referring to this very matter, ' the excess of receivers 

 over givers was becoming so marked that farms were being abandoned, 

 and tillages falling to woodland, the resources of the tenants being 

 exhausted by the hugeness 6 of the imposts.' And this evidence does 

 not stand alone. So Constantine sought a remedy in prevention of 

 movement, binding down the tenants to the soil. Henceforth the land 

 to which a colonus 7 was attached by birth, and the colonus himself, were 

 to be legally and economically inseparable. Attempts at evading the 

 new rule were persistently met by later 8 legislation. The motive of 

 such attempts may be found by remembering that depopulation was 



1 Cf cod Th XI 1 6 passim. 



2 A rule of 366, or later according to Mommsen, cod Th xi i 14, cod Just xi 48 4. 



3 Cf cod Th xin 10 3, retained in cod Just xi 48 ?, plainly recognizing this. 



4 See the advantages of the colonate summed up in de Coulanges p 144, and cf ibid\> 139. 



5 Lactantius de mort pers 7 3. 6 enormitate indictionum. 



7 Cf Augustin de civ Dei x i coloni, qui condicionem debent genitali solo, propter agri 

 tulturam sub dominio possessorum. 



s CfcodThv i7( 9 )i, 2(332), etc. 



