432 Ownership. Occupation. Labour 



but the personal property of their landlords, as Seeck holds ; or usually 

 descendants of coloni, as Weber thought; is more than I can venture 

 to decide. I do not think that either hypothesis 1 exhausts all the 

 possibilities, and the point is not material to the present inquiry. In 

 any case it can hardly be doubted that both classes consisted of 

 men who worked with their own hands, only aided in some cases by 

 slave labour which was far from easy to procure. 



LXI. CONCLUDING CHAPTER. 



After so long a discussion of the surviving evidence, it is time to 

 sum up the results and see to what conclusions the inquiry leads us in 

 respect of the farm life and labour of the Greco- Roman world. And 

 first as to the figures of the picture, the characters with whose position 

 and fortunes we are concerned. We find three classes, owner farmer 

 labourer, clearly marked though not so as to be mutually exclusive. 

 We can only begin with ownership in some form, however rudimentary; 

 for the claim to resist encroachment on a more or less ill-defined area 

 is a phenomenon of even the rude life of hunter-tribes. How private 

 property grew out of common ownership is a question beyond the 

 range of the present inquiry. It is enough that the owner, whether a 

 clan or a family or an individual, has a recognized right to use the 

 thing owned (here land) and to debar others from doing so. But it is 

 clear that he may also be the actual manager of its use: he may even 

 supply in person all the labour needed for turning it to account: in 

 short, he may be his own farmer and his own labourer. And legend 

 asserts or implies that such was the primitive condition of man when 

 he passed from nomadic to settled existence. Differentiation of function 

 is therefore a product of time and circumstance, a development varying 

 in date and degree among various races and in various portions of the 

 world. Once the stage of civilization is reached at which the regular 

 cultivation of the same piece of land year by year is the normal means 

 of sustaining human life, we meet the simplest economic figure, the 

 peasant who supplies his own needs by his own methods, tilling the 

 soil which in some sense he claims as his own. Whether it is his own 

 permanently as an individual, or temporarily as a member of a village 

 community, is a difference immaterial from the present point of view. 

 Nor does it matter that his method of dealing with the land may be 

 regulated by principles conventional in the society to which he belongs. 



Delegation of management is a momentous step, destined to bring 

 important unforeseen consequences. Many reasons may have rendered 

 it necessary or at least convenient. It appears in two forms, the actual 

 and relative dates of which are hardly to be determined with certainty. 



1 Seeck just cited. Weber, Agrargeschichte p 257. 



