It was in the latter part of the third century, when the whole fabric of society seemed threatened with destruction, that the state, with the object of maintaining organized industry and commerce, placed upon the properties of the members of the various colleges in Rome and in the municipalities the burden of maintaining the work of these corporations; a burden which soon came also to be laid upon the individual members thereof. In this way the plebeian class throughout the empire sank to the status of laborers in the service of the state.
VI. The Colonate or Serfdom
While the municipal decurions, and the Roman and municipal plebs had thus sunk to the position of fiscally exploited classes, the bulk of the agricultural population of the empire had fallen into a species of serfdom known to the Romans as the colonate, from the use of the word colonus to denote a tenant farmer. This condition arose under varying circumstances in the different parts of the empire, but its development in Italy and the West was much influenced by the situation in some of the eastern provinces, where the peasantry were in a state of quasi-serfdom prior to the Roman conquest.
Egypt. In Egypt under the Ptolemies the inhabitants of village communities were compelled to perform personal services to the state, including the cultivation of royal land not let out on contract, each within the boundaries of the community in which he was registered (his idia). With the introduction of Roman rule this theory of the idia was given greater precision. All the land of each village had to be tilled by the residents thereof, either as owners or tenants. At times, indeed, the inhabitants of one village might be forced to cultivate vacant lands at a distance. During the seasons of sowing and harvest the presence of every villager was required in his idia. The crushing weight of taxation, added to the other obligations of the peasantry caused many of them to flee from their idia, and this led to an increasing amount of unleased state land. As a large number of private estates had developed, chiefly because of the encouragement extended to those who brought waste land under cultivation, the government forced the property holders to assume the contracts for the [pg 289]vacant public lands in their districts. With the introduction of the municipal councils in the course of the third century, these were made responsible for the collection of the taxes of each nome. To enable the councillors, who were property holders, to fulfill this obligation, their tenants were forbidden to leave their holdings. And so, as state or private tenants, the peasants came to be bound to the soil.
The development in Asia Minor was similar. There the royal lands of the Seleucids became the public land of Rome, and out of this the Roman magnates of the later Republic developed vast estates which in turn were concentrated in the hands of Augustus. These imperial domains were cultivated by peasants, who lived in village communities and paid a yearly rental for the land they occupied. The rest of the land of Asia formed the territories dependent upon the Greek cities, and was occupied by a native population who were in part free peasants settled in villages. On the imperial domains the village came to be the idia to which the peasant was permanently attached for the performance of his liturgies or obligatory services, while on the municipal territories the agricultural population was bound to the soil as tenants of the municipal landholders, the local senators, upon whom had been placed the responsibility for the payment of the taxes of their municipalities.
Africa. In Africa the transformation was effected differently. There, at the opening of the principate, outside of the municipal territories, the land fell into ager publicus, private estates of Roman senators and imperial domains. Under the early emperors, particularly Nero, the bulk of the private estates passed by legacy and confiscation into the control of the princeps, who also took over the administration of the public domain in so far as it was not absorbed in new municipal areas. This domain land was divided into large districts (tractus, regiones) which were directly administered by imperial procurators. Each district comprised a number of estates (saltus, fundi). Whatever slave labor had at one time been used in African agricultural operations was, by the early principate, largely displaced by free laborers, called coloni. These coloni were either Italian immigrants or tributary native holders of the public land.
The estates were usually managed as follows. The procurators leased them to tenant contractors (conductores), who retained a part of their lease holds under their own supervision, and sublet the remainder to tenant farmers (coloni). The relation of these coloni to [pg 290]the contractors as well as to the owners of private estates or their bailiffs (vilici), was regulated by an edict of a certain Mancia, apparently a procurator under the Flavians. By this edict the coloni were obliged to pay a definite proportion of their crop as rental, and in addition to render a certain number of days’ work, personally and with their teams, on the land of the person from whom they held their lease. The coloni comprised both landless residents on the estates and small landholders from neighboring villages. They were encouraged to occupy vacant domain land and bring it under cultivation. Over plough land thus cultivated they obtained the right of occupation for life, but orchard land became an hereditary possession, while in both cases the occupant was required to pay rental in kind to the state. Hadrian also tried to further the development of peasant landholders by permitting the coloni to occupy any lands not tilled by the middlemen, and giving them rights of possession over all types of land. However, the forced services still remained and these constituted the chief grievance of the coloni. And here the government was on the horns of a dilemma, for if the middlemen were restrained from undue exactions often large areas remained untilled, and if the coloni were oppressed they absconded and left their holdings without tenants.
It was in the course of the third century that the failure to create an adequate class of independent small farmers caused the state to fall back upon the development of large private estates as the only way of keeping the land under cultivation and maintaining the public revenues. As a result of this change of policy the middlemen were transformed from tenants into proprietors, and, like the landholders of Egypt, they were forced to assume the lease of vacant public land adjacent to their estates. But to make it possible for the proprietors to fulfill this obligation the state had to give them control over the labor needed to till the soil. Hence the coloni were forbidden to leave the estates where they had once established themselves as tenants. In Africa the estate became the idia or origo corresponding to the village in Egypt. In the municipal territories the landholders of the towns played the rôle of the middlemen on the imperial domains.
Italy. In Italy, unlike Africa, conditions upon the private, rather than the imperial, domains determined the rise of the colonate. At the close of the Republic the land of Italy was occupied by the [pg 291]latifundia and peasant holdings, the former of which were by far the most important factor in agricultural life. It will be recalled that the latifundia were great plantations and ranches whose development had been facilitated by an abundant supply of cheap slave labor. However, even in the first century B. C. these plantations were partly tilled by free peasants, either as tenants or day laborers, and under the principate there was a gradual displacement of slaves by free coloni. The causes for this transformation lay in the cutting off of the main supply of slaves through the suppression of the slave-trading pirates and the cessation of aggressive foreign wars, the decrease in the number of slaves through manumissions, the growth of humanitarian tendencies which checked their ruthless exploitation, and the realization that the employment of free labor was in the long run more profitable than that of slaves, particularly when the latter were becoming increasingly expensive to procure. The coloni worked the estates of the landowners for a certain proportion of the harvest. As elsewhere, in Italy it was fiscal necessity which converted the free coloni into serfs. With the spread of waste lands, due partly to a decline of the population, the state intervened on behalf of the landlords as it had in the provinces and attached the peasants to the domain where they had once been voluntary tenants. Elsewhere throughout the empire, although the process cannot be traced in detail, a similar transformation took place.