Slaves of the soil Walter Scheidel ELIO LO CASCIO (ed.), TERRE, PROPRIETARI E CONTADINI DELL'IMPERO ROMANO: DALL'AFFITTO AGRARIO AL COLONATO TARDOANTICO (La Nuova Scientifica Italiana, Rome 1997). Pp. 351. ISBN 88-430-0560-X. MIROSLAVA MIRKOVIC, THE LATER ROMAN COLONATE AND FREEDOM (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 87, pt. 2; Philadelphia 1997). Pp. vii + 144. ISBN 0-87169-872-2; ISSN 0065-9746. $18 (paper). The origins and nature of the institution known as the Late Roman ‘colonate’ have been debated for centuries. This is hardly surprising, given that these issues may be of considerable relevance to our understanding of social, economic and administrative change between the earlier and later stages of the Imperial period. Just as competing interpretations of the ‘colonate’ tend to shape our perception of the ‘Later Roman Empire’ as a whole, so preconceived views on the latter inform our approaches to the study of the former. For M. Mirkovic, the debate has revolved around two main theories, “one of the colonate as a by-product of the fiscal policy of fourth-century emperors, the other of a previously created dependence on the landowner” (13).? This strikes me as a rather narrow perspective. The Italian volume of 14 essays (the proceedings of a conference held on Capri in 1995) gives a better idea of the diversity of current positions and perspectives? The options on offer range from what we may call an ‘evolutionary’ model, which has free and independent tenants turned into coloni, to a ‘supplementary’ model, according to which traditional forms of farm-tenancy survived and the ‘colonate’ emerged from outside the context of classical locatio conductio. Mirkovic’s alternatives are simply variants of the first of these positions. I have suggested models which, though nothing more than ideal types that are rarely, if ever, encountered in pure form and need not even be mutually exclusive, may help identify conflicting approaches in modem scholarship. Only a single contributor to the Italian conference volume takes the ‘classic’ evolutionary approach: P. Rosafio builds on the “fatto che i coloni tardoantichi derivano dagli affituari liberi dell’eta precedente, la cui figura giuridica @ ben illustrata dai frammenti del Digesto” (247). Yet Rosafio’s “fact” is actually the pivotal question: is it true that (all, many, some, 1 See esp. J-M. Carrig, “Le ‘colonat du Bas-empire’: un mythe historiographique?” Opus 1 (1982) 351-70, and id., “Un roman des origines: les généalogies du ‘colonat du Bas-empire’,” Opus 2 (1983) 205-51, on eatly modem work, and also A. Marcone, II colonato tardoantico nella storiografia moderna (da Fustel de Coulanges ai nostri giorni) (Como 1988) for more recent scholarship, 2 For a more precise exposition of this view (17): “Numerous theories on the origin of the dependent colonate in contemporary thought may actually be reduced to two theories of research: those who claim that coloni sank gradually into a position of quasi-slavery due to rent arrears, and those who explain the dependence of the coloni as a result of Diocletian's fiscal reform”, 3 E. Lo Cascio, “Introduzione. Dall’affito agrario al colonato tardoantico: continuita o frattura?” (15- 25); L. Capogrossi Colognesi, “Lavoro agricolo e strutture fondiarie” (27-46); J. Carlsen, “I sovrinten- denti degli affituari durante il Principato” (47-60); D. Kehoe, “Investimento e sicurezza del possesso nell’affito agrario romano” (61-73); J-M. Carrié, ""Colonato del Basso Impero': la resistenza del mito” (75-150); J. Kolendo, “La continuita delle strutture agrarie in Africa romana?” (151-61); B. Sirks, “Con- tinuita nel colonato?” (163-84); D. Vera, “Padroni, contadini, contratti: realia del colonato tardo- antico” (185-224); A. Marcone, “Il colonato tardoantico: i problemi aperti” (225-39); P. Rosafio, "Colo- nie clienti: analogie e differenze” (241-51); J. Banaji, “Lavoratori liberi e residenza coatta: il colonato romano in prospettiva storica” (253-80); J.J. Aubert, “Liturgie, lavoro coatto e colonato nell’Egitto tardoromano” (281-94); C. R. Whittaker, “Agostino e il colonato” (295-309); A. Giardina, “Gli schiavi, i coloni ei problemi di una transizione” (311-23). 4 This position is well borne out by the title of his previous paper, “Dalla locazione al colonato: per un tentativo di ricostruzione,” AION 13 (1991) 1-45.728 Walter Scheidel few?) tenants were transformed into bound coloni? Several of the other papers address this issue from different angles. We are reminded that, old-style farm-tenancy did not disappear. Evidence of its survival into late antiquity aside, it would seem rather odd for Tribonian’s team to have filled their new ‘Digest’ with such a large number of excerpts concerned with an already defunct practice. D. Vera in particular stresses continuity in traditional farm-tenancy (188-90), while C. R. Whittaker curtly dismisses as “myth” the assumption that it had become less common, let alone disappeared in the Late Em- pire (298)5 Then again, land leases in locatio conductio style may not have been particularly widespread to begin with (Vera 190, and cf. 196: “Nelle province i contadini avevano seguito sempre altri usi”). Perhaps only some tenants lost some of their freedom. Vera argues for regional variation, and A. Marcone concurs: while the former rejects the notion of either universal locatio conductio in the Early Empire or some homogeneous ‘colonate’ in later centuries, Marcone advocates regional studies. Unfortunately, archaeology cannot be of much help: J. Kolendo’s paper con- firms “that archaeology cannot illuminate such matters as tenure systems, social order and public policy”. © Changing patterns of land use do not necessarily tell us about the status of the rural labour force. But what if the life of small farmers in the Early Empire had been worse, or that of the later coloni better, than we tend to assume? The letters of the law may always have been of limited import in the relations between powerful landlords and poor tenants, even in Italy itself Earlier accounts of violence in the Roman countryside and comparative evidence from the more recent past may further reinforce our scepticism.® Even if tenants can be shown to have sometimes been aware of and benefited from such formal legal provisions? this hardly constitutes proof of widespread ‘rule of the law’ in the modern sense. In practice, local custom — the resilient consuetudo regionis hinted at in the imperial law codes — may well have pre- vailed over sporadic rulings emanating from a distant centre. Did the Late Imperial state really succeed in tightening the screws? Are repetitive or progressively severe laws indirect evidence of their failure? Recent work on Late Roman legis- lation has yet to make an impact on the study of the ‘colonate’."° “In a sense, ... laws existed because they were broken. What is not established by their existence is the scale on which they were broken, not enforced, got round or ignored”.1! Vera emphasizes discrepancies between law and practice, as does Whittaker who, drawing on the recently discovered letters of Augus- tine, juxtaposes legal provisions with what he terms “reality”, that is, literary snapshots from the African countryside (cf. also Vera 200, 203). B. Sirks has gone a long way in casting doubt on the reality of the ‘colonate’; R. S. Bagnall fails to find a major shift towards the ‘colonate’ in 4th-c. Egypt.!? Building on his earlier work, J.-M. Carrié once more explores the extent to 8 See also Mirkovic 57. 6 P.Garnsey, “Where did Italian peasants live?” ProcCambPhilSoc 225 (1979) 5. Occasional challenges have failed to invalidate this claim: for discussion and references, see my Grundpacht und Lohnarbeit in der Landwirtschaft des rémischen Italien (Frankfurt 1994) 11-13. 7 Vera 187, with reference to B. W. Frier, Landlords and tenants in imperial Rome (Princeton 1980) 48 ff 8 P. A. Brunt, Italian manpower 225 B.C.-A.D. 14 (Oxford 1971, rept. 1987) 551-57; F. M. Snowden, Violence and the great estates in the south of Italy: Apulia, 1900-1922 (Cambridge 1986). 9 See D. P. Kehoe, “Legal institutions and the bargaining power of the tenant in Roman Egypt,” Archiv fiir Papyrusforschung 41 (1995) 232-62; id., Investment, profit, and tenancy: the jurists and the Roman agrarian economy (Ann Arbor 1997) esp. 138-44 (reviewed by S. Treggiari, JRA 12 [1999] 737-44); cf. also Kehoe's review of Scheidel, Grundpacht (supra n.6) in JRA 9 (1996) 392-94 10 J. Harries, Law and empire in late antiquity (Cambridge 1999) esp. chapt. 4 on the efficacy of law (and cf. 188-90 on colon’); see also ead. and I. Wood (edd.), The Theodosian Code: studies in the imperial law of late antiquity (London 1993). 11 Harries 1999 (supra n.10) 80. 12 _B Sirks, “Reconsidering the Roman colonate,” ZRG 110 (1993) 331-69; R. S. Bagnall, Egypt in late anti-Slaves of the soil 729 which the ‘colonate’ can be dismissed as a construct of modern scholarship." Here, ancient historians have much to learn from S. Reynolds’s massive study of the nature of feudalism, whose critical assessment of the history of scholarship since the 16th c. runs parallel to Carrié’s enquiries.!* Then again, the ‘colonate’ might have been very real but did not evolve from farm-tenancy. This is an alternative route taken by J. Banaji. In his view, the ‘colonate’ governed labour relations, and the fiscal provision of adscriptio was predicated upon existing means of control of landlords over their labourers, regardless of whether or not they used to be ‘free’.15 In this scenario, the fiscal jurisdiction of the landlord granted by the state was merely an extension of his private jurisdiction: “la base del colonato fu dunque il potere privato dei padroni sui lavo- ratori” (258). From this perspective, it does not really matter whether the landlord controlled the labour of the colonus or the colonus proper, given that it was impossible to distinguish between these two forms of dominance (261). Banaji’s ‘colonate’, though far from a mere paper tiger,’® does not require us to reckon with radical change between Early and Late Empire.” If the ‘colonate’ had been a marginal institution, confined to a few percent of the rural population, it would be of fairly limited interest to us.!¥ Had it been much more common and developed out of classic locatio conductio, it could be certain of our attention as evidence of the state's ability to impose its will on the countryside. But is it plausible that mere fiat could have changed the lot of millions, or even tens of millions, of peasants? Is it not more likely that imperial legislation followed local practice? In the latter case, why did the concept of the ‘colonate’ only emerge in late antiquity? Banaji thinks of the Late Roman coloni not as tenants but as some kind of landless, salaried farm labourers employed and sheltered by landowners (262). Similar arrangements, he holds, can be found in Latin America (267-72), and various systems of “labour tenancy” in different parts of the world, for example in Italy (272-79). Regardless of the merits of this particular line of argument, the application of comparative evidence to the study of the ‘colonate’ has long been overdue and is therefore to be welcomed, at least in principle.” Moreover, his discus- sion of oppressed groups of salaried agricultural labourers in Latin America (the gananes of Mexico and the yanacona of Peru) that contemporary sources portrayed like (and later even defined as) adscripticii highlights intriguing similarities between Late Roman and early mod- ern practice. However, landless labourers are not the only ones ready to be turned into coloni, and even in Latin America itself, dependence went back a long way.” Mirkovic urges us not to ignore “the relationship between colonus and possessor, which is indubitably much older than the first quity (Princeton 1993) 115, 149 (but cf. D. W. Rathbone, CR 45 [1995] 109). 19 Carrié and his previous studies cited supra n.1. 14S. Reynolds, Fiefs and vassals: the medieval evidence reinterpreted (Oxford 1994) 3-14. 15 Banaji 258: “La base giuridica del sistema consisteva nella capacita del proprietario terriero di controllare Ia sua forza lavoro" (italics in original). 16 CE his trenchant criticism of Carrie's position (255-56) 17. Sirks and Marcone try to establish links between these periods via the Heroninos archive (A.D. 249- 268), studied in exemplary fashion by D. W. Rathbone (Economic rationalism and rural society in third~ ‘century A.D. Egypt: the Heroninos archive and the Appianus estate [Cambridge 1991). 18 Marcone (239 1.39) refers to D. W. Rathbone, CR 1995, 106 f. [recte: 109] to counter this view: in that case, Italian chattel slavery, as a minority phenomenon, would also be of little import. However, this analogy would hold only if the ‘colonate’ had been as crucial to élite status as chattel slavery had been, 19 The lack of comparative approaches to the ‘colonate’ compares poorly with the growing amount of comparativist work on Roman slavery: compare the sample of pertinent scholarship in my review of K. Bradley, Slavery and society at Rome (Cambridge 1994) in Phoenix 50 (1996) 176, 20 Banaji refers to the “ascribed” yanacona of the Spanish period as descendants of the servile ‘yana /yanacona of the Inca period, re-tied to the land after the upheaval of the conquest (269-70). Insofar as they had traditionally been dependent on landlords, adscription thus restored their ancestral status,730 Walter Scheidel laws on coloni” (15). In the Roman world, as P. Panitschek has argued, various categories of semi-free peasants, such as clients and debt-bondsmen, could conceivably have existed for centuries before they became the object of imperial legislation and entered the law codes as bound coloni! For Rathbone, the ‘colonate’ may well have been “a simplistic bureaucratic attempt to define a single category ... the many forms of unfree rural labour which were to be found in the Roman empire”. Is it credible that such important and potentially very large segments of the population remained mostly (though perhaps not entirely) invisible during the Late Republic and the Principate, only to emerge in later sources? Panitschek and A. V. Koptev attribute this shift in focus to the enfranchisement of the rural masses in the 3rd ¢.23 While it did not take more than a dip of Caracalla’s signet-ring to confer Roman citizenship on untold millions across the empire, the problem of how to reconcile the unequivocal notion of freedom enshrined in Roman civil law with the exigencies of life on the ground would occupy the authorities for generations to come. Koptev’s explanation, briefly summarized by Marcone (228-29 n.16), is that Roman law only gradually came to deal with recently enfranchised tenants without an origo in an urban territory, defining them as coloni tied to the estates of their landlords. What if the apparent rise of the ‘colonate’ from the early 4th c. onwards is a function of changes in the nature of the evidence rather than changes in rural labour relations? This is a serious problem that transcends the narrow issue of the ‘colonate’: to what degree was the Roman empire transformed by the troubles of the 3rd c., the ‘Later Roman Empire’ really different from the empire of the Principate? Different perspectives in late antiquity could produce very different versions — the Roman empire of Ammianus is not the Roman empire of Ambrose. Is it possible that earlier and later sources dealing with rural labour are separated by a similar gap in perspective? ‘Those excerpts from the works of classical jurists that happen to survive in the Digest fail to show much interest in the local conditions of various provinces. Vague references to local mos or consuetudo often sufficed. As Mirkovic reminds us, under the Early Empire “the Roman govern- ment did not concer itself with the way in which a landowner would retain a colonus who had not fulfilled his obligations” (114). Back then, the thankless and largely impossible task of returning indebted tenants who had fled their plots of land to evade taxation was left to provincial governors. We have no idea how such problems were dealt with in any of the pro- vinces that have failed to produce a sufficiently large number of surviving papyri — ie., all but one. Imperial constitutions expressly addressing labour relations in individual provinces, such as Illyricum (CJ 11.53.1), Palestine (CJ 11.51.1) and Thrace (CJ 11.2.1), or among newly subjugated barbarians (CTh 5.6.3), were a novelty of the 4th c. So were literary accounts of rural 21 P. Panitschek, “Der spatantike Kolonat: ein Substitut far die ‘Halbfreiheit’ peregriner Rechts- setzungen?” ZRG 107 (1990) 137-54. Debt-bondage in particular “was not unknown in the first centuries of the Empire and in some provinces had its roots in pre-Roman times” (Mirkovic 57). For such groups, see, eg, E. Lo Cascio, “Obaerarii’ (‘obaerati’): la nozione della dipendenza in Varrone,” Index 11 (1982) 265-84; Mirkovic 40-46. 22._D.W. Rathbone, “The ancient economy and Graeco-Roman Egypt,” in L. Criscuolo and G. Geraci (edd), Egitto e storia antica dall'ellenismo al’ eta araba:bilancio di un confronto (Bologna 1989) 167. 23. Panitschek (supra n.21); A. V. Koptev, “Development of serfdom in the Late Roman Empire,” VDI211 (1994) 40-63 [Russian with English summary}. 24 In Egypt, provisions for the punishment of those harbouring runaway debtors are attested from the Severan period (Mirkovic 114). It is impossible to determine the date of the earliest such edict ever promulgated (as opposed to the oldest one known to us). The fist surviving edict requiring fugitive tax- payers to return to their villages dates from A.D. 104 (S. Link, “Anachoresis: Steuerflucht im Agypten der frithen Kaiserzeit,” Klio 75 [1993] 306-20, provides a recent overview). Since a disproportionately large number of the surviving Early Imperial papyri come from the 2nd c, it is a fair guess that comparable measures were actually enacted after the Roman takeover of Egypt. Roman officials in other provinces must have been similarly concerned about the movements oftheir tax-paying subjects,Slaves of the soil 731 life in the provinces in general. Of 67 Greek and Latin authors listed in the indices locorum of P. W. De Neeve's study of Roman farm-tenancy in the Republican and Early Imperial period? and of the Italian conference volume who could readily be placed, 44 lived and wrote before 235 and 23 afterwards. Of the ‘early’ authors 91% were either natives of Italy or had moved there, as opposed to a mere 22% of the ‘later’ authors. This contrast is so pronounced that the addition of further, less relevant, authors could not possibly alter the picture. Our vision of the ‘Later Roman Empire’ is strongly conditioned by provincial voices. This was the time when the spot- light finally fell on the countrysides of Spain, Gaul, Africa or Syria, which had been all but invisible in previous centuries. Even so, the changing character of the evidence may be only part of the explanation. In Mirkovic's words, “the issue of freedom is fundamental to any study of the Roman colonate” (1). By restricting freedom of movement, Late Roman legislation challenged the “right to act of one’s own free will” (110) without formally altering the status of the individuals in question. As long as the state continued to uphold the all-encompassing dichotomy of free and slave, intermediate stages of dependence and ‘un-freedom’ had to be defined by specific utilitarian, and ultimately arbitrary, provisions. Mirkovic plausibly maintains that this dependence had been created by the reiationship of coloni with their landlords rather than by imperial fiscal policy (113)27'As CJ 11.53.1 emphasizes, coloni were tied to the land non tributario nexu, sed nomine et titulo colonorum (40): simply put, they were dependent because they were dependent. However, Mirkovic's argument that most first-generation coloni had voluntarily (albeit often under financial duress) put themselves in that position seems to me less compelling. Studies of the ‘colonate’ commonly aim to explain what may well have been the ordinary without taking account of the extraordinary. Is it dependence and coercion and restrictions on the freedom of movement that are in need of explication, or their absence? Banaji dismisses the false dichotomy of free labour and coercion as an anachronistic perspective. And indeed, prior to the 19th c,, legal constraints on ‘free’ labour were the norm rather than the exception.* Viewed from this angle, it is the classical institutions — tenancy contracts in locatio conductio style between parties of nominal equals, contractual wage labour without personal subordination of the labourer — that deserve our attention? M. I. Finley tried to explain the rise of free labour for or depending on the resources of others (otherwise a contradiction in terms) by reference to the emergence of chattel slavery, which 25 P.W. de Neeve, Colonus: private farm-tenancy during the Republic and the Early Empire (Amsterdam 1984). 26 Tamnot aware of any descriptions of rural conditions in the provinces by provincial authors under the Republic. The few Early Imperial sources that refer to the provincial countryside are of little help: authors like Strabo and Josephus were not interested in rural labour, whereas Dio Chrysostomus constructs a sentimental vision of Euboian peasants and Apuleius has little to say about N African farming except that his wife Pudentilla gave 400 slaves to her sons (a conventional figure: see my. “Finances, figures and fiction,” CQ 46 [1996] 237 n.34; on Apuleius’s evidence see A. Gutsfeld, “Zur Wirtschaftsmentalitit nichtsenatorischer provinzialer Oberschichten: Aemilia Pudentilla und ihre Verwandten,” Klio 74 {1992} 250-68). The Principate produced nothing remotely comparable to the evidence provided by Libanius, Augustine or Salvianus. 27 Compare on 124: “Itis clear that some of the terms, such as adscripticius or tributarius, mainly indicate position in relation to taxation. This is nonetheless a consequence of their real position relative to the landlords”, 28 Banaji 279-80. See, eg,,R. J. Steinfeld, The invention of free labor: the employment relation im English and ‘American lato and culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill 1991) or J. A. Glickstein, Concepts of free labor in fantebellum America (New Haven 1991), and, aimed at ancient historians, my “The hireling and the slave: 1 transatlantic perspective,” in L. Foxhall and P. Cartledge (edd.), Money, labour and land in ancient Greece (London forthcoming). Cf. also Mirkovic 42. 29. In Vera's words (190): “Il problema fondamentale non appare la sparizione della locatio-conductio nella piccola affittanza — che non pare essere avvenuuta né nella documentazione, né nella realt — quanto la sua diffusione e il grado do continuita con le forme classiche di questo contratto”732 Walter Scheidel tended to eliminate intermediate forms of dependent labour.™ It is interesting to see that in the Digest, farm-tenancy and wage labour are discussed in the context of fully-developed, and indeed pervasive, chattel slavery. But Finley's explanation of the eventual decline of these institutions — ie., the downgrading and assimilation of free labour to slavery — may hold only for a small segment of the population of the Roman empire. In the Italian conference volume, Vera (rightly, in my view) tums away from this model (185-86, cf. 190-91). If this kind of freedom had not been common even under the Early Empire, how could it have disappeared in places where it had never existed? Mirkovic concentrates on the problem of the “loss of freedom” of those who had been born “free Roman citizens but who later, as coloni, sank to a position between freedom and slavery” (3). However, if dependence and coercion were the norm, and widespread in the Early Empire outside Italy and the core regions of Roman citizenship in the provinces, the ‘colonate’ loses much of its mystique. In this scenario, the state merely availed itself of local traditions of control by formalizing existing relationships of dependence and formally extending landlords’ control over their labour force. Mirkovic likewise concludes that the later Roman empire “exploited for fiscal purposes the colonate relationship that [had] evolved in previous centuries” (112). If imperial legislation on the ‘colonate’ was meant to engender genuine change, it was unlikely to work — in Averil Cameron’s words, “an institution more theoretical than real”! Alternatively, if it was real, it may not have been particularly novel. The conservative position that the ‘colonate’” was both novel and real finally seems to have gone out of fash- ion? In keeping with broader trends in current scholarship, recent research on the ‘colonate’ privileges problems of perception and representation over traditional, positivistic approaches: not everything that appears in the sources at a given moment had not existed before — or existed at all. Law may have clashed with reality, or reality may temporarily have been hidden from our view. Few Roman historians will find either proposition intrinsically impos- sible, implausible or even surprising. In both cases, it is the nature of the sources that creates the most serious problems. Needless to say, this recognition of the paramount importance of text and representation does not take us any closer to a universally acceptable interpretation. As a consequence, the historiography of the Roman ‘colonate’ is now more fragmented than ever. Stanford University 30 M.L Finley, Economy and society in ancient Greece (edd. B. D. Shaw and R. P. Saller; London 1981) 114- 15; id., Ancient slavery and modern ideology (expanded edn. ed. by B. D. Shaw; Princeton 1998) 154-58 (and 211-16 for the reversal of this process). This nexus between slavery and freedom is a major theme of O. Patterson, Freedom, vol. 1: Freedom: in the making of Western culture (New York 1991). 31 A. Cameron, The Mediterranean world in late antiquity A.D. 395-600 (London 1993) 86. 32 This view tends to over-estimate the ability of an ancient government to change the lives of many millions of its distant subjects, paying scant attention to the structural weakness of pre-modern empires in general; cf, e.g, M. Mann, The sources of social power, vol. 1: A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge 1986).