The younger Pliny, a Roman senator originally from Como in north
Italy, wrote to a friend that his investments were almost entirely in rural
property ( Ep. 3.19). Many or most senators would have been similarly
placed, especially those who like Pliny were not among the most wealthy
and who were not from Rome itself or its environs. Pliny is thought to
have been worth about 20 million sesterces, but fortunes twenty times
more substantial are known from the early Principate. Pliny’s fortune
was itself twenty times larger than the minimum property qualifi cation
for the Roman senate, one million sesterces. There must have been
a considerable number of men in Italy and the provinces who had the
basic census requirement for senatorial membership but never became
senators.^1
This chapter proceeds from the premiss that land was the basis of the
personal fortunes of the rich and of the wealth of the empire to examine
patterns of landholding, the spatial distribution of estates, their internal
structure, management and labour strategies, the mentalité of large
landowners, the existence and viability of subsistence farming and the
productivity of agriculture. The discussion is Italy- centred because detailed
evidence for provincial agriculture is lacking; trends such as the extension of
arable and the wider diffusion of cereals, vines and olives are treated in
another section (see Chapter Five).
Geographical distribution of property
We envisage three broad types of property disposition among the wealthy,
which roughly correspond with the three categories of landowners outlined
above:
1 Local gentry held their land more or less entirely in their region of
origin.
6
The land
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