92 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
2 Middle- ranking senators and equestrians of municipal background
had, on top of their local estates, one or more additional centres of
property.
3 The richest members of the Roman elite possessed a complex of
properties in Italy and abroad.
One could attain the basic senatorial census by building up holdings simply in
the territory of one’s place of origin, and many men of limited ambition did so.
Two examples will suffi ce, one from the late Republic, the other from the early
empire. First, Sextus Roscius, whose son was a client of Cicero, owned land
worth six million sesterces at Ameria in the Tiber valley in the time of Sulla.
Secondly, the so- called alimentary inscription documenting the poor relief
scheme provided by the emperor Trajan for Veleia, a town in the hills above
Piacenza (Placentia) in Emilia, shows three estates falling within the city
territory of about the minimum senatorial census.^2 There may have been
others unrecorded of the same type, in addition to estates of the requisite value
that fl owed over into the territories of the adjacent cities of Piacenza, Parma
and Luca. Veleia too, though merely an obscure hill town, attracted capital
from the neighbouring rich, mainly from Piacenza, in particular because of its
ample pasturage ( saltus ). Few of the local magnates concerned, if they were
indeed only local magnates, would have owned property much further afi eld.^3
In contrast, Pliny came into possession of a property worth perhaps
7 million sesterces a good way from Como, at Tifernum Tiberinum in
Umbria. A letter ( Ep. 3.19) shows him on the point of purchasing a farm
probably adjoining that estate for 3 million sesterces (reduced from
5 million). This was all in addition to estates inherited from both parents
and other properties at Como, and various non- productive properties, i.e.
houses, on Lake Como, at Laurentium near Rome and at Rome itself on the
Esquiline. Among men of equestrian standing from Como who acquired
property elsewhere can be named the elder Pliny, uncle of the younger Pliny,
if as seems likely it was he who acquired the Umbrian property and later
transmitted it to his nephew and heir; and Calpurnius Fabatus, the father of
Pliny’s third wife, a landowner in Campania and Ameria as well as Como.
The productive property of Pompeia Celerina, mother of Pliny’s second wife,
was divided among three towns on the via Flaminia (Ocriculum, Narnia,
Carsulae) and Perusia further north, and may represent part of a more
extensive senatorial estate with a nucleus somewhere in Tuscany or Umbria.^4
The extension of the landed interests of former municipal magnates was
a natural consequence of their social and political promotion. In this respect
there was little difference between a man like Pliny from the backblocks of
Italy, and someone of provincial origin who entered the Roman elite.
Provincial senators inevitably acquired Italian land, in the fi rst instance
somewhere handy for the capital and on a relatively small scale. Trajan
directed them to increase their stake in Italy to one third of their fortune, but
half a century later this was reduced by Marcus Aurelius to one quarter.^5