THE LAND 93The wealth of Pliny and his circle, and of the average provincial senator,
was relatively modest, and the geographical spread of their investments
limited. Wealth of a different order, differently distributed, is revealed by the
elder Pliny’s reference to the six men who ‘owned half of Africa’, and whose
estates, once confi scated by the emperor Nero, formed the basis of the vast
imperial saltus in that area ( HN 18.35); or by Seneca’s characterization of
the archetypal rich man (and as the owner of 300 million sesterces Seneca
could write with authority) who, among other things, ‘farms land in all the
provinces’ ( Ep. 87.7). The requisite information is not available, but one
would expect senatorial provincial investment to have been centred on the
western part of the empire, which fell easy prey to foreign capital under the
early Principate, rather than the economically developed, urbanized and
sophisticated East. There is none the less evidence of Roman senatorial
property in the East, for example in Macedonia and Asia, in the estates of Q.
Pompeius and Rubellius Plautus, respectively. The ‘Romans’ who are attested
as payers of a land- tax in an inscription from Messene probably belonging
to the early empire may not have been of high status, even though their total
payment was considerable. They are best seen as representatives of the quite
substantial class of enterprising but relatively low- status Italians who had
been economically active in the eastern (and western) provinces since the
late Republic. Egypt was a special case, as the emperor’s private domain to
which Roman senators and other high offi cials were denied access. Members
of the imperial family, and the closest associates of emperors (such as
Maecenas, Pallas and Seneca) were granted the income of individual estates
without, however, acquiring ownership.^6
Property size
Seneca, Pliny and Columella deplore the existence of huge properties. The
term latifundium appears in the literary sources precisely in their period, the
mid- fi rst century AD. There has been no conceptual innovation: Varro wrote
a century earlier of a great estate ( latus fundus ) owned by a rich man
(1.16.4). His tone is neutral. In contrast, for the later writers latifundia
symbolized the degeneracy of Italy or rich Romans. Their disapproval was
moral. Latifundia are associated in their works with gangs of chained slaves,
often with criminal records, and in Columella (though he does not use the
term) with the downgrading of free citizens into a state of dependency akin
to debt- bondage.^7
But what was a latifundium? No defi nition or technical discussion
survives. The agronomists proper avoided the term and even the phenomenon,
outside the preface of Columella. The elder Pliny wrote that 1,300,000
sesterces would buy a latifundium ( HN 13.92), but this is the most casual
suggestion and only confuses the issue. By that criterion, the younger Pliny,
not to mention the elder Pliny himself, the source of much of his nephew’s