94 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
property, become latifondisti several times over. It is hardly surprising, then,
that modern accounts do not coincide. On the one hand, the ‘ranch’, on
which livestock- raising on a large scale was carried on, and the extensive
cereal farm (best- known from north Africa and Sicily, but also posited for
Italy), are both termed latifundia ; on the other hand, the term is sometimes
used loosely for the conglomeration of scattered properties of more moderate
size that are thought to have commonly constituted a senator’s estate –
roughly in the range of the ‘model’ farms of the agricultural writers (200
iugera or 50 hectares for an arable farm, 100 iugera or 25 hectares for a
vineyard, 240 iugera or 60 hectares for an oliveyard), or larger.
If Seneca and Columella were attacking a real contemporary phenomenon,
in however rhetorical and exaggerated a fashion, their criticism appears to
have been directed chiefl y at individuals who had in their hands vast tracts
of arable, some of which had been allowed to degenerate into pasture land.
It is hard to fi nd convincing specimens among known landowners. Of
two examples of extreme wealth cited by the elder Pliny, one is not apposite.
L. Tarius Rufus, an admiral of Augustus, invested and lost 100 million
sesterces in land in the region of Picenum ( HN 18.37). We are not told the
quantity and quality of the land purchased, but wine- jars bearing his name
have been found. If most of the land was under vines, then Pliny’s cautionary
tale, otherwise obscure, becomes comprehensible. This was a case of
someone who sank all his money in a risky investment in one corner of Italy,
and suffered bad fortune predictably and deservedly in consequence. Pliny’s
other example is a more appropriate target of abuse from critics of huge
estates. C. Caecilius Isidorus, a freedman who was probably an heir of the
great Republican family the Metelli, owned or leased, among other things, a
vast area of arable and pasturage. On his death in 8 BC , Isidorus bequeathed
3,600 pairs of oxen, 257,000 other stock and 4,116 slaves, plus 60 million
sesterces in cash ( HN 33.135).^8
It is highly improbable that there were many latifondisti who specialized
in animal husbandry on anything like the scale of Isidorus. Extensive
livestock- raising in a Mediterranean setting required access to, though not
necessarily ownership of, a large amount of grazing land and in contrasting
climatic zones, broadly, mountain and plain. Long- range transhumant
pastoralism, which is fi rst directly attested in Varro, is likely to have ‘taken
off’ in Italy, in particular on the Puglia-Abruzzi route, more than a century
earlier, when victory in war and confi scations had given the Roman state
control over the whole of central and southern Italy. Varro himself owned
land at both ends of this transhumant route. Yet his own 800 sheep, and his
failure to cite another, larger fl ock (he mentions one of 700), suggests that
even long- range pastoralism was practised for the most part on a relatively
modest scale in his period. There is an absence of data for the Principate, but
any attempt to swell measurably the signifi cance of the industry under the
empire is likely to founder on the economic argument of limited demand for
the products of pastoralism. The Aragonese Dogana of the medieval and