98 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
permanent labour force and management, and temporary labour, free or
slave, was brought in at times of peak activity, in particular, for the harvest.
If the landowner did not administer his estate ‘directly’ through a slave
bailiff ( vilicus ), then he leased his land (by locatio- conductio ). Tenancy was
not a monochrome institution. A tenant ( colonus ) might in principle
supervise slave- workers (cf. Columella 1.7.3; Pliny, Ep. 9.37), provided by
either himself or the landlord, on a property of considerable size. Such
tenants included men of some status and means, like Verus, graciously
thanked for taking on the farm that was Pliny’s gift to his nurse ( Ep. 6.3), or
Rufus, the friend of the son of Calpurnius Fabatus and a possible manager
for his country estate in Campania ( Ep. 6.30). On the other hand, a tenant
might work a rather smaller farm himself with the aid of his family. The
numerous farms at Veleia that were given a low capital value probably
included a number that were worked as single economic units by small men
on tenancies. Apart from obvious differences in length of tenancy and level
of rent, tenancies also varied in the way rent was exacted, as a fi xed payment
or an agreed proportion of the harvest ( métayage, introduced by Pliny in
place of a fi xed money rent on one of several of his properties, Ep. 9.37).^14
Agricultural slavery was at its peak in the last two centuries of the
Republic, at least in central and southern Italy. Tenancy was an accepted
way of running rural estates in Italy of the late Republic, and was always
dominant in some shape or form in the empire at large. The question is
whether it is necessary to believe in a decisive swing of the pendulum away
from slavery and toward tenancy in the heartlands of agricultural slavery in
the early Principate.^15
The reduction in the numbers of slaves in agriculture, assuming that there
was one, was a much longer and slower process than has often been imagined.
Theories that entail a speeded- up and shortened process of change fail to
establish their point. It used to be thought that agricultural slavery collapsed
with the end of the era of expansion marked by the reign of the fi rst emperor,
Augustus. As the slave supply diminished, so slave prices rose and slave
labour became unprofi table. But the supply of slaves did not fall off
drastically after the reign of Augustus. Wars continued, though on a reduced
scale. The slave trade, which was well- organized and crossed the frontiers
freely, was always an important source of slaves. There were other signifi cant
sources, including breeding, and the exposure or sale of unwanted children.
The argument for decline from rising slave prices is not impressive. Jones’
calculation on which it rests, that ‘a slave in the second century cost eight to
ten times his annual keep as against a year or a year and a quarter’s keep in
fourth- century Athens’, is based on inadequate and misleading data. In any
case, if all the available literary evidence is marshalled, then the case for the
survival of slaves in numbers throughout the period of the Principate seems
established. The implication of the legal sources that slavery was important
in Italian agriculture in the second and early third centuries is worth stressing.
There is no sign that slaves could only be afforded by the very rich.^16