THE LAND 99It has been proposed that there was a crisis in agricultural (and industrial)
slavery at some point in the second century, to be explained in terms of a
structural defect in the ‘slave mode of production’.^17 This is presented as
a problem of supervision, brought on or aggravated by a supposed
transformation of medium- sized properties into latifundia on which larger
slave staffs were employed. The problem was solved by the widespread
division of the large estates into tenancies controlled by freedmen and
promoted slaves (the so- called quasi- coloni of the juristic texts). This
reconstruction founders on the evidence for the survival of slaves in the
Italian countryside in and beyond the ‘period of crisis’. Even supposing
it were agreed that the ‘slave estate’ disintegrated, and that the specialist
wine production that was its hallmark came to a halt in this period (both
assertions might be contested), then slaves must have been redeployed
without change of status into other forms of rural production. This is
not at all problematic. Leaving aside the traditional use of slaves in
familial farming units, slaves were employed in enterprises devoted to
livestock- raising and cereal production by rich Italians before the ‘Catonian’
slave estate evolved. As to the solution that is proposed to the ‘crisis’, we
should think twice before accepting, without evidence, that large- scale
parcelling of property took place in the second half of our period, whether
because of a crisis in the supply or management of slaves or for some other
reason.
Finally, we may briefl y mention the theory that changing economic
attitudes among landowners produced a swing toward tenancy in the early
Principate. This argument rests on the ephemeral basis of two assumptions,
that landowners were less interested in their estates under the Principate
than under the Republic, and that the less interested a landowner was in his
estate the more likely he was to turn to tenancy. But at least the thesis raises
questions that we have not yet considered about the attitudes of landowners
to their rural investments.^18
Attitudes
What, if anything, can be divined about the economic attitudes of men of
property from the way their estates were structured, managed and worked?
The normal view, powerfully advocated by Finley above all, is that the social
and political value placed on land investment hampered the development of
economic concepts and institutions in antiquity. Landowners had a strictly
limited notion of profi t and how to seek it, and a gravely defective method
of calculating it (as illustrated by Columella’s attempt to demonstrate the
profi tability of viticulture). In general, they were held in bondage by a value
system that emphasized consumption rather than productive investment.^19
The case of Pliny, recorded in the act of purchasing property, is pertinent,
since the property in question adjoined his existing estate in Tifernum