THE LAND 101management and labour, and without the benefi t of a conceptual apparatus
that was created by the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century.
Peasant farming
At Veleia, no proprietor declared an estate of value lower than 50,000
sesterces. In the corresponding and roughly contemporaneous (but less
informative) inscription from Ligures Baebiani, a small town near Benevento
in the south of Italy, one landowner owned and declared property worth
only 14,000 sesterces. This points to a threshold of 10,000 sesterces below
which landowners were not permitted or not persuaded to participate in
Trajan’s scheme.^20
In theory, then, we would expect a class of small independent farmers
operating at or near subsistence level to have existed in both places. Their
children might even have been among the benefi ciaries of the scheme, those
who received the payments made by the declaring landowners as interest on
the loans they were given by the government.
Small peasant proprietors – that is, owner- occupiers operating on or near
subsistence level – keep a low profi le in the period of the Principate. Their
omission from the inscriptions of Veleia and Ligures Baebiani – unless they
are some of the many landowners named only as neighbours – is symptomatic.
Literature, the product of the social and cultural elite, does not notice the
independent peasantry as a class, except for soldiers turned peasants, and
then only momentarily. It is uninterested in status demarcations among the
rural population. Thus, the poverty of Simulus, the farmer of the pseudo-
Virgilian Moretum is securely established, but we are left in doubt whether
he was a slave tenant ( quasi- colonus ), a freedman tenant ( colonus ) or an
owner- occupier, freed or freeborn. Archaeological evidence shares this
defi ciency. Field- survey can show the survival of small- unit farming, as in
Tuscany and the Molise, but it cannot distinguish an owner- occupier from a
tenant. To make matters worse, peasants do not leave monuments. Their
farmsteads, built of perishable materials, have not survived. The normal
‘small site’ of the archaeological fi eld- survey turns out to have a relatively
elaborate construction inappropriate to a basic peasant cottage. Its owner
might have controlled perhaps 50 to 80 iugera or 12½ to 20 hectares and
produced cash crops for the local market.^21
The small owner- declarants at Ligures Baebiani fi t into this sub- class of
peasants operating at above subsistence level. One might say that 14,000
sesterces, the value of the cheapest property declared there, would have
bought 56 iugera or 14 hectares of arable at 250 sesterces per iugerum, a
quarter of the price Columella plucked out of the air for land suitable for
development as a vineyard (3.3.8).
The collapse of the independent peasantry is a cliché of Roman agrarian
history. The problem of their invisibility can be solved at a stroke by denying