282 Grey
somewhat by the Ostrogothic period.85 But it is no less difficult to determine
the extent to which differences in terminology reflect different legal categories,
still less the relationship between whatever legal categories might have existed
and socio-economic realities. In the Edictum Theoderici the word colonus
seems not to function explicitly and universally as an indicator of registered
tenancy. What, then, does it denote: tenancy or simply agricultural activity?
Cassiodorus’ generalizing observation that “coloni sunt qui agros iugiter col-
unt” would seem to indicate the latter, but we should be cautious about assum-
ing congruence in the vocabulary employed in a letter and a legal text.86 While
we appear to be on firmer terminological ground in regarding originarius as
an indicator of registration on an origo, it seems unnecessarily reductive to
assume that this legal category excluded the possibility of these individuals
also appearing in other guises in our texts. That is, we should be careful not to
assume that legal categorizations reflected, still less determined, the economic
strategies open to small agriculturalists.87
In this context, too, provisions forbidding domini from inducing a slave or
originiarius of another dominus to leave their estate place this tension between
legal-fiscal ideals and socio-economic realities in high relief. Consequently, it
would appear that the provisions of the chapter concerning the oppositio origi-
nis hinge on claims about where the tenant or labourer in question is legally
registered. Evidently, the act of registration continued in the Ostrogothic
period to present a certain security for small agriculturalists but also to act as a
potential impediment to long-standing practices of labour exploitation, which
rested upon a flexible and dynamic labour market.
At any rate the coincidence of a certain conceptual slippage between slav-
ery and freedom, the employment of the vocabulary of slavery as an analogy
for the obligations of registered tenants to their origo, and continuing efforts
to police the boundaries between servi and ingenui may be interpreted as a
continuation—albeit perhaps in a rather less nuanced form—of phenomena
we see in the legislation concerning slaves and registered coloni of the 4th and
5th centuries.88 This concern to police the boundaries between slavery and
freedom serve as a reminder that slaves continued to exist and their labour
85 For this terminological diversity and its implications, Grey “Contextualizing Colonatus”,
pp. 170–5. For the Ostrogothic period see Vera, “Proprietà terriera”, pp. 144–5. Schipp,
weströmische Kolonat, p. 285, explicitly translates originarii as “Kolonen”, thereby avoiding
questions of terminology.
86 Cassiodorus, Variae 8.31.
87 Vera, “Proprietà terriera”, pp. 147–8.
88 For fuller exposition: Grey, “Slavery in the Late Roman World”, pp. 502–6.