CONCLUSION 231moderate prosperity and contri buted signifi cantly to the provisioning of
Rome throughout our period.
In this agrarian economy, rich landowners are more visible than poor, so
that there is a temptation to deny altogether the existence of a signifi cant
number of owner- occupiers operating at or near subsistence level. This view
and the associated assumption that low productivity and primitive methods
made subsistence farming unviable should be rejected. The commonly
accepted doctrine of a rapid and decisive shift from slave labour and
management to tenancies in consequence of the ‘internal contradictions’ of
slavery or declining interest among landowners in their estates is also
dubious. First, the reduction in the numbers of agricultural slaves was a
much longer and slower process than is envisaged in the conventional
argument. Secondly, the evidence suggests the wealthy were actively
concerned with, rather than uninterested in, landed investment and income.
Similarly, with regard to patterns of landholding, only a few wealthy
landowners held land in the form of huge tracts of arable- turned-pastureland,
the latifundia of the moralising literature of the early Principate. Their
property was typically dispersed and fragmented, a product of inheritance,
marriage patterns and economic forces.
An ‘underdeveloped’ agrarian economy was able to meet the demands of
the Roman government without jeopardizing the survival chances of Rome’s
subjects. The burdens imposed were greater in aggregate than ever before,
but were also distributed throughout the empire. A three- fold division
operated, without substantial overlap, between areas supplying tax- and
rent- grain to Rome, food and equipment to the army and money for civilian
and military salaries and other cash expenditures. Rome’s subjects were no
less able than previously to cope with the food shortages endemic in the
region. Subsistence farmers were vulnerable but also resilient. In the urban
context ‘euergetism’, the willingness of the local elite to contribute money,
goods and services, continued to perform its function of staving off
catastrophe in the absence of any organized system of ‘famine relief’.
However, local elites included in their ranks speculators as well as
benefactors. There are signs that profi teering in essential foodstuffs became
more common than in the past, and that local government was less able to
control it and more ready to seek outside intervention. These were ominous
developments, but local patriotism was seriously undermined not by the
normal operation of Roman government under the Principate, but by
the collapse of central authority combined with chronic insecurity in the
localities in the mid- third century.
III
Augustus restored stability to Roman society. Social divisions and tensions
persisted, but the social order was held together by the family, by other