”No two characters seem more inconsistent than those of trader and sovereign” (Adam Smith, The...

BEYOND VAGNARINew themes in the Study of Roman South Italy

Proceedings of a conference held in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology,

University of Edinburgh, 26-28 October 2012

edited by Alastair M. Small

Bari 2014

38

o f f p r i n t

beyond vagnari. new themes in the Study of Roman South Italy - ISbn 978-88-7228-726-2 - © 2014 edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it

NicholAS Purcell

‘No TWo chArAcTerS SeeM More iNcoNSiSTeNTThAN ThoSe oF TrADer AND SoVereiGN’

(ADAM SMiTh, THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, V, 2, i).

The ProBleM oF roMAN iMPeriAl eSTATeS

1. Problems and paradoxes of the Roman ‘imperial estate’

in the exemplary publication of the Vagnari project, Alastair Small speaks of the

roman emperors ‘extracting maximum economic benefit’ from their rights in the

estate whose existence there he has deduced from the archaeological record. 1 This

seemingly uncontroversial suggestion in fact invites a great deal of further reflection

and deeper probing. how was ‘benefit’ construed, and who received it, and how?

how was it calibrated, and by what methods, and how efficiently, was it maximized?

how was the ‘extraction’ managed? And what was the balance of strictly economic

benefits against other possible goals in the ownership and management of property?

rulers might be thought specially likely to have other kinds of real or alleged

purposes in their actual running of their assets and in their presentation of how they

might be seen to run them, making possible an actual conflict of objectives, of the

kind which impelled Adam Smith to the remark which i have used as my title and

epigraph. Vagnari does indeed offer a splendid point de repère for these questions, and

in this brief essay my aim is simply to air briefly a few of them, and relate them to

what we know of this site and its setting.

The issue is timely. it raises important questions about the history of roman

property – a subject which, even for italy of the imperial period, let alone in most

other parts of the empire – has strangely been neglected. it is indicative that much of

the available scholarship has been devoted to precisely the extraction of maximum

benefit from holdings of land, notably in the sophisticated debate among historians

It is a pleasure to thank Alastair and Carola for the invitation to participate in the Vagnari conferenceand for his generous hospitality in Edinburgh on that occasion.

1 A.M. Small, Vagnari. Il villaggio, l’artigianato, la proprietà imperiale, Bari 2011, 22.


of the roman economy on roman agrarian rationality, above all in the treatises of

cato, Varro and columella. Those authors do to some extent treat the formation and

development of portfolios of property, but the relationship of those themes to the

economic goals of the year-by-year running of productive enterprise has not been so

popular a subject. Both the asides of roman authors on other aspects of property,

such as the younger Pliny’s pulchritudo iungendi, the ‘elegance of joining things up’,

and comparative reflection on the social, cultural, and political meanings of land-

ownership, offer alternative reasons for the accumulation of property which need to

be carefully balanced against ‘economic benefit’ by the historian. 2 Starting from

economic rationality can beg an important question. Smith’s aperçu makes it hard to

look at Vagnari, and other parts of the emperors’ property portfolio, without taking

serious thought about alternative rationalities and modalities of ownership in which

the economic played a different part. once we have learned to ask such questions of

the imperial estate, moreover, we might be in a position to extend a more broadly

based political, social and cultural enquiry into the historical nature of roman

property to the estates of the roman and local élites. The obvious and intrinsic

difficulties of combining the ‘characters of trader and sovereign’ point us toward

asking related questions of the whole regime of property and its manifestations in the

conceptual and physical landscapes. There are signs that there is currently a new

interest in this enquiry. 3

While there remains so much that we do not understand about the general

phenomena of ownership and of rights in the landscape, urban or rural, it is perhaps

unsurprising that the category ‘imperial estate’, with which imperial-period historians

and archaeologists operate, continues to appear somewhat enigmatic. 4 it is prone to

becoming a fossilized and unrealistic analytical concept. We are used to looking for

private property in the literary, epigraphic or archaeological landscape. We know that

there were several categories of public property (of which more below), but that much

from each of these was let in units which made it resemble private land. only in the

case of imperial property are we faced with a quantitatively important element in the

landscape which was in some sense publicly managed. But we also know that

‘imperial estate’ likewise covers a wide plurality of different assets. rather than

2 Pliny, Ep. 3, 19, 2, on which see now S. Swain, Economy, family, and society from Rome to Islam:a critical edition, English translation and study of Bryson’s Management of the Estate, cambridge 2013,157-160.

3 The usefulness of imperial property for an enquiry of this kind is splendidly demonstrated by theremarkable M. Maiuro, Res Caesaris: ricerche sulla proprietà imperiale nel Principato, Bari 2012. J.Dubouloz, La propriété immobilière à Rome et en Italie (Ier-Ve siècles): organisation et transmissiondes praedia urbana, roma 2011 is something of a revolution. Swain, in Economy, family, and society,presents an interesting case, wide-ranging in its implications, for reconstructing an early imperialphilosophical reflection on the realities of land management.

4 D.J. crawford, Imperial estates, in M.i. Finley (ed.), Studies in Roman Property, cambridge 1976,57-70 was a landmark, but the danger in surveying imperial property across the empire has been theacceptance of ‘imperial estate’ as too monochrome a category.

NicholAS Purcell266


separating out imperial property, then, its different manifestations need to be

reinserted into their regional and subregional contexts. That will eventually mean

attempting to understand holistically the cadastral firmament, the whole landscape

of property. What did it mean for such a general view that such a landscape included

caesar’s holdings? how do imperial estates change our assessment of other parts of

the economic landscape? What historical trajectories can we associate with the

formation, development, or disappearance, of imperial holdings? The publication of

the model fieldwork at Vagnari provides a splendid moment to take stock and reflect

on these important questions.

Among the signs of new approaches to the history of roman property, we should

hope for more exploration of the significance of what was owned and how it was

owned for the self-definition of élite men and women. Since a roman public persona

was to an important extent shaped by ownership, from the basic fact of the calibration

of civic status through the census, to the multiple forms of display made through the

collection of eloquent possessions, to the possibility of the effects of confiscation on

the caput itself, it is all the more surprising that modern scholarship, with its marked

interest in image-building, has not explored this more. 5 Such constructions worked

as a system of representation, meanings depended on points of reference, and the

practice of the largest players had a normative role. 6 This configuration of the

prominent man by means of what he owned, and where, became important in new

ways during the second century Bc. in the age of Sulla, l. Marcius Philippus could

still observe, in an inflammatory speech, that there were not as many as 2000

individuals in the roman res publica who had what you would call property. 7

Philippus was taken to suggest that these small numbers made the great possessores

vulnerable to redistribution of assets, and even great holdings of land did not in practice

confer the stability and permanence of economic title which was the aspiration of many

landowners. The desirability of real estate meant that there was a lively market in it,

which militated against the maintenance of ancestral holdings, especially when

combined with the accidents of marriage and inheritance – to say nothing of proscription

and the casualties of civil war. Property thus stood for the persona of the prominent

individual, but paradoxically its shape and character were notably volatile. When rome

first acquired a ruling family, their property could hardly not be a key element in the new

cadastral order, but its nature could only be novel in important respects, including the

extent to which it would continue to share in the shifting mutability of the élite land

market. like their impact on the res publica, the caesars’ role in private possessio would

look continuous with the past, but actually be strikingly new.

The ProBleM oF roMAN iMPeriAl eSTATeS 267

5 For urban praedia a start has now been made by Dubouloz in La propriété immobilière.6 The evidence was collected by i. Shatzman, Senatorial wealth and Roman politics, Brussels 1977.

The vigorous market in high-end property was presented by e. rawson, The Ciceronian aristocracyand its properties, in Finley, Studies in Roman Property 85-102.

7 cic., Off. 2, 73.


2. The difficult landscapes of Roman property

There is a history of the landscape of property to be conceived from the inside, as

it were, then, in which the configurations of modes of owning and patterns of

proprietorship are the object of study. There is, however, another, outsiders’ view, in

which the questions are more like those asked today by a human geographer – about

the balance of arable and pastoral, the density of settlement, the size and social

formations of the workforces, and the configuration of the system of communication

and of the points of access to it and the nodes within it. And this, unlike the first, on

the whole, has its roman precursors. roman observers reflected on the character of

the productive landscape, generalising about the visible economy and society of

primary production and how it changed with time and across italian space. The

evidence may have been unsystematic or anecdotal, and the judgements superficial,

but the practice of thinking and talking in a general manner about large-scale,

landscape-wide, agronomic issues was politically vital, is relatively well attested and

is inseparable from how decisions were made in practice about the formation of

portfolios of property. To put it another way: the genesis and development of the

roman imperial estate cannot be understood without the Gracchi.

here, then, are some of the ideologically charged issues to set alongside the

calculus of yields or profits. They can of course only be very briefly evoked in this

account.

First, visions of the ‘landscape of property’. This generalisation is not an

exclusively modern mode of historical ratiocination. Ancient observers too looked

across the land – from sea to sea – across whole regions, or provinces, or kingdoms

– and asked ‘who owns it?’. 8 The question, the perception, the concern, need more

attention than they have usually had. There were satisfactory and less satisfactory

answers. Some concerned the size of the estate. Allotment-landscape was one possible

intuition. The predominant latifundium or super-latifundium was another: like the

latifondi of early modern italy, not usually a consolidated centrally managed working

unit, but a huge cluster of different elements acquired piecemeal and held for various

lengths of time, in that kaleidoscopic mutability of property we have already noted. 9

others were more concerned with the type of person who owned: entitled citizens, in

the case of allotments; or, as in Philippus’ summary, the total number of landowners

who really counted; and most resonantly of all, the roman People itself. Ager

publicus p. R. had a huge conceptual significance, and was the centre not just of the

8 We still lack an account of the literary and intellectual origins or correlates of this way of thinking,visible already, for instance, in a hellenistic context in the Letter of Aristeas.

9 Thus, for instance, Dubouloz, La propriété immobilière. A. Mangiatordi, Insediamenti rurali estrutture agrarie nella Puglia centrale, Bari 2011, 108-109 is good on the fragmented latifundium; cf.M. Petrusewicz, Latifondo: economia morale e vita materiale in una periferia dell’Ottocento, Venice1989.

NicholAS Purcell268


practical life of property, but of how people imagined and discussed property in every

context, since in a landscape of property, the layout of all the parts changes the

character of the whole. But public land had other forms too: the land of roman

temples, or of chartered towns, was also extensive. The landscape of property, then,

was by no means just a tessellation of plots, large and small, owned on identical terms

by different proprietors. it was a polythetic category in which qualitatively different

kinds of owning were juxtaposed, each affecting the sum of the parts.

Next, and playing a supporting role in conceptualising property-landscapes, the

dominant productive strategies practiced by the different kinds of proprietor on the

different types of land. Again this was not the product of land-use surveys: it was

impressionistic, but it was nonetheless an ingredient in real discussion and debate. The

themes are familiar: ploughland vs grazing-land, as in the Polla stone; land worked

by coerced slave-familiae or free labourers; land in hand or let to tenants; land worked

or left idle. All these politically sensitive areas could be presented as subject to

epochal and calamitous change, but the detailed realities were more repetitive and

change more gradual and more normal. 10 ‘Abandonment’ for instance, should be seen

against the background of a less dramatic suite of changes, in which the resources of

the landscape could be, and were from time to time, subject to different mises en

valeur, which were not necessarily long-enduring. 11

3. Older problematics and imperial transformations

it is a striking testimony to the reception of such landscape-wide notions of

property that Dio can make Maecenas give advice to Augustus about the place of

imperial (he calls it ‘public’) land in italy as a whole: he recommends selling

everything (except a few ‘useful or necessary’ portions) off, to establish a larger cadre

of prosperous owners, and bring the land fully under cultivation; meanwhile the cash

can be put out at interest to yield revenue for the emperor.12 here all the preoc-

cupations are visible: numbers of owners, continuity of cultivation, a sense of the

overweening size of the imperial portfolio, a confusion between types of ‘public’

land, and, perhaps most interestingly, an informed calculation of constituents of the

portfolio against those scales of usefulness, and a ‘necessity’ which is presumably

essentially symbolic and political.

The acquisition and maintenance of imperial property must thus be seen as another

member of the suite of aspects of the wide productive landscape in which ancient

10 c.r. Whittaker, Agri deserti, in Finley, Studies in Roman Property, 137-165 showed how hard thedossier on this subject was to use as evidence for systemic crisis.

11 For intensification and abatement as patterns in Mediterranean agrarian history, P. horden - N.Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: a study in Mediterranean history, oxford 2000, 263-270.

12 Dio 52, 28, 3.



decision-making can be shown to have been active, another area on which ideological

and political concerns demonstrably bore, and must be studied alongside the older

problematics, to bring out cross-fertilisations. i revisit the themes sketched in section

ii to indicate how this might be done.

First, the complex presentation of public or state land. The link between imperial

property and ager publicus was emphasized long ago by henry Pelham, but has been

rather lost to view, as scholarship on the different thorny questions has become

increasingly specialized. 13 Within italy at least, the point is not whether particular

tracts of public land formed particular imperial praedia. it is rather that the ecology

of ager publicus within a polythetic system of property is a precedent for the

functioning of imperial domains within such a system. indeed it is apparent that ager

publicus survived, so that imperial land, even if it sometimes derived from public

holdings, was added as yet another kind of property in the pluralistic continuum of

ownership. imperial land, though it did have a distinct status, fitted in to the complex

matrix of alternatives to ager privatus. The rhythms of its management, with their

social and economic consequences, should be seen as part of the experience of the

whole ‘public sector’ of land-owning, as well as being the object of particular

enquiry.

The emperor’s land now took over some of the ideological tasks formerly

performed by ager publicus, and this legacy may be of more historical importance

than individual instances of the usurpation by caesar of particular tracts which had

belonged to his People. Among these tasks was what might broadly and rather grandly

be called demographic policy, another of the larger concerns which we know the

romans articulated, if rather vaguely. even if the emperors did not in any formal way

take over ager publicus, they did take on the responsibility for agrarian settlement

policy, and the equipping of their own lands with suitable labour and supervisory

staff was a problem which they considered alongside deciding whether, and where,

to make formal settlements of other romans. it is hard to demonstrate that thinking

on these separate issues was joined up, but there are cases where ‘public’ style

deductions and large, well attested holdings of imperial land are attested in close

proximity. The public rhetoric of populous and productive landscapes, and the image

of the emperor as the nurturer of the people, offer some background to actions of this

kind. 14 emperors also succeeded to the duty to maintain rural order, as the republican

system had done for silvae callesque, and Augustus is already found sending

emissaries to Apulia to coerce and intimidate rural populations which had become

13 h.F. Pelham, The imperial domains and the colonate, in Essays in Roman history, oxford 1911,275-299; see now S.T. roselaar, Public land in the Roman Republic: a social and economic history ofAger Publicus in Italy 396-89 BC, oxford 2010.

14 A good instance is the coloni vel familia Caesaris at Abella (Liber Coloniarum 236l, with Pelham,Imperial domains, 290; for the ager Laurens, Maiuro, Res Caesaris, 263-264.

NicholAS Purcell270


rebellious. The owner of the imperial estates had a simultaneous imperative to

maintain order, social stability, security. 15

The emperors also regulated the largest landowners, expounding the notion that all

senators ought to have a significant stake in italian landowning. 16 it will not have

escaped senators that their holdings, huge as they were, in being subjected to the

supervision of the emperor as beneficent manager of the whole italian landscape,

were now in a way comparable to allotments made to their social inferiors. The

prominence of imperial property underlined this change, and was perceived as a

challenge, a competition and a threat. 17 it was possible on the other hand to regard

the stability of imperial property as one of the ways in which the imperial system

served to guarantee and propagate order, security, and continuity in the face of the

uncertainties of the future. 18

The distribution of ‘chartered’ towns across italy was another readily intuited

pattern in the landscape of property. here we cannot examine how far emperors,

following on from the initiatives of the civil war period in accommodating veterans,

pursued policies in this area: but it is important that – for whatever reason – the model

of the nucleated urban territory was employed unevenly across italy. it was

counterpointed with other systems, such as the Augustan regiones, or territories

conceived through the major roads. Where the city model dominated, the web of

urban obligations and the local status pyramid shaped the praxis of possession. But

further from compact territories, landowners might be less constrained by the regular

hierarchies and municipal responsibilities. in such areas, imperial estate management

is especially interesting, and developed its own regional topographical labelling, with

certain substantial districts being configured as tractus. 19

The lands and other interests of the emperors were thus inserted, as public land had

been earlier, into a whole range of different local regimes of property; and, like ager

publicus, imperial landowning changed everything it touched. What the caesars

owned was effectively a super-latifundium, their portfolio, in one sense, just that of

a super-large manager of microregional resources. Some scattered estates of the local

latifundium regularly specialised in, as it might be, clayworks, or quarrying, or

15 ILS 961 (Allifae, c. A.D. 8) with restorations by G. camodeca: M. Aedius Celer M. Furi Camillicos legatus missus a Divo Augusto cum A. Plautio in Apulia ad servos torquendos. See camodeca, G.,Problemi di storia sociale in Alife romana: le gentes senatorie degli Aedui e dei Granii e i ceti dirigentidel primo principato, in l. Di cosmo - A.M. Villucci (eds), il territorio alifano: archeologia, arte, storia,S. Angelo d’Alife 1990, 123-144, at 133.

16 ShA Marcus 9, 8 for senatorial lands in italy. N. Purcell, Rome and Italy, in A. Bowman et alii (eds)The High Empire: A.D. 70-192 (Cambridge Ancient History XI), cambridge 2000, 405-444.

17 V.A. Sirago, L’Italia agraria sotto Traiano, louvain 1958 and the deliberate formation of theimperial estate at the expense of large senatorial landowners. See, however, Maiuro, Res Caesaris, 117-145, against exaggerating the proportion of italian land in imperial ownership.

18 Thus Maiuro, Res Caesaris, 17.19 crawford, Imperial estates, 52-53, on regiones, tractus, taxeis.



woodland, or marsh. So in a sense the emperors’ ownership of mines, brickworks,

forests, was qualitatively of the same kind as the practice of any part of the

contemporary Mediterranean. But at the same time, the level of specialization, and the

effect on the management infrastructures of coping with it, changed the nature of the

whole portfolio, and made imperial running of even the more comparable holdings,

such as individual agricultural praedia, different from the experience of substantial

civilian landowners. it is not so much, therefore, that there were estates large and

small in a single system of property. What is at stake is rather the distinction and

juxtaposition of different regimes of property.

in the end, what caesar owned directly stood for his role in the whole empire:

Caesar omnia habet. 20 (And we may add that the running of imperial assets was

distinguished qualitatively by the special legal regime made possible by the emperor’s

ruling power). how what was his was run was therefore of some significance for his

image. The emperor was no doubt scrutinised for how he addressed the problems

shared with all agriculturalists, problems of estate management, choice of strategy,

intensity of effort, labour relations. There is no doubt that this did not prevent

emperors from leaving parts of their land uncultivated. 21 But it is equally clear that

this is why it was worth advertising the good practices which are commemorated in

the dossiers of evidence from the Bagradas valley on which so much of our

understanding of imperial estates depends. 22

imperial property thus has a special place in the debate about the profit-motive in

roman primary production. its annual economic yield, in cash or kind, was only part

of the point of landowning. 23 As rural proprietors, emperors had some different

imperatives from privati. They did, however, share with other possessores the pursuit

of some return from what they owned. They needed strategies for estate management

and for labour. The scale, diversity, and fragmentation of imperial assets made direct

management, in ancient conditions, relatively unappealing, and controlling frequent

change was especially demanding. Again like privati, as Pliny’s letters reveal,

therefore, emperors found tenancy the most suitable solution. Through substantial

tenancies, they could maximise the regularity of moderate rental return, and transfer

the burdens of small-scale strategy decision and marketing. The African dossiers show

20 B.M. levick, ‘Caesar omnia habet’: property and politics under the Principate, in K.A. raaflaubet alii (eds), Opposition et résistances à l’Empire d’Auguste à Trajan, Vandoeuvres-Genève 1987, 187-218.

21 As clearly stated in the famous passage concerning Pertinax and agri deserti: herodian 2, 4, 6 withe. lo cascio, Il princeps e il suo impero, Bari 2000, 305; Whittaker, Agri deserti, 140-141.

22 D.P. Kehoe, The economics of agriculture on Roman imperial estates in North Africa, Göttingen1988; M. de Vos, The rural landscape of Thugga: farms, presses, mills and transport, in A. Bowman -A. Wilson (eds), The Roman agricultural economy: organization, investment, and production, oxford2013, 143-218.

23 i omit here the question of the extent to which the sale of land formed part of the emperors’patrimonial strategy.

NicholAS Purcell272


clearly how, there at least, emperors dealt with head tenants who in turn controlled the

labour of a much larger number of working tenants.

These inscriptions suggest that the philosophy of this system, displayed positively

with some care by those who set them up, was the maintenance of full cultivation

and the regular improvement of the enterprise. The leases were designed to appear

relatively favourable: security of tenure and of its transmission to the tenants’ heirs

were intended as an attractive return for this commitment to good and sustainable

agricultural practice. The idea is also expressed in the famous anecdote about

Pertinax’ empire-wide intervention to encourage the occupation of unworked land:

‘immunity from all intrusive action by the proprietor’ was one of the baits offered. 24

The emperors’ regulations were, by contrast, presented as benign and rather remote:

an emanation from the heart of the law-giving machinery of the empire; as in the (no

doubt self-serving) claims for the continuity and stability across generations expressed

by imperial tenants in Anatolia: ‘everything that is ours, since our ancestors’, they say,

‘has been in the first instance subject to regulation by the most sacred Fiscus

according to the law of Farming’. 25

These broadly emphyteutic lease-systems gave a character to imperial property

which built on the stability offered by imperial ownership, and helped it compete as

a sector in the pursuit of good chief tenants. 26 Besides moderate continuous yield for

low administrative outlay, emperors benefited from being associated with progressive

land-management and the production of worthwhile crops, maintaining a population

on the land (and a tax-paying one too, at least in the provinces).

4. Vagnari and the larger history of the landscape

The coherence and extent of the narrative offered by the Vagnari estate are among

the reasons why the site is so significant. it compels us to foreground change through

time. here we can see some of the main trajectories of the history of the larger

landscape, and something of that ‘general landscape management’, that higher

agronomy to which the imperial domain could not but contribute. Apulia in general

exhibits the fact of abandonment and the complex processes of re-occupation, the

nexus of road-building and settlement across south italy, the major ideological stand-

off between pastoralism and arable strategies visible in the suppression of pastores in

185/4 and in the Polla stone; and the identity of parts of the south-east as a stronghold

of rural slave-labour which is still visible in the troubles in Apulia suppressed by

24 herodian, 2, 4, 6: pantos despoteias amerimnia.25 F.F. Abbott - A.c. Johnson, Municipal administration in the Roman Empire, Princeton 1926, 478-

480 no 142; B.M. levick, The government of the Roman empire: a sourcebook, london 1985, 222-223no. 221: to tes georgias dikaion. on the inscription, see now D. Kehoe, Law and the rural economy inthe Roman empire, Ann Arbor 2007, 84-87.

26 cf. Pliny Ep. 3, 19, 7 on penuria colonorum.



Aedius celer. long known epigraphically as a region of important imperial estates,

Apulia is also a marked case of an uneven balance between urban and rural, and the

juxtaposition of different modes of regionalisation. 27

The archaeological history of Vagnari illuminates the distinction between

calamitous abandonment and more normal abatement which was drawn in section

iii. The basic questions of where the people were, and how mobile they were, and on

what occasions, and to what extent, which of them impinged on the archaeological

record, are especially visible. This should not be related incautiously to the intractable

problem of population aggregates. 28 A further recurrent issue in the drier parts of the

italian peninsula must also be the effects of different interventions on the medium-

term history of the landscape. Do episodes of intensification require periods of

abatement to restore soil-fertility? What are the causes and distribution of one-way

transformations, the degradation of soils, the formation of badlands, the exhaustion

of aquifers? And what responses to such episodes have been possible, and are any of

them effective? Some forms of exploitation were temporary and seasonal. We are

still not clear what the archaeology of winter-pasture looks like.

in this location, far from significant urban foci, the development of the Via Appia

is a particularly significant historical factor, and the re-dating of the Via Appia

extension by the Vagnari excavations is a highly significant result. 29 The road is likely

to have played a very important role in the development of the estate hub at Vagnari

and nearby. And not only for communications and the movement of goods: the

imperial administration needed to provide for the maintenance of the road and its

services. imperial estates offered services and yield in kind. The 20-lb weights with

which the produce of Vagnari was measured need not only have been concerned with

the market! in general, Apulian archaeology presents no reason to be doubtful about

the productive efficacy of the imperial estate. The evidence for variety and change,

indeed, might induce speaking about dynamism which contrasts with the traditional

picture of state-run enterprise.

Among these changes, the transformations of the very early empire at Vagnari are

especially noteworthy. The Flavian and Antonine periods have loomed rather too

large in the study of imperial property, and it is valuable to have this evidence from

the years when the emperors’ portfolio was still acquiring its original shape. The most

interesting feature of all is the notably para-urban village, with its implications for

deliberate intervention in the large-scale management of a substantial district around

this focus. here is part of the dossier on the history of a non-urban zone, one of those

gaps in the municipal model of imperial italy. And the replacement of artisan services

27 Maiuro, Res Caesaris, 284-92 for Apulia with earlier bibliography; Mangiatordi, Insediamentirurali, 51-53; 97; 127-129.

28 See now the judicious account of S. hin, The demography of Roman Italy: population dynamicsin an ancient conquest society 201 BCE-14 CE, cambridge 2013.

29 For the Via Appia, Small in Vagnari, 18-19.

NicholAS Purcell274


elsewhere offered by the city, with the on-site ironworking, is therefore also of special

significance.

it is also natural to ask whether we have here part of the archaeology of an

emphyteutic landscape. That fits the non-urban feeling of the region’s archaeology

(and fits seductively well with what we know from ethnographic study of the

character of modern emphyteutic landscapes in Puglia and Basilicata). 30 it would be

especially appropriate to see the S. Felice villa as the abode and headquarters of a

conductor or head tenant in the manner of the Bagradas dossiers. The multiplication

of small settlements on the territory through the mid-late imperial period could attest

the successful development of the strategy through the attraction and prospering of

sub-tenants in the manner to which the African material aspires.

This can only be a possible angle of interpretation at present, and numerous

questions remain open. What was the annual cycle of employment of the inhabitants

of the vicus? What were the outlets for this inter-urban zone in the world of more

urban markets and centres of storage and distribution? how stable and self-replacing

was the rural population? Was there a role for slaves in primary production alongside

coloni of greater or lesser means, and how did that change over the imperial period?

We can only ask for further excavation and survey of the calibre represented by the

Vagnari volume.

5. Returning to Adam Smith

Smith’s paradox would have been readily intelligible to élite romans. in the

absence of a ‘sovereign’, men of sufficient auctoritas to lead the res publica still

found it necessary to distance themselves from the image of the ‘trader’. 31 on the

other hand, ‘of all those methods by which we acquire, none is better, none more

bountiful, none pleasanter, none more worthy of a free man, than agriculture’.

Agriculture was still a method of acquisition, and it was awkward that it entailed the

marketing of the produce. had romans formulated a theory of monarchy, it is likely

that they, like Smith, would have thought this proportionately difficult for a

sufficiently elevated king.

The roman emperor was, however, not exactly a sovereign, and the fictions by

which he could pose as a senator among other primores were promoted by his sharing

in their preoccupation with, and self-definition through, italian land-ownership. if a

cicero could fudge the ethical problem of combining profit and politics, so could

Augustus and his successors. What i have tried to show in this brief sketch, is that


30 A.h. Galt, Emphyteusis and indigenous agricultural development: the case of Locorotondo, Italy,in r. herr (ed.), Themes in rural history of the western world, Ames iowa 1993, 67-98; A.h. Galt, Farfrom the church bells: settlement and society in an Apulian town, cambridge 1991.

31 The locus classicus is of course cicero, Off. 1, 150-1; the quotation is from 151.


behind this accommodation lay aspects of being a great proprietor which went far

beyond the extraction of profit from production, aspects which were already important

in the last two centuries B.c. but which came to their richest development in the

praedia Caesaris of the early empire. The roman emperors, like some of those who

ran ager publicus before them, sought to create a segment of the empire’s productive

landscape in which they could control order, foster stability, remedy the problems of

élite competition, and urban administrative chaos, and which was yet as totally

predictable in rent as they could possibly make it. Whether or not they succeeded

very well at any of this, these were not the aims of a ‘trader’. There is nothing in the

history of the roman imperial estate, at Vagnari or elsewhere, which might prove

Adam Smith wrong in his opinion.

NicholAS Purcell276

Ulrike Roth, Beyond Vagnari: a small achieve-ment

Alastair M. Small, Introduction

Douwe Yntema, Romanization and south-eastItaly

Edward Herring, “The ties that bind”: ethnic-ity and social cohesion in Hellenistic CentralPuglia

Bice Peruzzi, The (d)evolution of grave good as-semblages in Peucetia in the 3rd century BCE

Saskia T. Roselaar, Economic developments andthe integration of southern Italy in the RomanRepublic

Alastair M. Small, From Silvium to Vagnari:sheep, wool and weaving on the saltus

Carola M. Small, Vagnari and the Basentello Sur-vey. A brief summary

Alastair M. Small, Tile stamps of privati from theBasentello valley field survey

Maureen Carroll, Vagnari 2012: New work in thevicus by the University of Sheffield

Alan Dalton, The excavation of the cistern atVagnari: an update

Liana Brent and Tracy Prowse, Grave goods,burial practices and patterns of distribution inthe Vagnari cemetery

Tracy Prowse, Chrystal Nause and MarissaLedger, Growing up and growing old on an im-perial estate: preliminary palaeopathologicalanalysis of skeletal remains from Vagnari

Myles McCallum and Hans vanderLeest, Re-search at San Felice: the villa on the imperialestate

Philip Kenrick, Domestic pottery at Vagnari: re-gional character and Adriatic connections

Alessandra De Stefano, The presence and cir-culation of lamps at Vagnari and in the valleyof the Basentello 143

Giacomo Disantarosa, Contextualizing the con-

text: amphorae from the site of Vagnari and fromthe Basentello valley

Myles McCallum and Adam Hyatt, A view ofVagnari from across the Basentello: initial re-sults from the BVARP survey, 2012

Maria Luisa Marchi, The landscape of Daunia:Ager Venusinus

Helena Fracchia, Rural agglomerations in theUpper Bradano Valley

Maurizio Gualtieri, The villa at Masseria Cic-cotti in the 3rd century AD

Helga Di Giuseppe, Imperial estates in inlandLucania

Edward Bispham and Susan Kane, The MiddleSangro Valley under the Empire: a productivelandscape?

Darian Marie Totten, Building regional con-nections in Late Antique southern Italy

Marcella Chelotti, The development of imperi-al properties in the Second Augustan Region fromthe 1st to the 3rd century AD

Marcella Chelotti and Alastair M. Small, AP-PENDIX. An updated location map of inscrip-tions relating to imperial slaves and freedmenin Regiones II and III

Nicholas Purcell, ‘No two characters seemmore inconsistent than those of trader andsovereign’ (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations,V, 2, I). The problem of Roman imperial estates

Pasquale Rosafio, Vagnari, an outline of the im-perial estate

Domenico Vera, Imperial estates in Late Romansouthern Italy: land concentration and rent dis-tribution

Pasquale Favia, The Alta Murgia and the Basen-tello valley between Late Antiquity and the Ear-ly Middle Ages: transformation of the country-side and changes in settlement in inland Cen-tral Apulia

Bibliography

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Edipuglia srl, via Dalmazia 22/b - 70127 Bari-S. Spiritotel. 0805333056-5333057 (fax) - http://www.edipuglia.it - e-mail: [email protected]

”No two characters seem more inconsistent than those of trader and sovereign” (Adam Smith, The...

Documents

Transcript of ”No two characters seem more inconsistent than those of trader and sovereign” (Adam Smith, The...