Farmers and Agriculture in the Roman Economy

David B. Hollander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351596411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Often viewed as self-sufficient, Roman farmers actually depended on markets to supply them with a wide range of goods and services, from metal tools to medical expertise. However, the nature, extent, and implications of their market interactions remain unclear. This monograph uses literary and archaeological evidence to examine how farmers – from smallholders to the owners of large estates – bought and sold, lent and borrowed, and cooperated as well as competed in the Roman economy. A clearer picture of the relationship between farmers and markets allows us to gauge their collective impact on, and exposure to, macroeconomic phenomena such as monetization and changes in the level and nature of demand for goods and labor. After considering the demographic and environmental context of Italian agriculture, the author explores three interrelated questions: what goods and services did farmers purchase; how did farmers acquire the money with which to make those purchases; and what factors drove farmers' economic decisions? This book provides a portrait of the economic world of the Roman farmer in late Republican and early Imperial Italy.

1 Problems and sources

1.1 Introduction

The vast majority of the population of Roman Italy worked the land,¹ but collectively Roman farmers have not received the attention from economic historians that has, in recent years, been devoted to fullers, prostitutes, traders, shopkeepers, auctioneers, and bankers.² This is not to say that they have been ignored – there has been considerable interest in certain subsets of Roman farmers such as tenants or estate owners³ – but they deserve greater attention as a whole. This book examines not Roman farming per se, a topic on which quite a lot has been published, but rather the economic behavior of Roman farmers: what they bought and sold, how they employed labor and capital, as well as their impact on and relation to the broader Roman economy.

For the purposes of this study, I define ‘farmer’ broadly as someone engaged in agriculture on a full or part-time basis, including laborers as well as those working in a management capacity either on their own land or someone else’s property. Thus, farmers can be the members of a smallholder household, seasonal workers from a nearby village or town (or even further afield), an estate owner, or his vilicus (estate manager). The chronological and geographical confines are late Republican and early imperial Italy (200 BCE to 200 CE), arguably the best documented region and period. Although I will make occasional references to other times and places, a broader scope would have made the project unmanageable.

1.2 The problem with self-sufficiency

One of the most persistent ideas about Roman farmers is that they were largely self-sufficient and so had a limited impact on the broader Roman economy. Scholars generally agree that the Roman elite and especially the agricultural writers considered self-sufficiency or autarky a “moral precept” and the “prevailing ideology.”⁴ While there is increasing doubt about the possibility of achieving self-sufficiency (see below), many historians consider it to have been at least the goal of most Roman peasants.⁵ The pursuit of self-sufficiency, it is often further believed, insulated rural areas from the monetized economy. As Keith Hopkins once put it, the “solid mass of self-sufficient production always stood outside the money economy.”⁶

At first glance, it is easy to see why self-sufficiency remains a powerful idea in discussions of Roman farmers. In the second century BCE Cato the Elder declared that the farmer should be a seller, not a buyer (Agr. 2.7); Varro, in a dialogue written a little more than a century later, has a character recommending that “nothing should be purchased which can grow on the farm and be made by the household” (Rust. 1.22); and the early imperial encyclopedist Pliny the Elder said that it was an old and well-accepted adage that “whoever buys what his farm could give him is a worthless farmer” (HN 18.41).⁷

Given such statements, it is hardly surprising that the concept of self-sufficiency, comes up so frequently in modern discussions of Roman farming. However, the matter is far more complicated and problematic than it would appear. Most importantly, all of the ancient agricultural writers make it clear in other, perhaps less memorable passages, that there were plenty of things a farmer had to purchase. Since that is a major theme of this study, I will leave the issue of necessary purchases to one side for the moment and focus on the idea of self-sufficiency in modern scholarship about Roman farmers. First of all, while scholars regularly use the term ‘self-sufficiency,’ they have not done so in a consistent fashion. Indeed, in many instances they have used the term without any indication of what they mean by it.⁸ Some conceive of self-sufficiency as an ideal rather than an economic practice that farmers could actually achieve. Paul Erdkamp, for example, calls autarky an “important goal” but concedes that “pure autarky could not be achieved.”⁹ Some consider self-sufficiency to be a phenomenon happening at the level of the individual household, while others see it as a village, town, or regional phenomenon.¹⁰ Some, when they talk about self-sufficiency, just mean self-sufficiency in all the food consumed by a farm household rather than in other goods like tools, ceramics, clothing, and so forth,¹¹ and acknowledge that even peasants had to make purchases in the market.¹² Sometimes self-sufficiency is part of a strategy that involves specialized production for the market.¹³

Although some scholars have viewed the pursuit of self-sufficiency as a dangerous strategy,¹⁴ others have regarded it as “hard-hearted economic rationality,”¹⁵ a “necessity,”¹⁶ or “a rational response to conditions of risk and uncertainty.”¹⁷ A few scholars have even pointed to the institution of the nundinae (the markets held every eighth day) as proof for some kind of self-sufficiency.¹⁸ Joan Frayn argued that the nundinae “by their very name suggest that they were intended to supplement the living of a farming community which was largely self-sufficient.”¹⁹ But surely the best proof would be the absence of markets or at least a considerably longer interval between market days. A weekly market day strongly suggests that there was a regular demand for goods that could not be supplied from one’s own farm or estate.²⁰ Poor transportation technology and networks have also been cited as the cause of Roman self-sufficiency. J. K. Evans, for example, argued that “the inadequacy of Roman land transport effectively condemned [the] majority to self-sufficiency.”²¹

There has, nevertheless, been plenty of skepticism about the idea. As early as 1970 Martin Frederiksen noted that there was “something a little suspect in the ideal of self-sufficiency.”²² In 1979, Paul Veyne published an article entitled “Mythe et réalité de l’autarcie à Rome” in which he discussed “une curieuse contradiction: que les Anciens (et leurs historiens) en aient tellement parlé et qu’ils l’aient si peu practiquée.”²³ Subsequently, many scholars began to refer to self-sufficiency as a myth²⁴ or a mirage.²⁵ In The Corrupting Sea, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell observed that “the prevalence of autarky has been deduced from its persistence as an ideal: practice has been inferred from rhetoric.”²⁶ They call “the pursuit of self-sufficiency … an ethical tenet rather than a practice observable in reality.”²⁷ More recently, in her excellent book Shopping in Ancient Rome, Claire Holleran pointed out that “the very fact that self-sufficiency was something to boast about suggests that this was not universal practice.”²⁸ Despite these doubts, historians continue to use the term but, with no generally accepted definition of self-sufficiency and an emerging consensus that, even if it was an ideal, it was not an achievable one, it is probably best to forgo the use of the term ‘self-sufficiency’ altogether and instead employ less ambiguous terminology such as ‘degrees of market dependency.’ A major goal of this book is to discuss what degrees of market dependency are plausible for various sorts of Roman farmers. Furthermore, I want to question some core assumptions of the modern discourse on self-sufficiency. Are our sources really advocating self-sufficiency as consistently and unambiguously as we tend to assume? It is worth noting that the Roman agricultural writers never use the word autarkeia nor any other term denoting the concept of self-sufficiency. Even if the pursuit of self-sufficiency (in some form) is in fact a rational economic strategy, it would be foolish to assume Roman farmers always behaved rationally.²⁹ The field of behavioral economics has identified many situations in which humans make economic decisions that are neither optimal nor unbiased.³⁰ I would suggest that many Roman farmers were not especially rational with respect to maximizing profit and that there were many different ideas about the best way to manage a farm.³¹ As the discussion of sources (below) indicates, advocating self-sufficient strategies could simply be a convenient way to attack one’s flashier, more market-reliant political rivals. Furthermore, was self-sufficiency (i.e., a very low degree of market dependence) a realistic goal from the perspective of resources and labor? In other words, could a Roman get anywhere close to self-sufficiency without vast estates to provide all the raw materials for his or her food, shelter, and clothing, and an army of slaves and/or dependents to farm the land, care for the animals, spin, weave, and make tools to provide even the minimum requirements of survival? Petronius’ Trimalchio seems to approach those conditions (Sat. 38) but surely no real Roman could aside from an emperor. Part of the appeal, finally, of the idea of self-sufficiency is that diminishing one’s reliance on the market provides security. But there were two far more practical ways to achieve security: friends and cash.³² Sensible Romans sought out both and, of course, neither could be acquired by pursuing self-sufficiency. This brings me to one further goal of this study: to consider not just the rural demand for goods and services but also rural demand for money.³³

1.3 Sources for Roman agriculture

This study draws on a wide range of textual and archaeological sources about which some preliminary remarks are in order. Four literary works are of particular importance: Cato’s De agricultura, Varro’s De re rustica, Columella’s De re rustica, and Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia. Due to their prominence in the following chapters, it is worthwhile discussing their value (and the problems associated with their use) as evidence immediately.

1.3.1 Cato’s De agricultura

Marcus Porcius Cato or Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE) was a prominent Roman politician, orator, and writer in the first half of the second century BCE. As a young man he fought against Hannibal in the Second Punic War and, in his final years, he helped bring about the Third Punic War and the destruction of Carthage. According to Plutarch (Cat. Mai. 3, 25), he was always devoted to agriculture, working beside his slaves in his youth and writing, probably in the 150s,³⁴ the De agricultura, his only surviving work. After briefly praising farmers as being the strongest men and most vigorous soldiers, Cato proceeds to discuss a range of subjects including how to go about purchasing a farm, what crops should be planted in what kinds of soil, the price of mills, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Problems and Sources
• 2 The parameters of Roman Agriculture
• 3 Buyers and Borrowers: The Rural Demand for Goods, Services, and Money
• 4 Vendors and Lenders: The Rural Supply of Goods and Services
• 5 Farmers’ Markets, Farmers’ Networks
• 6 Farmers in Roman Economic History
• Bibliography
• Index