Law and the Rural Economy in the Roman Empire

3. Roman Legal Policy and Private Farm Tenancy

93 Chapter 3 Roman Legal Policy and Private Farm Tenancy %% The formal and informal institutions surrounding farm tenancy played a fundamental role in shaping the Roman agrarian economy, in par‑ ticular, the distribution of wealth between large landowners and the small farmers who cultivated the bulk of the land. In this chapter, I clarify the likely economic effects engendered by the Roman government’s legal poli‑ cies surrounding farm tenancy by analyzing how the jurists dealt with two areas of the law crucial to the Roman agrarian economy: the risk in agri‑ culture caused by weather and the tenant’s security of tenure. My focus in this chapter is on the formal institutions surrounding tenancy. They encompass the laws surrounding land tenure, in particular the classical Roman law of farm tenancy, as well as the institutions that served to en‑ force these laws, including the law courts and the Roman state. Informal institutions, such as social values and local traditions, are more difficult to detect in the legal sources but probably also played a significant role in defining the conditions surrounding land tenure.1 Farm tenancy was an institution crucial to the financial interests of upper-class Romans.2 It provided Roman landowners with a means to simplify the difficult task of managing diverse properties that were often scattered geographically.3 In addition, tenancy gave landowners a means of organizing labor, a consideration that might be especially important in exploiting properties that were isolated or for other reasons could not be cultivated in common with a larger set of properties.4 In some cases, ten‑ ancy provided an additional advantage as well, in that it allowed land‑ owners to share the costs of investing in agriculture with their tenants. Law and the Rural Economy in the Roman Empire 94 The ­managerial and investment-sharing advantages of farm tenancy might be very attractive for upper-class landowners who could reduce their own managerial costs and exposure to risk by relying on tenants for the dayto -day management of their land and for the continued investment in its upkeep that was needed to ensure its productivity for the long term.5 By examining the formal institutions surrounding farm tenancy, we can trace certain broad principles that guided Roman legal policy. The Roman government did not prescribe systems of land tenure but instead reacted to legal issues put before it as it responded to the needs of the empire’s sub‑ jects. To some extent Roman legal policy was guided by a legal conserva‑ tism, since the government was reluctant to cast aside time-honored legal categories as economic and social conditions in the empire changed. But the very efforts of the Roman legal authorities to use conventional Roman private law as a way to interpret the rights and duties of the empire’s subjects often allows us to glimpse at the underlying economic relation‑ ships. At the same time, however, I would argue that the government was guided by an understanding of the economic realities of the empire that it shared with upper-class Romans. This is the class, of course, from which the Roman legal authorities were recruited.6 In the conception of the ju‑ rists, agriculture represented primarily a form of security rather than an in‑ vestment in the modern sense. Many upper-class landowners would have managed their holdings in such a way as to achieve stable and predictable incomes that would help maintain their privileged social position. Such landowners would not have been interested first and foremost in choos‑ ing among various options for investing their wealth, since the Roman economy offered them few investment choices that could be expected to provide stable returns for the long term.7 In its efforts to adjudicate legal issues connected with the agrarian economy, the Roman government faced the difficult problem of interpret‑ ing in a consistent manner the rights and duties of the empire’s subjects, who lived under a wide variety of land-tenure arrangements. This prob‑ lem became more acute as the imperial government was called upon with increasing frequency to settle legal disputes. Thus, when we analyze the government’s legal policy in the rural economy, we won’t be examining the tenure arrangements of any particular locality but rather the way in which the Roman legal authorities defined such tenure arrangements as they imposed a legal order that facilitated the adjudication of disputes. Their policy was to foster, to the extent that the adjudication of legal...