Law and the Rural Economy in the Roman Empire

4. Legal Order in the Rural Economy

131 Chapter 4 Legal Order in the Rural Economy %% My investigation of the law of farm tenancy in the previous chap‑ ter suggests both the flexibility of the Roman legal institutions and the limits of their authority in defining the conditions under which land­ owners and tenants participated in the agrarian economy. The Roman government displayed considerable flexibility as it endeavored to accom‑ modate within the conventions of Roman private law a wide variety of tenure arrangements, many of which were probably in origin quite foreign to Roman practices. The flexibility that the government demonstrated in such a key area of tenancy law as the allocation of risk suggests its recogni‑ tion of the importance to the Roman estate economy of the long-term, uninterrupted occupation of the land by productive farmers. In this chapter, I approach Roman legal institutions from a somewhat different perspective, by examining in greater detail the limits on what the government could accomplish in its efforts to establish a basic legal regime governing the agrarian economy. In the first two sections of this chapter, I focus on imperial constitutions concerned with some of the difficult legal questions raised by the significant role that long-term tenure played in the Roman economy. In the latter part of the chapter, I examine other areas of the law important for the rural economy, in particular, the adjudication of legal issues surrounding debt, as well as disputes over possession and ownership of property. The evidence to be examined includes imperial constitutions preserved in the Code of Justinian and the Theodosian Code from the third and fourth centuries, and even later. These texts provide us with some hints about the complexities of the contemporary agrarian economy and of the difficulties that the government faced in adjudicating disputes. Although Law and the Rural Economy in the Roman Empire 132 the focus of my book is on the early empire, I think that it is justified to consider material from the third and fourth centuries together. Recent scholarship has moved away from the notion of a sudden break in agrar‑ ian relationships in the fourth century with the development of the late antique fiscal system and instead has traced the origins of this institution to conditions in the third century and earlier.1 Accordingly, constitutions from the fourth century and sometimes later help us to trace some of the issues that the government had to confront in the earlier period as it de‑ veloped a legal policy. As I argue, the state’s power to regulate the rural economy was quite limited, and as it faced some of the contradictions raised by its policy of favoring long-term tenure, the state struggled to define property rights of landowners and tenants more precisely. This effort suggests that the realworld tenure arrangements were a good deal more complicated than what was envisioned in the legal authorities’ responses to petitions. The government responded to this situation by carefully defining prop‑ erty rights when they were either vaguely defined or defined in such a way that it found unacceptable. Usually, the property rights that the govern‑ ment would reject gave too much power to the tenant and compromised the interests of landowners. In facing the difficult task of defining the rights and obligations of landowners and small farmers in diverse tenure arrange‑ ments, the government struggled to balance the interests of these groups as it sought to impose a kind of legal order over the rural economy. This legal order rested on the principle that the Roman law courts were the authori‑ tative venue through which to settle disputes. The efforts of the govern‑ ment to impose this legal order did not mean that private means of dispute settlement ceased to function. Rather, the government’s legal policy pro‑ vided both landowners and smaller farmers consistent legal norms that helped to shape the private arrangements that both parties would make. Ultimately, the existence of viable state institutions to settle disputes ac‑ corded the economically weaker party some protection. This tended to strengthen the hand of smaller farmers in the Roman economy, with sig‑ nificant effects for the incentives for investment by large land­owners as well as the distribution of wealth between city and countryside. Legal Issues Arising from Long-Term Tenancy Arrangements To begin with local tenure arrangements based on custom, the government tended to recognize them as enforceable in its courts. Much of the task of [3.145.55.169] Project MUSE (2024-04...