roman agrarian policies and the italian countryside 133–91 bc

257 Pages·2017·4.78 MB·English

ROMAN AGRARIAN POLICIES AND
THE ITALIAN COUNTRYSIDE 133–91 BC

Kim Young-Chae

Merton College

University of Oxford

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,

Trinity Term 2016
Roman Agrarian Policies and the Italian Countryside 133–91 BC

Kim Young-Chae, Merton College, D.Phil, Trinity Term 2016

Abstract
This thesis is an investigation into the economic background to the Social War (91–88
BC), a rebellion against the Roman Republic by Rome‘s allies in Italy, and examines the allied
reception of Roman agrarian schemes in the decades prior to the Social War, with particular
attention to free small-scale farmers. It has been argued that the consequences of the Gracchan
agrarian reforms contributed to the decision of the Italians to revolt in 91 BC. The history of the
Gracchan period, however, suffers from limited documentary sources. Furthermore, as
Romano-centric preconceptions underlay many modern studies in which the Social War was
understood as a fight for the Roman citizenship, the Gracchan reforms and the post-Gracchan
agrarian policies have not been fully explored from an allied perspective. After reviewing the
demographic approach to the ‗second-century rural crisis‘ which allergedly prompted the
Gracchan reforms, the thesis attempts to understand the operations of the Gracchan reforms in
the territories of the Latin and Italian states via an archaeological case-study of the Latin town
of Luceria in northern Apulia, where large areas of the Roman land division and settlement
system known as centuriation were identified near the town. The thesis moves on to the post-
Gracchan era and investigates how the allied interest in Roman public land (ager publicus) was
continuously threatened or neglected under the post-Gracchan agrarian legislation (121–111
BC), and argues that allied small-scale farmers in particular stood to lose a lot in this process.
The thesis then endeavours to demonstrate how the political aspirations of the allies had
evolved in tandem with Roman agrarian policies, from a request for passive protection from
maltreatment by Romans in the 120s BC to the demand for an active share in power by 91 BC.
The thesis discusses Saturninus‘ agrarian schemes in 103 and 100 BC, whose implications have
been neglected in the context both of Roman agrarian history and the Social War, and presents
Livius Drusus‘ scheme of extensive colonisation of Italy in 91 BC as a complete reversal of
policy, contravening the post-Gracchan agrarian settlement which had confirmed the end of
land distributions in Italy. The thesis concludes by arguing that the Roman agrarian policy on
the redistribution of public land was the cause of the most consistent and systematic
maltreatment of the theoretically autonomous allied states, in which the inequality between
Romans and Italians was increasingly highlighted.
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Acknowledgment

I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to Edward Bispham, my masters and
doctoral Supervisor. The conventions of the acknowledgement cannot do justice to my debts to
him over the past six years. Without him, my experiences at Oxford and in Italy would have
been different and the outcome of my studies lacked what merit it may have. Nicholas Purcell,
Anna Clark and Josephine Quinn read the drafts of the earlier chapters and provided me with
useful suggestions and comments. I am grateful to Nicholas Purcell for being a constant source
of support and encouragement. I thank Andrew Wilson for clarifying a misunderstood feature
from the Nocelli farm and Gregory Hutchinson for encouraging me to put forward my ideas on
Appian. John Hayes offered his views on the pottery from the Nocelli farm from photographs. I
am also grateful to Jonathan Prag, my College Advisor, for his kind support and guidance.
Alastair Small first indicated to me Apulia, and Michael Crawford clarified what I
could find there. My special thanks go to Dominic Rathbone. In Rome, I gained greatly from
the discussion with Jeremia Pelgrom. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the National
Collection of Aerial Photography and the British School at Rome, especially that of Alessandra
Giovenco.
This study would never have been possible without the works of previous scholars.

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Contents

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... 2
Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 6
1. The Missing Population: State Settlement Schemes and Demography .................................. 12
1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 12
2. Tradition and challenges ..................................................................................................... 15
3. A reading of the Augustan figures ...................................................................................... 22
4. The theory of the moderate population growth and the problem of interpreting the figures
for 125/124 and 115/114. ........................................................................................................ 25
5. The poorer assidui and higher mobility .............................................................................. 30
6. Colonisation and the increase in the census figures in the early second century ................ 35
7. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 41
2. Small Farm Sites From the Second Century ........................................................................... 45
1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 45
2. Small-scale farmers in Italy in the second century ............................................................. 46
1. Small-scale farmers: who is a peasant? ........................................................................... 46
2. A putative granary at Pievina in central Etruria .............................................................. 51
3. From a hut to a villa: a case from Matrice and a farmhouse at Cercemaggiore in
Samnium ............................................................................................................................. 56
3. Farms in the Centuriated Landscape: .................................................................................. 60
the Nocelli Farm and the Posta Crusta Farm in Northern Apulia and the Problem of Latin and
Allied Territory under the Gracchan Agrarian Reforms ......................................................... 60
1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 60
2. The origin of ager publicus at Luceria and the problem of Latin territory ..................... 62
3. The centuriation patterns at Luceria ................................................................................ 69
4. The excavated evidence of the Nocelli farm and other farm sites in the centuriated area
at Luceria ............................................................................................................................. 77
5. The Posta Crusta farm at Herdonia ................................................................................. 92
6. The land redditus in the lex agraria of 111 .................................................................... 97
4. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 104
3. Post-Gracchan Agrarian Laws 121-111 ................................................................................ 108
1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 108
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2. The three post-Gracchan agrarian laws of Appian, the lex Thoria and the lex agraria of
111 ......................................................................................................................................... 110
1. ‗…ex lege plebeiue scito exue h(ac) l(ege)…‘: ager publicus made private between 133
and 111 .............................................................................................................................. 110
2. What did Tiberius forbid? ............................................................................................. 115
3. The lex Thoria ............................................................................................................... 122
4. To conclude, which is which? ....................................................................................... 134
3. The sale of ager publicus by the old possessors and non-Romans in Italy ....................... 141
4. the privatisation of ager publicus and the allied enjoyment of ius commercii .................. 147
5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 152
4. Agrarian Legislation 104-103 and the Problem of Veteran Settlements ............................... 155
1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 155
2. The agrarian proposal of L. Marcius Philippus ................................................................. 156
3. Ager in Africa: the agrarian law of L. Appuleius Saturninus in 103 ................................. 160
5. Agrarian Legislation 100-91 and the Development of the Italian Question ......................... 185
1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 185
2. The colonial law of 100, the Italians and the urban plebs ................................................. 185
3. The 90s .............................................................................................................................. 213
4. The legislation of M. Livius Drusus the Younger ............................................................. 228
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 241
Bibliography.............................................................................................................................. 247

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Introduction

In 125 the Latin town of Fregellae revolted against the Roman Republic.1 It was
captured and was destroyed as a punishment by the Roman praetor L. Opimius.2 The
circumstances of this startling event, the rebellion of a Latin colony which had showed
conspicuous fidelity to Rome during the Hannibalic invasion, are not stated in the sources. It is
important, however, that Asconius cautiously notes that the other Latin allies were also
rebellious at the time and seemed to have been crushed by Opimius.3 Plutarch says that in Rome
C. Gracchus was prosecuted for causing the allies to revolt with their headquarters at Fregellae.
The author of De viris illustribus believes that Asculum, the the chief town of the allied
Picentes (ciuitas foederata), revolted too, although this may well be retrojection from the Social
War in 91.4 It seems, at any rate, that the Fregellans ended up being isolated in staging full-scale
uprising. They cannot, however, have waged a war against Rome without expecting that support
would be forthcoming; their action would otherwise have been the purest insanity.5 In all
probability, they rebelled, believing that ‗other allies of the Latin name‘ would join them and
waited for the support to come until the treachery of a native admitted the Romans.
It is unlikely that Asconius was here confused and referred to the Social War: he
relates this before moving on to Opimius‘ consulship in 122. It is an important testimony from a
near-contemporary source that Latin dissatisfaction was widespread in the 120s. Nevertheless, it
appears that no Latin ally formed a united front with the Fregellans when they revolted. In 91,
however, when Asculum rose up against Rome, perhaps prematurely, this became known as the
outbreak of the Social War (also known as the Marsic or Italian War) when the most of Rome‘s

1 All dates are B.C. unless otherwise noted.
2 On the rebellion of Fregellae: Livy Per. 60. 3; Asc.17 C; Vell. 2. 6. 4; Val. Max. 2. 8. 4; Plut. CG. 3.1;
De vir ill. 65. 2; Obseq 30; Amm. Marc. 25. 9. 10. Loyalty during the Second Punic War: Livy 27. 10; 27.
26; Plut. Marc. 29.
3 Asc. 17 C: ‗Notum est Opimium in praetura Fregellas cepisse, quo facto visus est ceteros quoque
nominis Latini socios male animatos repressisse.‘
4 Brunt (1965), 90; Rawson (1998), 72 n. 15. Sherwin-White (1973), 103; Conole (1981), 135-36
speculate that the ‗twelve Latin colonies (duodecim coloniae)‘ in Cic. Caec. 102, which seem to have
inferior status, were involved in the rebellion of Fregellae.
5 Conole (1981), 135; Rawson (1998), 72.
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allies in central and southern Italy rebelled against Rome.6 This prompts questions. Why did the
Italian allies make a decision in 91 different from that of Latins who did not follow the lead of
Fregellae in 125? What brought about the change in the attitude of the allied groups in this
period?7 What was the nature and extent of the allied — both Latin and Italian — grievances?
What were the major social and economic issues in these years that might have influenced the
decision of Rome‘s allies to revolt?8 And why did the Latins, except Venusia, not join the revolt
of 91?
This thesis is principally interested in this thirty-four-year period between the rebellion
of Fregellae and the tribunate of M. Livius Drusus the Younger; it investigates the allied
reception of Roman agrarian schemes from Ti. Gracchus‘ legislation onwards, with particular
attention to free small-scale farmers. It has been argued that the consequences of the Gracchan
agrarian reforms which redistributed landless citizens on Roman public land (ager publicus) in
Italy which had been illegally occupied by the rich contributed to both the revolts, in 125 and
91.9 The revolt of Fregellae may well be connected to the failure of the citizenship proposal of
the consul and the Gracchan agrarian commissioner M. Fulvius Flaccus in the same year, who
expected that some allied landowners would be bought off with enfranchisement and stop

6 On the outbreak of the Social War: Vell. 2. 15. 1; Livy Per. 72.
7 In what follows, where I speak of the ‗Italians‘ I am refering to Rome‘s allies in Italy, which is
represented as the Latin ‗Italici‘ and the Greek ‗Ἰηαιηώηαη‘ in the works of ancient writers I cite. It is
unclear, however, that such ancient usage always strictly excludes Latins (for the discussion on Appian‘s
use of Ἰηαιηώηαη in pre-Social War period, see Chapter 5 Section 2), and when I use ‗Italians‘ I shall in
general refer to both Latin and Italian allies, as in Badian (1970/71), 373, that is, to borrow the words of
the lex agraria of 111, ‗Romanus sociumue nominisue Latini (lex agr. l. 21)‘. I will make further
qualification in referring to Latin allies specifically. Where I use ‗allies (socii)‘, I am referring to both
Latin and Italian allies.
8 Sherwin-White (1973), 134-49 argued that the Social War was the revolt from Rome, not a fight for the
Roman citizenship, and this view followed by Nagle (1973); Scullard (1982). Contra, Brunt (1965);
Gabba (1994), 104-13. Mouritsen (1998) made a valuable contribution to the study of the Social War by
cautioning against confusing the outcome of the war with its aim, that is, understanding the Social War as
a fight to achieve Roman citizenship. The view that that the Social War is best understood as a fight for
independence has been further advanced in Pobjoy (2000); Bispham (2007a); Bispham (2016) and seems
now to be the received opinion, as in Roselaar (2010), 283, 289. Fronda (2010), 324 considers that the
Italians may have revolted in order to gain Roman citizenship.
9 On the link between Flaccus‘ enfranchisement proposal and the revolt of Fregellae: Sherwin-White
(1973), 134; Stockton (1979), 96-97; Gabba (1989), 242; Lintott (1994), 76; Conole (1981), 133-34;
Rawson (1998), 72. Fulvius Flaccus‘ enfranchisement proposal: App. BC 1. 21. 8. The Gracchan agrarian
reforms as the cause of the Social War: Salmon (1967), 323; Nagle (1973); Howarth (1999); Rathbone
(2003), 160; Roselaar (2010), 222, 284, 289. Fronda (2010), 324.
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opposing the Gracchan operations; our sources agree that the murder of the tribune M. Livius
Drusus the Younger in 91, who re-introduced the proposal for the distribution of ager publicus
in Italy and also proposed enfranchisement of the allies, or the Latins, triggered the Social
War.10
The history of the Gracchan period, however, suffers from limited documentary sources,
and while Romano-centric preconceptions underlay many modern Gracchan studies in which
the Social War was understood as a fight for the Roman citizenship, the Gracchan reforms and
the post-Gracchan agrarian policies have not been fully explored from an allied perspective, and
the connection between the alleged Italian desire for Roman citizenship and Roman agrarian
policies about the allocation of ager publicus has sometimes been viewed with suspicion.11 That
non-Roman interest under Roman agrarian policies is still a vastly under-explored topic is
arguably owing to the limitations of our literary sources; archaeology has been increasingly
adopted in research into second century developments and enriched our understanding of the
topic.12 In the same vein, this study is primarily interested in how much archaeology could offer
in reappraising the Gracchan countryside and illuminating the social and economic conditions
of the free smallholders in Italy, who are often under-represented or oversimplified in the
literary tradition. Above all, when it comes to the agrarian history of this period, our most
secure item of information is clearly the so-called lex agraria of 111, the only epigraphically
attested Roman agrarian law dating to the second century.13 The information of the lex agraria
will be used as the principal and firmest basis for my discussion throughout this study.
With these considerations, the structure of the thesis is organized as follows. First, some
preliminary discussions on the so-called ‗second-century crisis‘ in Italy, which allegedly
prompted Ti. Gracchus‘ legislation in 133, have to be made. Brunt‘s claim that an assessment of

10 See Chapter 5 Section 4 for Flaccus‘ citizenship proposal, Section 5 for the sources on Drusus‘s
murder and the outbreak of the Social War.
11 Notably, Mouritsen (1998).
12 Frederiksen (1971); Dyson (1978); Rathbone (1981); Carandini (1994), Patterson et al (2004),
Rathbone (2008); Launaro (2011) with the revision by Hin (2013); De Ligt (2015).
13 All references to the lex agraria are to Crawford‘s edition in 1996. The commentary in Lintott (1992)
is valuable. The new edition of Sisani (2015) will be cited where relevant.
8
population is indispensible to understanding the agrarian developments in the late Republic has
value,14 and in this light, Chapter 1, ‗The Missing Population: State Settlement Schemes and
Demography‘, reviews the ongoing debate about demography of Italy in the second century.
My approach to the problems of using the census figures and the assessment of population
dynamics in the second century is based on two premises. First, our census results are defective
and there were a large number of people who were not counted in the census returns; second,
dispossessed free small-holders were likely to become more mobile, thereby contributing to low
census figures. I suggest that instead of attempting to derive absolute population numbers from
our sources, our goal should be to explain what seem to be overall trends in the census figures
and find implications there. I argue that two noticeable increases in the census figures in the
second century (the first is observed the years between 203 and 163; the second between 130
and 124) were perhaps related to the state‘s land distribution programmes to settle its mobile
population. It may be that the state‘s large scale land distribution policy in the century, that is
the active colonisation in the first three decades in the century and the Gracchan reforms,
contributed to the increase in census figures.
While Chapter 1 concerns the demographic representation of Roman citizen
smallholders, Chapter 2, ‗Small Farm Sites from the Second Century‘, is interested in the
archaeological presence of non-Roman small-scale farmers and examines small rural sites
which show interesting aspects of the agricultural economy of the small-scale farmers and the
agrarian changes they seem to have faced in this period. At the outset, it is imperative to clarify
what we mean by small-scale farmers, and we move on to discuss the excavated small rural
sites from central Etruria and Samnium, which deserve more attention than they have received.
Yet it is the Apulian farms from the centuriated areas in the Tavoliere that form the core of my
archaeological investigation into Gracchan countryside: the farms and the centuriation systems
will be examined in the context of Gracchan operations in the allied territories.

14 Brunt (1971) 3-4; echoed in Morley (2006), 321.
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An extensive bibliography already exists on the question of identifying the post-
Gracchan agrarian laws in Appian‘s infamous passage (App. BC 1. 27. 121-24), often with the
agrarian law of Sp. Thorius on which Cicero comments twice (Cic. Brut. 136; Cic. De or. 2.
284) and the epigraphic lex agraria of 111. Chapter 3, ‗The Post-Gracchan Agrarian Laws 121-
111‘, attempts to reconstruct the post-Gracchan developments, with the emphasis on the
situation of the non-Roman small farmers during this winding-up process of the Gracchan
reforms. Chapter 3 provides a review of literary sources and also of historiography. Mouritsen
(1998) dismissed the link between the enfranchisement question and the troubles over the
Roman agrarian schemes before the tribunate of Livius Drusus. This view, however, was
brought back into discussion by Roselaar (2010), and there needs to be further examination. The
epigraphically attested lex agraria of 111 should be the starting point and used as an external
corrective of Appian‘s account and the most useful guide in understanding Cicero‘s brief
remarks.
The last Chapters 4, ‗Agrarian Legislation 104–103 and the Problem of Veteran
Settlements‘, and 5, ‗Agrarian Legislation 100–91 and the Development of the Italian Question‘,
examine the agrarian measures in the years between the lex agraria of 111 and the tribunate of
Livius Drusus in 91. In this period the provision of land for discharged Roman soldiers grew as
a central question in Roman politics, as did the issue of how to reconcile the need for veteran
settlements with the availability of land in Italy and the allied occupation of that land. This
period also witnessed what is often called the ‗Italian question‘, that is, ‗the problem of the
enfranchisement of the Italians as it appears in Roman politics,‘15 maturing in tandem with
Roman agrarian policy: a request for passive protection from maltreatment in the 120s
developed into the demand for an active share in power by 91. However, this twenty-year
period between the Gracchan era and the pivotal year of 91 has been treated marginally in the
history of Roman agrarian policy in modern scholarship, although it was not extraneous to the
development of the ‗Italian question‘. In particular, Saturninus‘ agrarian schemes in 103 and

15 The definition by Badian (1970/71), 373.
10