Land and Securing the Future in the Roman Empire

Abstract

In this chapter, I examine the ways in which important constituencies in the Roman Empire, including the Roman imperial government, private property owners, and civic benefactors, used land as an economic resource to achieve their most important goals. In an economy that largely revolved around agriculture, land represented the most important source of wealth for most Roman property owners, while taxes from land and rents from imperial properties provided the bulk of revenues for the imperial government. Thus it is to be expected that long-term financial planning would revolve around land. I examine this situation more deeply by analysing the way in which economic actors used land to achieve specific financial goals and the factors that limited their ability to do so. To consider the Roman administration, its efforts to maintain the viability of town councils as an institution of government in the empire depended on ensuring that decurions were protected against the possibility of losing their land, and accordingly it adopted a series of policies, including prohibiting the alienation of land belonging to key social groups and, in late antiquity, defining the assets of decurions as being held in a kind of corporate trust by the local council. To secure benefactions, such as alimentary foundations in cities in Italy and the provinces, the imperial government and private benefactors found various ways to tie the expenditures for their programmes to income generated from land. However, there were limits to the capacity of land to support long-term financial goals. Although it was common for borrowers to use their land as security in credit arrangements, the evidence for loans secured by land from papyri in Egypt suggests that such loans were mostly short-term, and most often to meet immediate financial needs. Thus it seems unlikely that land could have often been leveraged to fund long-term investment in potentially productive business arrangements. An analysis of the ways in which land factored into long-term financial planning helps us to better understand the nature of the Roman economy and the limits on its capacity to grow.