Private Property Rights and Public Claims on Land in the Roman Empire

Abstract

The Roman administration imposed restrictions on private property rights stemming largely from fiscal concerns. It sought to accomplish two goals. First, the administration sought to assure stable revenues from taxes on land, which required measures both to enforce tax obligations on land, and to take measures to ensure that land liable for taxation remained cultivated. This latter effort often involved accommodating systems of land tenure that compromised the rights of landowners in conventional Roman law. Second, administrative policies increasingly imposed restrictions on the freedom that property owners, especially local landowning elites serving on town councils, had in disposing of their land. Here the aim was to maintain the viability of municipal structures throughout the empire. Fiscal concerns often resulted in liens imposed on private land by the Fiscus, which constrained the ways in which landowners could use their land, e.g., pledging it as security for loans, or selling it to use the proceeds for other types of investments. In addition, administrative policy limited the capacity of key social groups, particularly decurions, to alienate their land. Eventually, in the later empire, local town councils exercised a degree of corporate control over the land belonging to decurions. In theory, then, much of the land belonging to the wealthiest class of landowners throughout the empire was subject to liens by both the Fiscus and by local councils. All this affected the capacity of landowners to dispose over their land. Roman legal authorities had to balance efforts to promote freedom of contracting against fiscal concerns. These administrative policies had some distributional effects, complementing those resulting from the administration’s intervention in the agrarian economy by means of extensive imperial properties. This policy, grounded in the Roman government’s efforts to secure stable revenues, made the state a major economic actor, with property that rivalled the combined holding of the senatorial order, and so to some degree inhibited the seemingly inevitable stratification of wealth in Roman society.