Questioni di storia agraria tardoromana: schiavi, coloni, villae

Abstract

Three general issues, which have been recently widely discussed, are relevant to the historical reconstruction of different provincial setups in Late Antiquity. One issue is whether rural slavery was quantitatively limited everywhere in the Empire and should be included in the free colonate, as scholars mainly argued in past decades, or whether it remained the type of labour more suitable to agricultural systems oriented towards a market economy, thus particularly flourishing in the East during the 4th-5thcentury AD development. Recent economic and legal historical research has identified colonate not as an organic part of agricultural systems where property did not concentrate on direct production but as a different institution: not a type of land rent but a “contract of employment” where coloni cultivated manorial lands (here again East and Egypt predominate) and were paid by the use of plots of land. Therefore in a kind of “precapitalistic” context the colonic workforce was a salary. Lastly was the luxurious Late Roman villa (praetorium) mainly the site for accumulation of surpluses produced autonomously in colonic farms or did it keep specific features of the classic model, i.e. resident slaves and direct agricultural production? Were well-known western villas similar to those still to be explored thoroughly in the East?