Dennis Kehoe, Land Tenure and Agricultural Regulation in Roman Law
Roman empire, privatisation, property rights, public/private, provinces/centres, legal protection, legal progress, fiscal policy, balance of powers, balancing common vs private interest..
Dennis P. Kehoe wrote:
Chapter 49
Tenure of Land and Agricultural Regulation
1. Introduction
The legal institutions surrounding land played a crucial role in shaping the most important relationships defining the Roman economy, since, as in other pre-industrial societies, it was dominated by agriculture. These legal institutions affected the fortunes of all the groups who were involved in the cultivation of land, including both estate owners and small private landowners, farm tenants and agricultural labourers, and so were an important factor in the capacity of the Roman economy to change and grow, as well as in the distribution of wealth across society. To consider the large landowners who comprised the elite classes of the Roman Empire, the laws defining ownership of land affected these groups’ incentives to invest in land, and so influenced the ability of the Empire’s agrarian economy to produce the surpluses needed to sustain the urban populations and urban economies across the Empire.
Likewise, many of these same landowners depended on farm tenants to cultivate the land from which they derived their wealth and social privileges. Thus the law’s treatment of tenancy affected the fortunes of much of the Empire’s population, as well as the ways in which landowners could profit from their land. Finally, the largest landowner in the Roman Empire was the state itself. The Imperial treasury, or fiscus, controlled a vast and ever growing number of estates and other properties including mines and quarries in Italy and in the provinces. These lands provided an important source of revenue that supplemented those collected from private land in the provinces, so that the legal administration of this land represented an important factor affecting the Empire’s agrarian economy. Land on Imperial estates was subject to legal rules somewhat different from those regulating private land, and the way in which land tenure was defined on Imperial land merits consideration alongside private land to provide a complete picture of the role that law played in the rural economy.
2. Privatisation of Land
The long-term trend in the Roman Empire was to define and protect private property rights to land. This process began in Italy during the Republican period, but continued in the provinces under the Principate. In archaic Rome, it is likely that a great deal of land was owned corporately by kinship groups, or gentes. In this circumstance, the head of the gens, or possibly the pater familias in a smaller kinship group, would exercise considerable discretion in allocating land among the group’s members. Although this is a matter of debate, it is likely that there was individually owned land in archaic Rome, although a great deal of land remained communal, as it did in later periods, when it was used for pasture. A gradual process led to the development of a legal category of private land over which the owner exercised full control, with the ability, within certain limits, to use it as he or she saw fit, and to alienate it by sale or gift, or to use it as collateral for a loan. As Rome extended its power in Italy, it confiscated a great deal of the land occupied by the towns it brought under its control. This public land, or ager publicus, comprised a considerable portion of the land in Italy. Much of it was left in the hands of its original owners and their successors, but without a formal legal title recognised in Roman law. The one protection that such occupiers might have from the perspective of Roman law was access to the interdicts that protected lawful protection. Some of this land, called ager censorius, was leased out to occupiers who paid an annual charge, or vectigal, for it; the contracts issued by the censors probably involved middlemen who leased the right to collect the annual rent from the occupiers.
The major changes in the status of public land in Italy occurred in two phases, at the time of the Sextio-Licinian laws of 367 BC, and the Gracchan land reforms of 133–121 BC. What precisely this legislation involved remains a topic of considerable scholarly controversy, but both sets of laws set limits on the occupation of ager publicus. One purpose of the Gracchan reforms (133, 123–121 BC) was to increase the number of assidui, citizens with sufficient property to be able to perform military service. This was accomplished by placing restrictions on the amount of public land that could be occupied, and redistributing the excess to Roman citizens. This newly redistributed land became privatised; it was classified as ager privatus vectigalisque, since at first the occupiers were required to pay a rent for it, with restrictions on their rights to alienate it. Subsequent legislation soon removed the obligation to pay the vectigal, and in the lex agraria of 111 BC both the land that had been distributed in the Gracchan programme and the public land left in the hands of its occupiers were privatised.
This tendency toward privatisation of land in Italy, together with the legal remedies aimed at protecting private rights to land, responded to the needs of an increasingly commercialised agrarian economy.
The substantial influx of wealth into Italy from the provinces, especially in the second century BC, resulted in prolonged economic change. The so-called villa-economy of Roman Italy featured compact estates, often cultivated with slave labour, that produced cash crops, in particular wine and olive oil, for growing markets in Rome and in other cities in Italy. The establishment and protection of private rights to land enhanced the incentives that landowners had to invest in intensive agriculture.
Roman legal policy also created private rights to other commodities connected with agriculture, including pasturing, access to roads, and water. The praedial or rustic servitudes represent a way of defining in terms of law reciprocal relationships that landowners in an agricultural community devised to share resources that were vital to agriculture but that were also disparately and unevenly distributed. A servitude represented a right, for example, to draw water, imposed on a “servient” property to benefit another “dominant” property. Servitudes were permanent rights, attached to the land rather than the persons who created them, and thus the holder of a servitude had an in rem [general rather than personal] claim to it.
Privatising land formed a major component of Rome’s policy in administering the provinces. There, the full rights of ownership in Roman law, dominium ex iure Quiritium, was only available to Roman citizens who owned land that had Italian rights, or ius Italicum. This right would commonly be granted to Roman colonies, towns in the province in which all the citizens would also have Roman citizenship. Until the reign of Diocletian (284–305), land with ius Italicum, like land in Italy, was exempt from the taxes generally imposed on provincial land.
[Egypt]
The evidence for the development of private property in many provinces is indirect, in the form of archaeological remains of estates that produced foodstuffs for the market, including in Gaul, Germany, Spain, Africa and Syria. In Egypt, papyrological evidence allows the process of the privatisation of land to be followed more closely. There the Romans inherited an agricultural system from the Ptolemies in which a great deal of land was under the control of the crown as royal land, ge basilike. Under Roman administration, katoecic land, originally assigned by the Ptolemies to support soldiers, became freely transferable, and for all intents and purposes private land (. Beginning in the Julio-Claudian period, the Romans changed the types of taxes collected from privately held land, replacing periodically readjusted taxes with a much lower fixed rate. One aspect of protecting private rights to land involved its registration. In Egypt, each nome (an administrative division of the province) had a “property registry” or “bureau of acquisitions” (βιβλιοθήκη ἐγκτήσεων), where transactions involving property were recorded, including both sales and other changes in ownership, as well as liens. These efforts facilitated transactions involving land, since, with more certain knowledge about the status of land, people would be more able to buy and sell land as well as to use it as security in loans.
Another reform to safeguard property rights over provincial land was the “long-time prescription”, or longi temporis praescriptio. This legal principle, first documented in a rescript issued in Egypt by the Emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211), protected lawful possessors of provincial land (different from Italic land, for which the rules of usucapion applied) against rival claims of ownership, say by people disputing an inheritance or past creditors. If the lawful possessor held the land for ten years, he would be protected from a suit from a rival claimant from the same city, and against a rival claimant from elsewhere if he held it for twenty years. However, claims by the Imperial treasury, or fiscus, such as might arise in the case of tax arrears or debts connected with the performance of a civic liturgy, were not subject to this prescription. Quite possibly, the prescription represented an effort to respond to disorder following the Antonine plague in 165 and subsequent years that could have compromised records and led to disputes over land. In Egypt, the policies described here helped to foster a class of landowners, similar to the curial classes in other cities in the Empire, to serve on the town councils created there at the beginning of the third century. In the third century, the development of large estates culminated in the immense properties of the Alexandrian magnate Aurelius Appianus and members of his circle, as documented in the Heroninos archive.
3. Farm Tenancy
Farm tenancy was a major aspect of the Roman legal regulations that surrounded land. The formal law of farm tenancy, locatio conductio, probably dates to the second century BC, when the other remedies for consensual contracts were created, including sale (emptio venditio), partnership (societas) and mandate (mandatum). However … as an economic institution farm tenancy was much older, since some form of it is characteristic of virtually all pre-industrial agrarian economies. Farm tenancy is to be distinguished from another form of land tenure, precarium. A person occupying land under precarium did so at the discretion of the landowner and had few rights—he could only stay on the land and cultivate it if the owner allowed this, and the owner could rescind his permission at any time. It is thought that in archaic Rome, landowners offered their clients access to land under this type of arrangement.
In its basic components … the classical Roman lease seems designed to answer the needs of landowners seeking to gain income from farms in which they had invested to profit from the burgeoning commercial agriculture in the late Republic. The conventional unit leased to a tenant was a farm, generally called a fundus. The term fundus is a very general one that refers to a farm as an individual autonomous unit of production, one that generally included a farmhouse, or villa. The leasing of a fundus can be contrasted with farm leases from Roman Egypt, which were generally for individual parcels of land or orchards. The conventional Roman farm lease was normally set for five years, and the tenant paid a rent in cash. The landlord’s primarily obligation was to provide a farm that the tenant could cultivate (frui), whereas the tenant was required to cultivate the farm in accordance with the terms of the lease and pay the rent (merces). The tenant would be liable for any damage inflicted on the farm beyond what could be accounted for by wear and tear alone. The tenant was normally free to sublet the farm (unless a specific contractual provision forbade this). The landlord had ample leverage against an unsatisfactory tenant. The landlord could dismiss the tenant at the end of the lease period. If the tenant failed to pay the rent or damaged the farm, the landlord could proceed against the property that the tenant brought onto the farm, the invecta inlata importata, which were pledged as security for the rent and for the condition of the farm but did not pass into the possession of the landlord, in contrast to many other credit arrangements. Two legal remedies were created in the Republic to facilitate the efforts of landlords to enforce the terms of leases. One was the Salvian interdict (interdictum Salvianum), by which a creditor (in the case of a farm lease, the lessor) could claim possession of the pledged property, not only from the debtor (the tenant), but also from any other person possessing it. …
What often determines the economic relationship between landowner and tenant, and thus affects the bargaining power of the two parties, is the way in which the costs of investment are shared. We can gain some understanding of how the jurists envisioned the allocation of investment from a famous text in which Ulpian cites a letter of the late-first-century jurist Neratius (D.19.2.19.2) about what the landlord was expected to provide so that the tenant would have a farm that he could use (frui). In this text, the landlord was expected to provide buildings, storage facilities; wine presses and olive presses; in other words, the most expensive equipment, which was often fixed to the ground. The tenant for his part was responsible for providing other equipment, such as ropes and tools. By implication, the tenant was normally expected to provide other movable capital, including draft animals and even slaves. In this type of lease, the tenant, paying a cash rent, would be involved in commercial agriculture. Roman farm tenancy, however, was far more complex than is suggested by this type of lease. Indeed, it is likely that many landowners, even in the period when commercial agriculture expanded in the late Republic, leased small plots of land to tenants with few resources of their own, who functioned as farm labourers. Except for the very wealthiest ones, tenants would generally have been in a position of some economic dependence in relationship to their landlords. But this is not to say that landowners could simply dictate terms to their tenants. For example, in the view of the first-century agronomist Columella (Rust. 1.7), tenants made the best contribution to the landowner’s fortunes when they remained on the land for long periods cultivating it productively. In this circumstance, it would be less likely that the tenants would request remissions of rent. In the experience of the senator Pliny the Younger in the early second century, the income from his estates largely depended on the production of his tenants. However, he repeatedly confronted problems arising from his tenants’ chronic indebtedness. Pliny’s solution was not to replace his tenants, but to grant frequent remissions of rent, and when that did not solve the problem, to try to reduce the risk his tenants bore by replacing the traditional system of leasing for cash rents with sharecropping (Ep. 9.37, 10.8.5).
The question of risk, clearly a significant problem for both landowners and tenants, was a major focus for the Roman legal authorities as they sought to devise regulations for farm tenancy. Mediterranean agriculture was subject to frequent droughts, even at the micro- level, which could devastate the annual harvest. The conventional Roman lease imposed the bulk of the risk on the tenant who, because he paid a rent in cash, was responsible for both the size of the harvest and the market price for the crops. Only when there was an unforeseen disaster, termed vis maior, was the tenant entitled to a remission of rent. The types of disaster that would qualify as vis maior included an unusual heat wave, an invasion by a hostile army, an earthquake, or an infestation by birds. But the normal hazards of farming, termed vitia ex re, did not entitle the tenant to a remission of rent, since, theoretically at least, he was supposed to take such risks into account when he negotiated his lease. The tenant’s right to a remission has been interpreted as resulting from the landlord’s failure to provide him with a farm that he could use; alternatively, the tenant’s right derived from the impossibility of his fulfilling his lease obligations. Although a diminished crop resulting from a drought, sterilitas, was formally regarded as a risk for which the tenant was supposed to account, one could leave him just as unable to pay his rent as a disaster that was considered vis maior. The Roman legal authorities, at least by the second century, developed a more flexible policy that took into account the fact that landowners often did grant remissions of rent for poor crops, much as Columella and Pliny discuss. Gaius states that the tenant would be entitled to a remission of rent “if the crops were damaged to a greater extent than was tolerable”, si laesi fuerint fructus plus quam tolera- bile est (D.19.2.25.6). …
In Roman law, however, the issue does not seem to have been whether the tenant had a right to claim a remission of rent for a poor harvest, but that landlords would be induced to grant them by social considerations or their own economic interests in maintaining working relationships with their tenants. So the task of the legal authorities was to determine what the rights and duties of landowners and tenants would be in this circumstance. The doctrine that the Roman government would follow was formulated by Papinian, as quoted by Ulpian (D.19.2.15.4), to the effect that a grant of a remission by the landlord in a poor year did not compromise his claim to the full rent for the lease period if later years proved more bountiful. This principle also informed a response by the Emperor Alexander Severus concerning a tenant’s request for a remission of rent for a poor harvest (C.4.65.8, a. 231). The Roman approach, in contrast to later civilian systems, did not envision the grant of remission as ending the lease relationship between landowner and tenant, but quite the opposite, it seems to have been adapted to an economic reality in which the tenant occupied the land on a much longer-term basis than would be suggested by the terms of the conventional farm lease discussed above.
This concern to maintain productive relationships between landowners and tenants can be seen in the legal authorities’ approach to another major issue in lease law, the tenant’s security of tenure. In Roman law, the tenant lacked the right of possession, so that any new owner of a farm that a tenant was leasing would not be required to observe the terms of an existing lease. The tenant’s only recourse would be against the original lessor, and his compensation would be monetary, without the new owner being compelled to allow him to stay on the farm. This lack of a right to possession has been seen as making the tenant’s rights to the land insecure, and thus represented a stumbling block to the tenant’s investment. To be sure, the tenant had the right to compensation for any improvements made to the farm that raised the value of the farm when the tenant left the lease. But it seems likely that such a legal claim would not by itself provide tenants with an incentive to invest if they viewed their tenure as short term. However, the … rescripts indicate that the Roman chancery was called upon repeatedly to adjudicate disputes arising from tenancy arrangements based more on local custom than on conventional Roman lease law. Some customary arrangements gave the tenure more security than we might expect under conventional lease law. Thus in the third century, the Emperor Gordian distinguished between tenants who were in leases for fixed periods and those who had perpetual leases.
A convenient legal principle that allowed the Roman authorities to interpret such customary lease arrangements in terms of conventional law was the “tacit renewal of the lease”, or relocatio tacita. According to this principle, if the tenant remained on his farm with the landowner’s consent, the lease was considered to be renewed for an additional year under the same terms as had existed previously. In theory, by this principle, customary leases could be considered as formally renewed indefinitely. … In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantine issued a constitution that explicitly recognised the legal enforceability of customary tenure arrangements. In this constitution, issued to the Vicar (the deputy praetorian prefect) for the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the emperor prohibited landowners from raising customary rents and also provided tenants with a legal basis to sue landowners who did this. The flexibility of Roman legal authorities in the third and fourth centuries suggests how they accommodated the needs of a broader community of citizens resulting from the Constitutio Antoniniana. The legal authorities incorporated “vulgar law”, that is, legal principles based on provincial practices, into the law of the Empire.
4. Land Tenure in the Provinces
… The main cultivators, coloni, were sharecroppers. They paid one-third of the produce as rent for most crops, and they occupied their land under perpetual leaseholds. Their leases were based on a lex Manciana, in all likelihood an originally private tenure arrangement that was then adopted by the fiscus as the estates on which it was used came into Imperial control. In the second century, the Imperial administration offered a series of incentives to tenants who brought land under cultivation by planting vineyards, olive trees, and fruit trees, including perpetual leaseholds in accordance with the lex Manciana as well as initial rent-free seasons. An originally ad hoc programme to achieve this purpose became more uniform under the Emperor Hadrian, with the lex Hadriana de rudibus agris, or the “Hadrianic law concerning unused lands”.
Set above the coloni as the permanent cultivators of the land were middlemen, conductores. They leased from the fiscus the right to collect the rent from the coloni (generally six days each year) and to use the labour and draft animals of that group to cultivate additional lands. The Imperial administration pursued a similar policy of relying on small-scale cultivators on Imperial estates or state-owned land in other provinces. Thus in Asia Minor, a series of petitions to emperors from Imperial tenants in conflict with officials from nearby towns indicate that Imperial estates in that region were cultivated by small farmers with security of tenure. Similarly, in Egypt, the Roman administration leased out state-owned land to small-scale cultivators, who were largely secure in their tenure.
…The lex Manciana was a long-lasting tenure arrangement, as it provided the basis for the land tenure of coloni who came into conflict with emphyteutic possessors under the Emperor Constantine over water rights. Moreover, under the Vandal regime in late-fifth-century North Africa, the lex Manciana established the basis of tenure on an estate in the pre-desert region. This is known from the Albertini Tablets, deeds of sale in which people who bought and sold cultivation rights, called culturae Mancianae, within a larger estate under the ownership of a private individual. The endurance of the lex Manciana suggests that it became a widespread form of tenure in North Africa, both on Imperial estates and even private land as well, possibly as Imperial estates over time returned to private ownership. …
5. Water Rights
The legal regulation of water rights was a significant issue in the provinces, where agriculture in many regions, not just in Egypt, but also in Spain and Africa among other places, required irrigation. In Italy, as we have seen, the Romans created private rights to water, in the form of servitudes, and such arrangements must also have existed in the provinces. But a different approach was needed with commonly owned water resources. A major difficulty with such resources is the so-called “tragedy of the commons”, as individual users have no incentive to preserve it or to invest in its upkeep, since such efforts will mainly benefit others. Still …communities do find ways to allocate water and other common property so as to share and provide for investment for the future. In Egypt, the irrigation from the Nile flood was organised at the village level, with theoretically all cultivators in the village required to contribute to the maintenance of dikes and canals with labour and taxes. In Africa … each user had the right to the water from the spring for a certain amount of time, in proportion to the number of trees he or she cultivated, which were a convenient proxy for the amount of land under cultivation. This was certainly a method of allocating water recognised in Roman law, as the Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus issued a rescript prescribing this method of apportioning water from a public river, as long as no one could show that more had been apportioned to him under his own right … disputes could arise if the community upstream were perceived as using too much water and compromising the interests of their neighbours downstream.
6. Transition to Late Antiquity
In late Antiquity, as the task to maintain tax revenues took on great urgency, the Roman government’s policies built upon the practice of the fiscus and private landowners of relying on small-scale cultivators in long-term tenancy arrangements. Its fiscal policy had two major components that affected the legal status of land and its cultivators. The first involved rigorous and regular censuses of the land, with an increased effort to maintain accurate records of landownership across the Empire, so as to identify landowners who would be responsible for paying taxes and the extent of their responsibility. As part of this effort, beginning in the reign of Diocletian, the Roman government developed a system of tax liability that, ideally at least, made taxes more uniform and equitable across the Empire. One element of this system was to assess the tax liability of land in terms of notional units, or iuga, that represented the land’s productivity as opposed to the size of a parcel. Theoretically, tax rates could be set that would represent an equal burden on various types of land, even across provinces, although in practice it is hard to imagine that tax assessments could have been uniform. In addition, land was assessed in capita, units that represented the personnel, including tenants and slaves, as well as animals, attached to it. The systems … were gradually implemented in the Roman Empire in the fourth century, although eventually taxing on the basis of capita was abandoned.
The second component of the Empire’s fiscal policy involved imposing greater responsibility on landowners to collect and pay taxes. One implication of this policy was that farmers were required to remain on their land, in their village of origin, their origo, or idia. This obligation was not an innovation of the late Imperial government, but it was applied more rigorously and uniformly in late Antiquity. One innovation was to define as the origo an estate on which tenants and probably other permanent labourers resided for the long term, when they were not otherwise registered in the census records as landowners in their own right. The estate owner would be responsible for collecting and paying any taxes that such coloni owed, but they would remain bound to the estate. Constitutions in the fourth century indicate that the “bound colonate” was gradually imposed throughout the Empire. The institution of the bound colonate imposed obligations on landowners, who could not dispossess coloni, change the terms of their tenure, or alienate the land without them. The colonate represented a fiscal definition of certain categories of rural tenants and labourers, but the binding of coloni to the land carried with it a gradual legal, economic and social subordination of many tenants and labourers to their landlords. The importance of binding coloni to the fiscal concerns of the Imperial government can be seen in the repeated laws in late Antiquity imposing fines and other harsh punishments both on coloni who fled the estates to which they were bound and on landowners who harboured fugitive slaves. It seems clear that the law tended to counter market forces, since coloni with resources at their disposal might find better economic opportunities outside of the estate to which they were bound. But if coloni fled and took up tenure on a new estate, any contractual relationship with a new landowner would necessarily be outside the reach of the law. This situation would tend to undermine the law’s authority in the rural economy.
The increasing fiscal responsibilities that landowners bore in late Antiquity and the binding of coloni were components of a gradual but long-term transformation in the countryside that altered the balance of power between powerful landowners and the Imperial government.
The Imperial government, for all its power, struggled to counter the growing power of landowners and to maintain the authority of its legal and fiscal institutions. One area of the law in which this struggle can be seen is in the phenomenon of rural patronage, or patrocinium. Landowners who played a major role in collecting taxes and organising liturgies could also use their position to offer protection to farmers against fiscal charges; sometimes in exchange for protection they might take over land of vulnerable rural residents. A series of Imperial laws at the end of the fourth and early fifth centuries suggest the level of concern that the Imperial government had over this problem. At the same time … the government’s legal institutions remained authoritative in the countryside, and were perhaps more authoritative than they had been under the Principate.
7. Long-Term Leasing and Emphyteusis
It was a common phenomenon for municipalities under the Principate to own substantial amounts of land, and they would often lease them on a perpetual basis. … By the third century, this form of long-term leasing became codified under a new contractual form, emphyteusis.
In emphyteusis, land would be assigned to an emphyteutic possessor, emphyteuticarius, on a perpetual basis, in exchange for an annual rent, or canon. The Roman legal authorities recognised the commonalities that emphyteusis shared with sale and lease, but they classified it as a distinct contract.
The emphyteutic possessor would be comparable to an owner, in that his rights would remain secure, and he enjoyed the right of possession over the property. The emphyteutic possessor could sell, bequeath or otherwise alienate his rights to others. At the same time, emphyteusis shared common characteristics with leasing, since the possessor’s rights depended on the payment of the annual rent. However, the possessor could only lose his rights after failing to pay the rent for three consecutive years.
State-owned and private land could be assigned under emphyteusis, as was land belonging to the Church, which in late Antiquity was a major institutional landowner.
The perpetual and alienable rights to municipal land and land held under emphyteutic leases meant that there were many people who held secure rights to land, but without being the owners in a formal sense. In this connection, we can think of the cultivators in Vandal-period Africa who bought and sold parcels of land within a large estate that were subject to Mancian tenures. Since, as seems clear, private landowners also leased out land on a long- term basis to tenants in customary land-tenure arrangements, there could be ambiguities about the precise nature of the tenants’ rights to their land. A series of constitutions in the third century and continuing into late Antiquity indicate that some of these private tenants claimed rights to their land on the basis of the long-term prescription, by which a lawful possessor of provincial land could establish a prescriptive right to it after the passage of the requisite number of years. However, the consistent policy of the Roman legal authorities was to deny such tenants rights of possession, and by extension, the possibility of taking advantage of the long-time prescription.
The Roman government insisted on interpreting the rights and duties of landowners and tenants in terms of the conventions of the classical Roman farm lease, but the existence of disputes involving tenants’ claiming the protection of the long-time prescription suggests how much more complex the actual conditions of land tenure in the countryside were.
8. Conclusion
This survey suggests that the forms of land tenure that existed in the Roman Empire varied considerably from province to province, and there are many areas where there is little evidence for the conditions under which land was cultivated, whether by slaves, tenants, wage labourers or some combination of all three. However, the responses of the legal authorities in matters involving land tenure focused primarily on allocating the costs of risk in agriculture between landowners and tenants, and accommodating long-term tenancy relationships within the conventions of Roman law. This situation suggests how important such relationships were to the Roman economy.
The Source:
Dennis P. Kehoe*, ‘Tenure of Land and Agricultural Regulation’, in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, edited by Paul J. Du Plessis, Kaius Tuori, and Clifford Ando**, Oxford University Press 2016
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