Debt, Land, and Labor in the Early Republican Economy

Author(s): Seth Bernard

Source: Phoenix , Vol. 70, No. 3/4 (Fall-Winter/automne-hiver 2016), pp. 317-338
Published by: Classical Association of Canada
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7834/phoenix.70.3-4.0317

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR IN THE EARLY
REPUBLICAN ECONOMY

Seth Bernard

This paper describes the role of debt in the early republican economy,
and especially debt’s relationship to the shifting balance of land and labor fol-
lowing the conquest of Veii in 396 b.c.1 My point of departure is a little noticed
pattern in the annalist record which alerts us to changing pressures on agricul-
tural production at that time. Reports of famine, common in the fifth century,
cease for almost a century after 383 b.c. By contrast, a series of laws relating
to debt appear in close succession following the first attested proposal of a lex
de aere alieno in 376 b.c. and its passage a decade later.2 The decline of one
phenomenon will not have caused the other’s appearance in any direct manner,
but the pattern nonetheless demands attention because both food shortage and
debt reflect aspects of the Roman agricultural economy: famine is a straightfor-
ward indicator of the insufficiency of production, while lending in this period
involved the exchange of various forms of capital or labor needed for agriculture,
or of agricultural produce itself.3
How then are we to understand an economy that attained levels of produc-
tion sufficient to end regular famine, but not to secure farmers against debt?
Lo Cascio (2009: 23), in one of the few studies attentive to this question, con-
cludes that what happened was the gradual lessening of Malthusian pressures in
the early fourth century b.c. That is, the conquest of Veii alleviated the problem
of Romans’ access to land, but only somewhat, since the ager Veientanus did not
resolve continuing problems signaled by the persistence of debt.4 However, the
change in symptoms suggests that what afflicted the early republican economy
was more complex, and the shift from an indicator of insufficient production
(famine) to one of unequal distribution (debt) is especially revealing. Thus, I
argue that the annalist record reflects a situation after the conquest of Veii in
which Roman landholding expanded, but in which the distribution of the factors

I thank Christer Bruun, James Tan, and the editor of Phoenix for their comments and encouragement.
1
The economic history of this period remains understudied, particularly when compared to the
intense attention the economies of the later republic and empire continue to receive. Along with De
Martino 1979 and important discussion in Cornell 1995, see Morel 2007; Viglietti 2011; Capogrossi
Colognesi 2012.
2
The Varronian chronology is used, but see below 321, n. 18.
3
On the agrarian basis of early republican debt, see Zehnacker 1980. One could transact debts
on a bronze standard (per aes et libram), but there is no support for the opinion of Watson (1975:
111) that bronze itself was exchanged at this time; the monetization of debt came later, as cf.
Bransbourg 2015.
4
See also De Martino 1974: 190–193; for debt’s recurrence in the period, see Hölkeskamp
1987: 96–101.

317
PHOENIX, VOL. 70 (2016) 3-4.

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318 PHOENIX

of production remained widely, perhaps increasingly, uneven. Roman landhold-

ers mediated such inequality through exchanges of credit and debt. Moreover,
the imbalance in the fourth century economy pertained not only to landholding,
but also to labor. Through institutions such as nexum, a form of debt-bondage,
labor constituted a central component of debt in the early republican economy.
The importance of the labor supply to the success of republican agriculture was
not lost on ancient sources: defending his actions in the ager Gallicus in the early
third century, M.’ Curius Dentatus reputedly declared that “he had acquired so
much land that any smaller number of men could not have tilled it, and had
captured so many men that any smaller territory would have been insufficient for
them” (Cass. Dio 8.37.1).5 Here I point out that the republican state’s earliest
significant territorial expansion did not produce such balanced results. Instead,
the reorganization of the ager Veientanus strained the labor supply relative to
landholding and reoriented the point of tension in the fourth-century Roman
economy from the availability of land toward the problem of labor.

i. significant patterns
The first issue is the annalist record and its potential relationship to historical
trends, since, as the evidence will make clear, the beginning of legislation against
debt is not reason to think that debt itself began in the fourth century. For the
early republic, the sources attest to eleven food shortages occurring in 508 b.c.,
492 b.c., 477 b.c., 456 b.c., 453 b.c., 440 b.c., 428 b.c., 411 b.c., 392 b.c.,
and 383 b.c., and then not again until 299 b.c.6 Meanwhile, at least six debt
laws are recorded in the fourth century starting with the lex Licinia Sextia de aere
alieno, proposed in 376 and passed in 367 b.c. Following this measure were the
lex Duilia Menenia de unciario fenore (357 b.c.), the lex de quinqueviris mensariis
creandis (352 b.c.), the plebiscitum de fenore semunciario (347 b.c.), the lex Genucia
de feneratione (342 b.c.), and the lex Poetelia Papiria de nexis (326 or 313 b.c.).7
Food shortage was only reported rarely in the third century, while debt remained
a prominent issue into the period of the Lex Hortensia (287 b.c.) and beyond,
even though the available sources give a more impressionistic view of it.8 Both
the list of famines and that of debt legislation largely depend on the coverage
of Livy’s narrative, and it is therefore unsurprising to find fewer attestations of
either event after the conclusion of his first decade.
5
Pace Erdkamp (2005: 46–47), the concept of labor productivity was not unknown in antiquity.
Land hunger tends to get more weight than labor in most histories of the period, but note the
nuanced study of labor and republican agriculture by Rosenstein (2004), although focusing on a
slightly later period.
6
For sources, see Northwood 2006.
7
For sources, see Rotondi 1912; Flach (1994) discusses the Licinio-Sextian laws; Elster (2003)
lists subsequent legislation. Two more possibilities are a lex Marcia de fenore in 352 and a lex Valeria
in 342 b.c., but see the doubts expressed by Savunen (1993: 144).
8
Consult the catalogue in Gabrielli 2003a.

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR 319

This discussion is, of course, both historical and historiographical, as it con-

cerns the transmission of information to written accounts, and then to our ex-
tant sources. Within the confines of this paper, I am unlikely to convince those
predisposed to dismiss the extant record for early republican history in its en-
tirety. But it also must be said that there are reasons for measured optimism in
the particular cases of information on famine and debt legislation. Regarding
food shortages, Northwood (2006) makes the important observation that the
frequencies of famine and plagues in the annalist record adhere to “significant
patterns” in that the occurrence of each event fits general historical expectations.
The grain supply, which depended on Rome’s control of territory or supply
routes, became less problematic with Roman expansion, while the recurrence
of pestilence reflected endemic disease. Moreover, the sudden disappearance of
food crises, while plagues continued to be reported, makes it difficult to suspect
large-scale historiographical invention, since there is no obvious reason for such
invention to have produced this particular and uneven distribution of events.9
Unlike with famine or plague, no external set of historical expectations exists
against which to test the pattern of debt laws in the annalist record. That
said, the relationship at Rome between law and writing, as well as the utility of
law as precedent in future proceedings—one thinks of the early development of
the legis actio—argue for the commitment of legislation to record at some early
point.10 Of course, many reports of early republican legislative action show
signs of manipulation or anachronism. However, a priori skepticism against the
whole record seems extreme, and arguments against the record are not always
free from their own set of assumptions.11 The Lex Licinia Sextia de aere alieno, for
example, is the first debt law described by our extant sources in any detail, while
the entire slate of laws containing the debt law is doubted by scholars, who see
it as particularly problematic that the law admitting plebs to the consulship does
not correspond with the fasti, the official list of annual consuls, and plebeian
admission to high office was legally addressed again shortly thereafter.12 Similar
criticism is then extended to the debt law: since another measure cancelling debt
and mandating repayment appears shortly afterwards, so the argument goes, how
could the initial lex have held much weight to begin with?13 But this is only
a valid critique if one thinks that the law’s intention was to effect a permanent
end to credit and debt relationships in the first place. Comparative evidence
suggests it was not. Similar “clean slate” measures are a widely attested strategy

9
See already Garnsey (1988: 167) arguing from Cato’s claim that the annales maximi contained
information on famines.
10
For writing and law in early Rome, see Gagarin 2008: 217–218.
11
Billows (1989) takes a skeptical position, but there is no positive evidence for his notion that
Sex. Aelius Paetus or any other early legal commentator was responsible for large-scale fabrication.
12
Von Fritz 1950; Billows 1989; Pellam (2014) argues that Livy’s description of the Licinio-
Sextian legislation is internally consistent, although he explicitly avoids historical implications.
13
Von Fritz 1950: 28.

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320 PHOENIX

for diminishing the level of indebtedness in agricultural economies in which

credit formed part of the enduring logic of peasant production. In the Near
East, clean slate proclamations go back almost as far as interest-bearing debt
itself, while debt cancellation appears in Greek law in most periods.14
Distortion in the record is also not always a sign of fabrication. One fourth-
century debt law that shows clear variance in the source material is the lex
Papiria Poetelia outlawing nexum. The two principal sources disagree over the
law’s date as Livy (8.28) attributed it to the consulship of C. Poetelius Libo
Visolus in 326 b.c., while Varro (Ling. 7.105) assigned it to the dictatorship
of Poetelius’ son in 313 b.c. In both accounts, however, the law’s force is
identical, and variation arises only over the attempt to synchronize the law with
the fasti.15 If anything, then, this discrepancy points to competing attempts to
reconcile authentic but independent documentary sources, probably separate lists
of magistrates and of legal measures.
Along with the internal reliability of the early republican legal record, at least
in a very general sense, it is also valuable to consider the potential correspondence
between Roman debt legislation and similar laws in other Mediterranean, and
particularly Greek, contexts. Gabrielli (2003a: 33–55) emphasizes similarities
between Rome and the kingdom of Syracuse. When Dionysius ii succeeded his
father in 367 b.c., the same year in which Livy dated the passage of the leges
Licinae Sextiae, the new king freed 3,000 Syracusan debt-bondsmen. The episode
is most clearly preserved by Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus, which calls
these debtors nexi (Iust. 21.1.1–5). When Agathocles seized power in Syracuse
in 316 b.c., he passed reforms intended to abolish debt and distribute land to the
poor (Diod. 19.9.5). Moreover, these two Syracusan laws were not themselves
exceptional, but formed part of a wave of debt legislation attested in many Greek
communities in the first half of the fourth century b.c.16
This Greek material offers a plausible context for Rome’s own debt legislation,
but it also poses a further question. Since debt existed in the better-documented
Greek world much earlier than legislation on debt, does the Roman legal record
reflect the increase of debt to problematic levels per se, or simply a change in
the institutional strategy towards an old problem? Debt certainly featured in
the narratives of fifth-century Rome, even if no specific legislative actions are
recorded. Dionysius of Halicarnassus made debt central to his portrayal of the
early conflict between plebeians and patricians, and he went so far as to attribute
attention towards problems of private debt to King Servius.17 Debt also featured
prominently in the Twelve Tables, in which multiple clauses described the legal
remedies available to creditors in the case of defaulted debtors.
14
Hudson (2002) discusses debt in the Near East; Asheri (1969) collects Greek debt laws.
15
For the respective magistrates, see Broughton 1951: 146, 158.
16
A quarter of the laws catalogued by Asheri (1969) date from 408 to 350 b.c.
17
Peppe (1981) provides the fullest study and concludes that Dionysius’ account was more
strongly influenced by Valerius Antias than that of Livy.

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR 321

Thus, this discussion supports the likelihood that debt legislation, and not
necessarily debt itself, started in the early fourth century shortly after famine
ended. In this case, legislation formed a new institutional strategy for an old
problem. The legal record might suggest that debt worsened until it finally
caught the attention of the Roman state: debt laws were passed in reaction to
crises, often when a great amount of debt threatened the political cohesion of the
Roman state. This is normally how the tradition framed such legal measures:
prior to the first debt law’s passage in 367 b.c., worsening debt appeared already
in the sources in the 380s and was held to have precipitated the Roman state’s
collapse into anarchy after the initial proposal of the Licinio-Sextian laws in
376 b.c.18 But the sudden turn to legislation to address the issue of debt can also
be interpreted as related to the rising political agency of the indebted in eliciting
political responses that had not previously been possible. Before returning to
this important point, however, it will be useful to look more closely at the nature
of early republican debt.

ii. debt in the early republican economy

What did debt actually involve in this period? It is clear that debt had a very
long history in both early Roman and contemporary Greek societies. Debt’s ap-
pearance in the Roman sources during moments of crisis, as well as the strongly
moralizing tone with which those sources tend to portray lending and usury, have
had a powerful cumulative effect, making Roman debt seem like a condition to
be avoided, and making the inability to repay a loan appear to have been socially
unacceptable behavior.19 To the contrary, I would argue that it is much more
likely that Romans in the early republic saw systematic indebtedness as a regular
part of the annual economic calculus of landholders.20 The ubiquitous use of
credit and debt in peasant economies makes the anthropological study of debt
of value here. Working in the tradition of Mauss, scholars continue to stress
how the extension of credit, while in the short term calculable against a simple
balance of debt, was also often fundamental to the longer-term maintenance of
social hierarchies.21 A useful distinction may be made between “debts” as tem-
porary deficits of resources, and “indebtedness” as a more permanent situation in
18
Discrepancies in this precise period between Greek and Varronian chronologies likely stem
from attempts to reconcile various understandings of the length of the time of anarchy starting in
the 370s, and they make for acute difficulty in understanding the sequence of Rome’s history in
the first half of the fourth century; on the problem, see the succinct summary of Oakley (1997:
104–106). In general, I use the Varronian chronology, but in consequence of the implausibly long
duration it assigns to the period of anarchy, the sequence of events during this time was possibly
more compressed.
19
Thus De Martino 1979: 143. On the subject of debt in late republican sources, see Frederiksen
1966; Shaw 1975.
20
Similarly for Athens, see Millett 1991: 36–38; for pre-modern Europe, Braudel 1982: 256.
21
Mauss 1990; for extensive discussion, see Graeber 2011; Peebles (2010) reviews recent scholar-
ship.

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322 PHOENIX

which the borrower’s future income was not necessarily expected to cover a loan,
but in which the extension of credit intended instead to reinforce the lender’s
long-term social domination.22 One suspects that the record of republican leg-
islation speaks more to short-term “debts” than to a constant and longer-term
background of lending and borrowing. However, such a background of “indebt-
edness” may be detectable in those institutions in which borrowing and lending
most overlapped with Roman social hierarchies. For example, the historical
record not only portrayed nexum as pervasive in the early republic, but it also
suggested that the institution served to define the prevailing hierarchy. That is,
in the annalists’ account of the struggle of the orders, it was the plebeians who
were nexi, and this form of indebtedness served to define their relationship with
the patricians.23
Nexum is fundamental to any understanding of debt in the early repub-
lic. However, serious—probably intractable—difficulties impede any modern
attempt to define an institution that was obscure already to those republican
jurists and antiquarians who wrote about it. Still, some points relevant to our
broader discussion should be made. Within the range of modern interpretation,
the simplest reading seems to be that nexum was a type of debt-bondage in-
volving the obligation of labor in exchange for forms of property.24 Supporting
this view is the Twelve Tables’ only intelligibly preserved mention of nexum,
which equated the institution with the sale of property through mutual assent,
mancipium (Tb. VI.1).25 This would confirm against some opinions that nexum
itself was not equivalent to default, nor was it created only at the point of a
defaulting loan, but it was at its basis a more simple form of exchange: labor for
property.26 Nexi could (and did) default on their loans, and in this case their

22
Jursa 2002: 209; see also Graeber (2011: 112) on the frequent incommensurability, often
intentional, of the objects given and exchanged in relationships of credit and debt.
23
This is particularly true of the lead-up to the first secession of the plebs, which arose especially
because of nexum according to Livy (2.23); see Richard 1978: 496–501. Indeed, Mauss (1990: 42)
already detected the socially constructive power of Roman nexum.
24
This is more or less Varro’s definition, even if the relevant passage shows anachronism: Ling.
7.105: liber, qui suas operas in servitutem pro pecunia quam debebat . . ., dum solveret, nexus vocatur (“a
free man, who [places] his labor into servitude in exchange for the money which he owes is called
a ‘nexus’ ”). For the anachronism of pecunia, see De Neeve 1984: 67. On textual corruption in this
passage, see Peppe 1981: 165–168. Earlier scholarship on the subject of nexum is enormous; for
discussion with earlier bibliography, cf. Tomulescu 1966; Watson 1975; Cornell 1995: 454, n. 37.
25
See Crawford 1996: 2.654–656. The only other extant mention is the highly obscure and
impossible to translate clause on nexus . . . forcti sanatique (tb. I.5), restored from a mangled passage
in Festus.
26
That nexum formed at default is an old argument, but Silver (2012) now suggests, mostly on
the basis of Liv. 2.23, that nexum was originally servitude created by default, whereas the Twelve
Tables changed the institution into a contract involving labor. Since Livy’s legal knowledge of nexum
in that period must ultimately depend on the Twelve Tables, I fail to see how we may distinguish
such a development.

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR 323

status may have changed.27 As a particular class of debtors, nexi entered into a
condition similar to slavery, and at a certain point their creditors could inflict
capital punishment upon them. But nexi were not slaves, as the Twelve Tables
knew both servi and nexi as distinct groups. By emphasizing the similarity of
nexum to other forms of exchange, I am not arguing that nexum was equally
beneficial to both parties involved, and the sources make it clear that nexi fre-
quently suffered abuse and violence at the hands of creditors. However, the early
republic was hardly an egalitarian society, and it is in this context of structural
inequality that nexum must be understood. If the nexum contract was formed
by mutual assent, then it is necessary to understand that the institution was
at some basic level conceived of as useful to both creditor and debtor, however
uneven the risks involved: nexum provided a borrower with capital or produce in
times of need, while reinforcing the social dominance of the creditor. As other
forms of indebtedness often functioned in other societies, nexum thus served to
reify the imbalanced structures of social domination present in early republican
Rome. In short, nexum should be seen not as something Roman smallholders
tried to avoid, but as a widespread strategy for exchanging labor, land, or capital
within existing social hierarchies.28
In turn, the importance of nexum to creditors and debtors alike suggests that
exchange was a central element of the Roman agricultural economy. Such a
view should make a great deal of sense considering the characteristic ecological
variability and risk inherent in Italian agriculture, which often resulted in widely
contrasting outcomes within geographically small areas. Small-scale agriculture
was by no means antithetical to markets, and farms close to the margin between
success and failure often had reason to participate in the exchange of various
forms of property. Farmers might find themselves with a glut of grain while
crops on neighboring estates failed, or vice versa.29 Likewise, the life-cycles of
peasant families created structural surpluses and deficits of labor in households
over time.
However, this idea that the Roman economic world in the fifth century b.c.
was full of peasants exchanging labor and property merits emphasis, as the early
republican economy is normally viewed as anything but dynamic.30 We do not
know when exactly Romans first began to conceptualize a day’s work (opera) in
terms of other forms of property, facilitating the exchange of one for the other,
but nexum and the record of “nexum bronze” (nexum aes), or nexum transacted by
means of bronze and a scale (per aes et libram), would suggest that labor could be
27
Perhaps from unbound to bound, nexi soluti to nexi vincti, following Liv. 2.23.8, although
“unbound” (soluti) would seem to imply a change of status itself.
28
Similarly, see Cornell 1995: 282–283.
29
See Halstead 1987; the idea of “microclimates” and high regional variability in Mediterranean
agriculture is especially emphasized by Horden and Purcell (2000).
30
Cf. Morel (2007), who portrays a mostly static Roman economy until ca 300 b.c.

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324 PHOENIX

valued in terms of other goods by an early date (cf. Fest. 162 L). The common
use by the fifth century of a bronze standard will have helped the exchange of
credit and debt involving different forms of labor or capital, and the absence
of Roman coinage at this moment did not entail the absence of money in this
sense.31
The possibility now raised that the entire series of so-called “dry branch”
(ramo secco) bronze bars belongs to the fifth century, and not earlier as previously
held, suggests that early republican Rome participated in a central Italian econ-
omy that was itself actively reconfiguring the meaning of value and economic
exchange before the widespread use of coinage.32 In any case, this discussion
emphasizes that indebtedness in the institutionalized practice of debt-bondage
or otherwise should be seen as a regular feature of the early republican economy.

iii. the annexation of the AGER VEIENTANUS

According to the sources, two events profoundly affected economic growth in

the crucial moment in the early fourth century when reports of famine stopped,
but when debt became a target of legal attention: the Roman conquest of Veii
and the Gallic sack of Rome. The sources, above all Livy, considered the
Gallic sack almost immediately to have created problematic levels of debt, with
the proposal of the Licinio-Sextian laws in 376 b.c. thus seeking to address a
problem that had been progressively worsening for over a decade. That said,
it is doubtful that the Gaul’s invasion brought about any large-scale economic
effects. The annalist tradition attributed the major share of plebeian debt to
the great cost of rebuilding Rome after a devastating fire; Livy connected this
rebuilding effort to the construction of the republican circuit walls in 378 b.c.
In his narrative, the fortification project’s building costs, met through the use of
forced citizen labor, pushed an already fragile Roman society into severe debt
and anarchy until the Licinio-Sextian laws remedied the situation.33 As recent
excavation in central Rome suggests, there may have been some destruction by
fire in the early fourth century b.c., but the sources’ portrayal of a holocaustic
incendium and subsequently costly repair effort remains untenable.34 In other

31
Emphasized by Crawford (1976; cf. 1985).
32
Pellegrini and Macellari 2002.
33
Liv. 6.32; for rebuilding and debt, cf. 5.55, 6.1, 6.4. For Livy’s extended narrative of building,
debt, and social crisis between the Gallic sack and the Licinio-Sextian laws, see Bernard forthcoming.
It is not impossible that the walls’ construction alone was responsible for significantly exacerbating
debt. On the walls’ archaeology, see Bernard 2012.
34
Recent excavations in the Argiletum and the Palatine demonstrate signs of an early fourth-
century fire, in the former case pertaining to two houses, but the picture remains that of scattered,
and thus limited, destruction with no known damage to public monuments. This remains compatible
with Coarelli 1978. For the Argiletum, see Delfino 2009; Delfino 2014; Di Giuseppe 2010; for the
Palatine, see Zeggio 2006: 70–71.

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR 325

words, at most it seems that the Gallic sack contributed to, rather than initiated,
problems of debt in the period.
By comparison, the annexation of the ager Veientanus seems to have triggered
greater economic change, and it is worth considering whether this change, and
not the Gallic sack, ultimately laid the grounds for rising economic inequality
in the period leading up to the Licinio-Sextian laws. While the archaeology
relating to the conquest of Veii is not straightforward, it supports the idea
of a major reorganization of the productive landscape north of the Tiber in
the early fourth century.35 By modern estimates, Rome came into possession
of ca 50,000 hectares of land across the Tiber through its conquest of Veii,
with an indeterminable but significant percentage of this territory available to
agriculture.36 Unsurprisingly, a variety of political and legal measures following
in the wake of this expansion focused on landholding in novel ways. In 393 b.c.,
a senatus consultum described by Livy (5.30.8) arranged for the distribution of
new territory to all free adult males in Roman households, and not simply
to patres familias. This was also the first recorded instance of individual or
viritim distributions of conquered land, in this case parceled into seven iugera
(1.75 ha.) allotments and given to individuals as private property.37 Land grants
such as this were aided by subsequent victories over Capena, and then Nepet
and Sutrium, the Etruriae claustra. Within a decade, Rome was able to award
citizenship and further land to those from Veii, Capena, and Fidenae who had
gone over to Rome during campaigns against their respective cities. The senate
was even attentive to landowners outside the Tiber Valley, as Livy (6.21) reports
that a five-man panel was appointed in 383 b.c. to distribute land seized from
the Volsci in the Pontine area.38 The organization of new landholding in the
hands of Roman citizens left its mark on the electoral system, as the creation of
four new rural tribes in 387 b.c. marked the first tribal expansion attested since
the earliest years of the republic.39
To the north of the Tiber, the gain from the conquest of Veii was not only
territorial: an increasing labor supply facilitated the reorganization of landhold-
ing as Rome was held to have sold the surviving population of Veii into slavery.
Livy supposed that the enslaved Veians enter the Roman economy in private
hands via sale (5.22.1). This is generally taken to be the first mass enslavement
35
Problematically, diagnostic pottery is lacking from the crucial period of the late fifth and early
fourth century, and this makes the time of the sack of Veii itself invisible to survey archaeology.
However, there were clear longer-term changes in settlement in the Tiber Valley between the fifth
and third centuries. See Patterson, Di Giuseppe, and Witcher 2004: 5–13.
36
Beloch (1926: 620) estimates 56,200 ha.; Afzelius (1942: 190) suggests 61,000 ha.; Roselaar
(2010: 33–34) problematizes such estimations. As De Martino (1974: 188) points out, non-arable
land was still productive for timber and other uses.
37
Livy reported seven iugera, while Greek sources gave different figures; cf. Liverani 1984: 36–37;
Roselaar 2010: 41–42, 55.
38
On Roman activity in the Pontine, see Coarelli 1990.
39
Taylor 2013: 47–49.

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326 PHOENIX

in republican history, establishing a precedent and perhaps marking a turn in

the nature and aims of Roman warfare.40

iv. landholding, labor, and production after veii

The conquest of Veii was thus a pivotal moment for Roman economic de-
velopment in that it contributed both labor and land to the economy. As noted
above, debt enters the narrative shortly thereafter, becoming increasingly visible
after the Gallic sack and persisting until the proposal of the Licinio-Sextian
laws in 376 b.c. and their passage a decade later. To understand why the gains
from the conquest of Veii failed to resolve the problem of debt, this section now
turns more closely to the question of how the reorganization of landholding in
the newly captured territory changed the factors of Roman production. I pur-
sue three related scenarios centering on labor, liquidity, and the productivity of
small-scale Roman agriculture. Together, these scenarios support the idea that
the land measures after the conquest of Veii produced a new class of citizen
smallholders, but also perpetuated and to some extent exacerbated inequalities
in the factors of production available to farms of different sizes. This in turn
produced very different outcomes for Roman farmers, and the best strategy for
managing such inequality remained credit and debt.

(a) Labor
It is not immediately clear whether the gain in labor through mass enslave-
ment after the conquest of Veii was proportionate to the acquisition of new
territory. Quantification is hardly possible since no source transmits specific fig-
ures, while the chronologically closest Roman census figure—159,573 in 393/2
b.c.—is almost certainly inflated.41 A very rough calculation has Rome’s terri-
tory increase by 59 per cent, while the walled area of Veii was ca 50 per cent
of the area enclosed by Rome’s republican walls.42 Obviously, not all of the
new territory was available to agriculture, but neither can we presume that all of
Veii’s population was sold into slavery. Just how many slaves were purchased by
Roman masters is unknown, but Harris (1990: 498) suggests that the number
was measurable in the tens of thousands. He also justly emphasizes that the
ability of the Roman economy to absorb this mass enslavement in a single stroke
would imply a concomitantly large demand for labor among landholders at that
time.43
There is an important but overlooked structural aspect of the enslavement
of Veii’s population as compared to mass enslavements in the later republic.

40
Bradley 2011: 244–245.
41
Brunt 1971: 27.
42
Cascino, Di Giuseppe, and Patterson (2012: 349) suggest the Etruscan settlement was ca
190 ha. Fulminante (2014: 102) suggests that Rome’s republican walls enclosed ca 360–400 ha.
43
Similarly, see G. Prachner cited in Welwei 2000: 54–55, n. 113.

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR 327

In reorganizing production in the ager Veientanus, Rome did not import labor
from peripheral areas into productive territory, but instead gained control of new
territory along with its laboring population. That is, those Etruscan residents
of the ager Veientanus who survived the war were enslaved and now worked
for Roman masters, but on the same land. Indeed, survey archaeology may
support this point: following Roman conquest, settlement in the middle Tiber
Valley does not generally expand into new areas of the region, but rather many
mid-republican sites were situated close to earlier, Etruscan farmsteads.44 While
some unquantifiable advantage must have accrued to Roman landowners from
the marginal utility of slave labor, the primary change in the labor force seems
therefore to have been one of legal status, not location. For this reason, growth
in the labor supply after the conquest of Veii may have been relatively modest
by comparison to later phases of Roman expansion, when slaves were brought
back to Italy from peripheral areas of military activity.
Thus, while Veii’s conquest provided Rome with both territory and slaves, it
may be that the gain in land was disproportionately greater than the gain in labor.
This idea finds support from scattered signs that the fourth-century Roman labor
supply became increasingly inelastic with the rapid gain in territory. One such
sign comes in the significant expansion of the Roman slave economy in the
middle decades of the fourth century, a trend detectable in the establishment
of a tax on manumission, the vicesima libertatis, in 357,45 or in the fact that
the second Romano-Carthaginian treaty referred to slave trading, whereas the
earlier treaty did not (Polyb. 3.24.6–7). Then, there are several episodes that
speak to increasing frictions over the use of forced free labor in both public and
private hands. As noted above, Livy reported that the censors in 378 relied on
forced citizen labor, plebs coacta, to construct the circuit walls around Rome with
disastrous results for plebeian debt. By the later half of the century, however,
nexum was curtailed by the Lex Poetelia at some disputed date, and then in
291 by the prosecution of L. Postumius Megellus for having set soldiers under
his command to work on his private estate during his consulship.46 As Gabba
(1990: 10–11) recognizes, these events represented wider dissatisfaction with
the older forms of aristocratic domination that characterized the labor economy
of the preceding centuries.
If indeed the conquest of Veii shifted the balance of labor relative to the
land available to Roman production, there are implications for how the early
development of Roman slavery is to be understood. Scheidel (2008) contrasts
the emergence of slave systems in Greece and Rome with that of the New
World: while slavery in the Americas emerged when European powers suddenly
found themselves possessed of massive landholdings, Roman slavery responded

44
Patterson, Di Giuseppe, and Witcher 2004: 13.
45
Liv. 7.16.7; Bradley 1984: 175–176.
46
Gabrielli 2003b.

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328 PHOENIX

to civic commitments on farmers, particularly military service.47 However, it

is important to observe that demand for labor in the New World was not
sufficiently met through the enslavement of indigenous American populations,
but only by the systematic importation of slaves from Africa. That is, the
separation between imperial core, imperially-controlled territory, and the source
of slaves was vital to the success of the American slave system.48 By the second
century b.c., if not earlier, Rome had created a similar dynamic by intensifying
Italy’s slave economy through provincial expansion and slave trading. But in light
of the initial development of the slave economy during Rome’s early expansion
in Italy it is worth considering whether the original impetus towards slavery
was not more similar to that of European colonialist states, since Rome too
confronted the need to meet demands for labor on newly acquired land, albeit
on a smaller scale.

(b) Liquidity
A second issue to consider is how the viritim distributions of land north of
the Tiber fit into the broader picture of property transfer in this period. There
are reasons to think that, at the time of the conquest of Veii, property remained
relatively illiquid and changed hands in ways favorable to a small class of elites,
generally making landholding patterns fairly stable. How could a Roman in the
fifth and fourth centuries acquire land? There were family-based means such as
inheritance, a topic that occupied much of the fifth table of the Twelve Tables,
and there were redistributive means such as land grants, as, for example, the
state grant reputedly made to the immigrating Sabine aristocrat Attius Clausus.49
Then, debt possibly allowed creditors to seize debtors’ land.50 However, it is not
difficult to recognize that all of these forms of property transfer favored wealthier
landowners who already possessed property and could therefore extend credit, or
who possessed social prestige. It is worth noting that there is now archaeological
evidence to confirm the existence of some substantial landholdings in archaic
Rome in the form of the proto-villas at the Auditorium on the Via Flaminia,
or the villa delle Grotte at Grottarosa in the Tiber Valley.51 But these remain
highly exceptional cases until the third century, when Volpe (2012) notes that
evidence for villas around Rome starts to become significantly fuller.
47
However, see Rosenstein 2004 for a different view of the pressure that military service put on
mid-republican households.
48
Eltis (2000: 24–27) discusses the scales of Amerindian and African slavery.
49
Liv. 2.16.5. While this particular detail might be dismissed as legend, horizontal elite mobility
featured prominently in early central Italy (Ampolo 1976; Bourdin 2012: 542–551), and this implies
that some way of granting land to immigrating foreign aristocrats existed.
50
The clearest statement to this effect is Liv. 2.23.6. Land forfeiture was not explicitly listed
among the punishments available to creditors in the Twelve Tables, though killing a debtor or
selling him into slavery may have carried such implications.
51
Auditorium villa: Carandini, D’Alessio, and Di Giuseppe 2006; villa delle Grotte: Becker
2006.

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR 329

By contrast, when was it possible for Romans to increase their landhold-

ings by purchasing land on the market? Like most topics in early Roman
law, the initial application of consensual sale to property is highly obscure.52
The extant evidence suggests that purchasing property must have continued
to present significant transaction costs in the early republic. First of all, it is
not clear what buyers could have used to purchase costly parcels of land in
the fifth century. Liquidity must have been a fundamental concern. The ex-
isting bronze standard could facilitate exchanges involving different forms of
property, such as capital for operae and so forth. However, it is less easy to
see how this standard would have applied to purchases on the scale of the
real estate market at a time when bronze itself was unlikely to have been
exchanged.53 Second, while the Twelve Tables depicted the sale of various
forms of property—nexum, mancipium, or the notorious law restricting a fa-
ther’s repeated sale of his son—the only explicit reference to the transfer of
land concerned the establishment of the legal right to an estate (auctoritas fundi)
after two years, apparently a form of usucaption or adverse possession, and
not straightforward sale.54 If sale was unusual, the Romans’ distribution of
Veii’s land to smallholders must be seen as revolutionary in a context in which
the acquisition of private property remained largely confined to forms of ex-
change available to wealthier elites. By the same token, smallholders were not
likely to have expanded their landholdings beyond their individual distribu-
tions.
It is only in the decades after the distribution of the ager Veientanus that we see
Romans first confronting the difficult transactional costs implied in the market-
exchange of property. An important precedent appears in Livy’s description
of the state’s creation of a panel of five “bankers,” the quinqueviri mensarii, in
352 b.c. (7.21.5–8):
Once people were disposed to concord, the new consuls applied themselves to the task of
lessening debt, the single matter which was seen to occupy all minds. They turned the
repayment of debt into a state concern by appointing a board of five whom they called
mensarii from their dispensation of money. For their equanimity and care these men
deserve to be celebrated by name in all historical annals: they were C. Duillius, P. Decius
Mus, M. Papirius, Q. Publilius, and T. Aemilius. With exceptional consideration and
more as an expense to the state than a loss, they took up a matter normally most difficult
to resolve for both sides, but in any case always hard for the one side. When they had
placed tables in the forum with bronze, outstanding loans and those impeded more by the
sluggishness of the debtors than by their finances were either discharged by the aerarium,
once surety had been first made to the people, or released by a fair-value estimation of

52
Cf. Watson 1964.
53
Cf. Viglietti 2014, but his reading of land prices in the sources seems overly optimistic; I
also find it hard to believe that the credit instruments that Harris (2006: 2–3) identifies with later
Roman property sale were available by this early date.
54
Tb. VI.3; see Kaser 1988 on usucaption.

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330 PHOENIX

property, so that a huge amount of debt was thoroughly resolved not only without injury
but even without complaints by either party.55

Two years later, Romans found that these actions resulted in confusing changes
in private ownership, so that the next censors were forced to address problems
“because the solution to the issue of debt had changed the title of many proper-
ties” (Liv. 7.22.6). Thus, according to Livy’s account, private property could be
transferred by the mid-fourth century, but only with exceptional state support,
and the results were less than ideal.
In the history of debt legislation of the period, the lex de quinqueviris mensariis
creandis as Livy described it stands out both as the earliest recorded attempt to
“publicize” private debt, and as the earliest explicit state-level awareness that the
illiquidity of debt (inertia debitorum) mattered as much as insolvency or poverty.
In Livy’s conception, these were debtors of means who wanted to resolve debts,
but could not because of disagreements over prices. This different approach to
debt, at least by comparison to other fourth-century legislation, solicits argu-
ments both for and against the historicity of Livy’s description. Whatever one
thinks, Nicolet (1963: 421) is wrong to dismiss the passage on the grounds that
it is overly Hellenizing, or that it merely transposed details from later quinque-
viri mensarii active during the Second Punic War. Hellenistic bankers called
trapezites, the etymological equivalent of mensarii, are never found engaged in
resolving credit issues using public funds, and the later republican mensarii were
tasked with refilling a depleted aerarium, not with making payments from it.56 If
anything, these fourth-century mensarii seem too unusual to have been complete
retrojections. Storchi Marino (1993) notes furthermore how these figures’ ac-
tions may fit into a progression of events in the Roman state’s gradual attempt
to resolve liquidity concerns over the long run of the fourth century. Along
with continuing legal attention to debt, this pattern of events includes the con-
struction of moneychanger stalls, tabernae argentariae, in the forum, perhaps in
318,57 and above all the initial production of Roman coinage in the late fourth
century. But all of these changes took place outside the immediate context of
Veii’s conquest, at which time the means of transferring real property must have
remained fairly restricted.

55
Inclinatis semel in concordiam animis novi consules fenebram quoque rem, quae distinere una animos
videbatur, levare adgressi solutionem alieni aeris in publicam curam verterunt quinqueviris creatis quos
mensarios ab dispensatione pecuniae appellarunt. Meriti aequitate curaque sunt, ut per omnium annalium
monumenta celebres nominibus essent; fuere autem C. Duillius P. Decius Mus M. Papirius Q. Publilius et
T. Aemilius. Qui rem difficillimam tractatu et plerumque parti utrique, semper certe alteri gravem cum alia
moderatione tum impendio magis publico quam iactura sustinuerunt. Tarda enim nomina et impeditiora
inertia debitorum quam facultatibus aut aerarium mensis cum aere in foro positis dissoluit, ut populo prius
caveretur, aut aestimatio aequis rerum pretiis liberavit, ut non modo sine iniuria sed etiam sine querimoniis
partis utriusque exhausta vis ingens aeris alieni sit.
56
For Greek trapezites, see Bogaert 1968; Andreau 1987: 222–224.
57
For the date, see Coarelli 1985: 142–143; see also Andreau 1987: 340.

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR 331

(c) Productivity
The importance of a restrictive property market in this period is that, as
alluded to, land will have rarely changed hands outside of state distributions or
inheritance, with the possible exception of defaults on debt. Thus, it is likely that
a mostly stable pattern of landholding emerged following the state’s individual
distributions of the ager Veientanus. In this section, I extend this observation to
argue that those new seven-iugera farms saw structurally different outcomes than
larger estates, and that such inequality sustained and even possibly increased the
level of debt. The key is both the amount of land given to new households, as
well as the potential family structures they contained.
Beginning with land, if Roman smallholders’ properties on the ager Veien-
tanus were mostly formed by the initial grants and not by subsequent purchases
of land, were seven-iugera farms sufficient by themselves to provide for new
settlers’ families? The productivity of early Roman agriculture is a longstand-
ing debate.58 Viglietti (2011: 139–155) now contends against most previous
opinion that the two iugera said by Pliny (NH 18.7) to have been typical for
earliest Roman landholding sufficed to feed a family. He may be right to note
that scholars often employ highly pessimistic figures mostly out of the belief
that early Roman agriculture was primitive. However, his view of the autarkic
early Roman farmer is unconvincing, chiefly because it takes into account little
else besides the variable ratio of grain yields to seed. Particularly, Viglietti over-
looks inputs of capital and labor, something his modern data will have taken for
granted, but to which ancient smallholders were highly sensitive: “Every farmer
can tell just how many yoke of oxen are enough for the farm, and how many
laborers.”59
Instead, recent attempts by Rosenstein (2004) or Erdkamp (2005) to model
agricultural production in the mid-republic which do consider multiple variables
reach similar conclusions: a small surplus may have sometimes been possible
for families on seven-iugera farms, but success unsurprisingly depended on a
variety of dynamic factors. Factors such as quality of land, family cycle, climate,
and access to other land mattered; if anything characterized production, it was
volatility. This limits the utility of quantification, and it seems safest instead to
conclude that small farmsteads were likely to have been conditionally successful.
Indeed, this makes sense in consideration of the fact that Romans themselves
seem to have considered seven-iugera farmsteads sufficient but modest. Roselaar
(2010: 204–207) notes that such allotments appear not only after the sack of
Veii, but in colonial contexts in the later republic: it is hard to think that
the Roman state made a regular habit of distributing plots of land that were
58
For earlier views, see Roselaar 2010: 204, n. 204.
59
Xen. Por. 4.5. Viglietti (2011: 139–55) also ignores processing costs: the same qualities which
he touts as giving emmer wheat (far) resistivity to fungus and parasites made processing prohibitively
expensive; cf. Halstead 2014: 170–171. Agronomists advised that hulling far be assigned to slaves
or prisoners (Cato Agr. 2; Plin. NH 18.29.112).

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332 PHOENIX

automatically set up to fail. But again, success was conditional on a variety of

factors, and farmers would regularly have needed to supplement income from
outside their own property.
It is therefore crucial to consider those methods by which small farms supple-
mented their income, and how the choices available to them affected their total
output. Some options such as wage labor seem unlikely for this period. Instead,
peasants could mitigate risk by extending cultivation to more land, perhaps by
working public land (ager publicus), or through sharecropping or tenancy, if and
when these arrangements existed. Following De Ligt (2000), tenancy seems at
least possible by this period. Notably, considering how difficult it appears to
have been to purchase more land, all such options implied cultivating land that
belonged to others. Thus, what is important is that, however the framework for
extending cultivation in this period is understood, all options implied the need
to pay rents. For ager publicus, Appian provides some idea of what rents cost: a
tenth of the produce from sown land, a fifth from orchards (BC 1.7). There is
no firm evidence for what percentage of harvests may have gone to rent under
scenarios of shareholding or tenancy.
What all of this means is that Romans on seven-iugera farms cultivating
land outside their farms received less return for their work compared to the
labor they put into working their own land. In other words, rents implied
diminishing returns on labor for smallholders as soon as they needed to extend
their production off of their own farms. The inverse held true as well: owners of
larger estates achieved better marginal return on labor than smallholders because
they could intensify production entirely on their own property without needing
to pay any portion of their income to other landowners.
Keeping in mind this difference in the utility of labor for small and large
estates, let us now consider family structures. As noted, Livy reported that the
senatus consultum distributing land in the ager Veientanus was unusual because
it extended property to all adult males in households, and not just to patres
familias. He then went on to add that the state’s intention in taking this step
was to increase childbearing and the Roman population. The same sentiment
appears in Appian’s account of the Gracchan crisis, when depopulation was an
ideological concern, which has led some to dismiss both Livy’s rhetoric and
his basic information. Alternatively, it has been proposed, land was simply
granted to patres familias as part of their existing holdings.60 This would have
perpetuated existing problems of indebtedness while making wealthy Roman
landholders wealthier, and the position is therefore not contrary to my larger
thesis. But there are also reasons to take seriously the claim of an unusual
distribution of land to both patres familias and liberi. First, we have seen that

60
Liv. 5.30.8; cf. App. BC 1.10; Evans 1981: 435; De Martino (1974: 169) argues instead that
land went to proletarii and poor plebs, but this requires us to suppose the urban population was
larger and more stable in this period than seems likely.

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR 333

the distribution of seven-iugera plots to new landholders as their total holding

did not imply farmsteads too small to be historical. Second, the potentially thin
labor supply may have caused the Roman state to show concern with increasing
the number of citizen landholders on its new territory. The creation of more
landowning citizens (assidui), likewise, will have been important to continuing
demands for military manpower. Such concern for increasing citizen landholders
would explain the contemporary grant of citizenship and land to residents of
Fidenae, Capena, and Veii who were loyal to Rome. Furthermore, the creation
of new citizens tied to land north of the Tiber also accords better with the
subsequent formation of new voting tribes located in those areas.
It thus seems plausible that anxiety over the labor supply may have led Rome
to grant plots of land to children (liberi) previously under the legal control of
their fathers. Let us try to picture what this scenario implied. First, most
new settlers would have been younger. Of course, the households of some more
elderly patres familias may have contained older sons with their own families, but
in a society where average life expectancy was generally low the senatus consultum
must have liberated a proportionately large number of younger adult children.
In this case, new farms would regularly have contained families at vulnerable
moments in their life cycles with households limited to maybe a young settler and
(perhaps) his new wife. If indeed these new farmers were called on as assidui
to contribute to warfare, it is easy to see how pressures on household labor
could mount for new landholders with smaller families. Second, the capital of
these new smallholders would have been limited to the little property (peculium)
allowed to them by their patres familias, or to what was already existing on the
land which they now received.61 At least deficits of labor on new farms could
be addressed in the long run by buying slaves or raising children. But these
options entailed significant up-front costs, either to purchase slaves, or in the
short-term risk of childbirth and the unavoidable loss of labor involved in child
rearing.
Thus, some settlers on the ager Veientanus may now have moved out from
under the legal control of their patres familias, but they faced two particular
inequalities. First, their smaller total landholdings implied that their regular
need to extend production off their property would have yielded structurally
lower returns than those available to larger landholders. Second, demography
and the potentially limited capital available to new settlers posed challenges in
the face of economic pressure, which will not have equally affected older patres
familias with larger families and already established farms.
Of course, another option available to new settlers with limited resources
was to borrow: as they were now legally independent and sui iuris, these new

61
Localized shifts in site organization between the Etruscan and mid-republican periods revealed
through survey archaeology might suggest that not all available capital (e.g., farm buildings) contin-
ued in use under Roman proprietors; cf. Patterson, Di Giuseppe, and Witcher 2004: 13.

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334 PHOENIX

landholders could take on debts. With little to offer in the short-term in return,
they may have entered into indebtedness that was not realistically repayable and
instead reinforced their dependencies upon other estates including, one might
imagine, those of their former patres familias. That is, the new settlers in the
ager Veientanus may have gained legal freedom, but older patterns of economic
domination based upon credit will have remained largely unaltered.
It is worth reiterating that in all cases in this scenario the scarcest resource
will have been labor. Larger estates received higher marginal returns on labor,
while their own landholdings would have expanded from the state distribution
of Veii’s territory. But since some older landowners may now have lost adult
sons to new farms north of the Tiber, they also faced potential labor shortfalls
and may therefore have been aggressive consumers on the labor market. To
supply sufficient labor to their now increased holdings, they may have purchased
slaves or extended credit in exchange for the labor of free citizens. It should be
clear that I am describing conditions conducive to the continuation of nexum in
terms of both an increasing demand for labor and the endurance of those social
hierarchies within which indebtedness operated.

v. conclusion
This discussion may now help us to explain the divergent pattern in the
annalist record and why the end of famine contrasted with the appearance of
legislation against debt. Rome’s first significant territorial expansion after the
conquest of Veii not only brought radical changes to Roman landholding, but
it also shifted the balance of labor relative to land, touching off consequential
developments in the Roman labor supply. Increased territory under cultivation
will have raised Rome’s total production and better sheltered the economy from
the risk of localized crop failure, but a thinned supply of labor changed the
point of economic tension from land hunger and famine to the search for labor
through debt-bondage and an increasing turn to slavery. As we have seen, labor
formed an essential ingredient to exchanges of credit and debt in this period.
It is therefore telling that indebtedness was not only common, but remained
fundamental to the structure of republican society after Rome’s movement into
the ager Veientanus.
One final question is why the Roman state first attempted to legislate against
debt when they did, if indebtedness formed a regular ingredient in the early
republican economy. As argued, the debt laws of the fourth century were likely
a new strategy to address an old problem. There are some hints in our sources
of periods of particularly intolerable debt in the fourth century; however, it is
also worth considering whether, in the account given above, the debtor class did
not gain greater political traction within the apparatus of the republican state.62
62
Gabrielli (2003a: 56) suggests that a similar consolidation of power in the hands of the demos
helped to bring about actions against debt in fourth-century Syracuse.

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 DEBT, LAND, AND LABOR 335

I have suggested that new farmsteads on the ager Veientanus were structurally
prone to debt because of the size of landholdings and the composition of settlers’
families; I have also noted that the Roman state may have made unprecedented
grants of land in its desire to increase the supply of citizen labor. Taken together,
this will have effectively created a substantial class of new assidui who were also
potentially debtors. That is, a relatively larger proportion of Rome’s voting
population, particularly in the new rural tribes, were in debt, and this may have
forced the issue at the level of public legislation.
Department of Classics
University of Toronto
125 Queen's Park
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 2C7 seth.bernard@utoronto.ca

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