if a proprietor sold any part of his estate, he was not allowed to retain the tenants.100 At the same time the condition of rustic slaves was improved. The government interfered here too, for the same reason, and forbade masters to sell slaves employed on the land except along with the land on which they worked.101 This limitation of the masters’ rights tended to raise the condition of the slave to that of the colon.
The proprietor’s power over his tenants was augmented by the fact that the State entrusted him with the duties of collecting the taxes for which each farm was liable,102 and of carrying out the conscription of the soldiers whom his estate was called upon to furnish. He also administered justice in petty matters and policed his domains. Thus the large proprietors formed an influential landed aristocracy, with some of the powers which the feudal lords of western Europe exercised in later times. They were a convenient auxiliary to the Government, but they were also a danger. The custom grew up for poor freemen to place themselves under the protection of wealthy landowners, who did not scruple to use their influence to divert the course of justice in favour of these clients, and were able by threats or bribery to corrupt the Government officials. Such patronage was forbidden by Imperial laws, but it was difficult to abolish it.103
It had long been the custom for public bodies to grant the land which they owned on a perpetual lease, subject to the payment of a ground-rent (vectigal). It was on this principle that Rome had dealt with conquered territory. The former proprietors continued to possess their land, but subject to the ownership (dominium) of the Roman people and liable to a ground-rent. In the fifth century this form of land tenure coalesced with another form of perpetual lease, emphyteusis, which had its roots not in Roman but in Greek history. Emphyteusis meant the cultivation of waste land by planting it with olives or vines or palms.104 To encourage such cultivation a special kind of tenure had come into use. The emphyteutes bound himself by contract to make certain improvements on the land; he paid a small fixed rent; his tenure was perpetual and passed to his heirs, lapsing only if he failed to fulfil his contract. In the course of time, all kinds of land, not only plantation land, might be held by emphyteutic tenure. Legally this agreement did not answer fully to the Roman conception either of a lease or of a sale, and lawyers differed as to its nature. It was finally ruled that it was neither a sale nor a lease, but a contract sui generis.105 This kind of tenancy was the rule on the Imperial domains. But it was also to be found on the estates of private persons.
(2) The trades to which the method of compulsion was first and most harshly applied were those on which the sustenance of the capital cities, Rome and Constantinople, depended: the skippers who conveyed the corn supplies from Africa and Egypt, and the bakers who made it into bread. These trades, like many others, had been organised in corporations or guilds (collegia), and as a general rule the son probably followed the father in his calling. It was the most profitable thing he could do, if his father’s capital was invested in the ships or in the bakery.106 But this changed when Diocletian required the skippers to transport the public food supplies, and made their property responsible for the safe arrival of the cargoes. They had to transport not only the supplies for the population of the capital, but the annonae for the soldiers. This was a burden which tempted the sons of a skipper to seek some other means of livelihood. Compulsion was therefore introduced, and the sons were bound to their father’s calling.107 The same principle was applied to the bakers, and other purveyors of food, on whom the State laid public burdens. In the course of the fourth century the members of all the trade guilds were bound to their occupations. It may be noticed that the workmen in the public factories (fabricae) were branded, so that if they fled from their labours they could be recognised and arrested.
(3) The decline of municipal life, and the decay of the well-to-do provincial citizen of the middle class, is one of the important social facts of the fourth and fifth centuries. The beginnings of this process were due to general economic conditions, but it was aggravated and hastened by Imperial legislation, and but for the policy of the Government might perhaps have been arrested.
The well-to-do members of a town community, whose means made them eligible for membership of the curia or local senate and for magistracy, formed the class of curiales.108 The members of the senate were called decuriones. But in the period of decline these terms were almost synonymous. As the numbers of the curials declined, there was not one of them who was not obliged at some time or other to discharge the unwelcome functions of a decurion. In former times it had been a coveted honour to fulfil the unpaid duties of local administration, but the legislation of the Emperors, from the end of the third century onward, rendered these duties an almost intolerable burden. The curials had now not only to perform their proper work of local government, the collection of the rates, and all the ordinary services which urban councils everywhere discharge. They had also to do the work of Imperial officials. They had to collect the land-taxes of the urban district. And they were made responsible for the full amount of taxation, so that if there were defaulters, they were collectively liable for the deficiency.109 They had also to arrange for the supply of horses and mules for the Imperial post, the upkeep of which, though its use was exclusively confined to Government officials, was laid upon the provincials and was a most burdensome corvée.
The burdens laid upon the curials became heavier as their numbers diminished. Diocletian’s reorganisation of the State service, with innumerable officials, invited the sons of well-to-do provincial families, who in old times would have been content with the prospect of local honours, to embrace an official career by which they might attain senatorial rank; and senatorial rank would deliver them from all curial obligations.
In course of time the plight of the middle-class provincials, who were generally owners of small farms in the neighbourhood of their town and suffered under the heavy taxation, became so undesirable that many of them left their homes, enlisted in the army, took orders in the Church, or even placed themselves under the patronage of rich proprietors in the country. The danger was imminent that the municipal organisation would entirely dissolve. Here again the Emperors resorted to compulsion. The condition of the curial was made a hereditary servitude.110 He was forbidden to leave his birthplace; if he wanted to travel, he had to obtain leave from the provincial governor. His sons were bound to be curials like himself; from their birth they were, in the expressive words of an Imperial law, like victims bound with fillets.111 He could only escape from his lot by forfeiting the whole or a part of his property. Restrictions were placed on his ordinary rights, as a Roman citizen, of selling his land or leaving it by will at his own discretion. Nothing shows the unenviable condition of the curial class more vividly than the practice of pressing a man into the curia as a punishment for misdemeanours.112
The power of the local magistrates had been diminished in the second century by Trajan’s institution of the curator civitatis, whose business was to superintend the finances of the municipality. The curator was indeed a townsman, but as a State servant he had ceased to belong to the curial order and he was appointed by the provincial governor. By the middle of the fourth century his prestige had declined because the right of appointing him had been transferred to the curia itself. He was overshadowed by the new office of defensor instituted by Valentinian I to protect the interests of the poorer classes against the oppression of the powerful.113 The defensor was to be appointed by the Praetorian Prefect, and he was to be a man who filled some not unimportant post in the State service. But the institution did not prove a success. It was difficult to get the right sort of people to undertake the office, and it was soon bestowed for corrupt reasons on unsuitable persons. Theodosius the Great sought to remedy this by transferring the appointment of the defensor to the curials.114 The prestige of the office at once declined, and the defensorship like the curatorship became one more burden imposed upon the sorely afflicted curial class, without any real power to compensate for the duties which it involved. The influence of all the urban magistracies, which had become anything rather than an honour, was soon to be overshadowed by that of the bishop. And this reminds us of another feature in the decline of municipal
