Walker - 1967 - A geography of Italy

PART l: SOME GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
were not particularly efficient. Slave manpower in the third and second centuries
was cheap but wasteful, and could only be used on routine manual tasks needed
in grain production and herding; for the more skilled work on vines, ohves and
fruit trees, free labour had to be hired. Perhaps the greatest asset o f slave labour
was that it was immune from mihtary service, but the frequent absence o f the
owner did not make for efficiency, and much depended on the quality and zest
o f the bailiff, himself usually a freedman. Perhaps the worst feature o f the latifundia
was the lack o f personal interest or responsibility for the land itself which
resulted in the ‘running down’ o f many areas suited to grain production. When
large-scale grain imports became available, not only from Sicily but also from
Sardinia, Africa and Egypt, big producers in Italy tended to switch to sheep,
cattle and goat rearing. Huge areas o f Apulia, Lucania, and even Sicily, became
sparsely populated ranches rim by barbarian slave herdsmen (usually Gauls) who
formed the backbone o f slave revolts in the first century BC. T h e ancient system
o f transhumance between the summer mountain pastures and the winter lowland
areas (e.g. between the Samnite hills and Apulia) was extended and the special
drover routes were protected by law. This development could not fail to have a
detrimental effect on the forests.
Fortunately the latifimdia did not blanket Italy completely. The Po Valley was
largely spared, as were inaccessible areas away from the main routes and the
coast, and elsewhere a sprinkling o f small and medium-sized farms flourished
particularly in the areas suited to the more specialized arboreal culture, e.g. Campania.
Even so, between the First Punic War and the time o f Augustus, the outstanding
feature of Italian agriculture was the squeezing out, not only o f the small
proprietor, but also o f the free labourer from the countryside by non-Italian
slaves who were sometimes freedmen set up as squatter tenants on the estate.
O f the 15 million inhabitants o f Italy at the beginning o f the first century
AD probably a quarter were of foreign origin, and the tendency for smaller families
among the Italian rich, which so alarmed Augustus, was later to spread down the
social scale. The cause of the small farmer was not without its champions.
Flaminius had advocated the settlement o f the Ager Gallicus by the landless
poor, but unfortunately this state land ended up, as in Sicily, in the hands of
larger owners. The most spectacular attempt to stem the economic flood and
rehabilitate the small farmer on former state lands, now firmly in the hands of
large owners, was made by the Gracchi, with only modest results. Even the
settlement o f veterans in Italy was a mixed blessing. Usually the land was
acquired by confiscation from political enemies (e.g. Sulla in Campania and
Etruria) and existing tenants were ejected, and very often an indifferent farmer
replaced a good one. In time veterans’ land often found its way back on to the
market and the accretion process was resumed. From the time o f Marius it
became customary for veterans to receive their grants o f land in the provinces,
thereby fiuTher reducing the native-born element in Italy.
These gloomy trends in the Italian countryside, which were to continue and
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