Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

340 12. land, labour and settlement
Cynopolis, and who employed twenty stewards for their Oxyrhynchite
lands alone. But in Egypt there is also plenty of evidence of smallholders
farming their own land, and of a sizeable group of middling landowners in
between, like the family of Apollos and Dioscorus, whose sixth-century
archive survives from Aphrodito. The Egyptian evidence is sufficiently
detailed and nuanced to show that landholding was very varied, and that
the land market was active and fluid – with scope for entrepreneurs like
Apollos and Aurelius Phoibammon to do very well out of lending money
to farmers and landowners, leasing land from absentee landlords, and subletting
the same to free tenants. 51
In the other eastern provinces, there is nothing approaching Egypt’s
wealth of documentation. However, the fine but scarcely luxurious houses
of northern Syria, and the active Anatolian villagers of the Life of
Theodore of Sykeon (alongside some references here to powerful secular
aristocrats), suggest that a varied pattern of landholding that included small
and middling landowners was not just a feature of the Nile valley. 52 In the
west, however, smallholders, and even middling landlords, are more
difficult to find in the sources. They are best documented in texts that either
record their undoing, such as Salvian’s attack on the oppression by great
landlords of the free farmers of Gaul (written probably in the 440s), or that
are very generalized and impossible to illustrate in detail on the ground,
such as the early-sixth-century Salic Law, which certainly seems to have
been designed for small-scale communities of free farmers. 53
Small freeholders and middling landlords existed in the west: common
sense and the texts cited above suggest as much. We simply do not have the
detailed evidence to detect them, let alone to begin to say how common
they were. But in our period, lack of evidence of people below the highest
reaches of society certainly is no proof of their absence. In the 1920s,
forty-five written tablets of the late fifth century were discovered in the
south of Africa Proconsularis, which revealed the presence of smallholders
in Vandal Africa cultivating land on perpetual and alienable leases
(by right of a centuries-old Roman law, the Lex Manciana). Without the
chance survival and discovery of these tablets, we would have had no
reason to suppose that such smallholders existed in fifth-century Africa,
where surviving literary texts and mosaics point much more to a world of
luxurious villas and rich landlords. 54
51 Egypt in general: Keenan in ch. 21c, pp.629,36 below. Apion estates: p. 319 above, n. 7; Jones,
LRE 780 and 784. Small and middling owners, and leasing: Keenan (1980); Keenan (1985); Bagnall,
Egypt 114–21.
52 Mitchell, Anatolia ii 122–50. For powerful aristocrats at Anastasiopolis: Life of Theodore (ed.
Festugière (1970) chs. 76 and 78 (English trans. Dawes and Baynes (1948)). For other evidence of
(over)mighty landlords in late antique Asia Minor: Feissel and Kaygusuz (1985) 412–13.
53 Salv. De Gub. Dei v.38–45; Pactus Legis Salicae; Wickham (1992) 233.
54 Albertini tablets: Courtois et al.(1952). Villas: see p. 333 above, n. 34.
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