Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

342 12. land, labour and settlement
greater eastern prosperity in the fifth and sixth century. Did small freeholders
more readily seize economic opportunities than great landowners?
Unfortunately, the data are such that we really cannot tell. That smaller
landholders could create and take advantage of economic growth is, I
think, clear from their evident presence in the east, and from the equally
evident and growing prosperity of the region. It is also supported by scraps
of written evidence, such as a passing reference in the fifth century by
Theodoret of Cyrrhus to a village in the Lebanon of small freeholders
(they are described as farmer-proprietors, kai geōrgoi kai despotai), who specialized
in growing nuts which they sold to merchants. 58
However, there is no reason to suppose that large landowners were any
the less aware of economic opportunities than their smaller brethren.
There are indeed suggestions in the scanty documentary evidence that
owners of large estates might sometimes be better placed to exploit opportunities
because of their greater access to the capital and labour necessary
for investment and innovation. In Egypt it is on the large estates (such as
those of the Apion family) that complex and extensive water-lifting devices
are most commonly recorded; 59 and, roughly contemporaneously (in the
later sixth century) but at different ends of the ancient world (the region
around Trier, and Mesopotamia where it borders on Armenia), two ecclesiastics
are recorded to have laid out new vineyards. The vineyard in the east
is known to have soon attracted wine-merchants (from Cappadocia), and
it, at least, must have been planted with the potential profits of commerce
firmly in mind. 60
If there really was a difference between east and west in the average size
of estates, the effect is perhaps more likely to have been fiscal, and felt by
the state, than economic, with an impact on regional standards of living.
Although it is difficult to prove, and although small landowners could club
together to buy a powerful patron in order to defend their interests, it is
nonetheless almost certainly true that the great in late antiquity were those
best able to escape or mitigate the fiscal demands of the state. 61 If so, the
western empire in the fourth and fifth century, and the barbarian successor
states of the fifth and sixth, may not have been as well equipped to
exploit their tax base, on which so much of their power depended, as the
58 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Hist. Mon. (ed. and French trans. P. Canivet and A. Leroy-Molinghen
1977–9) xvii.2. The holy man (Abrahamēs) came to the village disguised as a merchant wanting to buy
nuts, and rented a house there in order to ply his business. 59 Bonneau (1970) 49–50.
60 Trier: Venantius Fortunatus, Carm. iii.12, lines 39–40 (the bishop, Nicetius of Trier, also built a
watermill on the estate). Borders of Armenia: John Eph. Lives of the Eastern Saints, Syriac text and
English trans. E. W. Brooks, 3 vols. 1923–5 (�PO xvii.1, xviii.4, xix.2), i.129–30 (on Addai).
61 For villagers acquiring powerful patrons, the classic text is Lib. Or. xlvii (esp. xlvii.4). Here the
protection was given by military commanders against the villagers’ landlords. Theodoret of Cyrrhus,
Hist. Mon. xvii.3, however, reveals a village of freeholders in the fifth-century Lebanon, brutalized and
powerless in the face of a tax demand (until saved by an advance secured by a well-connected holy man).
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