specially to denote, the system of non-colonial assignment. The amount granted to individuals in assignments of both types varied from time to time. It was reckoned in terms of the jugerum, which was approximately 58 of an English acre. The earliest and smallest assignment was 2 jugera—an amount so small that it seems to presuppose on the part of the recipient some share in common or gentile property or some additional private property of his own. Other quotas were 3, 3712, 7, 10+14 jugera. The last was the maximum amount granted before the time of Ti. Gracchus (133 B.C.), and it was held by representatives of the old school that 7 jugera were as much as any frugal Roman should want (Pliny, Historia Naturalis, xviii. 18). The division was carried out by commissions of 3, 5 or 10 men appointed by the people (Cicero, de Lege Agraria ii. 7. 17). The land which the state retained as ager publicus was always placed in the hands of individuals, who occupied it in some manner remunerative to the state. These individuals (possessores) were never regarded as owners of the land thus occupied. It remained the property of the state, was held without a contract (precario) and could be resumed by the state at will. But though the possessors had no claim against the state, their ownership could be defended against all other individual claimants; and it seems probable that from an early date the praetor’s possessory interdict was used to protect all occupiers, provided their tenure had been acquired neither by force (vi) nor by seizure of land in its occupiers, absence (clam), nor by mere permission of the previous holder to occupy (precario alter ab altero). Moreover, Appian says that possessors of this type could transfer their land by inheritance, and that the land was accepted as security by creditors. This kind of occupation, therefore, though clearly distinguished from ownership (dominium), was yet regarded as a perfectly secure form of tenure. All occupiers of public land paid dues to the state through a state contractor (publicanus). These dues varied in amount, and in the method of their collection. We learn from Appian that the ordinary dues paid by occupiers of arable land in Italy were 110 of seed crops and 15 of plant produce. Owners who turned cattle or sheep on pasture land belonging to the state also paid fixed dues to the treasury. The occupiers of the Roman public land in Campania paid a large rent (Cic. de leg. Agr. i. 7. 21). Appian’s account of the public land (Bell. Civ. i. 7) would lead us to suppose that the amount of tax paid by the occupier, and the method adopted by the state for the collection of the revenues, depended upon the nature of the land at the time when it first passed to a possessor. He says that some of the public land which was in a good state of cultivation was let on lease; but that with regard to the poor or devastated land proclamation was made that anyone might squat on it and till it in return for the small payment in kind mentioned above. It has been questioned whether the land described by Appian and by Cicero as let on lease, of which the Campanian land and some lands in Sicily are typical, represents a legally distinct class. It seems probable that the distinction is one of practice rather than of law, and that the difference lay not in the relation between the state and the possessor (as would be the case if the leased land were really let to individuals by the censor, while the occupied land was held by mere permission of the state without any contract) but in the details of the contract between the censor and the publicanus with regard to the collection of the dues. The conditions of the tenure of the Roman public land in Africa are known to us from the Lex Agraria of 111 B.C. (Bruns, Fontes, i. 3. 11, vv. 85 foll.). Here the publicanus is the middleman between the state and the possessor, and purchases from the censor the right of collecting dues. The law places no restriction on bargaining between the censor and the publicanus, but enacts that no possessor or pastor shall ever be required by the publicanus to pay more than the amount prescribed by the censors of 115 B.C. These conditions may be regarded as typical for the occupation of public lands. And when Cicero speaks of public land as let on lease (locatus) by the censor, he no doubt refers to the farming of the taxes to a publicanus for a fixed period, and not to the letting of the land. This seems clear from a passage (in Verr. iii. 6. 12) where he speaks of land in Sicily which had been restored by Rome to former owners as being leased. The land itself could not be leased by Rome if it belonged not to Rome but to the Sicilian inhabitants; but the collection of the revenues due to Rome could be so leased to Publicani (q.v.). And the same explanation would apply to Cicero’s statements that the Campanian land was let on lease by the censors (cf. Festus, s.v. venditiones). The view that there was a distinct class of the public land which was let out for a fixed term of years to tenants on a definite lease, unlike the ordinary public land which was always held in occupation merely at will (precario), has been maintained by W. A. Becker, and seems to be supported, with the help of conjecture, by a few passages in Cicero and by Hyginus (Gromatici, p. 116). But the passage of Hyginus is barely intelligible even on this supposition; and Cicero’s repeated statement that the Campanian land was expressly exempted from the legislation of the Gracchi (cf. Lex Agraria, Bruns, loc. cit. v. 6) shows that there was not sufficient distinction
between the Campanian tenure and that of other public land in Italy to make this definite exception by name superfluous. The Sempronian law could obviously not touch land which the state had leased to occupiers on the basis of a definite contract. Moreover, we have absolutely no evidence for such a contract, even in Cicero’s speeches against Rullus, when he might be expected to mention it as an objection to Rullus’s bill. That there were some distinctive characteristics about the tenure of certain lands, of which the Campanian land is typical, seems proved by the repeated association of these lands with certain special lands in the provinces, especially at Leontini in Sicily, and by some passages in the Gromatici where agri vectigales are spoken of as a distinct class. But what these characteristics were cannot be clearly determined. It seems certain that in every case the possessor occupied precario, and that only in the bargain between the censor and the middleman was there room for contract. Thus the state was justified in the claim to resume public land which it made in many of the Agrarian laws.
The earliest agrarian measures of which we have any record are the distributions of land conquered in war to poor citizens, which later authorities attribute to Numa and Servius Tullius. Such assignments, however, are not the result of legislative acts, but of a voluntary surrender on the king’s part of his own portion of the spoils. It is probable that the agrarian law which resulted from the proposals of Spurius Cassius (consul 486 B.C.) was the first attempt made by the Roman people to exercise its control over the occupation of state territory. According to the traditional account, Cassius proposed that such portion of lands lately conquered from the Hernici as fell to the Roman state should be divided in equal shares between the Roman plebs and the Latins; and further that poor citizens should receive allotments of land previously conquered, and occupied without any legal right by the Patricians. The inclusion of the Latins in the distribution was afterwards dropped; but the law in its final form certainly asserted the right of the Plebeians to take their share in the public land. The accounts given of it by Livy and Dionysius are no doubt coloured by their knowledge of later agrarian legislation, and it seems hardly likely that the proposal to resume and redistribute public land already occupied was made at this early stage; but it probably challenged the exclusive claim of Patricians to occupy. We hear of another agrarian law proposed by the tribune Lucius Icilius in 456 B.C. (Lex Icilia de Aventino publicando) which regulated in some way the tenure of public land on the Aventine. In 376 B.C. the tribunes Licinius and Sextius introduced into their laws, for the promotion of the privileges of the plebs, a clause enacting that no more than 500 jugera of land should be occupied by a single cultivator. It seems almost certain from Livy’s account that this measure referred only to the occupation of ager publicus, though some modern authorities have upheld the view that it dealt with land held on any kind of tenure, others again that it dealt only with private property in land. According to Appian, the law also enacted that only 100 cattle and 500 sheep might be turned by one owner on the public pastures. But it failed
