of very frequent occurrence.[1] Even the traditions of Roman law furnish the information that wealth consisted at first in cattle and the usufruct of the soil, and that it was not till later that land came to be distributed among the burgesses as their own special property.[2] More reliable evidence that such was the case is afforded by the designation of wealth as "cattle-estate," or "slave-and-cattle-estate," (pecunia, familia pecuniaque), and of the special possessions of the children of the household and of slaves as "lesser cattle" (peculium); also by the earliest form of acquiring property, the laying hold of it with the hand (mancipatio), which was only appropriate to the case of moveable articles (P. 162); and above all by the oldest measure of land, the "lordship" (heredium, from herus lord), consisting of two jugera (about an acre and a quarter), which can only have applied to garden-ground, and not to the hide.[3] When and how the distribu-
- ↑ The system which we meet with in the case of the Germanic joint tillage, combining a partition of the land in property among the clansmen with common cultivation by the clan, can hardly ever have existed in Italy. Had each clansman been regarded in Italy, as among the Germans, in the light of proprietor of a particular spot in each portion of the collective domain that was marked off for tillage, the separate husbandry of later times would probably have set out from a minute subdivision of hides. But the very opposite was the case; the individual names of the Roman hides (fundus Cornelianus) show clearly that the Roman proprietor owned from the beginning a possession not dismembered but united.
- ↑ Cicero (de Rep. ii. 9, 14, comp. Plutarch, Q. Rom. xv.) states: Tum (in the time of Romulus) erat res in pecore et locorum possessionibus, ex quo pecuniosi et locupletes vocabantur—(Numa) primum agros, quos bello Romulus ceperat, divisit viritim civibus. In like manner Dionysius represents Romulus as dividing the land into thirty curial districts, and Numa as establishing boundary-stones and introducing the festival of the Terminalia (i. 7, ii. 74; and thence Plutarch, Numa, 16).
- ↑ Since this assertion still continues to be disputed, we shall let the numbers speak for themselves. Roman farmers reckoned on an average five modii as sufficient to sow a jugerum, and the produce as five-fold. The produce of a heredium accordingly (even when, without taking into view the space occupied by the dwelling-house and farm-yard, we regard it as entirely arable land, and make no account of years of fallow) amounted to fifty, or deducting the seed forty, modii. For an adult hard-working slave Cato reckons fifty-one modii as the annual consumption. These data enable any one to answer for himself the question whether a Roman family could or could not subsist on the produce of an heredium. This result is not shaken by reckoning up the subsidiary produce yielded by the arable land itself and by the common pasturage, such as figs, vegetables, milk, flesh, &c.; for pastoral husbandry was always of subordinate importance among the Romans, and grain notoriously formed the chief subsistence of the people; nor is it much affected by the boasted thoroughness of the older cultivation. Beyond question, the
