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Updated: June 16, 2025
I pass over the fact that Cato's example of a farm of two hundred and forty jugera is neither a fair nor a comparable unit.
H. N. xviii. 3, 18: fourteen -jugera-, Victor, 33; Plutarch, Apophth. A comparison of the Germanic proportions gives the same result.
There was a new secession of the people to the Janiculum, followed by the enactment of the Hortensian laws, celebrated in the history of jurisprudence because they deprived the senate of its veto and declared that the voice of the people assembled in their tribes was supreme law. Debts were abolished or greatly reduced, and seven jugera of land were allotted to every citizen.
It professed to be the renewal of an older law, which had limited the amount of domain land which an individual might possess to five hundred jugera; it professed, that is, to reinforce an injunction which had been persistently disobeyed, for this enactment restricting possession had never been repealed.
The estate of Lucius Manlius, which Cato sketches in his work on agriculture, was far from rivalling the great demesnes of the princes of the land. It consisted of 240 jugera devoted to the olive and of 100 jugera reserved for the vine. Provision was made for a moderate supply of corn and for pasturage for the cattle that worked upon the fields.
If you cultivate less than two hundred and forty jugera of olives you cannot get along with less than one overseer, while if you cultivate twice or more as much land you will not require two or three overseers.
He was found at work on his little farm, which comprised only four jugera, either digging or plowing, and after he had sent for his toga, or outer garment, which he had thrown off for convenience in working, and had put it on, he listened to the message, and accepted the responsibility.
These ideas the three confederates revived in the colonial laws, which Saturninus as tribune of the people had partly introduced already , partly now introduced . As early as the former year the interrupted distribution of the Carthaginian territory had been resumed primarily for the benefit of the soldiers of Marius not the burgesses only but, as it would seem, also the Italian allies and each of these veterans had been promised an allotment of 100 -jugera-, or about five times the size of an ordinary Italian farm, in the province of Africa.
Thus the farm does not entirely depend on the labour of its own familia; nevertheless it rests still upon an economic basis of slave labour. For an olivetum of 240 jugera Cato puts the necessary hands as thirteen in number, all non-free; for a vineyard of 100 jugera at sixteen; and these figures are no doubt low, if we remember his character for parsimony and profit-making.
The system was supposed to have existed from the times of the Kings; it was believed to have formed the basis of the first agrarian law, that of Spurius Cassius in 486; it had been employed after the conquest of the Volscians in the fourth century and that of the Sabines in the third; it had animated the agrarian legislation of Flaminius when in 232 he romanised the ager Gallicus south of Ariminum without planting a single colony in this region; and a date preceding the Gracchan legislation by only forty years had seen the resumption of the method, when some Gallic and Ligurian land, held to be the spoil of war and declared to be unoccupied, had been parcelled out into allotments, of ten jugera to Roman citizens and of three to members of the Latin name.
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