Roman flight

M.I. Finley: Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology
pp 139-141
'The question then is whether, over the empire as a whole, there was a significant decline in commodity production. I believe that the answer is in the affirmative and that the reasons are to be found in two separate, though not unrelated, developments.
...

The other development was a still later one, not setting in before the fourth and fifth centuries. In the year 527 the emperor wrote to an official in southern Italy, in a communication drafted by Cassiodorus (Variae 8.31), ordering all possessores and curiales to return to the cities and leave the countryside to their coloni.53 A flight from the cities by the wealthier (and wealthiest) sectors of the population was widespread in the last centuries of the western Empire, notably but not exclusively in the regions most subject to the Germanic invasions.54 A corollary was a general decline in the urban population. There was extensive geographic variation, as there was in the impact of the armies, but there can be no question about the over-all pattern - in general, not in detail, because research into the phenomenon is still almost nonexistent: it is absent, for example, from Jones's monumental Later Roman Empire.55 Ancient writers, such as Cassiodorus or St Ambrose before him (writing about Aemilia), deplored the effect on civilization and culture. My interest is another one: when wealthy absentee landowners withdrew to their estates, they tended to convert their new bases not only into fortified centres but also into self-sufficient communities, supplying as much of their own needs as possible, in food and clothing, in woodwork and even metalwork. These men of course continued as commodity producers, as I have already indicated, but they appear to have reduced the market as a whole by their change in residence, which amounted to a change in way of life.'



Torsten