Even a cursory read of Cicero’s letters reveals his extensive property portfolio, with a house on the Palatine, suburban and country villas (several of which were located on the Bay of Naples), productive agricultural estates, lodges where he could stay while on journeys and urban rental properties, including apartment blocks and tabernae. Several generations later, Pliny’s correspondence displays a similar concern with the acquisition of real estate, indicating that he and his peers were actively involved in the buying and selling of land and property. Such letters indicate a dynamic market in real estate. Yet, despite the importance of property ownership in the Roman economy, the real estate market remains underexplored. This new volume goes a long way towards addressing that gap in our scholarship, offering a collection of essays tightly focused on the buying, selling and rental of property in the Roman world.
As the editors note, previous scholarship has focused predominantly on rental accommodation, villas and legal frameworks of property ownership. Their aim is to broaden the study of the Roman real estate market, incorporating a new structural framework emphasising the importance of transaction costs, as well as considering the phenomenon of property acquisition and price-setting from a social and behavioural perspective. This further develops the approach they took in their earlier volume on information asymmetry in the Roman economy (Managing Information in the Roman Economy, 2021). The present work considers both residential and commercial property (two things which are in any case difficult to separate in the Roman world), and while it is focused predominantly on Italy, it includes regional studies of the north-western provinces and Roman Egypt.
The volume is divided into five thematic parts, with the first comprising two chapters themed around concepts and control. Rosillo-López presents a study of government intervention in real estate in the Roman world, arguing that laws and procedures facilitating private ownership of land and property were consistently upheld. García Morcillo then explores value creation within the real estate market, demonstrating the complexities and social constructions that underlie the formation of price in this context.
Part II includes a series of case studies focused on land, property and law, opening with Kehoe’s study of land as an economic resource. As the most stable source of wealth, Kehoe asks to what extent land could be leveraged to create capital for future investment. He contends that, while our evidence suggests that land was used mainly to secure short-term loans rather than mortgaged over a longer period, imperial alimentary schemes such as those detailed in the famous inscription from Veleia (or indeed private schemes such as those of Pliny at Como) indicate that land could still be used for long-term financial planning. In contrast to the more complex social and behavioural mechanics of property price setting discussed by García Morcillo, the price of agricultural land appears more predictable here, with Kehoe regarding the price as being set in relation to the expected annual income of the land in question. Capogrossi Colognesi makes use of legal sources to reflect on the accumulation of agrarian property in the late Republic and the Principate, arguing that even if adjacent estates (fundi) were brought under the same ownership, they continued to operate as individual production units. This not only maintained elasticity in larger estates but likely facilitated the circulation of land, as an independent fundus could more easily be sold on. Finally, Andreau discusses the real estate market as evidenced in the Campanian wax tablets.
Social status and investment in real estate by the Roman elite is the thematic focus of Part III, which begins with a pair of papers concentrating on Cicero. Koedijk uses a case study of Cicero’s letters to tackle the question of how the Roman world had a functioning property market when it lacked real estate agents. Over several months in the spring and early summer of 45 b.c.e., Cicero tried to find an appropriate location to construct a shrine to his recently deceased daughter Tullia, and while he was ultimately unsuccessful in his aims, his letters give an insight into the means by which he attempted to purchase a suitable property in the Roman suburbium. Social relations and networks are central to the process, with Cicero considering a total of twelve properties, eight of them seriously, only three of which appear to have been for sale on the open market. The specific circumstances of Cicero’s property search and its emotional context may make this an unusual situation, but the process itself, with its clear shortcomings and inefficiencies, may have been typical. Koedijk demonstrates here that the practicalities of the market made it difficult to find out which properties were potentially for sale and in particular to find out accurate price information. The whole system appears to have been characterised by inefficiency. Pina Polo’s study of senatorial villae as information hubs similarly emphasises the importance of networks and social relations. He draws again on Cicero’s letters to trace his movements and his social and political networking between April and July 44 b.c.e., when he was moving between estates in Latium and Campania in the immediate aftermath of Caesar’s assassination. Pina Pola’s appendix listing Cicero’s correspondents during this period brings his political networking into sharp relief. Ownership of real estate was not just about income and economic security but was also essential for such networking; a villa in a suitably well-connected and accessible location must have been priced accordingly. Conversely, Marzano considers a particularly poorly connected villa on the Sorrento Peninsula, arguing that the very inaccessibility of Positano likely made it an attractive prospect for Tiberius. This section ends with a study of the gens Neratia and their extensive real estate holdings, especially around Samnium.
A pair of papers then focus specifically on urban businesses (Part IV). With Maschek we return to Cicero, whose comments to Atticus about the collapse of two of his recently inherited tabernae in Puteoli form a starting point for a study of elite investment in urban real estate. Maschek ably demonstrates that the income derived from urban tabernae and lodgings formed a revenue stream equal to that of agricultural production for the wealthy elites of late-Republican Italy. Mataix Ferrándiz expands the focus of the volume to consider the place of horrea within the real estate market, exploring the intimate relationship between warehouses and shipping.
Finally, Part V considers the real estate market outside Italy. Piacentin explores the limited evidence for imperial estates in the north-western provinces of the Roman empire, suggesting that the emperor rarely sought to own estates in these regions but focused largely on exploiting pre-existing economic resources such as mines. Kelly exploits the rich papyrological material to paint a detailed picture of the market in agricultural land and housing in Roman Egypt between 1 and 274 c.e. He demonstrates that while the market in agricultural land appears to have been organised along financially rational principles, this was not the case when it came to the leasing or sale of housing, which was largely driven by familial concerns. Taken together, the chapters that make up this volume enable the editors successfully to achieve their aim to shed new light on the dynamics of the Roman real estate market.
