nts of one village might be forced to cultivate vacant lands at a
distance. During the seasons of sowing and harvest the presence of every
villager was required in his _idia_. The crushing weight of taxation,
added to the other obligations of the peasantry caused many of them to
flee from their _idia_, and this led to an increasing amount of unleased
state land. As a large number of private estates had developed, chiefly
because of the encouragement extended to those who brought waste land
under cultivation, the government forced the property holders to assume
the contracts for the vacant public lands in their districts. With the
introduction of the municipal councils in the course of the third century,
these were made responsible for the collection of the taxes of each nome.
To enable the councillors, who were property holders, to fulfill this
obligation, their tenants were forbidden to leave their holdings. And so,
as state or private tenants, the peasants came to be bound to the soil.

The development in Asia Minor was similar. There the royal lands of the
Seleucids became the public land of Rome, and out of this the Roman
magnates of the later Republic developed vast estates which in turn were
concentrated in the hands of Augustus. These imperial domains were
cultivated by peasants, who lived in village communities and paid a yearly
rental for the land they occupied. The rest of the land of Asia formed the
territories dependent upon the Greek cities, and was occupied by a native
population who were in part free peasants settled in villages. On the
imperial domains the village came to be the _idia_ to which the peasant
was permanently attached for the performance of his liturgies or
obligatory services, while on the municipal territories the agricultural
population was bound to the soil as tenants of the municipal landholders,
the local senators, upon whom had been placed the responsibility for the
payment of the taxes of their municipalities.

*Africa.* In Africa the transformation was effected differently. There, at
the opening of the principate, outside of the municipal territories, the
land fell into _ager publicus_, private estates of Roman senators and
imperial domains. Under the early emperors, particularly Nero, the bulk of
the private estates passed by legacy and confiscation into the control of
the princeps, who also took over the administration of the public domain
in so far as it was not absorbed in new mu