transformed from
tenants into proprietors, and, like the landholders of Egypt, they were
forced to assume the lease of vacant public land adjacent to their
estates. But to make it possible for the proprietors to fulfill this
obligation the state had to give them control over the labor needed to
till the soil. Hence the _coloni_ were forbidden to leave the estates
where they had once established themselves as tenants. In Africa the
estate became the _idia_ or _origo_ corresponding to the village in Egypt.
In the municipal territories the landholders of the towns played the role
of the middlemen on the imperial domains.

*Italy.* In Italy, unlike Africa, conditions upon the private, rather than
the imperial, domains determined the rise of the colonate. At the close of
the Republic the land of Italy was occupied by the _latifundia_ and
peasant holdings, the former of which were by far the most important
factor in agricultural life. It will be recalled that the _latifundia_
were great plantations and ranches whose development had been facilitated
by an abundant supply of cheap slave labor. However, even in the first
century B. C. these plantations were partly tilled by free peasants,
either as tenants or day laborers, and under the principate there was a
gradual displacement of slaves by free _coloni_. The causes for this
transformation lay in the cutting off of the main supply of slaves through
the suppression of the slave-trading pirates and the cessation of
aggressive foreign wars, the decrease in the number of slaves through
manumissions, the growth of humanitarian tendencies which checked their
ruthless exploitation, and the realization that the employment of free
labor was in the long run more profitable than that of slaves,
particularly when the latter were becoming increasingly expensive to
procure. The _coloni_ worked the estates of the landowners for a certain
proportion of the harvest. As elsewhere, in Italy it was fiscal necessity
which converted the free _coloni_ into serfs. With the spread of waste
lands, due partly to a decline of the population, the state intervened on
behalf of the landlords as it had in the provinces and attached the
peasants to the domain where they had once been voluntary tenants.
Elsewhere throughout the empire, although the process cannot be traced in
detail, a similar transformation took place.

Perhaps the ultimate responsibility for the development of the colonate
may rest upon th