It was the year 40 BC when the famous Virgil traveled to Rome from his estate in Mantua to meet with Octavius and demand the return of some expropriated lands given to a retired legionary. It wasn’t a punishment but a necessity to resort to such measure to acquire lands to give to the veterans, so they would have a means of livelihood after their retirement. This was demanded by them, once the civil war they fought for the so-called Second Triumvirate (formed by Octavius, Mark Antony, and Lepidus) against Brutus and Cassius, the fugitive murderers of Julius Caesar, had ended.
During the journey, Virgil composed the ninth chapter of one of his masterpieces, Bucolica (“Bucolics”, also known as “Eclogues”), which he had started at the insistence of Gaius Asinius Pollio. This politician and literary friend of his had helped him win the lawsuit that arose from that claim, but it still remained unresolved because the military recipient not only refused to leave the land but also violently threatened anyone who even hinted at it.
In the first eclogue, he had already made a reference to the inconvenient individual who held their lands: Oh Licidas, we had never feared this: to have lived so long for a stranger, taking possession of our little fields, to say to us: This is mine, get out of here, old farmers! In the ninth, he insisted on the matter: Will I see my kingdoms again, after some lean harvests? Will an impious soldier possess these well-tended meadows, a barbarian possess these crops?.
As we were saying, Virgil did not sit idly by, and in the capital, he personally met with an Octavius who was already beginning to have problems with Mark Antony, anticipating a new conflict, but he managed to recover his properties. These, in short, had been the material protagonists of a land survey system with which the Roman administration divided the land into grids to facilitate its identification by the owner, whether it be a citizen who had just acquired it or an old owner who was reclaiming it – as in the case of the writer and the vehement legionary.
This system was called centuriato (in modern English centuriation) because each plot was named a centuria although it also received the names of limitatio and castramentatio. Centuriation divided the land using a grid plan (regular grid) and was not only used for agricultural estates but also for roads and canals, fitting especially well in flat areas but not giving up on rugged ones.
The Emilia-Romagna plain, located between the Apennines and the Po River, Cremona, the aforementioned Mantua, or Campania present typical examples of parcelation by this system, although similar examples have been found in many other places on the Italian peninsula around certain cities (Padua, Florence, Bergamo…). Dozens of remains of centuriations have been found by archaeologists in Italy.
Likewise, we find indications of centuriation in other more distant places that received more or less intense Romanization, such as the ancient province of Moesia, which covered central Serbia, Kosovo, and northern parts of Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Romania, as well as southern Ukraine. Also in Britain, specifically the English towns of Ripe and Worthing in Sussex, plus Great Wymondley in Hertfordshire.
However, apart from Italy, they appear more frequently in what was the Narbonne Gaul (southeastern France, around Béziers, Valence, and Orange, with the latter having a huge cadastral plan of centuriation in stone) and Hispania (mainly in the Mediterranean strip, from Emporiae in Tarraco to Corduba in Baetica, passing through Girona, Barcelona, Tarragona, Cartagena, or Elche, among others, but also in more distant places like the Pyrenean Cerdanya, the Cantabrian colony of Flaviobriga, or Lusitania).
In all these places, one can appreciate or deduce the influence that the Romans had on shaping the landscape, although the growth experienced in the 20th century and the construction of large infrastructures have blurred it somewhat. It is worth noting, however, that the ager centuriato was the most common parcelation system, but not the only one. Nor was it entirely original, since other earlier civilizations, such as the Egyptian, Greek, or Etruscan, had similar methods, something inevitable in societies that depended on the countryside.
The Romans introduced it in the 4th century BC to organize the new colonies they had founded in the ager Sabinus (Sabinia), the northeastern region of Latium, whose economy was based on livestock farming. A couple of centuries later, around 268 BC, the creation of new settlements in the Po Valley, such as Ariminum (today Rimini), forced the systematization and standardization of the process, something that received a new and important impetus with the Lex Sempronia Agraria introduced by the plebeian tribune reformer Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in 133 BC.
This law stipulated the distribution among the plebeians of the public lands that belonged to the ordo senatorius (senatorial class), in order to provide resources to the lower social strata and address the unemployment in the city. For this, it limited property to five hundred jugerae (a measure of variable surface equivalence depending on the place, between a quarter of a hectare and thirty-two hectares). Two jugerae constituted a heredium, which was the amount initially assigned to each citizen as inheritable property. One hundred heredia equaled one centuria, and four centuries formed a saltus.
Now, how was it put into practice? The brain behind it all was the surveyor, a topographic technician in charge of mapping the available land, who first established an umbilicus agri or umbilicus soli (navel of the field or of the sun), a central point from which, using gromas, squares, and the gnomon (triangulation and leveling devices with plumb lines), he drew two perpendicular axes. One of them took the west as a reference and therefore had a west-east direction, called the decumanus maximus; the other was oriented north-south and was called the cardo maximus. These were the same ones that articulated military camps into two main avenues.
The irregularities of the terrain, the existence of constructions (roads, forts…), the river courses, or the need to drain rainwater often meant that they did not always coincide with the cardinal points; but what they did was divide the plot into four quarters: ultra (front), citra (back), dextera (right), and sinistra (left). The next step was to add the limites quintarii, axes or paths parallel to the main ones, at intervals of one hundred actus (each actus was equivalent to about twenty-four steps, or about thirty-five and a half meters).
In turn, the resulting squares were subdivided into smaller ones by new parallel and perpendicular lines separated, so that the territory was framed in a grid where each side of the square measured twenty actus (about seven hundred and ten meters, although in some places, it was halved). This square was the centuria that named the whole system and contained four hundred square actus (one thousand two hundred and sixty square meters).
But the subdivision continued, and each centuria was divided into a dozen strips parallel to each of the two main axes, at intervals of two actus, resulting in one hundred heredia (smaller squares of half a hectare of surface area). Each heredium was divided into two halves north-south, creating a pair of jugerae, each of which was the amount of land that could be plowed by a pair of oxen in one day, according to calculations from Antiquity (what in Spain would later be called an ox day). The secondary layouts of this grid were usually used for irrigation ditches and passageways.
In the beginning, about two jugerae (a little over five thousand square meters) were assigned to new landowners (retired soldiers, settlers, prisoners released after a war…), so that approximately a hundred farmers could settle in a century, which is why the system became known as centuriato.
Flexibility was important because theory was one thing and practice was another; if the terrain was irregular, dry, unproductive, or too rocky, the figures were adjusted to reality.
Speaking of rocks, one of the basic tasks of agriculture is clearing them from the fields. Farmers used to set them aside along the boundaries of their plots, clearly defining their extent; so much so that these linear accumulations are very useful to archaeologists today, two millennia later, with the help of aerial photographs or infrared rays, to locate possible Roman settlements.
This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on October 19, 2023: Centuriación, el complejo sistema de reparto de tierras en la antigua Roma
Sources
Virgilio, Las Bucólicas | Horacio Capel, La morfología de las ciudades. Sociedad, cultura y paisaje urbano | Enrique Ariño Gil, Josep M. Gurt Esparraguera y Josep M. Palet Martínez, El pasado presente. Arqueología de los paisajes en la Hispania romana | Anders Bell, Castra et urbs romana: An examination of the common features of Roman settlements in Italy and the Empire and a system to aid in the discovery of their origins | Umberto Laffi, Studi di Storia Romana e di Diritto | Isaac Moreno Gallo, Topografía romana | Wikipedia
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