Latifundium

Squirreling this away for trivia.

Katarina brought up, like, these concepts of, like, Andorrarum and Latifundia that I think, like, have to...

Could come up for me at trivia.

I feel it in my bones.

And so the poor are kind of getting either shoved out or bought out.

And this is a problem that a lot of people have heard of this idea of the Latifundia, these

like wide, vast land holdings of the Roman elite.

Probably in this period, it's not necessarily huge consolidated land holdings because economies of scale don't necessarily, they hit a cap pretty quickly in pre-modern agriculture.

And the rich? Well, they bought everything.

They built the Latifundia, these massive slave-run farms that were the size of small towns.

Walter Scheidel has done the closest work anyone's actually done on counting the enslaved population of Italy.

And he lands somewhere around a fifth of everybody living on the peninsula.