I’m looking for a Latin term, if there is one, to describe land received by a Roman soldier in lieu of monetary compensation for military service. Did Pompeii serve as such? I remember reading somewhere that Roman soldiers took over homes and land as compensation or as retirement pay. Not sure.
‘stipendum’ perhaps?
Missio agraria was the term for a discharge with a grant of land, in distinction from missio nummaria, discharge with a grant of money. I don’t know if there was a specific term for the land or the money which was granted, though.
Thankjs UDS 1. I’m still trying to verify my recollection about Pompeii as an example of Roman soldiers being granted ‘missio agraria’.
For a long time, Rome survived without a professional army. Citizens were called to service as the need arose; they served for as long as the emergency endured; then they went home. There were no long service arrangements and no retirement gratuities. (Which is not to say that after a particular war the Senate might not provide rewards or compensation for those who served, but these were ad hoc and mostly wouldn’t have taken the form of land grants, since most citizens were landowners already.)
It’ only the late Republican period that Rome has a standing army; this is when the system of retirement grants of cash or land develops.
The land was either land in newly-conquered areas - it made sense to reward soldiers out of the lands they had conquered, and to colonise those areas with ex-soldiers - or land in Italy from the stock of “public land”. But much public land was, in practice, occupied and used by high-status Romans; they resented having to hand it back to the state to distribute to soldiers. So the system of land grants caused a fair amount of resentment, and in the time of Augustus, in the first century, it was largely superseded by cash grants only, financed by taxation.
Which means, unless Pompeii was established during the late Republican period, it was not established as an ex-soldiers colony. And it wasn’t established in that period; it’s centuries older.
But it did rebel against Rome in the late Republican period, during the Social Wars. It was quickly reconquered, and those citizens who were prominent in the rebellion were punished by (among other things) having their land confiscated. And, yes, much of this confiscated land was parcelled out to ex-soldiers. And I think this happened on a large enough scale to alter the character of the city. Previously it had seen itself as a Samnite city allied with Rome, but after this it very quickly became a Roman city - Latin became the dominant language, Pompeiians were automatically Roman citizens, etc, etc. Of course, the settlement in and around the city of ex-soldiers wasn’t the only factor at work here, but it was probably a contributing factor.
Thanks UDS1. I had forgottent the context in which confioscated land around Pompeii had been parcelled out to retired soldiers during the Soclal Wars. I have several books by Mary Beard. It may have been in one of them that she mentions it.