class. But what these characteristics were cannot be clearly
determined. It seems certain that in every case the
possessor occupied precario, and that only in the bargain
between the censor and the middleman was there room for
contract. Thus the state was justified in the claim to
resume public land which it made in many of the Agrarian laws.
The earliest agrarian measures of which we have any record are
the distributions of land conquered in war to poor citizens,
which later authorities attribute to Numa and Servius Tullius.
Such assignments, however, are not the result of legislative
acts, but of a voluntary surrender on the king's part of his
own portion of the spoils. It is probable that the agrarian
law which resulted from the proposals of Spurius Cassius
(consul 486 B.C.) was the first attempt made by the Roman
people to exercise its control over the occupation of state
territory. According to the traditional account, Cassius
proposed that such portion of lands lately conquered from
the Hernici as fell to the Roman state should be divided
in equal shares between the Roman plebs and the Latins;
and further that poor citizens should receive allotments of
land previously conquered, and occupied without any legal
right by the Patricians. The inclusion of the Latins in
the distribution was afterwards dropped; but the law in its
final form certainly asserted the right of the Plebeians
to take their share in the public land. The accounts given
of it by Livy and Dionysius are no doubt coloured by their
knowledge of later agrarian legislation, and it seems hardly
likely that the proposal to resume and redistribute public
land already occupied was made at this early stage; but it
probably challenged the exclusive claim of Patricians to
occupy. We hear of another agrarian law proposed by the
tribune Lucius Icilius in 456 B.C. (Lex Icilia de Aventino
publicando) which regulated in some way the tenure of public
land on the Aventine. In 376 B.C. the tribunes Licinius
and Sextius introduced into their laws, for the promotion
of the privileges of the plebs, a clause enacting that no
more than 500 jugera of land should be occupied by a single
cultivator. It seems almost certain from Livy's account
that this measure referred only to the occupation of ager
publicus, though some modern authorities have upheld the
view that it dealt with land held on any kind of tenure,
others again that it dealtonlywith private property in
land. According to Appian, the law also enacted that only 100
cattle and 500 sheep might be turned by one owner on the public
pastures. But it failed of its object because it did not
provide any adequate machinery for the resumption by the
state of land held in excess of the prescribed amount, and
was therefore easily evaded. The next agrarian law we hear
of was a more special measure dealing with lands conquered
from the Senones and Picentines. In 232 B.C. C. Flaminius,
then tribune of the plebs, proposed to resume these lands
for the state, although they were already occupied by large
landholders, and to distribute them in allotments to poor
citizens. The measure met with much opposition from the
richer classes, and did not gain the sanction of the senate;
but C. Flaminius ignored constitutional usage and brought it
direct before the council of the plebs, by which it was made
law. In 133 B.C. the tribune Tiberius Gracchus (q.v.)
re-enacted the earlier measure of Licinius and Sextius, with
the additional provisions that each owner might occupy 250
jugera for each son, in addition to the original 500, and that
a commission of three (iii. viri agris dandis adsignandis)
should be appointed to carry out the terms of the law. He
also enacted that the land occupied in excess of the prescribed
amount, and on that account resumed for the state by the land
commission, should be distributed in inalienable lots to poor
citizens. Subsequent modifications of those provisions
which dealt with the powers of the land commission led to
a re-enactment of the whole by C. Gracchus, the brother of
Tiberius, tribune in 123 B.C. But within 15 years from
the tribunate of C. Gracchus the whole of his law had been
rendered null by three further enactments. The first of these
permitted the sale of land allotted under the law, which thus
tended to return into the hands of its former occupiers as
private property, which the state had no longer any right to
resume. The second abolished the commission appointed to
carry out the terms of the law, thus putting a stop to further
resumption and distribution, and also transformed existing
occupiers into owners of the land they occupied, paying
only a small due to the treasury. The third (probably the
surviving Lex Agraria, Bruns, loc. cit.) abolished the
payment. This law belongs to the year 111 B.C. The dates
of the two former laws are uncertain, but it is probable that
the first was passed in 121, the second in 119 or 118. From
this time forward a change comes over land legislation. The
ordinary public land in Italy, in the hands of occupiers,
which had given rise to all the agrarian legislation between
376 and 111, had practically ceased to exist. The Campanian
land still remained, but the same reasons which led to its
exemption from the Gracchan legislation seem to have continued
to protect its holders until 63 B.C. In the meantime several
agrarian laws were passed which provided for the distribution
of land placed in some other way at the disposal of the
state. In 100 B.C. Appuleius Saturninus (q.v.), tribune
of the plebs, proposed the allotment of lands recently taken
from the Cimbri in Gaul. This law was passed, but eventually
declared null by the senate, with the rest of Saturninus's
laws. A more dangerous precedent was set by Sulla in his
dictatorship (82-81 B.C..) He was the first to confiscate
the lands of his political foes, and of communities which had
resisted him, and treating them as ager publicus, assign
them to his veterans as a prize. This example was followed
by Octavian (Augustus) and Antony (M. Antonius) after their
proscriptions in 43 B.C. A third method of providing land
for distribution was that adopted by Servilius Rullus (q.v.)
in 63 B.C. His bill enacted that land should be purchased
in Italy with money gained by the sale of Roman territories
abroad, and allotted to citizens. A commission of ten (x.
viri agris dandis adsignandis), annually elected by 9
out of the 35 tribes, was to carry out the terms of the
law. Rullus also ventured to propose the distribution of the
Campanian land, which had hitherto been respected by all agrarian
reformers. It was chiefly on this ground that Cicero in
his three speeches on the Agrarian law succeeded in exciting
such a general feeling against it that it was eventually
withdrawn. In 60 B.C. the tribune L. Flavius brought
forward a bill for the distribution of lands to Pompey's
veterans. The Campanian land was certainly to be included in
the distribution, and it is clear from Cicero that the bill in
some way dealt violently with the rights of private owners. It
also, however, enacted that land should be purchased by the
state with the wealth which Pompey's conquests had brought
into the treasury. The last proposal was supported by Cicero,
but the bill seems to have been dropped, only to reappear in
more moderate form in the following year. A consular bill,
the lex Julia Campana, was passed by Julius Caesar in 59
B.C., which provided for the settlement of Pompey's veterans
on the Campanian land, and other lands purchased by the state
from private owners in Italy with the full consent of the
latter. In its original form, the bill omitted all reference
to the Campanian land, which seems to have been included
by Caesar in the distribution only when the continued and
unreasoning opposition of the senate had goaded him to extreme
measures. A commission of twenty was to be appointed to
carry out the law, from which Caesar himself was expressly
excluded. This measure finally settled the question of
the Campanian land, which now passed out of the category of
ager publicus. The last agrarian law of the republic was
that passed in 44 B.C. on the proposal of the consul M.
Antonius, or of his brother L. Antonius. We have no detailed
account of the measure, but it seems to have provided grants
of land for veterans, and was to be administered by seven
commissioners. The law was afterwards cancelled by decree of
the senate, probably on the ground of some technical flaw.
The emperor Vespasian attempted to reclaim for the state small
oddments of land (subseciva) which were held by neighbouring
owners to whom they had never been definitely assigned. The
attempt met with violent opposition, and though resumed by
Titus, was finally crushed by Domitian, who issued an edict
recognizing all oddments of land thus held to be private property.
AUTHORITIES.--Niebuhr, History of Rome (English
translation), ii. p. 129 foll. (Cambridge, 1832); Becker,
Handbuch der romischen Alterthumer, iii. 2, p. 142
(Leipzig, 1843); Marquardt, Romische Staatsverwaltung,
i. p. 96 foll. (Leipzig, 1881); Madvig, Verfassung und
Verwaltung des romischen Staates, ii. p. 364 foll. (Leipzig,
1882), (See also ROME, History.) (A. H. J. G; A. M. CL.)
AGREDA, MARIA FERNANDEZ CORONEL, ABBESS OF, known in
religion as Sor (Sister) Maria de Jesus (1602-1665), was the
daughter of Don Francisco Coronel and of his wife Catalina de
Arana. She was born at Agreda, on the borders of Navarre
and Aragon, on the 2nd of April 1602. All her family were
powerfully influenced by the ecstatic piety of Spain in that
age. Her biographer, Samaniego, records that even as an
infant in arms she was filled with divine knowledge. Her
stupidity as a child is piously accounted for by extreme
humility. From childhood she was favoured by ecstasies and
visions. When she was fifteen the whole family entered
religion. The father, now an old man, and the two sons
entered the Franciscan house of San Antonio de Nalda. Maria,
her mother and sister established a Franciscan nunnery in the
family house at Agreda, which, when Maria's reputation had
extended, was replaced by the existing building. She began
it with one hundred reals (one pound sterling) lent her by a
devotee, and it was completed in fourteen years by voluntary
gifts. Much against her own wish, we are told, she was
appointed abbess at the age of twenty-five. In 1668, four
years after her death, the Franciscans published a story that
at the age of twenty-two she had been miraculously conveyed to
Mexico, to convert a native people, and had made five hundred
journeys through the air for that purpose in one year.
Though the rule required the abbess to be changed every three
years, Maria remained the effective ruler of Agreda till her
death. The Virgin was declared abbess, and Maria acted as
her locus tenens. In her later years she inclined to the
``internal prayer,'' and neglect of the outward offices
of the church, which was usual with the ``alumbrados'' or
Quietists. The Inquisition took notice of her, but she was
not proceeded against with severity. Maria's importance in
religion and Spanish history is based on two grounds. In the
earlier part of her life, while the Franciscan, Francisco Andres
de la Torre, was her confessor, she wrote an Introduction to
the History of the Most Blessed Virgin. It was destroyed by
the direction of another confessor. Later on, by the order
of her superiors, and under the guidance of her Franciscan
confessor, Andres de Fuen Mayor, she wrote The Mystic City
