Veteran’s estate as a category of roman land surveying

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how did form veterans landowning in the Roman land surveying. The main sources on the problem are the treatises of Roman land surveyers (1-2 centuries AD). They contain information about the principles of surveying of land plots for Roman retirees and about right guarantees the veterans had. The task of this article is reconstruction of the process of civic assignations in Ancient Rome and highlighting of features of this action when land was granted to the veterans. At the end of 2nd century BC the limitatio has become the most common way of land division thank to activities of brothers Gracchi. The limitatio assumed the creation of dividers that organized space: Decumanus maximus and Cardo maximus . Their intersection created four parts of the future Ager Colonicus for veterans. The limits parallel to the main ones turned the colony field into a clearly organized boundary grid with a square unit of area - centuria, within which the land plots (intended for tillage, horticulture, viticulture) were formed for veterans. Since the time of Caesar and Augustus, the question of adding grazing land to the arable land was decided in the Roman land surveying art. The most desired types of non-arable land was not only forests, pastureland and relicta but also subseciva - remainders from land division. Those vacant centuriae were a good arable land which the state temporarily allocated to new settlers on a lease basis. In the cadastre, a special right of remainders (ius subsecivorum) was created, unifying the lease relations. Thus, the farm of the Roman veteran consisted of fertile land suitable for all types of agricultural activities, as well as different categories of land, which contributed to the development of property and ownership relations.