Annaeus Florus Quotes
How could the plebeians be restored to the land without dispossessing those who possessed it, who were themselves part of the people and held estates left to them by their forefathers by a kind of right.
In every society where there had been past unjust ownership of land, all efforts of land reform were faced with the problem of having to dispossess the current “owners” who themselves had not been guilty of the crimes of their ancestors in unjustly obtaining the land originally. In America land reform was unworkable in most cases and the solution was usually a large monetary payment as compensation for the land.
Annaeus Florus, 640-616 B.C., Roman historian, Epitome
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His bill introduced in the House of Representatives. It did not pass.
Primogeniture is the system where property is inherited from the father to the first born son. At the time women could not own property unless they were widows. It is the basis of most aristocracies. See {627010} for an American view of primogeniture that was stated a little earlier.
Peter van der Kun. The Roman society had developed huge inequalities in the wealth of its citizens. Land was the measure of wealth as the value was produced by the farming of it. In an agrarian reform, the holdings of any one citizen was limited to 500 acres. In effect the Romans created a maximum of wealth. To the owners of the large tracts of land, this was a redistribution of wealth.
Nelson was referring to the past. The industrial revolution created other forms of wealth and power as a huge factory could be built on a small piece of land. In farming, the yield is proportional to the acreage tilled. Not so in manufacturing. With the knowledge era, intellectual property could produce much wealth and power, and factory size and land ownership was not necessary.
Use included renting it. What he opposed was simply holding land when whites were driving Indians off their lands because all the unused land outside of the reservation was owned by someone and the asking price was very high. Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
The Romans were very organized regarding land ownership. When they conquered Africa, defeating Carthage, they found no written records of land ownership, no deeds, no bills of sale. Therefore, they opened up the entire land mass of Africa for what amounted to public colonization where the land could be worked and claimed legally. Illiterate Africans had no written records, and most areas where under the control of a strongman who “owned” all of the land with no notion of private ownership of land.
Three main sets of works are attributed to Florus (a Roman cognomen): Virgilius orator an poeta, an Epitome of Roman History and a collection of poems (26 tetrameters, and five hexameters about roses). As to whether these were composed by the same person, or set of people, is unclear, but the works are variously attributed to:
