De Conditionibus AgrorumHe wrote a treatise entitled
De Conditionibus Agrorum, of
which the commencement, perhaps curtailed and interpolated, is preserved in the collection
of Agrimensores. It displays considerable legal knowledge, and contains much interesting
information. It treats of the distinctions between coloniae, municipia, and praefecturae,
between eager occupatorius and ager arcifinius, &c.; and of the distinctions in the mode
of limitatio corresponding to distinctions in the condition of the land.
It is confined to land in Italy. Goesius thinks that the author also wrote on land out of
Italy, and that the fragment we possess ought to be entitled
De Conditionibus Agrorum Italiae. From the two parts of the work of
Siculus Flaccus, and from some similar work of Frontinus, he supposes that the treatise
De Coloniis (
Rei Agrariae
Auctores, p. 102, Goes.) was chiefly compiled, since that compilation cites a
Liber Conditionum Italiae, and is ascribed in some manuscripts
to the hybrid Julius Frontinus Siculus.
Some fragments of the same, or of a very similar work, have found their way, probably by
an accidental transposition of leaves, into the so-called
Liber
Simplici (pp. 76, 86, 87, Goes.), which is supposed by modern critics to be a
compilation of Aggenus Urbicus.
A similar transposition has happened in another instance. A treatise
De Controversiis Agrorum, not unlike (although inferior to) the treatise of
Frontinus on the same subject, was first published by Blame in the
Rheinisches Museum für Jurisprudenz, vol. v. pp. 142-170. In this treatise,
in the midst of the
Controversia de Fine, is a long passage of
Siculus Flaccus, interpolated from the fragment
De Conditionibus
Agrorum (from
ergo ut dixi, p. 4, to
viae
saepe necessariae, p. 9, Goes.). The whole treatise in which this interpolation occurs
was attributed by Rudorff to Siculus Flaccus ; but Blume, in conformity with the statement
of the Codex Arcerianus. assigns it to Hyginus.