Villas, Peasant Agriculture, and the Roman Rural Economy

The Roman villa was a defining element of the Roman world and its appearance and spread, both in various regions of Roman Italy and abroad, have been linked to various historical phenomena: Rome's territorial expansion, the establishment of colonial settlements, and the indigenous elites' readiness to participate in forms of Roman life. While traditional historiography has seen the spread of large villas in Republican Italy as a phenomenon that displaced small and medium landowners from the land, and thus contributed to Rome's socio-political problems, recent studies have stressed that large villas and farms were not at variance with each other. The papers gathered in this volume aim at giving a more organic evaluation of how the 'villa economy' and the 'peasant economy' operated, and to what degree, if any, the two were integrated. It does so by addressing two main questions: whether villas and small and medium farms were part of two distinctive productive and distributive systems or not; and to what extent the picture emerging from provincial territories compares with the situation in Roman Italy.