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Fabricius's Villa Urbana.
Visitors to this Villa
Salvete, omnes!
Upper class, wealthy Roman Citizens in the countryside around Rome and throughout the Empire lived in villa-complexes, the accomodation for rural farms. The villa-complex consisted of three parts. The "Villa Urbana" where the owner and his family lived. This would be similar to the wealthy-persons Domus in the city and would have painted walls and lovely artistic mosaics on the floors. The Villa is plumbed with running water and has under-floor central heating. The "Villa Rustica" where the staff and slaves of the villa worked and lived. This was also the living quarters for the farms animals. There would usually be other rooms here that might be used as store rooms, a hospital and even a prison! The third part of the villa-complex would be the storage rooms. These would be where the products of the farm were stored ready for transport to buyers. Storage rooms here would have been used for Oil, Wine, Grain, Grapes and any other produce of the villa. Other rooms in the villa might include an office, a temple for worship, several bedrooms, a dining room and a kitchen.
During the Roman time, much of the crops were raised on large estates know as latifundia. The farms were staffed mostly by slaves from conquered countries. By 100 B.C. most farming was done on large estates. The owners of these estates often lived in town for the majority of the year. A manager, called a vilicus, supervised the farm work on the estate. Another person, the villica, would be in charge of the household. Often the villica and the villicus were slaves. The work on the estates was done in large part by slave laborers. Over ninety percent of the Romans lived and worked in the countryside. All of these were often slaves but each had different degrees of privilege and different amount of physical labor based on their level.
The Romans realized that the soil would become depleted if it did not receive fertilization. They were one of the early civilizations to employ a type of mixed farming. They would use manure from their farm animals to help revitalize their soils. Yet the Romans did suffer from a decline in food production toward the end of their empire due to land overuse.
Ancient Roman manuals about agriculture state that a standard farm of 200 iugera (51 hectares) could be worked by 6 laborers and 2 assistants, and Italy had in the first century AD a total estimated cultivated area of 20 million iugera, with 600,000 farm laborers plus another 150,000 laborers working in assistant tasks. Italy at that time had a total labor force estimated to be 3 million (from 7 million population), of which roughly 750,000 were farmers making up 25% of the total labor force.
A well managed grain farm of 200 iugera could produce about 50 modii of grain per iugerum per year in an average harvest. The total produce of the farm would be 10,000 modii. Of this 1,200 would be used as seed. Ancient farms had a much lower productivity compared to modern ones with can produce over 200 seeds from only 1 compared to 8 to 1 in ancient Roman farms. About 400 modii would be consumed by the 8 laborers that worked on the farm. Some 8,000 modii were sold, which could feed about 200 people engaged in non agricultural tasks and 400 were stored. The total population of the Roman Empire engaged directly in grain production would be 4% of the population, about 2.5-3 million workers or 15% of the adult male labor force.
There was a massive amount of commerce between the provinces of the empire, all the regions of the empire became interdependent with one another, some provinces specialized in the production of grain, others in wine and others in olive oil, depending on the soil type. Roman vineyards were smaller and were more labor intensive than grain fields, but a single iugerum of land could produce an average of 30 amphora of wine per year. Wine was one of Italy's main exports.
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