Roman Agriculture

Abstract

The Roman Empire was an agrarian society. Most of the population tilled the land, but many rural laborers were slaves or tenants who did not own the land on which they worked. Economic behavior has always been embedded in a deep cultural context, and it is beyond dispute that an agrarian approach underlies Roman economic thought. The traditional ideal of a Roman citizen was as a farmer and as a soldier like the Republican hero Q. Cincinnatus, who allegedly was ploughing his land when the Senate appointed him dictator, and returned to it after a victorious sixteen-day military campaign. Although it was merely an ideal, land owing was considered the most social respectable form of investment for the elite, and, according to a law of 218 BCE, senators and their sons were forbidden to own large transport vessels. The role of agriculture in the Roman economy and the agrarian institutions changed over time, as Rome expanded and transformed from a small city-state in central Italy in fifth century bce to one of the Mediterranean great powers after the Second Punic War (218–201 bce) and finally the only superpower in the first five centuries ce. The development of Roman agriculture can be deduced from data available from written evidence—literary and legal sources, inscriptions, and papyri—and archaeological material, where excavations of farms and villas together with field surveys are important. Information about the development of the settlement pattern in certain regions depends on this evidence, but distribution maps may reflect only the degree of publications of archaeological fieldwork in these areas. The crops varied according to climate and geography, and there are huge differences between the Roman provinces from Britain in the north to the provinces of North Africa in the south and from Spain in the west to Syria in the east. The recent rapid development of paleoethnobotany has offered much new data on crops and agricultural practice in different regions. These regional diversities are also reflected in settlement patterns and the rural labor force. More traditional forms of labor, such as tenants and dependent peasants, dominated the rural manpower in the provinces, and agricultural slavery was widespread only in Italy and Sicily, with the exception of managers of estates owned by the elite. This diversity became even more profound in Late Antiquity with the transformation of society and the economy together with the slow disintegration of the empire.