Abstract
It is a matter for surprise that none but the vaguest idea can be gleaned from ancient writers of the appearance or plan of an ordinary farm-house in the ancient world. Cato, Varro, Columella, the Elder Pliny, and Palladius describe with varying degrees of detail the kind of site on which such a house might most suitably be built and the type of rooms required for those who inhabit it. They indicate the uses to which the various portions of the house were put (villa urbana, villa rustica, willa fructuaria) but none of them thought it necessary to describe methodically the lay-out of the house as a whole. Varro mentions incidentally a ‘cohors’ (cortile or farm-yard) and states that on a large farm it is more convenient to have two such areas, one for the kitchen and tool-sheds, the other for live-stock. Varro's remark is vague enough, but the notices of other writers are even vaguer. The younger Pliny sets out to give a detailed description of his Laurentine villa, but the attempts of modern scholars to reconstruct the plan of the villa from Pliny's description have produced the most varied results and shown the futility of the quest.
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