Chapter 4

Rural Bliss - Roman Dreamland

In This Chapter

● The Roman love of the countryside

● Roman textbooks on how to be farmers

● What villas meant to the Romans

● How the rest of the Empire picked up the villa habit

All across the Roman world, from remote parts of Gaul to the Rhine frontier, North Africa, and by the Black Sea, untold millions of farmers and peasants toiled for their whole lives on the land, producing the vast quantities of produce that were transported to Rome to feed the mob and the populations of the Empire’s cities. But to the Romans, agriculture was more than a business enterprise. Despite the fact that Roman power and identity were tied up in Rome the city, the Romans always felt that living in and off the countryside was the only means to find inner peace. Even when they couldn’t be in the countryside, they adorned the walls of their townhouses with mythical pastoral scenes. The works of Roman poets and writers include literary descriptions of rustic topics, which were seen as patriotic symbols of Roman austerity, restraint, and hard work: the very qualities that had turned Rome into a powerful city with a vast Empire. Even conquered provincials started buying into the same fantasy. In short, if the heart of the Roman world was the city (see Chapter 6), its soul - at least to the Romans themselves - was the countryside.

This chapter is all about the Romans’ fanciful image of the countryside, the authors who helped create and promote that idea, and the way rich Romans tried to live out their rural dream in country villas. But it’s also about the everyday reality of living in a townhouse or apartment block, or eking out a life as an estate worker supporting the Roman rural dream.

Part I: Romans - The Big Boys of the Ancient World

The Roman Fantasy Self-image: We're Farmers at Heart

Even though the Empire only functioned because of the army, cities, communications, assemblies, magistracies, and the way the emperors ruled, the Romans permanently fantasised about an idyllic Italian rural past. Romans believed that Rome had become so powerful because of their origins as peasant farmers with the hard work and discipline that involved.

The great textbooks on Roman rural life were written by three stalwarts of the tradition: Cato (234-149 BC), Varro (116-27 BC), and Columella (first century AD). These men were very influential in their own time, mainly amongst educated men (it’s unlikely the average farmer even knew the books existed, let alone had the opportunity to read or own a copy). But what matters more than that is what they tell us about the Roman self-image and the value Roman thinkers attributed to farming.

The Roman scholar Cato (full name Marcus Porcius Cato) grew up on his father’s farm near the Sabine town of Reate (modern Rieti) about 60 kilometres (40 miles) north-east of Rome. He came to love the soil for its purity and the simple, straightforward life of a farmer and saw the farming life as the ultimate gesture of Roman patriotism. In his De Agri Cultura (‘On the Cultivation of Fields’), which was supposed to be a farmer’s handbook, Cato conveys the sense that farming is the only honest way to earn a living. Money-lending and trade might offer a chance of more cash, but according to Cato, they were dishonourable and full of hazards. Cato also claimed that the ‘bravest and sturdiest’ soldiers came from farming stock. In his work, Cato helped to reinforce the Roman tradition that the Empire was the reward and fruit of an army whose origins lay in tilling the fields.

Marcus Terentius Varro was born in Reate (Rieti) and had a successful career working for Pompey the Great (discussed in Chapter 14). In later life, he spent most of his time writing. He was almost 80 when he started his Res Rusticae (‘Country Matters’), which was supposed to be a handbook for his wife Fundania who had just bought a farm. Varro wrote his work as a series of dialogues between various characters with appropriate rustic names like Scrofa (which also means ‘breeding sow’) and Stolo (which means ‘a shoot growing out of a plant or tree’). In addition to providing a lot of basic technical information for farmers, Varro’s work also inspired the Roman poet Virgil’s Georgies, poems that celebrated rural idealism and were used by Augustus and later emperors to reinforce Roman self-belief.

Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella came from Spain but lived and farmed in Italy. He wrote his Rei Rusticae (‘On Agriculture’) in about AD 60-65 to encourage agriculture. He was very worried about what he considered the decline of Italian agriculture due to absentee landlords who had no interest in promoting farming. As Italy became more and more dependent on imported food, Columella was desperate to encourage landowners to take more interest, but he knew only hard graft would turn things around. The point of Res Rusticae, which discussed the farm buildings, crops, fruit, animals, staff duties, and trees, was to provide the essential information to work from and to make a farm a successful and profitable investment.

Life in the City; Dreams in the Country

London, Washington, and New York are full of people from every social tier. The movers and shakers at the top come to the city for business reasons, for government, to be part of the action. Other people come because of the availability of work, and the security and convenience of a city. Rome was just the same. It was the centre of power and commerce, and it attracted people like a magnet. But one of the great paradoxes of city life is that city dwellers spend a lot of time wishing they lived somewhere else.

As the Romans became more dependent on the advantages of urban life and a cosmopolitan economy, they agonised over what they had lost, just as we do. Cities are noisy, busy, dirty places, and plenty of Romans yearned for the wide open spaces away from the crowds. Educated Romans read Virgil’s Georgies poems to dream of a past paradise, as we go and watch movies of Jane Austen novels filmed in soft focus on eighteenth-century country estates and moan about the loss of our countryside to motorways, interstates, car parks, and shopping malls.

Escaping the city

Everyone knows what happens when human beings live in close proximity, especially those who live in cities. The poet Juvenal, who lived in Rome in the early second century AD, slated city life for the horrendous noise of traffic that kept him awake at night. When he tried to move around, he found his way barred by traffic jams, accidents, crowds of people, and he dodged falling roof tiles, drunks fighting, and muggers.

For the average super-rich Roman, then, a country estate offered a blissful escape from Rome’s public life and stinking racket. Rich Romans needing to escape the city raced off to extravagant country houses they called villae (‘farms’). In exceptional cases, villas were like villages or small towns, manned by small armies of slaves, where their owners pretended they were ‘downshifting’ to a country lifestyle. You can read more about Roman villas in the section ‘Villas: Bedrock of Roman Agriculture’, later in this chapter.

Happy Horace and others

In 39 BC the poet Horace was given a farm by his friend and patron, Maecenas. Horace was delighted, and you can see from his excitement how much it meant to him:

'It's just what I had been praying for: a modest-sized plot of land, where there might be a garden, and not far from the house a spring with a ceaseless flow of water, and above these a small piece of woodland. The gods have given me all this but more of it and even better. I am happy. Mercury, I ask nothing more from you except that you ensure these blessings last the rest of my life.'

Seneca (5 BC-AD 65), Nero's tutor, got sick one day and decided to escape to his country estate, desperate to get out of Rome. He wrote to a friend to rave about the experience. He sounds like someone who's managed to escape from Manchester or Chicago for the weekend:

'As soon as I had left behind that crushing air in Rome and that stink of smoky cooking hearths which belch out, along with all the ashes, all the poisonous fumes they've stored inside whenever they're fired up, than I noticed an immediate improvement in my condition. You can just imagine how invigorated I felt when I reached my vineyards. I ploughed into my dinner - you might as well be talking about cattle sent out into spring pastures!'

Buying and investing in land

For a noble Roman, which mean the senatorial class (refer to Chapter 2), owning land and storing wealth in land was the only acceptable way to earn a living. So a noble villa owner would always be on the lookout to increase his land holding, which meant buying up neighbouring estates if they came on the market. (Trade was regarded as vulgar, a snobbery that made it easy for the equestrians to corner the commercial markets, often earning enough to buy their own villas.)

Buying more land meant thinking about all sorts of considerations: Was the villa house in good repair? Did it even need to be kept or could it be demolished? Was the land productive and good quality? How had it been run in the past? Were the tenants reliable and well looked after? Would more slaves be needed to get the estate up to scratch and turn a good profit? If the harvest was bad, would the rents need to be put down for the tenants?

For wealthy aristocratic Romans, these were the primary considerations in life - we know they were because they wrote about them. A large and healthy estate enriched such men and their immediate families but also, and perhaps more importantly, became what they could leave to their heirs and descendants, which was a huge matter of prestige as well as security. Of course, the more prestigious the villa, the more attractive it was to bad or resentful emperors who looked for excuses to confiscate the wealthiest estates (for example, Constantius II did quite a business in this regard; see Chapter 20); so the very thing that made a Roman secure - wealth - also put him at risk.

Tour du jour: Pliny the Younger's villa

Pliny the Younger (c. AD 61-113) (full name, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus) was a Senator from Comum (Como) who became Governor of the province of Bithynia and Pontus under Trajan (98-117). He's famous for the letters he sent to friends and colleagues. One of the best-known is his description of his Laurentine villa about 25 kilometres (15 miles) from Rome in a letter he wrote in the late first century AD. It's so important and so vivid the best thing I can do is let Pliny tell you about it himself with some excerpts I've picked out. Bear in mind his villa was a luxury home despite his claims about its modesty. Now over to Pliny to take us round his place:

● Entering the villa: 'My villa is the right size for me but inexpensive to maintain. The front hall is plain, without being mean, through which you come to D-shaped colonnades which enclose a small and cheerful intermediate courtyard . . . [which] leads through to a well-lit and pleasing inner hall. From there it leads into an elegant dining room which runs down to the seashore, so that when the wind blows from the south-west it is gently splashed by the waves which work themselves out at its base.

'On every side of this dining room there are folding doors or windows of a similar size through which you have a view of three different seas, as it were, from the front and the two sides. From the back you can see through to the inner hall, the courtyards and the colonnades and from the entrance hall through to the distant woods and mountains.

'To the left of this dining room, a bit farther back from the sea, is a large bedroom and beyond that another one, but smaller, which has one window facing the rising sun, and another the setting sun. This room also has a view of the sea, but from a safer distance. In the angle formed between this bedroom and the dining room is a corner where the sun's warmth is retained and concentrated. This forms the household's winter quarters and the gymnasium because it is sheltered from all the winds except the one which brings rain and it can still be used after the weather has broken.'

● The library and accommodation for slaves and guests: 'Joining this angle is an apsidal room, with windows so arranged that the sun shines in all day. One wall is fitted with bookcases containing the works of authors I never grow tired of. Next to this is a bedroom opposite a corridor fitted with a raised floor fitted with pipes which take in hot steam and circulate it at a fixed temperature. The other rooms on this side of the villa are set aside for my slaves and freedmen but the majority of these are smart enough to put guests in.'

● The baths and sea views: Next comes the bath suite's cold bath. This is large and roomy and has two curved baths built into opposite walls which are quite sufficient considering that the sea is so close. Next is the oil and massage room, the furnace chamber, the boiler room, then two sanctuaries which are tasteful and very sumptuous. This leads to the hot swimming pool from which bathers survey the sea. Near

this is the ball-court which the sun warms as it goes down. From here you go up to a tower which is a two-up, two-down, arrangement of rooms, as well as a dining room which has a panoramic view of the sea, the coast, and all the beautiful villas along the shore. At the other end is a second tower with a room lit by the sun as it rises and as it sets. Behind here there is a large wine cellar and granary, and underneath a roomy dining room where the sea can only just be heard, even when it is rough. It looks out across the garden and the drive.'

● The garden: 'The drive is marked out with a box hedge, or rosemary where the box has gaps, because box grows very well if the buildings give it shelter but withers when exposed to the wind or sea spray, even from some distance. The inner part of the drive has a shady vine pergola where the path is so soft and forgiving that you can walk on it barefoot. The garden is mainly planted with mulberries and figs, which this soil favours as much as it repels everything else. Over here there is a dining room which despite being away from the sea has a garden view which is equally pleasant. Two rooms run round the back part of it, through the windows of which the villa entrance and a fine kitchen garden can be seen.'

In another letter Pliny tells us about what he did at his villa. As you'll see, he doesn't seem to have spent any of his time farming. Despite what men like Cato wanted Romans to do, the truth is that wealthy Romans regarded getting hands dirty as something for their tenants and slaves:

'I get up when I feel like it, normally when the sun rises, and often before that but never later. The shutters stay closed because the darkness and peace help me meditate. Freed from all those external distractions I am left to my own thoughts and my eyes don't make my mind wander. With nothing to see, my eyes are controlled by my imagination.

'Anything I am working on can be sorted out, chosen, and corrected, in my head. What I get done depends on how well I can concentrate and remember. Then I call my secretary, open the shutters, and dictate to him what I have knocked into shape. Then I send him away, call him back, and send him away again. At the fourth or fifth hour after sunrise (I don't stick to an exact time) I take a walk on the terrace or portico where I carry on thinking about or dictating whatever is outstanding on the topic I am working on. Once that's done, I go for a drive where I carry on as before when I was in my study or walking. I find the change of scene revives me and helps me concentrate.

'When I get home I have a rest and then a walk. Then I read out loud a Greek or Latin passage with proper enunciation. The reason is more for my digestion than for the good of my voice, though both are improved by the activity. Another walk follows before I am oiled, do my exercises, and have a bath. If I dine alone with my wife, or with a few friends, we have a reading during the meal. Once we have eaten we either listen to music or a comedy. When that's over I take a walk with members of the household, several of whom are well educated. So, the evenings pass with all sorts of conversations and even when the days are at their longest, they end very pleasantly.'

Villas: Bedrock of Roman Agriculture

The bedrock of the Roman agricultural world was the villa estate. Villa means farm, and the term was applied to almost everything from a fairly reasonable farmhouse right up to vast palatial country estates that looked as much like a farm as the White House does Abraham Lincoln’s (so-called) wooden hut birthplace in Kentucky. But that didn’t stop the owners pretending they were farmers in the best Roman tradition. They were encouraged by writers like Cato, who told his readers to build a villa they’d want to go and stay in often so the farm could benefit from the attention and interest. That’s key: Roman villa owners rarely lived in villas the whole time; they usually split their time between a place in town and the country villa. Sometimes they even had several villas.

Rome’s grain supply, and the grain used by towns and forts all over the Empire, was grown on these vast agricultural estates (for the grain supply and trade, see Chapter 7). In reality, villas were like agricultural factories, mass-producing food to make their owners wealthier.

Here a villa, there a villa . . .

Villas have been found all over the Roman world, usually on the best land, evidence for farming on an industrial scale. The biggest estates included not just thousands of slaves but whole villages of tenanted communities working vast expanses of land. Many very rich villa owners had several villas, visiting them only occasionally, and normally used resident staff like a bailiff and slaves to run the farm. It’s quite possible that modest villas were parts of huge estates owned by big landlords and lived in only by tenants.

As Rome’s power and influence spread across the Roman Empire, the villa tradition and the Roman love of simpler rural origins spread, too. Rome’s great genius had always been to make others want to ‘be Roman’, rather than regarding themselves as conquered subject peoples. These villa owners picked up the Roman literary tradition as well and absorbed it into their ideas of who they were.

Imperial and giant estates

The most important landowner of all was the emperor, who had more land than anyone else thanks to his inheritances, what he had conquered himself, and what had been confiscated from his enemies. These were the imperial estates, and they were managed by imperial procurators (usually freedmen) who rented land to tenant farmers (coloni) or sublet it to lessees. The tenants had to hand over some of their produce (as much as one third) to the landlord, lessee, or the procurator.

Houses in the Roman Empire

There were two main types of Roman house: the country villa, and the townhouse (domus). Villas tended to sprawl out with various wings surrounding courtyards, while townhouses were compact, inward-looking buildings where the rooms faced enclosed gardens (as can best be seen at Pompeii in Italy today). Townhouses and villas were similar in having public rooms for receiving guests, clients, and business visitors, and private family rooms. These are the main ones:

● Prothryum: Entrance corridor.

● Atrium: Entrance hall with a central opening in the roof and below it a small rain-catching pool called the impluvium. This was the public reception hall and it also held the household shrine (lararium - see Chapter 9).

● Tablinum: A corridor room connecting the atrium to the peristylium.

● Peristylium: A garden surrounded by a covered walkway supported by a colonnade.

● Oecus: Reception room opening off the peristylium.

● Cubicula: Bedrooms, opening off the atrium and peristylium.

● Triclinium: Dining room, also usually opening off the atrium or peristylium, and often more than one, designed for summer and winter use.

● Xystus:A bigger enclosed garden.

● Others: Other rooms were used for storage, kitchens, or perhaps a library. Some streetfacing rooms or suites were sublet as self-contained shops to tenants (perhaps the owner's freedmen and their families). Some townhouses had an upstairs level but these rarely survived, even at Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Needless to say only people with money could afford villas or townhouses with all these facilities.

The walls in affluent Roman villas and town-houses were painted in panels and borders of bright colours, including pictures of mythological scenes and fantasy architecture. The floors in the best rooms would have had mosaic pavements featuring geometric designs, pictures of mythological beasts, gods, and heroes, as well as a variety of rural everyday activities like hunting. The quality of the flooring and wall painting always reflected the owner's tastes, pocket, and the date. Rich people could also afford glass windows instead of an iron grille, but they were small by our standards and made of an opaque greeny-blue glass. The constant increase in luxury and extravagance in wealthy townhouses in Rome was considered by Pliny the Elder to be a mark of how excessive Roman culture had become. The smartest house in Rome in 78 BC wasn't even in the top 100 by 43 BC and by Pliny's time they'd all been surpassed by houses elsewhere.

Meanwhile, ordinary people in towns had to make do with renting rooms in apartment blocks (sometimes several storeys high) or as self-contained parts of the rich houses let out to rent. In the countryside, simple stone farmhouses might be all a peasant farmer could afford, and in remoter provinces like Britain, thatched roundhouses of an ancient Iron Age design were still used by the poorest people.

Giant villa estates weren’t much different, merely that the owner was a private landlord. In Nero’s time (AD 54-68), just six landlords owned half of the province of Africa, which most of them managed by constantly buying up neighbouring land. These vast slave-operated estates were called latifundia (‘extended estates’), and by the days of the Empire, smallholdings on them were increasingly let out to free tenants, who provided additional seasonal labour.

Melania the Younger was a hyper-wealthy Christian heiress in the year AD 404. She had estates in Italy, Sicily, North Africa, Spain, and Britain. We know about her because as part of her faith she toured her property, giving it away, but it shows how the super-rich of the Roman world were truly international millionaires, despite belonging to a culture that thought it was maintaining the simple country life.

Villas in the later years of the Empire

By the fourth and fifth centuries AD, the world of Pliny the Younger and his villa seems a very long way back in the past. Some provinces had been overrun with barbarians. When Britain was abandoned in 410, the collapse of a financial system, provincial government, and a trading and communications infrastructure, as well as barbarian raids, soon saw her villas falling into ruin by the early fifth century. But in other provinces, the wealthy landowners carried on as if nothing had changed. Ausonius (AD 310-395), the Gallo-Roman poet and tutor to the emperor Gratian (367-383), wrote many poems, but one of his best-known was about the river Moselle near where he had grown up. Copying the style of Roman classical poetry from writers like Virgil, Ausonius described the Moselle as a rural paradise of abundant produce including fish, and peopled it with ancient Roman gods.

Even Gaius Sidonius Apollinaris (AD 430-post 475), who became Bishop of Auvergne and helped lead the Gaulish resistance against the Visigoths, wrote about his villa and rural life almost as if he was personal friend of Virgil’s and had lived 500 years before his own time. Sidonius also talks about his friends’ villas, showing that fifth-century southern Gaul still had plenty of senatorial aristocrats who enjoyed traditional Roman villa life.

Living in villas meant being dependent on a colossal amount of tied labour, safe and reliable communications to ship supplies in and produce out, and access to reliable markets in towns. In the Eastern Empire, this system lasted a lot longer, but in the Western Empire, as order collapsed and as provinces were lost, it became impossible to maintain villa estates and the Roman fantasy rural way of life.

A Quick Rural Reality Check

Don’t be fooled by the Romans’ self-image. The reality for most people in the Roman Empire was a life of endless toil in the fields, coming back from war to find your smallholding had been absorbed into a huge slave-run estate, struggling against natural disasters, bad weather, pests, tax collectors, and the economic chaos caused in the third and fourth centuries by civil war and barbarian invasions, or scraping a living in a crowded apartment block in a city. Many of these people worked as slaves or tenants on vast villa or imperial estates and had no chance at all of ever experiencing the kind of villa life men like Pliny the Younger and Ausonius banged on about.

But it’s also true that the rich villa owners set the social standard for top-class living and less-well-off people did whatever they could to copy them. That’s why archaeologists dig up small and modest villas with maybe just a couple of mosaic floors laid by a second-rate mosaicist, because to the less-well-off villa owner, a bad mosaic was better than no mosaic at all - a bit like people today buying cheap copies of designer clothing worn by film stars. As ever, people are pretty much the same whatever time or place you look at!

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