Grain agriculture in ancient Rome provided bread for everyman's table & was idealized among the social elite as a way of life. Cicero considered farming the best of all Roman occupations. In his treatise On Duties, he declared that "of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a free man." When one of his clients was derided in court for preferring a rural lifestyle, Cicero defended country life as "the teacher of economy, of industry, & of justice." Cato wrote "when they would praise a worthy man their praise took this form: 'Good husband good farmer'; it is from the farming class that the bravest men & the sturdiest soldiers come." Cato, Columella, Varro & Palladius wrote handbooks on farming.
Staple crops included wheat, emmer, spelt, & barley, all of them used for bread, the mainstay of every Roman table. In his treatise De agricultura ("On Farming", 2nd century BC), Cato wrote that the best farms contained a vineyard, followed by an irrigated garden, willow plantation, olive orchard, meadow, grain land, forest trees, vineyard trained on trees, & lastly acorn woodlands. "The people living in the city of Rome constituted a huge market for the purchase of food produced on Italian farms. Cato claimed that a small farm should have "a foreman, a foreman's wife, ten laborers, one ox driver, one donkey driver, one man in charge of the willow grove, one swineherd, in all sixteen persons; two oxen, two donkeys for wagon work, one donkey for the mill work."
Land ownership was a dominant factor in distinguishing the aristocracy from the common person, & the more land a Roman owned, the more important he would be in the city. Soldiers were often rewarded with land from the commander they served. Though farms depended on slave labor, free men & citizens were hired at farms to oversee the slaves & ensure that the farms ran smoothly. The Romans had four systems of farm management: direct work by owner & his family; tenant farming or sharecropping in which the owner & a tenant divide up a farm's produce; forced labor by slaves owned by aristocrats & supervised by slave managers; & other arrangements in which a farm was leased to a tenant.
There was much commerce between the provinces of the empire, & all regions of the empire were largely economically interdependent. Some provinces specialized in the production of grains including wheat, emmer, spelt, barley, & millet; others in wine & others in olive oil, depending on the soil type. Columella writes in his Res Rustica, "Soil that is heavy, chalky, & wet is not unsuited to the growing for winter wheat & spelt. Barley tolerates no place except one that is loose & dry." Pliny the Elder wrote extensively about agriculture in his Naturalis Historia including chapter XVIII on The Natural History of Grain
In the Roman Empire, some calculated that a family of 6 people would need to cultivate 12 iugera/ 3 hectares of land to meet minimum food requirements (without animals). Romans could acquire land for a farm in one of three ways. The most common way to gain land was to purchase the land. Though some lower class citizens did own small pieces of land, they often found it too difficult & expensive to maintain, & would sell it to someone in the aristocracy who had the financial backing to support a farm. Though there were some public lands available to the common person for use, aristocrats also tended to purchase those pieces of land, which caused a great deal of tension between the two classes. Some theorize that “Mass eviction of the poor by the rich underlay the political tensions & civil wars of the last century of the Roman Republic.” Another way to acquire land was as a reward for going to war. High ranking soldiers returning from war would often be given small pieces of public land or land in provinces as a way of paying them for their services. The last way to obtain land was through inheritance. A father could leave his land to his family, usually to his son, in the event of his death.
Cato explained that though some small farms were owned by lower class citizens & soldiers, much of the land was controlled by the noble class of Rome. Land ownership was just one of many distinctions that set the aristocracy apart from the lower classes. Aristocracy would "reorganize small holdings into larger more profitable farms in order to compete with other nobles." It was considered a point of pride to own not just the largest piece of land, but also to have land that grew high quality produce. As Cato wrote "when they would praise a worthy man their praise took this form: 'Good husband good farmer'; it is from the farming class that the bravest men & the sturdiest soldiers come." Careful planning went into every detail of owning & maintaining a farm in Roman culture.
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