V Italy and the Villa Estate, or, of Cabbages and Kings

Extract

Luxury villas and working farms are crucial to Roman interest in what constitutes landscape, and they form the backdrop for this Survey's final two chapters. By the mid-first century BCE, lavishly designed and decorated villas represented not just a source of revenue qualifying their wealthy and educated owners for entering public life, but also an alternative performance venue to the traditional urban sites for political debate – Senate and Forum. Relationship with and management of land became a way of ‘defining what it meant to be a member of the Roman elite, in excluding outsiders from this powerful and privileged group and in controlling insiders.