Employment for 80-90 percent of the people in the ancient Roman world simply meant being a farmer out in the countryside. The basis of the Roman economy was farming and land ownership. The Latin word for farmer is agricola—a revealing word because it is made up of two other words: ager, which means "field," and the verb colere, which means "to cultivate." Thus, an agricola is literally one who cultivates the field. From these terms comes our modern English word, agriculture.
During the republic, farms tended to be fairly small. The average farm was typically as much land as one family could manage. Archaeological evidence suggests that farms may have been on average about 1.6 hectares in area. Roman farmers had a saying that you could not trust anyone whose farm was larger than 12 iugera (about 3 hectares). They were suspicious of anyone who farmed more than he needed to, since this indicated that he must be greedy and therefore also dishonest. Cincinnatus, the ideal Roman citizen-hero, worked a farm of about 1.2 hectares.
During the Late Republic, when rich men began buying up all the land and putting together huge estates, the Romans passed legislation stipulating that it was illegal for any one person to own more than 500 iugera of land. In practice, this law was either plainly ignored or else people found loopholes to circumvent it, but it nonetheless serves as an interesting indication of how suspicious Romans were of large landholders.
The core of Roman agriculture was what is known today as the Mediterranean triad; wheat, olives, and wine. The cultivation of wheat was a multistep process. Many Romans seem to have used a two-field system, which meant that each year farmers only planted on half their land while the other half was allowed to rest to recover nutrients and moisture. Farmers first had to prepare the land they were going to farm, and this meant plowing. Each field had to be plowed between three and six times before it would be properly ready; this process entailed extremely hard work. Oxen, which were used to pull plows, were quite expensive. Often an entire village would share one team of oxen, which were probably the most valuable things in the village. After plowing, the farmer had to fertilize the fields, which demanded that manure be mixed into the soil, often by hand. It is estimated that it took a family six days working from dawn until dusk to properly manure a single acre of soil. Fertilization was followed by the actual sowing of the seeds. Romans just scattered the seed around by hand, so they ended up wasting and losing a lot. Modern sow-to-reap ratios are very high, about 1:50 or so, but Roman farmers may have had ratios of only 1:4. Thus one-quarter of each crop had fo be saved to produce the next one. Once the seeds were sown, the soil had to be worked over with hoes and weeded by hand. At last came harvest time. Farmers walked through the wheat fields with sickles and cut off the wheat stalks. The work was by no means finished yet, however. The wheat stalks were then threshed to separate the grain from the straw. On the threshing floor, farmers beat the wheat with flails or sometimes even had cows trample on it. Threshing was followed by winnowing, in which the wheat was tossed into the air to separate out the heavier grain from the chaff.
If all these stages went well and the crops were neither destroyed by rain, flood, cold, or vermin nor stolen by thieves, then a farmer at last ended up with some wheat. The amount was probably barely enough to feed a family for the coming year; even in a perfect year, the surplus might amount to only 5-10 percent. This was a world always literally on the brink of starvation. The routine of Roman farming had little variation and demanded lots of hard work, and the rhythms of the cultivation process governed life for the vast majority of people in the Roman world.
Other cereal crops grown included barley and millet. Ancient sources seem to have regarded these as less desirable for human consumption. They were primarily used as feed for animals, although in the army a common punishment was to have to eat barley for a while instead of wheat. Despite this bias, many poor people probably depended on barley for subsistence.
Another important crop was olives. The olive is the definitive plant of fhe Mediterranean, but it is also the one most restricted by environmental factors. Olives were, of course, eaten as food, but olive oil was used for many other purposes, such as in cooking (instead of butter), as a light
Figure 12.1 A Roman plow. Roman agriculture was a labor-intensive process using only the most basic tools.
Source (in lamps that burned olive oil), as a kind of soap (rubbed on the body and then scraped off after bathing), and as the basis for all sorts of perfumes (modern perfumes, in contrast, have an alcohol base). Olives were truly central to the entire Mediterranean lifestyle.
Olives were harvested in the fall. Olive trees were precious resources, since a tree can take 5-10 years to even start producing olives, but they can live for hundreds of years. The trees are biennial, producing a crop every other year. The olives had to be carefully picked by hand, since they are very tender and bruise easily. After harvesting, olives could be transformed into olive oil by putting the olives in a press. The oil yield from this process was one-quarter to one-third the original weight of the olives. The Romans made use of every bit of the olive. The pressing process resulted in a black, sludgelike by-product, which was used for fertilizer, pesticide, sealant, moth deterrent, copper polish, axle grease, and sheep medicine.
Grapes were widely cultivated and were most often consumed in the form of wine. The main labor in grape growing consisted of pruning, grafting, and harvesting. This work could be done by the elderly and by children, leaving the able-bodied adults free for more demanding activities such as wheat farming. Wine was made by pressing the grapes and then allowing the juice to ferment. Vegetables were also grown but were not staples of the average diet. Crops such as vegetables could be grown in and around olive trees. There were no pesticides or mechanical harvesters in the ancient world, so it was possible to cultivate different crops mixed together on the same plot of land, a process known as intercultivation.
The main animals that were raised were sheep and goats, from which were obtained milk and cheese. Cattle herding was relatively rare on the shores of the Mediterranean. Goats and sheep could graze on mountainous terrain that was unsuitable for growing crops, and the lonely goatherd leading flocks around the mountains of Italy was a stereotypical figure in
Roman literature. Beekeeping was common and was especially important since honey was the only sweetener that was widely available to the Romans.
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