While the term villa is generic today, its meaning extended across the entirety of ancient Roman life: villas supplied food, oil, and wine to towns and cities and produced raw materials for craft industries and building construction. Villas were also venues for pleasure, relaxation, and the cultivation of friendships and the mind. Many villas were known for their spectacular sites, architecture, decoration, and furnishing. Villas came to be ubiquitous throughout ancient Rome's European and Mediterranean rural hegemony. This volume compiles a wealth of newly translated Latin and ancient Greek sources-treatises, letters, poems, histories, biographies, and other works of literary art-to vividly convey the architectural, economic, social, political, and cultural significance of ancient Roman villas from their Greek antecedents through the early Christian period. Thematic chapters reveal ancient Roman attitudes on villa architecture, agricultural operations, and the practices of buying, building, decorating, entertaining, and pursuing leisure at villas. References to family, gender relations, and the lives of enslaved persons aim to situated, if only indirectly, a broad range of experiences within villas. Supplemented by generous commentaries, copious annotation, a comprehensive bibliography, and a glossary, this definitive sourcebook equips scholars and students alike for further research and makes for fascinating reading. This impressive book presents a wide range of ancient Greek and Roman literary sources (treatises, letters, poems, etc.) on Roman villas and villa life from the Republican to the late Imperial/early Christian period. Thanks to the clarity of organization and the editor's lucid prose, the reader can navigate the content quite easily and gain a good sense of the development as well as significance of Roman villas in relation social and political life, architectural developments, the agricultural economy, private as well as imperial ownership, and more.
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