Women who managed Roman villas held far more power than historians once believed, according to a new study that finds these women were skilled managers of farm production, not simple housekeepers.
The study, published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, comes from Tamara Lewit of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Lewit examined ancient texts, artwork, and excavated villa sites to build a fuller picture of the vilica, the female supervisor found at Roman farming estates for five centuries.
For decades, scholars described the vilica as a housekeeper who handled food and supervised indoor slaves. That view traces back to a study by historian Jasper Carlsen, who called her role largely domestic.
Later scholars, including Ulrike Roth and Lena Lovén, agreed that her duties stayed indoors, separate from farm work.
Records from the Roman villas show women as production managers
Lewit argues that this picture rests on a misreading of the main source, the Roman writer Columella. His first-century farming manual, “De Re Rustica,” devotes an entire book to the vilica.
But its opening pages borrow heavily from a much older Greek text, Xenophon’s “Oeconomicus,” which describes an idealized wife confined to her home. Lewit says scholars mistook those borrowed lines for Columella’s own view of Roman women.
The rest of Columella’s book tells a different story. He puts the vilica in charge of wine and olive oil production, the two most valuable goods a villa could sell.
She managed workers who sealed massive storage jars called dolia, some holding up to 1,000 liters, and oversaw the buildings where grapes were pressed and olives were milled.
Some villas stored enough wine to fill more than 650,000 liters worth of jars, showing the scale of the work under her control.
Villa ruins and ancient rituals confirm the manager’s power
Excavated villas back up this picture. Their layouts separate the owner’s living quarters from busy work zones with presses, storage halls, and animal pens, exactly where Columella places the vilica’s duties.
The vilica also carried out religious rituals meant to ensure good harvests, offering sacrifices to the gods Liber and Libera before the grape harvest.
Roman mosaics and paintings show women overseeing farm tasks, including one scene of a woman supervising workers as they coat wine jars with pitch.
Lewit concludes that women who served as vilica were trained managers who ran key parts of the Roman villa economy, work long overlooked because of assumptions about women’s roles in ancient Rome.
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