Cato is said to have lived near the village of Tusculum (and, even today, a modern Italian village nearby bears his name after centuries of tradition that his farm was located there). In the second century BC, Cato the Elder represented the well-off independent farmer who, like his American counterpart in the 19th century, equated self-sufficiency with freedom, frugality with morality, and all with the Roman traditions of independence. Even in the first century A.D., Columella’s De Re Rustica could still treat of the villa rustica and active farming as synonomous.

A peculiar thread that runs throughout Roman history is the harking back of later writers to the supposed glories of the proud, independent small farmer, backbone of the lost Republic; a type that in earlier days would have simply been the mass of the country population.

Scholars suggest that the architectural features what came to be known as the "villa rustica" or the rustic farmhouse, derived from Etruscan models. Although maintaining many features of what would later come to be known as the standard Roman model – entrance, atrium with impluvium pool, kitchen, dining room, study, with a small portico garden in the back – the farmhouse was built for function, not form or luxury. Cato himself suggested a well-built but simple house (and perhaps to him, more importantly) of the multiple outbuildings necessary for self-sufficient farming).

In "On Farming," he notes that a man should plant his acres first and only build his house when he is 36 years old, with the farm already developed and producing. Besides the house, a farmer needed a press room (for the complex process of pressing olives for wine), a winery (with a cauldron room for boiling and reducing wine), stables for horses, ox-sheds, granaries, and sheds for weaving, plus rooms for his slaves and farm manager. He is particular about the useful dung-heaps and household gardens. One must imagine the villa rustica surrounded by outbuildings, each with a highly specified use.

Columella, who frequently quotes Cato, notes The size of the villa and the number of its parts should be proportioned to the whole inclosure, and it should be divided into three groups: the villa urbana46 or manor house, the villa rustica or farmhouse, and the villa fructuaria or storehouse. The manor house should be divided in turn into winter apartments and summer apartments, in such a way that the winter bedrooms may face the sunrise at the winter solstice, and the winter dining-room face the sunset at the equinox. The summer bedrooms, on the other hand, should look toward the midday sun at the time of the equinox, but the dining-rooms of that season should look toward the rising sun of winter. The baths should face the setting sun of summer that they may be lighted from midday up to evening. The promenades should be exposed to the midday sun at the equinox, so as to receive both the maximum of sun in winter and the minimum in summer. But in the part devoted to farm uses there will be placed a spacious and high kitchen, that the rafters may be free from the danger of fire, and that it may offer a convenient stopping-place for the slave household at every season of the year. It will be best that cubicles for unfettered slaves be built to admit the midday sun at the equinox; for those who are in chains there should be an underground prison, as wholesome as possible, receiving light through a number of narrow windows built so high from the ground that they cannot be reached with the hand.

The acreage of these simple villas varied; Cato suggested 240 iugera (15 acres) minimum devoted to olive cultivation, which might suggest a farm of roughly 50 acres to grow olives, wheat and barley, crops for grazing cattle, sheep and goats, fruit trees, and other necessities of life. He believed that even 15 acres would require five laborers, three oxherds, one donkey-driver, one swineherd, and one shepherd. The majority, if not all, the farm laborers were slaves, so extensive lodgings were required for the ‘help.’ Since "villa" is a diminutive for the Latin word for village, it is clear that even a modest working farm would be similar to a small village but, where the father, as paterfamilias, was in charge but the manager and housekeeper were next in line of authority.

The above description is far from the elegant villas later kept by Roman statesmen and wealthy merchants, and Tiberius Gracchus actually postulated that the accumulation of viable farming land into decorate country estates was an evil for Italia at large. However, in spite of repeated attempts, no legislation stopped the wealthy from buying up the small farms and running the estate by slave labor. Nor did the popularity of not only one, but multiple, country houses among the rich ever wane, even when it was obvious that latifundia were changing the very nature of the Italian countryside. Cicero was, then, in the majority when he chose his country retreats not for pragmatic but for social and emotional reasons.

SOURCES:

Cato, De Agricultura

Columella, De Re Rustica