For five centuries, historians believed Roman women on farms just cooked and cleaned. A new study reveals they actually ran operations producing tens of thousands of liters of wine and olive oil — and made major money for landowners.
The misunderstanding started with a Greek philosopher. When Roman writer Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella wrote a farming manual in the first century CE, he opened his section on the female farm manager, called the vilica, with a long quote from Xenophon, an Athenian philosopher who lived four centuries earlier. Xenophon argued women belonged indoors. Many modern historians read Columella's text and assumed the vilica was just a housekeeper.
But Columella wasn't describing Xenophon's ideal wife. Four times in his manual, he states these ideas belonged to the Greek philosopher, not himself. Columella listed completely different duties for the vilica on a Roman farm: the making of wine and olive oil — the backbone of landowners' profits.
According to Columella, the vilica extracted juice from grapes during harvest, added flavorings and preservatives like salt, fennel or boiled grape juice, and oversaw fermentation into wine. She also managed turning olives into olive oil. From archaeology, we know that such production used huge machines in substantial buildings and could reach 50,000 to 100,000 liters per year — or even more.
"The vilica was therefore responsible for overseeing large-scale work essential to the operation of the estate," wrote the study's author, Dr. [Name redacted for neutrality], whose paper appears in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.
Roman farmers saw wine-making as risky business. Uncontrolled temperatures, bacteria or oxygenation could easily ruin a batch, turning it moldy or sour. Columella instructed the vilica to make offerings to the gods to prevent such disasters. Cato the Elder, another Roman writer from two centuries before, also gave the vilica responsibility for offering garlands at the altar "for abundance."
Legal writings support her importance too. The first-century BCE jurist Trebatius included the vilica in the instrumentum fundi — the list of everything needed for productive farm work, including enslaved workers. Cato listed both male and female farm managers as essential staff for vineyards and olive farms.
This research, drawing on texts, laws and grave inscriptions spanning five centuries, shows female farm managers hiding in plain sight all along. Their roles were not domestic sidelines but central to ancient Rome's most profitable industries.