Do Agricultural Writers Present an Accurate Picture of the Role of Slaves in the Agriculture of Roman Italy?
… and regional trends and fit them into the greater context of the question. Another problem of over-generalisation concerns the agricultural writers. It is essential that they are not always considered representing a united view when they wrote at different times and from different places. Despite this concern, in the context of this question certain links do occur regarding the type of agriculture that they presented. It will be shown in this paper that the agricultural writers on the whole present a picture of an aspect of Roman agriculture in which slaves played an important role, namely the phenomenon of latifundia. As well as other literary and epigraphical evidence, the main source for investigating the actual relevance of the agricultural writers in relation to this paper is archaeological. The latest archaeological evidence will be used to show that it appears that the agricultural writers do accurately represent an important agricultural phenomenon. However, …
