For decades, the Roman vilica was described in passing — if at all — as a housekeeper. The female counterpart to the vilicus (bailiff), she was assumed to manage domestic chores, oversee household meals, and generally keep the villa’s living quarters in order. A minor figure on the margins of Roman agricultural history.
New research by Tamara Lewit, an honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne, argues that historians got this almost entirely wrong. The vilica was not a domestic servant. She was the manager of the most economically significant operations on a Roman farm: wine and olive oil production.
The study, published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, draws on literary, legal, and archaeological evidence spanning five centuries — from the 2nd century BCE to the 3rd century CE — to reconstruct a role that historians had systematically undervalued.
What the vilica actually did
The most detailed ancient source on the vilica‘s duties is Book 12 of Columella’s De Re Rustica (On Agriculture), written in the 1st century CE. Columella devotes an entire book to her responsibilities, which center on production — not domesticity.
She oversaw the extraction of juice from grapes, the addition of flavorings such as salt, wormwood, fennel, and boiled grape-juice (defrutum), and the management of fermentation in massive storage jars called dolia, some capable of holding 1,000 liters each. She directed the production of olive oil, turning inedible olives into saleable goods at scales reaching 50,000 to 100,000 liters per year from a single villa, using large mechanical presses. She supervised work areas — stables, wine-making buildings, pressing rooms — kept poultry, and managed both female and male workers.
She also performed religious rituals. Columella instructs her to protect wine during fermentation through ceremonies that guarded against mold and spoilage. Cato the Elder, writing two centuries earlier in his De Agri Cultura (c. 160 BCE), says she must regularly offer garlands at the altar “for abundance,” with sacrifices made to Liber and Libera, the fertility and wine deities, before the grape harvest.
Archaeological evidence supports the textual record. A mosaic at the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily depicts a woman holding garlands at an altar beside a wine jug — exactly the scene Cato describes. A fragmentary wall painting from beneath Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome shows a female figure overseeing wine-making workers. An altar found inside the wine production and storage area (the cella vinaria) of the Villa of Las Musas in Navarre, Spain, confirms that rituals took place where production happened, not in domestic spaces.
The source of the misunderstanding
The persistent mischaracterization of the vilica as a housekeeper can be traced in part to a misreading of Columella. In his agricultural manual, Columella quotes Xenophon’s Oeconomicus — a 4th century BCE Greek text about Athenian upper-class wives — on the idea that women should stay indoors. But Columella states explicitly four times that these are Xenophon’s ideas, not his own. Later scholars, including Jasper Carlsen in his influential study of Roman estate managers, and those who followed him (Ulrike Roth, Lena Loven), took Columella’s citation of Xenophon as a reflection of Roman reality rather than as a philosophical quotation from a different culture and era.
Roman agricultural treatises themselves make clear that the vilica‘s work was firmly located in the productive, profit-generating heart of the farm. Columella places her duties in the pressing buildings, storage halls, and production areas. Excavated villa layouts confirm that the owner’s living quarters were physically separated from these busy work zones. Trebatius, a 1st century BCE jurist, classified the vilica as part of the instrumentum fundi — the legal category for everything “required for productive work, gathering, and preserving the estate’s produce” — alongside tools and equipment, not domestic furnishings.
Why it matters
The Roman agricultural economy was the backbone of the ancient world. Wine and olive oil were among the most valuable traded goods, and their production — on an industrial scale — took place on villa estates across the empire. If the women who managed that production have been miscategorized as domestic helpers, an entire dimension of the Roman economy has been misunderstood.
Lewit’s paper is open access and available through Cambridge University Press.
Sources
- Lewit, T. (2026). “Not just a housekeeper: a new look at the work of the Roman vilica.” Journal of Roman Archaeology, First View, 1-37. DOI: 10.1017/S1047759426100804
- Live Science: “Not a housekeeper but a vilica: the many responsibilities of Roman-era female farm managers“