Luxury villas and working farms are crucial to Roman interest in what constitutes landscape, and they form the backdrop for this Survey's final two chapters. By the mid-first century BCE, lavishly designed and decorated villas represented not just a source of revenue qualifying their wealthy and educated owners for entering public life, but also an alternative performance venue to the traditional urban sites for political debate – Senate and Forum. Relationship with and management of land became a way of ‘defining what it meant to be a member of the Roman elite, in excluding outsiders from this powerful and privileged group and in controlling insiders.