Book contents
1 - Rural Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Summary
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Daily Life in Late Antiquity , pp. 21 - 46Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018
References
Further Reading
The following primary sources are available in English translation and provide further insight into the topics discussed in this chapter:
Readers interested in learning more about the Apion agricultural dynasty and their archives can peruse P. Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2006) and T. Hickey, Wine, Wealth, and the State in Late Ancient Egypt (Ann Arbor, MI, 2012). Those generally curious about late Roman agriculture should consult M. Decker, Tilling the Hateful Earth: Agricultural Production and Trade in the Late Antique East (Oxford, 2009) and P. Halstead, Two Oxen Ahead: Pre-Mechanized Farming in the Mediterranean (Chichester, UK, 2014). Two recommended studies of late Roman peasant communities are L. Dossey, Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa (Cambridge, 2010) and C. Grey, Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside (Cambridge, 2011). For the fate of villas and farmland in the West from an archaeological perspective, see T. Lewit “Vanishing Villas: What Happened to Elite Rural Habitations in the West in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries?,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 16.1 (2003): 26–74. Ancient economic history is essentially the history of agricultural enterprise and trade. See W. Scheidel, I. Morris, and R. Saller (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge, 2007) and C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Cambridge, 2005). And for late antique environmental and climate change, see K. Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2017) and P. Squatriti, “Barbarizing the Bel Paese: Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy,” in Arnold, Bjornlie, and Sessa (eds.), A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy (Leiden, 2016): 390–424. Finally, introductions to the topic of food in antiquity include P. Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 1999) and J. Wilkins and R. Nadeau (eds.), A Companion to Food in the Ancient World (Malden, MA, 2015).