Villa At Chedwokth (Gloucestershire): reconstruction drawing of the buildings about A.D. 300. This well-preserved example of a comfortable farm-house in the
northernmost of Rome's provinces has a secluded inner courtyard surrounded by the best-appointed domestic accommodation and an outer yard opening to the
estate. The owner's wealth was probably based upon stock-breeding and wool-production.
In taking the cities and their articulate classes (and therefore most of the surviving evidence) as the basis for the analysis of Roman society, we risk ignoring the
great majority of the population on whose labours the prosperity of the cities depended but who do not make a proportionate impact on the surviving source
material: the rural peasantry. That the cities in fact depended on the economic exploitation of the peasantry is axiomatic. But it would be a mistake to assume from
this that the cities and the countryside were in consequence divided by an overt mutual enmity. The city, as a market, centre of distribution, source of occasional
delights and pleasures and, not least, home of the major gods, was a real and active presence in the life of the peasantry, even if a relatively small part of their
physical existence was spent there. In the fourth century John Chrysostom remarked on the Syriac peasantry flooding into Antioch on Christian feast days, 'divided
from us in language but at one in faith'; it is one of the few literary acknowledgments we possess of the peasantry or, as in this case, of its non-classical language,
but the situation it evokes is evidently common and immemorial. By the same token the local aristocracies, in whose hands lay the conduct of civic politics and the
provision of public services, were the owners of the land and spent much time on their farms and country estates-a pattern of life illustrated by Apuleius for second-
century Oea (in Tripolitania) as much as by the historian Ammianus Marcellinus for fourth-century Leptis Magna and Nisibis (in Mesopotamia).
Among true 'city-dwellers' we should count professional men such as teachers and doctors, craftsmen, fortune-tellers and magicians, traders, merchants, and so on.
For the activities of many of these professions, the value system of Greek and Roman society, rooted in the attitudes of landed amateurism, was reluctant to assign