What was the social ranking of farmers in Ancient Rome?
Most of the people of Rome (or any civilization prior to the 19th Century, in fact) were poor subsistence farmers. The lowly surpluses of even the most intensive agricultural projects could only allow for never more than ten percent of the population to live in resource hungry cities such as Roma, Alexandria and Constantinople. Though a great deal of a typical peasant family’s year consisted of holidays, the actual work of farming itself was laborious and backbreaking. Roman plows in particular were primitive and turned very little soil, and fields had to be harvested by hand. Though the Roman Empire is often depicted as being a metropolitan era with advanced agrarian practices, Europe of the Middle Ages had a much larger population on account of technological advances accumulated later on (a contributing factor to the later Black Death). There were class elements to farming in Rome as well. Wealthy patricians and upstart middle-class men would often engage in the creation of latifundi
