There was in the later Roman world a veritable 'explosion' of documentation and pictorial representation of rural life that paved the way to the medieval world by illustrating the ruralization of the lives of even urban inhabitants. The first thing, which must be studied in any discussion of the countryside in late antiquity, is whether production on the land had declined. There are some reasons why it might have done so: war damage, particularly in frontier regions; loss of land to barbarian settlements; over-taxation in certain parts; shortage of manpower; bad management, particularly as a result of absentee landlords or imperial ownership. But it is necessary to look at the positive evidence also: whether there was better management and technological improvement; and whether new land was being brought into production and new labour resources made available. Assessment of the productivity of the land must include some discussion about the forces of production and the ownership of land.

This chapter deals with the agricultural and rural life in the later Roman empire. The relative scarcity of stock-raising land had more than one effect upon ancient life; it affected, for instance, the diet. The chapter discusses the social consequences of the dry farming and irrigatory methods of agriculture which are characteristic of large portions of the Roman Empire. In the Roman Empire rights existed (or at least jurists proclaimed that they existed) on provincial soil because their recipients were precarious grantees of the Roman government. The supremacy of the state and the suspicions of the central government kept company law backward in the Roman world, so that no facilities existed for joint-stock agricultural enterprises or agricultural banks. Explorations in the Decapolis show the ordinary population dwelling in well-built houses of squared stone, and in Asia Minor, the monumental evidences of the later Roman Empire argue a standard of life higher at least than that of the modern Turkish village.