Henchir Mettich Imperial Estate
About
A great imperial olive estate stood in the Bagradas Valley, fifty kilometers from Carthage. In 116 CE, procurators of Trajan carved its farming rules onto stone for the tenant farmers who worked its fields, fixing exactly how much of each harvest went to Rome: a third of the grain, a third of the wine, a fifth of the olive oil. That inscription, the Lex Manciana of Henchir Mettich, remains the fullest surviving record of daily life on a Roman imperial farm.
What happened here
A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.
In ancient writing
- CIL VIII 25902, Lex Manciana inscription (Henchir Mettich) 116/117 CE
A bronze/stone copy of estate regulations for the imperial estate Villa Magna Variana sive Mappalia Siga, setting out the coloni's right to work the estate's unused (subseciva) land under the lex Manciana.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →