Villa of Hortensius, Baiae
About
The orator Quintus Hortensius, Cicero's courtroom rival, kept a villa on this coast with fishponds so lavish that Varro recorded him weeping over a dead pet moray eel. Pliny the Elder later used the story to mock Rome's fishpond-owning elite, a class so common on this shore that Cicero coined the label piscinarii for its members. The ponds needed constant seawater exchange through rock-cut channels. Such fishpond villas on the Baiae shore stayed in aristocratic hands into the imperial period.
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.
Sources
Nearby
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