While the term villa is generic today, its meaning extended across the entirety of ancient Roman life: villas supplied food, oil, and wine to towns and cities and produced raw materials for craft industries and building construction. Villas were also venues for pleasure, relaxation, and the cultivation of friendships and the mind. Many villas were known for their spectacular sites, architecture, decoration, and furnishing. Villas came to be ubiquitous throughout ancient Rome's European and Mediterranean rural hegemony. This volume compiles a wealth of newly translated Latin and ancient Greek sources-treatises, letters, poems, histories, biographies, and other works of literary art-to vividly convey the architectural, economic, social, political, and cultural significance of ancient Roman villas from their Greek antecedents through the early Christian period. Thematic chapters reveal ancient Roman attitudes on villa architecture, agricultural operations, and the practices of buying,