Beyond the City Walls: The Extra-Urban Role of the Aedile in Middle Republican Rome and Cato’s De Agricultura

This article argues that the role of the aedileship outside of the urbs in the agrarian sphere has been underappreciated in treatments of the office during the Roman Republic, as well as in readings of Cato the elder’s De Agricultura. By assessing the prosecutorial jurisdiction of the aediles in the agrarian sphere, and how this extra-urban role was connected to their urban duties, the magistracy takes on a new complexion. In this context, a neglected passage from Cato’s handbook, where he advises the young paterfamilias to build a villa at age thirty-six (Agr. 3.1), taken alongside other evidence, opens a window onto how the rural role played by the magistracy ultimately began to wane from the early second century BCE onwards.