Female farm managers in ancient Rome were not just “housekeepers” hanging around the kitchen. A reread of Roman texts and archaeology points to something far more consequential: women on farms helped supervise wine production, olive oil processing, and other activities tied directly to landowners’ profits.

The key pivot comes from a familiar farming authority, Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, writing in the 1st century CE. In his section on the vilica, Columella lays out duties for the female manager, and the list is not domestic by default. The male manager is termed the vilicus and the female manager the vilica, terms derived from their roles at the “villa.” Columella’s description emphasizes the making of wine and olive oil, including grape harvest juice extraction, adding flavorings and preservatives like salt, wormwood, fennel, or boiled grape-juice, and overseeing fermentation into wine. He also includes work to convert unedible olives into olive oil for sale, tying the vilica to the revenue engine of the estate.

That is why the paper matters. Modern historians, the article notes, have generally assumed these women were housekeepers, segregated from the productive business of the farm. The new work challenges that assumption, in part by addressing a misleading pathway: Columella begins his discussion with a long quote from Xenophon, the Greek philosopher who wrote in Athens more than four centuries earlier. Xenophon’s “natural” role for upper-class women was to stay indoors and supervise domestic work. Because the quote comes first, many historians followed what the text seemed to imply. But Columella, according to the source, signals that this is not his position. He says four times that the ideas are Xenophon’s, not his own.

Once you get past that false lead, the vilica’s responsibilities look operational. Columella lists duties that, in modern terms, are process control, quality preservation, and throughput management. He describes harvest-time extraction, the addition of preservatives and flavorings, and the management of fermentation. He also describes turning olives into olive oil. The article links this to what archaeologists have learned about production scale. Using huge machines in substantial buildings, wine or oil production could reach 50,000 to 100,000 litres per year, or even more. In that kind of output environment, the vilica is not a decorative figure in the background. She is responsible for overseeing large-scale work essential to estate operations.

There is also the “risk management” angle, and it is not metaphorical. In Roman wine-making, the article says the process was precarious because of uncontrolled temperatures, bacteria, or oxygenation. Wine could mold or turn into vinegar. The striking detail in Columella’s account is that he includes offerings to avert disaster in his instructions for the female farm manager. Correct sacrifices to the gods were seen as vital to the success of the farm, and archaeology has uncovered altars for offerings in Roman wine-making buildings. For executives who deal with industries where outcomes hinge on process integrity, this reads like an old-school reminder: even when the tools are different, the incentives for preventing failure are the same.

The sourcing doesn’t rely only on Columella. Legal writings on inheritance, quoting the 1st century BCE jurist Trebatius, include the vilica through the instrumentum fundi, “whatever (including enslaved personnel) is required for productive work, gathering and preserving produce of the estate.” Another aristocratic landowner and writer, Cato the Elder, living two centuries before Columella, lists both the female and male farm managers as essential staff for a vineyard or olive farm. Cato gives only a small section to the female manager’s tasks, but the close look, per the source, shows these are not predominantly domestic. Cato includes keeping poultry and processing seasonal farm products. He does include supervision of cleaning, but the article argues this could refer to maintenance of work spaces such as stables and wine-making buildings, which are integral to estate management and also listed among the vilica’s duties by Columella. Cato also assigns the vilica responsibility for sacrifices to the gods for the farm’s success, including regularly offering garlands at the altar “for abundance.”

Archaeological imagery backs up the text-based interpretation, even if the evidence is incomplete. The article points to a mosaic from the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily showing Roman farm women at work. Another mosaic depicts estate work in different seasons, including sacrifices for abundant crops to the god Jupiter in his Celtic form as a sky and weather god. A woman is shown holding garlands, with a jug for wine offerings and a male figure nearby, in a scene that matches Cato’s instructions. The article also notes the rarity of images of female figures, but it cites a fragmentary wall painting from Rome showing a female overseeing wine-making workers, aligning with Columella’s description.

No vilica left an account in her own words. Still, the article argues that careful attention to the evidence lets us “hear an echo of her voice.” For modern leaders, the operational lesson is uncomfortable but useful: when researchers (and by extension, organizations) default to a neat narrative, they can miss where value is actually created. On a Roman estate, the vilica appears embedded in the farm’s productive core: wine, oil, preservation, and the rituals meant to keep the process from going sideways. Misreading that role is not just an academic mistake. It changes how we understand incentives, labor systems, and who held the levers of production in an economy where agriculture was king.