It is very unlikely indeed that any substantial urban community survived the events which culminated in the fall of the Western Empire. If the inscriptional evidence has been read aright, Veii was already in full decline in the fourth century. The reasons may well have been in the first place economic, namely the concentration of such wealth as there was in the hands of the well-to-do landlords whose villas are so conspicuous a feature of the local countryside, at the expense of a township which, lying off the main road and lacking any particular resources, had already begun to be something of an anachronism two or three centuries earlier. At the same time it lay near enough to the main road to be vulnerable to any marauding army; and, unlike so many other ancient Italian towns, it had no impregnable hilltop fortress to which its inhabitants could withdraw. As a functioning community Veii may well have ceased to exist by the fifth century.

The villas were less exposed, those of them at any rate that lay off the main roads; and representing as they do a less complex economy than that of the towns, they were more resilient in the face of disaster. Even at an earlier date there are very few traces of any intensive agricultural specialisation, and a great many of them were certainly still functioning in Late Antiquity.