This paper explores how the sociopolitical, economic, and demographic transformations of the Middle Republican period affected rural settlement and landscape exploitation in Central Tyrrhenian Italy. Two lines of archaeological inquiry are pursued. The first concerns settlement data from three major survey projects: the South Etruria Survey, Rome Suburbium Project, and Pontine Region Project. Despite local variation, these surveys highlight two general changes firmly placed in the late 4th and 3rd centuries BC: an increase in rural site numbers and the rise of specialized commercial farms. The second topic concerns centuriation. It is argued that some field systems, including the centuriation of the Pontine plain, were laid out in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries to reclaim marginal landscapes. Labor-cost analyses suggest such projects involved substantial and sustained investment. The chapter then discusses the implications of these rural transformations in relation to urban contexts and the period’s broader history. Despite continuous warfare, Central Italy apparently witnessed demographic and economic growth, which in turn contributed to Rome’s expansion.

This chapter examines the discursive role of plaustrum, first plotting out its reliable representation in Latin literary texts as the sturdy uehiculum par excellence, repeatedly defined as a functional tool for agricultural (and other) hauling. It then moves on to unpack the different versions of two crucial episodes in which the conveyance is represented delivering much more, for the Roman republic – even saving it from disaster: first, before the Gallic occupation of Rome after the battle of the Allia in 390 BCE, Albinius’ legendary lending of his plaustrum for the delivery of the very religious life of the city; and second, in 311 BCE, the dramatic walk-out of the tibicines, and their drugged recovery by means of plaustra. In particular, Ovid’s version of the tale in the Fasti serves as an entrée to the final section of the chapter, which investigates the deep-seated metapoetics of this clunkiest and lowest of Roman vehicles.