The Romans did not have the fight against sour land which is the heritage of the modern farmer after years of continuous application to his land of phosphoric and sulphuric acid in the form of mineral fertilizers. What sour land the Romans had they corrected with humus making barnyard manure, or the rich compost which Cato and Columella recommend. They had, however, a test for sourness of land which is still practised even where the convenient litmus paper is available. Virgil (Georgic II, 241) gives the formula: "Fill a basket with soil, and strain fresh water through it. The taste of water strained through sour soil will twist awry the taster's face."]
[Footnote 63: This sounds like the boast of the modern proprietor of an old blue grass sod in Northern Virginia or Kentucky. On the general question of pasture vs. arable land, cf. Hartlib's Legacie: "It is a misfortune that pasture lands are not more improved. England abounds in pasturage more than any other country, and is, therefore, richer. In France, acre for acre, the land is not comparable to ours: and, therefore, Fortescue, chancellor to Henry VI, observes that we get more in England by standing still (alluding to our meadows) than the French do by working (that is, cultivating their vineyards and corn lands)."
We may permit Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois II, 23, 14) to voice the French side of this question. "Les pais de pâturage sont pen peuplês. Les terres à bled occupent plus d'hommes et les vignobles infiniment d'avantage. En Angleterre on s'est souvent plaint que l'augmentation des pâturage diminuoit les habitans."
In the introduction to his Book Two (post, p. 179) Varro states the sound conclusion, that the two kinds of husbandry should be combined on the same land. Sir Anthony Fitzherbert knew this: "An housbande can not well thryue by his corne without he haue other cattell, nor by his cattell without corne. For els he shall be a byer, a borrower or a beggar."]
[Footnote 64: This is the explanation of why Aesop's fox found the grapes to be sour which grew on a trellis, for he had expected to find them of easy access on the ground. Aesop was a Phrygian, and, while Bentley has proved that Aesop never wrote the existing fables which go by that name, yet it is recognized that they are of Oriental origin and it is evident that that of the Fox and the Grapes came out of Asia, where, as Varro says, the grapes were usually allowed to grow on the ground.]
[Footnote 65: One is tempted to include here Pliny's observations upon the tests of good soil if only for the sake of his description of one of the sweetest sensations of the farmer every where, the aroma of new ploughed fertile land:—
"Those unguents which have a taste of earth are better," says Cicero, "than those which smack of saffron," it seeming to him more to the purpose to express himself by the word taste than smell. And such is the fact no doubt, that soil is the best which has the savour of a perfume. If the question should be put to us, what is this odour of the earth that is held in such estimation; our answer is that it is the same that is often to be recognized at the moment of sunset without the necessity even of turning up the ground, at the spots where the extremities of the rainbow have been observed to meet the earth: as also, when after long continued drought, the rain has soaked the ground. Then it is that the earth exhales the divine odour that is so peculiarly its own, and to which, imparted to it by the sun, there is no perfume however sweet that can possibly be compared. It is this odour which the earth, when turned up, ought to emit, and which, when once found, can never deceive any person: and this will be found the best criterion for judging of the quality of the soil. Such, too, is the odour that is usually perceived in land newly cleared when an ancient forest has been just cut down; its excellence is a thing that is universally admitted.]
[Footnote 66: The actus was the head land or as much land as a yoke of oxen could plough at a single spell without stopping, and measured 120 feet in length and four feet in width. Cf. Pliny, H.N. XVIII, 3. Hence the square of the head land became the basis of the Roman land measure. With the derivation of the actus may be compared that of the English furlong (furrow-long) and the French arpent (literally, head land).]
[Footnote 67: On the socialistic principle of Strepsiades in Aristophanes' Clouds that the use of geometry is to divide the land into equal parts.]
[Footnote 68: As it is difficult to appreciate that the Roman Campagna was formerly populous with villas, when one contemplates its green solitudes today, so when one faces the dread malaria which there breeds, one wonders how the Romans of the Republic maintained so long their hardy constitutions. It is now agreed that there was no malaria in the Land of Saturn so long as the volcanos in the Alban hills were active, because their gases purified the air and kept down the mosquitoes, and geology tells us that Monte Pila was in eruption for two or three centuries after the foundation of Rome. By the beginning of the second century B.C. the fever seems to have become endemic. Plautus and Terence both mention it and Cato (CLVII) describes its symptoms unmistakably. In his book on the effect of malaria in history, W.H. Jones expresses the opinion that the malady was brought into Italy from Africa by Hannibal's soldiers, but it is more probable that it was always there. See the discussion in Lanciani's Wanderings in the Roman Campagna. In Varro's time the Roman fever had begun to sap the vitality of the Roman people, and the "animalia minuta" in this passage suggests that Varro had a curious appreciation of what we call the modern science of the subject. Columella (I, 5, 6) indeed specifically mentions mosquitoes (infestis aculeis armata animalia) as one of the risks incident to living near a swamp.]
[Footnote 69: In the thirteenth century Ibn-al-Awam, a learned Moor, wrote at Seville his Kitab al-felahah, or Book of Agriculture, which has preserved for us not only the wisdom of the Moorish practice in agriculture and gardening which made Spain an enchanted paradise, but also the tradition of the Arabs in such matters, purporting to go back, through the Nabataeans to the Chaldaean books, which recorded the agricultural methods that obtained "by the waters of Babylon." Ibn-al-Awam's book has, therefore, a double interest for us, and we are fortunate in having it available in an admirable French translation from the Arabic by J.J. Clement-Mullet (Paris, Librairie A. Franck, 1864). Not the least profitable chapters in this book are those devoted to the preparation of manure in composts, to be ripened in pits as Varro advises in the text. They show a thoroughness, a care and an art in the mixing of the various animal dungs, with straw, woodsearth and cinders, which few modern gardeners could equal. German scholarship has questioned the Chaldaean origin of the authorities quoted, but there is internal evidence which smacks of an oriental despotism that might well be Babylonian. In a recipe for a rich compost suitable for small garden plants, we are advised (I, 2, I, p. 95), without a quiver, to mix in blood—that of the camel or the sheep if necessary—but human blood is to be preferred!]
[Footnote 70: What Varro describes as the military fence of ditch and bank was doubtless the typical Herefordshire fence of modern England which Arthur Young, in The Farmers' Letters, recommends so highly as at once most effective and most economical. The bank is topped with a plashed hedge of white thorn in which sallow, ash, hazel and beech are planted for "firing." The fencing practice of the American farmer has followed the line of least resistance and is founded on the lowest first cost: the original "snake" fences of split rails, upon the making of which a former generation of pioneer American boys qualified themselves for Presidential campaigns, being followed by woven wire "made by a trust" and not the most enduring achievement of Big Business. The practical farmer, as well as the lover of rural scenery, has cause for regret that American agricultural practice has not yet had the patience to enclose the land within live hedges and ditches.]
[Footnote 71: The kind of fence which Varro here describes as "ex terra et lapillis compositis in formis" is also described by Pliny (H.N. XXXV, 169), as formaceos or moulded, and he adds, "aevis durant." It would thus clearly appear to have been of gravel concrete, the use of which the manufacturers of cement are now telling us, is the badge of the modern progressive farmer. Cato (XXXVIII) told how to burn lime on the farm, and these concrete fences were, of course, formed with lime as the matrix. When only a few years ago, Portland cement was first produced in America at a cost and in a quantity to stimulate the development of concrete construction, engineers began with rough broken stone and sand as the constituents of what they call the aggregate, but some one soon "discovered" that the use of smooth natural gravel made more compact concrete and "gravel concrete" became the last word in engineering practice. But it was older even than Varro. A Chicago business man visiting Mycenae picked up and brought home a bit of rubbish from Schliemann's excavations of the ancient masonry: lying on his office desk it attracted the attention of an engineering friend who exclaimed, "That is one of the best samples of the new gravel concrete I have seen. Did it come out of the Illinois tunnel?" "No," replied the returned traveller, "it came out of the tomb of Agamemnon!"]
[Footnote 72: Varro here seems to forget the unities. He speaks in his own person, when Scrofa has the floor.]
[Footnote 73: It will be recalled that Aristotle described slaves as living tools. In Roman law a slave was not a persona but a res. Cf. Gaius II, 15.]
[Footnote 74: One of the most interesting of these freemen labourers of whom we know is that Ofellus whom Horace (Satire II, 2) tells us was working with cheerful philosophy as a hired hand upon his own ancestral property from which he had been turned out in the confiscations following the battle of Philippi. This might have been the fate of Virgil also had he not chanced to have powerful friends.]
[Footnote 75: "Mais lorsque, malgré le dégoût de la chaîne domestique, nous voyons naître entre les males et les femelles ces sentiments que la nature a partout fondés sur un libre choix: lorsque l'amour a commencé a unir ces couples captifs, alors leur esclavage, devenu pour eux aussi doux que la douce liberté, leur fait oublier peu à peu leur droits de franchise naturelle et les prérogatives de leur état sauvage; et ces lieux des premiers plaisirs, des premières amours, ces lieux si chers à tout être sensible, deviennent leur demeure de prédilection et leur habitation de choix: l'éducation de la famille rend encore cette affection plus profonde et la communique en même temps aux petits, qui s'étant trouvés citoyens par naissance d'un séjour adopté par leur parents, ne cherchent point à en changer: car ne pouvant avoir que pen ou point d'idée d'un état different ni d'un autre séjour ils s'attachent au lieu ou ils sont nés comme à leur patrie; et l'on sait que la terre natale est chère a ceux même qui l'habitent en esclaves."
One might assume that this eloquent and comfortable essay on contentment in slavery had been written to illustrate Varro's text at this point, but, as a matter of fact, it is Buffon's observation (VIII, 460) on the domestication of wild ducks!]
[Footnote 76: Saserna's rule would be the equivalent of one hand to every five acres cultivated. With slave labour, certainly with negro slave labour, the experience of American cotton planters in the nineteenth century very nearly confirmed this requirement, but one of the economic advantages of the abolition of slavery is illustrated by this very point. In Latimer's First Sermon before King Edward VI, animadverting on the advance in farm rents in his day, he says that his father, a typical substantial English yeoman of the time of the discovery of America, was able to employ profitably six labourers in cultivating 120 acres, or, say, one hand for each twenty acres, which was precisely what Arthur Young recommended as necessary for high farming at the end of the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century the American farmer seldom employs more than one hand for every eighty acres cultivated, but this is partly due to the use of improved machinery and partly to the fact that his land is not thoroughly cultivated.]
[Footnote 77: This example of Roman cost accounting is matched by
Walter of Henley in thirteenth century England.
"Some men will tell you that a plough cannot work eight score or nine score acres yearly, but I will show you that it can. You know well that a furlong ought to be forty perches long and four wide, and the King's perch is sixteen feet and a half: then an acre is sixty-six feet in width. Now in ploughing go thirty-six times round to make the ridge narrower, and when the acre is ploughed then you have made seventy-two furlongs, which are six leagues, for be it known that twelve furlongs are a league. And the horse or ox must be very poor that cannot from the morning go easily in pace three leagues in length from his starting place and return by three o'clock. And I will show you by another reason that it can do as much. You know that there are in the year fifty-two weeks. Now take away eight weeks for holy days and other hindrances, then are there forty-four working weeks left. And in all that time the plough shall only have to plough for fallow or for spring or winter sowing three roods and a half daily, and for second fallowing an acre. Now see if a plough were properly kept and followed, if it could not do as much daily."]
[Footnote 78: Stolo is quibbling. Cato's unit of 240 jugera was based on the duodecimal system of weights and measures which the Romans had originally derived from Babylon but afterwards modified by the use of a decimal system. The enlightened and progressive nations of the modern world who have followed the Romans in adopting a decimal system may perhaps approve Stolo's remarks, but it behooves those of us who still cling to the duodecimal system to defend Cato, if only to keep up our own courage.]
[Footnote 79: Here, in a few words, is the whole doctrine of intelligent agriculture. Cf. Donaldson's Agricultural Biography, tit. Jethro Tull. "The name of Tull will ever descend to posterity as one of the greatest luminaries, if not the very greatest benefactor, that British agriculture has the pride to acknowledge. His example furnishes the vast advantages of educated men directing their attention to the cultivation of the soil, as they bring enlightened minds to bear upon its practice and look at the object in a naked point of view, being divested of the dogmas and trammels of the craft with which the practitioners of routine are inexpugnably provided and entrenched."]
[Footnote 80: Pliny quotes Cato: "What ever can be done by the help of the ass costs the least money," which is the philosophy of modern power machinery on the farm, as elsewhere. It is largely a question of the cost of fuel, as Varro says.]
[Footnote 81: Green manuring is one of the oldest, as it is one of the best, of agricultural practices. Long before Varro, Theophrastus (II.P. 9, I) had recorded what the agricultural colleges teach today—that beans are valuable for this purpose because they rot readily, and, he adds, in Macedonia and Thessaly it has always been the custom to turn them under when they bloom.]
[Footnote 82: Although Varro advises the first ploughing in the spring, the ancients were not unmindful of the advantages of winter ploughing of stiff and heavy clay. Theophrastus, who died in B.C. 287, advises it "that the earth may feel the cold." Indeed, he was fully alive to the reasons urged by the modern professors of agronomy for intensive cultivation. "For the soil," he says (C.P. III, 25), "often inverted becomes free, light and clear of weeds, so that it can most easily afford nourishment."
King Solomon gives the same advice, "The sluggard will not plough by reason of the winter, therefore shall he begin harvest and have nothing." Proverbs, XX, 4.]
[Footnote 83: The Romans understood the advantages of thorough cultivation of the soil. As appears from the text, they habitually broke up a sod in the spring, ploughed it again at midsummer, and once more in September before seeding. Pliny prescribes that the first ploughing should be nine inches deep, and says that the Etruscans some times ploughed their stiff clay as many as nine times. The accepted Roman reason for this was the eradication of weeds, but it also accomplished in some measure the purpose of "dry farming"—the conservation of the moisture content of the soil, as that had been practised for countless generations in the sandy Valley of Mesopotamia. Varro makes no exception to this rule, but Virgil was here, as in other instances, induced to depart from Varro's wisdom, with the result that he imposed upon Roman agriculture several thoroughly bad practices. Thus, while he applies Varro ploughing rules to rich land and bids the farmer "exercetque frequens tellurem atque imperat arvis," he says (Geo. I, 62) that it will suffice to give sandy land a single shallow ploughing in September immediately before seeding, for fear, forsooth, that the summer suns will evaporate whatever moisture there is in it! Again, Virgil recommends, what Varro does not, cross-ploughing and burning the stubble and Virgil's advice was generally followed.
In William Benson's edition (1725) of the Georgics "with notes critical and rustick," it is stated that "the husbandry of England in general is Virgilian, which is shown by paring and burning the surface: by raftering and cross-ploughing, and that in those parts of England where the Romans principally inhabited all along the Southern coast Latin words remain to this hour among shepherds and ploughmen in their rustick affairs: and what will seem more strange at first sight to affirm though in fact really true, there is more of Virgil's husbandry put in practice in England at this instant than in Italy itself." That this was the fact in the thirteenth century is clear from the quotations we have made from Walter of Henley's Dite de Hosebondrie. Cf. also Sir Anthony Fitzherbert and the account of the manorial system of farming in England in Prothero's English Farming Past and Present.
It remained for Jethro Tull of the Horseshoeing Husbandry to unloose in England the long spell of the magic of Virgil's poetry upon practical agriculture.]
[Footnote 84: The Julian calendar, which took effect on January 1, B.C. 45, had been in use only eight years when Varro was writing.]
[Footnote 85: Schneider and others have attempted to emend the enumeration of the days in this succession of seasons, but Keil justly observes: "As we do not know what principle Varro followed in establishing these divisions of the year, it is safer to set them down as they are written in the codex than to be tempted by uncertain emendation." I have accordingly followed Keil here.]
[Footnote 86: The practice of ridging land seeded to grain was necessary before the invention of the modern drill. Dickson, in his Husbandry of the Ancients, XXIV, argues that, while wasteful of land, it had the advantage of preventing the grain from lodging. Walter of Henley, who followed the Roman methods by tradition without knowing it, advises with them that to be successful in this kind of seeding the furrow at the last ploughing of the fallow should be so narrow as to be indistinguishable. "At sowing do not plough large furrows," he says, "but little and well laid together that the seed may fall evenly: if you plough a large furrow to be quick you will do harm. How? I will tell you. When, the ground is sown then the harrow will come and pull the corn into the hollow which is between the two ridges and the large ridge shall be uncovered, then no corn shall grow there. And will you see this? When the corn is above ground go to the end of the ridge and you will see that I tell you truly. And if the land must be sown below the ridge see that it is ploughed with small furrows and the earth raised as much as you are able. And see that the ridge which is between the two furrows is narrow. And let the earth, which lies like a crest in the furrow under the left foot after the plough, be over-turned, and then shall the furrow be narrow enough."]
[Footnote 87: Farrago was a mixture of refuse far, or spelt, with vetch, sown thick and cut green to be fed to cattle in the process now called soiling. The English word "forage" comes from this Latin original.]
[Footnote 88: Spanish American engineers today insert in their specifications for lumber the stipulation that it be cut on the wane of the moon. The rural confidence in the influence of the moon upon the life of a farm still persists vigorously: thus as Pliny (H.N. XVIII, 75) counselled that one wean a colt only when the moon is on the wane, so it will be found that the moon is consulted before a colt is weaned on most American farms today: for that may be safely done, says the rural oracle, only when the moon's sign, as given in the almanack, corresponds with a part of the almanack's "moon's man" or "anatomic" at or below the knees, i.e., when the moon is in one or the other of the signs Pisces, Capricornus or Aquarius: but never at a time of day when the moon is in its "Southing."]
[Footnote 89: Modern agricultural chemistry has contradicted this judgment of Cassius, for the manure of sea birds, especially that brought from the South American islands in the Pacific, known commercially as Peruvian guano, is found on analysis to be high in the elements which are most beneficial to plant life.]
[Footnote 90: Seed selection, which is now preached so earnestly by the Agricultural Department of the United States as one of the things necessary to increase the yield of wheat and corn, has ever been good practice. Following Varro Virgil (Georgic I, 197) insists upon it: "I have seen those seeds on whose selection much time and labour had been spent, nevertheless degenerate if men did not every year rigorously separate by hand all the largest specimens."]
[Footnote 91: Cicero (de Div. II, 24) records a mot of Cato's that he wondered that an haruspex did not laugh when he saw another—"qui mirari se aiebat, quod non rideret aruspex, aruspicem quum vidisset."]
[Footnote 92: This process of propagation which Varro describes as "new" is still practised by curious orchardists under the name "inarching." The free end of a growing twig is introduced into a limb of its own tree, back of a specimen fruit, thus pushing its development by means of the supplemental feeding so provided. Cf. Cyc. Am. Hort. II, 664.]
[Footnote 93: Alfalfa is the Moorish name which the Spaniards brought to America with the forage plant Medicago Sativa, Linn., which all over Southern Europe is known by the French name lucerne. It is proper to honour the Moors by continuing in use their name for this interesting plant, because undoubtedly they preserved it for the use of the modern world, just as undoubtedly they bequeathed to us that fine sentiment known as personal honour.
Alfalfa was one of the standbys of ancient agriculture. According to Pliny, it was introduced into Italy from Greece, whence it had been brought from Asia during the Persian wars, and so derived its Greek and Roman name Medica. As Cato does not mention it with the other legumes he used, it is probable that the Romans had not yet adopted it in Cato's day, but by the time of Varro and Virgil it was well established in Italy. In Columella's day it was already a feature of the agriculture of Andalousia, and there the Moors, who loved plants, kept it alive, as it were a Vestal fire, while it died out of Italy during the Dark Ages: from Spain it spread again all over Southern Europe, and with America it was a fair exchange for tobacco. Alfalfa has always been the subject of high praise wherever it has been known. The Greek Amphilochus devoted a whole book to it, as have the English Walter Harte in the middle of the eighteenth century and the American Coburn at the beginning of the twentieth century, but none of them is more instructive on the subject of its culture than is Columella in a few paragraphs. Because of the difficulty of getting a stand of it in many soils, it is important to realize the pains which the Romans took with the seed bed, for it is on this point that most American farmers fail. Says Columella (II, 10):
"But of all the legumes, alfalfa is the best, because, when once it is sown, it lasts ten years: because it can be mowed four times, and even six times, a year: because it improves the soil: because all lean cattle grow fat by feeding upon it: because it is a remedy for sick beasts: because a jugerum (two-thirds of an acre) of it will feed three horses plentifully for a year. We will teach you the manner of cultivating it, as follows: The land which you wish to set in alfalfa the following spring should be broken up about the Kalends of October, so that it may mellow through the entire winter. About the Kalends of February harrow it thoroughly, remove all the stones and break up the clods. Later, about the month of March, harrow it for the third time. When you have so got the land in good order, lay it off after the manner of a garden, in beds ten feet wide and fifty feet long, so that it may be possible to let in water by the paths, and access on every side may be had by the weeders. Then cover the beds with well rotted manure. At last, about the end of April, sow plentifully so that a single measure (cyanthus) of seed will cover a space ten feet long and five wide. When you have done this brush in the seed with wooden rakes: this is most important for otherwise the sprouts will be withered by the sun. After the sowing no iron tool should touch the beds; but, as I have said, they should be cultivated with wooden rakes, and in the same manner they should be weeded so that no foreign grass can choke out the young alfalfa. The first cutting should be late, when the seed begins to fall: afterwards, when it is well rooted, you can cut it as young as you wish to feed to the stock. Feed it at first sparingly, until the stock becomes accustomed to it, for it causes bloat and excess of blood. After cutting, irrigate the beds frequently, and after a few days, when the roots begin to sprout, weed out all other kinds of grass. Cultivated in this way alfalfa can be mowed six times a year, and it will last for ten years."]
[Footnote 94: See the explanation of what the Romans meant by terra varia in the note on Cato V. ante, p. 40.]
[Footnote 95: It is interesting to note from the statements in the text that in Varro's time the Roman farmer in Italy both sowed and reaped substantially the same amount of wheat as does the American farmer today. Varro says that the Romans sowed five modii of wheat to the jugerum and reaped on the maximum fifteen for one. As the modius was nearly the equivalent of our peck, the Roman allowance for sowing corresponds to the present American practice of sowing seven pecks of wheat to the acre: and on this basis a yield of 26 bushels to the acre, which is not uncommon in the United States, is the equivalent of the Roman harvest of fifteen for one.
It is fair to the average Italian farmer of the present day who is held up by the economists to scorn because he does not produce more than eleven bushels of wheat to the acre, to record that in Columella's time, when agriculture had declined as compared with Varro's experience, the average yield of grain in many parts of Italy did not exceed four for one (Columella, III, 3), or say seven and a half bushels to the acre.
Varro's statement that at Byzacium in Africa wheat yielded 100 for one, which Pliny (II.N. XVIII, 23) increases to 150 for one, means from 175 to 260 bushels per acre, seems incredible to us, but is confirmed by the testimony of agricultural practice in Palestine. Isaac claimed to reap an hundred fold, and the parable of the Sower alludes to yields of 30, 60 and 100 fold.
Harte Essays on Husbandry, 91, says that the average yield in England in the middle of the eighteenth century was seven for one, though he records the case of an award by the Dublin Society in 1763 to an Irish gentleman who raised 50 bushels of wheat from a single peck of seed! Harte was a parson, but apparently he did not bring the same unction into his agriculture as did the Rev. Robert Herrick to the husbandry of his Devonshire glebe, a century earlier. In Herrick's Thanksgiving to God for his House he sings:
"Lord, 'tis thy plenty dropping hand
That soils my land
And giv'st me for my bushel sown
Twice ten for one.
Thou makst my teeming hen to lay
Her egg each day:
Besides my healthful ewes to bear
Me twins each year."]
[Footnote 96: As the Gallic header here described by Varro is the direct ancestor of our modern marvellous self-binding harvester, it is of interest to rehearse the other ancient references to it.
Pliny (H. N. XVIII, 72) says:
"In the vast domains of the provinces of Gaul a large hollow frame armed with teeth and supported on two wheels is driven through the standing corn, the beasts being yoked behind it, the result being that the ears are torn off and fall within the frame." Palladius (VII, 2) goes more into detail:
"The people of the more level regions of Gaul have devised a method of harvesting quickly and with a minimum of human labour, for thereby a single ox is made to bear the burden of the entire harvest. A cart is constructed on two low wheels and is furnished with a square body, of which the side boards are adjusted to slope upward and outward to make greater capacity. The front of the body is left open and there across the width of the cart are set a series of lance shaped teeth spaced to the distance between the grain stalks and curved upward. Behind the cart two short shafts are fashioned, like those of a litter, where the ox is yoked and harnessed with his head towards the cart: for this purpose it is well to use a well broken and sensible ox, which will not push ahead of his driver. When this machine is driven through the standing grain all the heads are stripped by the teeth and are thrown back and collected in the body of the cart, the straw being left standing. The machine is so contrived that the driver can adjust its height to that of the grain. Thus with little going and coming and in a few short hours the entire harvest is made. This method is available in level or prairie countries and to those who do not need to save the straw."
That ingenious Dutchman Conrad Heresbach refers, in his Husbandry, to Palladius' description of the Gallic header with small respect, which indicates that in the sixteenth century it was no longer in use. I quote from Barnaby Googe's translation of Heresbach (the book which served Izaak Walton as the model for his Compleat Angler): "This tricke might be used in levell and champion countries, but with us it would make but ill-favoured worke."
Dondlinger, in his excellent Book of Wheat (1908), which should be in the hands of every grain farmer, gives a picture reproducing the Gallic header and says:
"After being used during hundreds of years the Gallic header disappeared, and it seems to have been completely forgotten for several centuries. Only through literature did it escape the fate of permanent oblivion and become a heritage for the modern world. The published description of the machine by Pliny and Palladius furnished the impulse in which modern harvesting inventions originated. Its distinctive features are retained in several modern inventions of this class, machines which have a practical use and value under conditions similar to those which existed on the plains of Gaul. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the social, economic and agricultural conditions in England, on account of increasing competition and the higher value of labour, were ripe for the movement of invention that was heralded by the printed account of the Gallic header. The first header was constructed by William Pitt in 1786. It was an attempted improvement on the ancient machine in that the stripping teeth were placed in a cylinder which was revolved by power transmitted from the wheels. This 'rippling cylinder' carried the heads of the wheat into the box of the machine, and gradually evolved into the present day reel."
It may be added that the William Pitt mentioned was not the statesman, but a contemporary agricultural writer of the same name.]
[Footnote 97: According to Sir Anthony Fitzherbert it was the custom in England to shear wheat and rye and to leave the straw standing after the third method described by Varro, the purpose being to preserve the straw to be cut later for thatching, as threshing it would necessarily destroy its value for thatching. It was the custom in England, however, to mow barley and oats.]
[Footnote 98: Pliny advises that the grain which collects on the circumference of a threshing floor of this description be saved for seed because it is evidently the heaviest.]
[Footnote 99: In the Apennines today the threshing floor, or aja, is anointed with cow dung smeared smooth with water, doubtless for the same reason that the Romans so used amurca.]
[Footnote 100: Between harvests the winnowing basket is quite generally used in Italy today for a cradle, as it was from the beginning of time, for there is an ancient gem representing the infant Bacchus asleep in a winnowing basket.]
[Footnote 101: What the French call, from the same practice, vin de rognure.]
[Footnote 102: Varro does not mention the season of the olive harvest, but Virgil tells us (G. II, 519) that in their day as now it was winter. Cato (XX-XXII) described the construction and operation of the trapetus in detail. 'It can still be seen in operation in Italy, turned by a patient donkey and flowing with the new oil of an intense blue-green colour. It is always flanked by an array of vast storage jars (Cato's dolii now called orci), which make one realize the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.]
[Footnote 103: The Roman waste of amurca, through ignorance of its value, was like the American waste of the cotton seed, which for many years was thrown out from the gin to rot upon the ground, even its fertilizing use being neglected. Now cotton seed has a market value equivalent to nearly 20 per cent of that of the staple. It is used for cattle feed and also is made into lard and "pure olive oil," being exported in bulk and imported again in bottles with Italian labels.]
[Footnote 104: Cf. Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero. "Let us consider that in a large city today the person and property of all, rich or poor, are adequately protected by a sound system of police and by courts of first instance which are sitting every day. Assault and murder, theft and burglary are exceptional. It might be going too far to say that at Rome they were the rule: but it is the fact that in what we may call the slums of Rome there was no machinery for checking them…. It is the great merit of Augustus that he made Rome not only a city of marble but one in which the persons and property of all citizens were fairly secure."
There are several contemporary references to the crowded and dangerous condition of the streets of Rome at the end of the Republic. Cicero (Plancius, 7) tells how he was pushed against the arch of Fabius while struggling through the press of the Via Sacra, and exonerates from blame the man who was the immediate cause of his inconvenience, holding that the one next beyond was more responsible: in which judgment Cicero was of the opinion of Mr. Justice Blackstone in the famous leading case of Scott v. Shepherd (1 Smith's L.C., 480), where the question was who was liable for the damage eventually done by the burning squib which was passed about the market house by successive hands. The majority of the court held, however, against Blackstone and Cicero, and established the doctrine of proximate cause.]
[Footnote 105: The Roman week (nundinum, or more properly inter nundinum) was of eight days, the last being the market day on which the citizens rested from agricultural labour and came into town to sell and buy and talk politics. Cf. Pliny, XVIII, 3. This custom which Varro regrets had fallen into desuetude so far as Rome was concerned was in his day still practised in the provinces. Thus the five tenants on Horace's Sabine farm were wont to go every nundinum to the market town of Varia (the modern Vicovaro) to transact public business (Epist. I, 14, 2).]
[Footnote 106: Varro here refers to the great economic change which was coming over Italian husbandry in the last days of the Republic, the disappearance of the small farms, the "septem jugera" which nurtured the early Roman heroes like Cincinnatus and Dentatus, and even the larger, but still comparatively small, farms which Cato describes, and the development of the latifundia given over to grazing.]
[Footnote 107: The tradition is, says Pliny, that King Augeas was the first in Greece to use manure, and that Hercules introduced the practice into Italy. To the wise farmer the myth of the Augean stables is the genesis of good agriculture.]
[Footnote 108: This was the "crowded hour" in Varro's life, and, as M. Boissier has pointed out, he loved to dwell upon its episodes. It will be recalled that Pompey divided the Mediterranean into thirteen districts for the war with the Pirates and put a responsible lieutenant in command of each, thus enabling him by concurrent action in all the districts to clear the seas in three months. Appian gives the list of officers and the limits of their commands, saying: "The coasts of Sicily and the Ionian sea as far as Acarnania were entrusted to Plotius and Varro." It is difficult to understand Varro's own reference to Delos, but Appian makes clear how it happened that Varro was stationed on the coast of Epirus and so fell in with the company of "half Greek shepherds" who are the dramatis personae of the second book. As the scene of the first book was laid in a temple of Tellus, so this relating to live stock is cast in a temple of Pales, the goddess of shepherds, on the occasion of the festival of the Parilia, and the names of the characters have a punning reference to live stock.]
[Footnote 109: The codices here contain an interpolation of the words "HIC INTERMISIMUS," to indicate that a part of the text is missing, with which judgment of some early student of the archetype Victorius, Scaliger and Ursinus, as well as their successors among the commentators on Varro, have all agreed. It is a pleasure to record the agreement on this point, because it is believed to be unique: but many precedents for plunging the reader in medias res, as does the surviving text, might be found in the modern short story of the artist in style. As M. Boissier points out Varro might have cited the beginning of the Odyssey as a precedent for this.]
[Footnote 110: This is a paraphase of a favorite locution of Homer's heroes, whose characteristic modesty does not, however, permit them to apply it to themselves, as Varro does. Thus in Iliad, VII, 114, Agamemnon advises Menelaos not to venture against Hector, whom "even Achilles dreadeth to meet in battle, wherein is the warrior's glory, and Achilles is better far than thou."]
[Footnote 111: Virgil (Aen. VII, 314) made a fine line out of this tradition, endowing the sturdy race of Fauns and Nymphs who inhabited the land of Saturn before the Golden Age, with the qualities of the trees on whose fruit they subsisted, "gensque virum truncis et duro robore nata."]
[Footnote 112: In the registers of the censors every thing from which the public revenues were derived was set down under the head of pascua, or "pasture lands," because for a long time the pasture lands were the only source of such revenue. Cf. Pliny, H.N. XVIII, 3.]
[Footnote 113: Olisippo is the modern Lisbon. This tradition about the mares of the region is repeated by Virgil (Geo. III, 272) by Columella (VI, 27) and by Pliny (VIII, 67). Professor Ridgeway in The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse describes it as "an aetiological myth to explain the swiftness of horses" for the fleetest horses came out of the West; thus Pegasus was born at the springs of the ocean, and there is the passage in Homer (Iliad, XVI, 149) about the horses "that flew as swift as the winds, the horses that the harpy Podarge (Swift Foot) bare to the West Wind as she grazed on the meadows by the stream of the Ocean." Hence we may conclude that there was a race of swift horses in Portugal in the earliest times, which Professor Ridgeway would doubtless like very much to prove, in support of his interesting thesis, were derived from Libya.]
[Footnote 114: Hypenemia, or barren eggs, are described intelligently by Aristotle (H.A.V. 1, 4, VI. 2, 5), and, with Varro's confidence in the country traditions, by Pliny, H.N. X, 80.
If he had known it, Varro might have here cited the fact that the unfertilized queen bee is parthenogenetic, though producing only male bees; i.e., drones: but it remained for a German clergyman, Dzierzon, to discover this in the eighteenth century.]
[Footnote 115: Cf. Plautus Menaechmi, II, 2, 279. One of the two Menaechmi is, on his arrival at Epidamnus, mistaken for his brother, of whose existence he does not know, and much to his amazement is introduced into the brother's life and possessions. At first he expostulates, accusing the slave of the brother, who has mistaken his identity, of being crazy and offers to exorcise him by a sacrifice of weanling pigs, wherefore he asks the question quoted in the text. Varro was evidently fond of this passage, as he quotes it again, post, p. 221. The Menaechmi is one of the immortal comedies and has survived in many forms on the modern stage all over Europe. From it Shakespeare derived the plot of the Comedy of Errors.]
[Footnote 116: It is interesting to compare these sane therapeutics with Cato's practice less than two hundred years previous (ante, p. 47), which was characteristic of the superstitious peasant who in Italy still seeks the priest to bless his ailing live stock.]
[Footnote 117: This Atticus was Cicero's intimate friend to whom he addressed so many of his charming letters. He changed his name as stated in the text, the new name being that of an uncle who adopted him, as we learn from his life by Nepos. As is well known to all students of Cicero, Atticus had dwelt in Athens many years and derived his income from estates in Epirus, which is the point of Scrofa's jest.]
[Footnote 118: This requirement of short legs is the more remarkable because of the long journeys which Varro says the Roman sheep were required to make between their summer and winter pastures. A similar necessity and bad roads created in England, before the eighteenth century, a demand for long legged sheep. Prothero (English Farming Past and Present) quotes a description of the "true old Warwickshire ram" in 1789: "His frame large and remarkably loose. His bone throughout heavy. His legs long and thick, terminating in large splaw feet."
One of the things which Bakewell accomplished was to shorten the legs as well as to increase the mutton on his New Leicesters. Of Bakewell, Mr. Prothero justly says, "By providing meat for the million he contributed as much to the wealth of the country as Arkwright or Watt."]
[Footnote 119: Shepherds still look for the black or spotted tongue in the mouth of the ram, for the reason given by Varro, but the warning is no longer put in the shepherds' manual.]
[Footnote 120: Varro would still feel at home in Apulia, for there the sheep industry is carried on much as it was in his time, and thence the calles publicae, to which he refers, still lead to the summer pastures in the Apennines. Cf. Beauclerk Rural Italy, chap. V. "The extensive pasturages of the 'Tavoliere di Puglia' (Apulia) are of great importance and have a history of their own. This vast domain covers 750,000 acres: its origin belongs to the time of the Roman Conquests and the protracted wars of the Republic, which were fought out in the plains, whence they became deserted and uncultivated, fit only for public pastures in winter time … the periodical emigrations of the flocks continue as in the past times: they descend from the mountains into the plains by a network of wide grassy roads which traverse the region in every direction and are called tratturi. These lanes are over 100 yards in width and cover a total length of 940 miles…. Not less than 50,000 animals are pastured on the Tavoliere, requiring over 1,500 square miles of land for their subsistence…. Five thousand persons are employed as shepherds."]
[Footnote 121: Varro quite uniformly uses words which indicate that he was accustomed to see sheep driven (abigere, propellere, adpellere) but we can see the flocks led in Italy today, as they were in Palestine soon after Varro's death, according to the testimony of that beautiful figure of the Good Shepherd (St. John, X, 4): "And when he putteth forth his own sheep he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice." R. Child, in his "Large Letter" in Hartlib's Legacie, gives the explanation of the difference in the custom:
"Our sheep do not follow their shepherds as they do in all other countries: for the shepherd goeth before and the sheep follow like a pack of dogs. This disobedience of our sheep doth not happen to us, as the Papist Priests tell their simple flocks, because we have left their great shepherd the Pope; but because we let our sheep range night and day in our fields without a shepherd: which other countries dare not for fear of wolves and other ravenous beasts, but are compelled to guard them all day with great dogs and to bring them home at night, or to watch them in their folds."]
[Footnote 122: Cf. Dante, Purg. XXVII, 79.
"Le capre
Tacite all' ombra mentre che'l sol ferve
Guardate dal pastor che'n su la verga
Poggiato s'e, e lor poggiato serve."]
[Footnote 123: It will be recalled that when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, was making his way to his house in company with the faithful swineherd Eumaeus, they met the goatherd Melanthius "leading his goats to feast the wooers, the best goats that were in all the herds." (Odyssey, XVII, 216), and that subsequently he suffered a terrible punishment for this unfaithfulness to his master's interests.]
[Footnote 124: Pliny (VIII, 76) calls these excrescences lanciniae, or folds, and attributes them exclusively to the she goat, as Varro seems to do also, but Columella (VII, 6) attributes them to the buck.]
[Footnote 125: Aristotle (H.A. I, 9.1) refers to this opinion and denounces it as erroneous.]
[Footnote 126: The Roman denarius, which has been here and later translated denier, may be considered for the purpose of comparing values as, roughly, the equivalent of the modern franc, or lira, say 20 cents United States money.]
[Footnote 127: Macrobius (Saturn. I, 6) tells another story of the origin of this cognomen, which, if not so heroic as that in the text, is entertaining. It is related that a neighbour's sow strayed on Tremelius' land and was caught and killed as a vagrant. When the owner came to claim it and asserted the right to search the premises Tremelius hid the carcass in the bed in which his wife was lying and then took a solemn oath that there was no sow in his house except that in the bed.]
[Footnote 128: It would seem, as Gibbon says of the Empress Theodora, that this passage could be left "veiled in the obscurity of a learned language"; but it may be noted that the locus classicus for the play on the word is the incident of the Megarian "mystery pigs" in Aristophanes' Acharnians, 728 ff. Cf. also Athenaeus, IX, 17, 18.]
[Footnote 129: Cf. Pliny (H.N. VIII, 77): "There is no animal that affords a greater variety to the palate of the epicure: all the others have their own peculiar flavour, but the flesh of the hog has nearly fifty different flavours."]
[Footnote 130: In his stimulating book, Comment la route crée le type Social, Edmond Desmolins submits an ingenious hypothesis to explain the pre-eminence of the Gauls in the growing and making of pork, and how that pre-eminence was itself the explanation of their early success in cultivating the cereals. He describes their migrating ancestors, the Celts, pushing their way up the Danube as hordes of nomad shepherds with their vast flocks and herds of horses and cattle, on the milk of which they had hitherto subsisted. So long as they journeyed through prairie steppes, the last of which was Hungary, they maintained their shepherd character, but when they once passed the site of the present city of Vienna and entered the plateau of Bavaria, they found new physical conditions which caused them to reduce and to separate their herds of large cattle—an unbroken forest affording little pasture of grass. Here they found the wild boar subsisting upon the mast of the forest, and him they domesticated out of an economic necessity, to take the place of their larger cattle as a basis of food supply. Until then they had not been meat eaters, and so had known no necessity for cereals, for milk is a balanced ration in itself. But this change of diet required them also to take to agriculture and so to abandon their nomad life.
'By reason of the habits of the animal, swine husbandry has a tendency in itself to confine those engaged in it to a more or less sedentary life, but we are about to see how the Celts were compelled to accomplish this important evolution by an even more powerful force. Meat cannot be eaten habitually except in conjunction with a cereal … and of all the meats pork is the one which demands this association most insistently, because it is the least easily digested and the most heating of all the meats…. So that is how the adoption of swine husbandry and a diet of pork compelled our nomad Celts to take the next step and settle down to agriculture.']
[Footnote 131: This Gallic tomacina was doubtless the ancestor of the mortadella now produced in the Emilia and known to English speaking consumers as "Bologna" sausage.]
[Footnote 132: The Gaul of which Cato was here writing is the modern Lombardy, one of the most densely populated and richest agricultural districts in the world. Here are found today those truly marvellous "marchite" or irrigated meadows which owe the initiative for their existence to the Cistercian monks of the Chiaravalle Abbey, who began their fruitful agricultural labours in the country near Milan in the twelfth century. There is a recorded instance of one of these meadows which yielded in a single season 140 tons of grass per hectare, equal to 75 tons of hay, or 30 tons per acre! The meadows are mowed six times a year, and the grass is fed green to Swiss cows, which are kept in great numbers for the manufacture of "frommaggio di grana," or Parmesan cheese. This system of green soiling maintains the fertility of the meadows, while the by-product of the dairies is the feeding of hogs, which are kept in such quantity that they are today exported as they were in the times of Cato and Varro. There is no region of the earth, unless it be Flanders, of which the aspect so rejoices the heart of a farmer as the Milanese. Well may the Lombard proverb say, "Chi ha prato, ha tutto."]
[Footnote 133: Virgil (Aen. VII, 26) subsequently made good use of this tradition of the founding of Lavinium, the sacred city of the Romans where the Penates dwelt and whither solemn processions were wont to proceed from Rome until Christianity became the State religion. The site has been identified as that of the modern village of Practica, where a few miserable shepherds collect during the winter months, fleeing to the hills at the approach of summer and the dread malaria.]
[Footnote 134: Cf. Polybius, XII, 4: 'For in Italy the swineherds manage the feeding of their pigs in the same way. They do not follow close behind the beasts, as in Greece, but keep some distance in front of them, sounding their horn every now and then: and the animals follow behind and run together at the sound. Indeed, the complete familiarity which the animals show with the particular horn to which they belong seems at first astonishing and almost incredible. For, owing to the populousness and wealth of the country, the droves of swine in Italy are exceedingly large, especially along the sea coast of the Tuscans and Gauls: for one sow will bring up a thousand pigs, or some times even more. They, therefore, drive them out from their night styes to feed according to their litters and ages. When if several droves are taken to the same place they cannot preserve these distinctions of litters: but they, of course, get mixed up with each other both as they are being driven out and as they feed, and as they are being brought home. Accordingly, the device of the horn blowing has been invented to separate them when they have got mixed up together, without labour or trouble. For as they feed one swineherd goes in one direction sounding his horn, and another in another and thus the animals sort themselves of their own accord and follow their own horn with such eagerness that it is impossible by any means to stop or hinder them. But in Greece when the swine get mixed up in the oak forests in their search for the mast, the swineherd who has most assistants and the best help at his disposal, when collecting his own animals drives off his neighbours' also. Some times, too, a thief lies in wait and drives them off without the swineherd knowing how he has lost them, because the beasts straggle a long way from their drivers in their eagerness to find acorns, when they are just beginning to fall.'
Bishop Latimer in one of his sermons quotes the phrase used in his youth, at the time of the discovery of America, in calling hogs: 'Come to thy minglemangle, come pur, come pur.' It would be impossible to transcribe the traditional call used in Virginia. One some times thinks that it was the original of the celebrated 'rebel yell' of General Lee's army.]
[Footnote 135: The use of the Greek salutation was esteemed by the more austere Romans of the age of Scipio an evidence of preciosity, to be laughed at: and so Lucienus' jesting apology for the use of it here doubtless was in reference to Lucilius' epigram which Cicero has preserved, de Finibus, I, 3.
"Graece ergo praetor Athenis
Id quod maluisti te, quum ad me accedi, saluto
[Greek: Chaire] inquam, Tite: lictores turma omni cohorsque
[Greek: Chaire] Tite! Hinc hostis mi Albucius, hinc inimicus."
It was the word which the Romans taught their parrots. Cf. Persius, Prolog. 8.]
[Footnote 136: The working ox was respected by the ancient Romans as a fellow labourer. Valerius Maximus (VIII, 8 ad fin.) cites a case of a Roman citizen who was put to death, because, to satisfy the craving of one of his children for beef to eat, he slew an ox from the plough. Ovid puts this sentiment in the mouth of Pythagoras, when he agrees that pigs and goats are fit subjects for sacrifice, but protests against such use of sheep and oxen. (Metamor. XV, 139.)
"Quid meruere boves, animal sine fraude dolisque
Innocuum, simplex, natum tolerare labores?
Immemor est demum, nee frugum manere dignus
Qui potuit curvi demto modo pondere arati
Ruricolam mactare suum: qui trita labore
Ilia quibus toties durum renovaverat arvum
Tot dederse messes, percussit colla securi."]
[Footnote 137: The learned commentators have been able to discover nothing about either this Plautius or this Hirrius, but it appears that Archelaus wrote a book under the title Bugonia, of which nothing survives. It may be conjectured, however, on the analogy of Samson's riddle to the Philistines, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness," (Judges, XIV, 14), that Plautius meant to imply that some good might be the consequence of the evil Hirrius had done: and that Vaccius cited the allusion to suggest to Varro that, while he might know nothing much about cattle, his attempt to deal with the subject might provoke some useful discussion.]
[Footnote 138: Darwin, Animals and Plants, II, 20, cites this passage and says that "at the present day the natives of Java some times drive their cattle into the forests to cross with the wild Banteng." The crossing of wild blood on domestic animals is not, however, always successful. A recent visitor to the German agricultural experiment station at Halle describes "a curious hairy beast with great horns, a wild look in his eye, a white streak down his back and a bumpy forehead, which had in it blood from cattle which had lived on the plains of Thibet, which had grazed on the lowland pastures of Holland, which had roamed the forests of northeast India and of the Malay Peninsular, and had wandered through the forests of Germany. We Americans had sympathy for this beast. He was some thing like ourselves, with the blood of many different races flowing through his veins."]
[Footnote 139: Pliny (VIII, 66) cites the fact that the Scythians always preferred mares to stallions for war, and gives an ingenious reason for the preference. Aristotle (H.A. VI, 22) says that the Scythians rode their pregnant mares until the very last, saying that the exercise rendered parturition more easy. Every breeder of heavy draft horses has seen a mare taken from the plough and have her foal in the field, with no detriment to either: and the story of the mare Keheilet Ajuz, who founded the best of the Arab families, is well known, but bears repetition. I quote from Spencer Borden, The Arab Horse, p. 44: "It is related that a certain Sheik was flying from an enemy, mounted on his favourite mare. Arab warriors trust themselves only to mares, they will not ride a stallion in war. The said mare was at the time far along toward parturition: indeed she became a mother when the flying horseman stopped for rest at noonday, the new comer being a filly. Being hard pressed the Sheik was compelled to remount his mare and again seek safety in flight, abandoning the newborn filly to her fate. Finally reaching safety among his own people, great was the surprise of all when, shortly after the arrival of the Sheik on his faithful mare, the little filly less than a day old came into camp also, having followed her mother across miles of desert. She was immediately given into the care of an old woman of the tribe (Ajuz = an old woman), hence her name Keheilet Ajuz, 'the mare of the old woman,' and grew to be the most famous of all the animals in the history of the breed."]
[Footnote 140: Varro does not describe the livery of the horses of his day, as he does of cattle, but Virgil (Georg. III, 81) supplies the deficiency, asserting that the best horses were bay (spadices) and roan (glauci) while the least esteemed were white (albi) and dun (gilvi), which is very interesting testimony in support of the most recent theory of the origin of the thoroughbred horse. Professor Ridgeway who, opposing Darwin's conclusion, contends for a multiple origin of the historic and recent races of horses, has collected a mass of information about the marking of famous horses of all ages in his Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse. He maintains that a bay livery, with a white star and stockings, the development of protective coloration from an originally striped coat, such as has gone on more recently in the case of the quaggas, is absolute evidence of the North African origin of a horse, and he shows that all the swiftest horses mentioned in history are of that race, while the heavier and less mettlesome horses of Northern origin have been, when pure bred, dun coloured or white.
Of the Italian breeds mentioned by Varro, Professor Ridgeway conjectures that the Etruscan (or Rosean) was probably an improved Northern horse, while the Apulian, from the South of Italy, represented an admixture of Libyan blood.]
[Footnote 141: Aristotle (H.A. VI, 22) preceded Varro with this good advice, saying that a mare "produces better foals at the end of four or five years. It is quite necessary that she should wait one year and should pass through a fallow, as it were—[Greek: poiein osper neion]."]
[Footnote 142: Mules were employed in antiquity from the earliest times. In Homer they were used for drawing wagons: thus Nausicaa drove a mule team to haul out the family wash, and Priam made his visit to Achilles in a mule litter. Homer professes to prefer mules to oxen for ploughing. There were mule races at the Greek games. Aristotle (Rhetoric, III, 2) tells an amusing story of Simonides, who, when the victor in the mule race offered him only a poor fee, refused to compose an ode, pretending to be shocked at the idea of writing about "semi-asses," but, on receipt of a proper fee, he wrote the ode beginning: "Hail, daughters of storm-footed mares," although they were equally daughters of the asses.]
[Footnote 143: The breed of Maremma sheep dogs, still preferred in
Italy, is white. He is doubtless the descendant of the large woolly
"Spitz" or Pomeranian wolf dog which is figured on Etruscan coins.]
[Footnote 144: In his essay,Notre ami le chien, Maeterlinck maintains eloquently that the dog alone among the domestic animals has given his confidence and friendship to man. "We are alone, absolutely alone, on this chance planet: and amid all the forms of life that surround us not one excepting the dog has made alliance with us. A few creatures fear us, most are unaware of us, and not one loves us. In the world of plants, we have dumb and motionless slaves: but they serve us in spite of themselves…. The rose and the corn, had they wings, would fly at our approach, like birds. Among the animals, we number a few servants who have submitted only through indifference, cowardice or stupidity: the uncertain and craven horse, who responds only to pain and is attached to nothing … the cow and the ox happy so long as they are eating and docile because for centuries they have not had a thought of their own…. I do not speak of the cat, to whom we are nothing more than a too large and uneatable prey: the ferocious cat whose side long contempt tolerates us only as encumbering parasites in our own homes. She at least curses us in her mysterious heart: but all the others live beside us as they might live beside a rock or a tree."
The effective use of this thesis in the scene of the revolt of the domestic animals in the Blue Bird will be remembered.]
[Footnote 145: This method of securing the faithful affection of a dog is solemnly recommended, without acknowledgment to Saserna, in the seventeenth century editions of the Maison Rustique (I, 27).]
[Footnote 146: Keil happily points out that in his book on the Latin language (VII, 31), Varro quotes the "ancient proverb" to which he here refers, viz.: "canis caninam non est" dog doesn't eat dog.]
[Footnote 147: Aristotle (H.A. VI, 20) says that puppies are blind from twelve to seventeen days, depending upon the season of the year at which they are born. Pliny (H N. VIII, 62) says from seven to twenty days, depending upon the supply of the mother's milk.]
[Footnote 148: It was among these hardy shepherd slaves that Spartacus recruited his army in 72-71 B.C., as did Caelius and Milo in 48 B.C., while their descendants were the brigands who infested Southern Italy even in the nineteenth century.]
[Footnote 149: Gaius, I, 119, II, 24, 41, describes in detail the processes here referred to by which a slave was acquired under the Roman law.]
[Footnote 150: Dennis, in his Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, draws a picture of modern Italy which may serve to illustrate Varro's sketch of the mountain life of the shepherds of his day:
"Occasionally in my wanderings on this site (Veii) I have entered, either from curiosity or for shelter, one of the capanne scattered over the downs. These are tall conical thatched huts which the shepherds make their winter abode. For in Italy, the lowlands being generally unhealthy in summer, the flocks are driven to the mountains about May, and as soon as the great heats are past are brought back to the rich pastures of the plains. It is a curious sight, the interior of a capanna, and affords an agreeable diversity to the antiquity hunter. A little boldness is requisite to pass through the pack of dogs, white as new dropt lambs, but large and fierce as wolves, which, were the shepherd not at hand, would tear in pieces whoever might venture to approach the hut: but with one of the pecoraj for a Teucer, nothing is to be feared. The capanne are of various sizes. One I entered not far from Veii was thirty or forty feet in diameter and fully as high, propped in the centre by two rough masts, between which a hole was left in the roof for the escape of smoke. Within the door lay a large pile of lambs, there might be a hundred, killed that morning and already flayed, and a number of shepherds were busied in operating on the carcases of others: all of which were to be dispatched forthwith to the Roman market. Though a fierce May sun blazed without, a huge fire roared in the middle of the hut: but this was for the sake of the ricotta, which was being made in another part of the capanna. Here stood a huge cauldron, full of boiling ewes' milk. In a warm state this curd is a delicious jelly and has often tempted me to enter a capanna in quest of it, to the amazement of the pecoraj, to whom it is vilior alga. Lord of the cauldron, stood a man dispensing ladlefuls of the rich simmering mess to his fellows, as they brought their bowls for their morning allowance: and he varied his occupation by pouring the same into certain small baskets, the serous part running off through the wicker and the residue caking as it cooled. On the same board stood the cheeses, previously made from the cream. In this hut lived twenty-five men, their nether limbs clad in goat skins, with the hair outwards, realizing the satyrs of ancient fable: but they had no nymphs to tease, nor shepherdesses to woo, and never
'sat all day Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love To amorous Phillida.'
They were a band of celibates without the vows. In such huts they dwell all the year round, flaying lambs or shearing sheep, living on bread, ricotta and water, very rarely tasting meat or wine and sleeping on shelves ranged round the hut, like berths in a ship's cabin. Thus are the dreams of Arcadia dispelled by realities."]
[Footnote 151: In modern Italy the shepherds do not take their women with them to the saltus, but, as Dennis says, lead there the life of "celibates, without the vows."]
[Footnote 152: In the Venitian provinces of Italy today the women are still seen at work in the harvest and rice fields with their babes in their bosoms: but the most amazing modern spectacle of this kind is that of women coaling ships in the East, carrying their unhappy youngsters up and down the coal ladders throughout the work.]
[Footnote 153: The author of Maison Rustique did not agree with Varro in this opinion. I quote from Surflet's translation of 1606 (I, 7):
"And for writing and reading it skilleth not whether he be able to doe it or no, or that he should have any other charge to looke unto besides that of yours, or else that he should use another to set downe in writing such expences as he hath laid out: for paper will admit any thing."]
[Footnote 154: This temple and fig tree stood in Rome at the foot of the Palatine hill, in the neighbourhood of the Lupercal. It was under this fig tree that Romulus and Remus were supposed to have been suckled by the wolf.]
[Footnote 155: 'That is the beste grease that is to a shepe, to grease hym in the mouthe with good meate,' says Sir Anthony Fitzherbert.]
[Footnote 156: Pliny (VII, 59) says that most nations learn the use of barbers next after that of letters, but that the Romans were late in this respect. Varro himself wore a beard, as appears on the coin he struck during the war with the Pirates. It is reproduced in Smiths Dict. Gr. and Rom. Biog., III, p. 1227.]
[Footnote 157: Cowper's verse in The Task seems to be all that is happy in the way of translation of Varro's text, "divina natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes": but Cowley's "God the first garden made, and the first city Cain" was probably Cowper's source. Cowley was a reader of Varro, as his pleasant and sane essay Of Agriculture shows.]
[Footnote 158: Following the precedent of the first and second books in the matter of local colour, the scene of this third book, relating to villas and the "small deer," which were there reared, is laid in the villa publica at Rome, and the characters of the dialogue are selected for the suggestion which their names may make of the denizens of the aviary, the barn yard and the bee-stand.]
[Footnote 159: This Appius Claudius Pulcher served in Asia under his brother-in-law Lucullus, was Augur in B.C. 59, Consul in 54 and Censor in 50. He wrote a book on augural law and the habits of birds at which Cicero poked some rather mean fun. He fixes the date of the dialogue.]
[Footnote 160: In Varro's time, as today, the river Velinus drained the fresh pastures of the Umbrian prairie of Rosea, "the nurse of Italy," which lay below the town of Reate (the modern Rieti), and was originally the bed of a lake. Its waters are so strongly impregnated with carbonate of lime that by their deposit of travertine they tend to block their own channel. The drainage of Rosea has, therefore, always been a matter of concern to the live stock industry of Reate, and in B.C. 272 M. Curius Dentatus opened the first of several successful artificial canals (the last dating from the sixteenth century, A.D.), which still serve to lead the Velinus into the Nar at the renowned Cascate delle Marmore. For two hundred years the people of Interamna (the modern Terni) had complained that their situation below the falls was endangered by Curius' canal, and finally in B.C. 54 the Roman Senate appointed the commission to which Appius Claudius refers in the text, to hear the controversy. Cicero was retained as counsel for the people of Reate, and during the hearing stopped, as Appius Claudius did, with our friend Axius at his Reatine villa, and wrote about the visit to the same Atticus whom we met in Varro's second book, as follows (ad Atticum, IV, 15): "After this was over the people of Reate summoned me to their Tempe to plead their cause against the people of Interamna, before the Consul and ten commissioners, the question being concerning the Veline lake, which, drained by M. Curius by means of a channel cut through the mountain, now flows into the Nar: by this means the famous Rosea has been reclaimed from the swamp, though still fairly moist. I stopped with Axius, who took me also to visit the Seven Waters." What was once deemed a danger is a double source of profit to the modern folk of Interamna. Tourists today crowd to see the same waterfall which Cicero visited, taking a tram from the busy little industrial town of Terni: and the waters which flow from Velinus now serve to generate power with which armour plates are manufactured for the Italian navy on the site of the ancient Interamna.]
[Footnote 161: Sicilian honey was famous for its flavour because of the bee pasture of thyme which there abounded, especially at Hybla. Theophrastus (H.P. III, 15, 5) explains that the honey of Corsica had an acrid taste, because the bees pastured there largely on box trees.]
[Footnote 162: These denizens of the Roman villa are all enumerated by Martial in his delightful verses (III, 38) upon Faustinus' villa at Baiae. The picture of the barn yard is very true to life in all ages, especially the touch of the hungry pigs sniffing after the pail of the farmer's wife:
"Vagatur omnis turba sordidae cortis
Argutus anser, gemmeique pavones
Nomenque debet quae rubentibus pennis,
Et picta perdix, Numidicaeque guttatae
Et impiorum phasiana Colchorum.
Rhodias superbi feminas prement galli
Sonantque turres plausibus columbarum,
Gemit hinc palumbus, inde cereus turtur
Avidi sequuntur villicae sinum porci:
Matremque plenam mollis agnus exspectat."]