Book III The Husbandry of the Steading
Introduction: the antiquity of country life
I
There are two modes of human life, my dear Pinnius, which are manifestly as different in the time of their origin as they are in their habitat, that of the country and that of the town. Country life is much the more ancient, for time was when men lived altogether in the country and had no towns: indeed, the oldest town in Greece, according to the tradition, is the Boeotian Thebes, which was founded by King Ogyges, and in our own land that of Rome, founded by King Romulus of which now it may be affirmed with confidence, as was not possible when Ennius wrote:
“’Tis seven hundred years, or more or less,
Since first illustrious Rome began her sway,
With hallowed augury.”
Now, if it is admitted that Thebes was founded before the deluge, which is known by Ogyges’ name, its age is not more than about twenty-one hundred years: and if that period is compared with the lapse of time since men began to cultivate the land and to live in huts and hovels, knowing naught of city walls and gates, it is evident that life in the country preceded life in town by a tale of immemorial years. Nor is this to be wondered at since ‘God made the country and man made the town.’[157] While the tradition is that all the arts were invented in Greece within a thousand years, there never was a time when the earth could not be cultivated. And, as life in the country is the more ancient, so it is the better life: for it was not without good reason that our ancestors were wont to plant colonies of citizens in the country, because by them they were both fed in times of peace and protected in times of war: nor was it without significance that they called both the Earth and Ceres by the common name of Mother and esteemed that those who worshipped her lead a life at once pious and useful and were the sole representatives left on earth of the race of Saturn. A proof of this is that the mysteries peculiar to the cult of Ceres were called Initia, the very name indicating that they related to the beginning of things.
A further proof that country life was earlier than that of town is found in the name of the town of Thebes, which was bestowed from the character of its situation rather than from the name of its founder: for in the ancient language, and among the Aeolians who had their origin in Boeotia, a small hill is called tebas without the aspirate; and in the Sabine country, where Pelasgians from Greece settled, they still have the same locution: witness that hill called Tebae which stands in the Sabine country on the via Salaria not far from the mile stone of Reate. At first agriculture was conducted on so small a scale that it had little distinction, since those who followed it, being sprung from shepherds, at once sowed their corn and pastured their flocks on the same land, but as later this art grew in importance the husbandry of live stock was separated, and it befel that some men were called farmers and others shepherds.
The art of feeding live stock should really be divided into two branches, as is not yet fully appreciated, one relating to the stock kept at the steading, the other to the stock pastured in the fields. The latter, which is designated by the name pecuaria, is well known and highly esteemed so that rich men, either lease or buy much pasture land in order to carry it on: the other, which is known as villatice, has, because it seemed to be of less importance, been treated by some as an incident of the husbandry of agriculture, when in fact it should be made a part of the husbandry of live stock: nor has it been described separately and at length by any one, so far as I know.
And so, as I think that there are three branches of farm management which are undertaken for profit, namely: agriculture, live stock and the industries peculiar to the steading, I have planned three books, of which I have already written two, the first concerning the husbandry of agriculture, which I dedicated to my wife Fundania, and the second concerning the husbandry of live stock to Turranius Niger: the third, relating to the profits of those industries which are carried on at the steading, I now send herewith to you; for the fact that we are neighbours and entertain a mutual affection seems to demand that it should be dedicated to you above all others.
Although you have a villa, which is remarkable for the beauty of its workmanship within and without, and for the splendour of its mosaic pavements, still you deem it to be bare unless you have the walls decorated also with books: so in like manner that your villa may be more distinguished by the profits you derive from it than by the character of its construction, and that I may be of assistance to that end, so far as may be, I have sent you this book, which is a summary of some conversations which we have had on the subject of what makes the perfectly equipped villa: and so I begin as follows:
Of the definition of a Roman villa
II. The Senator Q. Axius, my fellow tribesman, and I had cast our votes at the comitia for the election of aediles, and, although it was the heat of the day, we wished to be on hand when the candidate whom we were supporting should go home. So Axius said to me: “What would you think of taking shelter in the villa publica[158] while the votes are being sorted rather than in the booth of our candidate.” “I hold,” said I, “not only with the proverb that bad advice is worst for him who gives it, but that good advice is good for both the giver and the taker.”
And so we made our way to the villa publica, where we found Appius Claudius,[159] the Augur, seated on a bench waiting for any call for his services by the Consul: on his left was Cornelius Merula (blackbird) of the Consular family of that name, and Fircellius Pavo (pea-cock) of Reate, and on his right Minutius Pica (mag-pie) and M. Petronius Passer (sparrow). When we had approached them Axius, smiling, said to Appius: “May we come into your aviary where you are sitting among the birds?”
“By all means,” replied Appius, “and especially you who set before me such birds as still make my mouth water, when I was your guest a few days ago at your Reatine villa on my way to lake Velinus to settle the controversy between the people of Interamna and Reate.[160]
“But” he added, “is not this villa, which our ancestors constructed, simpler and so better than that elaborate one of yours at Reate: do you see any where here any furniture of citrus wood or ormolu, any decorations of vermillion or blue, any tessellations or mosaic work, all of which on the other hand were displayed in your house? And while this is open to the entire people, yours is available to you alone: this is the resort for the citizens after the comitia in the Campus Martius, and for all alike, while yours is reserved for mares and asses. And furthermore it should be considered that this building is useful in carrying on the public business, for here the consuls review the army on parade, here the arms are inspected, here the censors enumerate the people.”
“Tell me,” retorted Axius, “which is useful, this villa of yours giving on the Campus Martius, more extravagantly arrayed with objects of art than all Reate put together, so bedizened is it with pictures and garnished with statues, or mine where there is no trace of the artists Lysippus or Antiphilus, but there are many of the farm hand and the shepherd?
“And since there can be no villa where there is no farm and that well cultivated, how can you call this house of yours a villa which has no land appurtenant to it and no cattle or horses? Again, tell me, pray, how does your villa compare with that of your grandfather and great grandfather, for one cannot see at yours, as one could always see at theirs, cured hay in the mows, the vintage in the cellar, and the harvest in the granary? Because, forsooth, a house is situated out of town, it is no more a villa for that reason than the houses of those who dwell beyond the Porta Flumentaria or in the Aemiliana suburb.”
“Since it appears that I do not know what a villa is,” replied Appius, smiling, “I wish you would be good enough to instruct me, so that I may not make a fool of myself, as I am planning to buy from M. Seius his villa at Ostia: for if a mere house is not a villa unless it is equipped with a jackass costing forty thousand sesterces ($2,000), like that you showed me at your place, I fear that I would be making a mistake in buying Seius’ house on the shore at Ostia in the belief that it is a villa. But it was our friend Merula here who put me in mind of buying this house, for he told me that he had spent several days there and that he had never seen a more delightful villa, and yet he saw there no paintings, nor any bronze or marble statues, neither did he see any wine press, or oil mill, or oil jars.”
“And what kind of a villa is this,” said Axius, turning to Merula, “where there are neither the ornaments of a town house nor the utensils of a farm?”
“Do you consider,” said Merula, “that your house on the bank of Velinus, which neither painter nor architect has ever seen, is any less a villa than the one you have in Rosea so elegantly decorated with the work of an architect and which you share with your famous jackass?”
Axius admitted, with a nod, that a simple farm house was as much entitled to be called a villa as any house which united the characteristics of both town and country, and asked what he deduced from this.
“What?” said Merula. “Why, if your estate in Rosea is to be approved by reason of the husbandry which you carry on, and is properly called a villa because there cattle are fed and stabled, then, by the same reasoning, all those houses should be called villas in which large profits are derived from husbandry: for what difference does it make whether you derive your profit from sheep or from birds? Is the income any sweeter which comes from cattle in which bees are generated, than from the bees themselves, such as work in their hives at the villa of Seius? Do you sell to the butcher the hogs which you raise at your farm for more than Seius sells his wild boars to the meat market?”
“Am I any less able,” replied Axius, “to have these things at my farm at Reate: is Sicilian honey made at Seius’ place and only Corsican honey at Reate,[161] and does the mast which he buys for his wild boars make them fat while that which I get for nothing from my woods makes mine lean?”
“But,” said Appius, “Merula does not deny that you can carry on at your villa the kind of husbandry which Seius does at his, yet I myself have seen that you don’t.
“For there are two kinds of husbandry of live stock: one in the fields, as of cattle; and the other at the steading, as of chickens and pigeons and bees and other such things which are usually kept at a villa.
“About the latter, Mago the Carthaginian, and Cassius Dionysius and others have treated specially in different parts of their books, and it would seem that Seius has read their precepts and so has learned how to make more profit from his villa alone by such husbandry than others make out of an entire farm.”
“Certainly,” agreed Merula, “for I have seen there great flocks of geese, chickens, pigeons, cranes and pea-cocks: also dormice, fish, wild boars and other such game.[162] The freedman who keeps his books which Varro has seen, assured me when he was doing the honours in the absence of his master, that Seius derives an income of more than fifty thousand sesterces ($2,500) per annum from his villa.”
As Axius seemed astonished, I asked him: “Surely you know the estate of my aunt in the Sabine country which is at the twenty-fourth mile stone from Rome on the via Salaria.”
“Of course, I do,” Axius replied, “for it is there that I am wont to divide the day in summer on my way from Reate to town and to spend the night when I come thence in winter.”
“Well,” I continued, “in that villa there is an aviary from which I know that there were taken in one season five thousand thrushes, which, at three deniers apiece, means that that department of the establishment brought in a revenue of sixty thousand sesterces that year, or twice the yield of the entire two hundred jugera of your farm at Reate.”[163]
“What, sixty thousand,” exclaimed Axius, “sixty thousand: you are making game of me!”
“Sixty thousand,” I affirmed, “but in order that you might realize such a lucky throw you will require either a public banquet or a triumph on the scale of that of Scipio Metellus, or club dinners, which indeed have now become so frequent as to raise the price of provisions of the market.”
“You will perchance expect this return every year,” said Merula, “so I trust that your aviary may not lead you into a loss. But surely in such good times as these it could not happen that you would fail, except rarely, for what year is there that does not see such a feast or a triumph, or club dinners, such as now-a-days consume victuals without number. Nay,” he added, “it seems that in our habit of luxury such a public banquet is a daily occurrence within the gates of Rome.”[164]
To supplement the examples of such profits: L. Albutius, a learned man and, as you know, the author of certain satires in the manner of Lucilius, has said that the returns from feeding live stock on his Alban farm are always less than his income from his villa, for the farm yields less than ten thousand sesterces and the villa more than twenty. He even maintains that if he should establish a villa near the sea in such a place as he might choose he could derive from it an income of more than a hundred thousand sesterces. Did not M. Cato recently sell forty thousand sesterces worth of fishes from the fish ponds of Lucullus after he had accepted the administration of his estate?”
“My dear Merula,” exclaimed Axius, “take me, I beg of you, as your pupil in the art of the husbandry of the steading.”
“I will begin,” replied Merula, “as soon as you promise me a minerval in the form of a dinner.”[165]
“You shall have it,” said Axius, “both today, and hereafter as well, off those delicacies you will teach me to rear.”
“I fear,” replied Merula, “that what you may offer me at the beginning of your experience with villa feeding will be dead geese or deceased pea-cocks.”
“And what difference will it make to you,” retorted Axius, “if I do serve you fish or fowl which has come to an untimely end: for in no event could you eat them unless they were dead: but I beg you,” he added, “matriculate me in the school of villa husbandry and expound to me the theory and the practice of it.”
Merula accepted the invitation cheerfully.
Of the Roman development of the industries of the steading
III. “In the first place,” he said, “you should know what kind of creatures you may raise or feed in or about a villa, either for your profit or for your pleasure. There are three divisions for this study: poultry houses, warrens and fish ponds.
“I include under the head of poultry houses the feeding of all kinds of fowls which are usually kept within the walls of a steading: under the head of warrens not merely what our great grandfathers meant—places where rabbits were usually kept—but any enclosure adjoining a villa in which game animals are enclosed to be fed. In like manner I include under the head of fish ponds all those places in which fish are kept at a villa either in fresh or salt water.
“Each of these divisions may be separated into at least two parts: thus the first, that with respect to poultry houses, should be treated with reference to a classification of fowls as between those which are content on land alone, such as pea-cocks, turtle doves, thrushes; and those which require access to water as well as land, such as geese, widgeons and ducks. So the second division, that relating to game, has two different classifications: one which includes the wild boar, the roe buck and hares; the other bees, snails and dormice.
“The third, or aquatic division, likewise has two classifications, one including fresh water fish, the other salt water fish.
“In order to secure and maintain a supply of these six classes of stock it is necessary to provide a force of three kinds of artificers, namely: fowlers, hunters and fishermen, or else you may buy breeding stock from such men, and trust to the diligence of your servants to rear and fatten their offspring until they are ready for market. Certain of them, such as dormice, snails and chickens, may, however, be obtained without the aid of a hunter’s net, and doubtless the business of keeping them began with the stock native to every farm: for the breeding even of chickens has not been a monopoly of the Roman augurs, to make provision for their auspices, but has been practised by all farmers from the beginning of time.[166] From such a start in the kind of husbandry we are now discussing, the next step was to provide masonry enclosures near the steading to confine game, and these served as well for shelter for the bee-stand, for originally the bees were wont to make their hives under the eaves of the farm house itself.
“The third division, that of keeping fish, had its origin in simple fresh water ponds in which fish taken in the streams were kept.
“There have been two steps in the development of each of these three conveniences; the earlier distinguished by the ancient simplicity, the later by our modern luxury. The earlier stage was that of our ancestors, who had but two places for keeping poultry: one the court yard of the steading in which chickens were fed and their profit derived from eggs and pullets, the other above ground, for their pigeons were kept in the dormers or on the roof of the farm house.
“Now-a-days, on the contrary, what our ancestors called hen-houses are known as ornithones, and serve to house thrushes and pea-cocks to cater to the delicate appetite of the master: and indeed such structures now have larger roofs than formerly sufficed to cover an entire farm house.
“Such has been the progress in respect of warrens also: your father, Axius, never saw any game but rabbits, nor did there exist in his time any such extensive enclosures as now are made, many jugera in extent, to hold wild boars and roe bucks. You can witness,” he said, turning to me, “that you found many wild boars in the warren of your farm at Tusculum, when you bought it from M. Piso.”
In respect of the third class, who was there who used to have any kind of a fish pond, except of fresh water, stocked merely with cat fish and mullets, while today our elegants declare that they would as soon have a pond stocked with frogs as with those fish I have named. You will recall the story of Philippus when he was entertained at Casinum by Ummidius: a pickerel caught in your river, Varro, was put before him, he tasted it and forthwith spat it out, exclaiming “May I perish, but I thought it was fish!”[167]
As the luxury of this age has enlarged our warrens, so has it carried our fish ponds even to the sea itself and has herded shoals of sea fish into them. Have not Sergius Orata (goldfish) and Licinius Murena (lamprey) taken their cognomens from fishes for this reason? And who does not know the fame of the fish ponds of Philippus, of Hortensius, and of the brothers Lucullus?
“Where, then, Axius, do you wish me to begin?”
Of aviaries
IV. “I prefer,” replied Axius, “that you should begin with the sequel—postprincipia, as they say in the camps—that is, with the present day rather than with the past, because the profits from pea-cocks are greater than those from hens, I will not dissemble that I wish to hear first of ornithones because the thrushes which are kept in them make the very name sound like money: indeed, the 60,000 sesterces of Fircelina have consumed me with avarice.”
“There are two kinds of ornithones,” replied Merula; “one for pleasure, like that so much admired which our friend Varro here has at his villa near Casinum: the other for profit, such as are maintained commercially, some even indoors in town, but chiefly in the Sabine country which abounds in thrushes. There is a third kind, consisting of a combination of the two I have mentioned, such as Lucullus maintained at his Tusculan villa, where he contrived a dining room under the same roof as his aviary to the end that he might feast delicately, satisfying two senses, now by eating the birds cooked and spread on a platter, now by seeing them flying about the windows: but the truth is that he was disappointed, for the eyes did not take as much pleasure from the sight of the flying birds as the nostrils were offended by their odour.”
a. For profit
V. “But, as I gather you would prefer, Axius, I will speak of that kind of ornithon which is established for profit, whence, but not where, fat thrushes are served.
“For this purpose is built a dome, in the form of a peristyle, with a roof over it and enclosed with netting, sufficiently large to accommodate several thousand thrushes[168] and blackbirds; indeed, some also include other kinds of birds, such as ortolans and quail, which sell for a good price when fat. Into this enclosure water should be conducted through a conduit and so disposed as to wind through the aviary in channels narrow enough to be cleaned easily (for if the water spreads out it is quickly polluted and rendered unfit to drink) and draining like a running stream to find its vent through another conduit, so that the birds may not be exposed to the risk of mud. The door should be low and narrow and well balanced on its hinges like the doors they have in the amphitheatres where bulls are fought: few windows and so placed that the birds cannot see trees and wild birds without, for that makes the prisoners pine and grow thin. The place should have only so much light as may be necessary to enable the birds to see where they are to perch and to eat and drink. The doors and the windows should be lightly stuccoed round about to keep out rats and other such vermin.
“Around the wall of the building on the inside are fastened many perches where the birds can sit, and another such convenience should be contrived from poles set on the ground and leaning against the walls and tied together with other poles fastened transversely at regular intervals, thus giving the appearance of the rising degrees of a theatre. Down on the ground near the drinking water you should place the birds’ food, which usually consists of little balls of a paste made out of figs and corn meal: but for twenty days before you intend to market your thrushes it is customary to feed them more heavily, both by giving them more food and that chiefly of finer meal.
“In this enclosure there should also be cages with wooden floors which may serve the birds as resting places supplementing the perches.
“Next to the aviary should be contrived a smaller structure, called the seclusorium, in which the keeper may array the birds found dead, to render an account of them to his master, and where he may drive the birds which are ready for market from the larger aviary: and to this end this smaller room is connected with the main cage by a large door and has more light: and there, when he has collected the number he wishes to market, the keeper kills them, which is done secretly, lest the others might despond at the sight and themselves die before they are ready for market.
“Thrushes are not like other birds of passage which lay their eggs in particular places, as the swan does in the fields and the swallows under the roof, but they lay anywhere: for, despite their masculine name (turdus) there are female thrushes, just as there are male blackbirds, although they have a purely feminine name (merula).
“All birds are divided as between those which are of passage, like swallows and cranes, and those which are domestic, like chickens and pigeons: thrushes are birds of passage and every year fly from across the sea into Italy about the time of the autumn equinox, returning about the spring equinox. At another season doves and quail do the same in immense numbers, as may be seen in the neighbouring islands of Pontia, Palmaria and Pandataria, for there they are wont to rest a few days on their arrival and again before they set out across the sea from Italy.”
b. For pleasure
“So,” said Appius to Axius, “if you enclose five thousand thrushes in such an aviary as Merula has described and there happens to be a banquet or a triumph, you will gain forthwith that sixty thousand sesterces which you so keenly covet and be able to lend the money out at good interest.” And then, turning to me, he added, “Do you tell us of that other kind of ornithon, namely: for pleasure merely, for it is said that you have constructed one near Casinum which surpasses not only the original built by the inventor of such flying cages, our friend M. Laenius Strabo of Brundisium (who was the first to keep birds confined in the chamber of a peristyle and to feed them through the net), but also the vast structures of Lucullus at Tusculum.”
“You know,” I said, “that there flows through my estate near Casinum[169] a stream which is both deep and clear and fifty-seven feet wide between the masonry embankments, so that it is necessary to use bridges to get from one part of the property to the other. On the upper reach of this stream is situated my Museum[170] and at a distance of 950 feet below is an island formed by the confluence of another stream. Along the bank for this distance is an uncovered walk ten feet broad and between this walk and the field is the location of my aviary enclosed on both sides, right and left, with high masonry walls. The ornithon itself is built in the shape of a writing tablet with a capital on it, the main quadrangle being forty-eight feet wide and seventy-two feet long, the capital semi-circular with a radius of twenty-seven feet. To this a covered walk or portico is joined, as it were across the bottom of the page of the tablet, with passages leading on either side of the ornithon proper which contains the cages, to the upper end of the interior quadrangle [adjoining the capital]. This portico is constructed of a series of stone columns between which and the main outside walls are planted dwarf shrubs, a net of hemp being stretched from the top of the walls to the architrave of the portico, and thence down to the stylobate or floor. The exterior spaces thus enclosed are filled with all kinds of birds which are fed through the net, water being provided by a small running stream. On the interior sides of the porticos, and adjoining them at the upper end of the interior quadrangle, are constructed on both sides two narrow oblong basins. Between these basins a path leads to the tholus, or rotunda, which is surrounded with two rows of columns, like that in the house of Catulus, except that I have substituted columns for walls. Beyond these columns at the end is a grove of large transplanted trees forming a roof of leaves, but admitting light underneath, as that is entirely cut off by the high walls on the sides. Between the exterior row of columns of the tholus, which are of stone, and the interior row, which are of pine, there is a narrow space, five feet in width. The exterior columns are filled in with a transparent net instead of walls, thus permitting the birds to look out upon the grove and the wild birds there but without escaping: the interior columns being filled in with the net of the main aviary. The space between the two rows of columns thus enclosed is equipped with perches for the birds in the form of many rods let into all the columns in ascending array like the degrees of a theatre; and here are enclosed all kinds of birds, but chiefly singing birds, like nightingales and blackbirds, for whom water is conducted by means of a small canal and food is supplied under the net. [Under the lantern of the tholus is a basin of water: and around this] a foot and nine inches below the stylobate or pedestal of the interior row of columns, runs a stone platform. This is five feet in width and two feet above the level of the basin, thus affording a space on which my bird guests may hop about from the cushions to the little columns [which are there provided for them].[171]
“The basin is immediately surrounded with a quay a foot in width adjoining [but below the level of] the platform and has a little island in the middle. Around the platform and the quay are contrived docks for ducks. On the island is a little column arranged to turn on its axis and carrying a wheel-shaped table with hollow drum-like dishes fashioned at the ends of the spokes two and a half feet wide and a palm in depth. This is turned by a boy whose business that is, so that meat and drink is put before all my bird guests in turn. From the elevation of the platform, where mats are usually placed, the ducks go out to swim in the basin, and from this streams flow into the two basins I have already described, and little fish may be seen darting from one to the other, while warm or cold water may be turned on the guests from the circumference of the revolving table, which I have described as equipped with spokes.
“Within the dome is an arrangement to tell the hours by marking the position in the heavens of the sun by day and Hesperus by night: and furthermore, as in the clock which [Andronicus] Cyrrestes constructed at Athens, the eight winds are depicted on the dome, and, by means of an arrow connecting with a vane, the prevailing wind is indicated to those within.”[172]
As we were talking an uproar was heard on the Campus Martius. While this did not astonish old parliamentary hands[173] like ourselves, who knew the enthusiasm of an election, yet we were anxious to know what it meant, and at this moment Pantuleius Parra came up and told us that while the votes were being sorted some one was caught stuffing the ballot box[174] and had been haled before the consul by the supporters of the rival candidate. Pavo rose to go, for it was understood that he who had been arrested was the campaign manager of Pavo’s own candidate.
Of pea-cocks
VI. “Now that Fircellius is gone you can speak freely of pea-cocks,” said Axius, “for if you should say any thing to their disadvantage in his presence, you might perchance have a crow to pluck with him on account of his relationship.”[175]
“Within my memory,” said Merula, “the practice of keeping commercial flocks of pea-cocks has largely developed and it has so developed that M. Aufidius Lurco is said to derive an income of sixty thousand sesterces per annum from them. If you keep them for profit it is well to have somewhat fewer males than females; while the contrary is true if you keep them for pleasure, for the pea-cock far surpasses his hen in beauty. With us they are fed in the country, but abroad it is said that they are kept on islands, as at Samos in the grove of Juno and at Planasia, the island of M. Piso. In setting up a flock age and beauty must be considered, for nature has given the palm of beauty to the pea-cock among all the birds. The hens are not fit for breeding under two years of age, nor when they are aged. They are fed all kinds of grain but chiefly barley. Scius makes a practice of feeding them a modius of barley apiece for the month before they begin to breed, his purpose being to make them more productive. He expects his overseer to raise three pea fowl for every hen, and he sells them when matured for fifty deniers ($10) a piece, a price such as one never obtains for a sheep.[176]
“Furthermore, he buys eggs and sets them under dunghill hens, transferring the young pea fowls so hatched to the shelter set apart for their kind. This house should be built large enough for the number of pea fowl to be kept and should be equipped with separate roosting places smoothly stuccoed, so that snakes and such vermin may not be able to get into it: and, furthermore, it should have attached to it a run in which the pea fowl may feed on sunny days, and both these places should be kept clean, as this kind of fowl demands. The keeper should make the rounds often with a shovel to collect and preserve their manure, which is not only fit for use in agriculture but serves also as bedding for your pea chicks.
“It is said that Q. Hortensius was the first to serve pea-cocks at dinner, on the occasion of his inauguration as an augur, an evidence of prodigality which was more approved by the luxurious than by good men of simple manners: but many others quickly followed his example, so that the price of pea fowl was raised until an egg sold for five deniers ($1) and a pea fowl itself readily for fifty ($10), thus a flock of an hundred of them easily yields an income of forty thousand sesterces, ($2,000), or even sixty ($3,000), if, as Abuccius advises, one obtains three chickens from every pea hen.”
Of pigeons
VII. In the meanwhile an apparitor came to Appius from the Consul and said that the augurs were summoned. As Appius went out from the villa publica, a flock of pigeons flew in, whereupon Merula said to Axius: “If you had established a [Greek: peristerogropheion] you would think that these were your pigeons, although they are wild, for it is the custom to keep both kinds in a [Greek: peristerotropheion]. One is the wild dove (or, as some call them the rock dove, or saxatilis), such as live in the towers and dormers (columines) of a farm house, whence they get the name columbae, because, on account of their natural timidity, they seek the highest places on the roof. On this account wild doves usually frequent towers, to which they may fly from the fields of their own accord, and return.[177] The other kind of pigeons is tamer and are wont to seek their food at the very threshold of a house. This kind is usually white in colour, the wild variety being mottled but without any white. From these two stocks a third or mixed variety has been developed for commercial profit and these are collected in the place which some call a peristereon (pigeon house), and others a peristerotropheion (place for raising pigeons), where there are often confined as many as five thousand at a time.
“A pigeon house is made like a great dome, with arched roof, a narrow entrance, and grilled windows or with wider lattices on all sides so that the interior may be well lighted and yet no snake or other such pest may have access. The walls and the dome within and the edges of the windows without should be smeared with light stucco to keep out rats and lizards, for nothing is so timid as a pigeon. A round nest should be provided for each pair of pigeons and these should be arranged in close order so that there may be established as many as possible of them ranked from the ground to the very dome. Each nest should have a door no bigger than necessary to enable the pigeons to go in and out but within should be of three palms in diameter. Under each rank of nests should be fastened planks two palms broad for the use of the pigeons as a vestibule on coming out. Water should be led into the pigeon house, both for them to drink and to bathe in, for pigeons are very clean birds. For this reason the keeper of the pigeons should sweep out the house several times a month, for that which soils it has so great a. value in agriculture that some writers even claim that it is the best of all manures. Furthermore, the keeper in these rounds may tend any pigeon which is ailing, remove any which are dead, and take out such squabs as are fit for market. Likewise, those which are setting should be transferred to a particular place, separated from the others by a net but from which the mothers may be free to get out of doors: which is done for two reasons: first, because if they become weary or decrepit from being cooped too long, they will be refreshed by the free air when they go abroad: secondly, because they serve as decoys for other pigeons, for their squabs will always bring them home themselves unless they are struck down by a crow or cut off by a hawk. Pigeon breeders rid themselves of the last mentioned pests by planting in the ground two rods smeared with birdlime and bent in one upon the other, and then tie on some bait so disposed that when the hawk falls upon his prey he finds himself entangled in the birdlime and is taken.
“It may be noted that the pigeon has a homing instinct, as is proved by the practice of many in letting pigeons loose from their bosoms in the theatre expecting them to return home, for if they did not return the practice would not persist.
“The food for pigeons is placed in mangers fastened around the walls and filled from the outside by means of conduits. They thrive on millet, wheat, barley, peas, beans and vetch. This regimen should be followed also, as far as possible, in the care of the wild pigeons, which live on the towers and the roofs of the barn.
“In equipping a [Greek: peristereon] pigeons of good age should be secured, neither squabs nor veterans, and as many males as females. Nothing is more prolific than the pigeon, for in forty days they conceive, lay, hatch and raise a brood, and they keep this up nearly all the year, stopping only from the winter solstice until spring. Squabs are hatched in pairs, and as soon as they have grown up and have strength breed with their own mothers. Those who fatten squabs in order to sell them dearer, make a practice of isolating them as soon as they are covered with feathers, then they cram them with white bread which has been chewed:[178] in winter this is fed twice a day, in summer three times a day, morning, noon and night, the midday meal being omitted in winter. Those which are just beginning to have feathers are left in the nests, but their legs are broken, and, in order that they may be crammed, the food is put before the mothers, for they will feed themselves and their squabs on it all day long. Squabs which are reared in this way become fat more quickly than others and have whiter flesh.
“A pair of pigeons will commonly sell at Rome for two hundred nummi, if they are well made, of good colour, without blemish, and of good breed: some times they even bring a thousand nummi, and there is a report that recently L. Axius, a Roman of the equestrian order, declined that sum, refusing to sell for less than four hundred deniers.”[179]
“If I could procure a fully equipped [Greek: peristereon],” cried Axius, “as readily as I have bought a supply of earthen ware nests, I would have had it already on the way to my farm.”
“As if,” remarked Pica, “there were not many of them here in town. But perhaps those who have pigeon houses on their roofs do not seem to you to be justified in calling them [Greek: peristereonas] even though some of them represent an investment of more than one hundred thousand sesterces. I advise you to buy out one of them and learn how to pocket a profit here in town, before you build on a large scale in the country.”
Of turtle doves
VIII. “So much for that then,” said Axius. “Proceed, please, to the next subject, Merula.”
“For turtle doves,” said Merula, “in like manner a house should be constructed proportioned to the number you intend to feed, and this, like the pigeon house, I have described, should have a door and windows and fresh water and walls and a vaulted roof, but in place of breeding nests the mutules should be extended through the walls or poles set in them in regular order with hempen mats on them, the lowest rank being not more than three feet from the floor, the rest at intervals of nine inches, the top rank six inches from the vault, and of equal breadth as the mutule stands out from the wall. On these the doves are fed day and night. For food they are given dry wheat, usually a half modius for every one hundred and twenty doves. Every day the house should be cleaned out, that they may not be injured by the accumulation of manure, and because also it has its place in the economy of the farm. The best time for fattening doves is about the harvest, for then the mothers are in their best condition and produce young ones not only in the largest number but the best for cramming: so that is the time when they are most profitable.”
Of poultry
IX. “Tell me now, if you please, Merula,” said Axius, “what I should know of raising and fattening poultry and wood pigeons, then we can proceed to the discussion of the remainder of our programme.”
“There are three kinds of fowls usually classed as poultry,” replied Merula, “dunghill fowl, jungle fowl and guinea fowl. The dunghill fowl are those which are constantly kept in the country at farms.
“He who wishes to establish an [Greek: ornithoboskeion] from which, by the exercise of intelligence and care, he can take large profits, as the people of Delos do with such great success,[180] should observe five principal rules: 1° in regard to buying, what kind and how many he will keep: 2° in regard to breeding: 3° in regard to eggs, how they are set and hatched: 4° in regard to chicks, how and by whom they are reared, and 5°, which is a supplement of all the foregoing, how they are fattened.
“The females of the dunghill fowl are called hens, the breeding males cocks, and the males which have been altered capons. Cocks are caponized by burning the spurs[181] with a hot iron until the skin is broken, the wound being poulticed with potters’ clay.
“He who wishes to have a model [Greek: ornithoboskeion] should equip it with all three kinds of fowls, though chiefly the dunghill variety. In purchasing these last it is important to choose fertile hens, which are indicated by red feathers, black wings, unequal toes, large heads, combs upstanding and heavy, for such hens are more likely to lay.
“A lusty cock may be known by his muscular carriage, his red comb, a beak short, strong and sharp, eyes tawny or black, wattles a whitish red, neck spotted or tinged with gold, the second joint of his legs well covered with feathers, short legs long spurs, a heavy tail, and profuse feathers, also by his spirit and his frequent crowing, his readiness to fight, and that he is not only not afraid of such animals as do the hens harm, but even goes out to fight them. You must be careful, however, not to buy for breeding any fowls of the breeds known as Tanagran, Medean and Chalcidean, for, while they are beautiful to look at and are fit for fighting with one another, they are practically sterile.
“If you wish to keep a flock of two hundred, choose an enclosed place and there construct two large poultry houses side by side and looking to the East, each about ten by five feet and a little less than five feet in height, and furnished with windows three by four feet in which are fitted shutters of wickerwork, which will serve to let in plenty of fresh air and light and yet keep out such vermin as prey upon chickens.
“Between the two houses should be a door by which the gallinarius who takes care of them, may have access. Within the houses enough poles are arranged to serve as roosts for all the chickens: opposite each roost a nest should be set in the wall. In front of the house should be an enclosed yard to which the fowls may have access in the day time and where they can dust themselves,[182] and there should be constructed the keeper’s house, which should be equipped all about with nests, either set into the walls or firmly fastened to them, for the least disturbance injures eggs when they are setting.
“When the hens begin to lay, straw should be spread in their nests and this should be renewed when they begin to set, for in such bedding are bred mites and other insects which will not suffer the hen to be quiet, with the result that the eggs are hatched unequally or rot.
“A hen should not be allowed to set on more than twenty-five eggs, although such is her fecundity that she lays more than that in a season. The best time for hatching is from the spring to the autumn equinox. Eggs laid before or after this season, or the first eggs laid by a pullet, should never be set. Hens used for setting should be old rather than young, without sharp beaks and claws, for those so equipped are better employed in laying than in setting. Hens a year or two years old are better fitted for laying.
“If you set pea-cock eggs under a hen, you should wait ten days before adding hen eggs to the nest, to insure them all hatching together, for the period of incubation of chicken eggs is thrice seven days and that of the eggs of pea-fowl is thrice nine. Sitting hens should be shut up day and night, except for a time in the morning and evening, when they are let out to eat and drink.
“The keeper should make the rounds every few days and turn the eggs, so that they may be kept warm all over. It is said that you can tell whether an egg is fertile or sterile by putting it in water: for if it is sterile it will float, while if it is fertile it will sink. Those who shake their eggs to ascertain this fact make a mistake for thereby they destroy the germ in them. It is also said that you can tell a sterile egg by the fact that it is transparent when held against the light.
“To preserve eggs they should be rubbed with fine salt or soaked for three or four hours in brine, and then cleaned off or packed in chaff or straw. Care should be taken to set eggs only in uneven numbers. The keeper can tell whether an egg is fertile or not four days after it is set, by holding it to the light, when he should throw it out if it is found to be empty and substitute another for it.
“The new hatched chickens should be taken from every nest and given to a hen who has only a few to care for. When in this way a setting hen has less than half her eggs left unhatched, they should be taken from her and put under another hen which has eggs still unhatched. It is not well to give more than thirty chicks to a hen. Chicks should be fed for the first fifteen days in the dust to protect them from injuring their tender beaks on the hard ground: their diet being crushed barley mixed with cress seed and soaked in wine, for prepared in this way the grain is digestible. They should be kept away from water in the beginning. When they begin to have feathers on their legs the mites should be carefully picked off their heads and necks, for these banes often destroy them. Deer’s horn should be burnt around their coops to keep snakes away, for the very smell of those vermin is fatal to young chickens. They should be allowed to run in the sun and to scratch in a dung heap, which serves to develop them. This rule applies not only to young chickens but also to the entire [Greek: ornithoboskeion], and should be practised all summer and even in winter on mild and sunny days. A net should be stretched over the chicken yard to keep the fowls themselves from flying out and to protect them from hawks and other birds of prey. Fowls should be protected from heat as well as cold, for both are harmful to them. When the chicks have got their feathers it is best to accustom them to follow one or two hens, leaving the other hens free to go to laying, in which occupation they are more useful than in rearing chicks.
“A hen should be set after the new moon, for those which begin earlier seldom hatch many chicks.
“They hatch usually in twenty days.
“And now since I have discussed the dunghill fowl at some length, I will make up to you by brevity with respect to the other kinds of fowls.
“Jungle fowl are rarely seen at Rome, and then usually in cages. They resemble guinea chickens more than dunghill fowls. When perfect in form and appearance they are often carried in the public processions with parrots and white blackbirds and other such rarities. They do not usually lay or raise their chickens on a farm, but in the forests. The island of Gallinaria, which lies in the Tuscan sea off the coast of Italy, opposite the Ligurian mountains (and the towns of Intermelii and Alba Ingannua) derives its name from them, though some maintain that the name comes from dunghill fowl which were carried to that island by sailors and have there run wild. Guinea fowl (gallinae africanae) are large, mottled and have their humps in their backs. The Greeks call them [Greek: meleagrís].[183] They are the last fowls which the culinary art has introduced to our dining tables, on account of their gamy flavour.[184] By reason of their rarity they sell for a high price.
“Of the three kinds of fowls, the ordinary dunghill fowl is used chiefly for cramming. For this purpose they are shut up in a small confined and darkened coop, because both exercise and light are enemies of fat. Any large chickens may be selected for this operation, not necessarily of that breed which the peasants call Melica incorrectly, for as the ancients said Thelis when they meant Thetis, so the country people still say Melica for Medica. This name was given at first to the fowls which were imported from Medea on account of their great size and then to all of that breed, but now the name is given indiscriminately to all large fowls by reason of their general resemblance. After the feathers have been pulled from their tails and wings they are crammed with balls of barley paste, with which may be mixed darnel meal, or flax seed soaked in soft water. They are fed twice a day but care must be taken to see that the last meal is digested before another is put before them. After they have been fed and their heads have been cleaned of mites, they are shut up again. This process is kept up for twenty-five days, when they will be fat.
“Some cram them on wheat bread soaked in water, or even in wine of good flavour and bouquet, claiming that they are thereby made fat and tender in twenty days.[185]
“If in the process of cramming the fowls lose their appetite from too much food, the ration should be reduced daily during the last ten days in the same proportion as it was increased during the first ten days, so that the ration will be the same on the twentieth as on the first day.
“Wood pigeons are crammed and fattened in the same way.”
Of geese
X. “Let us now pass,” said Axius, “to that tribe which cannot live in the barn yard all the time, or even on land, but requires access to ponds. I mean those whom you philhellenes call amphibia. I understand that you call the places in which geese are kept by the Greek name [Greek: chaenoboskeion], and that Scipio Metellus and M. Seius have several large flocks of geese.”
“It is Seius’ practice,” said Merula, “to maintain his flocks of geese[186] in accordance with the five rules I have laid down for poultry, namely: with respect to choice of individuals, breeding, eggs, goslings and the process of cramming.
“On the first point he requires the slave who buys his geese to select them of good size and of white plumage, because they reproduce their own qualities in their goslings. This is necessary for there is another kind of geese of variegated plumage, which are called wild, and do not flock freely with the other kind and are domesticated with difficulty.
“The best time for breeding geese is at the end of winter and for laying and hatching from the beginning of February or March until the summer solstice. They breed usually in the water, diving to the bottom of the stream or pond.[187] A goose lays only three times a year: and each one should be furnished with a coop about two and a half feet square and bedded with straw: each of their eggs should be marked for identification, for they will not hatch any eggs but their own. They are usually set on nine or eleven eggs, never more than fifteen, nor less than five. In cold weather they set for thirty days, in warm weather twenty-five. When they are hatched the goslings are suffered to remain with their mother for five days, and then daily, when the weather is fine, they are driven out to the meadows or to the ponds or some swampy place. The gosling houses may be built either above or below ground, but never more than twenty should be housed together and care must be taken lest the floor be damp and that they are bedded on chaff or some thing of that kind, and that the house is so constructed as to keep out weasels and other beasts which prey on goslings. Geese are fed in wet places and it is the practice to sow especially for their food supply, using for this purpose any kind of grain, but particularly that salad plant called endive[188] which keeps green wherever there is water, freshening at the mere contact of water however dry it may be. This is gathered to be fed to them, for if they have access to the place where it is growing they will destroy the plant by trampling on it, or else kill themselves by eating too much of it, for they are greedy by nature. For this reason they must be watched, as often in feeding their greediness leads them to seize a root and to break their own necks in attempting to pull it from the ground: for the neck is weak, as the head is soft.
“If there is none of this plant they should be fed barley or some other grain. When the farrago season is on, feed that to them, but in the same manner as I have described in respect of endive. While they are setting they may be fed ground barley soaked in water. The goslings may be fed for the first two days on barley cake (pollenta) or raw barley, and for the next three days fresh water cress chopped fine in a dish. When they are of an age to be kept by themselves in flocks of twenty, in the kind of house I have described, they are fed on barley meal or farrago or some kind of young herbage cut up.
“For cramming, goslings are picked out when they are about six months old, and are shut up in the fattening pen and there are fed three times a day as much as they will eat, of crushed barley and flour dust mixed with water, and after meals they should be made to drink copiously. Kept on this diet they will be fat in about two months.[189] After every meal the feeding place must be cleaned, for, while geese like a clean place, they never leave any place clean in which they have been.”
Of ducks
XI. “Whoever wishes to keep a flock of ducks and to establish a [Greek: naessotropheion], should choose for it, above all others if it is possible, a swampy location because that is most agreeable to the ducks, but, if not, then a situation sloping to a natural lake or pool, or to an artificial pond, with steps leading down to it, practicable for the ducks. The enclosure where they are kept should have a wall fifteen feet high, such as you saw at Seius’ villa, with only one door opening into it. All around the wall on the inside should run a broad platform on which are built against the wall the duck houses, fronting on a level concrete vestibule in which is constructed a permanent channel in which their food can be placed in water, for ducks are fed in that way. The entire wall should be given a smooth coating of stucco to keep out polecats[190] and other animals of prey, and the enclosure should be covered with a net of large mesh to prevent eagles from pouncing in and the ducks themselves from flying out.[191]
“For food they are given wheat, barley, grape marc, and some times even lobsters and other such aquatic animals. The pond in the enclosure should be fed with a large head of water so that it may be kept always fresh.
“There are other kinds of similar birds, like teals and coots which may be fed in the same way.
“Some even keep partridges, which, as Archelaus writes, conceive when they hear the voice of the male bird. By reason of the natural abundance and the delicacy of their flesh, these last are not crammed like those domestic fowls I have described, but they are fattened by feeding in the ordinary way.
“And now, as I think that I have completed the first act of the drama of the barn yard, I am done.”
Of rabbits
XII. At this point Appius returned and, after an exchange of questions and answers as to what had been said and done during his absence, he said: “Here beginneth the second act of those industries which are wont to be practised at a villa, namely of those enclosures which are still known as leporaria from their ancient special designation. Today a warren no longer means an acre or two in which hares are kept, but some times forests of vast extent in which troops of red deer and roe deer are enclosed. Q. Fulvius Lippinus is said to have forty jugera enclosed in the neighbourhood of Tarquinii[192] where he keeps not only those animals I have named but wild sheep as well. Parks of still larger extent are found in the territory of Statonia (in Etruria) and in certain other places: indeed, in transalpine Gaul T. Pompeius has so great a game preserve that the enclosure is about four miles in extent.[193]
“It is the practice to keep in such enclosures not only the animals I have named, but also snail houses and bee hives and jars in which dormice are fed, but the care and the increase and the feeding of all these things are easy, except in the case of bees. Who does not know that a leporarium should be enclosed with masonry walls which are at once smooth and high the one to keep out wild cats and badgers and other such beasts: the other to prevent wolves from getting over. Within should be coverts where the hares may lurk in the day time under bushes and grass, and trees with broad spreading branches to ward off the attacks of the eagle.
“Who does not know also that if he introduces only a few hares of both sexes in a short time the place will be full of them, for such is the fecundity of this quadruped that two pair are enough to stock an entire warren in a short time. Often a mother who has just had her litter is found to be big with another: indeed, Archelaus says that if you want to know how old a hare is you have only to count the number of openings in her belly, for without doubt there is one for every year of her life.
“It has recently become the practice to cram hares as well as poultry, and for this purpose they are taken out of the warren and shut up in small hutches where they are fattened. There are three kinds of hares: the first, our common Italian kind, which has short front legs and long hind legs, the upper part of the body dark coloured, the belly white, and long ears. Some say that our hare conceives a second time while it is still big. In transalpine Gaul and Macedonia they grow to a great size, but in Spain and in Italy they are not so large. The second kind is native in Gaul near the Alps, and is white all over the body: these are brought to Rome, but rarely. The third kind is native in Spain and is like our hare in every way except that it is smaller and is called rabbit (cuniculus).[194] L. Aelius thinks that the hare (lepus) gets his name from his swiftness, as it were that he is light of foot (levipes), but I think the name is derived from the ancient Greek, because the Aeolians of Boeotia call him [Greek: leporis]. The rabbits derive their latin name of cuniculi from the habit of making underground burrows to hide in [for cuniculus is a Spanish word for mine]. If possible you should have all these three kinds in your warren. I am sure you already have the first two kinds,” Apius added, turning to me, “and, as you were so many years in Spain doubtless some rabbits followed you home.””
Of game preserves
XIII. Then addressing himself again to Axius, Appius continued:
“You know, of course, that wild boars are kept in game parks, and that those which are brought in wild are fattened with as little trouble as the tame ones which are born in the park, for you have doubtless seen at the farm near Tusculum, which Varro here bought from M. Pupius Piso, wild boars and roe bucks assemble at the sound of the trumpet to be fed at regular hours, when from a platform, the keeper scatters mast to the wild boars and vetch or some such forage to the roe bucks.”
“I saw this done,” put in Axius, “more dramatically when I was a visitor at the villa of Q. Hortensius in the country near Laurentum. He has there a wood of more than fifty jugera in extent, all enclosed, but it might better be called a [Greek: theriotropheion] than a warren; there on high ground he caused his dinner table to be spread, and while we supped Hortensius gave orders that Orpheus be summoned: when he came, arrayed in his long robe, with a cithara in his hands, he was desired to sing. At that moment a trumpet was sounded and at once Orpheus was surrounded by a large audience of deer and wild boars and other quadrupeds: it seemed to be not less agreeable a spectacle than the shows of game, without African beasts, which the Aediles provide in the Circus Maximus.”
Of snails
XIV. And turning to Merula, Axius continued: “Appius has lightened your task, my dear Merula, so far as concerns the matter of game, and briefly the second act of our drama may be brought to an end, for I do not seek to learn any thing about snails and dormice, which is all that is left on the programme, for there can be no great trouble in keeping them.”
“It is not so simple as you seem to think, my dear Axius,” replied Merula, “for a place suitable for keeping snails[195] I must be not only in the open air but entirely surrounded by water, otherwise you will be kept running not only after the children but also the parents which you have supplied for breeding.”
“In other words,” said I, “they must be enclosed by water to save the maintenance of a slave catcher.”
“A place which is not baked by the sun and on which the dew remains is preferable,” continued Merula. “If the place you use for your snails is not supplied with dew naturally, as often is the case in sunny situations, and there is no available shady recess, such as is found under rocks or hills whose feet are laved by a lake or a stream, then you must supply dew artificially. This may be done by leading into the snailery a pipe on the end of which is fixed a rose nozzle, through which water is forced against a rock so that it scatters in spray. The problem of feeding snails is small, for they supply themselves without help, finding what they require as they creep over the level ground and also while clinging to the sides of a wall, if no running water prevents their access to it. On the hucksters’ stands they keep alive a long time, as it were chewing their own cud, all that is done for them being to supply a few laurel leaves and scatter a little bran over them: so a cook never knows whether he is cooking them alive or dead.
“There are many kinds of snails, such as the small white ones, which come from Reate: the large variety which are imported from Illyricum, and the medium size which come from Africa: but they vary in size in certain localities of each of those countries. Thus, there is found in Africa a variety which are called solitannae of so great size that their shells will hold ten quarts:[196] and so in the other countries I have named they are found together of all sizes. They produce an innumerable progeny, which at first are very small and soft but develop their hard shell with time. If you have large islands in the enclosure you may expect a rich haul from your snails.
“Snails are fattened by placing them in a jar smeared with boiled must and corn meal, on which they feed, and pierced with holes to admit the air, but they are naturally hardy.”
Of dormice
XV. “Dormice[197] are preserved on a different systern than snails, for while the one is confined by barriers of water, the other is kept in by a wall which must be coated on the inside with smooth stone or stucco to prevent their escape. Young nut trees should be planted in the enclosure, and when these are not bearing, mast and chestnuts should be thrown in to the dormice, for that is what makes them fat. Roomy cages should be provided for them in which to rear their young.[198] Little water is necessary, for dormice do not require much water, but on the contrary affect dry places. They are fattened in jars which are usually kept indoors. The potters make these jars in different shapes, but with paths for the dormice to use contrived on the sides and a hollow to hold their food, which consists of mast, walnuts and chestnuts.[199] Covers are placed on the jars and there in the dark the dormice are fattened.”
Of bees
XVI. “It remains now,” said Appius, “to rehearse the third and last act of our drama of the husbandry of the steading and to discuss the keeping of fishes.”
“The third, indeed,” exclaimed Axius, “shall we deprive ourselves of honey because in your youth you never drank mead in your own house, such was your practice of frugality?”
“He speaks the truth,” said Appius, to us, “for I was indeed left a poor orphan with two brothers and two sisters to provide for, and it was not until I had married one of them to Lucullus without portion and he had named me his heir that I began to drink mead in my own house and to supply it to my household: but there never was a day when I did not offer it to all my guests. But apart from that, it has been my fortune, not yours,[200] Axius, to have known these winged creatures whom nature has endowed so richly with industry and art, and that you may appreciate that I know more than you do of their almost incredible natural art, listen to what I am to say. It will then be for Merula to develop the practice of the bee keeper, or, as the Greeks call it, [Greek: melittourgia], as methodically as he has his other subjects.
“To begin then,[201] bees are generated partly by other bees and partly from the decaying carcase of an ox: so Archelaus in one of his epigrams calls them
‘flitting offspring of decaying beef,’
and else where he says,
‘wasps spring from horses, bees from calves.’
“Bees are not of a solitary habit like eagles, but are of a social nature, like men, a characteristic they share with daws, but not for the same reason, for bees live in colonies, the better to work and build, while daws congregate for gossip. Thus the life of a bee is one of intelligence and art, for man has learned from them to manufacture, to build, and to store his food: three occupations which are not the same but are diverse in their nature, for it is one thing to provide food, another to manufacture wax and honey, and still another to build a house. Has not each cell in a honey comb six sides, or as many as a bee has feet, the art of which arrangement appears in the teaching of the geometricians that of all polygons the hexagon covers the largest area within a circle.[202] Bees feed out of doors, but it is at home that they manufacture that which is the sweetest of all things, acceptable to gods and men alike: for honey comb is offered on the altars and honey is served at the beginning of a dinner and again at dessert.
“Bees have institutions like our own, consisting of royalty, government and organized society. Cleanliness in all things is their aim: and so they never alight in any place where there is filth or an evil odour, or even where there is a strong savour of such an unguent as we may consider agreeable. For the same reason if one who approaches them is covered with perfume,[203] they do not lick him as flies do, but they sting him, and by the same token no one ever sees bees crawling on meat and blood and grease, as flies do. And so they only settle in places of sweet savour. They do a minimum of damage because in their harvesting they leave what they touch none the worse.[204] They are not so cowardly as not to resist who ever attempts to disturb them, and yet they are fully conscious of their own weakness. They are called the Winged Servants of the Muses, because when they swarm they are quickly brought together by the music of cymbals and the clapping of hands: and as men assign Helicon and Olympus to be the haunts of the Muses, so nature has attributed the flowery and uncultivated mountains to the bees. They follow their king[205] wheresoever he goes, supporting him when he is tired and even taking him upon their backs if he is unable to fly, so do they wish to serve him.[206] As they are not idlers themselves, so do they hate those who are, and thus driving out the drones, they exclude them from the hive, because they are of no service but merely consume honey: and it happens that a few bees, buzzing with wrath, will drive out a number of drones.
“They smear every thing about the entrance to the hive with a gum which is found between the cells which the Greeks call [Greek: erithakae]. They live under the discipline of an army, taking turns in resting and all doing their equal share of work, and they send out colonies and carry out the orders of their leaders, given with the voice, but as it were with a trumpet: and in like manner they have signs of peace and of war.
“But, Merula, now in my course I pass on the torch to you, as our Axius here is doubtless languishing while he has listened to all this natural history, for I have said nothing of profit.”
“I do not know,” said Merula, “whether what I can say on the subject of the profit to be derived from bees will satisfy you, Axius, but I have as my authorities not only Seius, who takes five thousand pounds of honey every year from the hives he leases,[207] but also our friend Varro here, for I have heard him tell of two brothers Veiani, from the Falerian territory, whom he had under his command in Spain and who, although their father left them only a small house with a curtilage of not exceeding a jugerum in extent, nevertheless made themselves rich. They set bee hives all about the house and planted part of the land in a garden and filled up the rest with thyme and clover and that bee plant known to us as apiastrum, though some call it [Greek: meliphullon], others [Greek: mellissophullon] and still others melittaena: and by this means they were wont to derive, as they estimated, an average income of not less than ten thousand sesterces per annum from honey; but they did this by being willing to wait until they could sell at their own time and price rather than by forcing the market.”
“Tell me,” exclaimed Axius, “where and how I should establish a bee-stand to make such a handsome profit.”
“The apiary,” replied Merula, “which some call by the Greek names [Greek: melitton] and [Greek: melittotropheion], and others mellarium, should preferably be placed near the house[208] in a location where there is no echo (for such sounds are deemed to put them to flight, as timid men are by the din of a battle) and where the temperature is mild, exposed neither to the heat of summer nor the cold of winter, giving preferably to the Southeast and near of access to places where their food is abundant and there is a supply of fresh water. If there is no natural supply of food available you should plant such things as best serve bees for pasture, namely: roses, thyme, bee balm,[209] poppies, beans, lentils, peas, basil, gladiolus, alfalfa, and especially clover which is of great service to the bees which are sick, for it begins to bloom at the vernal equinox and lasts until that of autumn. As clover is the best food for sick bees, so thyme is the best for making honey, and it is because Sicily abounds in good thyme that it takes the palm for producing honey. On this account some men bruise thyme in a mortar and mix warm water with it and then spray all their nursery plants with it for the sake of the bees.
“The hives should be set as near the house as convenient: some men even put them under the very portico for greater safety. Hives are made in various shapes and sizes and of different material;[210] thus some make them round out of wicker work: others of frame covered with bark: others use hollow tree trunks: others vessels of pottery: some even build them square out of rods, allowing about three feet in length and a foot in height, but these dimensions should be reduced where you have not enough bees to fill a hive of that size, for fear that the bees might become discouraged by too large an empty space.
“The bee hive derives its name alvus, which is the same as our word for belly, from the fact that it holds food, that is to say, honey; and it is on this analogy that hives are usually shaped to imitate the form of the belly, small in the waist and bulging out below. When the hives are made of wicker work they should be coated evenly within and without with ox dung[211] so that the bees may not be driven away by the roughness of their roof. The hives should be so ordered under the shelter of a wall that they may not be disturbed nor touch one another when arranged in ranks, for it is the practice to place hives in two and some times three separated ranks, but the opinion is that it is better to reduce the ranks to two than to increase them to four. In the middle of the hive small openings are made on the right and the left to serve as entrances for the bees, and on top is placed a practicable cover, which may be removed to give access to the honey comb. This is best when made of bark, and worst of pottery, because that is strongly affected both by the cold of winter and the heat of summer. In spring and summer the bee keeper should inspect each hive at least three times a month, fumigating them lightly, cleaning and throwing out dirt and worms. At the same time he should take precautions to keep down the number of princes, for they keep the bees from work by stirring up sedition. There are said to be three kinds of royalties among the bees: the black, the red and the mottled, or, as Menecrates writes, two: the black and the mottled: and as the latter is the better it behooves the bee keeper, when he finds both kinds in a hive, to kill the black one, as he is forever playing politics[212] against the other king, whereby the hive must suffer, for inevitably one of the kings will flee or be driven out, in either case taking his party with him.
“Of working bees the small round mottled variety is considered the best. The drone, or, as some call him, the thief,[213] is black with a large belly. The wasp, which has some resemblance to a bee, is not, however, a fellow labourer, but attacks the bees with his sting, wherefore the bees keep him at a distance.
“Bees are themselves distinguished as wild and tame. I call those wild which feed in the forests, and those tame which feed in cultivated places. The forest bees are smaller in size and hairy but better workmen.
“In buying bees it behooves the purchaser to see whether they are well or ailing. The signs of health are a thick swarm, well groomed appearance and a hive being filled in a workmanlike manner. The signs of lack of condition on the other hand are a hairy and bristling appearance and a dusty coat, unless this last is caused by a pressure of work, for under such circumstances they often wear themselves down and become thin.
“If the hives are to be transferred from one place to another it is necessary to choose a fit time to make the move and a suitable place to receive them. As to time, spring is preferable to winter because in winter they have difficulty in adjusting themselves to a new location and so often run away, as they do also if you move them from a good location to a place where proper pasture is not available. Nor is a transfer from one hive to another in the same place to be undertaken carelessly, but that to which the bees are to be transferred should be rubbed with bee balm, which will serve as a bait for them, and some pieces of honey comb should be placed in it, not far from the entrances, for fear that the bees might run away if they found the larder of their new home empty.
“Menecrates says that bees contract a malady of the bowels from their first spring pasture on the blossoms of the almond and the cornel cherry and are cured by giving them urine to drink.[214]
“That gummy substance which the bees use, chiefly in summer to construct a sort of curtain between the entrance and the hive, is called propolis, and by the same name is used by physicians in making plasters: by reason of which use it sells in the Via Sacra for more than honey itself. That substance which is called erithacen, and is used to glue the cells together, is different from both honey and propolis: it is supposed to have a quality of attraction for bees and is accordingly mixed with bee balm and smeared on the branch or other place on which it is desired to have a swarm light. The comb is made of wax and is multicellular, each cell in it having six sides or as many as nature has given the bee feet. It is said that bees do not gather from the same plants all the materials which enter in these four substances which they manufacture, namely: propolis, erithacen, wax and honey. Thus from the pomegranate and the asparagus they gather food alone, wax from the olive tree, honey from the fig, but not of good quality: other plants like the bean, the bee balm, the gourd and the cabbage serve a double purpose and yield both wax and food: while the apple and the wild pear serve a similar double purpose but for food and honey and the poppy again for wax and honey.
“Others again provide material for three purposes, food, honey and wax, such as the almond and the charlock.[215] In like manner there are flowers from each of which they derive a different one of these substances, and others from which they derive several of them: while they make distinctions in respect of plants according to the quality of the product they yield,—or rather the plants make the distinction for them—as with respect to honey, some yield liquid honey, like the skirwort,[216] and others thick honey like the rosemary. So again honey of insipid flavour is made from the fig, good honey from clover, and the best of all from thyme.
“And since drink is part of a bee’s diet and water is the liquid they use, there should be provided near the stand a place for them to drink, which may be either a running stream or a reservoir not more than two or three fingers deep in which bricks or stones are placed in such a way as to project a little from the water, and so furnish a place for the bees to sit and drink; but the greatest care must be taken to keep this water fresh, as it is of high importance to the making of good honey.
“As the bees cannot go out to distant pasture in all weathers, food must be prepared for them, as otherwise they will live on their supply of honey and so deplete the store in the hive. For this purpose ten pounds of ripe figs may be boiled in six congii of water and bits of the paste thus prepared should be set out near the hives. Others provide honey water in little dishes and float flocks of clean wool on them through which the bees may suck without risk of either getting more than is good for them or of being drowned. One such dish should be provided for each hive and they should be kept filled. Others again bray dried grapes and figs together and, mixing in some boiled must, make a paste of which bits are exposed near the hives during such part of the winter as the bees are still able to go forth in search of food.
“When a swarm is about to come out of the hive (which happens when a number of young bees have matured, and the hive determines to send their youth out to found a colony, as formerly the Sabines often were compelled to do on account of the number of their children)[217] there are two signs by which the intention may be known: one that for several days before hand, and especially in the evening, many bees weave themselves together and hang upon the entrance of the hive like grapes: the other that when they are about to go forth or have already begun to go they buzz together lustily, as soldiers do when they break camp. Those who have come forth first fly about the hive waiting for the others, who have not yet collected, to join them. When the bee keeper notices this he has only to throw dust on them and at the same time beat upon some copper vessel to collect them, thoroughly frightened, where he desires in some nearby place on which he has smeared erithacen and bees’ balm and other things in which they delight. When they have settled down he should place near them a hive smeared within with the same baits, and then, by blowing a light smoke around them, compel them to enter the hive. When thus introduced into their new abode the swarm makes itself at home cheerfully, so that even if placed next to the parent hive they will prefer their new colonial settlement.
“And now, having told you all I know about the care of bees, I will speak of that for which the industry is carried on, that is to say, of the profit.
“The honey is taken off when the hive is full, as may be determined by removing the cover of the hive, for if the openings of the combs are seen to be sealed, as it were with a skin, then the hive is full of honey: but the bees themselves give notice of this condition by keeping up a loud buzzing within, by their agitation when they go in and out and by driving out the drones.
“In taking off honey some say that you should be content with nine parts, leaving the tenth, because if you take it all the bees will desert the hive: others leave a still larger proportion than I have mentioned.
“As those who crop their corn land every year obtain good yields only at intervals, so it is with bee hives: you will have more industrious and more profitable bees if you do not exact of them the same tribute every year.
“It is considered that honey should be taken off for the first time at the rising of the Pleiades, for the second time at the end of summer before Arcturus has reached the zenith, and for the third time after the setting of the Pleiades, but this last time beware not to take more than one-third of the store even if the hive is full, leaving the other two-thirds for the winter supply, but if the hive is only partially filled nothing should be taken off. In any event, when a large amount of honey is to be taken off a hive it should not be done all at once or ostentatiously less the bees be discouraged. Those combs which, on being taken off, are found to be partly unfilled with honey or to be soiled, should be pared with a knife.
“Care must be taken that the weaker bees in a hive are not oppressed by the stronger, for this diminishes the profit: to this end the minority party[218] may be colonized under another king. When bees are given to fighting with one another, you should sprinkle them with honey water, upon which they will not only cease fighting but will crowd together and kiss one another: and this will prove the case even more if they are sprinkled with mead, for the savour of the wine in it will cause them to apply themselves so greedily that they will fuddle themselves in sucking it. If the bees seem lazy about coming out to work and any part of them get the habit of remaining in the hive, they should be fumigated and odoriferous herbs, like bees’ balm and thyme, should be placed near the hive. Watchful care is necessary to protect them from ruin by heat or cold. If the bees are overtaken by a sudden rain or cold while at pasture (which rarely happens for they usually foresee such things) and are stricken down by the heavy rain drops and laid low and stunned, you should gather them in a dish and place them under cover in a warm place until the weather has cleared, when they should be sprinkled with ashes of fig wood (making sure that the ashes are rather hot than warm) the dish should then be shaken gently without touching the bees with your hand, and placed in the sun. When the bees feel this warmth they revive and get on their feet again, just as flies do after they have been apparently drowned. This should be done near the hive so that when the bees have come to themselves they may return home and to work.”
Of fish ponds
XVII. Here Pavo returned and said: “You may weigh anchor now if you wish. The drawing of the lots of the tribes to determine a tie vote is over and the herald is announcing the result of the election.”
Appius arose without delay and went to congratulate his candidate, and escort him home.
Merula said: “I will leave the third act of our drama of the husbandry of the steading to you, Axius,” and went out with the others, leaving Axius with me to wait for our candidate whom we knew would come to join us. Axius said to me: “I do not regret Merula’s departure at this point, for I am quite well up on the subject of fish ponds, which still remains to complete our programme.
“There are two kinds of fish ponds, of fresh water and salt water. The former are commonly maintained by farmers and without much expense, for the Lymphae, the homely goddesses of the Fountains, supply the water for them, while the latter, the sea ponds, are the play things of our nobles and are furnished with both water and fishes, as it were by Neptune himself: serving more the purposes of pleasure than of utility, their accomplishment being rather to empty than to fill the exchequers of their lords. For in the first place they are built at great expense, then they are stocked at great expense, and finally they are maintained at great expense.
“Hirrus was wont to derive an income of twelve thousand sesterces from the buildings surrounding his fish ponds, all of which he spent for food for his fishes: and no wonder, for I remember that on one occasion he lent two thousand murenae to Caesar[219] by weight (stipulating for their return in kind), so that his villa (which was not otherwise extraordinary) sold for four million sesterces on account of the stock of fish.
“In sooth, the inland ponds of our farmer folk may well be called dulcis, and those other amara.[220]
“A single fish pond suffices us simple folk, but those amateurs must have a series of them linked together: for as Pausias and other painters of his school have boxes with as many compartments as they have different coloured wax, so must they fain have as many ponds as they have different varieties of fish.
“These fish are furthermore sacred, more sacred, indeed, than those fish which you, Varro, say you saw in Lydia, (at the same time that you saw the dancing isles)[221] which came to the shore, where the altar was erected for a sacrifice, in shoals at the sound of the Greek pipe, because no one ever ventured to molest them; so no cook has ever been known to have ’sauced’ one of these fishes.[222]
“When our friend Hortensius had those fish ponds at Baulii, which represented so large an investment, he was wont to send to Puteoli to buy the fish he served on his table, as I have often seen when I was visiting him. And it was not enough that his fishes did not supply his table, but he was at pains to supply theirs, taking greater precautions lest his mullets (mulli) should go hungry than I do for my mules in Rosea, and it was not at less cost that he supplied meat and drink to his stock than I do to mine. For I raise my asses, which bring such fancy prices, at the cost of one servant, a little barley and the water which springs from my land, while Hortensius must needs maintain a fleet of fishermen to keep him supplied with small fry to feed to his fish, or, when the sea runs high and such deep sea forage is cut off by a storm, and it is not possible even to draw live bait ashore in a net, he is fain to buy in the market for the delectation of the denizens of his ponds the very salt fish which is the food of the people.”
“Doubtless,” said I, “Hortensius would prefer to have you take the carriage mules out of his stable than one of his barbel mules from the fish pond.”
“Yes, indeed,” agreed Axius, “and he would rather have a sick slave drink cold water than that his beloved fish should be risked in that which is fresh. On the other hand, M. Lucullus was reputed to be so careless and neglectful of his fish ponds that he did not provide any suitable quarters for his fishes in hot weather, but permitted them to remain in ponds which were unhealthy with stagnant water: a practice very different from that of his brother L. Lucullus, who yielded nothing to Neptune himself in his care of his fishes, for he pierced a mountain at Naples, and so contrived that the sea water in his fish ponds should be renewed by the action of the tides. Furthermore, he has arranged that his beloved fishes may be driven into a cool place during the heat of the day, just as the Apulian shepherds do when they drive their flocks along the drift ways to the Sabine mountains: for so great was his ardour for the welfare of his fishes that he gave a commission to his architect to drive at his sole cost a tunnel from his fish ponds at Raise to the sea, and by throwing out a mole contrived that the tide should flow in and out of his fish ponds twice a day, from moon to moon, and so cool them off.”
At this moment, while we were talking, there was a sound of foot steps on the right and our candidate came into the villa publica arrayed in the broad purple of his new rank as an aedile. We went to meet him and, after congratulations, escorted him to the Capitol, whence he departed for his home and we to ours.
So there, my dear Pinnius, is the brief record of our discourse on the husbandry of the steading.
Footnotes
1 “The manner in which the ancients managed their fallow is certainly most worthy of our attention: their care in ploughing, according to the situation of the land, and nature of the climate, and their manner of adapting the kind of ploughing to answer the purposes intended by the operation, are also most worthy of our imitation. Their exactness in these things exceeds any thing of the kind found amongst the moderns, and is even beyond what any practical writer on agriculture has proposed. This is an evidence that tillage is not even in this age brought to that perfection of which it is capable: and that, notwithstanding all the improvements lately introduced, we may yet receive some instruction from a proper attention to the precepts and practices of the ancients. I am desirous to add that this attention may be useful by preventing improvers from running into every specious scheme of agriculture produced by a lively imagination and engaging them to study the great variety of soils and even climates in this island, and to be careful in adapting to these their several operations.” Dickson Husbandry of the Ancients, XXIII.
The Rev. Andrew Dickson, who died in 1776, was minister of Aberlady in the county of East Lothian, the son of a progressive and successful Scots farmer, and had experience in practical agriculture, as well as in scholarship, as his book shows.
2 The compilation of rural lore, known as the Geoponica, which exists in Greek, was made at Byzantium for the Emperor Constantine VII about the middle of the tenth century A.D. It is very largely a paraphrase of the Roman authors, and is useful principally in elucidating their textual difficulties.
3 Donald G. Mitchell made an interesting collation, in his Wet Days at Edgewood, of the large number of books on agriculture which have been written in old age and by men of affairs, in many lands and many languages.
4 It is interesting to record, however, that Varro received the Navalis Corona for personal gallantry in the war against the pirates. This distinction was even more rare than our modern Medal of Honor or Victoria Cross, and was awarded only to a commander who leapt under arms on the deck of an enemies’ ship and then succeeded in capturing her.
5 Caesar did not live to accomplish this, but some years after his death a public library was established at Rome by Asinius Pollio, which Pliny says (H.N. VII, 31) was the first ever built, those at Alexandria and Pergamus having been private institutions of the kings.
In a land where public libraries have been every where founded out of the accumulations of Big Business, it is interesting to note that Pollio derived the funds with which this the first of their kind was endowed, from the plunder of the Illyrians!
6 Cf. Sellar, Roman Poets of the Augustan Age. Virgil Ch.
V. Boissier, Etudes sur M.T. Varron, Ch. IX. Servius Comm. in Verg.
Georg. I, 43.
It does not appear that many of the commentators on Virgil have taken the trouble to study Varro thoroughly. They are usually better scholars than farmers.
7 It is not remarkable that Virgil failed to make acknowledgment to Varro in the Georgics when he failed to make acknowledgment to Homer in the Aeneid. See Petrarch’s Epistle to Homer for a loyal but vain attempt to justify this neglect.
8 Cf. W.H. Myers’ Classical Essays, p. 110: “For in the face of some German criticism it is necessary to repeat that in order to judge poetry it is, before all things, necessary to enjoy it. We may all desire that historical and philological science should push her dominion into every recess of human action and human speech, but we must utter some protest when the very heights of Parnassus are invaded by a spirit which surely is not science, but her unmeaning shadow; a spirit which would degrade every masterpiece of human genius into the mere pabulum of hungry professors, and which values a poet’s text only as a field for the rivalries of sterile pedantry and arbitrary conjecture.”
9 It was perhaps this encomium upon the farmer at the expense of the banker which inspired Horace’s friend Alfius to withdraw his capital from his banking business and dream a delicious idyl of a simple carefree country life: but, it will be recalled (Epode II, the famous “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis”) that Alfius, like many a modern amateur farmer, recruited from town, soon repented that he had ever listened to the alluring call of “back to the land” and after a few weeks of disillusion in the country, returned to town and sought to get his money out again at usury.
Columella (I, praef.) is not content with Cato’s contrast of the virtue of the farmer with the iniquity of the banker, but he brings in the lawyer’s profession for animadversion also. This, he says, the ancient Romans used to term a canine profession, because it consisted in barking at the rich.
10 The Roman numerals at the beginning of the paragraphs indicate the chapters of Cato from which they are translated. If Cato had not pretended to despise every thing which smacked of Greek literary art he might have edited and arranged his material, in which event his book would have been easier to read than it is, and no less valuable. Modern scholarship would not now venture to perform such an office for such a result, because it involves tampering with a text (as who should say, shooting a fox!) and yet modern scholarship wonders at the decay of classical studies in an impatient age. At the risk of anathema the present version has attempted to group Cato’s material, and in so doing has omitted most of those portions which are now of merely curious interest.
11 This, of course, means buying at a high price, except in extraordinary cases. There is another system of agriculture which admits of the pride of making two blades of grass grow where none was before, and the profit which comes of buying cheap and selling dear. This is farming for improvement, an art which was well described two hundred years before Cato. Xenophon (Economicus XX, 22) says:
“For those who are able to attend to their affairs, however, and who will apply themselves to agriculture earnestly, my lather both practised himself and taught me a most successful method of making profit; for he would never allow me to buy ground already cultivated, but exhorted me to purchase such as from want of care or want of means in those who had possessed it, was left untilled and unplanted. He used to say that well cultivated land cost a great sum of money and admitted of no improvement, and he considered that land which is unsusceptible of improvement did not give the same pleasure to the owner as other land, but he thought that whatever a person had or bought up that was continually growing better afforded him the highest gratification.”
12 Every rural community in the Eastern part of the United States has grown familiar with the contrast between the intelligent amateur, who, while endeavoring earnestly to set an example of good agriculture, fails to make expenses out of his land, and the born farmer who is self-supporting in the practice of methods contemned by the agricultural colleges. Too often the conclusion is drawn that scientific agriculture will not pay; but Cato puts his finger on the true reason. The man who does not depend on his land for his living too often permits his farm to get what Cato calls the “spending habit.” Pliny (H.N. XVIII, 7) makes some pertinent observations on the subject:
“I may possibly appear guilty of some degree of rashness in making mention of a maxim of the ancients which will very probably be looked upon as quite incredible, ‘that nothing is so disadvantageous as to cultivate land in the highest style of perfection.’”
And he illustrates by the example of a Roman gentleman, who, like Arthur Young in eighteenth century England, wasted a large fortune in an attempt to bring his lands to perfect cultivation. “To cultivate land well is absolutely necessary,” Pliny continues, “but to cultivate it in the very highest style is mere extravagance, unless, indeed, the work is done by the hands of a man’s own family, his tenants, or those whom he is obliged to keep at any rate.”
13 In this practice has been the delight of men of affairs of all ages who turn to agriculture for relaxation. Horace cites it with telling effect in the ode (III, 5) in which he describes the noble serenity of mind with which Regulus returned to the torture and certain death which awaited him at Carthage: and Homer makes an enduring picture of it in the person of the King supervising his fall ploughing, which Hephsestus wrought upon the shield of Achilles (Iliad, XVIII, 540). “Furthermore, he set in the shield a soft fresh ploughed field, rich tilth and wide, the third time ploughed, and many ploughers therein drove their yokes to and fro as they wheeled about. Whensoever they came to the boundary of the field and turned, then would a man come to each and give into his hands a goblet of sweet wine: while others would be turning back along the furrows, fain to reach the boundary of the deep tilth, … and among them the King was standing in silence, with his staff, rejoicing in his heart.”
14 This advice to sell the worn out oxen and the sick slaves justly excited Plutarch’s generous scorn, and has been made the text of a sweeping denunciation by Mommsen of the practice of husbandry by men of affairs in Cato’s time. “The whole system,” says Mommsen, “was pervaded by the utterly unscrupulous spirit characteristic of the power of capital.” And he adds, “If we have risen to that little-to-be-envied elevation of thought which values no feature of an economy save the capital invested in it, we cannot deny to the management of the Roman estates the praise of consistency, energy, punctuality, frugality and solidity.” Without any desire to defend Cato, one may suggest, out of an experience in a kind of farm management not very different from that Cato pictures, that it is doubtful whether even Cato himself was quite as economical and efficient, and so as capitalistic in his farming, as he advises others to be: certainly a whole race of contemporary country gentlemen was not equal to it. It is much easier to write about business-like farming than to practise it.
15 Hesiod (W. & D. 338) had already given this same advice to the Greek farmer:
“Invite the man that loves thee to a feast, but let alone thine enemy, and especially invite him that dwelleth near thee, for if, mark you, any thing untoward shall have happened at home neighbours are wont to come ungirt, but kinsfolk gird themselves first.” This agreement of the Socialist Hesiod with the Capitalist Cato is remarkable only as it illustrates that both systems when wisely expounded rest on human nature. That upon which they here agree is the foundation of the modern European societies for rural co-operative credit which President Taft recommended to the American people. These societies, says the bulletin of the International Institute of Agriculture published at Rome in 1912, rest on three chief safeguards:
(a) That membership is confined to persons residing within a small district, and, therefore, the members are personally known to one another;
(b) That the members, being mutually responsible, it will be to the interest of all members to keep an eye upon a borrower and to see that he makes proper use of the money lent to him;
(c) That in like manner, it is to the interest of all members to help a member when he is in difficulties.
16 This was an estate of average size, probably within Virgil’s precept, (Georgic II, 412). “Laudato ingentia rura, exiguum colito.” Some scholars have deemed this phrase a quotation from Cato, but it is more likely derived from Mago the Carthaginian who is reported to have said: “Imbecilliorem agrum quam agricolam, esse debere,”—the farmer should be bigger than his farm.
17 The philosophy of Cato’s plan, of laying out a farm is found in the agricultural history of the Romans down to the time of the Punic wars. Mommsen (II, 370) gives the facts, and Ferrero in his first volume makes brilliant use of them. There is sketched the old peasant aristocrat living on his few acres, his decay and the creation of comparatively large estates worked by slaves in charge of overseers, which followed the conquest of the Italian states about B.C. 300. This was the civilization in which Cato had been reared, but in his time another important change was taking place. The Roman frontier was again widened by the conquest of the Mediterranean basin: the acquisition of Sicily and Sardinia ended breadstuff farming as the staple on the Italian peninsular. The competition of the broad and fertile acres of those great Islands had the effect in Italy which the cultivation of the Dakota wheat lands had upon the grain farming of New York and Virginia. About 150 B.C. the vine and the olive became the staples of Italy and corn was superseded. Although this was not accomplished until after Cato’s death, he foresaw it, and recommended that a farm be laid out accordingly, and his scheme of putting one’s reliance upon the vine and the olive was doubtless very advanced doctrine, when it first found expression.
18 Pliny quotes Cato as advising to buy what others have built rather than build oneself, and thus, as he says, enjoy the fruits of another’s folly. The cacoethes aedificandi is a familiar disease among country gentlemen.
19 Columella (I,4) makes the acute observation that the country house should also be agreeable to the owner’s wife if he wishes to get the full measure of enjoyment out of it. Mago, the Carthaginian, advised to, “if you buy a farm, sell your house in town, lest you be tempted to prefer the cultivation of the urban gods to those of the country.”
20 According to German scholarship the accepted text of Cato’s version of this immemorial epigram is a model of the brevity which is the test of wit, “Frons occipitio prior est.” Pliny probably quoting from memory, expands it to “Frons domini plus prodest quam occípitíum.” Palladius (I, 6) gives another version: “Praesentia domini provectus est agri.” It is found in some form in almost every book on agriculture since Cato, until we reach the literature in which science has taken the place of wisdom—in the Byzantine Geoponica, the Italian Crescenzi, the Dutch Heresbach, the French Maison Rustique, and the English Gervase Markkam. Poor Richard’s Almanack gives it twice, as “the foot of a master is the best manure” and “the eye of a master will do more work than both his hands.” It is perennial in its appeal. The present editor saw it recently in the German comic paper Fliegende Blätter. But the jest is much older than Cato. It appears in Aeschylus, Persae, 171 and Xenophon employs it in Oeconomicus (XII, 20):
“The reply attributed to the barbarian,” added Ischomachus, “appears to me to be exceedingly to the purpose, for when the King of Persia having met with a fine horse and wishing to have it fattened as soon as possible, asked one of those who were considered knowing about horses what would fatten a horse soonest, it is said that he answered ‘the master’s eye.’”
21 The English word “orchard” scarcely translates arbustum, but every one who has been in Italy will recall the endless procession of small fields of maize and rye and alfalfa through which serried ranks of mulberry or feathery elm trees, linked with the charming drop and garland of the vines, seem to dance toward one in the brilliant sunlight, like so many Greek maidens on a frieze. These are arbusta.
22 Cato was a strong advocate of the cabbage; he called it the best of the vegetables and urged that it be planted in every garden for health and happiness. Horace records (Odes. III, 21, 11) that old Cato’s virtue was frequently warmed with wine, and Cato himself explains (CLVI) how this could be accomplished without loss of dignity, for, he says, if, after you have dined well, you will eat five cabbage leaves they will make you feel as if you had had nothing to drink, so that you can drink as much more as you wish—“bibesque quantum voles!”
This was an ancient Egyptian precaution which the Greeks had learned.
Cf. Athenaeus, I, 62.
23 Henry Home, Lord Kames, a Scots judge of the eighteenth century, whom Dr. Johnson considered a better farmer than judge and a better judge than scholar, but who had many of the characteristics of our priscus Cato, argues (following an English tradition which had previously been voiced by Walter of Henley and Sir Anthony Fitzherbert) in his ingenious Gentleman Farmer against the expense of ploughing with horses and urges a return to oxen. He points out that horses involve a large original investment, are worn out in farm work, and after their prime steadily depreciate in value; while, on the other hand, the ox can be fattened for market when his usefulness as a draught animal is over, and then sell for more than his original cost; that he is less subject to infirmities than the horse; can be fed per tractive unit more economically and gives more valuable manure. These are strong arguments where the cost of human labour is small and economical farm management does not require that the time of the ploughman shall be limited if the unit cost of ploughing is to be reasonable. The ox is slow, but in slave times he might reasonably have been preferred to the horse. Today Lord Kames, (or even old Hesiod, who urged that a ploughman of forty year and a yoke of eight year steers be employed because they turned a more deliberate and so a better furrow) would be considering the economical practicability of the gasolene motor as tractive power for a gang of “crooked” ploughs.
24 Cato adds a long list of implements and other necessary equipment.
25 The Roman overseer was usually a superior, and often a much indulged, slave. Cf. Horace’s letter (Epist. I, 14) to his overseer.
26 This was the traditional wisdom which was preached also in Virginia in slave times. In his Arator (1817) Col. John Taylor of Caroline says of agricultural slaves:
“The best source for securing their happiness, their honesty and their usefulness is their food…. One great value of establishing a comfortable diet for slaves is its convenience as an instrument of reward and punishment, so powerful as almost to abolish the thefts which often diminish considerably the owner’s ability to provide for them.”
27 Reading “compitalibus in compito,” literally “the cross roads altar on festival days.”
28 It is evident that Cato’s housekeeper would have welcomed a visit from Mr. Roosevelt’s Rural Uplift Commission. We may add to this Sir Anthony Fitzherbert’s description of the duties of a farmer’s wife in sixteenth century England:
“It is a wyues occupation to wynowe all maner of cornes, to make malte, to wasshe and wrynge, to make heye, shere corne, and in tyme of nede to helpe her husbande to fyll the mucke-wayne or dounge-carte, dryue the ploughe, to loode hey, corne and suche other. And to go or ride to the market, to sel butter, chese, mylke, egges, chekyns, capons, hennes, pygges, gese, and all maner of cornes. And also to bye all maner of necessarye thynges belongynge to houssholde, and to make a trewe rekenynge and acompte to her husbande what she hath payed.”
Sir Anthony Fitzherbert (1470-1538) was the English judge whose law books are, or should be, known to all lawyers. His Boke of Husbandry, published in 1534, is one of the classics of English agriculture, and justly, for it is full of shrewd observation and deliberate wisdom expressed in a virile style, with agreeable leaven of piety and humour. Fitzherbert anticipated a modern poet, Henley, in one of his most happy phrases: “Ryght so euery man is capitayne of his owne soule”. The Husbandry is best available to the modern reader in the edition by Skeat published for the English Dialect Society in 1882.
29 Cato is careful not to undertake to say how this may be assured; another evidence of his wisdom.
30 In his instructive discourse on ploughing, Columella (II, 4) gives the key to Cato’s warning against ploughing land when it is in the condition he calls rotten (cariosa):
“Rich land, which holds moisture a long time, should be broken up (proscindere) at the season when the weather is beginning to be warm and the weeds are developing, so that none of their seed may mature: but it should be ploughed with such close furrows that one can with difficulty distinguish where the plough share has been, for in that way all the weeds are uprooted and destroyed.
“The spring ploughing should be followed up with frequent stirring of the soil until it is reduced to dust, so that there may be no necessity, or very little, of harrowing after the land is seeded: for the ancient Romans said that a field was badly ploughed which had to be harrowed after the seed had been sown.
“A farmer should himself make sure that his ploughing has been well done, not alone by inspection, for the eye is often amused by a smooth surface which in fact conceals clods, but also by experiment, which is less likely to be deceived, as by driving a stout stick through the furrows: if it penetrates the soil readily and without obstruction, it will be evident that all the land there about is in good order: but if some part harder than the rest resists the pressure, it will be clear that the ploughing has been badly done. When the ploughmen see this done from time to time they are not guilty of clod hopping.
“Hence wet land should be broken up after the Ides of April, and, when it has been ploughed at that season, it should be worked again, after an interval of twenty days, about the time of the solstice, which is the eighth or ninth day before the Kalends of July, and again the third time about the Kalends of September, for it is not the practice of experienced farmers to till the land in the interval after the summer solstice, unless the ground shall have been soaked with a heavy down-pour of sudden rain, like those of winter, as does some times happen at this season. In that event there is no reason why the fallow should not be cultivated during the month of July. But when you do till at this season beware lest the land be worked while it is muddy: or when, having been sprinkled by a shower, it is in the condition which the country people call varia and cariosa, that is to say, when, after a long drought, a light rain has moistened the surface of the upturned sod but has not soaked to the bottom of the furrow.
“Those plough lands which are cultivated when they are miry are rendered useless for an entire year—they can be neither seeded nor harrowed nor hoed—but those which are worked when they are in the state which has been described as varia, remain sterile for three years on end. We should, therefore, follow a medium course and plough when the land neither lacks moisture nor yet is deep in marsh.”
31 Columella (II, 13) justly says about manure, “Wherefore if it is, as it would seem to be, the thing of the greatest value to the farmer, I consider that it should be studied with the greatest care, especially since the ancient authors, while they have not altogether neglected it, have nevertheless discussed it with too little elaboration.” He goes on (II, 14) to lay down rules about the compost heap which should be written in letters of gold in every farm house.
“I appreciate that there are certain kinds of farms on which it is impossible to keep either live stock or birds, yet even in such places it is a lazy farmer who lacks manure: for he can collect leaves, rubbish from the hedge rows, and droppings from the high ways: without giving offence, and indeed earning gratitude, he can cut ferns from his neighbour’s land: and all these things he can mingle with the sweepings of the courtyard: he can dig a pit, like that we have counselled for the protection of stable manure, and there mix together ashes, sewage, and straw, and indeed every waste thing which is swept up on the place. But it is wise to bury a piece of oak wood in the midst of this compost, for that will prevent venomous snakes from lurking in it. This will suffice for a farm without live stock.”
One can see in Flanders today the happy land smiling its appreciation of farm management such as this, but what American farmer has yet learned this kind of conservation of his natural resources.
32 The occupants of the motor cars which now roll so swiftly and so comfortably along the French national highway from Paris to Tours, through the pleasant pays de Beauce, can see this admirable and economical method of manuring still in practice. The sheep are folded and fed at night, under the watchful eye of the shepherd stretched at ease in his wheeled cabin, on the land which was ploughed the day before.
33 These of course are all legumes. The intelligent farmer today sits under his shade tree and meditates comfortably upon the least expensive and most profitable labour on his farm, the countless millions of beneficent bacteria who, his willing slaves, are ceaselessly at work during hot weather forming root tubercles on his legumes, be it clover or cow peas, and so fixing for their lord the free atmospheric nitrogen contained in the soil. As Macaulay would say, “every school boy knows” now that leguminous root nodules are endotrophic mycorrhiza,—but the Romans did not! Nevertheless their empirical practice of soil improvement with legumes was quite as good as ours. Varro (I, 23) explains the Roman method of green manuring more fully than Cato. Columella (II, 13) insists further that if the hay is saved the stubble of legumes should be promptly ploughed for he says the roots will evaporate their own moisture and continue to pump the land of its fertility unless they are at once turned over.
If the Romans followed this wise advice they were better farmers than most of us today, for we are usually content to let the stubble dry out before ploughing.
34 Was this ensilage? The ancients had their silo pits, but they used them chiefly as granaries, and as such they are described, by Varro (I, 57, 63), by Columella (I, 6), and by Pliny (XVIII, 30, 73).
35 The extravagant American farmer has not yet learned to feed the leaves of trees, but in older and more economical civilizations the practice is still observed.
36 Amurca was the dregs of olive oil. Cato recommends its use for many purposes in the economy of the farm, for a moth proof (XCVIII), as a relish for cattle (CIII), as a fertilizer (CXXX), and as an anointment for the threshing floor to kill weevil (XCI).
37 There is a similar remedy for scratches in horses, which is traditional in the cavalry service today, and is extraordinarily efficacious.
38 Cf. Pliny H.N. XVII, 267 and Fraser, The Golden Bough, XI, 177. The principle is one of magical homeopathy: as the split reed, when bound together, may cohere and heal by the medicine of the incantation, so may the broken bone.
39 These examples will serve to illustrate how far Cato’s veterinary science was behind his agriculture, and what a curious confusion of native good sense and traditional superstition there was in his method of caring for his live stock. On questions of preventing malady he had the wisdom of experience, but malady once arrived he was a simple pagan. There was a notable advance in the Roman knowledge of how to treat sick cattle in the century after Cato. Cf. Varro, II, 5.
The words of the incantations themselves are mere sound and fury signifying nothing, like the “counting out” rhythms used by children at their games.
40 Cato gives many recipes of household as well as agricultural economy. Out of respect for the pure food law most of them have been here suppressed, but these samples are ventured because Varro mentions them and the editor is advised that some enterprising young ladies in Wisconsin have recently had the courage to put them to the test, and vow that they ate their handiwork! As they live to tell the tale, it is assumed that the recipes are harmless.
41 Cf. the following traditional formula as practised in
Virginia:
A Virginia Recipe for Curing Hams
“Rub each ham separately with ½ teaspoonful of saltpetre (use a small spoon); then rub each ham with a large tablespoonfulof best black pepper; then rub each ham with a gill of molasses (black strap is best).
Then for 1,000 lbs. of ham take 3-1/4 pecks of coarse salt, 2-1/2 lbs. of saltpetre, 2 qts. hickory ashes, 2 qts. molasses, 2 teacupfuls of red pepper.
“Mix all together on the salting table. Then rub each ham with this mixture, and, in packing, spread some of it on each layer of ham. Use no more salt than has been mixed. Pack skin down and let stand for five weeks, then hang in the smoke house for five or six weeks, and smoke in damp weather, using hickory wood.
“As a ham, however well cured, is of no use to civilized man until it is cooked, and as this crowning mystery is seldom revealed out of Virginia, it may not be out of place to record here the process.”
A Virginia Recipe for Cooking Hams
Soak over night in cold water, having first scrubbed the ham with a small brush to remove all the pepper, saltpetre, etc., left from the curing process.
Put on to boil next morning in tepid water, skin downwards, letting it simmer on back of stove, never to boil hard. This takes about four hours (or until it is done, when the ham is supposed to turn over, skin upwards, of its own accord, as it will if the boiler is large enough). Set aside over another night in the water it has boiled in.
The following day, skin and bake in the oven, having covered the ham well with brown sugar, basting at intervals with cider. When it is well baked, take it out of the oven and baste another ten to twenty minutes in the pan on top of the stove. The sugar crust should be quite brown and crisp when done.
To be thoroughly appreciated a ham should be carved on the table, by a pretty woman. A thick slice of ham is a crime against good breeding.
42 It is interesting that Varro has realized the hope, here expressed, that his wisdom might survive for the benefit of the “uttermost generations of men” chiefly in the case of this treatise on Husbandry among the many monuments of his industry and learning. Petrarch in his Epistle to Varro in that first delightful book of Letters to Dead Authors (de rebus familiaribus XXIV, 6) rehearses the loss of Varro’s books and, adapting the thought here expressed in the text, regrets for that reason that Varro cannot be included in that company of men “whom we love even after their death owing to the good and righteous deeds that live after them, men who mold our character by their teaching and comfort us by their example, when the rest of mankind offends both our eyes and our nostrils; men who, though they have gone hence to the common abode of all (as Plautus says in Casina), nevertheless continue to be of service to the living.” If Petrarch had been a farmer he might have saved some of his regret, for Varro is surely, by virtue of the Rerum Rusticarum, a member of the fellowship Petrarch describes.
43 Varro was essentially an antiquary and it is amusing to observe that he is unable to suppress his learning even in his prayers. One is reminded of the anecdote of the New England minister, who, in the course of an unctuous prayer, proclaimed, with magisterial authority, “Paradoxical as it may appear, O Lord, it is nevertheless true, etc.”
44 Following Plato and Xenophon and Cicero, Varro cast his books into the form of dialogues to make them entertaining (“and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice in Wonderland, “without pictures or conversations.”): for the same reason he was careful about his local colour. Thus the scene of this first book, which relates to agriculture proper, is laid at Rome in the temple of Earth on the festival of the Seed Sowing, and the characters bear names of punning reference to the tilling of the soil. Varro was strong on puns, avowing (Cicero Acad. I, 2) that that form of humour made it easier for people of small intelligence to swallow his learning.
45 The story is that when Scipio captured Carthage he distributed the Punic libraries among the native allies, reserving only the agricultural works of Mago, which the Roman Senate subsequently ordered to be translated into Latin, so highly were they esteemed. Probably more real wealth was brought to Rome in the pages of these precious volumes than was represented by all the other plunder of Carthage. “The improving a kingdom in matter of husbandry is better than conquering a new kingdom,” says old Samuel Hartlib, Milton’s friend, in his Legacie. It is a curious fact that as the Romans derived agricultural wisdom from their ancient enemies, so did the English. Cf. Thorold Rogers’ Six Centuries of Work and Wages. “We owe the improvements in English agriculture to Holland. From this country we borrowed, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the cultivation of winter roots, and, at that of the eighteenth, the artificial grasses. The Dutch had practised agriculture with the patient and minute industry of market gardeners. They had tried successfully to cultivate every thing to the uttermost, which could be used for human food, or could give innocent gratification to a refined taste. They taught agriculture and they taught gardening. They were the first people to surround their homesteads with flower beds, with groves, with trim parterres, with the finest turf, to improve fruit trees, to seek out and perfect edible roots and herbs at once for man and cattle. We owe to the Dutch that scurvy and leprosy have been banished from England, that continuous crops have taken the place of barren fallows, that the true rotation of crops has been discovered and perfected, that the population of these islands has been increased and that the cattle and sheep in England are ten times what they were in numbers and three times what they were in size and quality.”
46 The Roman proverb which Agrius had in mind reminds one of the witty French woman’s comment upon the achievement of St. Denis in walking several miles to Montmartre, after his head had been cut off, (as all the world can still see him doing in the verrières of Notre Dame de Chartres): “en pareil cas, ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte.”
47 To this glowing description of agricultural Italy in the Augustan age may be annexed that of Machiavelli on the state of Tuscany in his youth: “Ridotta tutta in somma pace e tranquillità, coltivata non meno ne’ luoghi più montuosi e più sterili che nelle pianure e regioni più fertili….” It is our privilege to see the image of this fruitful cultivation of the mountain tops not only in Machiavelli’s prose, but on the walls of the Palazzo Riccardi in Gozzoli’s Journey of the Magi, where, like King Robert of Sicily, the Magi crossed
“Into the lovely land of Italy
Whose loveliness was more resplendent made
By the mere passing of that cavalcade.”
It seems almost a pity to contrast with these the comment of a careful and sympathetic student of the agricultural Italy of the age of King Umberto: “To return to the question of the natural richness of agricultural Italy,” says Dr. W.N. Beauclerk in his Rural Italy (1888), “we may compare the words of the German ballad: ‘In Italy macaroni ready cooked rains from the sky, and the vines are festooned with sausages,’ with the words today rife throughout the Kingdom, ‘Rural Italy is poor and miserable, and has no future in store for her.’ The fact is that Italy is rich in capabilities of production, but exhausted in spontaneous fertility. Her vast forests have been cut down, giving place to sterile and malarious ground: the plains and shores formerly covered with wealthy and populous cities are now deserted marshes: Sardinia and other ancient granaries of the Roman Empire are empty and unproductive: two-thirds of the Kingdom are occupied by mountains impossible of cultivation, and the remainder is to a large extent ill-farmed and unremunerative. To call Italy the ‘Garden of Europe’ under these circumstances seems cruel irony.”
48 As we may assume that the yields of wine of which Fundanius boasts were the largest of which Varro had information in the Italy of his time, it is interesting to compare them with the largest yields of the most productive wine country of France today. Fifteen cullei, or three hundred amphorae per jugerum, is the equivalent of 2700 gallons per acre: while according to P. Joigneaux, in the Livre de la Ferme, the largest yields in modern France are in the Midi (specifically Herault), where in exceptional cases they amount to as much as 250 hectolitres to the hectare, or say 2672 gallons per acre. It may be noted that the yields of the best modern wines, like Burgundy, are less than half of this, and it is probable that the same was true of the vinum Setinum of Augustus, if not of the Horatian Massic.
49 The modern Italian opinion of farming in a fertile but unhealthy situation is expressed with a grim humour in the Tuscan proverb: “in Maremma s’arricchisce in un anno, si muore in sei mesi.”
50 This is Keil’s ingenious interpretation of an obscure passage. We may compare the English designation of a church yard as “God’s acre.” What Licinius Crassus actually did was, while haranguing from the rostra, to turn his back upon the Comitium, where the Senators gathered, and address himself directly to the people assembled in the Forum. The act was significant as indicating that the sovereignty had changed place.
51 Tremelius Scrofa was the author of a treatise on agriculture, which Columella cites, but which has not otherwise survived.
52 “It was a received opinion amongst the antients that a large, busy, well peopled village, situated in a country thoroughly cultivated, was a more magnificent sight than the palaces of noblemen and princes in the midst of neglected lands.” Harte’s Essays on Husbandry, p. 11. This is a delightful book, the ripe product of a gentleman and a scholar. In the middle of the eighteenth century it advocated what we are still advocating—that agriculture, as the basis of national wealth, deserves the study and attention of the highest intelligence; specifically it proposed the introduction of new grasses and forage crops (alfalfa above all others) to enable the land to support more live stock. It was published in 1764, just after France had ceded to England by the Treaty of Paris all of her possessions in America east of the Mississippi River; and not the least interesting passages of Harte’s book are those proposing an agricultural development of the newly acquired territory between Lake Illinois (Michigan) and the Mississippi, which he suggests may be readily brought under cultivation with the aid of the buffaloes of the country. He shrewdly says: “Maize may be raised in this part of Canada to what quantity we please, for it grows there naturally in great abundance.” It happened, however, that a few years later, in 1778, Col. George Rogers Clark of Virginia made a certain expedition through the wilderness to the British outpost at Vincennes, which saved England the trouble of taking Harte’s advice, but that it has not been neglected may be evident from the fact that less than a century and a half later, or in 1910, the State of Illinois produced 415 million bushels of maize, besides twice as much oats and half as much wheat as did old England herself in the same year of grace.
Harte was the travelling governor of that young Mr. Stanhope, to whom my lord Chesterfield wrote his famous worldly wise letters. He was the author also of a Life of Gustavus Adolphus, which was a failure. Dr. Johnson, who liked Harte, said: “It was unlucky in coming out on the same day with Robertson’s History of Scotland. His Husbandry, however, is good.” (Boswell, IV, 91). With this judgment of Dr. Johnson there has been, and must be, general concurrence.
53 Pliny records (H.N. XVIII, 7) that at Lucullus’ farm there was less ground for ploughing than of floor for sweeping.
54 Eggs were the first course, as apples were the last, at a
Roman dinner, hence the saying “ab ovo usque ad mala.”
55 Cf. Gilbert Murray’s version of Euripides’ Troades, 799:
In Salamis, filled with the foaming
Of billows and murmur of bees,
Old Telamon stayed from his roaming,
Long ago, on a throne of the seas;
Looking out on the hills olive laden,
Enchanted, where first from the earth.
The gray-gleaming fruit of the Maiden
Athena had birth.
The physical reason why the olive flourished in Attica, as Theophrastus points out (C.P.V. II, 2), was because it craves a thin soil, and that of Attica, with its out-croppings of calcareous rock, suits the olive perfectly, while fit for little else agricultural.
56 In the Geoponica (XIII, 15) there has been preserved a remedy for a similar evil, which, in all fairness, should be credited to Saserna. In any event, it is what the newspapers used to call “important, if true,” viz: “If ever you come into a place where fleas abound, cry Och! Och! ([Greek: och, och]) and they will not touch you.”
57 The editor of an Iowa farm journal, who has been making a study of agricultural Europe, has recently reported an interesting comparison between the results of extensive farming as practised in Iowa and intensive farming as practised in Bavaria. He begins with the thesis that the object of agriculture is to put the energy of the sun’s rays into forms which animals and human beings can use, and, reducing the crop production of each country to thermal units, he finds “that for every man, woman and child connected with farming in Iowa 14,200 therms of sun’s energy were imprisoned, while for every man, woman and child connected with farming in Bavaria only 2,600 therms were stored up. In other words, the average Iowa farmer is six times as successful in his efforts to capture the power of the sun’s rays as the average Bavarian farmer. On the other hand, the average acre of Iowa land is only about one-seventh as successful as the average acre of Bavarian land in supporting those who live on it. If we look on land as the unit, then the Bavarians get better results than we in Iowa, but if we look on human labor as the unit, then the Iowa farmers are far ahead of those of Bavaria.”
It may be remarked that if the Iowa farmer, who gets his results by the use of machinery, was to adopt also the intensive practice of the Bavarian farmer, he would secure at once the greatest efficiency per acre and per man, and that is the true purpose of agriculture.
58 It is one of the charms of Varro’s treatise that he always insists cheerfully on the pleasure to be derived from the land. It is the same spirit which Conington has remarked cropping out in many places in Virgil’s Georgics—the joy of the husbandman in his work, as in the “iuvat” of
“iuvat Ismara Baccho Conserere, atque olea magnum vestire Taburnum.”
This is the blessed “surcease of sorrow” of which the crowded life of the modern city knows nothing: but, as the practical Roman indicates, it will not support life of its own mere motion. Cf. Dr. Johnson’s picture of Shenstone: “He began from this time to entangle his walks and to wind his waters: which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skillful. His house was mean, and he did not improve it: his care was of his grounds…. In time his expences brought clamours about him, that overpowered the lambs’ bleat and the linnets’ song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fawns and fairies.”
59 Walter of Henley, in thirteenth century England, drove home a shrewd comment on the country gentleman who farms without keeping accounts and thinks he is engaged in a profitable industry. “You know surely,” he says, “that an acre sown with wheat takes three ploughings, except lands which are sown yearly, and that one with another each ploughing is worth six pence, and harrowing a penny, and on the acre it is necessary to sow at least two bushels. Now two bushels at Michaelmas are worth at least twelve pence, and weeding a half penny and reaping five pence, and carrying in August a penny: the straw will pay for the threshing. At three times your sowing you ought to have six bushels, worth three shillings; and the cost amounts to three shillings and three half pence, and the ground is yours and not reckoned.”
Of Walter of Henley little is known, but it is conjectured that he was the bailiff of the manors near Henley which belonged to the Abbey of Canterbury. His curious and valuable Dite de Hosebondrie, which is as original in its way as Cato’s treatise, being entirely free from mere literary tradition, is now available to the modern reader in a translation, from the original barbarous English law French, by Elizabeth Lamond, made for the Royal Historical Society in 1890.
60 This was just before Pharsalia, and the army was that of
Pompey which Varro had joined after surrendering to Caesar in Spain.
61 In this enumeration of trees Varro does not include the chestnut which is now one of the features of the Italian mountain landscape and furnishes support for a considerable part of the Italian population, who subsist on necci, those indigestible chestnut flour cakes, just as the Irish peasants do on potatoes. The chestnut was late in getting a foothold in Italy but it was there in Varro’s day. He mentions the nuts as part of the diet of dormice (III, 15).
By the thirteenth century chestnuts had become an established article of human food in Italy. Pietro Crescenzi (1230-1307) describes two varieties, the cultivated and the wild, and quotes the Arabian physician Avicenna to the effect that chestnuts are “di tarda digestione ma di buono nuttimento.” It is perhaps for this very reason that chestnut bread is acceptable to those engaged in heavy labor. Fynes Moryson says in his Itinerary (1617) that maslin bread made of a mixture of rye and wheat flour was used by labourers in England because it “abode longer in the stomach and was not so soon digested with their labour.”
Crescenzi, who was a lawyer and a judge, says in his preface that he had left his native Bologna because of the civil strifes, had taken foreign service in several parts of Italy, and so had opportunity to see the world. He wrote his book on agriculture because, as he says, of all the things he learned on his travels there was nothing “piu a bondevole, niuna piu dolce, et niuna piu degna de l’huomo libero,” a sentiment which Socrates had expressed sixteen hundred years earlier and which was echoed six hundred years later by another far-sighted Italian, the statesman Cavour.
62 The white chalk which Scrofa saw used as manure in Transalpine Gaul, when he was serving in the army under Julius Caesar, was undoubtedly marl, the use of which in that region as in Britain was subsequently noted by Pliny (H.N. XVII, 4).
There were no deposits of marl in Italy, and so the Romans knew nothing of its use, from experience, but Pliny’s treatment of the subject shows a sound source of information. In England, where several kinds of marl are found in quantities, its use was probably never discontinued after the Roman times. Walter of Henley discusses its use in the thirteenth century, and Sir Anthony Fitzherbert continues the discussion in the sixteenth century. In connection with the history of the use of marl in agriculture may be cited the tender tribute which Arthur Young recorded on the tombstone of his wife in Bradfield Church. The lady’s chief virtue appears to have been, in the memory of her husband, that she was “the great-grand-daughter of John Allen, esq. of Lyng House in the County of Norfolk, the first person according to the Comte de Boulainvilliers, who there used marl.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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).
67 On the socialistic principle of Strepsiades in Aristophanes’ Clouds that the use of geometry is to divide the land into equal parts.
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.
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!
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.
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!”
72 Varro here seems to forget the unities. He speaks in his own person, when Scrofa has the floor.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
84 The Julian calendar, which took effect on January 1, B.C. 45, had been in use only eight years when Varro was writing.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
94 See the explanation of what the Romans meant by terra varia in the note on Cato V. ante, p. 40.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
101 What the French call, from the same practice, vin de rognure.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
125 Aristotle (H.A. I, 9.1) refers to this opinion and denounces it as erroneous.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.’
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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].”
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
155 ‘That is the beste grease that is to a shepe, to grease hym in the mouthe with good meate,’ says Sir Anthony Fitzherbert.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
163 The sestertius was one quarter of a denarius, or, say, the equivalent of five cents. It was also called nummus, as we say “nickel.” The ordinary unit used by the Romans in reckoning considerable sums of money was 1,000 sesterces, which may accordingly be translated as the equivalent of (say) $50. Axius’ jackass thus cost $2,000, while Seius’ income from his villa was $2,500 per annum, that of Varro’s aunt from her aviary was $3,000, and that of Axius from his farm $1,500. Cicero records that Axius was a money lender, which explains the fun here made of his avarice.
164 Columella, writing about one hundred years after Varro, refers to this passage and says that luxury had so developed since Varro’s time that it no longer required an extraordinary occasion, like a triumph, to bring the price of thrushes to three denarii a piece, but that that had become a current quotation.
165 A minerval was the fee (of Minerva) paid to a school teacher.
166 The inventor of the auspices ex tripudiis or the feeding of chickens was evidently an ingenious poultry fancier who succeeded in securing the care of his favourites at the public charge.
167 This was L. Marcius Philippus, the orator mentioned by Horace (Epist. I, 7, 46), who was Consul in B.C. 91, and was celebrated for his luxurious habits, which his wealth enabled him to gratify. His son married the widow of C. Octavius and so became the step-father of the Emperor Augustus.
168 This was turdus pilaris, the variety of thrush which is called field fare.
169 The traveller by railway from Rome to Naples passes near Varro’s estate of Casinum, and if he stops at the mediaeval town of San Germano to visit the neighbouring Badia di Monte Cassino, where the “angelic doctor” Thomas Aquinas was educated, he will find Varro’s memory kept green: for he will be entertained at the Albergo Varrone (“very fair but bargaining advisable,” sagely counsels Mr. Baedeker) and on his way up the long winding road to the Abbey there will be pointed out to him the river Rapido, on the banks of which Varro’s aviary stood, and nearby what is reputed to be the site of the old polymath’s villa which Antony polluted with the orgies Cicero described in the second Philippic. Antony’s destruction of his library was a great blow to Varro, but one likes to think that his ghost can take satisfaction in the maintenance, so near the haunts of his flesh, of such a noble collection of books as is the continuing pride of the Abbey on the mountain above.
170 Varro’s Museum, or study where he wooed the Muses, on his estate at Casinum was not unlike that of Cicero at his native Arpinum, which he described (de Leg. II, 3) agreeably as on an island in the cold and clear Fibrenus just above its confluence with the more important river Liris, where, like a plebeian marrying into a patrician family, it lost its name but contributed its freshness. The younger Pliny built a study in the garden of his Laurentine villa near Ostia, which he describes (II, 17) with enthusiasm: “horti diaeta est, amores mei, re vera amores”: and here he found refuge from the tumult of his household during the festivities of the Saturnalia, which corresponded with our Christmas. In the ante bellum days every Virginia gentleman had such an “office” in his house yard where he pretended to transact his farm business, but where actually he was wont to escape from the obligations of family and continuous hospitality.
171 The commentators on this interesting but obscure description of Varro’s aviary have at this point usually endeavoured to explain the arrangements of the chamber under the lantern of the tholus with respect to its use as a dining room which Varro frequented himself, and hence have been amused into all kinds of difficulties of interpretation. The references to the convivae are what lead them astray, and it remained for Keil to suggest that this was a playful allusion to the birds themselves, a conclusion which is strengthened by Varro’s previous statement of the failure of Lucullus’ attempt to maintain a dining room in his aviary.
172 Cf. Vitruvius, I, 6: “Andronicus Cyrrhestes built at Athens an octagonal marble tower, on the sides of which were carved images of the eight winds, each on the side opposite that from which it blew. On the pyramidal roof of this tower he placed a bronze Triton holding a rod in his right hand, and so contrived that the Triton, revolving with the wind, always stood opposed to that which prevailed, and thus pointed with his rod to the image on the tower of the wind that was blowing at the moment.” The ruins of this Tower of the Winds may still be seen in Athens. There is a picture of it in Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities in the article Andronicus.
173 One ventures to translate athletoe comitiorum by Mr.
Gladstone’s famous phrase.
174 Reading “tesserulas coicientem in loculum.”
175 A French translator might better convey the intention of the pun, contained in the ducere serram of the text, by the locution, une prise de bec.
176 It probably will not comfort the ultimate consumer who holds in such odium the celebrated “Schedule K” of the Payne-Aldrich tariff, to realize that the American wool grower puts no higher value on his sheep than did his Roman ancestor, as revealed by this quotation from the stock yards of Varro’s time. It is interesting, however, to the breeder to know that a good price for wool has always stimulated the production of the best stock. Strabo says that the wool of Turdetania in Spain was so celebrated in the generation after Varro that a ram of the breed (the ancestors of the modern Merino) fetched a talent, say $1,200; a price which may be compared with that of the prize ram recently sold in England for export to the Argentine for as much as a thousand pounds sterling, and considered a good commercial investment at that. Doubtless the market for Rosean mules comforted Axius in his investment of the equivalent of £400 in a breeding jack.
177 In feudal times the right to maintain a dove cote was the exclusive privilege of the lord of the manor. According to their immemorial custom, which Varro notices, the pigeons preyed on the neighbourhood crops and were detested by the community in consequence. During the French revolution they were one of the counts in the indictment of the land-owning aristocracy, and in the event the pigeons as well as their owners had the sins of their forefathers justly visited upon them. The American farmer who has a pigeon-keeping neighbour and is restrained by the pettiness of the annoyance from making a point on their trespasses, feels something of the blind and impotent wrath of the French peasant against the whole pigeon family.
178 It appears that the Romans actually hired men to chew the food intended for cramming birds, so as to relieve the unhappy victims even of such exercise as they might get from assimilating their diet. Columella (VII, 10) in discussing the diet of thrushes deprecates this practice, sagely saying that the wages of the chewers are out of proportion to the benefit obtained, and that any way the chewers swallow a good part of what they are given to macerate.
The typical tramp of the comic papers who is forever looking for occupation without work might well envy these Roman professional chewers. Not even Dr. Wiley’s “poison squad” employed to test food products could compare with them.
179 These prices of $10 and $50 and even $80 a pair for pigeons, large as they seem, were surpassed under the Empire. Columella says (VIII, 8): “That excellent author, M. Varro, tells us that in his more austere time it was not unusual for a pair of pigeons to sell for a thousand sesterces, a price at which the present day should blush, if we may believe the report that men have been found to pay for a pair as much as four thousand nummi.” ($200.)
180 The market for chickens and eggs in the United States would doubtless astonish the people of Delos as much as the statistics do us (ipsa suas mirantur Gargara messes!). It is solemnly recorded that the American hen produces a billion and a quarter dozen eggs per annum, of a value greater than that of either the wheat or cotton crops, and yet there are many of us who cannot get our hens to lay more than a hundred eggs a year!
181 Reading ad infirma crura. This practice is explained more at length by Columella (VIII, 2, 3) who specifies the spurs, calcaribus inustis.
Buffon, who describes a ‘practice of trimming the combs of capons, adds (V, 302) an interesting account of an experiment which he says he had made “une espece de greffe animale”: after trimming the comb of a growing cockerel his budding spurs were cut out and grafted on the roots of the comb, where they took root and flourished, growing to a length of two and a half inches, in some cases curving forward like the horns of a ram, and in others turning back like those of a goat.
182 The dusting yard which Varro here describes was in the open, but Columella (VIII, 3) advises what modern poultry farmers pride themselves upon having recently discovered,—a covered scratching pen strewn with litter to afford exercise for the hens in rough weather. It will be observed that, so far as ventilation is concerned, Varro recommends a hen house open to the weather: this is another standard of modern practice which has had a hard struggle against prejudice. Columella adds two more interesting bits of advice, that for the comfort of the hens the roosts should be cut square, and for cleanliness their water trough should be enclosed leaving only openings large enough to receive a hen’s head. With so much enlightenment and sanitation one would expect one or the other of these Romans to tell us of some “teeming hen” like Herrick’s who laid “her egg each day.”
We are proud to be able to cite the eminent Roseburg Industrious Biddy who, in the year of grace 1912, achieved the championship of America with a record of 266 eggs in ten months and nineteen days, and was sold for $800: but Varro is content to suggest that a hen will lay more eggs in a season than she can hatch, and the conservative Columella (VIII, 5) that the number of eggs depends upon diet.
183 The guinea fowl got their Greek name, meleagrides, because the story was that the sisters of Meleager were turned into guinea hens. Pliny (H.N. X, 38) says that they fight every year on Meleager’s tomb. It is a fact that they are a pugnacious fowl. Buffon says that guinea fowl disappeared from Europe in the Dark Ages and were not known again until the route to the Indies via the Cape of Good Hope was opened when they were imported anew from the west coast of Africa.
184 Reading, “propter fastidium hominum.” Cf. Pliny (X, 38), whose explanation is “propter ingratum virus.”
185 There is a Virginia practice of feeding a fat turkey heavily on bread soaked in wine or liquor just before he is killed, the result being that as the turkey gets into that condition which used to put our ancestors under the table, he relaxes all his tendons and so is sweeter and more tender when he comes above the table. There is a humanitarian side to the practice which should recommend it even to the W.C.T.U. as well as to the epicure.
186 Many thousands of geese used to be driven every year to Rome from the land of the Morini in Northern Gaul, but the Germans are the modern consumers. A British consular report says that in addition to the domestic supply a special “goose train” of from fifteen to forty cars is received daily in Berlin from Russia. It would seem that the goose that lays the golden egg has emigrated to Muscovy. Buffon says that the introduction of the Virginia turkey into Europe drove the goose off the tables of all civilized peoples.
187 Columella (VIII, 14) repeats this myth, but Aristotle (H.A. V, 2, 9) says that geese bathe after breeding. Buffon gives a Gallic touch, “ces oiseaux preludent aux actes de l’amour en allant d’abord s’egayer dans l’eau.”
188 Reading seris. It is the Cichorium endivia of
Linnaeus. Cf. Pliny (H.N. XX, 32.)
189 Varro does not mention it, but the Romans knew and prized pâté de foie gras under the name ficatum, which indicates that they produced it by cramming their geese with a diet of figs. Cf. Horace’s verse “pinguibus et ficis pastum iecur anseris albi.”
In Toulouse, whence now comes the best of this dainty of the epicure, the geese are crammed daily with a dough of corn meal mixed with the oil of poppies, fed through a tin funnel, which is introduced into the esophagus of the unhappy bird. At the end of a month the stertorous breathing of the victim proclaims the time of sacrifice to Apicius. The liver is expected to weigh a kilogram, (say two pounds), while at least two kilograms of fat are saved in addition, to garnish the family plat of vegetables during the remainder of the year.
190 Reading foeles, which Keller, in his account of the fauna of ancient Italy in the Cambridge Companion to Latin Studies, identifies with Martes vulgaris. Sir Anthony Fitzherbert calls them fullymartes. It does not appear that the Romans had in Varro’s time brought from Egypt our household cat, F. maniculata. They used weasels and tame snakes for catching mice.
191 Darwin (Animals and Plants, I, 8) cites this passage and argues that Varro’s advice to cover the duck yard with netting to keep the ducks from flying out is evidence that in Varro’s time ducks were not entirely domesticated, and hence that the modern domestic duck is the same species as the wild duck. It may be noted, however, that Varro gives the same advice about netting the chicken yard, having said that chickens had been domesticated from the beginning of time.
192 The ancient Etruscan city of Tarquinii is now known as Corneto. The wild sheep which Lippinus there kept in his game preserves were probably the mouflon which are still hunted in Sardinia and Corsica, though they may have been the Phrygian wild sheep (Aegoceros argali) which Varro mentions in Book II. Pliny (H.N. VIII, 211) says that this Lippinus was the first of the Romans to keep wild animals enclosed; that he established his preserves shortly before the Civil Wars, and that he soon had imitators.
193 Reading * * * * [Transcriber’s note: the preceding four *s are actually four instances of the “infinity” symbol (like a digit 8 rotated horizontally)]passum. The Roman mile, mille passuum, was 142 yards less than the English mile.
194 Of the three kinds of hares mentioned by Varro the “common Italian kind” was L. timidus, a roast shoulder of which Horace vaunts as a delicacy: the Alpine hare was L. variabilis, which grows white on the approach of winter: and the cuniculus was the common rabbit known to our English ancestors as the coney. Strabo records (Casaub, 144) that the inhabitants of the Gymnesian (Balearic) Islands in Spain sent a deputation to Augustus to request a military force to exterminate the pest of rabbits, for such was their multitude that the people were being crowded out of their homes by them, in which their plight was that of modern Australia. They were usually hunted in Spain with muzzled ferrets imported from Africa.
195 The edible snail, helix pomatia, L., is still an article of commerce in France and Italy. They prey upon vines and give evidence of their appreciation of the best by abounding in the vineyards of the Cote d’or, the ancient Burgundy. There at the end of summer they are gathered for the double purpose of protecting the vines and delighting the epicure: are then stored in a safe place until cold weather, when they considerately seal up their own shells with a calcareous secretion and so are shipped to market.
Here is the recipe for ‘escargots à la bourguignonne,’ which despite the prejudice engendered by Leviticus (XI, 30.) may be recommended to the American palate jaded by beefsteak and potatoes and the high cost of living: “Mettre les escargots a bouillir pendant 5 a 10 minutes dans de l’eau salée, les retirer de leur coquille, les laver a l’eau froide pour les debarrasser du limon, les cuire dans un court-bouillon fortement assaisonné. Apres cuisson les replacer dans le coquille bien nettoyee, en les garnissant au fond et par dessus d’une farce de beurre frais manipule avec un fin hachis de persil, cerfeuil, ail, echalote, sel et poivre. Avant de servir, faire chauffer au four.”
196 Reading LXXX quadrantes. A comparison may be made of this capacity with that of the ordinary snail known to the Romans, for their smallest unit of liquid measure was called a cochlear, or snail shell, and contained.02 of a modern pint, or, as we may say, a spoonful: indeed the French word cuiller is derived from cochlear.
197 It is perhaps well to remind the American reader that the European dormouse (Myoxus glis. Fr. loir. Ger. siebenschlafer) is rather a squirrel than a mouse, and that he is still esteemed a dainty edible, as he was by the Romans: indeed when fat, just before he retires to hibernate, he might be preferred to ’possum and other strange dishes on which some hospitable Americans regale themselves and the patient palates of touring Presidents. In his treatise De re culinaria Apicius gives a recipe for a ragout of dormice which sounds appetizing.
198 Darwin (Animals and Plants, XVIII) says: “I have never heard of the dormouse breeding in captivity.”
199 Varro makes no mention of tea and bread and butter as part of the diet of a dormouse; so we are better able to understand his abstinence at the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland. As Martial (III, 58) calls him somniculosus, it is probable that his table manners on that occasion were nothing new and that his English and German names were always justified.
200 This is one of Varro’s puns which requires a surgical operation to get it into one’s head. Appius is selected to talk about bees because his name has some echo of the sound of apis, the word for bee.
201 The study of bees was as interesting to the ancients as it is to us. There have survived from among many others the treatises of Aristotle, Varro, Virgil, Columella and Pliny, but they are all made up, as Maeterlinck has remarked, of “erreurs charmantes,” and for that reason the antique lore of bees is read perhaps to best advantage in the mellifluous verses of the fourth Georgic, which follow Varro closely.
202 He might have said also that the hexagonal form of construction employed by bees produces the largest possible result with the least labour and material. Maeterlinck rehearses (La Vie des Abeilles, 138) the result of the study of this problem in the highest mathematics:
“Réaumur avait proposé au célèbre mathematicien Koenig le problem suivant: ‘Entre toutes les cellules hexagonales a fond pyramidal compose de trois rhombes semblables et égaux, determiner celle qui peut être construite avec le moins de matière?’ Koenig trouva qu’une telle cellule avait son fond fait de trois rhombes dont chaque grand angle était de 109 degrés, 26 minutes et chaque petit de 70 degrés, 34 minutes. Or, un autre savant, Maraldi, ayant mesuré aussi exactement que possible les angles des rhombes construits par les abeilles fixa les grands à 109 degrés, 28 minutes, et les petits a 70 degrés, 32 minutes. Il n’y avait done, entre les deux solutions qu’une difference de 2 minutes. II est probable que l’erreur, s’il y en a une, doit être imputee a Maraldi plutot qu’aux abeilles, car aucun instrument ne permet de mesurer avec une precision infaìllible les angles des cellules qui ne sont pas assez nettlement definis.”
Maclaurin, a Scotch physicist, checked Koenig’s computations and reported to the Royal Society in London in 1743 that he found a solution in exact accord with Maraldi’s measurements, thereby completely justifying the mathematics of the bee architect.
203 The Romans were as curious and as constant in the use of perfumes as we are of tobacco. It is perhaps well to remember that they might find our smoke as offensive as we would their unguents.
204 Indeed one of the marvels of nature is the service which certain bees perform for certain plants in transferring their fertilizing pollen which has no other means of transportation. Darwin is most interesting on this subject.
205 The ancients, even Aristotle, did not know that the queen bee is the common mother of the hive. They called her the king, and it remained for Swammerdam in the seventeenth century to determine with the microscope this important fact. From that discovery has developed our modern knowledge of the bee; that the drones are the males and are suffered by the (normally) sterile workers to live only until one of them has performed his office of fertilizing once for all the new queen in that nuptial flight, so dramatically fatal to the successful swain, which Maeterlinck has described with wonderful rhetoric, whereupon the workers massacre the surviving males without mercy. This is the “driving out” which Varro mentions.
206 This picture of the queen bee is hardly in accord with modern observations. It seems that while the queen is treated with the utmost respect, she is rather a royal prisoner than a ruler, and, after her nuptial flight, is confined to her function of laying eggs incessantly unless she may be unwillingly dragged forth to lead a swarm. Maeterlinck thus pictures (La Vie des Abeilles, 174) her existence with a Gallic pencil:
“Elle n’aura aucune des habitudes, aucunes des passions que nous croyons inherentes à l’abeille. Elle n’eprouvera ni le desir du soleil, ni le besoin de l’espace et mourra sans avoir visite une fleur. Elle passera son existence dans l’ombre et l’agitation de la foule à la recherche infatigable de berceaux à peupler. En revanche, elle connaitra seule l’inquietude de l’amour.”
207 It would have interested Axius to know that the annual consumption of honey in the United States today is from 100 to 125 million pounds and that the crop has a money value of at least ten million dollars. To match Seius, we might put forward a bee farmer in California who produces annually 150,000 pounds of honey from 2,000 hives.
208 Maeterlinck has made a charming picture of this habit of propinquity of the bee-stand to the human habitation. He describes (La Vie des Abeilles, 14) the old man who taught him to love bees when he was a boy in Flanders, an old man whose entire happiness “consistait aux beautés d’un jardin et parmi ces beautés la mieux aimee et la plus visitées etait un roucher, composé de douze cloches de paille qu’il avait peint, les unes de rose vif, les autres de jaune clair, la plupart d’un bleu tendre, car il avail observé, bien avant les experiences de Sir John Lubbock, que le bleu est la couleur preferée des abeilles. Il avait installé ce roucher centre le mur blanchi de la maison, dans l’angle que formait une des ces savoureuses et fraiches cuisines hollondaises aux dressoirs de faience ou étincalaient les etains et les cuivres qui, par la porte ouverte, se reflétaient dans un canal paisible. Et l’eau chargés d’images familières, sous un rideau de peupliers, guidait les regards jusqu’au répos d’un horizon de moulins et de prés.”
209 Reading Apiastro. This is the Melissa officinalis of
Linnaeus. Cf. Pliny, XX, 45 and XXI, 86.
210 Bee keepers attribute to Reaumur the invention of the modern glass observation hive, which has made possible so much of our knowledge of the bee, but it may be noted that Pliny (H.N. XXI, 47) mentions hives of “lapis specularis,” some sort of talc, contrived for the purpose of observing bees at work. The great advance in bee hives is, however, the sectional construction attributed to Langstroth and developed in America by Root.
211 Columella, (IX, 14) referring to the myth of the generation of bees in the carcase of an ox (out of which Virgil made the fable of the pastor Aristaeus in the Fourth Georgic), explains the practice mentioned in the text with the statement “hic enim quasi quadam cognatione generis maxime est apibus aptus.” The plastering of wicker hives with ox dung persisted and is recommended in the seventeenth century editions of the Maison Rustique.
213 This is a mistake upon which Aristotle could have corrected Varro.
214 After studying the commentators on this obscure passage,
I have elected to follow the emendation of Ursinus, which, although
Keil sneers at its license, has the advantage of making sense.
217 The philosophy of the bee is not as selfish as that human principle which Varro attributes to them. The hive does not send forth its “youth” to found a colony, but, on the contrary, abandons its home and its accumulated store of wealth to its youth and itself ventures forth under the leadership of the old queen to face the uncertainties of the future, leaving only a small band of old bees to guard the hive and rear the young until the new queen shall have supplied a new population.
219 Pliny (H.N. IX, 81) relates that this loan was made to supply the banquet on the occasion of one of the triumphs of Caesar the dictator, but Pliny puts the loan at six thousand fishes.
220 It is impossible to translate this pun into English, dulcis being the equivalent of both “fresh” and “agreeable,” and amara of “salt” and “disagreeable.” A French translator would have at his command doux and amer.
221 Cf. Pliny (H.N. II, 96): “In Lydia the islands called Calaminae are not only driven about by the wind, but may even be pushed at pleasure from place to place, by which means many people saved themselves in the Mithridatic war. There are some small islands in the Nymphaeus called the Dancers, because, when choruses are sung, they move in tune with the measure of the music.”
222 Reading in ius vocare, with the double entendre of service in a sauce and bringing to justice.