A LATIN FARMER.
IT is certainly a remarkable fact, as Mr. Lloyd Storr-Best remarks in an introduction to his admirable translation of Varro's "Rerum Rusticarum," just added to Bohn's Classical Lthrary, that out of the enormous mass of writing which Varro left behind him, a treatise on farming should be the only work which remains to us in anything approaching com- pleteness. Varro was eighty-four when he died, and he had then, he tells us in one of his prefaces, written four hundred and ninety books. Less than ten remain, and six of these arc mutilated. One work in forty-one books, the" Antiquities Human and Divine," survived almost till the Renaissance, and then disappeared; Petrarch lent the books to his old master, who pawned them, and died before they could be found and redeemed. And here, for the first time in a good translation, we have Varro's experience and advice on farming, as fresh and as sound to-day in its main teaching as on the day when he sat down, in his eightieth year, to write a treatise on the subject for his wife. Sound, indeed. we should expect the writing of a practical Latin farmer to be, for human knowledge of the natural processes of agri- culture goes back to a date long before the period of Latin civilization. But here and there we come across a note which even anticipates knowledge, as when, for instance, Varro in writing on the choice of sites for a farmhouse cautions the builder against the neighbourhood of swampy ground, "because certain minute animals, invisible to the eye, breed there, and, borne by the air, reach the inside of the body by way of the mouth and nose, and cause diseases which are difficult to get rid of." There could hardly be a better modern description of microbes; and there is an amusing sequel to it in the comment of a German scholar, Schneider, writing at the end of the eighteenth century. Columella, following and sometimes explaining, sometimes misunder- standing Varro, writes of marshes breeding " creaturee armed with sharp stings," that is, mosquitoes. Schneider with superior wisdom is incredulous. "Am I to believe that Varro attributed lingering diseases to these small gnats ? Never did any doctor, ancient or modern, make such an assertion." If Schneider had lived a hundred years later, he might have applauded Columella's brilliant
mistake. But there are other Varronian passages which read as fresh and as cogent as anything which we can write to-day on the same subject. He speaks of the decay of agriculture in the country. "Now that nearly all heads of families have deserted scythe and plough, and sneaked within the city walls, preferring to keep their hands astir in theatre and circus rather than amidst corn-crops and vineyards, we contract with people to bring us the corn, whereby we may grow fat, from Africa and Sardinia, and get in the vintage by ship from the islands of Cos or Chios." Whereas, of course, we ought to get the people back to the land again, and, having done so, produce at home the goods which we now import from foreign countries. Where does the Latin farmer end and the modern politician begin ?
How few are the modifications of the simpler processes of farming to which we have won through since the days of Varro may be judged from references to his writing almost at random. Hay-making and corn-reaping, after all, are pro- cesses which go back beyond Latium to Genesis. "When grass has ceased growing and the heat begins to dry it up, it should be cut close with the scythe, and then tossed with forks until thoroughly dry. When it is quite dry it should be made into bundles and then carted to the homestead. Then any bay left on the meadows must be raked up, and the heap thus made added to the rest of the hay." We have added to the scythe the blade of the horse-drawn machine, but Pliny, for that matter, describes a horse-drawn corn-mower which may be a modification of a reaping instrument mentioned by Varro, "a curved piece of wood with a small iron saw at the end. This grasps a bundle of ears, cuts them off, and leaves the stalks standing in the field to be subsequently out close to the ground." Again, we have developed various scientific systems of manuring, and in particular pay a high price for guano. Varro, mentioning various methods of manuring crops and fields, says that he considers the best manure is the sweepings from aviaries where fieldfares and blackbirds are kept, and that the rent paid for aviaries is less in cases where the owner reserves this manure for his own purposes than where it is thrown in as part of the bargain. Or take, on the subject of sales and bargains, the guarantee which the buyer of sheep and cattle exacted from the seller in the market. How would what Varro calls "the time-honoured formula" suit the modern farmer ? "Do you guarantee that those sheep before our eyes, about which the bargain is being made, are genuinely sound in the sense in which a flock of sheep is considered genuinely sound, excluding those blind of one eye, deaf, or minae—that is, with belly devoid of wool—that they do not come from a tainted flock, that possession is good in law, and that the sale is legal?" The warrant asked for in the case of oxen broken to the plough is simpler. "Do you guarantee that these oxen are sound and that the buyer incurs no liability for damage done by them?" One may speculate as to the assurances and reservations which the legally minded Latin would gradually graft on to the simpler barterings of his forefathers; or through what period did the formula become " time-honoured " ? Other customs of field and farm are perhaps less ancient, and would come into existence with the settling of a nomadic race in permanent homes —the planting of trees and the storage of fruit, for instance. "Some people think that apples keep well enough in a storehouse when placed on shelves or a plaster floor; others prefer to have straw under them or even flocks of wool." Those are differences of opinion still unsettled. Olives are best "kept either green in brine or, after being well bruised, in mastic oil." Walnuts can be kept in sand, and so can pomegranates ; you should put unripe pomegranates on the branch into sand in a pot, sink the pot in the ground, and smear the branch with pitch ; then the pomegranates, when taken up, are "not only sound, but bigger than they would ever have been if left hanging on the tree." It sounds a fascinating experiment, a little like the modern plan of separating young potatoes from the root and burying them so that they can be dug up as " new " potatoes at Christmas.
Farm birds and beasts remain the same, though the number of species varies ; the Latin farmer kept some which are strangers to our homesteads—fieldfares, peacocks, snails, and dormice, for instance. He also had a different way of looking at his farm dogs. He bred his sheep-dog for size and courage, and Varro advises him to get white dogs, since they are more easily distinguished in the dark, and will not run the
risk of being killed by the shepherd in mistake for a beast of prey. The house-dog, on the contrary, suggests Columella, enlarging on Varro, should be black ; he should be huge and thick-set, with a head so large as to seem the biggest part of him, and he should have black or yellow gleaming eyes. Being black the burglar thinks he is a shadow, and so the dog "can get at him more safely." Columella is writing, of course, rather of the villa-dog than the watchdog of the farm, but farms could be worth the attention of burglars as well as villas. One of the points of interest in comparing the methods of the ancient and modern stockbreeder is the prices obtainable for animals or birds either for breeding or for table purposes. A common price at Rome for a pair of pigeons of good colour and a good breed was 200 sesterces (Ll 12e.), and a particularly good pair would fetch 1,000 sesterces (£8). Indeed, Varro states that a Roman knight, Lucius Arius, refused 400 denarii (twelve guineas) for a pair of w hich he was particularly proud. Peacocks in the same way were valuable fancy stock. Varro gives an instance of a breeder, M. Aufidius Lurco, who was believed to make an income of more than 60,000 sesterces (PASO) out of his birds. Peacocks were kept in flocks, and successful breeders allowed them as much as a peck of barley each per month. "Their eggs sell now for 5 denarii (3s. 3d.) apiece, while the birds themselves fetch without difficulty 50 denarii a head, and a flock of one hundred easily makes 40,000 sesterces (2324" The peacock was first introduced as a table bird, it is believed, by Quintus Hortensius, at a dinner given to celebrate his election as augur. Another bird which commanded a good price in the poultry market was the fieldfare. Fieldfares used to be caught in nets at the time of their autumn migration, and were then transferred to aviaries where they were liberally supplied with the food and water which in a wild state they might possibly find it difficult to get. "To my knowledge," Varro writes of a particular farm, "the aviary alone turned out five thousand fieldfares worth three denarii apiece, so that in that year that department of the villa made 60,000 sesterces." The possibilities of another farm mentioned were even larger ; we bear of a "great preserve for game" of 9,000 acres kept by Titus Pompeius in Transalpine Gaul, and on an estate kept by Varro himself there were wild boars and roe- deer which came to feed at fixed times at the blowing of a horn. "When I was at Q. Hortensius's, near Laurentium," one of Varro's imaginary characters is made to say, "I saw the thing done more in the Thracian fashion, for there was a wood there of more than fifty jugera (33 acres) surrounded by a wall, and this enclosure he did not call a hare warren, but a theriotrophion (place for feeding animals). There, on an eminence on which a dining-table and couches were set, we dined, and our host summoned Orpheus to appear. He came, clad in a stola, and on the order to sing to his cithera blew a blast on the horn, whereat a host of stags, wild boars, and other quadrupeds poured round us, making as fine a show, I thought, as when the mdiles give us a hunt without African beasts in the Circus Maximus." But these warrens planned on a big scale were not only for the larger beasts. There would be a place set apart for snails, either "a shady spot at the foot of mountain rocks, the base of which is bathed by a lake or streams," or "a dewy place made artificially." The snails fonnd their own food in their snail-bed, and when set on the huckster's stall were given "a few bay leaves and a sprinkling of bran." They were even less trouble than the dormice, which needed a building round them—" a wall the whole of which is faced on the inside with smooth stone or plaster, to prevent the dormice from crawling out. In it should be small acorn-bearing trees." Here the dormice were left free to eat and breed, and in due course were taken up to be fattened. This was done by placing them in jars with acorns, walnuts, or chestnuts ; a lid was then put on the jar, and the dormice were kept till they were wanted for the table.
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