Delphi Complete Works of Varro

by Marcus Terentius Varro

  [56.1] “I have been sitting in the steading for a long time,” exclaimed Agrius, “waiting, key in hand, Stolo, for you to bring the crops into the barn.” “Well,” replied Stolo, “here I am. I am coming up to the threshold; open the doors. First, it is better to stow the hay crop under cover than in stacks, as by this method it makes better fodder — as is proved by the fact that when both kinds are offered them, cattle prefer the former.

  [57.1] “Wheat should be stored in granaries, above ground, open to the draught on the east and north, and not exposed to damp air rising in the vicinity. The walls and floor are to be coated with marble cement, [2] or at least with clay mixed with grain-chaff and amurca, as this both keeps out mice and worms and makes the grain more solid and firm. Some farmers sprinkle the wheat, too, with amurca, using a quadrantal to about a thousand modii. Different farmers use different powders or sprays, such as Chalcidian or Carian chalk, or wormwood, and other things of this kind. Some use underground caves as granaries, the so-called sirus, such as occur in Cappadocia and Thrace; and still others use wells, as in the Carthaginian and Oscensian districts in Hither Spain. They cover the bottom of these with straw, and are careful not to let moisture or air touch them, except when the grain is removed for use; for the weevil does not breed where air does not reach. Wheat stored in this way keeps as long as fifty years, and millet more than a hundred. [3] Some people, as in Hither Spain and in Apulia, build granaries in the field, above ground, so constructed that the wind can cool them not only from the sides, through windows, but also beneath from the ground. Beans and legumes are kept fresh for a very long time in olive jars sealed with ashes.

  [58.1] “Cato says that smaller and larger Aminnian grape, and the Apician, are best stored in jars, and that the same grapes keep well also in boiled or plain must; and that the best ones for drying are the hard grapes and the Aminnian.

  [59.1] “The varieties of apples for preserving are the smaller and larger quinces, the Scantian, the Scaudian, the small round, and those formerly called must-apples, but now called honey-apples. It is thought that all these keep well in a dry and cool place, laid on straw. For this reason those who build fruit-houses are careful to let them have windows facing the north and open to the wind; but they have shutters, to keep the fruit from shrivelling after losing its juice, when the wind blows steadily. [2] And it is for this reason, too — to make it cooler — that they coat the ceilings, walls, and floors with marble cement. Some people even spread a dining-table in it to dine there; and, in fact, if luxury allows people to do this in a picture gallery, where the scene is set by art, why should they not enjoy a scene set by nature, in a charming arrangement of fruit? Provided always that you do not follow the example set by some, of buying fruit in Rome and carrying it to the country to pile it up in the fruit-gallery for a dinner-party. [3] Some think that apples keep quite well in the gallery if placed on boards on the cement, but others lay them on straw, or even on wool; that pomegranates are preserved by burying their stems in a jar of sand, and large and small quinces in hanging baskets; while, on the other hand, late Anician pears keep best when put down in boiled must. Some hold that boiled sorbs keep best when cut up and dried in the sun, like pears; and that sorbs are easily kept just as they are, wherever they are put, if the place is dry; that rape should be cut up and preserved in mustard, walnuts in sand. Pomegranates are also kept in sand if they are stored freshly gathered and ripe; green ones also, if you keep them on the branch, put them in a pot with no bottom, bury them in the ground, and seal the ends of the branches so that no outside air can reach them; such fruits will be taken out not only sound but even larger than they would ever be if they had hung on the tree.

  [60.1] “Of the olives, Cato writes that the table olives, the orcites, and the posea are best preserved either green or in brine, or, when bruised, in mastic oil. The black orcites, if they are covered with salt for five days after being dried, and then, after the salt has been shaken off, are exposed to the sun for two days, usually keep sound; and that the same varieties may be satisfactorily preserved unsalted in boiled must.

  [61.1] “Experienced farmers store their amurca in jars, just as they do oil and wine. The method of preserving is: as soon as it flows out from the press, two-thirds of it is boiled away, and when it is cool it is stored in vessels. There are also other methods, such as that in which must is added.

  [62.1] “As no one stores the products of the farm except to bring them forth later, a few remarks must be made about this, the sixth step. Preserved things are brought out of storage because they are to be either protected or consumed or sold. As the three operations are for different purposes, the protecting and the consuming take place at different times.

  [63.1] “Grain which the weevil has begun to infest should be brought out for protection. When it is brought out, bowls of water should be placed around in the sun; the weevils will congregate at these and drown themselves. Those who keep their grain under ground in the pits which they call sirus should remove the grain some time after the pits are opened, as it is dangerous to enter them immediately, some people having been suffocated while doing so. Spelt which you have stored in the ear at harvest-time and wish to prepare for food should be brought out in winter, so that it may be ground in the mill and parched.

  [64.1] “Amurca, which is a watery fluid, after it is pressed from the olives is stored along with the dregs in an earthenware vessel. Some farmers use the following method for preserving it: After fifteen days the dregs which, being lighter, have risen to the top are blown off, and the fluid is turned into other vessels; this operation is repeated at the same intervals twelve times during the next six months, the last cleansing being done preferably when the moon is waning. Then they boil in copper vessels over a slow fire until it is reduced to two-thirds its volume. It is then fit to be drawn off for use.

  [65.1] “Must which is stored in jars to make wine should not be brought out while it is fermenting, and not even after the fermentation has gone far enough to make wine. If you wish to drink old wine (and wine is not old enough until a year has been added to its age), it should be brought out when it is a year old. But if it is of the variety of grapes that sours quickly, it must be used up or sold before the next vintage. There are brands of wine, the Falernian for instance, which are the more valuable when brought out the more years you have kept them in store.

  [66.1] “If you take out the preserved white olives soon, while they are fresh, the palate will reject them because of the bitter taste; and likewise the black olives, unless you first steep them in salt so that they may be taken into the mouth without distaste.

  [67.1] “As for the walnut, the date, and the Sabine fig, the sooner you use them the better the flavour; for with time the fig gets too pale, the date too soft, and the nut too dry.

  [68.1] “Fruits that are hung, such as grapes, apples, and sorbs, themselves indicate the proper time for consumption; for by the change of colour and the shrivelling of the skin they put you on notice that if you do not take them down to eat they will come down to be thrown away. If you store sorbs which are ripe and soft, you must use them quickly; those hung up when sour may wait, for they mean, before ripening, to reach in the house a degree of maturity which they cannot reach on the tree.

  [69.1] “The part of the spelt harvest which you wish to have ready for food should be taken out in winter to be roasted at the mill; while the part reserved for seed should be taken out when the land is ready to receive it. With regard to seed in general, each kind should be taken out at its proper time. As to the crops intended for market, care must be used as to the proper time for taking out each; thus you should take out and sell at once those which do not stand storage before they spoil, while you should sell those which keep well when the price is high. For often products which have been stored quite a long time will not only pay interest on the storage, but even double the profit if they are marketed at the right time.”

  [2] While he was speaking the
sacristan’s freedman runs up to us with tears in his eyes and begs us to pardon him keeping us so long, and asks us to go to a funeral for him the next day. We spring to our feet and cry out in chorus: “What? To a funeral? What funeral? What has happened?” Bursting into tears, he tells us that his master had been stabbed with a knife by someone, and had fallen to the ground; that in the crowd he could not tell who it was, but had only heard a voice saying that a mistake had been made. [3] As he had carried his old master home and sent the servants to find a surgeon and bring him with all speed, he hoped he might be pardoned for attending to his duty rather than coming to us; and though he had not been able to keep him from breathing his last a few moments later, he thought that he had acted rightly. We had no fault to find with him, and walking down from the temple we went our several ways, rather blaming the mischances of life than being surprised that such a thing had occurred in Rome.

  BOOK II

  It was not without pleasure that those great men, our ancestors, put the Romans who lived in the country ahead of those who lived in the city. For as in the country those who live in the villa are lazier than those who are engaged in carrying out work on the land, so they thought that those who settled in town were more indolent than those who dwelt in the country. Hence they so divided the year that they attended to their town affairs only on the ninth days, and dwelt in the country on the remaining seven. [2] So long as they kept up this practice they attained both objects — keeping their lands most productive by cultivation, and themselves enjoying better health and not requiring the citified gymnasia of the Greeks. In these days one such gymnasium is hardly enough, and they do not think they have a real villa unless it rings with many resounding Greek names, places severally called procoetion (ante-room), palaestra (exercise-room), apodyterion (dressing-room), peristylon (colonnade), ornithon (aviary), peripteros (pergola), oporotheca (fruit-room). [3] As therefore in these days practically all the heads of families have sneaked within the walls, abandoning the sickle and the plough, and would rather busy their hands in the theatre and in the circus than in the grain-fields and the vineyards, we hire a man to bring us from Africa and Sardinia the grain with which to fill our stomachs, and the vintage we store comes in ships from the islands of Cos and Chios.

  [4] And so, in a land where shepherds who founded the city taught their offspring the cultivation of the earth, there, on the contrary, their descendants, from greed and in the face of the laws, have made pastures out of grain lands — not knowing that agriculture and grazing are not the same thing. For the shepherd is one thing and the ploughman another; and it does not follow that because cattle can graze in a field the herdsman is the same as the ploughman. For grazing cattle do not produce what grows on the land, but tear it off with their teeth; while on the other hand the domestic ox becomes the cause why the grain grows more easily in the ploughed land, and the fodder in the fallow land. [5] The skill and knowledge of the farmer, I repeat, are one thing, and those of the herdsman another; in the province of the farmer are those things which are made to spring from the earth by cultivation of the land; in that of the herdsman, however, those that spring from the herd. As the association between them is very close, inasmuch as it is frequently more profitable to the owner of the farm to feed the fodder on the place than to sell it, and inasmuch as manure is admirably adapted to the fruits of the earth, and cattle especially fitted to produce it, one who owns a farm ought to have a knowledge of both pursuits, agriculture and cattle-raising, and also of the husbandry of the steading. For from it, too, no little revenue can be derived — from the poultry-yards, the rabbit-hutches, and the fishponds. [6] And since I have written a book for my wife, Fundania, on one of these subjects, that of agriculture, on account of her owning a farm, for you, my dear Turranius Niger, who take keen delight in cattle, inasmuch as your feet often carry you, on buying bent, to market at Campi Macri, that you may more easily meet the outlay incurred by the many demands made upon you, I shall run over briefly and summarily the subject of cattle-raising; and I shall the more readily do this because I have myself owned large stocks of cattle, sheep in Apulia and horses in the district of Reate. I shall take as the foundation the conversations I had with extensive cattle-owners in Epirus, at the time when, during the war with the pirates, I was in command of the Greek fleets operating between Delos and Sicily. At this point I shall begin. . . .

  [1.1] When Menates had left, Cossinius remarked to me: “We shall not let you go until you have set forth those three topics of which you had begun to speak when we were interrupted.” “Which three?” inquired Murrius; “do you mean what you were saying to me yesterday about animal husbandry?” “The points our friend here had begun to discuss,” said he, “the origin, the dignity, and science. . .” [2] “Well,” said I, “I shall speak at least of the historical side and tell what I have learned of the two topics first mentioned — the origin and the dignity. Scrofa will take up the tale at the third division, when it becomes a science. He is, if I may quote Greek to half-Greek shepherds, ‘a much better man than I am.’ For he is the man who taught your son-in-law, Gaius Lucilius Hirtius, whose flocks in the country of the Bruttii are renowned.” “But you shall have this discussion by us,” said Scrofa, “only on condition that you, who are the cattle-raising champions of Epirus, shall repay us by disclosing what you know of the subject; for no man can know everything.” [3] When I had accepted the proposal and was to open the play — not that I do not own flocks myself in Italy, but not all who own a harp are harpers” — I began: “As it is a necessity of nature that people and flocks have always existed (whether there was an original generating principle of animals, as Thales of Miletus and Zeno of Citium thought, or, on the contrary, as was the view of Pythagoras of Samos and of Aristotle of Stagira, there was no point of beginning for them), it is a necessity that from the remotest antiquity of human life they have come down, as Dicaearchus teaches, step by step to our age, and that the most distant stage was that state of nature [4] in which man lived on those products which the virgin earth brought forth of her own accord; they descended from this stage into the second, the pastoral, in which they gathered for their use acorns, arbutus berries, mulberries, and other fruits by plucking them from wild and uncultivated trees and bushes, and likewise caught, shut up, and tamed such wild animals as they could for the like advantage. There is good reason to suppose that, of these, sheep were first taken, both because they are useful and because they are tractable; for these are naturally most placid and most adapted to the life of man. For to his food they brought milk and cheese, and to his body wool and skins for clothing. [5] Then by a third stage man came from the pastoral life to that of the tiller of the soil; in this they retained much of the former two stages, and after reaching it they went far before reaching our stage. Even now there are several species of wild animals in various places: as of sheep in Phrygia, where numerous flocks are seen, and in Samothrace those goats which are called in Latin rotae; for there are many wild goats in Italy in the vicinity of Mount Fiscellum and Mount Tetrica. As to swine, everybody knows — except those who think that wild boars ought not to be called swine. There are even now many quite wild cattle in Dardania, Maedica, and Thrace; wild asses in Phrygia and Lycaonia, and wild horses at several points in Hither Spain.

  [6] “The origin is as I have given it; the dignity, as I shall now show. Of the ancients the most illustrious were all shepherds, as appears in both Greek and Latin literature, and in the ancient poets, who call some men ‘rich in flocks,’ others ‘rich in sheep,’ others ‘rich in herds’; and they have related that on account of their costliness some sheep actually had fleeces of gold — as at Argos the one which Atreus complains that Thyestes stole from him; or as in the realm of Aeetes in Colchis, the ram in search of whose golden fleece the Argonauts of royal blood are said to have fared forth; or as among the Hesperides in Libya, from which Hercules brought from Africa to Greece golden mala, which is the ancient manner of naming goats and sheep. For
the Greeks called these mela from the sound of their bleating; [7] and in fact our people give them a similar name from the same bleating, but with a different consonant (for the bleating seems to give the sound be, and not me), and they call the bleating of sheep baelare, and hence later, by the excision of a letter, as occurs in many words, balare. But if the flock had not been held in high honour among the ancients, the astronomers, in laying out the heavens, would not have called by their names the signs of the zodiac; they not only did not hesitate to give such names, but many of them begin their enumeration of the twelve signs with the names of the Ram and the Bull, placing them ahead of Apollo and Hercules. For those gods follow them, but are called the Twins. [8] And they were not content to have one-sixth of the twelve signs bear the names of domestic animals, but added Capricornus, so that one-fourth might have them. And besides this, they added of the domestic animals the she-goat, the kid, and the dog. Or are not tracts on land and sea also known by the names of animals? For instance, they named a sea Aegean from the word for goats, a mountain on the border of Syria, Taurus, a mountain in the Sabine country, Cantherius, and two straits Bosphorus (ox-ford) — the Thracian and the Cimmerian. [9] Did they not give such names to many places on land, as, for instance, the city in Greece called ‘Hippion (horse-rearing) Argos’? And, finally, is not Italy named from vituli (bullocks), as Piso states? Further, does not everyone agree that the Roman people is sprung from shepherds? Is there anyone who does not know that Faustulus, the foster-father who reared Romulus and Remus, was a shepherd? Will not the fact that they chose exactly the Parilia as the time to found a city demonstrate that they were themselves shepherds? Is not the same thing proved by the following facts: that up to this day a fine is assessed after the ancient fashion in oxen and sheep; that the oldest copper coins are marked with cattle; [10] that when the city was founded the position of walls and gates was marked out by a bull and a cow; that when the Roman people is purified by the suovetaurilia, a boar, a ram, and a bull are driven around; that many of our family names are derived from both classes, the larger and the smaller, such as Porcius, Ovinius, Caprilius from the smaller, and Equitius, Taurius, Asinius from the larger; and that the so-called cognomina [surnames] prove the same thing, as, for instance, the Annii Caprae, the Statilii Tauri, the Pomponii Vituli, and many others, derived from the names of domestic animals?