Delphi Complete Works of Varro

by Marcus Terentius Varro

  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 Caesar178 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.179

  “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)180 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.181

  “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.

  ENDNOTES.

  1 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.

  2 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.”

  3 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.

  4 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 t
ried 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.”

  5 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.”

  6 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.”

  7 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.

  8 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.”

  9 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.

  10 Tremelius Scrofa was the author of a treatise on agriculture, which Columella cites, but which has not otherwise survived.

  11 “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.

  12 Pliny records (H.N. XVIII, 7) that at Lucullus’ farm there was less ground for ploughing than of floor for sweeping.

  13 Eggs were the first course, as apples were the last, at a

  Roman dinner, hence the saying “ab ovo usque ad mala.”

  14 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.

  15 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.”]

  16 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 productio
n 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.

  17 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.”