Delphi Complete Works of Varro

by Marcus Terentius Varro

  62 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.

  63 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.

  64 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).

  65 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.

  66 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.

  67 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.

  68 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.

  69 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.”

  70 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.”

  71 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.

  72 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.

  73 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.

  74 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.

  75 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.

  76 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.

  77 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 cr
eated 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.”

  78 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.

  79 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.”

  80 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.”

  81 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.”

  82 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.

  83 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.

  84 Aristotle (H.A. I, 9.1) refers to this opinion and denounces it as erroneous.

  85 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.

  86 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.

  87 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.

  88 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.”

  89 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.’

  90 This Gallic tomacina was doubtless the ancestor of the mortadella now produced in the Emilia and known to English speaking consumers as “Bologna” sausage.

  91 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.”

  92 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.

  93 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.’