ROMAN FARM MANAGEMENT: THE TREATISES OF CATO AND VARRO TEXT

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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 184: Reading, "propter fastidium hominum." Cf. Pliny (X, 38), whose explanation is "propter ingratum virus."] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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."] [Footnote 188: Reading _seris_. It is the _Cichorium endivia_ of Linnaeus. Cf. Pliny (_H.N._ XX, 32.)] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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."] [Footnote 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_.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 198: Darwin (_Animals and Plants_, XVIII) says: "I have never heard of the dormouse breeding in captivity."] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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."] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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."] [Footnote 209: Reading _Apiastro_. This is the _Melissa officinalis_ of Linnaeus. Cf. Pliny, XX, 45 and XXI, 86.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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_.] [Footnote 212: Reading _seditiosum_.] [Footnote 213: This is a mistake upon which Aristotle could have corrected Varro.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 215: _Sinapis arvensis_, Linn.] [Footnote 216: _Sium sisarum_, Linn.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 218: Reading _imbecilliores_.] [Footnote 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.] [Footnote 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_.] [Footnote 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."] [Footnote 222: Reading _in ius vocare_, with the _double entendre_ of service in a sauce and bringing to justice.] INDEX _Actus (actus guadratus)_, unit of area in land measurement Aegean Sea, derivation of name Aesop's fable of the fox Agriculture, distinguished from grazing, pottery-making, etc. definition of scope of purposes of, are profit and pleasure four divisions for the study of effect of conformation of the land on, effect of character of soil Albutius, L. Alfalfa, advice concerning Alfius, Roman farmer banker Alpine hares Amurca, farm uses of used for anointing threshing floors waste of, by Romans method of preserving condensing Apiaries, location of _See_ Bees. Apicius, recipe for ragout of dormice by, Appian, quoted Appius Claudius Pulcher Apples, storing Apulian breed of horses Aquinas, Thomas _Arbusta_, the Italian _Arista_, etymology of word Aristotle, on blindness of puppies cited on goats' breathing through their ears on exercising of pregnant mares on breeding of mares story related by _Arpent_, derivation of Asparagus planting, Asses, use of, as compared with other draught animals manure of certain choice breeds of buying, breeding, care of, etc. milk of Atticus, T. Pomponius Augeas, King, tradition concerning Augustine, St., on Varro indebtedness of, to works of Varro Aviaries, profits from two classes of those kept for profit those kept for pleasure Aviary, Varro's, at Casinum B Bakewell, breeding of sheep by Barbers, the first, in Italy Barn yards, arrangement of Barrows, hogs called Bavaria, agriculture in Iowa contrasted with that in Beans, use of, for green manuring storing Beauclerk, W.N., on agriculture in modern Italy quoted Bees, eggs of unfertilized queen the keeping of theories concerning generation of treatises on, by ancient writers habits and houses of money to be made from location of stands for food for; structure and care of hives kinds of selection of moving swarming of removal of honey general care of