Cato on Farming E-Book

Marcus Cato

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1998

Beschreibung

The first recipes to have survived in Latin, from the 2nd century BC, it is a particularly important resource. Cato wrote the earliest surviving complete work of Latin prose literature. It was this treatise: a book of instruction about the cultivation of vines, olives and fruit, the management of slaves and contract labour, the rituals consequent on ownership and even cookery for humans and the pharmacy.

Leseprobe

For MAUREEN

First published in 1998 by Prospect Books, Allaleigh House, Blackawton, Totnes, Devon TQ9 7DL.

Reprinted, 2010.

© 1998, commentary and English translation, Andrew Dalby. © 1998, drawings, Andras Kaldor. © 1998, Latin text, Société d’Edition Les Belles Lettres.

The author and translator, Andrew Dalby, asserts his right to be identified as author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

The Latin text derives from Caton, De l’Agriculture, edited and translated by R. Goujard, Paris, 1975. It is here reprinted (without the editorial apparatus) by kind permission of the Société d’Edition Les Belles Lettres, Paris.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue entry of this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset and designed by Tom Jaine. Cover illustration by Philippa Stockley.

ISBN 0907325 807; 978-0-907325-80-2 ePub ISBN: 978-1-909248-06-9 PRC ISBN: 978-1-909248-07-6

Printed and bound by Short Run Press Ltd, Exeter.

Contents

Introduction

A note on money

A note on sex

Illustrations

De Agricultura.

On Farming

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Cato’s On Farming is the first surviving work of Latin prose, the oldest visible star in a great galaxy. It is firsthand evidence of farming, rural life and slavery in Italy 2,200 years ago, when Rome was almost ready to rule the Mediterranean. It allows us to penetrate the mind of a remarkable and original man, one whose longterm infuence on his city, its empire and its literature was profound.

This is the first English translation of On Farming for over sixty years. The translation and footnotes go together: as explained later in this introduction, they are designed to make clear to the modern reader the structure of Cato’s book and the way he expected it to be read.

Cato’s Italy

In 200 bc Rome was not yet the unquestioned ruler of Italy. The last great challenge to Roman rule of the peninsula, the ‘Social War’, was still more than a century in the future. Yet in trade, in politics and in intellectual life Rome, once a citystate, was gradually, imperceptibly, becoming the dominant power and taking the role of a capital.

Italy remained fragmented both politically and linguistically. Latinwas the native tongue of Latium (modern Lazio) including Rome itself, and was spreading inexorably. Oscan, Umbrian and other Italic languages, closely related to Latin, were spoken across most of the centre of the peninsula. Greek, Messapian, Sicel and Punic were among the languages of the south and of Sicily. Etruscan, Celtic, Ligurian and Venetic were the major languages of the north; Etruscan was now giving way to Latin with the political decline of the cities of Etruria. Migrations and varying political fortunes had carried several of these languages, notably Etruscan and Oscan, well beyond their native territories – yet within three centuries all of them, except Greek and Latin, would be extinct.

The ascendancy of Latin, even in Cato’s time, is shown by the fact that it was becoming a language of literature. Among the writers of Latin in the second century bc, Cato actually has a rare distinction: he will have heard Latin spoken in his infancy, and it may have been his mother tongue.1 The comic playwright Plautus, the only author who wrote in Latin before Cato and whose works happen to survive, was Umbrian. So was the tragedian Accius. Caecilius was a Celt from northern Italy. Pacuvius and the narrative poet Ennius were Oscan speakers; Ennius will have learnt Latin as a third language, having been bilingual in Oscan and Greek (footnote 30 below). The comic playwright Terence is said to have been North African. If so, either a Berber language or Punic (the language of Carthage) was his mother tongue, and his second language may well have been Greek. They were, all of them, skilled linguists and stylists, but if any one of them can show us how the logic of native spoken Latin might be transformed directly into the logic of a written text, that one is Cato.

Cato’s Life2

Marcus Porcius Cato was bor34 BC in Tusculum, a selfgoverning town of Latium fifteen miles south of Rome. Its citizens, including Cato’s father, were Roman citizens.

His father’s living, however, was as a farmer in the mountainous Sabine country, well to the southeast. ‘I spent all my boyhood in frugality, privation and hard work, reclaiming the Sabine rocks, digging and planting those finty felds’ (Cato, Speeches 128).

It was normal for Romans and other Italians to have two or three names. Marcus was his praenomen or forename, used by close family and friends. Porcius was his nomen, his wider family name. A third name or cognomen had generally originated as a nickname of somekind; his own cognomen, Cato, went back in the family at least to his greatgrandfather Cato, who was ‘more than once rewarded for bravery, and was reimbursed from public funds, five times successively, when warhorses of his were killed in battle’ (Plutarch, Cato 1.1).

Cato embarked on a career in public life. For a Roman citizen this meant service as an army offcer followed by competitive election to ‘magistracies’. Each of these lasted for one year; some of them led to army command, some to civilian administration. This alternation of military and civil posts was normal for ambitious and wealthy Romans for some centuries afterwards. Rome’s rapid expansion from country town to imperial metropolis certainly had something to do with the fact that, for Romans, military success was a necessary part of a political career.

‘I first enlisted at seventeen, when Hannibal was having his run of luck, setting Italy on fre’, said Cato (Speeches, 187–8). The friendship and patronage of L. Valerius Flaccus, roughly Cato’s age and the son of a consul, helped him to the rank of military tribune under Q. Fabius Maximus in 214.

After some years of fghting, Cato was elected quaestor in 204, again under Flaccus’ patronage. This was the first rung on the ladder of electoral politics. His biographer adds: ‘The Romans had a special term, New Men, for people who rose in politics without any family precedent. This was what they called Cato. He liked to say that in terms of offce and power he was New, but in terms of his family’s bravery and prowess he was extremely Old’ (Plutarch, Cato 1.2).3 As quaestor he served under P. Cornelius Scipio ‘Africanus’, who was then gathering forces in Sicily for the invasion of Africa that would end the long war against Hannibal. Scipio enjoyed the Greek culture and fne living of Syracuse. Cato did not, and thought them bad for Roman soldiers.

As a politician, Cato could now wield patronage himself. His powers as a speaker were employed on behalf of people in nearby villages and towns who wished to use him as an advocate, in the ever-increasing number of disputes in which ‘judgment was to take place at Rome’ (to quote Cato, 149).4 He will have begun to prosper.

His next elected offce, in 199, was as one of the two aediles, an offce that traditionally carried civil responsibilities in Rome itself. That year Cato and his colleague found excuses to organize more Games than usual – not an unpopular move.

In 198 he was elected praetor, and spent the year as governor of Sardinia – a year during which his chief distinction, according to later reports, was an almost showy refusal to spend public money unnecessarily.

In 195 he and his friend Flaccus were elected consuls. This was the climax of many Roman political careers. Cato’s task as consul was to command the Roman army in the northeastern half of the vast new territory of Spain, which had been captured from the Carthaginians a few years before but was almost continually in revolt. Within the limit of the single campaigning season, from a ‘very diffcult and unfavourable starting point’ as Cato himself said (Speeches 19), he ran an effective campaign, training, disciplining and stretching his troops, confronting and defeating rebels. He even rescued a junior colleague, the praetor P. Manlius, from threatened annihilation in southwestern Spain beyond Cato’s own province.

He seemed so successful that he was voted the honour of celebrating a Triumph on his return to Rome. The booty he had won made up a bonus of a pound of silver to every legionary. The Senate concludedthat his army could safely be disbanded. Whereupon Spain broke out in revolt once more – but this was a problem for his successor in Spain,Scipio Africanus.

And so in the course of his career Cato had served the expanding Roman state successively in Sicily and north Africa, in Sardinia and in Spain. He also served with distinction in Greece in 191 and 189. But hisreal fame came – and still comes – from what he did and said in Rome. From the outset of his political career, he was the conviction politician of the day. He knew Roman behaviour, Roman morality, the Romanway. From this standpoint he attacked a succession of victims for em-bezzlement and other illegal acts while abroad, and generally succeeded in convicting them or at any rate in discrediting them. They includedM’. Acilius Glabrio, his commander in 191, another New Man; the great Scipio Africanus, Cato’s commander in Sicily and Africa, and his brother L. Cornelius Scipio; and Q. Minucius Thermus, one of those who followed Cato in Spain. By 184 he had a well-deserved reputation for stubborn righteousness and fery oratory. It must have been clear to his former superiors that he was likely to be anything but loyal to them. It was equally clear to Cato that he had a higher loyalty: to Rome, its laws and its ancient morality.

Every five years Rome elected two censors. These held office for a year and their task was to review the lists of the Senate, the Equites‘knights’ and the citizen body in general, expelling those who were either unworthy of the rank or too poor to meet their obligations. The censorship was sometimes looked on as an honourable sinecure, but in 184 a climate had been created, with Cato’s help, in which Romans wanted better behaviour from their aristocrats. In 184 there was ferce competition for the censorship. All other candidates, except Flaccus, ran what we might call ‘negative’ campaigns, directed against Cato personally. Cato and Flaccus were elected.

Their famous censorship of 184/3 aroused political feuds that ‘occupied Cato for the rest of his life’ (Livy 39.44.9). They demoted several senators and knights, for reasons including personal morals. Victims included M. Fulvius Nobilior, whom Cato had served in 189, and L. Quinctius Flamininus, brother of one of Rome’s greatest gen-erals. Cato concerned himself freely with issues of morality and private expenditure, speaking out On Clothes and Vehicles and On Statues and Pictures. The censors imposed penalties for encroachment on public land and misuse of the public water supply. They extended Rome’s sewer network to serve the Aventine hill, at great cost.

Cato, it is reliably said, disapproved of humour when censorial business was in hand. L. Nasica was asked formally at registration, ‘Answer to your mind. Have you a wife?’ He replied, ‘Yes, but not to my mind!’and was immediately demoted.5

After his censorship Cato held no more elected offces, but his involvement in Roman politics was uninterrupted. As senator, advocate, prosecutor, he continued to target misbehaviour by generals on campaign and by governors in overseas provinces. His oratorical skills were used in long-running disputes with old adversaries and their relatives as well as in defending, or rewriting, his own past acts.

Rome’s involvement in the eastern Mediterranean meanwhile grew and grew. Cato found himself the patron or advocate of Greek delegations who had come to press a case in Rome. As a self-proclaimed traditional Roman, a self-proclaimed distruster of Greeks, he mighthave found this position uncomfortable, but it did not leave him at aloss for words. He was asked in 150 if he would help to get a thousand state hostages released and sent home to Greece. When the debate inthe Senate had dragged on for a while, Cato rose and said, ‘As if we hadnothing to do, we sit all day deciding whether some old Greeks shouldbe buried by our undertakers or by Achaean ones.’ Like many of Cato’sthrowaway remarks, this intervention was well-judged; the vote, when it came, was for releasing the ‘old Greeks’, who had had a seventeen years’ enforced holiday in Rome. Among them was the future historian Polybius.6

Cato’s last major contribution to Roman public affairs was to urge war against Carthage, Rome’s great rival. The ‘Third Punic War’, as it is now known, was eventually declared in Cato’s lifetime. It ended, after his death, with the complete destruction of Carthage. As Cato had so insistently repeated, Carthago delenda est, ‘Carthage must be razed.’Its destroyer would be P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, brother of Cato’s daughter-in-law Tertia. ‘He alone has a mind,’ said the aged Cato about Aemilianus, ‘the rest are darting shadows’ (Polybius 36 fragment 8.7).7

Cato had married Licinia, ‘noble but not rich’, about the time of his consulship. He was said to have joked ‘that his wife never put her arms round him except when there was a thunderstorm: he was a happy man when Jove thundered’ (Plutarch, Cato 17.7). He was also said to be a good husband and a thoughtful and painstaking father.

His first son, Marcus Cato later called ‘Licinianus’, was born around 192. Cato took personal charge of his son’seducation, and himself wroteout a history of Rome ‘in big letters’ to teach Marcus to read. Marcus foughthonourably in Greece in 168 under the eminent L. Aemilius Paullus. He married Tertia, his commander’s daughter, in the 160s anddied just after being elected praetor in the late 150s.

Licinia, too, died relatively young. At the age of about 80, still vigorous, Cato married a much younger woman, Salonia. She was the daughter of one of his secretaries, so it is on balance likely that she was not of Roman descent. He had a son by Salonia, also called Marcus and known to later historians as ‘Cato Salonius’ or ‘Salonianus’.8 Cato died in 149.

His Writings and Opinions

On Farming is the only work by Cato that survives to modern times, but later Romans were able to read numerous other writings by him. Their quotations of Cato make up a collection of fragments from which we can learn something of his lost work.9 The fragments are full of personal opinions forcefully stated. Classicists like their classical authors to be logical and consistent, and the fragments have been much mulled over in order to demonstrate logic and consistency in Cato.

About a hundred and fifty of Cato’s speeches10 were known to Cicero, a century after his time. We no longer know even the titles of all of these. It seems clear that Cato began as early as 202 to write out and retain versions of the speeches that he had actually delivered ‘In the Senate’ or ‘To the People’: the first that we can date was On the Improper Election of the Aediles, delivered in 202. Several speeches from the year in which he was Consul, a self-justifcatory retrospect On his Consulship, and numerous speeches as Censor, are among the ones from which fragments are known. It is not clear whether he himself allowed others to read and copy the texts (i.e. whether he ‘published’ them), or whether this first happened after his death.

We might conclude, from Cato’s political biography and from reading what we can of his speeches, that Rome was the centre of his life and thoughts. Yet On Farming has little to do with Rome and its politics. It is written from the point of view of a landowner on the borders of Campania and Samnium, whose farm management must fit in with local practice and local market forces whether his town house happens to be in Rome, Tusculum or elsewhere.

So is the provincial perspective of On Farming an aberration? Or is Cato’s view of Italy, and Rome’s place in it, more subtle than we might assume from his political life and the reports of his speeches?

The answer is clear from the surviving fragments of a highly original work by Cato, called in Latin Origines, ‘Beginnings’.11 This was a history in seven books; the first history in Latin prose. Its sole focus might have been the growth and triumph of Rome, the city which by Cato’s time dominated Italy unchallenged and the city to which he had devoted his own political career. In fact Cato planned the Origines in a completely different way, as his biographer Nepos makes clear:

In his old age he determined to write a history. There are seven books of it. Book I is the history of the early kings of Rome; books II and III the beginnings of each Italian city. This seems called Origines.

Nepos, Cato 3.

The city histories in books II and III of the Origines were apparently treated on an individual basis, drawing on their own local traditions. The last four books did indeed deal with Rome’s later wars and with the growth in the city’s power; they ‘outweighed’ the rest (says Festus, On the Meaning of Words p. 198 M) but they did not tempt Cato to change the Italian emphasis signalled in his title.

Why, then, did Cato set out to show that Rome was, at its beginning,just one city among many? We know something of the existing Roman writings on which he must have drawn. There were two long poems in Latin, the Punic War by Naevius and the Annals by Cato’s own client Ennius; and two prose histories written in Greek by Romans, Q. Fabius Pictor and L. Cincius Alimentus. All four of these works were Rome-centred from beginning to end. Moreover, the two poems wove Roman history inextricably into the adventures and plans of the Graeco-Roman gods, a precedent that Rome’s national poetry followed ever after. I think we may suppose that Cato would have been dissatisfed with theseperspectives, as he certainly was with that of the offcial records of the Pontifex Maximus.12 His own experience reminded him that Rome was not everything, either to the peoples of Italy or to the gods they worshipped.

Incidentally, Cato’s own contribution to Rome was not downplayed in the Origines: he was ‘not the man to minimize his own achievements’ (Livy 34.15.9). Several of his own speeches were included verbatim in the book. He made it a rule not to mention individual military commanders by name – yet we have the impression that certain campaigns in which a certain Tusculan had participated were highlighted.

We have not yet fnished listing the published writings of this remarkable author. His manual On Soldiery (De Re Militari) was probably a practical notebook, like On Farming, based on his own experience.13 His book on the law relating to priests and augurs can be seen in thesame light, and might follow naturally from the religious prescriptions already included in On Farming.14To His Son was a book of advice.15Carmen De Moribus ‘Poem on morals’ might have drawn on some of the same material, and was apparently in prose, in spite of its title.16 Finally he compiled a book of Sayings, some of them translated from Greek, and indeed this sub-literary genre had fairly recently become popular in Greek.17

Why did Cato write? It is easy to begin an answer. He was a man confdent of his opinion, proud of his experience, and keen that others should benefit from both. And he was in the habit of keeping written records for his own use.18 Yet these things might not have been enough to bring about the creation of a prose literature in a new language, which is what Cato did.

It seems quite possible that the decisive point was the need, in the 180s, to teach young Marcus Licinianus. Cato distrusted Greek slave professionals, and there were no other teachers. So he became his son’s teacher, and taught him not in Greek but in his native Latin. The history ‘in big letters’, already mentioned, was followed by other texts addressed to Marcus, one of which later circulated as To His Son.

That much is known. There were surely friends and clients who would say that these writings of Cato’s should be copied and would be welcomed by others; from such a beginning, Cato might well have found it satisfying to continue to expound, on history, agriculture, warfare and other matters, to a less limited audience. But this is guesswork.

Cato and ‘On Farming’

Let us recall Marcus Cato the Censor, who first taught Agriculture to speak Latin.

Columella, On Farming 1.1.12.

There had been Greek writings on farming. There was a massive Carthaginian farming manual, soon to be translated into Latin at state expense. Cato probably knew none of these. If he had consulted any books on his subject that came from an established literary milieu, we may think that he would have given a more effective structure to his own. The later, more solid and systematic Latin textbooks on farming were far in the future (see below). In this, as in every one of his writings, Cato was a pioneer.

It is sometimes argued that he wrote On Farming as propaganda – because, for some political reason, he wanted more rich Romans to buyland and produce oil or wine. These arguments underestimate the book. We can begin to see from the reports of his speeches, and in any case wewould know from other sources, that Cato was a master of persuasion: no one in Rome in his time could be confdent of winning an argumentagainst him. If On Farming is a political argument, it is surely an argument so full of irrelevances and inconsequentialities as to persuade nobody.

Cato’s real motivation is surely simpler. He knew farming and was confdent in his knowledge. Some Romans had become rich; many peasants had died or had been ruined in the years of war. With Rome’s recent conquests slaves were suddenly plentiful. Land and labour were relatively cheap, and slave-run farms were likely to prove a profitable investment.19 Advice was needed by people who were buying farms but had no family experience of exploiting the land. Cato would provide it.

He put down what he knew, as it came to his mind, as if he were giving advice or instructions verbally: the choice of a farm, the staffng and equipping of it, the use of the land, the work that must be planned through the year, the essential religious rites, the terms of trade for building work and for various tasks that were subcontracted – and a good deal more.

The headings and sub-headings of the present translation are newlysupplied.20 They are no more than a shadow of Cato’s real train of thought, which is as coherent, and as inconsequential, as a conversationor a series of conversations. The sequence of topics is partly random (as if, ‘We haven’t yet said anything about…’), partly suggested by incidental and superfcial connections of word or thought21 (as if, ‘Mentioning amurca reminds me of other uses…’), partly a matter of rethinking and recapping (as if, ‘When talking about manure I might have added…’, or even, ‘I don’t remember whether I told you…’).

The result is utterly different from any structure that teachers would have approved, had there as yet been any teachers of Latin. That did not matter to Cato, whose audience would get to know his opinions by reading or listening to the book and would then make any logical connections that they wished.22

‘On Farming’: an Outline

Let us observe, in the early sections of On Farming, how the logic of Cato’s thought leads him from each topic to the next.

Buying and Developing a Farm, the first main section (1–9), develops from an obvious initial topic, that of Selecting the Property, which demands advice of the ideal choice of extras that will aid self-suffciency, from a vineyard to an acorn wood. A mixed farm of that kindrequires careful work management and annual timetabling: so, in Directing the Business, Cato’s instructions to the visiting owner emphasize exactly that. The discussion runs on to inventory management andthe question of when to sell. This is an aspect of longer term timetablingwhich tempts Cato to be provocative about when to plant out a farm (early) and when to plan the Farm Buildings (late). Instructions onbuilding conclude with more general advice, including, ‘Be a good neighbour, and do not allow your slaves to do wrong.’ It is the Farm Manager who must prevent this, so he comes next to Cato’s mind. General precepts on the farm manager’s work are followed by a series of desultory Memoranda for the Manager (as I suppose they are: theymake best sense if they are taken as suggested instructions from the owner to the manager). These semi-proverbial ‘memoranda’ end with instructions on crop storage. They lead on to others, equally generalized but no longer specially shaped as rules from owner to manager, about Where to Plant crops. Finally Cato digresses to a much more specifc topic: what kind of crops are most profitable on a Property Close to the City, that is, close enough to Rome to supply fresh produce to the city markets.

Several passages in that first section suggested a need to list thefarm’s equipment systematically: we recall for example the advice that a farm being considered for purchase should have ‘not too much equipment’ (1) and the owner’s responsibility to take stock and ‘hold anauction’ (2). Yet, in returning to these points (10–22), and making lists, Cato was doing something quite new – and something that later Romanagricultural writers were happy to copy and expand. Some items in this list of equipment must be built in, and that brings back to Cato’s mind the desirability of setting out the ‘terms of trade’ for building, a topicwhich also follows on from chapters 3–4. The detail that the buyersupplies timber for building and scaffolding demands advice on whento cut timber, advice which is therefore inserted (17). Having listed the equipment in the press room, Cato is reminded of the farmer’s need tounderstand, and assemble correctly, a press and crushing mill. He explains at length. Both of these items are huge investments: in fnancial terms the space that Cato gives to them (18–22) is not at all disproportionate.

Because we are talking about presses – about preparing for the vintage and the olive harvest – we move naturally to other preparations for the vintage. The general logic that leads us through the next parts of On Farming (23–53) is a farming calendar. Cato never sets this out clearly (as later authors, such as Columella and Palladius, do). The subject simply develops out of the vintage and the other work that is done at the same time. Cato digresses from matters truly relevant to the calendar wherever a question occurs to him: the doctoring of wine, and so to the making of ‘Greek Wine’ (24); trenching for olives, and so to the propagation of olives (28), and so also to the business of manuring (29). Now we come to preparation for the olive harvest – the topic fits here again because of the calendar, so we are given a bit more of it; and so to the choice of timber for press equipment, and so to the time for cutting timber – another topic which has been raised already, but which is called to mind here for a second time. Next in the mental calendar is the pruning and layering of vines, and that leads to some general rules on tending vines (32). So onwards through the year: the reader can by now follow Cato’s logic without my help. The section that I have headed Supplies Through the Year (54–63) is a footnote to the calendar, giving us annual calculations of fodder for animals and food and clothing for slaves, with some other rules of thumb. The Olive Harvest (64–68) may be seen as the fnal section of the calendar (but, if so, the calendar runs for more than a year) or it may be regarded as a second footnote, dealing with the day-to-day organization of a particular task for which the equipment has already been detailed.

The remainder of On Farming consists, we may say, of a series of appendices. First we have the recipes (69–130). The logic of their inclusion is varied. Those that use amurca are surely there so that the reader will know what to do with this valuable substance – it was evidently a commonplace that many people did not know what to do with it.23 We know exactly why the medical and veterinary recipes are there (70–73 and elsewhere), thanks to a verbatim quotation from another of Cato’s writings (perhaps from To His Son):

In due course, my son Marcus, I shall explain what I found out in Athens about these Greeks, and demonstrate what advantage there may be in looking into their writings (while not taking them too seriously). They are a worthless and unruly tribe. Take this as a prophecy: when those folk give us their writings they will corrupt everything. All the more if they send their doctors here. They have sworn to kill all barbarians with medicine – and they charge a fee for doing it, in order to be trusted and to work more easily. They call us barbarians, too, of course, and opici, a dirtier name than the rest. I have forbidden you to deal with doctors.

Cato quoted by Pliny 29.13–14.

After giving his own summary of thipassage, his biographer Plutarch observes drily (Cato, 24.1) that Cato’s own medicines proved better for Cato himself than for his wife and son, both of whom died young. We can at least be sure, from this tirade, that Cato aimed to make his readers as independent of Greek doctors as of any other expensive and unreliable advisers.

We cannot be so sure why there is a section of recipes for bread and cakes (74–87) recipes in a Greek tradition and perhaps drawing on a Greek cookbook.24 Possibly Cato included them so that the owner and guests might be entertained when visiting the farm; possibly so that proper offerings might be made to the gods; more likely, I believe, so that profitable sales might be made at a neighbouring market.

Finally we have a passage that is even more miscellaneous. I have divided it as Rituals and Forms of Contract (131–150) and, failing any other linking theme that I can discover, Addenda (151–162). The rituals follow easily enough, it must be said, from the section of recipes; they are recipes in a sense. Yet these rituals are interspersed with quite different topics. The passage as a whole has no organization. We are truly faced with a series of addenda, each called for in some way by preceding sections of Cato’s text, none closely linked with its neighbours.

As pieces of early Latin, the rituals (132, 134, 139–141) – spare, rhythmical, practical – are unique.25 A reader who looks at no other section of the Latin text will, I hope, look at these.

‘On Farming’: Themes and Controversies

On Farming must, in Cato’s time, have been a useful, memorable, often irritating handbook. To us now it is an astonishingly rich source of information on Italy in the second century bc, and many still fnd it an irritating handbook.26 Here some themes that emerge from study of On Farming will be outlined, and we shall see why one or two of the features of On Farming attract irritation.

It will already be clear why there is repetition and duplication –features that many have found puzzling. If a topic comes to Cato’s mind twice, he puts it in twice. This is the logic of teaching, not that of writing. A teacher will reinforce a lesson by reverting to it whenever it becomes relevant once more, possibly putting the matter in a different way the second time, possibly repeating it without variation. Cato does the same.

There is an unresolved confict, throughout the book, between the farm as a way of life and the farm as a mere investment. The reason for this is obvious – it is the difference between Cato’s own rural upbringingand his later prosperity as a city politician, a difference which he hadprobably never thought out fully. In spite of this, most of Cato’s information will have been really useful to an owner, a manager or both.They could not learn to do everything necessary from this book, but, like a Baedeker, it would help to render them independent of unreliable guides.

A second point which, we may say, Cato had not thought throughfully was how best to adapt his personal and local experience into general advice. Anyone who picks up the book will learn a great deal more about farming in the mountainous district where Latium, Campania and Samnium meet than about any other parts of Italy – even getting a list of the market towns of choice (chapter 135). The focal point is the Venafrum country. We have to guess that this was where Cato farmed. Possibly it was the farm that he inherited from his father, in which case we must also guess that they had turned it over largely to olives, building a press room and buying a costly crushing mill, trapetum, from somewhere near neighbouring Suessa after making an estimate of the comparative cost of purchase at Pompeii (chapter 22). Cato never announces that his information and advice apply especially to this small region of Italy. The reader simply becomes aware that it isso – just as someone who gets the benefit of a farmer’s verbal advicewill fnd, unavoidably, that it derives from that farmer’s personal and local experience.

For all that, Cato is not insisting on the desirability of just two kinds of specialized farm. Those who think that he is doing that will fnd him more inconsistent than he really is. We remember that the reader who has a farm close to a city is advised in chapters 7–9 to develop it in a wholly different way. That reader, and others with quite varied needs and interests, will fnd plenty of further help in many places in the book. But, in general, owners whose farms were to grow a traditional range of produce would need relatively little of Cato’s advice: they would get it from their neighbours, and from local labourers, who would know what did best locally, how it was to be tended, and what there was a market for: ‘choose … whatever people say does best in your district’ (6). The women on the farm would already know all about keeping hens (143, compare 39) and every reader envisaged by Cato would know how to grow garlic (48 and footnote at 70).

Thus the heavy slant in Cato’s book is easily motivated. Cato’s experience was clearly of turning farms over to olives and to wine. Romanswere at this very time taking advantage of rural depopulation and dereliction to buy land and to do the same thing. These were specializedbusinesses: they demanded investment; they competed in a risky market. The inexperienced owner needed independent advice, and Cato was in a position to supply it.

Cato pays great attention to cost and savings. This is a point of real interest to economic historians, but his approach attracts disdain from modern economists. His advice, throughout On Farming, tends towards making the farm as self-suffcient as possible. Modern investors, bycontrast, have been taught to maximize income from whatever is the principal produce and to spend a proportion of this income on supplies. Economics has gained many converts in the last quarter of a millennium; for all that, some small-scale farmers in southern Europe are still closer to Cato than to Adam Smith in their views on this point. It must be said that extremely high transport costs in republican Italy would have helped to make self-suffciency an even more attractive aim then than it is now.

The question of self-suffciency notwithstanding, Cato’s focus overall is on the investment potential of a farm. His approach to the use of capital is therefore under the spotlight, and we note that he distinguishes in his Preface (see also footnote there) among land, trade and ‘money-lending’ as potential uses of money. He regarded trade as unsafe and money-lending as immoral. Other Roman senators took similar views to his – indeed, they were enshrined in Roman law. Yet somehow Roman senators were able to grow rich through trade, and Cato himself was said to have lent money on maritime trade through an intermediary (so Plutarch, Cato 21.6).27 The patron-client relationships of Roman society made the difference. A Roman senator could quite properly get his hands dirty in the purchase and management of land. As to trade and the fnancing of trade, that was a business for one’s clients, ‘intermediaries’, to engage in.

On Farming sheds a bleak light on Roman treatment of slave labour. This is one of the topics that make the work so useful to the social historian. In exploring it, we notice on one side the cool calculations of food and clothing and the provocative advice to sell off ‘an old slave, a sickly slave’ (2); on the other, reliance on the assiduity and intelligence of the ‘manager’ and ‘manageress’ (5, 142–143), themselves almost certainly slaves. It is important to be aware that Rome’s treatment of rural labour could be far more brutal than is suggested in this book. In the last two centuries bc, successive slave and shepherd revolts in southern Italy and Sicily ended in the execution and crucifxion of thousands.

Aside from the purely economic context of On Farming, Cato’s treatment of his own slaves is recorded in some detail and was relatively humane (see particularly Plutarch, Cato).