to deal with the villici and the colom, if her age bore
suitable relation to that of her husband. The lipe
maturity of many of the rural writers I have introduced
cannot fail to arrest attention. Thus, Xenophon gained
a strength in his Elian fields that carried him into the
nineties; Cato lived to be over eighty; and now we
have Varro, writing his book out by Tusculiun at the
same age, and surviving to counsel with Fundania ten
years more. Pliny, too, (the elder,) who, if not a &rmer,
had his country-seats, and left very much to establish
our acquaintance with the Roman rural life, was a hale,
much-enduring man, of such soldierly habits and large
abstemiousness as to warrant a good fourscore, — if he
had not fallen imder that murderous cloud of ashes
from Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79.
The poets, doubtless, burnt out earlier, as they usually
do. VirgO, whom I shall come to speak of presently,
certainly did: he died at fifty-one. TibuUus, whose
opening Idyl is as pretty a bit of gasconade about living
in a cottage in the country, upon love and a few vege-
tables, as a maiden could wish for, did not reach the
fifties ; and Martial, whose " Faustine Villia," if noth-
ing else, entitles him to rural oblation, fell short of the
sixties. Varro himself alludes with pride to the greater
longevity of those who live in the country, and alleges
as a reason, ^* quod Divina natiira dedit ctffros, an
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8§ WET DAYS.
humana adtficavit urhes" Is not this the possible
original of Cowper's " God made the country, and man
made the town"?
The old man is very &11 in his rules for Fundania,
not only as regards general management, but in respect
to the choice of land, the determination of its quali-
ties, the building of the country-houses, the arrange-
ment of the offices, the regimen of the servants, and
the treatment of the various manures and crops. He
clearly urges rotation, has faith in a very large in-
fluence of the moon, counts the droppings of pigeons
the best of all manures, and gives the sea-birds very
little credit for their contributions to the same office.*
I even find this octogenarian waxing jocose at times.
On a certain occasion he says, (it is mentioned in his
book of poultry and birds,t) " I paid a visit with a
friend to Appius Claudius, the Augur, and found him
seated, with Cornelius Merula [blackbird] and Fircel-
lius Pavo [peacock] on his left, while Minutius Pica
[magpie] and Petronius Passer [sparrow] were on his
right ; whereupon my friend says, * My good sir, you
receive us in your aviary, seated among your birds.'"
The jokelet is not indeed over-racy, but it has a quaint
twang, coming as it does in musty type over so man^
centuries, from the pen of an old man of eighty, who
* Lib. i. cap. zxxiiii. ** Stercns optimum scribit Cassins esse Tola*
cnua, prseter palustriam, ac nantium.^'
t Lib. III. cap. ii. De Re Rusticd.
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COLUMELLA. SI
discussed guinea-fowl and geese, and who niade m3n>
ing calls at the house of Judge Appius Claudius.
Yarro indulges in some sharp sneers at those who
had written on the same suhject before him. This wai
natural enough in a man of his piu'suits : he had writ
ten four hundred books.
Columella,
/ \F Cohmiella we know scarcely more than that he
^^ lived somewhere about the time of Tiberius, that
he was a man of wealth, that he travelled extensively
through Gaul, Italy, and Greece, observing intelligently
different methods of culture, and that he has given the
fullest existing compend of ancient agriculture. In his
chapter upon Gku'dening he warms into hexameters;
but the rest is stately and euphonious prose. In his
opening chapter, he does not forego such praises of the
former's life as sound like a lawyer's address before a
county - society on a fair -day. Cincinnatus and his
plough come in for it ; and Fabricius and Curius Den-
tatus ; with which names, luckily, our orators cannot
whet their periods, since Columella's mention of them
is about all we know of their farming.
He falls into the way, moreover, of lamenting, as
people obstinately continue to do, the " good old times,"
when men were better than " now," and when the rea-
sonable delights of the garden and the fields engrossed
3
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64 WET DAYS.
them to the neglect of the circus and the theatres
But when he opens upon his subject proper, it is in
grandiose Spanish style, (he was a native of Cadiz,)
with a maxim broad enough to cover all possible condi-
tions: — "Whoever would devote himself to the pursuit
of agriculture should understand that he must summon
to his aid — prudence in business, a faculty of spend-
ing, and a determination to work." * Oi , as Tremellius
says, — "That man will master the craft, who knows
how to cultivate, et poterit, et volet."
This is comprehensive, if not encouraging. It would
be hard to say, indeed, in what particular this summa-
tion of Columella would not apply to the pursuit of
almost any man. That " faculty of spending " is a tre-
mendous bolster to a great many other things as well
as farming. Neither parsons nor politicians can ignore
it wholly. It is only another shape of the poterit, and
the poterit only a scholarly rendering of pounds and
pence. As if Tremellius had said, — That man will
make his way at farming who understands the business,
who has the money to apply to it, and who is willing to
bleed freely. There are a great many people who have
said the same thing since.
With a kindred sagacity this shrewd Roman advisei
a man to slip upon his farm often, in order that his stew
*' ' Qui studium agricolationi dederit, sciat hsec sibi aiyocfinda
pruaentiam rci, facuUatem Impendcndi, voluntatem agendi."
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COLUMELLA, M
ATd may keep sharply at his work ; he even suggests
that the landlord make a feint of e( ming, when he has
no intention thereto, that he may gain a day's alertness
from the bailiff. The book is of course a measure of
the advances made in farming during the two hundred
years elapsed since Cato's time; but those advances
were not great There was advance in power to sys-
tematize facts, advance in literary aptitude, but no ver^
noticeable gain in methods of culture. Columella gives
the results of wider observation, and of more persistent
study ; but, for aught I can see, a man could get a crop
of lentils as well with Cato as with Columella ; a man
would house his flocks and servants as well out of the
one as the other ; in short, a man would grow into the
" faculty of spending " as swiitiy under the teachings
of the Senator as of the later writer of the reign of
Tiberius.
It is to be observed, however, that, so far as one can
judge from the work of Columella, farming was now
conducted upon a grander scale. The days when Cin-
cinnatus dug among his own cabbages, and Curius
Dentatus bent his own back to the sarculum, were long
gone by, and were looked back upon, I dare say, by the
first readers of the elegant Columella, as we look back
to the days of Captain Smith, Pocahontas, and corn-cakes
baked in the ashes. The details of a Roman farmery
which are entered upon by this author are of an extent
and of a nicety which would compare with an East
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56
WET DAYS.
Lothian steading. He divides the entire establishment
into three distinct parts : the villa urbana, the villa rus*
tica, and the fructuaria ; or, as we might say, the man-
sion-house, the laborers' cottages, and the out-buildings.
I give a reduced drawing of such a design from
(^lastelFs " Villas of the Ancients." * A huge kitchen, it
* The following letters and numbers indicate the several parts: —
A« Th£ Villa Urbai^a.
a. Inner court.
6. Summer dining-room.
c. Winter dining-room.
d. Withdrawing-rooms.
e. Winter apartments.
/. Summer apartments.
g. Library.
h,. Servants* hall.
t. Dressing-room of baths.
h» Bathing-room.
U Warm cell.
m. Sweating-room.
ft. Furnace.
0. Porters* lodges.
B« Villa Rustioa and Fructuaria.
1. Inner farm-yard.
2. Pond.
3. Outer yard
4. Kitchen.
6. New wine.
6. Old wine.
7. Housekeeper.
8. Spinning-room.
9. To sick-room.
10. Lodges.
11. Stairs to bailiff's room.
12. Keeper of stoves.
13. Stairs to work-house.
14. Wine-press.
16. Oil-press.
16. Granaries.
17. Fruit-room.
18. Master of cattle.
19. Ox-staTis.
20. Herdsmen.
21. Stables.
22. Grooms
23. Sheepfold.
24. Shepherds.
25. Groat-pens.
26. Goatherds.
27. Dog-kennels.
28. Cart-houses.
29. Hog-sties.
30. Hog-keepcrs.
31. Bakehouse.
32. Mill.
33. Outer pond.
34. Dunghills.
35. Wood and fodder.
36. Hen-yard.
37. 38. Dove-houseB
39. Thrushes.
40. Poultry.
41. Poulterers.
42. Porter.
43. Dog-kennclii
44.' Orchard.
45. Kitchen-gard«&
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COLUMELLA.
IL ROMAN FARMERY.
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88 WET DAYS.
will be seen, forms a prominent feature of the " rustic *
part of the establishment, and opening directly upon
the kitchen are the ox-stalls. Behind these is a court
flanked by the herdsmen's quarters, and by the wine-
cellars; and still farther in the rear, a larger court
with goat-pens, cells for the goatherds, and kennels
for dogs. In short, it is an establishment which would
have amazed old Hesiod with his couplet of ploughs
and his " sharp-toothed cur."
Columella urges, like Cato, frequent ploughings, —
si-ggesting that they be repeated until no trace of the
furrows can be detected, by which we may infer that
the ploughs carried but a scanty mould-board. He ad-
vises that manures be turned under immediately after
their application, and shows himself up to the best prac-
tice of our time in directing that the manure-heap
be protected from the weather. He commends the
lucem and the cytisus, is full in the matter of all
field-crops, and his garden-poem shows gleams of sunny
fruit, from the apple to the pomegranate. His in-
strucdons in respect of poultry are of the amplest, and,
bating a little heathen wickedness of ti'eatment, are bet-
ter than the majority of poulterers could give us now
It is but dull work to follow all these teachings;
here and there I warm into a little sympathy, as I
catch sight, in his Latin dress, of our old friend Our-
ttdio; here and there I sniff a fruit that seems famil
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A ROMAN DREAM. 9S
iar, — as the ftaga^ or a morum ; and here and there
comes blushmg into the crabbed text the sweet name
of some home-flower, — a lily, a narcissus, or a rose.
The chief value of the work of Columella, however,
lies in its clear showing-forth of the relative importance
given to different crops, under Boman culture, and to
the raising of cattle, poultry, fish, etc., as compared with
crops. Knowing this, we know very much that will
help us toward an estimate of the domestic life of the
Romans. We learn, with surprise, how little they re-
garded their oxen, save as working-animals, — whether
the milk-white steers of Clitumnus, or the dun Cam-
panian cattle, whose descendants show their long-
homed stateliness to this day in the Boman forum.
The sheep, too, whether of Tarentum or of Canusiiun,
were regarded as of value chiefly for their wool and
milk ; and it is surely amaang, that men who could
appreciate the iambics of Horace and the eloquence of
Cicero should have shown so little ^cy for a hX
saddle of mutton or for a mottled sirloin of beef.
A Roman Dream,
T CHANGE from Columella to Vu-gil, and from Vh^
-â– - back to some pleasant Idyl of Tibullus, and from
Tibullus to the pretty prate of Horace about the Sa-
bine Hills; I stroll through Pliny's villa, eying the
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40 WET DAYS.
clipped box-trees ; I hear the rattle in the tennis-court ,
I watch the tall Roman girls —
" Grandes virgines probonun cclonorum " —
marching along with their wicker-baskets filled with
curds and fresh-plucked thrushes, until there comes
over me a confusion of times and places.
— The sound of the battle of to-day dies ; the fresh
blood-stains fade ; and I seem to wake upon the heights
of Tusculum, in the days of Tiberius. The farm-flat
below is a miniature Campagna, along which I see
stretching straight to the city the shining pavement of
the Via Tusculana. The spires yonder melt into mist,
and in place of them I see the marble house-walls of
which Augustus boasted. As yet the grander mon-
imients of the Empire are not built ; but there is a
blotch of cliff which may be the Tarpeian Bock, and
beside it a huge hulk of building on the Capitoline
Hill, where sat the Roman Senate. A little hitherward
are the gay turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the
princely houses on the Palatine Hill, and in the fore-
ground the stately tomb of Caecilia Metella. I see the
barriers of a hippodrome (where now howling jockeys
make the twilight hideous) ; a gestcUio, with its lines of
trees, is before me, and the velvety lavender-green of
oliye-oichards covers the hills behind. Vines gron
upon the slope eastward, —
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A ROMAN DREAM. 41
** Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem," *^
j^ning around, and flinging off a great wealth of ten
drils from their supporting-poles (pedamenta). The
f5gs begin to show the purple bloom of fruitage, and ihe
viUuus, who has just now come in from the airiolum,
reports a good crop, and asks if it would not be well to
apply a few loads of marl (tofacea) to the summer fal-
low, which Cato is just now breaking up with the Cam-
panian steers, for barley.
Scipio, a stanch Numidian, has gone to market with
three asses loaded with cabbages and asparagus. Vil-
licus tells me that the poultry in the fattening-coops (as
close-shut as the Strasburg geese) * are doing well, and
he has added a soupgon of sweetening to their barley-
gruel. The young doves have their legs faithfully bro-
ken, (" ohteras crura^^) and are placidly fattening on
their stumps. The thrush-house is properly darkened,
only enough light entering to show the food to some
three or four thousand birds, which are in course of
cramming for the market The cochlearium has a good
stock of snails and mussels ; and the little donnice are
growing into fine condition for an approaching Imperial
banquet.
Villicus reports the clip of the Tarentine sheep un-
* ** Locus ad banc rem desiderator maxime calidus, et minimi lLmi<
nis, in quo singula caveis aagostioribus vel sportis inclusss pendeaiil
Aves, sed ita coarctattc, nc versari possiiU.^^ — Columella, Lib. VIII.
Gap.Tii
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oogle
42 WET DATS.
usually fine, and free from burrs. The new must is all
a-foam in the mnaria; and around the inner cellar
{gaudendum est !) there is a tier of urns, as large as
school-boys, brimming with ripe Falernian.
If it were not stormy, I might order out the farm'
chariot, or curriculum^ which is, after all, but a low,
dumpy kind of horse-cart, and take a drive over the
lava pavement of the Via Tusculana, to learn what news
is astir, and what the citizens talk of in the forum. Is
all quiet upon the Rhine ? How is it possibly with
Germanicus? And what of that story of the arrest
of Seneca ? It could hardly have happened, they say,
in the good old days of the Republic.
And with this mention, as with the sound of a gun,
the Roman pastoral dream is broken. The Campagna,
the olive-orchards, the columbarium, fall back to their
old places in the blurred type of Columella. The Cam-
panian steers are unyoked, and stabled in the text of
Varro. The turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of
the palaces of Sylla and the Caesars, give place to the
spires of a New-England town, — southward of which
I see through the mist a solitary flag flying over a
soldiers' iiospital. It reminds of nearer and deadlier
perils than ever environed the Roman Republic, —
perils out of which, if the wisdom and courage of the
people do not find a way, some new Caesar will point it
with the sword.
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A ROMAN DREAM. 43
Looking northward, I see there is a bight of blue in
the sky ; and a lee set of dark-gray and purple clouds
is folding down over the eastern horizon, — against
which the spires and the flag show clearer than even
It means that the rain has stopped ; and the rain buy
ing stopjied, my in-door work is done.
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SECOND DAY.
VirgiL
Q< NO WING: the checkered fields below are trace-
'^ able now only by the brown lines of fences and
the sparse trees that mark the hedge-rows. The white
of the houses and of the spires of the town is seen dimly
through the snow, and seems to waver and shift position
like the sails and spars of ships seen through fog. And
straightway upon this image of ships and swaying spars
I go sailing back to the farm-land of the past, and
sharpen my pen for another day's work among the
old farm-writers.
I suspect Virgil was never a serious farmer. I am
confident he never had one of those callosities upon
the inner side of his right thumb which come of the
lower thole of a scythe-snath, after a week's mowing.
But he had that quick poet's eye which sees it a
glance what other men see only in a day. Not a shnib
or a tree, not a bit of fallow ground or of nodding ientUs
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VIRGIL, 45
escaped his observation ; not a bird or a bee ; not even
the mosquitoes, which to this day hover pestiferously
about the low-lying sedge-lands of Mantua. His first
pastoral, little known now, and rarelj printed with his
works, is inscribed Chdex,*
Young Virgil appears to have been of a delicate con-
stitution, and probably left the fever-bearing regions of
the Mincio for the higher plain of Milan for sanitary
reasons, as much as the other, — of studying, as men
of his parts did study, Greek and philosophy. There is
a story, indeed, that he studied and practised farriery,
as his father had done before him ; and Jethro Tull, in
his crude onslaught upon what he calls the Yirgilian
husbandry, (chap, ix.,) intimates that a farrier could be
no way fit to lay down the rules for good farm-practice.
But this story of his having been a horse-doctor rests,
so far as I can discover, only on this flimsy tradition, —
that the young poet, on his way to the South of Italy,
after leaving Milan and Mantua, fell in at Rome with
the master-of-horse to Octavianus, and gave such shrewd
hints to that official in regard to the points and failings
of certain favorite horses of the Roman Triumvir (for
Octavianus had not as yet assumed the purple) as to
gain a presentation to the future Augustus, and rich
marks of his favor.
It is certain that the poet journeyed to the South
* " Ltuimus: haec *ropter CuUcis sint carmina dicta/*
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46 WET DAYS.
and that thenceforward the glorious sunshine of Bai«
and of the Neapolitan shores gave a color to his poems
and to his life.
Yet his agricultural method was derived almost
wholly from his observation in the North of Italy. He
never forgot the marshy borders of the Mincio, nor the
shores of beautiful Benacus (Lago di Garda) ; who
knows but he may some time have driven his flocks
a^field on the very battle-ground of Solferino ?
But the ruralities of Virgil take a special interest
from the period in which they were written. He fol-
lowed upon the heel of long and desolating intestine
wars, — a singing-bird in the wake of vultures. No
wonder the voice seemed strangely sweet
The eloquence of the Senate had long ago lost its
traditionary power ; the sword was every way keener.
Who should listen to the best of speakers, when Pom-
pey was in the forimi, covered with the spoils of the
East? Who should care for Cicero's periods, when the
magnificent conqueror of Gaul is skirting the Umbrian
Marshes, making straight for the Rubicon and Rome ?
Then came Pharsalia, with its bloody trail, from
which Caesar rises only to be slaughtered in the Senate*
Chamber. Next comes the long duel between the
Triumvirate and the palsied representatives of the
Republican party. Philippi closes that interlude ; and
there is a new duel between Octavianus and Antony
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VIRGIL. 47
(Lepidus c ounting for nothing). Tie gallant lover of
Cleopatra is pitted against a gallant general who ia
a nephew to the first Caesar. The fight comes off at
Actium, and the lover is the loser ; the pretty Egyptian
Jezebel, with her golden-prowed galleys, goes sweeping
down, under a full press of wind, to swell the squadron
of the conqueror. The winds will always carry the
Jezebels to the conquering side.
Such, then, was the condition of Italy, — its families
divided, its grain-fields trampled down by the Volscian
cavalry, its houses red with fresh blood-stains, its homes
beyond the Po parcelled out to lawless returning sol-
diers, its public security poised on the point of the
sword of Augustus, — when Virgil's Bucolics appear : a
pastoral thanksgiving for the patrimony that had been
spared him, through court-favor.
There is a show of gross adulation that makes one
blush for his manhood ; but withal he is a most lithe-
some poet, whose words are like honeyed blossoms, and
whose graceful measure is like a hedge of bloom that
sways with spring breezes, and spends perfume as it
sways.
The Georgics were said to have been written at the
suggestion of Maecenas, a cultivated friend of Augustus,
who, like many another friend of the party in power,
had made a great fortune out of the wars that desolated
Italy. He made good use of it, however, in patronizing
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48 WET DAYS.
Virgil, and in bestowing a snug farm in the Sabine couii>
try upon Horace ; where I had the pleasure of drink-
ing goats' milk — " dtdci digne mero " — in the spring
of 1846.
There can be no doul^t but Virgil had been an atten-
tive reader of Xenophon, of Hesiod, of Cato, and of
Varro ; otherwise he certainly would have been unwor-
thy of the task he had' undertaken, — that of laying
down the rules of good husbandry in a w^y that should
insure the reading of them, and kindle a love for the
pursuit
I suspect that Virgil was npt only a reader of all that
had been written on the subject, but that he was also an
insistant questioner of every sagacious landholder and
every sturdy farmer that he fell in with, whether on the
Campanian hills or at the house of Msecenas. How
else does a man accomplish himself for a didactic work
relating to matters of fact? I suspect, moreover,
that Virgil, during those half dozen years in which he
•was engaged upon fhis task, lost no opportunity of in-
specting every beehive that fell in his way, of measiu*-
ing the points and graces of every pretty heifer he saw
irf the fields, and of noting with the eye of an artist
the color of every furrow that glided from tiie plough.
It is inconceivable that a man of his intellectual address
. should have given so much of literary toil to a work
that was not in every essential fully up to the best
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VIRGIL. 49
practice of the day. Five years, it is said, were given
to the accomplishment of this short poem. What say
oiir poetasters to this ? Fifteen hundred days, we will
suppose, to less than twice as many lines ; blocking out
four or five for his morning's task, and all the evening
— for he was a late worker — licking them into shape,
as a bear licks her cubs.
But what good is in it all? Simply as a work of
art, it will be cherished through all time, — an earlier
Titian, whose color can never fade. It was, besides, a
most beguiling peace-note, following upon the rude blasts
of wdo*. It gave a new charm to forsaken homesteads.
Under the Yirgilian leadership, Monte Gennaro and the
heights of Tusculum beckon the Romans to the fields ;
the meadows by reedy Thrasymene are made golden
with doubled crops. The Tarentine sheep multiply
around Benacus, and crop close those dark bits of
herbage which have been fed by the blood of Roman
citizens.
Thus much for the magic of the verse ; but there is
also sound farm-talk in Virgil. I am aware that Seneca,
living a few years after him, invidiously objects that
he was more careful of his language than of his doc-
trine, and that Columella quotes him charily, — that
the collector of the " Geoponics ** ignores him, and that
Tull gives hmi clumsy raillery ; but I have yet to see in
what respect his system falls short of CJolumella, or how
5
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5C WET DAYS,
it differs materially, except in fulness, from the teachingi