Chapter I: Columella and Agriculture

Columella’s works—His date—Subjects treated in _De Re
Rustica_—His outlook on agriculture—Vivid glimpses of
farm-life—Attitude to sources—Prose style—Feeling for
colour—His verse-book on gardens—Things useful and things
beautiful.

The _De Re Rustica_ of L. Junius Moderatus Columella[513] is our best witness to methods of husbandry in the earlier Empire. A Spaniard by birth—his native place was Gades[514] (Cadiz)—he took both a family and a personal interest in farming. His uncle, “the most diligent husbandman in the province of Baetica,”[515] whom he several times cites with respect, gained great experience in land-owning: and when Columella himself acquired estates in Italy,[516] he added practical knowledge to his study of Greek, Carthaginian and Roman writers on the subject. An inscription[517] tells that he was of the Galerian tribe and served as an officer in the _legio sexta ferrata_; so it is a reasonable conjecture that, when that legion was stationed in Syria, he took the opportunity of observing agricultural operations which he recalled when he came to write.[518] Besides his _De Re Rustica_ in twelve books (originally designed to end with the tenth book which is in verse), he had previously written a manual on agriculture, of which the second book, _De Arboribus_, is left. A work now missing was his counterblast to fortune-telling, _Adversus Astrologos_ (XI. i. 31); and he at least had it in mind to compose[519] an account of rituals followed in farming, which would have been of great value for a student of Roman religion.

He wrote after Julius Graecinus and Cornelius Celsus (the agricultural part of whose encyclopaedia he often quotes), but before the elder Pliny, who in turn used Columella. One other chronological point can be determined, which shows he was writing in Nero’s reign. In the third book of the _De Re Rustica_ he mentions Seneca, “a person of excellent genius and learning,” as holding a Nomentan estate[520] not far from his own; and, as Seneca acquired this late in life but must have already held it long enough to make it known for its abundant vintage-yield, the inference is that this book was written not much before Seneca’s death in A.D. 65.

Briefly these are the subjects of the twelve books:

I, General rules for country life, _e.g._ on choosing land, securing water and staffing a farm; II, treatment of land, ploughing, manuring, various crops; III-IV, vineyards and vines; V, land dimensions, elms, olives, fruit-trees; VI, cattle, horses, mules; VII, sheep, goats, and (after a chapter on cheese-making) swine and dogs; VIII, poultry and fish-ponds; IX, wild cattle and bees; X, gardens (in verse); XI, duties of a farm-bailiff, work for different months, and gardens (in prose); XII, duties of a bailiff’s wife—provisions, pickling, fruit-preserving; on mead, cheese, figs, raisins, making and treatment of wines, savoury olive marmalade, salting swine’s flesh.

From the mere headings one can see at once that such work is technical rather than literary; yet there is much in it to recreate important aspects of the environment of the Romans in the first century. Columella was conscious that agriculture, the traditional strength of Rome, was being sapped by the multiplication of parks and country-seats and by wasteful mismanagement of estates through incompetence. He is very insistent on the abuses due to absentee landlords, and equally insistent on the need for practical farming and personal control. The owner who manages for himself ought to secure better returns than he would by letting to tenant-farmers, though this latter method avoids some of the risks consequent on running the farm by slave-labour under a farm-bailiff.

A summary examination of his preface to the first book illustrates his general outlook and his advocacy of restored attention to agriculture, for which he has imbibed a traditional Roman veneration. The old Roman practice, he says, of land-tilling in which a consul or a dictator used to take personal delight, the pursuit which might be called “own sister to philosophy” (_quasi consanguinea sapientiae_), has fallen on evil days. There are teachers for all other sciences and arts, including trumpery, luxurious, and even disreputable ones; but, he adds, “of agriculture I have never known any to profess themselves either instructors or students.” Mother earth is foolishly alleged to have declined in fertility, whereas the true reason is that skilled labour is not being devoted to her. Feeble old town-slaves will be banished to do country work, although rural toil demands both knowledge and “green age” capable of standing fatigue. In contrast with olden times, we Romans “have crept (_correpsimus_) inside the city-wall and ply our hands rather in circuses and theatres than among crops and vineyards.” We misspend our days and nights and “consider ourselves lucky because we never see a sunrise or a sunset.” Things are come to such a pass that “in this Latium and Saturnian land we let out by public auction the importation of corn from our provinces.” Agriculture is no easy thing to excel in; but the right attitude is not despair in face of its vast variety (_tam variae tamque uastae scientiae_), but determination to use the knowledge handed down by Greek and Roman writers (many of whom Columella names),[521] and to make diligent practical experiment. As he remarks in his first chapter, “practice and experience are masters in the arts”: books and rules are only auxiliary: nothing benefits the farm so much as the master’s own presence.

Naturally the didactic value in such work outweighs the artistic; but there is a great deal of old-world information which can hardly fail to interest, though it may but concern the right contrivance of an old Italian hen-house, the food proper for poultry, recipes for preserving pears, the way to make mead of the very best honey, or the mode of reasonably encouraging treatment which Columella found efficacious with his slaves. It is something to have thus brought home to the mind what life meant on farms in the imperial period, to learn that a shepherd’s dog should be white so that it could be distinguished on dark mornings or at evening twilight from the dangerous wolf, to note the frugality and energy laid down as ideally requisite in a competent farm-bailiff, to admire the methodical regularity declared to be equally essential in the farm-bailiff’s wife as in a chorus of singers or (as the author says, no doubt with a touch of personal reminiscence) in the army. One of the truly Roman features in Columella is his maintenance of a standard of hard work, fortified by his citation from Cato, “by doing nothing men learn to do evil.” It is true his science is far from impeccable: some of his cures are appallingly foolish, and his astronomy little likely to produce a sound calendar. But then even blunders may have the merit of affording amusement; and, besides, there is in him a modesty which half disarms criticism. It appears very prettily in his final sentence, when, now an old man, and conscious of the magnitude of his theme, he comes to say good-bye to it:

As a conclusion of my work now accomplished, I think it not
improper, Publius Silvinus, to declare to my readers (if truly
any be found who deign to take cognizance of such affairs)
that I nowise doubted the existence of wellnigh an infinity
of matters capable of being ingrafted upon this subject, but
that I judged it right that only such as seemed most necessary
should be handed down to remembrance. Nature has not, however,
bestowed even on grey hairs insight into all things; for even
whosoever have been esteemed the wisest of mortals are said to
have known many things, but not all.[522]

Columella’s sources include, besides Greek authorities and Mago, the Carthaginian, whose work the senate of the republic had ordained to be translated into Latin, Cato,[523] the Sasernae (father and son), Tremellius Scrofa, Varro, Virgil, Hyginus, and among later writers Graecinus, Julius Atticus and Cornelius Celsus. The two last he characterizes as “the most celebrated authors of our age.”[524] He often adduces Celsus’s opinions, just as he often quotes Virgil’s _Georgics_. Columella is noticeably more specific, in fact more honest, touching his sources than many writers of antiquity were. Nothing could be more open than his introductory remarks on bees and beehives. It is solely for the sake of completeness, he explains, that he must include the theme: for on it “no precepts can be given more carefully than have been delivered by Hyginus, nor more gracefully than by Virgil, nor more elegantly than by Celsus.”[525]

Columella writes on a practical subject in a practical way. Of course there must be rare technical words drawn from operations that fall to be described, like _abnodare_ (“cut off knots,” IV. xxii. 4, IV. xxiv. 10), _decacuminare_ (“cut tops off,” IV. vii. 3, V. vi. 12), _canteriatae_ (of vines supported by trellis-work, V. iv. 1, _cf._ _canterius_, IV. xii. 1), _impedatio_ (“propping,” IV. xiii. 1), _scabrata_ (of a vine roughened by pruning, IV. xxiv. 22), _glocire_ (of a hen’s clucking, VIII. v. 4).[526] His sentences are clear and business-like, though without the archaic and bare jerkiness of Cato. Generally his most polished style appears in his prefaces; and, where he aims at finish, the influence of Cicero can be traced. Even without exact statistics, the ear detects the cadences of his _clausulae_—a liking for cretics (or resolved cretics) followed by trochee or double trochee, spondee or double spondee. One feature anyway is refreshing: he does not weary his reader with purple patches or with the artifices of his age. There are allusions to Spanish habits and Spanish names, but there is no Spanish rhetoric. When he is enthusiastic, his enthusiasm is natural, and that is why one can honestly welcome a certain poetic vein in him. Independently of his constant quotations from Virgil and his verse-book on gardens, an artistic sentiment stirs within the author, and his eye does not fail to mark nor his pen to convey the colours of an Italian vineyard in autumn:[527]

Even the greatest stranger to rural life, should he come into
your grounds planted in due season, must with a transport of
pleasure marvel at the kindliness of Nature, to see there
the Bituric vines rich in fruitage, and here their rivals,
the pale yellow vines, match each other.... Bounteous earth,
rejoicing over the annual return of the season, as it were some
eternal child-bearing, offers to mankind her breasts distended
with new wine. Amidst all, while Bacchus favours the pregnant
vine-branches whether of the white kind or golden and ruddy,
or agleam with purple brightness, everywhere doth Autumn shine
lustrous, laden with parti-coloured fruits.

This feeling for colour is met with again in his verses:

Plant many-colour’d blooms, those stars of earth—
White gilly-flower and gold-eyed marigold,
The fair-tress’d daffodil and “lion’s maw”
Fierce gaping, lilies too that keep
Their greenness in grey baskets, hyacinths
Or snowy-white or blue. Add violets
Pale-creeping or with gold and purple proud,
And roses over-full of modest blush.[528]

His treatment of horticulture in the tenth book, like his motive for writing it, was partly utilitarian, partly, but only partly, poetic. He was scarcely free enough in soul to take a garden, as Bacon did, for “the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man”; nor would Bacon’s threefold division of “a greene in the entrance, a heath or desart in the going forth, and the maine garden in the midst” ever have occurred to Columella. The luxury of contemporary banquets shocked him, he says in his preface; no poor man could afford such extravagance. Yet thrifty use might be made of a garden, and this would have been handled in prose but for Silvinus’s request that Columella should write in verse what Virgil expressly bequeathed in the fourth _Georgic_ for literary posterity. Parts of the subject seemed so insignificant that the author feared its treatment might resemble “making ropes out of sand”; and thus throughout the 436 hexameters there may be traced a sort of conflict between the desire to give serviceable advice concerning a market-garden and an artistic yearning after beauty. Columella, indeed, succeeds, as Martial did after him, in making some at least of his vegetables poetic. Flowers are a godsend to him. Besides, there are Virgilian echoes from _Eclogues_, _Georgics_ and _Aeneid_, but also occurrences of compound adjectives proportionately rather more frequent than in Virgil.[529]

The start is made on useful topics—soil proper to a garden, trees indicative of suitable ground, the wall or fence, the undesirability of statues save of the protective wooden Garden-God; then, after a pause to utter a conventional invocation, the author advocates digging and ploughing regardless of mercy for “mother earth.” The season

When nesting swallows twitter “Spring is come”[530]

calls for the employment of manure, hoe, rake and spade, and for the planting of gay flowers, as in the passage already translated. Herbs of various potency, different kinds of cabbage, watering of young plants and the management of a dry hill-plot lead to his insistence on work at the right moment:

Be wakeful, men! noiseless the Seasons ply
Their pace, and all the year turns round unheard.[531]

Then follows a procession of vegetables—parsley, leeks, parsnips and lettuces, with a side-glance directed to the “thousand hues” secured by the skilled gardener, till the fertility of spring wakes a rhapsody on the dominion of Venus as reminiscent of Lucretius and of Virgil’s second _Georgic_, as it is anticipative of the _Peruigilium Veneris_:

Hence ocean, hence the hills, hence all the world
Do keep spring-time; hence lust in man and herd
And fowl: the fire of love lit at the heart
Rageth within the marrow, till o’ercloy’d
Venus fulfils the fruitful frame and gets
Manifold offspring, peopling still the world
With young, lest in a barren age it faint.[532]

Here, however, the poet checks himself: let such themes be reserved for a bard inspired to sing of nature’s mysteries: he must answer the call to humbler matters:

Knit strains with slender thread such as ’mid toil
The pruner, bending o’er his shrubs, may sing
Attuned, or gardener in his pleasaunce green.[533]

So we find ourselves among cresses, artichokes, pomegranates and beet; till again the brilliant array of spring-blossom fills the poet with glee over the flower-harvest:

Yea, harvest presseth on the scented blooms:
Now is spring gaudy, now the bounteous earth
Is glad to deck her brows with coronal
Of all the proud-pied increase of the year.
Now Phrygian lotus shows its gem-like face,
And violet-beds unclose their winking eyes.
The “lion” yawns and, tinged with nature’s blush,
The rose unveils her maiden cheek to pay
The gods due worship and their sanctuaries
Perfume with blended scents of Araby.[534]

So for the moment he is on the verge of fairyland invoking the nymphs.

Then comes the thought that in workaday Italy and in its market towns there is money to be made from the produce; so one must remember the tasks appropriate as the day lengthens and the southern heat increases: one must be on guard against inroads of insects and danger to ripe fruits from rain and hail, and must grow cucumbers and melons, plums, peaches and figs, not forgetting Vulcan’s feast in autumn. But, at this autumnal allusion, the vintage beckons us away from gardens to obey the summons of Bacchus, and with that Columella finishes his task self-imposed in pursuance of the behest of Virgil, the Roman Hesiod,

Who sang through Roman towns the Ascraean lay.[535]