XXV. VARRO.
M Terentius Varro wrote his treatise de re rustica in 37-6 BC at the age of 80. The subject was only one of an immense number to which he devoted his talents and wide learning when not actively engaged in public duties. The last republican rally under Brutus and Cassius had failed at Philippi in 42, and the Roman world was shared out between the Triumvirs. In 36 the suppression of Lepidus declared what was already obvious, that Antony and Octavian were the real holders of power and probable rivals. Proscriptions, confiscations, land-allotments to soldiers, the wars with Antony’s brother Lucius and the great Pompey’s son Sextus, had added to the unsettlement and exhaustion of Italy. If it appeared to Varro that a treatise on farming would be opportune (and we may fairly conjecture that it did), there was surely much to justify his opinion in the distressful state of many parts of the country. But at this point we are met by a passage[712] in the work itself which seems to prove that he took a very different view of present agricultural conditions in Italy. Some of the speakers (the book is in form a dialogue) declare that no country is better cultivated than Italy, that no other country is so fully cultivated all through (tota), that Italian crops are in general the best of their several kinds, and in particular that Italy is one great orchard. Instances in point are given. That Varro, like Cicero, took great care[713] to avoid anachronisms and improbabilities, that his characters are real persons, and that he tries hard to fit the several topics to the several characters, is not to be denied. But it is perhaps too much to assume that such general remarks as those just cited are meant to represent the known personal opinions of the speakers. If we could be sure of the date at which the dialogue is supposed to be held, we might have a more satisfactory standard for estimating the significance and historical value of these utterances. Unluckily we have no convincing evidence as to the intended date. The scene of the second book can be laid in 67 BC with reasonable certainty, and that of the third in 54 BC. But no passage occurs in the first book sufficient to furnish material for a like inference. When Stolo refers[714] to Varro’s presence with the fleet and army at Corcyra, some have thought that he has in mind the time of the civil war in 49 BC. It is much more likely that the reference is to Varro’s service[715] as one of Pompey’s lieutenants in the pirate war of 67 BC. The dialogue of Book I would then be placed after the summer of that year, probably not much later. The boast of the speakers as to the splendid cultivation of Italy in general would refer to the time when the disturbance caused by the confiscations and assignations of Sulla was dying down and the rising of Spartacus had lately been suppressed. It would be placed before the later disturbances caused by measures designed to satisfy the claims of Pompeian Caesarian and Triumviral armies. Vergil had not yet been driven from his Cisalpine farm.
Whether by placing Book I in this interval, and by supposing that the circumstances of that time would fit the utterances of Varro’s characters, I am exceeding the limits of sober guesswork, I cannot judge. But I am convinced that in any case upland pastures and forest-lands[716] accounted for a very large part of the surface of Italy then, as they do still. Indeed Varro recognizes this in his references to the migration of flocks and herds according to the seasons, and particularly when he notes not only the great stretches of rough land to be traversed but also the need of active and sturdy pastores able to beat off the assaults of wild beasts and robbers. Surely the complete cultivation of Italy, compared as it is with that of other countries, is a description not to be taken literally, but as a natural exaggeration in the mouth of a self-complacent Roman agriculturist. Be this as it may, the treatise marks a great advance on that of Cato in some respects. Many details are common to both writers, in particular the repeated insistence on the main principle that whatever the farmer does must be made to pay. Profit, not sentiment or fancy, was their common and truly Roman aim. But in the century or more that had elapsed since Cato wrote other authors (such as Saserna) had treated of farming, and much had been learnt from Greek and Punic authorities. Knowledge of the products and practices of foreign lands had greatly increased, and Varro, who had himself added to this store, made free use of the wider range of facts now at the service of inquirers. And the enlarged outlook called for a systematic method. Accordingly Varro’s work is clearly divided into three discussions, of tillage (Book I), grazing and stock-breeding (II), and keeping fancy animals (III) chiefly to supply the market for table-luxuries. And he goes into detail in a spirit different from that of Cato. Cato jerked out dogmatic precepts when he thought fit, for instance his wonderful list of farm-requisites. Varro is more concerned with the principles, the reasons for preferring this or that method, derived from the theories and experience of the past. For instance, in estimating the staff required, he insists[717] on its being proportioned to the scale of the work to be done: as the average day’s work (opera) varies in efficiency according to the soil, it is not possible to assign a definite number of hands to a farm of definite area. Nor is he content simply to take slave-labour, supplemented by hired free labour and contract-work, for granted. In a short but important passage he discusses the labour-question, with reasons for the preference of this or that class of labour for this or that purpose, of course preferring whichever is likely to give the maximum of profit with the minimum of loss.
It is this passage[718] that is chiefly of interest from my present point of view, and I will therefore translate it in full.
‘So much for the four conditions[719] of the farm that are connected with the soil, and the second four external to the farm but bearing on its cultivation. Now for the appliances used in tillage. Some classify these under two heads (a) men (b) the implements necessary for their work. Others under three[720] heads (a) the possessed of true speech (b) the possessed of inarticulate speech (c) the speechless. In these classes respectively are included[721] (a) slaves (b) oxen (c) waggons, and such are the three kinds of equipment. The men employed in all tillage are either slaves or freemen or both. Free labour is seen in the case of those who till their[722] land themselves, as poor peasants[723] with the help of their families mostly do: or in that of wage-earners[724], as when a farmer hires free hands to carry out the more important operations on his farm, vintage or hay-harvest and the like: such also are those who were called “tied men”[725] in Italy, a class still numerous in Asia Egypt and Illyricum. Speaking of these[726] as a class, I maintain that in the tillage of malarious land[727] it pays better to employ free wage-earners than slaves; even in a healthy spot the more important operations, such as getting in vintage or harvest, are best so managed. As to their qualities, Cassius writes thus: in buying[728] labourers you are to choose men fit for heavy work, not less than 22 years of age and ready to learn farm-duties. This you can infer from giving them other tasks and seeing how they perform them, or by questioning[729] new slaves as to the work they used to do under their former owner. Slaves should be neither timid nor high-spirited. Their overseers[730] should be men able to read and write, in fact with a touch of education, honest fellows, somewhat older than the mere labourers just mentioned. For these are more willing to obey their elders. Above all things the one indispensable quality in overseers is practical knowledge of farming. For the overseer is not only to give orders, but to take part in carrying them out; so that the slave may do as he sees the overseer do, and note the reasonableness of his own subordination to one his superior in knowledge. On the other hand the overseer should not be allowed to enforce obedience by the lash rather than by reprimand,—of course supposing that the same effect[731] is produced. Again, you should not buy too many slaves of the same race, for nothing breeds trouble in the household[732] more than this. For the overseers there should be rewards to make them keen in their work: care should be taken to allow them a private store[733] and slave concubines to bear them children, a tie which steadies them and binds them more closely to the estate. It is these family ties that distinguish the slave-gangs from Epirus and give them a high market-value. You should grant favours to overseers to gain their goodwill, and also to the most efficient of the common hands; with these it is also well to talk over the work that is to be undertaken, for it makes them think that their owner takes some account of them and does not utterly despise them. They can be given more interest in their work by more generous treatment in the way of food or clothing, or by a holiday or by leave to keep a beast or so of their own at grass on the estate, or other privileges: thus any who have been overtasked or punished may find some comfort[734] and recover their ready goodwill towards their owner.’
This passage well illustrates the advance in scientific treatment of the subject since the time of Cato. The analysis and classification may not be very profound, but it tends to orderly method, not to oracles. The influence of Greek writings is to be traced, for instance in the rules for the choice and treatment of slaves. The writings of Aristotle and his school had been studied in Rome since the great collection had been brought by Sulla from the East. How far Varro actually borrows from Aristotle or Plato or Xenophon is not always easy to say. The advice to avoid getting too many slaves of one race or too spirited, and to use sexual relations as a restraining tie, were by this time common-places of slave-management, and appear under Cato in somewhat cruder practical forms. But Varro is involved in the difficulties that have ever beset those who try to work on double principles, to treat the slave as at once the chattel of an owner and a partner in common humanity. So he tells his reader ‘manage your slaves as men, if you can get them to obey you on those terms; if not,—well, you must make them obey—flog them.’ Humanitarian principles have not gone far in the system of Varro, who looks solely from the master’s point of view. The master gets rather more out of his slaves when they work to gain privileges than when they work merely to escape immediate punishment. So he is willing to offer privileges, and the prospect of promotion to the higher ranks of the staff. Overseers and the best of the common hands may form a little quasi-property of their own by the master’s leave. But these peculia do not seem to be a step on the road to manumission, of which we hear nothing in this treatise. We are left to infer that rustic slaves on estates generally remained there when past active work, tolerated hangers-on, living on what they could pick up, and that to have acquired some peculium was a comfortable resource in old age. In short, the hopes of the worn-out rustic bondman were limited indeed.
When we note Varro’s attitude towards free labour we cannot wonder that humanitarianism is not conspicuous in his treatment of slavery. Hired men are more to be trusted than slaves, so you will employ them, as Cato advised, for jobs that need care and honesty and that cannot wait. But he adds a sinister hint as to employing them on work dangerous to health. Your own slaves for whom you have paid good money are too valuable to be exposed to such risks. The great merit of the mercennarius is that, when the job is done and his wage paid, you have done with him and have no further responsibility. This brutally industrial view is closely connected with the legal atmosphere of Roman civilization, in which Varro lived and moved. The debtor discharging his debt by serving his creditor as a farm-hand, once an ordinary figure in Italy, was now only found abroad: Varro mentions this unhappy class, for he is not thinking of Italy alone. It is interesting to hear from him that peasant-farmers were not extinct in Italy. But we are not told whether they were still numerous or whether they were mostly to be found in certain districts, as from other authorities we are tempted to infer. Nor do we learn whether men with small farms of their own often went out as wage-earners; nor again whether landless mercennarii were in his time a numerous class. These omissions make it very difficult for us to form any clear and trustworthy picture of rural conditions as they presented themselves to Varro. It would seem that they were in general much the same as in Cato’s time, but that Varro is more inclined to discuss openly some details that Cato took for granted. So in his turn Varro takes some things for granted, passing lightly over details that we cannot but wish to know.
There is however one important matter, ignored by Cato (at least in his text as we have it), to which reference is found in Varro. It is the presence of the free tenant farmer (colonus) in the agricultural system of Italy. He tells us that the formal lease[735] of a farm usually contained a clause by which the colonus was forbidden to graze a she-goat’s offspring on the farm. In another passage[736] the same prohibition is mentioned, but with this limitation, that it applies only to land planted with immature saplings. So poisonous were the teeth of nibbling goats thought to be. The restriction imposed on the tenant suggests that the landlord was bargaining at an advantage; the lessor could dictate his terms to the lessee. That the tenant farmers of this period were at least in some cases humble dependants of their landlords is clearly shewn by a passage[737] of Caesar. In order to hold Massalia for Pompey in 49 BC, Domitius raised a squadron of seven ships, the crews for which he made up from his own[738] slaves freedmen and tenants. Soon after he refers to this force[739] as the tenants and herdsmen brought by Domitius. These herdsmen are no doubt some of the slaves before mentioned. It is evident that the free retainers called tenants are not conceived as having much choice in the matter when their noble lord called them out for service. Probably their effective freedom consisted in the right to own property (if they could get it), to make wills, to rear children of their own, and other like privileges. But their landlord would have so great a hold[740] on them that, though in theory freemen, they were in practice compelled to do his bidding. In later times we shall find the tenant farmer a common figure in rural life, but very dependent on his landlord; and it is by no means clear that his position had ever been a strong and independent one. Of Varro all we can say is that he does refer to farm-tenancy as a business-relation, and infer from his words that in that relation the landowner had the upper hand.
Beside what we may call the legal sense of ‘tenant,’ Varro also uses colonus in its older sense of ‘cultivator.’ In discussing the convenience of being able to supply farm needs, and dispose of farm surplus, in the neighbourhood, he points out that the presence or absence of this advantage may make all the difference whether a farm can be made to pay or not. For instance, it is seldom worth while to keep skilled craftsmen[741] of your own: the death of one such specialist sweeps away the (year’s) profit of the farm. Only rich landowners can provide for such services in their regular staff. So the usual practice of coloni is to rely on local men for such services, paying a yearly fee and having a right to their attendance at call. The coloni here are simply ‘farmers,’ and there is nothing to shew that they do not own their farms. The connexion with the verb colere appears even more strongly where pastor is contrasted[742] with colonus, grazier with tiller: and in that passage the colonus is apparently identical with the dominus fundi just below. The coloni of these passages can hardly be mere tenants, but on the other hand they are certainly not great landowners. They seem to be men farming their own land, but in a small way[743] of business. Whether there were many such people in Varro’s Italy, he does not tell us. Nor do we find any indication to shew whether they would normally take part in farm work with their own hands. When he deplores[744] the modern tendency to crowd into the city, where men use their hands for applauding shows, having abandoned the sickle and the plough, he is merely repeating the common lament of reformers. There is no sign of any hope of serious reaction against this tendency: the importation and cheap distribution of foreign corn is a degenerate and ruinous policy, but there it is. Varro admired the small holdings and peasant farmers of yore, but no man knew better that independent rustic citizens of that type had passed away from the chief arable districts of Italy never to return.
That small undertakings were still carried on in the neighbourhood of Rome and other urban centres, is evident from the market-gardens of the Imperial age. A notable case[745] is that of the bee-farm of a single iugerum worked at a good profit by two brothers about 30 miles north of Rome. Varro expressly notes that they were able to bide their time so as not to sell on a bad market. He had first-hand knowledge of these men, who had served under him in Spain. Clearly they were citizens. They can hardly have kept slaves. It seems to have been a very exceptional case, and to be cited as such: it is very different from that of the peasant farmer of early Rome, concerned first of all to grow food for himself and his family. Agriculture as treated by Varro is based on slave labour, and no small part of his work deals with the quarters, feeding, clothing, discipline, sanitation, and mating, of the slave staff. True to his legal bent, he is careful to safeguard the rights of the slaveowner by explaining[746] the formal details necessary to effect a valid purchase, with guarantee of bodily soundness, freedom from vice, and flawless title. Again, to keep slaves profitably it was urgently necessary to keep them constantly employed, so that the capital sunk in them should not lie idle and the hands lose the habit of industry. Therefore, while relying on local craftsmen for special skilled services occasionally needed, he insists that a number of rustic articles should be manufactured on the farm. ‘One ought not to buy anything that can be produced on the estate[747] and made up by the staff (domesticis = familia), such as wicker work and things made of rough wood.’ Moreover, the organization of the staff in departments is an elaborate slave-hierarchy. Under the general direction of the vilicus, each separate function of tillage or grazing, or keeping and fattening fancy-stock has its proper foreman. Such posts carried little privileges, and were of course tenable during good behaviour. Some foremen would have several common hands under them: none would wish to be degraded back to the ranks. It seems that some wealthy men kept[748] birdcatchers huntsmen or fishermen of their own, but Varro, writing for the average landlord, seems to regard these as being properly free professionals. As for the common hands, the ‘labourers’ (operarii), on whose bone and sinew the whole economic structure rested, their condition was much the same as in Cato’s time, but apparently somewhat less wretched. Varro does not propose to sell off worn-out slaves; this let us credit to humaner feelings. He shews a marked regard for the health and comfort of slaves; this may be partly humanity, but that it is also due to an enlightened perception of the owner’s interest is certain. He does not provide for an ergastulum, though those horrible prisons were well known in his day. Why is this? Perhaps partly because slave-labour was no longer normally employed on estates in the extremely crude and brutal fashion that was customary in the second century BC. And partly perhaps owing to the great disturbances of land-tenure since the measures of the Gracchi and the confiscations of Sulla. The earlier latifundia had been in their glory when the wealthy nobles sat securely in power, and this security was for the present at an end. But, if the slave operarii were somewhat better treated, their actual field labour was probably no less hard. Many pieces of land could not be worked with the clumsy and superficial plough then in use. Either the slope of the ground forbade it, or a deeper turning of the soil was needed, as for growing[749] vines. This meant wholesale digging, and the slave was in effect a navvy without pay or respite. No wonder that fossor became a proverbial term for mere animal strength and dull unadaptability. An interesting estimate of the capability of an average digger is quoted[750] from Saserna. One man can dig over 8 iugera in 45 days. But 4 day’s work is enough for one iugerum (about ⅝ of an acre). The 13 spare days allowed are set to the account[751] of sickness, bad weather, awkwardness, and slackness. Truly a liberal margin to allow for waste. It cannot have been easy to farm at a profit with slave-labour on such terms; for the slave’s necessary upkeep was, however meagre, a continual charge.
And yet we do not find Varro suggesting that free wage-earning labour might in the long run prove more economical than slave-labour even for rough work. Nay more, he does not refer to the employment of contractors with their several gangs, each interested in getting his particular job done quickly and the price paid. He only refers to mercennarii in general terms, as we saw above. Nor does he speak[752] of politio as a special process, as Cato does. It may be that he did not think it worth while to enter into these topics. But it is more probable that the results of agrarian legislation and civil warfare in the revolutionary period had affected the problems of rustic labour. The attempt to revive by law the class of small cultivating owners had been a failure. Military service as a career had competed with rustic wage-earning. Men waiting to be hired as farm hands were probably scarce. Otherwise, how can we account for the great armies raised in those days? To refer once more to a point mentioned above, Varro does not suggest that the charge of an estate might with advantage be entrusted to a freeman as vilicus. That we can discover all the reasons for the preference of slaves as stewards is too much to hope for. That it seemed to be a guarantee of honesty and devotion to duty, the manager being wholly in his master’s power, is a fairly certain guess. And yet Varro like others saw the advisability of employing free labour for occasional work of importance. Perhaps the permanent nature of a steward’s responsibilities had something to do with the preference. It may well have been difficult to keep a hold on a free manager. In management of a slave staff no small tact and intelligence were needed as well as a thorough knowledge of farming. General experience needed to be supplemented by an intimate knowledge[753] of the conditions of the neighbourhood and the capacities of the particular estate. And a free citizen, whose abilities and energy might qualify him for management of a big landed estate, had endless opportunities of turning his qualities to his own profit elsewhere. Whether as individuals or in companies, enterprising Romans found lucrative openings in the farming of revenues, in state-contracts, in commerce, or in money-lending, both in Italy and in the Provinces. Such employments, compared with a possible estate-stewardship, would offer greater personal independence and a prospect of larger gains. And freemen of a baser and less effective type would have been worse than useless: certainly far inferior to well-chosen slaves.