[Footnote 5: Caesar did not live to accomplish this, but some years after his death a public library was established at Rome by Asinius Pollio, which Pliny says (H.N. VII, 31) was the first ever built, those at Alexandria and Pergamus having been private institutions of the kings.
In a land where public libraries have been every where founded out of the accumulations of Big Business, it is interesting to note that Pollio derived the funds with which this the first of their kind was endowed, from the plunder of the Illyrians!]
[Footnote 6: Cf. Sellar, Roman Poets of the Augustan Age. Virgil Ch.
V. Boissier, Etudes sur M.T. Varron, Ch. IX. Servius Comm. in Verg.
Georg. I, 43.
It does not appear that many of the commentators on Virgil have taken the trouble to study Varro thoroughly. They are usually better scholars than farmers.]
[Footnote 7: It is not remarkable that Virgil failed to make acknowledgment to Varro in the Georgics when he failed to make acknowledgment to Homer in the Aeneid. See Petrarch's Epistle to Homer for a loyal but vain attempt to justify this neglect.]
[Footnote 8: Cf. W.H. Myers' Classical Essays, p. 110: "For in the face of some German criticism it is necessary to repeat that in order to judge poetry it is, before all things, necessary to enjoy it. We may all desire that historical and philological science should push her dominion into every recess of human action and human speech, but we must utter some protest when the very heights of Parnassus are invaded by a spirit which surely is not science, but her unmeaning shadow; a spirit which would degrade every masterpiece of human genius into the mere pabulum of hungry professors, and which values a poet's text only as a field for the rivalries of sterile pedantry and arbitrary conjecture.">[
[Footnote 9: It was perhaps this encomium upon the farmer at the expense of the banker which inspired Horace's friend Alfius to withdraw his capital from his banking business and dream a delicious idyl of a simple carefree country life: but, it will be recalled (Epode II, the famous "Beatus ille qui procul negotiis") that Alfius, like many a modern amateur farmer, recruited from town, soon repented that he had ever listened to the alluring call of "back to the land" and after a few weeks of disillusion in the country, returned to town and sought to get his money out again at usury.
Columella (I, praef.) is not content with Cato's contrast of the virtue of the farmer with the iniquity of the banker, but he brings in the lawyer's profession for animadversion also. This, he says, the ancient Romans used to term a canine profession, because it consisted in barking at the rich.]
[Footnote 10: The Roman numerals at the beginning of the paragraphs indicate the chapters of Cato from which they are translated. If Cato had not pretended to despise every thing which smacked of Greek literary art he might have edited and arranged his material, in which event his book would have been easier to read than it is, and no less valuable. Modern scholarship would not now venture to perform such an office for such a result, because it involves tampering with a text (as who should say, shooting a fox!) and yet modern scholarship wonders at the decay of classical studies in an impatient age. At the risk of anathema the present version has attempted to group Cato's material, and in so doing has omitted most of those portions which are now of merely curious interest.]
[Footnote 11: This, of course, means buying at a high price, except in extraordinary cases. There is another system of agriculture which admits of the pride of making two blades of grass grow where none was before, and the profit which comes of buying cheap and selling dear. This is farming for improvement, an art which was well described two hundred years before Cato. Xenophon (Economicus XX, 22) says: