quinque bonos solitum Variam dimittere patres,
thus rendered by Howes
Dear Bailiff of the woody wild domain
Whose peace restores me to myself again,—
(A sprightlier scene, it seems, thy taste requires,
To Varia though it send five sturdy sires
The lords of five good households)—
and the question at once arises, what sort of persons are meant by these ‘five good fathers.’ In agreement with the excellent note of Wilkins I hold that they are free heads of households, and that they are persons existing in the then present time, not imagined figures of a former age. It seems also clear that they were living on the modest estate (agellus) of Horace. If so, then they can hardly be other than tenants of farms included therein. Therefore it has naturally been inferred that the estate consisted of a villa with a home-farm managed by a steward controlling the staff of eight slaves of whom we hear elsewhere: and that the outlying portions were let to free farmers[848] on terms of money rent or shares of produce. Horace would thus be the landlord of five coloni, and his relations with them would normally be kept up through the agency of the resident slave-steward of the home-farm. All this agrees perfectly with other evidence as to the customary arrangements followed on rural estates; and I accept it as a valuable illustration of a system not new but tending to become more and more prevalent as time went on. But it is well to note that the case is one from a hill district, and that we must not from it draw any inference as to how things were moving on the great lowland estates, the chief latifundial farm-areas of Italy.
The patres referred to are virtually patres familias[849], free responsible persons, probably Roman citizens, but tenants, not landowning yeomen of the ancient type. Whether their visits to Varia (Vicovaro) were to bear their part in the local affairs of their market-town, or to buy and sell, or for both purposes, is not quite clear; nor does it here concern us. But we should much like to know whether these five farmers, or some of them, employed[850] any slaves. I do not see how this curiosity is to be gratified. Perhaps we may argue that their assumed liberty to come and go points to the employment of some labour other than their own: but would this labour be slave or free? If we assume (as I think we fairly may) that the labour needed would be mainly regular routine-work and not occasional help, this points rather to slave-labour. Nor is there any general reason for distrusting that conclusion; only it would probably mean slave-labour on a small scale. There is moreover no reason to think that free wage-labourers for regular routine work were plentiful in the Sabine hills. And these small farmers were not likely to be creditors, served by debtors (obaerati) working off arrears of debt, a class of labour which according to Varro seems to have been no longer available in Italy. There I must leave this question, for I can add no more.