That Vergil is all the while pointing the way to a system of small farms and working farmers, though some topics (for instance stock-keeping) seem to touch on a larger scale of business, may be gathered from his references to coloni. The word is in general used merely as the substantive corresponding to colere, and its place is often taken by agricola (I 300, II 459) or rusticus (II 406) or other substitutes. In II 433 homines means much the same as the agrestis of I 41, only that the former need stimulus and the latter guidance. The typical picture of the colonus comes in I 291-302, where the small farmer and his industrious wife are seen taking some relaxation in the winter season, but never idle. It is surely a somewhat idealized picture. The parallel in Horace (epode II) is more matter-of-fact, and clearly includes slaves, an element ignored by Vergil. The colonus is not a mere tenant farmer, but a yeoman tilling his own land, like the veteres coloni of the ninth eclogue, a freeman, and we may add liable to military service, like those in I 507 whose conscription left the farms derelict. A curious and evidently exceptional case is that of the Corycius senex (IV 125-46), said to be one of Pompey’s pirate colonists. The man is a squatter on a patch of unoccupied land, which he has cultivated as a garden, raising by unwearied industry quite wonderful crops of vegetables fruit and flowers, and remarkably successful[888] as a bee-keeper. Perhaps this transplanted Oriental had no slave, at least when he started gardening. But I note that his croft was more than a iugerum (pauca relicti iugera ruris) at the time when Vergil saw it, and I imagine the process of reclaiming the waste to have been gradual. When this small holding was complete and in full bearing, would the work of one elderly man suffice to carry it on? I wonder. But we get no hint of a slave or a hireling, or even of a wife. All I can venture to say is that this story is meant to be significant of the moral and material wellbeing of the small cultivator. It is curious that just above (118, cf 147-8) the poet is at pains to excuse his omission to discuss in detail the proper management of horti, on the pretext of want of space. For he was no mean antiquary, and Pliny tells[889] us that in the Twelve Tables hortus was used of what was afterwards called villa, a country farm, while heredium stood for a garden; and adds that in old time per se hortus ager pauperis erat. But hortus is to Vergil strictly a garden, and the old Corycian is cited expressly as a gardener: his land, we are told, was not suited for growing corn or vines.
The mention of gardening invites me to say a few words on the short descriptive idyll Moretum which has been regarded as a youthful composition of Vergil (perhaps from a Greek original) with more justice than some other pieces attributed to him. I see no strong objection to admitting it as Vergilian, but it is of course crude and far removed from the manner and finish of the mature Georgics. The peasant Simylus, exigui cultor rusticus agri, is a poor small farmer whose thrift and industry enable him to make a living ‘in a humble and pottering way,’ as Gilbert puts it. His holding is partly ordinary arable land, but includes a hortus as well. In the latter he skilfully grows a variety of vegetables, for which he finds a regular market in the city. Poor though he is, and accustomed to wait on himself, apparently unmarried, he yet owns a slave (famulam, 93) and she is a negro, fully described (31-5), woolly hair, thick lips, dark skin, spindle shanks, paddle feet, etc. She probably would do the house-work, but the preparation of food is a duty in which her master also bears a part. We hear of no male slave, and the ploughing of fields and digging the garden are apparently done by himself singlehanded. The yoke of oxen are mentioned in the last lines. The picture is such as may have been true of some humble homesteads in Italy, but the tradition of a Greek original, and the names Simylus and Scybale, must leave us in some doubt as to whether the scene be really Italian. The position is in fact much the same as it is in regard to the Bucolics.
Whatever may be the correct view as to the authorship and bearing of the Moretum, there are I think certain conclusions to be drawn from an examination of the Georgics, which it is time to summarize. First, the tendency of the poem is to advocate a system of smaller holdings and more intensive cultivation than had for a long period been customary in a large part of Italy. This reform is rather suggested by implication than directly urged, though one precept, said to be borrowed[890] from old Cato, recommends it in plain words. For the glorification of labour in general is all the while pointing in this direction. Secondly, the policy of the new Emperor, who posed as Restorer and Preserver rather than Reformer, finds a sympathetic or obedient expression in this tendency. For it is delicately conveyed that the reform of an evil agricultural present virtually consists in the return to the ways of a better past. And the poet, acting as poet simply, throws on this better past the halo of a golden age still more remote. The virtues of the Sabines of old[891] are an example of the happiness and honour attainable by a rustic folk. But to Vergil, steeped in ancient legend, the historic worthies of a former age are not the beginning of things. They come ‘trailing clouds of glory’ from the mythical origin[892] of mankind, from a world of primeval abundance and brotherly communism, a world which he like Lucretius pauses to portray. Thirdly, the reaction of Augustus against the bold cosmopolitanism of Julius Caesar has I think left a mark on the Georgics in the fact that the poem is, as Sellar says, so thoroughly representative of Italy. Roman Italy was not yet ready to become merely a part of an imperial estate. If people were to acquiesce in a monarchy, it had to be disguised, and one important disguise was the make-believe that the Roman people were lords of the world. A very harmless method of ministering to Roman self-complacency was excessive praise of Italy, its soil, its climate, its natural features, its various products, its races of men and their works, and all the historic associations of the victorious past. It is a notable fact that this panegyric[893] breaks out in the utterances of four very dissimilar works that still survive: for beside the Georgics I must place[894] the so-called Roman Antiquities of Dionysius, the Geography of Strabo, and the de re rustica of Varro. These four are practically contemporaries. It seems to me hardly credible that there was not some common influence operative at the time and encouraging utterances of this tone.
The actual success or failure of the attempt to revive Roman agriculture on a better footing is not only a question of fact in itself historically important: its determination will throw light on the circumstances in which Vergil wrote, and perhaps help somewhat in suggesting reasons for his avoidance of certain topics. If we are to believe Horace[895], the agricultural policy of Augustus was a grand success: security, prosperity, virtue, good order, had become normal: fertility had returned to the countryside. I had better say at once that I put little faith in these utterances of a court poet. Far more significant is the statement, preserved by Suetonius[896], of the evils dealt with by Augustus in country districts. Parties of armed bandits infested the country. Travellers, slaves and freemen alike, were kidnapped and ergastulis possessorum supprimebantur. He checked the brigandage by armed police posted at suitable spots, and ergastula recognovit. But it is not said that he did away with them: he cleared out of them the persons illegally held in bondage (suppressi). Not only is rustic slavery in full swing in the treatise of Varro: some 80 years later the ergastulum is adopted as a matter of course by Columella, and appears as a canker of agriculture in the complaints of Pliny. The neglect of rustic industry is lamented by all three writers, and to the testimony of such witnesses it is quite needless to add quotations from writers of merely literary merit. There is no serious doubt that the reconstruction of agriculture on the basis of small farms tilled by working farmers was at best successful in a very moderate degree; and this for many a long year. Organized slave-labour remained the staple appliance of tillage until the growing scarcity of slaves and the financial policy of the later Empire brought about the momentous change by which the free farmer gradually became the predial serf.
Another point to be noted in the Georgics is the absence of any reference to coloni as tenants under a landlord. Yet we know that this relation existed in Cicero’s time, and tenant farmers appear in Varro[897] and Columella[898]. Vergil, but for a stray reference in the Aeneid, might seem never to have heard of the existence of such people. It is easy to say that the difference between an owner and a tenant is a difference in law, and unsuited for discussion in a poem. But it also involves economic problems. The landlord wants a good return on his capital, the tenant wants to make a good living, and the conditions of tenancy vary greatly in various cases. The younger Pliny[899] had to deal with awkward questions between him and his tenants, and there is no reason to suppose that his case was exceptional. Surely the subject was one of immediate interest to an agricultural reformer, quite as interesting as a number of the details set forth here and there in the Georgics; that is, assuming that the author meant his farmer to be economically prosperous as well as to set a good example. It may be argued that the operations enjoined on the farmer would greatly improve the farm and enhance the value of the land, and that no man in his senses would do this unless the land were his own: there was therefore no need to discuss tenancy, ownership being manifestly implied. The argument is fair, so far as it goes. But it does not justify complete silence on what was probably at the moment a question of no small importance in the eyes of landowners.
Some passages of Horace may serve to shew that circumstances might have justified or even invited some reference to this topic. In the seventh epistle of the first book he tells the story of how Philippus played a rather scurvy trick on a freedman in a small way of business as an auctioneer. As a social superior, his patronage turned the poor man’s head. Taking him for an outing to his own Sabine country place, he infected him with desire of a rustic life. He amused himself by persuading him to buy a small farm, offering him about £60 as a gift and a loan of as much more. The conversion of a regular town-bred man into a thoroughgoing farmer was of course a pitiful failure. Devotion and industry availed him nothing. The losses and disappointments incidental to farming were too much for him. He seems to have had no slave: he probably had not sufficient capital. He ended by piteously entreating his patron to put him back into his own trade. The story is placed about two generations before Horace wrote. But it would be pointless if it were out of date in its setting, which it surely is not; it might have happened to a contemporary, nay to Horace himself. It is addressed to his own patron Maecenas, the generous donor of his own Sabine estate. Here we have a clear intimation that to buy a little plot and try to get a living out of it by your own labour was an enterprise in which success was no easy matter. In the second satire of the second book we have the case of Ofellus, one of the yeomen of the old school. He had been a working farmer on his own land, but in the times of trouble his farm had been confiscated and made over to a discharged soldier. But this veteran wisely left him in occupation as cultivator on terms. Whether he became a sort of farm-bailiff, working for the new owner’s account at a fixed salary, or whether he became a tenant, farming on his own account and paying a rent, has been doubted. I am strongly of the second opinion. For it was certainly to the owner’s interest that the land should be well-farmed, and that his own income (the endowment of his later years) should be well-secured by giving the farmer every motive for industry. These considerations do not suit well with the former alternative, which also makes colonus hardly distinguishable from vilicus. Again, the colonus is on the farm[900] cum pecore et gnatis. The pecus, like the children, is surely the farmer’s own, and it is much more likely that the live-stock should belong to a rent-paying tenant than to a salaried bailiff. Moreover, there is no mention of slaves. The man works the farm with the help of his family. Is it likely that he would turn them into a household of serfs? Therefore I render line 115 fortem mercede colonum ‘a sturdy tenant-farmer sitting at a rent’; that is, on a holding that as owner he formerly occupied rent-free. He can make the farm pay even now: as for the mere fact of ground-landlordship, that is an idle boast, and in any case limited by the span of human life. I claim that these two passages are enough to prove the point for which I am contending; namely, that questions of the tenure under which agriculture could best be carried on were matters of some interest and importance about the time when Vergil was writing the Georgics.
But the help of Horace is by no means exhausted. He refers to a story of a wage-earning labourer (mercennarius) who had the luck to turn up a buried treasure, a find which enabled him to buy the very farm on which he was employed, and work it as his own. There is no point in this ‘yarn’ unless it was a well-known tale, part of the current stock of the day. The famous satire in which it occurs (II 6) seems to be almost exactly contemporary with the appearance of the Georgics. In it the restful charm of country life is heartily preferred to the worries and boredom of Rome. His Sabine estate, with its garden, its unfailing spring of water, and a strip of woodland, is of no great size, but it is enough: he is no greedy land-grabber. When in Rome he longs for it. There he can take his ease among spoilt young slaves, born[901] on the place, keeping a sort of Liberty Hall for his friends. The talk at table is not de villis domibusve alienis but of a more rational and improving kind: envy of other men’s wealth is talked out with an apposite fable. Here we have mention of wage-earning, land-purchase, and slaves. And the poet’s estate is evidently in the first place a residence, not a farm worked on strict economic lines. That the number of slave hands (operae) employed there on the Home Farm[902] was eight, we learn from another satire (II 7 118). To the smart country seats, which advertise the solid wealth of rich capitalists, he refers in express terms in epistles I 15 45-6, and by many less particular references. The land-grabbers are often mentioned, and the forest-lands (saltus) used for grazing, in which much money was invested by men ‘land-proud,’ as a sign of their importance. In short, the picture of rural Italy given by Horace reveals to us a state of things wholly unfavourable to the reception of the message of the Georgics. When he speaks of pauper ruris colonus or of inopes coloni he is surely not betraying envy of these toilers’ lot. Far from it. When enjoying a change in his country place, he may occasionally divert himself with a short spell[903] of field-work, at which his neighbours grin. On the other hand the spectacle of a disreputable freedman, enriched by speculations in time of public calamity, and enabled through ill-gotten wealth to become a great landlord, is the cause of wrathful indignation (epode IV). And these and other candid utterances come from one whose father was a freedman in a country town, farming in quite a small way, to whose care and self-denial the son owed the education that equipped him for rising in the world. Horace indeed is one of the best of witnesses on these points.
There are points on which Vergil and Horace are agreed, though generally with a certain difference of attitude. Thus, both prefer the country to the town, but Horace frankly because he enjoys it and likes a rest: he does not idealize country life as such, still less agricultural labour. Both disapprove latifundia, but Horace on simple commonsense grounds, not as a reformer. Both praise good old times, but Horace without the faintest suggestion of possible revival of them, or anything like them. Both refer to the beginnings of civilization, but Vergil looks back to a golden age of primitive communism, when in medium quaerebant and so forth; a state of things ended by Jove’s ordinance that man should raise himself by toil. Horace, less convinced of the superiority of the past, depicts[904] the noble savage as having to fight for every thing, even acorns; and traces steps, leading eventually to law and order, by which he became less savage and more noble. Horace is nearer to Lucretius here than Vergil is. Neither could ignore the disturbing effect of the disbanding of armies and ejectment of farmers to make way for the settlement of rude soldiers on the land. But to Horace, personally unconcerned, a cool view was more possible. So, while hinting at public uneasiness[905] as to the detailed intentions of the new ruler in this matter, he is able to look at the policy in general merely as the restoration of weary veterans to a life of peace and the relief of their chief’s anxieties. Vergil, himself a sufferer, had his little fling in the Bucolics, and was silent[906] in the Georgics. Again, Vergil shuns the function of war as a means of supplying the slave-market. He knows it well enough, and as a feature of the ‘heroic’ ages the fate of the captive appears in the Aeneid. Horace makes no scruple[907] of stating the time-honoured principle that a captive is to the conqueror a valuable asset: there is a market for him as a serviceable drudge, and not to spare his life is sheer waste. That there may be sarcasm underlying the passage does not impair its candour. And it distinctly includes rustic slavery in the words sine pascat durus aretque. Lastly, while both poets praise the restfulness of the countryside with equal sincerity, it is Horace who recognizes[908] that the working farmer himself, after his long labours at the plough, looks forward to retirement and ease when he has saved enough to live on. His is a real rustic, Vergil’s an ideal.
It will be admitted that all writers are, as sources of evidence, at their best when they feel free to say or to leave unsaid this or that according to their own judgment. If there is in the background some other person whom it is necessary to please, it is very hard to divine the reason of an author’s frankness, and still more of his reticence. For instance, the omission of a topic naturally connected with a subject need not imply that a patron forbade its introduction. I cannot believe that such a man as Maecenas[909] banned the free mention of slavery in the Georgics. But, if a whole subject is proposed for treatment under conditions of a well-understood tendency, the writer is not unlikely to discover that artistic loyalty to that tendency will operate to render the introduction of this or that particular topic a matter of extreme difficulty. If the task of Vergil was to recommend a return to a more wholesome system of agriculture, reference to the labour-question or to land-tenure bristled with difficulties. My belief is that the poet shirked these topics, relevant though they surely were, because he did not see how to treat them without provoking controversy or ill-feeling; a result which Maecenas and the Emperor were undoubtedly anxious to avoid. It was simpler and safer not to refer to these things. True, the omission was a restraint on full-blooded realism. An indistinct picture was produced, and modern critics have some reason to complain of the difficulty of understanding many places of the Georgics.
Whether chronological considerations may throw any light on the influences to which this indistinctness is due, and, if so, what is their exact significance, are very difficult questions, to which I cannot offer a definite answer. The completion of the Georgics is placed in the year 30 BC, after seven years more or less spent on composition and revision. Now it was in that year that the new ruler, supreme since the overthrow of Antony, organized the great disbandment of armies of which he speaks in the famous inscription[910] recording the events of his career. He tells us that he rewarded all the discharged men, either with assignations of land or with sums of money in lieu thereof. The lands were bought by him (not confiscated) and the money-payments also were at his cost (a me dedi). Below he refers to the matter again, and adds that to pay for lands taken and assigned to soldiers was a thing no one had ever done before. That he paid in all cases, and paid the full market value, he does not expressly say; Mommsen shews cause for doubting it. The only remark I have to make is that in the years between Philippi and Aetium there was plenty of fighting and negotiations. Maecenas was for most of the time in a position of great trust, and pretty certainly in touch with all that went on. The fact that a wholesale discharge of soldiers was surely coming, and that the future of agriculture in Italy was doubtful, was perhaps not likely to escape the forecast of so far-sighted a man. Is it just possible that Vergil may have had a hint from him, to stick to generalities and avoid controversial topics? We are credibly informed[911] that Maecenas was well rewarded by his master for his valuable services, and it has been pointed out[912] that his position of authority offered many opportunities of profitable transactions on his own account. There is even an express tradition that he was concerned in the liquidation of one estate. In short, he was one of the land-speculators of the time. To such a man it would seem not untimely to praise the virtues of the rustic Romans of old and to recommend their revival in the coming age; but to call attention to the uncertainties of the present, involving many awkward problems, would seem imprudent. In suggesting, doubtfully, that a patron’s restraining hand may have had something to do with the poet’s reticence, I may be exaggerating the pressure exercised by the one on the other. But that Maecenas interested himself in the slowly-growing poem is hardly to be doubted. Early in each of the four books he is addressed by name. His haud mollia iussa (III 41) may imply nothing more than the general difficulty of Vergil’s task: but may it not faintly indicate just the least little restiveness under a guidance that could not be refused openly?