To reject the suggestion of actual interference on Maecenas’ part is not to say that the Georgics exhibits no deference to his wishes. That many a veiled hint could be given by a patron in conversation is obvious. That Maecenas would be a master of that judicious art, is probable from what we know of his character and career. But, while it is plain that questions of land-tenure would from his point of view be better ignored, how would his likes and dislikes affect the mention of slavery and the labour-question? Here I must refer to the three great writers on agriculture. Cato, about 150 years earlier, and Columella, about 80 years later, both contemplate the actual buying of land, and insist on the care necessary in selection. The contemporary Varro seems certainly to assume purchase. All three deal with slave-labour, Cato like a hard-fisted dominus of an old-Roman generation just become consciously imperial and bent on gain, Columella as a skilful organizer of the only regular supply of labour practically available: Varro, who makes more allowance[913] for free labour beside that of slaves, reserves the free man for important jobs, where he may be trusted to use his wits, or for unhealthy work, in which to risk slaves is to risk your own property. All the ordinary work in his system is done by slaves. The contemporary Livy[914] tells us that in his time large districts near Rome had scarce any free inhabitants left. The elder Pliny, reckoning up the advantages of Italy for the practice of agriculture, includes[915] among them the supply of servitia, though no man knew better than he what fatal results had issued from the plantation-system. It is to be borne in mind that this evidence relates to the plains and the lower slopes of hills, that is to the main agricultural districts. It is to these parts that Gardthausen[916] rightly confines his remarks on the desolation of Italy, which began before the civil wars and was accelerated by them. Other labour was scarce, and gangs of slaves, generally chained, were almost the only practicable means of tillage for profit. Speaking broadly, I think the truth of this picture is not to be denied. If then the word had gone forth that a return to smaller-scale farming was to be advocated as a cure for present evils, it was hardly possible to touch on slavery without some unfavourable reference to the plantation-system. Now surely it is most unlikely that Maecenas, a cool observer and a thorough child of the age, sincerely believed in the possibility of setting back the clock. The economic problem could not be solved so simply, by creating a wave of ‘back-to-the-land’ enthusiasm. I suggest that he saw no good to be got by openly endeavouring to recreate the race of small working farmers by artificial means. Would it be wise to renew an attempt in which the Gracchi had failed? Now to Vergil, who had passed his youth in a district of more humane agriculture, the mere praise of farming, with its rich compensations for never-ending toil and care, would be a congenial theme. The outcome of their combination was that a topic not easily idealized in treatment was omitted. The realistic value of the picture was impaired to the relief of both poet and patron. But what the poem gained as a beautiful aspiration it lost as a practical authority.
Can we suppose that Vergil did not know how important a place in contemporary agriculture was filled by slave-labour? I think not: surely it is inconceivable. What meets us at every turn in other writers cannot have been unknown to him. Macrobius[917] has preserved for us a curious record belonging to 43 BC, when the great confiscations and assignations of land were being carried out in the Cisalpine by order of the Triumvirs. Money and arms, needed for the coming campaign of Philippi, were being requisitioned at the same time. The men of property threatened by these exactions hid themselves. Their slaves were offered rewards and freedom if they would betray their masters’ hiding-places, but not one of them yielded to the temptation. The commander who made the offer was Pollio. No doubt domestics are chiefly meant, but there were rustic slaves, and we have reason to think that they were humanely treated in those parts. Dion Cassius[918] tells us that in 41 BC Octavian, under great pressure from the clamorous armies, saw nothing to be done but to take all Italian lands from present owners and hand them over to the soldiers μετά τε τῆς δουλείας καὶ μετὰ τῆς ἄλλης κατασκευῆς. Circumstances necessitated compromise, which does not concern us here. But it is well to remember that it was just the best land that the soldiers wanted, and with it slaves and other farm-stock. For it was a pension after service, not a hard life of bodily drudgery, that was in view. The plan of letting the former owner stay on as a tenant has been referred to above.
I hold then that Vergil’s silence on the topics to which I have called attention, however congenial it may have been to him, was intentional: and that the poem, published in honorem Maecenatis[919], was limited as to its practical outlook with the approval, if not at the suggestion, of the patron. It is essentially a literary work. In it Vergil’s power of gathering materials from all quarters and fusing them into a whole of his own creation is exemplified to a wonderful degree. His own deep love of the country, with its homely sights and sounds, phenomena of a Nature whose laws he felt unable to explore, helped him to execute the task of recommending a social and economic reform through the medium of poetry. By ignoring topics deemed unsuitable, he left his sympathies and enthusiasm free course, and without sympathies and enthusiasm the Georgics would not have been immortal. Even when digressing from agriculture, as in his opening address to the Emperor, there is more sincerity than we are at first disposed to grant. He had not been a Republican, like Horace, and probably had been from the first attached to the cause of the Caesars.
I can discover no ground for thinking[920] that Vergil was ever himself a farmer. That Pliny and Columella cite him as an authority is in my opinion due to the predominance of his works in the literary world. As writers of prose dealing with facts often of an uninspiring kind, it would seem to raise the artistic tone of heavy paragraphs if the first name in Latin literature could be introduced with an apposite quotation in agreement with their own context. Vergil-worship began early and lasted long; and indeed his admirers in the present day are sometimes so absorbed in finding[921] more and more in what he said that they do not trouble themselves to ask whether there may not be some significance[922] in his silences. Rightly or wrongly, I am persuaded that this question ought at least to be asked in connexion with the Georgics. I have reserved till the last a passage[923] of Seneca, in which he challenges the authority of Vergil in some points connected with trees, speaking of him as Vergilius noster, qui non quid verissime sed quid decentissime diceretur aspexit, nec agricolas docere voluit sed legentes delectare. Now Seneca was devoted to the works of Vergil, and is constantly quoting them. He has no prejudice against the poet. The view of the Georgics set forth in these words implies no literary dispraise, but a refusal to let poetic excellence give currency to technical errors. Seneca is often tiresome, but in this matter his criticism is in my opinion sound. In the matter of labour my contention is not that the poet has inadvertently erred, but that he has for some reason deliberately dissembled.
XXX. THE ELDER SENECA AND OTHERS.
The comparatively silent interval, between the Augustan circle and the new group of writers under Claudius and Nero, furnishes little of importance. The one writer who stands out as giving us a few scraps of evidence is the elder Seneca, the earliest of the natives of Spain who made their mark in Latin literature. But the character of his work, which consists of examples of the treatment of problem-cases in the schools of rhetoric, makes him a very peculiar witness. When he tells us how this or that pleader of note made some point neatly, the words have their appropriate place in the texture of a particular argument. Often they contain a fallacious suggestion or a misstatement useful for the purpose of ex parte advocacy, but having as statements no authority whatever. Still there are a few references of significance and value. Thus, when the poor man’s son refuses the rich man’s offer to adopt him, and his own father approves the proposal, one rhetorician made the young man[924] say ‘Great troops of slaves whom their lord does not know by sight, and the farm-prisons echoing to the sound of the lash, have no charm for me: my love for my father is an unbought love.’ Again, a poor man, whose property has been outrageously damaged by a rich neighbour, protests[925] against the whims of modern luxury. ‘Country districts’ he says ‘that once were the plough-lands of whole communities are now each worked by a single slave-gang, and the sway of stewards is wider than the realms of kings.’ Now, we cannot cite the old rhetorician as an authority on agriculture directly: but he gives us proof positive that references to estates worked by gangs[926] of slaves, and the ergastula in which the poor wretches were shut up after the hours of labour, would not in his time sound strange to Roman audiences. Another passage[927] touches on a very typical lecture-room theme, an unnatural son. A father is banished for unintentional homicide. The law forbids the sheltering and feeding of an exile. But the father contrives to return and haunt an estate adjoining the main property, now controlled by his son. The son hears of these visits, flogs the vilicus for connivance, and compels him to exclude the old man. The piece is one of which only a brief abstract remains, but there is enough to shew that, while the gist of it was a casuistic discussion of a moral problem, it assumes as a matter of course the liability of a trusted slave to the lash. The faithful and kindly slave is contrasted with the unnatural son. There are in these curious collections other utterances indicative of the spread of humanitarian notions. Thus in the piece first cited[928] above, the poor man’s son in refusing the rich man’s offer of adoption, as a situation to which he could never accommodate himself, is made to add ‘If you were selling a favourite slave, you would inquire whether the buyer was a cruel man.’ Such ideas come from the later Greek philosophies, chiefly Stoic, the system on which Seneca brought up his more famous son. In one place[929] we find an echo of an earlier Greek sentiment, when a rhetorician propounds the doctrine that Fortune only, not Nature, distinguishes freemen from slaves.
Indeed it is evident, from the many passages that touch on slavery and expose some of its worst horrors, that the subject was at this time beginning to attract more general attention than heretofore. And the relations of patron and freedman, also discussed in these artificial school-debates, are a further illustration of this tendency. Milder and more humane principles were germinating, though as yet they had not found expression in law. In arguing on a peculiarly revolting case (the deliberate mutilation of child-beggars) a speaker incidentally refers[930] to wealthy landowners recruiting their slave-gangs by seizing freemen. The hearers are supposed to receive this reference to kidnapping as no exceptional thing extravagantly suggested. We have seen that both Augustus and Tiberius had to intervene to put down this suppressio. One little note of interest deserves passing mention. In a discussion on unequal marriages the question is raised whether even the very highest desert on a slave’s part could justify a father in taking him as a son-in-law. A speaker cites the case[931] of Old Cato, who married the daughter of his own colonus. Here we clearly have the tenant farmer in the second century BC In Plutarch the man appears as a client. Neither writer makes him a freedman in so many words. But it is probably the underlying fact. That the daughter was ingenua does not rule out this supposition.
Velleius and Valerius Maximus also belong to the reign of Tiberius. The former in what remains of his history supplies nothing to my purpose. Valerius made a collection of anecdotes from Roman and foreign histories illustrating various virtues and vices, classifying the examples of good and bad action under heads. They are ‘lifted’ from the works of earlier writers: many are taken from Livy, already used as a classic quarry. The book is pervaded by tiresome moralizing, and points of interest are few. There is the story of the farm[932] of Regulus, of the patriotic refusal[933] of M’ Curius to take more than the normal seven iugera of land as a reward from the state, of the horny-handed rustic voter[934] being asked whether he walked on his hands; also reference to the simple habits of the famous Catos, and a passing remark that the men of old had few slaves. Those of the above passages that are of any value at all have been noticed in earlier sections. The freedman Phaedrus gives us next to nothing in his fables, unless we care to note the items[935] of a farm-property, agellos pecora villam operarios boves iumenta et instrumentum rusticum, and a fable specially illustrating the fact that a master’s eye sees what escapes the notice of the slave-staff, even of the vilicus.