1 68 Cato's opportunism 



grow a few vegetables in some waste corner of the farmjLBi 

 characteristic storv raises some doubt in this matter. ^W 



\ut another 



characteristic story raises some doubt in this matter. ^We are told 

 that, having remarked that sexual passion was generally the cause of 

 slaves getting into mischief, he allowed them 1 to have intercourse with 

 the female slaves at a fixed tariff. Now, to afford himself this indul- 

 gence, a slave must have had a peculitim. But Cato did not think 

 it worth mentioning, unless of course we assume that a reference 

 has dropped out of the text. Nor does he refer to manumission : but 

 we hear of his having a freedman probably not a farm-slave at all. 

 / Cato's position, taken as a whole, shews no sign of a reactionary 

 aim, no uncompromising desire of reversion to a vanished past. Nor 

 does he fall in with the latest fashion, and treat the huge latifundtum 

 as the last word in landowning. His precepts have in view a fairly 

 large estate, and perhaps we may infer that he thought this about as 

 much as a noble landlord, with other calls upon his energies, could 

 farm through a steward without losing effective control. He does 

 not, like the Carthaginian Mago, insist on the landlord residing 2 

 permanently on the estate. In truth he writes as an opportunist. 

 For this man, who won his fame as the severest critic of his own / 

 times, knew very well that contemporary Romans of good station 

 and property would never consent to abdicate their part in public 

 life and settle down to merely rustic interests. Nor indeed would 

 such retirement have been consistent with Roman traditions. But 

 conditions had greatly changed since the days of the farmer-nobles 

 who could easily attend the Senate or Assembly at short notice. The 

 far greater extent of territory over which modern estates were spread 

 made it impossible to assume that they all lay near the city. And 

 yet the attraction of Rome was greater than ever. It was the centre 

 and head of a dominion already great, and in Cato's day ever 

 growing. The great critic might declaim against the methods and 

 effects of this or that particular conquest and denounce the iniquities 

 of Roman officials : but he himself bore no light hand in advancing 

 the power of Rome, and thereby in making Rome the focus of the 

 intrigues and ambitions of the Mediterranean world. So he accepted 

 the land-system of the new age, and with it the great extension of 

 slave-labour and slave-management, and tried to shew by what devo- 

 tion and under what conditions it could be made to pay. It must be 

 borne in mind that slave-labour on the land was no new thing. It 

 was there from time immemorial, ready for organization on a large 

 scale ; and it was this extension of an existing institution that was 

 new. Agriculture had once been to the ordinary Roman citizen the 

 means of livelihood. It was now, in great part of the most strictly 



1 Plut Cat mat 21. 2 Pliny NH xvm 35. 



