ROME AUGUSTUS TO NERO 



XXIX. HORACE AND VERGIL. 



For literary evidence bearing on agriculture in the time of Augustus 

 we naturally look to Vergil and Horace. Now these two witnesses, taken 

 Separately and construed literally, might convey very different, even 

 inconsistent, impressions of farm life and labour in the world around 

 them. And Vergil is the central figure of Roman literature, the poet 

 who absorbed the products of the past and dominated those of many 

 generations to come. His quality as a witness to the present is what 

 concerns us here. I have tried to discuss this problem thoroughly and 

 fairly in a special section. 'In order to do this, it has been necessary 

 to deal pari passu with most of the evidence of Horace, the rest of 

 which can be treated first by itself. 



Horace, the freedman's son, himself an illustration of the way in 

 which the ranks of Roman citizenship were being recruited from foreign 

 sources, yields to none in his admiration of the rustic Romans of old 1 

 and the manly virtues of the genuine stock. In the dialogue between 

 himself and his slave Davus the latter is made to twit him with his 

 praises of the simple life and manners of the commons of yore, though 

 he would never be content to live as they did. A palpable hit, as 

 Horace knew : but he did not change his tone. With due respect he 

 speaks of the farmers of olden time, men of sturdy mould and few 

 wants. It was as poor men on small hereditary farms 9 that M' Curius 

 and Camillua grew to be champions of Koine. In those- far oil d.i\ -. 

 the citizen might have little of his own, but the public treasury" was 

 full ; a sharp contrast to present selfishness and greedy land-grabbing. 

 Those old farmer folk put their own hand to the work. Their sons 

 were brought up to a daily round of heavy tasks, and the mother of 

 such families 4 was a strict ruler and an active housewife. For the scale 

 of all their operations was small, and personal labour their chief means 



of" attaining limited ends. They are not represented as nsiiu; slave 

 labour, nor is the omission strange. For the military needs of the 

 great world-empire were never far from the minds of the Augustan 

 writers, conscious as they were of their master's anxieties on this score. 

 Now the typical peasant of old time was farmer and soldier too, and 

 it is of the rusticorum mascula militum proles that Horace is thinking. 



1 I lor Sat II 7 33, Epist \\ i 139-40. a I lor Odes I u. 



Odes II 15, 18, Sat 11 6 6-15. * Odu III 6. 



