214 Agriculture large and small 



There was no need to refer to farm-slaves even in the case of Regulus 1 , 

 whom tradition evidently assumed to have been a slaveowner. But, 

 when he refers to circumstances of his own day, the slave meets us 

 everywhere ; not only in urban life and the domestic circle, but on 

 the farm and in the contractor's 2 labour-gang. We then hear of great 

 estates, of great blocks of land mostly forest (saltus)* bought up by 

 the rich, of the sumptuous mllae of the new style, all implying masses 

 of slave labour : also of the great estates outside 4 Italy, from which 

 speculators were already drawing incomes. 



Side by side with these scenes of aggressive opulence, we find 

 occasional mention of a poorer class, farming small holdings, who are 

 sometimes represented 5 as cultivators of land inherited from their fore- 

 fathers. How far we are to take these references literally, that is as 

 evidence that such persons were ordinary figures in the rustic life of 

 Italy, may be doubted. The poet in need of material for contrasts, 

 which are inevitably part of his stock-in-trade, has little in common 

 with the statistician or even the stolid reporter. Nor can we be sure 

 that the man who ' works his paternal farm with oxen of his own ' or 

 ' delights to cleave his ancestral fields with the mattock,' are workers 

 doing the bodily labour in person. Even Horace, inclined though he 

 is to realism, cannot be trusted so far: such words 6 as arat and 

 aedificat for instance do not necessarily mean that the man guides the 

 plough or is his own mason or carpenter. When he speaks of ' all that 

 the tireless Apulian 7 ploughs' that is, the harvests he raises by 

 ploughing he does not seem to have in mind the small farmer. For 

 the context clearly suggests corn raised on a large scale. And yet else- 

 where 8 he gives us a picture of an Apulian peasant whose hard toil is 

 cheered and eased by the work and attentions of his sunburnt wife, a 

 little ideal scene of rural bliss. Apulia is a large district, and not 

 uniform 9 in character, so we need not assume that either of these 

 passages misrepresents fact. And there is a noticeable difference be- 

 tween the style of the Satires and Epistles on the one hand and that 

 of the Odes on the other. In vocabulary, as in metre and rhythm, the 

 former enjoy an easy license denied to the severer lyric poems on 

 which he stakes his strictly poetic reputation. In the Odes 10 for instance 



1 Odes in 5. See above pp 139-40. 2 Odes in i redemptor cumfamulis. 



3 Odes ii 3, Epist n 2 177-8. 4 Odes I i, n 16, in 16. 



5 Odes I i patriot... agros, Epode II 3 pater na rura bobus exercet suis. 



6 Epode IV 13 arat Falerni millefundi iugera, etc. 



7 Odes in 16 quicquidarat impiger Apulus. 8 Epode II 39 foil. 



9 A fact recognized by Horace himself in lines 14-16 of Odes in 4, and Sat \ 5 lines 77 

 foil. 



10 Odes I 35 pauper... ruris colonus, n 14 inopes coloni. Sat II 2 115, where the fact of 

 expulsion in favour of a military pensioner is judiciously ignored. See below. 



