Meaning of pater discussed 217 



It remains to ask whether the identification of patres vtiftipatres 

 familias exhausts the full meaning of the word. In the Aeneid(xil 520) 

 a combatant slain is described as by craft a poor fisherman of Lerna, 

 no dependant of the wealthy, and then follow the words conductaque pater 

 tellure serebat. Now most commentators and translators seem deter- 

 mined to find in this a reference to the man's father, which is surely 

 flat and superfluous. The stress is not on pater but on conducta. Is not 

 pater an honourable quality-term, referring to the man 1 himself? He 

 would not be always fishing in the lake. He had a dwelling of some 

 sort, most probably a patch of land, to grow his vegetables. The point 

 is that even this was not his own, but hired from some landowner. I 

 would render ' and the land where the honest man used to grow a crop 

 from seed was rented from another.' That pater (Aeneas etc) is often 

 used as a complimentary prefix, is well known, and I think it delicately 

 expresses the poet's kindly appreciation of the poor but honest and 

 independent rustic. In the 'passage of Horace I am inclined to detect 

 something of the same flavour. Some have supposed that the five 

 'fathers' were decurions of the local township of Varia, who went thither 

 to meetings of the local senate. I shrink from reading this into the 

 words of Horace, all the more as Nissen 2 has shewn good reason for 

 doubting whether Varia was anything more than a subordinate hamlet 

 (vicus) of Tibur. 



The general effect of the words, taken in context with the rest of 

 the epistle, is this : the vilicus, once a common slave-labourer (medias- 

 tinus) in Rome, hankers after town life, finding his rustic stewardship 

 dull on a small estate such as that of Horace. To Horace the place 

 is a charming retreat from the follies and worries of Rome. To him 

 the estate with its quiet homestead and the five tenants of the outlying 

 farms is an ideal property : he wants 3 a retreat, not urban excitements. 

 To the steward it seems that there is 'nothing doing,' while the 

 grandeur of a great estate is lacking. So the master is contented, 

 while the slave is discontented, with this five-farm property looked at 

 from their different points of view. 



But the most serious problem that meets us in endeavouring to 

 appraise the evidence of the Augustan literature is connected with 

 the Georgics of Vergil. Passages from Horace will be helpful in this 

 inquiry, in the course of which the remarkable difference between these 

 two witnesses will appear. The stray references in other writers of the 



1 I find that Mr Warde Fowler, The death of Turnus p 105, also takes this view. But 

 he understands pater to imply that the man brought up a family, which I do not. I agree 

 that it gives the idea of headship of a household. 



2 Italische Landeskunde II p 615. 



3 The description of such an agellus in Plin epist I 24 illustrates the wants of a literary 

 landowner excellently. 



