230 coloni 



day's work 1 of a labourer' would perhaps have too technical and prosaic 

 a flavour. In the single instance (A en VII 331-2), where it occurs in 

 the familiar phrase da operam, it is coupled with laborem, which rather 

 suggests a certain timidity in the use of a colloquial expression. The 

 plural, frequent in the writers on agriculture, he does not use at all, 

 whether because he avoids the statistical estimates in which it most 

 naturally comes, or from sheer fastidiousness due to the disreputable 

 associations of operae in political slang. Perhaps neither of these reasons 

 is quite enough to account for the absence of the word from the Georgics. 

 That famulus and famula occur in the Aeneid only is not surprising, 

 for they represent the fytftje? and Bficoal of Greek heroic poetry. But 

 famula appears in the Moretum, of which I will speak below. 



That Vergil is all the while pointing the way to a system of small 

 farms and working farmers, though some topics (for instance stock- 

 keeping) seem to touch on a larger scale of business, may be gathered 

 from his references to coloni. The word is in general used merely as 

 the substantive corresponding to colere, and its place is often taken 

 by agricola (I 300, II 459) or rusticus (II 406) or other substitutes. In 

 II 433 homines means much the same as the agrestis of I 41, only that 

 the former need stimulus and the latter guidance. The typical picture 

 of the colonus comes in I 291-302, where the small farmer and his 

 industrious wife are seen taking some relaxation in the winter season, 

 but never idle. It is surely a somewhat idealized picture. The parallel 

 in Horace (epode II) is more matter-of-fact, and clearly includes slaves, 

 an element ignored by Vergil. The colonus is not a mere tenant farmer, 

 but a yeoman tilling his own land, like the veteres coloni of the ninth 

 eclogue, a freeman, and we may add liable to military service, like those 

 in I 507 whose conscription left the farms derelict. A curious and 

 evidently exceptional case is that of the Corycius senex (IV 125-46), 

 said to be one of Pompey's pirate colonists. The man is a squatter on 

 a patch of unoccupied land, which he has cultivated as a garden, raising 

 by unwearied industry quite wonderful crops of vegetables fruit and 

 flowers, and remarkably successful 2 as a bee-keeper. Perhaps this trans- 

 planted Oriental had no slave, at least when he started gardening. But 

 I note that his croft was more than a iugerum (pauca relicti itigera 

 ruris} at the time when Vergil saw it, and I imagine the process of 

 reclaiming the waste to have been gradual. When this small holding 

 was complete and in full bearing, would the work of one elderly man 

 suffice to carry it on? I wonder. But we get no hint of a slave or a 

 hireling, or even of a wife. All I can venture to say is that this story 

 is meant to be significant of the moral and material wellbeing of the 



1 Cf Cic de off\ 41, 150, passages in which the growth of the technical sense is seen. 



2 See the interesting story of the bee-farm in Varro RR ill 16 10, n. 



