on land and landlords 235 



The pecuS) like the children, is surely the farmer's own, and it is much 

 more likely that the live-stock should belong to a rent-paying tenant 

 than to a salaried bailiff. Moreover, there is no mention of slaves. 

 The man works the farm with the help of his family. Is it likely that 

 he would turn them into a household of serfs ? Therefore I render line 

 115 fortem mercede colonum ' a sturdy tenant-farmer sitting at a rent ' ; 

 that is, on a holding that as owner he formerly occupied rent-free. He 

 can make the farm pay even now : as for the mere fact of ground- 

 landlordship, that is an idle boast, and in any case limited by the span 

 of human life. I claim that these two passages are enough to prove 

 the point for which I am contending ; namely, that questions of the 

 tenure under which agriculture could best be carried on were matters 

 of some interest and importance about the time when Vergil was 

 writing the Georgics. 



But the help of Horace, is by no means exhausted. He refers to a 

 story of a wage-earning labourer (mercennarius) who had the luck to 

 turn up a buried treasure, a find which enabled him to buy the very 

 farm on which he was employed, and work it as his own. There is no 

 point in this 'yarn ' unless it was a well-known tale, part of the current 

 stock of the day. The famous satire in which it occurs (ll 6) seems to 

 be almost exactly contemporary with the appearance of the Georgics. 

 In it the restful charm of country life is heartily preferred to the 

 worries and boredom of Rome. His Sabine estate, with its garden, its 

 unfailing spring of water, and a strip of woodland, is of no great size, 

 but it is enough : he is no greedy land-grabber. When in Rome he 

 longs for it. There he can take his ease among spoilt young slaves, 

 born 1 on the place, keeping a sort of Liberty Hall for his friends. The 

 talk at table is not de villis domibusve alienis but of a more rational 

 and improving kind : envy of other men's wealth is talked out with an 

 apposite fable. Here we have mention of wage-earning, land-purchase, 

 and slaves. And the poet's estate is evidently in the first place a resi- 

 dence, not a farm worked on strict economic lines. That the number of 

 slave hands (pperae) employed there on the Home Farm 2 was eight, we 

 learn from another satire (ll 7 1 18). To the smart country seats, which 

 advertise the solid wealth of rich capitalists, he refers in express terms 

 in epistles I 15 45-6, and by many less particular references. The 

 land-grabbers are often mentioned, and the forest-lands (saltus} used 

 for grazing, in which much money was invested by men ' land-proud/ 

 as a sign of their importance. In short, the picture of rural Italy given 

 by Horace reveals to us a state of things wholly unfavourable to the 

 reception of the message of the Georgics. When he speaks of pauper 

 ruris colonus or viinopes coloni he is surely not betraying envy of these 



1 Cf Tibullus II i 23 turbaque vernarum saturi bona signa coloni. 2 See above, p 216. 



