248 Lucan 



the happy age of primitive communism, when all shared the owner- 

 ship of all. Cramped and unsatisfied, this avaritia can never find the 

 way back to the old state of plenty and happiness. ' Hence, though 

 she now endeavour to make good 1 what she has wasted; though she 

 add field to field by buying out her neighbours or wrongfully ejecting 

 them; though she expand her country estates on the scale of pro- 

 vinces, and enjoy the sense of landlordism in the power of touring 

 mile after mile without leaving her own domains; still no enlargement 

 of bounds will bring us back to the point from whence we started.' 

 Again, in protesting against the luxurious ostentation of travellers and 

 others, he shews that they are really in debt. 'So-and-so is, you fancy, 

 a rich man... because he has arable estates 2 in all provinces of the 

 empire... because his holding of land near Rome is on a scale one 

 would grudge him even in the wilds of Apulia.' Such a man is in debt 

 to Fortune. In these as in other passages the preacher illustrates his 

 sermon by references calculated to bring home his points. Naturally 

 he selects for the purpose matters familiar to his audience; and it is 

 this alone that make the passages worth quoting. The same may be 

 said of his sympathetic reference 3 to the hard lot of a slave transferred 

 from the easy duties of urban service to the severe toil of farm labour. 

 In general it may be remarked that the evidence of Seneca and other 

 literary men of this period is to be taken in connexion with the trea- 

 tise of Columella, who is the contemporary specialist on agriculture. 

 The prevalence of slave labour and the growth of the tenant-farmer 

 class are attested by both lines of evidence. 



XXXII. LUCAN, PETRONIUS, AND OTHERS. 



Lucan, Seneca's nephew, has a few interesting references in his 

 poem on the great civil war. Thus, in the eloquent passage 4 lamenting 

 the decay of Roman vital strength, a long process to be disastrously 

 completed in the great Pharsalian battle, he dwells on the shrinkage 

 of free Roman population in Italy. The towns and the countryside 

 alike are empty, houses deserted, and it is by the labour of chained 5 

 slaves that Italian crops are raised. Elsewhere 6 he looks further back, 



1 epist 90 39 licet itaque nunc conetur reparare quod perdidit^ licet agros agris adiciat 

 vitinum vel pretio pellens vel iniuHa, licet in pr ovine iarum spatium rura dilatet et possessionem 

 vocet per sua longam peregrinationem ... etc. For iniuria cf Columella I 3 6, .7. The violent 

 expulsion of poor farmers by the rich is an old topic. Cf Sallust lug 41 8, Appian civ 

 i 7 5 and see index. 



2 epist 87 7 quiet in omnibus provinciis arat.,,quia tantum suburbani agri possidet quan- 

 tum invidiose in desertis Apuliae possideret. 



3 de ira in 29 i. < Lucan vn 387-439. 

 6 vincto fossore coluntur Hesperiae vegetes. 6 i 158-82. 



