A choice of evils 253 



are a bad business. But there is a worse; namely the town-bred 1 

 tenant, who prefers farming with a slave staff to turning farmer him- 

 self. It was a saying of Saserna, that out of a fellow of this sort you 

 generally get not your rent but a lawsuit. His advice then was, take 

 pains to get country-bred farmers 2 and keep them in permanent 

 tenancy: that is, when you are not free to farm your own land, or 

 when it does not suit your interest to farm it with a slave staff. This 

 last condition, says Columella, only refers to the case of lands derelict* 

 through malaria or barren soil. 



There are however farms on which it is the landlord's own interest 

 to place tenants rather than work them by slaves for his own account. 

 Such are distant holdings, too out-of-the-way for the proprietor to visit 

 them easily. Slaves out of reach of constant inspection will play havoc 

 with any farm, particularly one on which corn is grown. They let out 

 the oxen for hire, neglect the proper feeding of live stock, shirk the 

 thorough turning of the earth, and in sowing tending harvesting and 

 threshing the crop they waste and cheat you to any extent. No 

 wonder the farm gets a bad name thanks to your steward and staff. 

 If you do not see your way to attend in person to an estate of this kind, 

 you had better let it to a tenant. From these remarks it seems clear 

 that the writer looks upon letting land to tenant farmers as no more 

 than an unwelcome alternative, to be adopted only in the case of farms 

 bad in quality or out of easy reach. Indeed he says frankly that, given 

 fair average conditions, the owner can always get better returns by 

 managing a farm himself than by letting it to a tenant : he may even 

 do better by leaving the charge to a steward, unless of course that 

 steward happens to be an utterly careless or thievish fellow. Taking 

 this in connexion with his remarks about stewards elsewhere, the net 

 result seems to be that a landlord must choose in any given case what 

 he judges to be the less of two evils. 



A few points here call for special consideration. In speaking of 

 the work or service (opus) that a landlord may require of a tenant, as 

 distinct from rent, what does Columella precisely mean ? It has been 

 held 4 that he refers to the landlord's right of insisting that his land 

 shall be well farmed. This presumably implies a clause in the lease 

 under which such a right could be enforced. But there are difficulties. 

 In the case of a distant farm, let to a tenant because it has 'to do 

 without the presence 5 of the landlord,' the right would surely be 



1 urbanum colonum, qui per familiam mavult agrum qtiam per se colere. 



2 rusticos et eosdem adsiduos colonos. 



3 in his regionibus quae gravitate caeli solique sterilitate vastantur. Cf I 5 5, gravibus* 

 and Varro I 17 2. 



4 By H. Blumner in Muller's Handbuch. So also Gummerus in Klio 1906 pp 85-6. 



5 domini praesentia cariturum. 



