A great compiler 281 



XXXVI. PLINY THE ELDER. 



Among the writers of this period who refer to agricultural matters the 

 most important is the elder Pliny, who contrived in a life of public 

 service 1 in various departments to amass a prodigious quantity of mis- 

 cellaneous learning and to write many erudite works. His naturalis 

 historia, an extraordinary compilation of encyclopaedic scope, contains 

 numerous references to agriculture, particularly in the eighteenth book. 

 He collected and repeated the gleanings from his omnivorous reading, 

 and the result is more remarkable for variety and bulk than for choice 

 and digestion. As a recorder he is helpful, preserving as he does a 

 vast number of details, some not otherwise preserved, others of use in 

 checking or supplementing other versions. Far removed as the book 

 is from being a smooth and readable literary work, the moralizing 

 rhetoric of the age shews its' influence not only in the constant effort 

 to wring a lesson of some kind out of the topic of the moment, but in 

 the longer sermonizing passages that lead up to some subject on which 

 the writer feels deeply. One of these 2 occurs in introducing agriculture, 

 and in pursuing the subject he loses no opportunity of contrasting a 

 degenerate present with a better past. We need not take his lamenta- 

 tions at their full face-value, but that they were in the main justified 

 is not open to doubt. It has been so often necessary to cite him in 

 earlier chapters, that we shall not have to dwell upon him at great 

 length here. 



The functions of compiler and antiquarian are apt to coincide very 

 closely, arid it is in his picture of the earlier conditions of Roman and 

 Italian farming that Pliny's evidence is most interesting. The old 

 traditions 3 of the simple and manly yeomen, each tilling his own little 

 plot of ground, content with his seven iugera of land or even with two 

 in the earliest times, Cincinnatus and the rest of the farmer-heroes, to 

 whom their native soil, proud of her noble sons, responded 4 with a 

 bounteous fertility that she denies to the heartless labour of slave-gangs 

 on modern latifundia, these are the topics on which he enlarges with 

 a rhetorical or even poetic warmth. The ruin of Italy, nay of Provinces 

 too, through the land-grabbing and formation of vast estates, is de- 

 nounced 5 in a classic passage. He sees no end to the process. Six 

 landlords held between them half the Province of Africa in the time of 

 Nero. Wanting money, the emperor put them to death for the sake of 



1 He was in command of the fleet at Misenum in 79 AD when the great eruption of Vesuvius 

 took place. He persisted in approaching it, and met his death. The family belonged to the 

 colony of Novum Comum in Transpadane Gaul, now part of Italy. 



2 NH xvin 1-5. 3 M5T xvin 7, 18, 20. 4 NH xvm 19, 21, 36. 

 5 NH xvin 35. 



