in face of rural evils 315 



compliance or ignoble trades. These upstarts, like the Trimalchio of 

 Petronius, live to display their wealth, and the acquisition of lands 1 

 and erection of costly villas are a means to this end. The fashion set 

 by them is followed by others, and over-buying and over-building are 

 the cause of bankruptcies. Two passages 2 indicate the continued ex- 

 istence of an atrocious evil notorious in the earlier period of the lati- 

 fundia, the practice of compelling small holders to part with their 

 land by various outrages. The live stock belonging to a rich neighbour 

 are driven on to the poor man's farm until the damage thus caused to 

 his crops forces him to sell of course at the aggressor's price. A 

 simpler form, ejectment without pretence of purchase, is mentioned as 

 an instance of the difficulties in the way of getting legal redress, at 

 least for civilians. There would be little point in mentioning such 

 wrongs as conceivable possibilities: surely they must have occurred 

 now and then in real life. The truth, I take it, was that the great land- 

 lord owning a host of slaves nad always at disposal a force well able 

 to carry out his territorial ambitions ; and possession of power was a 

 temptation to use it. The employment of slaves in rural border-raids 

 was no new thing, and the slave, having himself nothing to lose, prob- 

 ably found zest in a change of occupation. 



In Juvenal agriculture appears as carried on by slave labour, and 

 the employment of supplementary wage-earners is ignored; not un- 

 naturally, for it was not necessary to refer to it. The satirist himself 3 

 has rustic slaves, and is proud that they are rustic, when they on a 

 special occasion come in to wait at his table in Rome. Slaves are of 

 course included 4 in the stock of an estate, great or small, given or sold. 

 All this is commonplace: what is more to the satirist's purpose is the 

 mention 5 of a member of an illustrious old family who has come down 

 in the world so low as to tend another man's flocks for hire. And this 

 is brought in as a contrast to the purse-proud insolence of a wealthy 

 freedman. But more remarkable is the absence of any reference to 

 tenant coloni. Even the word colonus does not occur in any shade of 

 meaning. This too may fairly be accounted for by the fact that little 

 could have been got out of references to the system for the purposes 

 of his argument. It was, as he knew, small peasant landowners, not 

 tenants, that had been the backbone of old Rome; and it was this 

 class, viewed with the sympathetic eye of one sighing for perished 

 glories, that he would have liked to restore. It is a satirist's bent to 

 wish for the unattainable and protest against the inevitable. For him- 

 self, he can sing the praises of rustic simplicity and cheapness and 



1 xiv 86-95, 140 foil, 274-5. Cf x 225-6 etc. 



2 xiv 140-55, xvi 36-9. Cf Seneca epist 90 39. 



3 xi 151 foil. 4 vi 149-52, ix 59-62. ' i 107-8. 



