A landowner as witness 317 



his advice, the main point being to get his friend out of Rome. I have 

 reserved for comparison with this passage one from Martial 1 . In a 

 couplet on a pair of halteres (something rather like dumb-bells) he says 

 'Why waste the strength of arms by use of silly dumb-bells ? If a man 

 wants exercise, he had better go and dig in a vineyard/ This is much 

 plainer, but one may doubt whether it is seriously meant to be an 

 ordinary rule of life. Probably it is no more than a sneer at gymnastic 

 exercises. For Martial well knew that muscle developed by the practice 

 of athletics 2 is very different from the bodily firmness and capacity for 

 continuous effort under varying conditions that is produced by a life 

 of hard manual labour. And the impression left on a reader's mind 

 by epigrammatist and satirist alike is that in Rome and in the most 

 favoured and accessible parts of Italy the blessing of 'corporal sound- 

 ness ' was tending to become a monopoly of slaves. For when Juvenal 

 declares 3 that nowadays the rough fossor, though shackled with a 

 heavy chain, turns up his nose at the garden-stuff that fed a Manius 

 Curius in the olden days, hankering after the savoury fleshpots of the 

 cook-shop, we need not take him too seriously. 



XLIII. PLINY THE YOUNGER. 



The younger Pliny, one of the generation who remembered Ves- 

 pasian, lived through the dark later years of Domitian, and rejoiced 

 in the better times of Nerva and Trajan, is one of our most important 

 witnesses. Not being a technical writer on agriculture, it was not his 

 business to dwell on what ought to be done rather than what was being 

 done. Being himself a great landowner as well as a man of wide in- 

 terests and high reputation, he knew the problems of contemporary 

 land-management from experience, and speaks with intelligence and 

 authority. He was not a man of robust constitution, and like many 

 others he found much refreshment in rural sojournings. He is re- 

 markable for keen appreciation of beautiful scenery. Adopted by his 

 uncle, the author of the Natural History, well-educated and in touch 

 with the literary circles and the best social life of Rome, his letters 

 illustrate the intellectual and moral influences that prevailed in c^lti- 

 vatd households of honest gentlemen.. In particular he is to us perhaps 

 tfie very best example of the humanizing tendency pf the current 

 philosophies of the day in relafloli^tcrtrre^subject of slavery. He is 



1 Mart xiv 49 exercet melius vinea fossa viros. 



2 See his use of ingenuus = no>\. fit for hard work, in 46, X 47, following Ovid, and cf the 

 lines to a slave ix 92. 



3 Juv xi 77-81. 



