ANCIENT AGEICULTUKAL LITERATURE. 155 



upon you, and will very much interrupt the business of the 

 farm. In giving the plan of the villa, he is very diffuse on 

 the apartments of the proprietor, the winter apartments, 

 the spring apartments, the summer apartments, and the 

 bath-rooms ; and on their respective aspects : the pleasure 

 grounds come in also for a specific notice ; but his direc- 

 tions for the " Rustica" which includes the kitchen, the 

 servants' lodgings, and the stables and the " Fructuaria," 

 which comprise the oil-cellar and press-room, wine-cellar, 

 hay-loft, granary, &c., are less precise and intelligible. 

 Both Cato and Varro prescribe, in general terms, that the 

 farm should not be too large for the villa, nor the villa for 

 the farm, and point out the inconveniences of each excess ; 

 and both give instances of known parties by whom respec- 

 tively each of these maxims has been transgressed. It is 

 not, however, till we come to Palladius, in whose time 

 tenant-farming had become more usual, that we find any 

 directions which are conformable to our notions of a farm- 

 house and buildings. He says that the buildings ought to 

 be proportioned to the value of the farm ; and that, in case 

 they were burnt down, the extreme sum allotted to rebuild 

 them ought not to exceed two years' rent : a sum which in 

 our climate would be very inadequate to fulfil our notions 

 of improved agriculture probably it would not do much 

 more than erect apartments and offices for Mr. Huxtable's 

 pigs. 



From the earliest antiquity oxen seem to have furnished 

 the moving power to the plough, though in a single pas- 

 sage, to which we have already alluded, Homer says that 

 in heavy fallow mules are far preferable. As the Romans 

 assigned 60 odd acres to each plough, they assigned to it 

 also 3 labourers, a proportion which did not include vine- 

 dressers, or those who were employed in olive and fruit 

 orchards. A passage in Columella indicates that a portion 

 of the labourers employed on a farm were " soluti, quibus 

 major est fides ;" but the bulk were slaves, and they were 

 sometimes worked in fetters, "alligati." The younger 



