34 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



they are bought with an eye to usefulness rather than beauty, will 

 not by their cost diminish your profit. Cato writes that the man 

 who has an olive orchard of 2$ojugera should arrange to use five sets 

 of tools and receptacles for oil, which he enumerates in detail as those 

 of bronze, kettle, pitchers, and pots; those of wood and iron, as 

 three large wagons, six ploughs with their shares, four* manure boxes, 

 and the like; and of iron implements the kind and the number neces- 

 sary, as eight pitchforks, the same number of hoes, half as many 

 shovels, etc. He gives another rule for implements in a vineyard: 

 if it be one hundred jugera, one should have on hand three sets of 

 tools for the winepress, covered jars to hold 800 cullei, twenty grape 

 hampers, twenty grain hampers, and other things of this sort. Others, 

 indeed, advise less of these, but I think he gave so large a number of 

 cullei so that one would not be compelled to sell the wine each year. 

 For old wine is worth more than new and the same wine worth more 

 at one time than another. 



"It is not without reason that those great men placed the Romans 

 who lived in the country above those of the city. They thought that 

 those who sat about in town were idlers compared with those who 

 tilled the fields. Accordingly they so divided the year that only every 

 eighth day did they tend to city business, leaving the other seven for 

 work on the farm. As long as they kept up this practice they attained 

 both ends, that of having farms very fruitful through careful cultiva- 

 tion, and that of being themselves of sounder health and not needing 

 the city gymnasiums of the Greeks. And so, since now for the most 

 part our heads of families have crept within the city walls, leaving 

 the pruning hook and the plough, and prefer to ply their hands in 

 theater and circus rather than in the corn and the vines, we let out 

 contracts for importing grain that we may get our fill from Africa and 

 Sardinia, and we load our ships with the vintage of the islands Cos 

 and Chios. Thus in the very land where shepherds, who founded the 

 city, taught their children agriculture, there the children of these men 

 in their greed have, in violation of laws, made cornfields into pasture, 

 unaware that agriculture and pasturing are not the same. For shep- 

 herd and ploughman are quite different, and even if he pastures his 

 herd on farm land the herdsman is not the same as the ox-driver. 

 Yet the connection between the two is close, because it is far more 

 advisable for the farm-owner to use the fodder on the farm as pas- 

 turage than to sell it, and because manure is best fitted for products 

 of the earth and cattle are especially convenient for producing this. 



