12 VARRO ON FARMING [bk. 



of the Plebs, 365 years after the expulsion of the 

 kings, was the first to lead the people, to hear the 

 laws announced, from the Comitium to the Forum, 

 their seven iugera of land/ 

 10 The other whom I see approaching is a col- 

 league of yours, one of the twenty commissioners 

 appointed to apportion the Campanian lands, Cn. 

 Tremelius Scrofa. Universally accomplished, he 

 is also considered the greatest Roman authority on 

 farming. And is he not rightly so considered? 

 said I ; for his farms, owing to their fine cultiva- 

 tion, are a pleasanter sight to many than the palatial 

 buildings of others, since people come in his case 

 to see farmhouses, not picture-galleries as at Lu- 



Comitlum the ancient comitia had been held, and In the time 

 of the kings and during the early republic it was the centre 

 of government and the stronghold of the patricians. The 

 Rostra, a raised semicircular stone platform on the confines 

 of the Comitium and the Forum — so situated that a speaker 

 could be heard both by patricians and plebeians. 



^ In septeni iugera forensia. According to Pliny (N. H., 

 xviii, 3), haec mensura [i.e., seven iugera] plehei post exactos 

 reges assignata est. Columella also speaks of post reges 

 exactos Liciniana ilia septena iugera quae plehi trihunus viritim 

 diviserat. Romulus had assigned two iugera to each man. 



Varro here speaks of the populus as one person, and the 

 Forum Romanum as its allotment of seven iugera. 



The meaning, then, of this difficult passage would seem to 

 be that C. Licinius Crassus when proposing a democratic 

 measure (that election to the priestly colleges should be by 

 the people, not co-optative) addressed himself to the people in 

 the Forum. Those who were then in the Comitium naturally 

 quitted it for the Forum in order to hear him. 



