172 VARRO ON FARMING [bk. 



her feet nor advance a step. And so if one wants 

 to move them from place to place, one puts them 

 into a wagon." Atilius of Spain, a trustworthy- 

 author of wide experience and much learning, used 

 to assert that once when a pig had been killed in 

 Lusitania in further Spain, there were sent as a pre- 

 sent to the senator L. Volumnius,^ two of its ribs 

 with the meat attached, which weighed twenty-three 

 pounds, and that in that pig the depth of flesh from 



12 skin to bone was one and a quarter feet. I said to 

 him : A fact quite as strange was once told me in 

 Arcadia, and I went, I remember, to look at a 

 sow which was not only incapable of getting up 

 owing to its fat, but had actually allowed a shrew- 

 mouse to eat away some of its flesh and make a 

 nest there and give birth to young ones. I am in- 

 formed that the same thing has occurred in Venetia ' 

 also. 



13 With regard to breeding, the fertility of a sow is 

 generally estimated from the first litter, as she does 

 not vary much in later ones. As to the rearing 



1 L. Volumnio. Cicero (Ad Div., vii, 32) mentions him as 

 one of his intimate friends, adduhitavi nuni a Senatore essent 

 Voluvmio quocum mihi magnus est usus. 



^ In Vineta. In place of this, which is unintelligible, I have 

 translated Victorius's conjecture, in Venetia. Varro (i, 8, 5) 

 speaks of vineyards being sometimes so overrun by mice that 

 they had to be filled with mouse-traps. In vineto therefore 

 suggested itself — but pigs do not live in vineyards ! Scaliger 

 remarks about this story that ' ' none need hesitate to believe 

 it, as there are people alive to-day who will testify that this 

 has happened in the south of France ! " 



