BOOK I. III. 8-II 



— not to Avant to buy more than a regard for their 

 reckonings allows. For this is the meaning of that 

 famous maxim of our ovm poet : 



Admire large farms, but yet a small one till." 



This precept, which a most learned man has expressed 9 

 in verse, is, in my opinion, a heritage from an- 

 tiquity, inasmuch as it is agreed that the Cartha- 

 ginians, a very shrewd people, had the saying that 

 the farm should be weaker than the farmer ; for, as 

 he must wrestle with it, if the land prove the stronger, 

 the master is crushed. And there is no doubt that 

 an extensive field, not properly cultivated, brings in 

 a smaller return than a httle one tilled -snth exceed- 

 ing care.'' For this reason those seven iugera of 10 

 Licinius,'' which the tribune of the plebs distributed 

 to each man after the expulsion of the kings, 

 rewarded the ancients AA-ith greater returns than our 

 very extensive fallow-lands bestow upon us nowa- 

 days. So great an amount, in fact, did Manius 

 Curius Dentatus, whom we mentioned a little above,'' 

 regard as a good fortune greater than that of one who 

 had been consul and had received a triumph, when 

 after the winning of a \actory under his successful 

 leadership, the people bestowed upon him, in token 

 of rcAvard for his unusual ability, fifty iugera of land ; 

 and, decHning the generosity of the state, he was 

 content with the portion allotted to his fellow- 

 citizens and to the common people. Later on, even 11 



I. 2. 9, who speaks of such a distribution of land as first made 

 by the tribune Gaius Licinius 365 years after the expulsion of 

 the kings; also Pliny, XVIIl. 18. A like distribution by 

 decree of the senate, after the conquest of Veii (396 B.C.), 

 is recorded by Livy, V. 30. 

 " Praef. 14. 



49 



