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"HIC INTERMISIMUS," to indicate that a part of the text is missing,
with which judgment of some early student of the archetype Victorius,
Scaliger and Ursinus, as well as their successors among the
commentators on Varro, have all agreed. It is a pleasure to record the
agreement on this point, because it is believed to be unique: but
many precedents for plunging the reader in medias res, as does the
surviving text, might be found in the modern short story of the
artist in style. As M. Boissier points out Varro might have cited the
beginning of the Odyssey as a precedent for this.]
[Footnote 110: This is a paraphase of a favorite locution of Homer's
heroes, whose characteristic modesty does not, however, permit them
to apply it to themselves, as Varro does. Thus in Iliad, VII, 114,
Agamemnon advises Menelaos not to venture against Hector, whom "even
Achilles dreadeth to meet in battle, wherein is the warrior's glory,
and Achilles is better far than thou."]
[Footnote 111: Virgil (Aen. VII, 314) made a fine line out of this
tradition, endowing the sturdy race of Fauns and Nymphs who inhabited
the land of Saturn before the Golden Age, with the qualities of the
trees on whose fruit they subsisted, "gensque virum truncis et duro
robore nata."]
[Footnote 112: In the registers of the censors every thing from which
the public revenues were derived was set down under the head of
pascua, or "pasture lands," because for a long time the pasture
lands were the only source of such revenue. Cf. Pliny, H.N. XVIII,
[Footnote 113: Olisippo is the modern Lisbon. This tradition about the
mares of the region is repeated by Virgil (Geo. III, 272) by Columella
(VI, 27) and by Pliny (VIII, 67). Professor Ridgeway in The Origin
and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse describes it as "an
aetiological myth to explain the swiftness of horses" for the fleetest
horses came out of the West; thus Pegasus was born at the springs of
the ocean, and there is the passage in Homer (Iliad, XVI, 149) about
the horses "that flew as swift as the winds, the horses that the
harpy Podarge (Swift Foot) bare to the West Wind as she grazed on the
meadows by the stream of the Ocean." Hence we may conclude that there
was a race of swift horses in Portugal in the earliest times, which
Professor Ridgeway would doubtless like very much to prove, in support
of his interesting thesis, were derived from Libya.]
[Footnote 114: Hypenemia, or barren eggs, are described intelligently
by Aristotle (H.A.V. 1, 4, VI. 2, 5), and, with Varro's confidence in
the country traditions, by Pliny, H.N. X, 80.
If he had known it, Varro might have here cited the fact that the
unfertilized queen bee is parthenogenetic, though producing only male
bees; i.e., drones: but it remained for a German clergyman, Dzierzon,
to discover this in the eighteenth century.]
[Footnote 115: Cf. Plautus Menaechmi, II, 2, 279. One of the two
Menaechmi is, on his arrival at Epidamnus, mistaken for his brother,
of whose existence he does not know, and much to his amazement is
introduced into the brother's life and possessions. At first he
expostulates, accusing the slave of the brother, who has mistaken his
identity, of being crazy and offers to exorcise him by a sacrifice
of weanling pigs, wherefore he asks the question quoted in the text.
Varro was evidently fond of this passage, as he quotes it again,
post, p. 221. The Menaechmi is one of the immortal comedies and
has survived in many forms on the modern stage all over Europe. From
it Shakespeare derived the plot of the Comedy of Errors.]
[Footnote 116: It is interesting to compare these sane therapeutics with
Cato's practice less than two hundred years previous (ante, p. 47),
which was characteristic of the superstitious peasant who in Italy
still seeks the priest to bless his ailing live stock.]
[Footnote 117: This Atticus was Cicero's intimate friend to whom he
addressed so many of his charming letters. He changed his name as
stated in the text, the new name being that of an uncle who adopted
him, as we learn from his life by Nepos. As is well known to all
students of Cicero, Atticus had dwelt in Athens many years and derived
his income from estates in Epirus, which is the point of Scrofa's
jest.]
[Footnote 118: This requirement of short legs is the more remarkable
because of the long journeys which Varro says the Roman sheep were
required to make between their summer and winter pastures. A similar
necessity and bad roads created in England, before the eighteenth
century, a demand for long legged sheep. Prothero (English Farming
Past and Present) quotes a description of the "true old Warwickshire
ram" in 1789: "His frame large and remarkably loose. His bone
throughout heavy. His legs long and thick, terminating in large splaw
feet."
One of the things which Bakewell accomplished was to shorten the legs
as well as to increase the mutton on his New Leicesters. Of Bakewell,
Mr. Prothero justly says, "By providing meat for the million he
contributed as much to the wealth of the country as Arkwright or
Watt."]
[Footnote 119: Shepherds still look for the black or spotted tongue in
the mouth of the ram, for the reason given by Varro, but the warning
is no longer put in the shepherds' manual.]
[Footnote 120: Varro would still feel at home in Apulia, for there the
sheep industry is carried on much as it was in his time, and thence
the calles publicae, to which he refers, still lead to the summer
pastures in the Apennines. Cf. Beauclerk Rural Italy, chap. V. "The
extensive pasturages of the 'Tavoliere di Puglia' (Apulia) are of
great importance and have a history of their own. This vast domain
covers 750,000 acres: its origin belongs to the time of the Roman
Conquests and the protracted wars of the Republic, which were fought
out in the plains, whence they became deserted and uncultivated, fit
only for public pastures in winter time ... the periodical emigrations
of the flocks continue as in the past times: they descend from the
mountains into the plains by a network of wide grassy roads which
traverse the region in every direction and are called tratturi.
These lanes are over 100 yards in width and cover a total length
of 940 miles.... Not less than 50,000 animals are pastured on the
Tavoliere, requiring over 1,500 square miles of land for their
subsistence.... Five thousand persons are employed as shepherds."]
[Footnote 121: Varro quite uniformly uses words which indicate that he
was accustomed to see sheep driven (abigere, propellere, adpellere)
but we can see the flocks led in Italy today, as they were in
Palestine soon after Varro's death, according to the testimony of that
beautiful figure of the Good Shepherd (St. John, X, 4): "And when he
putteth forth his own sheep he goeth before them, and the sheep follow
him, for they know his voice." R. Child, in his "Large Letter" in
Hartlib's Legacie, gives the explanation of the difference in the
custom:
"Our sheep do not follow their shepherds as they do in all other
countries: for the shepherd goeth before and the sheep follow like a
pack of dogs. This disobedience of our sheep doth not happen to us,
as the Papist Priests tell their simple flocks, because we have left
their great shepherd the Pope; but because we let our sheep range
night and day in our fields without a shepherd: which other countries
dare not for fear of wolves and other ravenous beasts, but are
compelled to guard them all day with great dogs and to bring them home
at night, or to watch them in their folds."]
[Footnote 122: Cf. Dante, Purg. XXVII, 79.
"Le capre
Tacite all' ombra mentre che'l sol ferve
Guardate dal pastor che'n su la verga
Poggiato s'e, e lor poggiato serve."]
[Footnote 123: It will be recalled that when Odysseus, disguised as a
beggar, was making his way to his house in company with the faithful
swineherd Eumaeus, they met the goatherd Melanthius "leading his goats
to feast the wooers, the best goats that were in all the herds."
(Odyssey, XVII, 216), and that subsequently he suffered a terrible
punishment for this unfaithfulness to his master's interests.]
[Footnote 124: Pliny (VIII, 76) calls these excrescences lanciniae, or
folds, and attributes them exclusively to the she goat, as Varro seems
to do also, but Columella (VII, 6) attributes them to the buck.]
[Footnote 125: Aristotle (H.A. I, 9.1) refers to this opinion and
denounces it as erroneous.]
[Footnote 126: The Roman denarius, which has been here and later
translated denier, may be considered for the purpose of comparing
values as, roughly, the equivalent of the modern franc, or lira, say
20 cents United States money.]
[Footnote 127: Macrobius (Saturn. I, 6) tells another story of the
origin of this cognomen, which, if not so heroic as that in the text,
is entertaining. It is related that a neighbour's sow strayed on
Tremelius' land and was caught and killed as a vagrant. When the
owner came to claim it and asserted the right to search the premises
Tremelius hid the carcass in the bed in which his wife was lying and
then took a solemn oath that there was no sow in his house except that
in the bed.]
[Footnote 128: It would seem, as Gibbon says of the Empress Theodora,
that this passage could be left "veiled in the obscurity of a learned
language"; but it may be noted that the locus classicus for the
play on the word is the incident of the Megarian "mystery pigs" in
Aristophanes' Acharnians, 728 ff. Cf. also Athenaeus, IX, 17, 18.]
[Footnote 129: Cf. Pliny (H.N. VIII, 77): "There is no animal that
affords a greater variety to the palate of the epicure: all the others
have their own peculiar flavour, but the flesh of the hog has nearly
fifty different flavours."]
[Footnote 130: In his stimulating book, Comment la route crée le type
Social, Edmond Desmolins submits an ingenious hypothesis to explain
the pre-eminence of the Gauls in the growing and making of pork,
and how that pre-eminence was itself the explanation of their early
success in cultivating the cereals. He describes their migrating
ancestors, the Celts, pushing their way up the Danube as hordes of
nomad shepherds with their vast flocks and herds of horses and cattle,
on the milk of which they had hitherto subsisted. So long as they
journeyed through prairie steppes, the last of which was Hungary, they
maintained their shepherd character, but when they once passed the
site of the present city of Vienna and entered the plateau of Bavaria,
they found new physical conditions which caused them to reduce and to
separate their herds of large cattle--an unbroken forest affording
little pasture of grass. Here they found the wild boar subsisting upon
the mast of the forest, and him they domesticated out of an economic
necessity, to take the place of their larger cattle as a basis of food
supply. Until then they had not been meat eaters, and so had known no
necessity for cereals, for milk is a balanced ration in itself. But
this change of diet required them also to take to agriculture and so
to abandon their nomad life.
'By reason of the habits of the animal, swine husbandry has a tendency
in itself to confine those engaged in it to a more or less sedentary
life, but we are about to see how the Celts were compelled to
accomplish this important evolution by an even more powerful force.
Meat cannot be eaten habitually except in conjunction with a
cereal ... and of all the meats pork is the one which demands this
association most insistently, because it is the least easily digested
and the most heating of all the meats.... So that is how the adoption
of swine husbandry and a diet of pork compelled our nomad Celts to
take the next step and settle down to agriculture.']
[Footnote 131: This Gallic tomacina was doubtless the ancestor of the
mortadella now produced in the Emilia and known to English speaking
consumers as "Bologna" sausage.]
[Footnote 132: The Gaul of which Cato was here writing is the modern
Lombardy, one of the most densely populated and richest agricultural
districts in the world. Here are found today those truly marvellous
"marchite" or irrigated meadows which owe the initiative for their
existence to the Cistercian monks of the Chiaravalle Abbey, who began
their fruitful agricultural labours in the country near Milan in the
twelfth century. There is a recorded instance of one of these meadows
which yielded in a single season 140 tons of grass per hectare, equal
to 75 tons of hay, or 30 tons per acre! The meadows are mowed six
times a year, and the grass is fed green to Swiss cows, which are kept
in great numbers for the manufacture of "frommaggio di grana," or
Parmesan cheese. This system of green soiling maintains the fertility
of the meadows, while the by-product of the dairies is the feeding of
hogs, which are kept in such quantity that they are today exported as
they were in the times of Cato and Varro. There is no region of the
earth, unless it be Flanders, of which the aspect so rejoices the
heart of a farmer as the Milanese. Well may the Lombard proverb say,
"Chi ha prato, ha tutto."]
[Footnote 133: Virgil (Aen. VII, 26) subsequently made good use of
this tradition of the founding of Lavinium, the sacred city of the
Romans where the Penates dwelt and whither solemn processions were
wont to proceed from Rome until Christianity became the State
religion. The site has been identified as that of the modern village
of Practica, where a few miserable shepherds collect during the winter
months, fleeing to the hills at the approach of summer and the dread
malaria.]
[Footnote 134: Cf. Polybius, XII, 4: 'For in Italy the swineherds manage
the feeding of their pigs in the same way. They do not follow close
behind the beasts, as in Greece, but keep some distance in front of
them, sounding their horn every now and then: and the animals follow
behind and run together at the sound. Indeed, the complete familiarity
which the animals show with the particular horn to which they belong
seems at first astonishing and almost incredible. For, owing to the
populousness and wealth of the country, the droves of swine in Italy
are exceedingly large, especially along the sea coast of the Tuscans
and Gauls: for one sow will bring up a thousand pigs, or some times
even more. They, therefore, drive them out from their night styes to
feed according to their litters and ages. When if several droves are
taken to the same place they cannot preserve these distinctions of
litters: but they, of course, get mixed up with each other both as
they are being driven out and as they feed, and as they are being
brought home. Accordingly, the device of the horn blowing has been
invented to separate them when they have got mixed up together,
without labour or trouble. For as they feed one swineherd goes in
one direction sounding his horn, and another in another and thus the
animals sort themselves of their own accord and follow their own horn
with such eagerness that it is impossible by any means to stop or
hinder them. But in Greece when the swine get mixed up in the oak
forests in their search for the mast, the swineherd who has most
assistants and the best help at his disposal, when collecting his own
animals drives off his neighbours' also. Some times, too, a thief lies
in wait and drives them off without the swineherd knowing how he has
lost them, because the beasts straggle a long way from their drivers
in their eagerness to find acorns, when they are just beginning to
fall.'
Bishop Latimer in one of his sermons quotes the phrase used in his
youth, at the time of the discovery of America, in calling hogs: 'Come
to thy minglemangle, come pur, come pur.' It would be impossible to
transcribe the traditional call used in Virginia. One some times
thinks that it was the original of the celebrated 'rebel yell' of
General Lee's army.]
[Footnote 135: The use of the Greek salutation was esteemed by the more
austere Romans of the age of Scipio an evidence of preciosity, to be
laughed at: and so Lucienus' jesting apology for the use of it here
doubtless was in reference to Lucilius' epigram which Cicero has
preserved, de Finibus, I, 3.
"Graece ergo praetor Athenis
Id quod maluisti te, quum ad me accedi, saluto
[Greek: Chaire] inquam, Tite: lictores turma omni cohorsque
[Greek: Chaire] Tite! Hinc hostis mi Albucius, hinc inimicus."
It was the word which the Romans taught their parrots. Cf. Persius,
Prolog. 8.]
[Footnote 136: The working ox was respected by the ancient Romans as a
fellow labourer. Valerius Maximus (VIII, 8 ad fin.) cites a case of
a Roman citizen who was put to death, because, to satisfy the craving
of one of his children for beef to eat, he slew an ox from the plough.
Ovid puts this sentiment in the mouth of Pythagoras, when he agrees
that pigs and goats are fit subjects for sacrifice, but protests
against such use of sheep and oxen. (Metamor. XV, 139.)
"Quid meruere boves, animal sine fraude dolisque
Innocuum, simplex, natum tolerare labores?
Immemor est demum, nee frugum manere dignus
Qui potuit curvi demto modo pondere arati
Ruricolam mactare suum: qui trita labore
Ilia quibus toties durum renovaverat arvum
Tot dederse messes, percussit colla securi."]
[Footnote 137: The learned commentators have been able to discover
nothing about either this Plautius or this Hirrius, but it appears
that Archelaus wrote a book under the title Bugonia, of which nothing
survives. It may be conjectured, however, on the analogy of Samson's
riddle to the Philistines, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and
out of the strong came forth sweetness," (Judges, XIV, 14), that
Plautius meant to imply that some good might be the consequence of the
evil Hirrius had done: and that Vaccius cited the allusion to suggest
to Varro that, while he might know nothing much about cattle,
his attempt to deal with the subject might provoke some useful
discussion.]
[Footnote 138: Darwin, Animals and Plants, II, 20, cites this passage
and says that "at the present day the natives of Java some times drive
their cattle into the forests to cross with the wild Banteng." The
crossing of wild blood on domestic animals is not, however, always
successful. A recent visitor to the German agricultural experiment
station at Halle describes "a curious hairy beast with great horns,
a wild look in his eye, a white streak down his back and a bumpy
forehead, which had in it blood from cattle which had lived on the
plains of Thibet, which had grazed on the lowland pastures of Holland,
which had roamed the forests of northeast India and of the Malay
Peninsular, and had wandered through the forests of Germany. We
Americans had sympathy for this beast. He was some thing like
ourselves, with the blood of many different races flowing through his
veins."]
[Footnote 139: Pliny (VIII, 66) cites the fact that the Scythians always
preferred mares to stallions for war, and gives an ingenious reason
for the preference. Aristotle (H.A. VI, 22) says that the Scythians
rode their pregnant mares until the very last, saying that the
exercise rendered parturition more easy. Every breeder of heavy draft
horses has seen a mare taken from the plough and have her foal in the
field, with no detriment to either: and the story of the mare Keheilet
Ajuz, who founded the best of the Arab families, is well known, but
bears repetition. I quote from Spencer Borden, The Arab Horse, p.
44: "It is related that a certain Sheik was flying from an enemy,
mounted on his favourite mare. Arab warriors trust themselves only to
mares, they will not ride a stallion in war. The said mare was at the
time far along toward parturition: indeed she became a mother when the
flying horseman stopped for rest at noonday, the new comer being a
filly. Being hard pressed the Sheik was compelled to remount his mare
and again seek safety in flight, abandoning the newborn filly to her
fate. Finally reaching safety among his own people, great was the
surprise of all when, shortly after the arrival of the Sheik on his
faithful mare, the little filly less than a day old came into camp
also, having followed her mother across miles of desert. She was
immediately given into the care of an old woman of the tribe (Ajuz
= an old woman), hence her name Keheilet Ajuz, 'the mare of the old
woman,' and grew to be the most famous of all the animals in the
history of the breed."]
[Footnote 140: Varro does not describe the livery of the horses of his
day, as he does of cattle, but Virgil (Georg. III, 81) supplies the
deficiency, asserting that the best horses were bay (spadices) and
roan (glauci) while the least esteemed were white (albi) and dun
(gilvi), which is very interesting testimony in support of the most
recent theory of the origin of the thoroughbred horse. Professor
Ridgeway who, opposing Darwin's conclusion, contends for a multiple
origin of the historic and recent races of horses, has collected a
mass of information about the marking of famous horses of all ages in
his Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse. He maintains
that a bay livery, with a white star and stockings, the development
of protective coloration from an originally striped coat, such as has
gone on more recently in the case of the quaggas, is absolute evidence
of the North African origin of a horse, and he shows that all the
swiftest horses mentioned in history are of that race, while the
heavier and less mettlesome horses of Northern origin have been, when
pure bred, dun coloured or white.
Of the Italian breeds mentioned by Varro, Professor Ridgeway
conjectures that the Etruscan (or Rosean) was probably an improved
Northern horse, while the Apulian, from the South of Italy,
represented an admixture of Libyan blood.]
[Footnote 141: Aristotle (H.A. VI, 22) preceded Varro with this good
advice, saying that a mare "produces better foals at the end of four
or five years. It is quite necessary that she should wait one year
and should pass through a fallow, as it were--[Greek: poiein osper
neion]."]
[Footnote 142: Mules were employed in antiquity from the earliest times.
In Homer they were used for drawing wagons: thus Nausicaa drove a mule
team to haul out the family wash, and Priam made his visit to Achilles
in a mule litter. Homer professes to prefer mules to oxen for
ploughing. There were mule races at the Greek games. Aristotle
(Rhetoric, III, 2) tells an amusing story of Simonides, who, when
the victor in the mule race offered him only a poor fee, refused to
compose an ode, pretending to be shocked at the idea of writing about
"semi-asses," but, on receipt of a proper fee, he wrote the ode
beginning: "Hail, daughters of storm-footed mares," although they were
equally daughters of the asses.]
[Footnote 143: The breed of Maremma sheep dogs, still preferred in
Italy, is white. He is doubtless the descendant of the large woolly
"Spitz" or Pomeranian wolf dog which is figured on Etruscan coins.]
[Footnote 144: In his essay,Notre ami le chien, Maeterlinck maintains
eloquently that the dog alone among the domestic animals has given his
confidence and friendship to man. "We are alone, absolutely alone, on
this chance planet: and amid all the forms of life that surround us
not one excepting the dog has made alliance with us. A few creatures
fear us, most are unaware of us, and not one loves us. In the world of
plants, we have dumb and motionless slaves: but they serve us in spite
of themselves.... The rose and the corn, had they wings, would fly at
our approach, like birds. Among the animals, we number a few servants
who have submitted only through indifference, cowardice or stupidity:
the uncertain and craven horse, who responds only to pain and is
attached to nothing ... the cow and the ox happy so long as they are
eating and docile because for centuries they have not had a thought of
their own.... I do not speak of the cat, to whom we are nothing more
than a too large and uneatable prey: the ferocious cat whose side long
contempt tolerates us only as encumbering parasites in our own homes.
She at least curses us in her mysterious heart: but all the others
live beside us as they might live beside a rock or a tree."
The effective use of this thesis in the scene of the revolt of the
domestic animals in the Blue Bird will be remembered.]
[Footnote 145: This method of securing the faithful affection of a dog
is solemnly recommended, without acknowledgment to Saserna, in the
seventeenth century editions of the Maison Rustique (I, 27).]
[Footnote 146: Keil happily points out that in his book on the Latin
language (VII, 31), Varro quotes the "ancient proverb" to which he
here refers, viz.: "canis caninam non est" dog doesn't eat dog.]
[Footnote 147: Aristotle (H.A. VI, 20) says that puppies are blind
from twelve to seventeen days, depending upon the season of the year
at which they are born. Pliny (H N. VIII, 62) says from seven to
twenty days, depending upon the supply of the mother's milk.]
[Footnote 148: It was among these hardy shepherd slaves that Spartacus
recruited his army in 72-71 B.C., as did Caelius and Milo in 48 B.C.,
while their descendants were the brigands who infested Southern Italy
even in the nineteenth century.]
[Footnote 149: Gaius, I, 119, II, 24, 41, describes in detail the
processes here referred to by which a slave was acquired under the
Roman law.]
[Footnote 150: Dennis, in his Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, draws
a picture of modern Italy which may serve to illustrate Varro's sketch
of the mountain life of the shepherds of his day:
"Occasionally in my wanderings on this site (Veii) I have entered,
either from curiosity or for shelter, one of the capanne scattered
over the downs. These are tall conical thatched huts which the
shepherds make their winter abode. For in Italy, the lowlands being
generally unhealthy in summer, the flocks are driven to the mountains
about May, and as soon as the great heats are past are brought back to
the rich pastures of the plains. It is a curious sight, the interior
of a capanna, and affords an agreeable diversity to the antiquity
hunter. A little boldness is requisite to pass through the pack of
dogs, white as new dropt lambs, but large and fierce as wolves, which,
were the shepherd not at hand, would tear in pieces whoever might
venture to approach the hut: but with one of the pecoraj for a
Teucer, nothing is to be feared. The capanne are of various sizes.
One I entered not far from Veii was thirty or forty feet in diameter
and fully as high, propped in the centre by two rough masts, between
which a hole was left in the roof for the escape of smoke. Within the
door lay a large pile of lambs, there might be a hundred, killed that
morning and already flayed, and a number of shepherds were busied
in operating on the carcases of others: all of which were to be
dispatched forthwith to the Roman market. Though a fierce May sun
blazed without, a huge fire roared in the middle of the hut: but this
was for the sake of the ricotta, which was being made in another
part of the capanna. Here stood a huge cauldron, full of boiling
ewes' milk. In a warm state this curd is a delicious jelly and has
often tempted me to enter a capanna in quest of it, to the amazement
of the pecoraj, to whom it is vilior alga. Lord of the cauldron,
stood a man dispensing ladlefuls of the rich simmering mess to his
fellows, as they brought their bowls for their morning allowance:
and he varied his occupation by pouring the same into certain small
baskets, the serous part running off through the wicker and the
residue caking as it cooled. On the same board stood the cheeses,
previously made from the cream. In this hut lived twenty-five men,
their nether limbs clad in goat skins, with the hair outwards,
realizing the satyrs of ancient fable: but they had no nymphs to
tease, nor shepherdesses to woo, and never
'sat all day
Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love
To amorous Phillida.'
They were a band of celibates without the vows. In such huts they
dwell all the year round, flaying lambs or shearing sheep, living
on bread, ricotta and water, very rarely tasting meat or wine and
sleeping on shelves ranged round the hut, like berths in a ship's
cabin. Thus are the dreams of Arcadia dispelled by realities."]
[Footnote 151: In modern Italy the shepherds do not take their women
with them to the saltus, but, as Dennis says, lead there the life of
"celibates, without the vows."]
[Footnote 152: In the Venitian provinces of Italy today the women are
still seen at work in the harvest and rice fields with their babes in
their bosoms: but the most amazing modern spectacle of this kind
is that of women coaling ships in the East, carrying their unhappy
youngsters up and down the coal ladders throughout the work.]
[Footnote 153: The author of Maison Rustique did not agree with Varro
in this opinion. I quote from Surflet's translation of 1606 (I, 7):
"And for writing and reading it skilleth not whether he be able to
doe it or no, or that he should have any other charge to looke unto
besides that of yours, or else that he should use another to set downe
in writing such expences as he hath laid out: for paper will admit any
thing."]
[Footnote 154: This temple and fig tree stood in Rome at the foot of the
Palatine hill, in the neighbourhood of the Lupercal. It was under this
fig tree that Romulus and Remus were supposed to have been suckled by
the wolf.]
[Footnote 155: 'That is the beste grease that is to a shepe, to grease
hym in the mouthe with good meate,' says Sir Anthony Fitzherbert.]
[Footnote 156: Pliny (VII, 59) says that most nations learn the use of
barbers next after that of letters, but that the Romans were late in
this respect. Varro himself wore a beard, as appears on the coin he
struck during the war with the Pirates. It is reproduced in Smiths
Dict. Gr. and Rom. Biog., III, p. 1227.]
[Footnote 157: Cowper's verse in The Task seems to be all that is
happy in the way of translation of Varro's text, "divina natura dedit
agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes": but Cowley's "God the first
garden made, and the first city Cain" was probably Cowper's source.
Cowley was a reader of Varro, as his pleasant and sane essay Of
Agriculture shows.]
[Footnote 158: Following the precedent of the first and second books in
the matter of local colour, the scene of this third book, relating to
villas and the "small deer," which were there reared, is laid in
the villa publica at Rome, and the characters of the dialogue are
selected for the suggestion which their names may make of the denizens
of the aviary, the barn yard and the bee-stand.]
[Footnote 159: This Appius Claudius Pulcher served in Asia under his
brother-in-law Lucullus, was Augur in B.C. 59, Consul in 54 and Censor
in 50. He wrote a book on augural law and the habits of birds at which
Cicero poked some rather mean fun. He fixes the date of the dialogue.]
[Footnote 160: In Varro's time, as today, the river Velinus drained the
fresh pastures of the Umbrian prairie of Rosea, "the nurse of Italy,"
which lay below the town of Reate (the modern Rieti), and was
originally the bed of a lake. Its waters are so strongly impregnated
with carbonate of lime that by their deposit of travertine they tend
to block their own channel. The drainage of Rosea has, therefore,
always been a matter of concern to the live stock industry of Reate,
and in B.C. 272 M. Curius Dentatus opened the first of several
successful artificial canals (the last dating from the sixteenth
century, A.D.), which still serve to lead the Velinus into the Nar at
the renowned Cascate delle Marmore. For two hundred years the people
of Interamna (the modern Terni) had complained that their situation
below the falls was endangered by Curius' canal, and finally in B.C.
54 the Roman Senate appointed the commission to which Appius Claudius
refers in the text, to hear the controversy. Cicero was retained as
counsel for the people of Reate, and during the hearing stopped, as
Appius Claudius did, with our friend Axius at his Reatine villa, and
wrote about the visit to the same Atticus whom we met in Varro's
second book, as follows (ad Atticum, IV, 15): "After this was over
the people of Reate summoned me to their Tempe to plead their
cause against the people of Interamna, before the Consul and ten
commissioners, the question being concerning the Veline lake, which,
drained by M. Curius by means of a channel cut through the mountain,
now flows into the Nar: by this means the famous Rosea has been
reclaimed from the swamp, though still fairly moist. I stopped with
Axius, who took me also to visit the Seven Waters." What was once
deemed a danger is a double source of profit to the modern folk of
Interamna. Tourists today crowd to see the same waterfall which Cicero
visited, taking a tram from the busy little industrial town of Terni:
and the waters which flow from Velinus now serve to generate power
with which armour plates are manufactured for the Italian navy on the
site of the ancient Interamna.]
[Footnote 161: Sicilian honey was famous for its flavour because of
the bee pasture of thyme which there abounded, especially at Hybla.
Theophrastus (H.P. III, 15, 5) explains that the honey of Corsica had
an acrid taste, because the bees pastured there largely on box trees.]
[Footnote 162: These denizens of the Roman villa are all enumerated by
Martial in his delightful verses (III, 38) upon Faustinus' villa at
Baiae. The picture of the barn yard is very true to life in all ages,
especially the touch of the hungry pigs sniffing after the pail of the
farmer's wife:
"Vagatur omnis turba sordidae cortis
Argutus anser, gemmeique pavones
Nomenque debet quae rubentibus pennis,
Et picta perdix, Numidicaeque guttatae
Et impiorum phasiana Colchorum.
Rhodias superbi feminas prement galli
Sonantque turres plausibus columbarum,
Gemit hinc palumbus, inde cereus turtur
Avidi sequuntur villicae sinum porci:
Matremque plenam mollis agnus exspectat."]
[Footnote 163: The sestertius was one quarter of a denarius, or,
say, the equivalent of five cents. It was also called nummus, as
we say "nickel." The ordinary unit used by the Romans in reckoning
considerable sums of money was 1,000 sesterces, which may accordingly
be translated as the equivalent of (say) $50. Axius' jackass thus cost
$2,000, while Seius' income from his villa was $2,500 per annum, that
of Varro's aunt from her aviary was $3,000, and that of Axius from
his farm $1,500. Cicero records that Axius was a money lender, which
explains the fun here made of his avarice.]
[Footnote 164: Columella, writing about one hundred years after Varro,
refers to this passage and says that luxury had so developed since
Varro's time that it no longer required an extraordinary occasion,
like a triumph, to bring the price of thrushes to three denarii a
piece, but that that had become a current quotation.]
[Footnote 165: A minerval was the fee (of Minerva) paid to a school
teacher.]
[Footnote 166: The inventor of the auspices ex tripudiis or the
feeding of chickens was evidently an ingenious poultry fancier who
succeeded in securing the care of his favourites at the public
charge.]
[Footnote 167: This was L. Marcius Philippus, the orator mentioned
by Horace (Epist. I, 7, 46), who was Consul in B.C. 91, and was
celebrated for his luxurious habits, which his wealth enabled him to
gratify. His son married the widow of C. Octavius and so became the
step-father of the Emperor Augustus.]
[Footnote 168: This was turdus pilaris, the variety of thrush which is
called field fare.]
[Footnote 169: The traveller by railway from Rome to Naples passes near
Varro's estate of Casinum, and if he stops at the mediaeval town of
San Germano to visit the neighbouring Badia di Monte Cassino, where
the "angelic doctor" Thomas Aquinas was educated, he will find Varro's
memory kept green: for he will be entertained at the Albergo Varrone
("very fair but bargaining advisable," sagely counsels Mr. Baedeker)
and on his way up the long winding road to the Abbey there will be
pointed out to him the river Rapido, on the banks of which Varro's
aviary stood, and nearby what is reputed to be the site of the
old polymath's villa which Antony polluted with the orgies Cicero
described in the second Philippic. Antony's destruction of his library
was a great blow to Varro, but one likes to think that his ghost can
take satisfaction in the maintenance, so near the haunts of his flesh,
of such a noble collection of books as is the continuing pride of the
Abbey on the mountain above.]
[Footnote 170: Varro's Museum, or study where he wooed the Muses, on his
estate at Casinum was not unlike that of Cicero at his native Arpinum,
which he described (de Leg. II, 3) agreeably as on an island in the
cold and clear Fibrenus just above its confluence with the more
important river Liris, where, like a plebeian marrying into a
patrician family, it lost its name but contributed its freshness. The
younger Pliny built a study in the garden of his Laurentine villa near
Ostia, which he describes (II, 17) with enthusiasm: "horti diaeta est,
amores mei, re vera amores": and here he found refuge from the tumult
of his household during the festivities of the Saturnalia, which
corresponded with our Christmas. In the ante bellum days every
Virginia gentleman had such an "office" in his house yard where he
pretended to transact his farm business, but where actually he
was wont to escape from the obligations of family and continuous
hospitality.]
[Footnote 171: The commentators on this interesting but obscure
description of Varro's aviary have at this point usually endeavoured
to explain the arrangements of the chamber under the lantern of
the tholus with respect to its use as a dining room which Varro
frequented himself, and hence have been amused into all kinds of
difficulties of interpretation. The references to the convivae are
what lead them astray, and it remained for Keil to suggest that this
was a playful allusion to the birds themselves, a conclusion which is
strengthened by Varro's previous statement of the failure of Lucullus'
attempt to maintain a dining room in his aviary.]
[Footnote 172: Cf. Vitruvius, I, 6: "Andronicus Cyrrhestes built at
Athens an octagonal marble tower, on the sides of which were carved
images of the eight winds, each on the side opposite that from which
it blew. On the pyramidal roof of this tower he placed a bronze Triton
holding a rod in his right hand, and so contrived that the Triton,
revolving with the wind, always stood opposed to that which prevailed,
and thus pointed with his rod to the image on the tower of the wind
that was blowing at the moment." The ruins of this Tower of the Winds
may still be seen in Athens. There is a picture of it in Harper's
Dictionary of Classical Antiquities in the article Andronicus.]
[Footnote 173: One ventures to translate athletoe comitiorum by Mr.
Gladstone's famous phrase.]
[Footnote 174: Reading "tesserulas coicientem in loculum."]
[Footnote 175: A French translator might better convey the intention
of the pun, contained in the ducere serram of the text, by the
locution, une prise de bec.]
[Footnote 176: It probably will not comfort the ultimate consumer who
holds in such odium the celebrated "Schedule K" of the Payne-Aldrich
tariff, to realize that the American wool grower puts no higher
value on his sheep than did his Roman ancestor, as revealed by this
quotation from the stock yards of Varro's time. It is interesting,
however, to the breeder to know that a good price for wool has always
stimulated the production of the best stock. Strabo says that the wool
of Turdetania in Spain was so celebrated in the generation after Varro
that a ram of the breed (the ancestors of the modern Merino) fetched
a talent, say $1,200; a price which may be compared with that of the
prize ram recently sold in England for export to the Argentine for as
much as a thousand pounds sterling, and considered a good commercial
investment at that. Doubtless the market for Rosean mules comforted
Axius in his investment of the equivalent of £400 in a breeding jack.]
[Footnote 177: In feudal times the right to maintain a dove cote was
the exclusive privilege of the lord of the manor. According to their
immemorial custom, which Varro notices, the pigeons preyed on the
neighbourhood crops and were detested by the community in consequence.
During the French revolution they were one of the counts in the
indictment of the land-owning aristocracy, and in the event the
pigeons as well as their owners had the sins of their forefathers
justly visited upon them. The American farmer who has a pigeon-keeping
neighbour and is restrained by the pettiness of the annoyance from
making a point on their trespasses, feels something of the blind and
impotent wrath of the French peasant against the whole pigeon family.]
[Footnote 178: It appears that the Romans actually hired men to chew the
food intended for cramming birds, so as to relieve the unhappy victims
even of such exercise as they might get from assimilating their diet.
Columella (VII, 10) in discussing the diet of thrushes deprecates
this practice, sagely saying that the wages of the chewers are out
of proportion to the benefit obtained, and that any way the chewers
swallow a good part of what they are given to macerate.
The typical tramp of the comic papers who is forever looking for
occupation without work might well envy these Roman professional
chewers. Not even Dr. Wiley's "poison squad" employed to test food
products could compare with them.]
[Footnote 179: These prices of $10 and $50 and even $80 a pair for
pigeons, large as they seem, were surpassed under the Empire.
Columella says (VIII, 8): "That excellent author, M. Varro, tells us
that in his more austere time it was not unusual for a pair of pigeons
to sell for a thousand sesterces, a price at which the present day
should blush, if we may believe the report that men have been found to
pay for a pair as much as four thousand nummi." ($200.)]
[Footnote 180: The market for chickens and eggs in the United States
would doubtless astonish the people of Delos as much as the statistics
do us (ipsa suas mirantur Gargara messes!). It is solemnly recorded
that the American hen produces a billion and a quarter dozen eggs per
annum, of a value greater than that of either the wheat or cotton
crops, and yet there are many of us who cannot get our hens to lay
more than a hundred eggs a year!]
[Footnote 181: Reading ad infirma crura. This practice is explained
more at length by Columella (VIII, 2, 3) who specifies the spurs,
calcaribus inustis.
Buffon, who describes a 'practice of trimming the combs of capons,
adds (V, 302) an interesting account of an experiment which he says he
had made "une espece de greffe animale": after trimming the comb of
a growing cockerel his budding spurs were cut out and grafted on the
roots of the comb, where they took root and flourished, growing to a
length of two and a half inches, in some cases curving forward like
the horns of a ram, and in others turning back like those of a goat.]
[Footnote 182: The dusting yard which Varro here describes was in the
open, but Columella (VIII, 3) advises what modern poultry farmers
pride themselves upon having recently discovered,--a covered
scratching pen strewn with litter to afford exercise for the hens in
rough weather. It will be observed that, so far as ventilation is
concerned, Varro recommends a hen house open to the weather: this is
another standard of modern practice which has had a hard struggle
against prejudice. Columella adds two more interesting bits of advice,
that for the comfort of the hens the roosts should be cut square, and
for cleanliness their water trough should be enclosed leaving
only openings large enough to receive a hen's head. With so much
enlightenment and sanitation one would expect one or the other of
these Romans to tell us of some "teeming hen" like Herrick's who laid
"her egg each day."
We are proud to be able to cite the eminent Roseburg Industrious Biddy
who, in the year of grace 1912, achieved the championship of America
with a record of 266 eggs in ten months and nineteen days, and was
sold for $800: but Varro is content to suggest that a hen will lay
more eggs in a season than she can hatch, and the conservative
Columella (VIII, 5) that the number of eggs depends upon diet.]
[Footnote 183: The guinea fowl got their Greek name, meleagrides,
because the story was that the sisters of Meleager were turned into
guinea hens. Pliny (H.N. X, 38) says that they fight every year on
Meleager's tomb. It is a fact that they are a pugnacious fowl. Buffon
says that guinea fowl disappeared from Europe in the Dark Ages and
were not known again until the route to the Indies via the Cape of
Good Hope was opened when they were imported anew from the west coast
of Africa.]
[Footnote 184: Reading, "propter fastidium hominum." Cf. Pliny (X, 38),
whose explanation is "propter ingratum virus."]
[Footnote 185: There is a Virginia practice of feeding a fat turkey
heavily on bread soaked in wine or liquor just before he is killed,
the result being that as the turkey gets into that condition which
used to put our ancestors under the table, he relaxes all his tendons
and so is sweeter and more tender when he comes above the table. There
is a humanitarian side to the practice which should recommend it even
to the W.C.T.U. as well as to the epicure.]
[Footnote 186: Many thousands of geese used to be driven every year to
Rome from the land of the Morini in Northern Gaul, but the Germans are
the modern consumers. A British consular report says that in addition
to the domestic supply a special "goose train" of from fifteen to
forty cars is received daily in Berlin from Russia. It would seem that
the goose that lays the golden egg has emigrated to Muscovy. Buffon
says that the introduction of the Virginia turkey into Europe drove
the goose off the tables of all civilized peoples.]
[Footnote 187: Columella (VIII, 14) repeats this myth, but Aristotle
(H.A. V, 2, 9) says that geese bathe after breeding. Buffon gives
a Gallic touch, "ces oiseaux preludent aux actes de l'amour en allant
d'abord s'egayer dans l'eau."]
[Footnote 188: Reading seris. It is the Cichorium endivia of
Linnaeus. Cf. Pliny (H.N. XX, 32.)]
[Footnote 189: Varro does not mention it, but the Romans knew and prized
pâté de foie gras under the name ficatum, which indicates
that
they produced it by cramming their geese with a diet of figs. Cf.
Horace's verse "pinguibus et ficis pastum iecur anseris albi."
In Toulouse, whence now comes the best of this dainty of the epicure,
the geese are crammed daily with a dough of corn meal mixed with the
oil of poppies, fed through a tin funnel, which is introduced into the
esophagus of the unhappy bird. At the end of a month the stertorous
breathing of the victim proclaims the time of sacrifice to Apicius.
The liver is expected to weigh a kilogram, (say two pounds), while
at least two kilograms of fat are saved in addition, to garnish the
family plat of vegetables during the remainder of the year.]
[Footnote 190: Reading foeles, which Keller, in his account of the
fauna of ancient Italy in the Cambridge Companion to Latin Studies,
identifies with Martes vulgaris. Sir Anthony Fitzherbert calls them
fullymartes. It does not appear that the Romans had in Varro's time
brought from Egypt our household cat, F. maniculata. They used
weasels and tame snakes for catching mice.]
[Footnote 191: Darwin (Animals and Plants, I, 8) cites this passage
and argues that Varro's advice to cover the duck yard with netting to
keep the ducks from flying out is evidence that in Varro's time ducks
were not entirely domesticated, and hence that the modern domestic
duck is the same species as the wild duck. It may be noted, however,
that Varro gives the same advice about netting the chicken yard,
having said that chickens had been domesticated from the beginning of
time.]
[Footnote 192: The ancient Etruscan city of Tarquinii is now known
as Corneto. The wild sheep which Lippinus there kept in his game
preserves were probably the mouflon which are still hunted in
Sardinia and Corsica, though they may have been the Phrygian wild
sheep (Aegoceros argali) which Varro mentions in Book II. Pliny
(H.N. VIII, 211) says that this Lippinus was the first of the Romans
to keep wild animals enclosed; that he established his preserves
shortly before the Civil Wars, and that he soon had imitators.]
[Footnote 193: Reading * * * * [Transcriber's note: the preceding four
*s are actually four instances of the "infinity" symbol (like a digit
8 rotated horizontally)]_passum_. The Roman mile, mille passuum, was
142 yards less than the English mile.]
[Footnote 194: Of the three kinds of hares mentioned by Varro the
"common Italian kind" was L. timidus, a roast shoulder of which
Horace vaunts as a delicacy: the Alpine hare was L. variabilis,
which grows white on the approach of winter: and the cuniculus was
the common rabbit known to our English ancestors as the coney. Strabo
records (Casaub, 144) that the inhabitants of the Gymnesian (Balearic)
Islands in Spain sent a deputation to Augustus to request a military
force to exterminate the pest of rabbits, for such was their multitude
that the people were being crowded out of their homes by them, in
which their plight was that of modern Australia. They were usually
hunted in Spain with muzzled ferrets imported from Africa.]
[Footnote 195: The edible snail, helix pomatia, L., is still an
article of commerce in France and Italy. They prey upon vines and
give evidence of their appreciation of the best by abounding in the
vineyards of the Cote d'or, the ancient Burgundy. There at the end
of summer they are gathered for the double purpose of protecting the
vines and delighting the epicure: are then stored in a safe place
until cold weather, when they considerately seal up their own shells
with a calcareous secretion and so are shipped to market.
Here is the recipe for 'escargots à la bourguignonne,' which despite
the prejudice engendered by Leviticus (XI, 30.) may be recommended
to the American palate jaded by beefsteak and potatoes and the high
cost of living: "Mettre les escargots a bouillir pendant 5 a 10
minutes dans de l'eau salée, les retirer de leur coquille, les laver
a l'eau froide pour les debarrasser du limon, les cuire dans un
court-bouillon fortement assaisonné. Apres cuisson les replacer dans
le coquille bien nettoyee, en les garnissant au fond et par dessus
d'une farce de beurre frais manipule avec un fin hachis de persil,
cerfeuil, ail, echalote, sel et poivre. Avant de servir, faire
chauffer au four."]
[Footnote 196: Reading LXXX quadrantes. A comparison may be made of
this capacity with that of the ordinary snail known to the Romans,
for their smallest unit of liquid measure was called a cochlear, or
snail shell, and contained.02 of a modern pint, or, as we may say,
a spoonful: indeed the French word cuiller is derived from
cochlear.]
[Footnote 197: It is perhaps well to remind the American reader that the
European dormouse (Myoxus glis. Fr. loir. Ger. siebenschlafer)
is rather a squirrel than a mouse, and that he is still esteemed a
dainty edible, as he was by the Romans: indeed when fat, just before
he retires to hibernate, he might be preferred to 'possum and other
strange dishes on which some hospitable Americans regale themselves
and the patient palates of touring Presidents. In his treatise De re
culinaria Apicius gives a recipe for a ragout of dormice which sounds
appetizing.]
[Footnote 198: Darwin (Animals and Plants, XVIII) says: "I have never
heard of the dormouse breeding in captivity."]
[Footnote 199: Varro makes no mention of tea and bread and butter as
part of the diet of a dormouse; so we are better able to understand
his abstinence at the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland. As
Martial (III, 58) calls him somniculosus, it is probable that his
table manners on that occasion were nothing new and that his English
and German names were always justified.]
[Footnote 200: This is one of Varro's puns which requires a surgical
operation to get it into one's head. Appius is selected to talk about
bees because his name has some echo of the sound of apis, the word
for bee.]
[Footnote 201: The study of bees was as interesting to the ancients as
it is to us. There have survived from among many others the treatises
of Aristotle, Varro, Virgil, Columella and Pliny, but they are all
made up, as Maeterlinck has remarked, of "erreurs charmantes," and for
that reason the antique lore of bees is read perhaps to best advantage
in the mellifluous verses of the fourth Georgic, which follow Varro
closely.]
[Footnote 202: He might have said also that the hexagonal form of
construction employed by bees produces the largest possible result
with the least labour and material. Maeterlinck rehearses (La Vie des
Abeilles, 138) the result of the study of this problem in the highest
mathematics:
"Réaumur avait proposé au célèbre mathematicien Koenig le
problem
suivant: 'Entre toutes les cellules hexagonales a fond pyramidal
compose de trois rhombes semblables et égaux, determiner celle qui
peut être construite avec le moins de matière?' Koenig trouva qu'une
telle cellule avait son fond fait de trois rhombes dont chaque grand
angle était de 109 degrés, 26 minutes et chaque petit de 70 degrés,
34
minutes. Or, un autre savant, Maraldi, ayant mesuré aussi exactement
que possible les angles des rhombes construits par les abeilles fixa
les grands à 109 degrés, 28 minutes, et les petits a 70 degrés, 32
minutes. Il n'y avait done, entre les deux solutions qu'une difference
de 2 minutes. II est probable que l'erreur, s'il y en a une, doit être
imputee a Maraldi plutot qu'aux abeilles, car aucun instrument ne
permet de mesurer avec une precision infaìllible les angles des
cellules qui ne sont pas assez nettlement definis."
Maclaurin, a Scotch physicist, checked Koenig's computations and
reported to the Royal Society in London in 1743 that he found a
solution in exact accord with Maraldi's measurements, thereby
completely justifying the mathematics of the bee architect.]
[Footnote 203: The Romans were as curious and as constant in the use of
perfumes as we are of tobacco. It is perhaps well to remember that
they might find our smoke as offensive as we would their unguents.]
[Footnote 204: Indeed one of the marvels of nature is the service
which certain bees perform for certain plants in transferring their
fertilizing pollen which has no other means of transportation. Darwin
is most interesting on this subject.]
[Footnote 205: The ancients, even Aristotle, did not know that the queen
bee is the common mother of the hive. They called her the king, and it
remained for Swammerdam in the seventeenth century to determine with
the microscope this important fact. From that discovery has developed
our modern knowledge of the bee; that the drones are the males and are
suffered by the (normally) sterile workers to live only until one of
them has performed his office of fertilizing once for all the new
queen in that nuptial flight, so dramatically fatal to the successful
swain, which Maeterlinck has described with wonderful rhetoric,
whereupon the workers massacre the surviving males without mercy. This
is the "driving out" which Varro mentions.]
[Footnote 206: This picture of the queen bee is hardly in accord with
modern observations. It seems that while the queen is treated with
the utmost respect, she is rather a royal prisoner than a ruler, and,
after her nuptial flight, is confined to her function of laying eggs
incessantly unless she may be unwillingly dragged forth to lead a
swarm. Maeterlinck thus pictures (La Vie des Abeilles, 174) her
existence with a Gallic pencil:
"Elle n'aura aucune des habitudes, aucunes des passions que nous
croyons inherentes à l'abeille. Elle n'eprouvera ni le desir du
soleil, ni le besoin de l'espace et mourra sans avoir visite une
fleur. Elle passera son existence dans l'ombre et l'agitation de la
foule à la recherche infatigable de berceaux à peupler. En revanche,
elle connaitra seule l'inquietude de l'amour."]
[Footnote 207: It would have interested Axius to know that the annual
consumption of honey in the United States today is from 100 to 125
million pounds and that the crop has a money value of at least ten
million dollars. To match Seius, we might put forward a bee farmer in
California who produces annually 150,000 pounds of honey from 2,000
hives.]
[Footnote 208: Maeterlinck has made a charming picture of this habit of
propinquity of the bee-stand to the human habitation. He describes
(La Vie des Abeilles, 14) the old man who taught him to love bees
when he was a boy in Flanders, an old man whose entire happiness
"consistait aux beautés d'un jardin et parmi ces beautés la mieux
aimee et la plus visitées etait un roucher, composé de douze cloches
de paille qu'il avait peint, les unes de rose vif, les autres de jaune
clair, la plupart d'un bleu tendre, car il avail observé, bien avant
les experiences de Sir John Lubbock, que le bleu est la couleur
preferée des abeilles. Il avait installé ce roucher centre le mur
blanchi de la maison, dans l'angle que formait une des ces savoureuses
et fraiches cuisines hollondaises aux dressoirs de faience ou
étincalaient les etains et les cuivres qui, par la porte ouverte,
se reflétaient dans un canal paisible. Et l'eau chargés d'images
familières, sous un rideau de peupliers, guidait les regards jusqu'au
répos d'un horizon de moulins et de prés."]
[Footnote 209: Reading Apiastro. This is the Melissa officinalis of
Linnaeus. Cf. Pliny, XX, 45 and XXI, 86.]
[Footnote 210: Bee keepers attribute to Reaumur the invention of the
modern glass observation hive, which has made possible so much of our
knowledge of the bee, but it may be noted that Pliny (H.N. XXI, 47)
mentions hives of "lapis specularis," some sort of talc, contrived for
the purpose of observing bees at work. The great advance in bee hives
is, however, the sectional construction attributed to Langstroth and
developed in America by Root.]
[Footnote 211: Columella, (IX, 14) referring to the myth of the
generation of bees in the carcase of an ox (out of which Virgil made
the fable of the pastor Aristaeus in the Fourth Georgic), explains
the practice mentioned in the text with the statement "hic enim quasi
quadam cognatione generis maxime est apibus aptus." The plastering
of wicker hives with ox dung persisted and is recommended in the
seventeenth century editions of the Maison Rustique.]
[Footnote 212: Reading seditiosum.]
[Footnote 213: This is a mistake upon which Aristotle could have
corrected Varro.]
[Footnote 214: After studying the commentators on this obscure passage,
I have elected to follow the emendation of Ursinus, which, although
Keil sneers at its license, has the advantage of making sense.]
[Footnote 215: Sinapis arvensis, Linn.]
[Footnote 216: Sium sisarum, Linn.]
[Footnote 217: The philosophy of the bee is not as selfish as that human
principle which Varro attributes to them. The hive does not send forth
its "youth" to found a colony, but, on the contrary, abandons its home
and its accumulated store of wealth to its youth and itself ventures
forth under the leadership of the old queen to face the uncertainties
of the future, leaving only a small band of old bees to guard the
hive and rear the young until the new queen shall have supplied a new
population.]
[Footnote 218: Reading imbecilliores.]
[Footnote 219: Pliny (H.N. IX, 81) relates that this loan was made to
supply the banquet on the occasion of one of the triumphs of Caesar
the dictator, but Pliny puts the loan at six thousand fishes.]
[Footnote 220: It is impossible to translate this pun into English,
dulcis being the equivalent of both "fresh" and "agreeable," and
amara of "salt" and "disagreeable." A French translator would have
at his command doux and amer.]
[Footnote 221: Cf. Pliny (H.N. II, 96): "In Lydia the islands called
Calaminae are not only driven about by the wind, but may even be
pushed at pleasure from place to place, by which means many people
saved themselves in the Mithridatic war. There are some small islands
in the Nymphaeus called the Dancers, because, when choruses are sung,
they move in tune with the measure of the music."]
[Footnote 222: Reading in ius vocare, with the double entendre of
service in a sauce and bringing to justice.]
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