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XXXV, 169), as formaceos or moulded, and he adds, "aevis durant." It
would thus clearly appear to have been of gravel concrete, the use of
which the manufacturers of cement are now telling us, is the badge of
the modern progressive farmer. Cato (XXXVIII) told how to burn lime on
the farm, and these concrete fences were, of course, formed with lime
as the matrix. When only a few years ago, Portland cement was first
produced in America at a cost and in a quantity to stimulate the
development of concrete construction, engineers began with rough
broken stone and sand as the constituents of what they call the
aggregate, but some one soon "discovered" that the use of smooth
natural gravel made more compact concrete and "gravel concrete" became
the last word in engineering practice. But it was older even than
Varro. A Chicago business man visiting Mycenae picked up and brought
home a bit of rubbish from Schliemann's excavations of the ancient
masonry: lying on his office desk it attracted the attention of an
engineering friend who exclaimed, "That is one of the best samples of
the new gravel concrete I have seen. Did it come out of the Illinois
tunnel?" "No," replied the returned traveller, "it came out of the
tomb of Agamemnon!"]
[Footnote 72: Varro here seems to forget the unities. He speaks in his
own person, when Scrofa has the floor.]
[Footnote 73: It will be recalled that Aristotle described slaves as
living tools. In Roman law a slave was not a persona but a res.
Cf. Gaius II, 15.]
[Footnote 74: One of the most interesting of these freemen labourers of
whom we know is that Ofellus whom Horace (Satire II, 2) tells us
was working with cheerful philosophy as a hired hand upon his
own ancestral property from which he had been turned out in the
confiscations following the battle of Philippi. This might have been
the fate of Virgil also had he not chanced to have powerful friends.]
[Footnote 75: "Mais lorsque, malgré le dégoût de la chaîne
domestique,
nous voyons naître entre les males et les femelles ces sentiments
que la nature a partout fondés sur un libre choix: lorsque l'amour a
commencé a unir ces couples captifs, alors leur esclavage, devenu pour
eux aussi doux que la douce liberté, leur fait oublier peu à peu
leur droits de franchise naturelle et les prérogatives de leur état
sauvage; et ces lieux des premiers plaisirs, des premières amours,
ces lieux si chers à tout être sensible, deviennent leur demeure de
prédilection et leur habitation de choix: l'éducation de la famille
rend encore cette affection plus profonde et la communique en même
temps aux petits, qui s'étant trouvés citoyens par naissance d'un
séjour adopté par leur parents, ne cherchent point à en changer: car
ne pouvant avoir que pen ou point d'idée d'un état different ni d'un
autre séjour ils s'attachent au lieu ou ils sont nés comme à leur
patrie; et l'on sait que la terre natale est chère a ceux même qui
l'habitent en esclaves."
One might assume that this eloquent and comfortable essay on
contentment in slavery had been written to illustrate Varro's text
at this point, but, as a matter of fact, it is Buffon's observation
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