TO the Silver Age belongs the classic Roman work on agriculture—the De Re Rustica (65) of Junius Columella. Like Quintilian, Martial, and the Senecas, he came from Spain; he farmed several estates in Italy and retired to a residence in Rome. The best lands, he found, were taken up by the villas and grounds of the rich; the next best by olive orchards and vineyards; only inferior soils were left for tillage. “We have abandoned the husbanding of our soil to our lowest slaves, and they treat it like barbarians.” The freemen of Italy, he thought, were degenerating in cities when they should have been hardening themselves by working the earth; “we ply our hands in circuses and theaters rather than among crops and vines.” Columella loved the soil, and felt that the physical culture of the earth is saner than the literary culture of the town; farming “is a blood relative of wisdom” (consanguinea sapientiae). To lure men back to the fields he adorned his subject with polished Latin, and when he came to speak of gardens and flowers he fell into enthusiastic verse.
It was in this period that Pliny the naturalist pronounced a premature epitaph: latifundia perdidere Italiam—“the large farms have ruined Italy.” Similar judgments occur in Seneca, Lucan, Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal. Seneca described cattle ranches wider than kingdoms, cultivated by fettered slaves; some estates were so large, said Columella, that their masters could never ride around them.1 Pliny mentions an estate with 4117 slaves, 7200 oxen, and 257,000 other animals.2 Land distributions by the Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus had raised the number of small holdings, but many of these had been abandoned during the wars and bought in by the rich. When imperial administration reduced plunder in the provinces, much patrician wealth went into large farms. The latifundia spread because greater profits flowed from producing cattle, oil, and wine than from growing cereals and vegetables, and the discovery that ranching, to be most profitable, required the operation of large areas under one management. By the close of the first Christian century these advantages were being offset by the rising cost of slaves and their slow and uninventive work.3 The long transition now began from slavery to serfdom. As peace diminished the flow of war captives into bondage, some owners of large estates, instead of operating them with slaves, divided them into small holdings and leased these to free tenants (coloni, cultivators) who paid in rent and labor. Most of the ager publicus belonging to the government was now worked in this way. So were the extensive properties of the younger Pliny, who describes his tenants as healthy, sturdy, good-natured, talkative peasants—precisely such as one finds throughout Italy today, unchanged after all-changes.
The modes and tools of tillage were essentially as they had been for centuries. Plow, spade, hoe, pick, pitchfork, scythe, rake, have preserved their forms almost unaltered for 3000 years. Corn was ground in mills turned by water or by beasts. Screw pumps and water wheels raised water out of mines or into irrigation canals. Soils were protected by crop rotation, and fertilized by manure, alfalfa, clover, rye, or beans.4 Seed selection was highly developed. Skillful care drew three, sometimes four, harvests per year from the rich fields of the Campagna and the valley of the Po;5 from one planting of alfalfa four to six crops could be cut yearly for ten years.6 All but the rarest European vegetables were grown, some of them in greenhouses for the winter trade. Fruit and nut trees of every sort abounded, for Roman generals and merchants, and alien merchants and slaves, had brought in many new species: the peach from Persia, the apricot from Armenia, the cherry from Pontic Cerasus (whence its name), the grape from Syria, the damson (pruna damascena) from Damascus, the plum and filbert from Asia Minor, the walnut from Greece, the olive and fig from Africa. . . . Clever arboriculturists had grafted the walnut upon the arbutus, the plum upon the plane tree, the cherry upon the elm. Pliny enumerates twenty-nine varieties of figs grown in Italy.7 “Through the zeal of our farmers,” said Columella, “Italy has learned to produce the fruits of almost the whole world.”8 In turn it transmitted these arts to western and northern Europe. Our rich dietary has a wide geography and a long history behind it, and the very food that we eat may be part of our Oriental and classical heritage.
Olive orchards were numerous, but vineyards were everywhere, beautifully terraced on the slopes. Italy produced fifty famous kinds of wine, and Rome alone drank 25,000,000 gallons per year—two quarts per week for each man, woman, and child, slave or free. Most wines were produced by capitalistic organization—by large-scale operations financed from Rome.9 Much of the product was exported and taught the graces of wine to beer-drinking countries like Germany and Gaul. During this first century Spain, Africa, and Gaul began to grow their own grapes; Italian vintners lost one provincial outlet after another, and glutted their domestic market in one of the few “overproduction” crises of Roman economy. Domitian tried to ease the situation, and restore cereal culture, by prohibiting the further plantings of vines in Italy and ordering half of all vineyards in the provinces destroyed.10 These edicts aroused a fury of protest and could not be enforced. In the second century the wines of Gaul and the oil of Spain, Africa, and the East began to crowd Italian products out of Mediterranean markets, and the economic decline of Italy began.
A large part of the peninsula was given over to grazing. The cheapest soils and slaves could be used for the raising of cattle, sheep, and swine. Careful attention was paid to scientific breeding. Horses were bred chiefly for war, hunting, and sport, seldom as draft animals; oxen drew the plow and the cart, mules bore burdens on their backs. Cows, sheep, and goats gave three kinds of milk, from which the Italian made delectable cheeses then as now. Swine were herded in woods rich with acorns and nuts; Rome, said Strabo, lived chiefly on pork fattened in the oak forests of northern Italy. Poultry fertilized the farmyard and helped feed the family, while bees provided the ancient and honorable substitute for sugar. If we add some acres of flax and hemp, a little hunting and much fishing, we get a picture of the Italian countryside as it was nineteen hundred years ago, and is today.