Cato on Farming

Cato, On Farming (De Agricultura). A Modern Translation with Commentary by Cato; A .

Dalby
Review by: Brian Campbell
The Classical Review, New Series, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2000), pp. 73-75
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3065308 .
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 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 73

ways, his feeding 'urban taste for alterity' (p. 145). The poem's singing contest features
an exchange of crudities between bumpkins. Who wins? The poem does not tell. Thus,
bickering over who is best is not only what happens in the poem, it is what happens in
us as we attempt to pass judgement on the poem and overleap its central impasse.
Chapter VII, 'Gendersong', Henderson's signature performance, attacks the
once-standard (read 'mid-eighties, though still in vogue') practice of using the
texts of Roman satire as documentary 'reports' on the position of women in Roman
culture. Such 'privileged' and 'objective' knowledge of the category 'Roman women'
never manages to be privileged or objective. It is always itself culturally engendered,
constituting 'its knower as Roman' (p. 179). Thus, telling of 'women' always tells on
the teller-and that, H. says, must go for H., too.
Chapter VIII, 'Be Alert', sorts through the irony of Horace's looking so much like
'The Pest' he grapples with in Satires 1.9. He shadow-boxes, H. clearly shows. Still, the
encounter is commonly polarized as a contest between 'pest' and 'poet'. Thus, the joke
is not just on Horace, but on our prejudicial attempts to see him free and clear of his
pest-like offensiveness.
Chapter IX, 'Persius'Didactic Satire', describes Persius'libellusas a course in moral
training, embedded in a specific cultural scene stressing control of the self, because
Nero controls everything else. These satires both take up that project, and satirize it,
by showing its institutional patterning (Persius as superbrat Nero) and by reminding
us of the impossibility of one's achieving self-reliance by relying on someone else's
script. Chapter X, 'Pump up the Volume', tells of the dangers of accommodating
ourselves to the performer'sego in Juvenal 1, though that is precisely what the poem
urges us to do. We assent to the idea that overdoing epic has been the undoing of good
literature since Valerius and Statius. Yet, we quickly come to realize that Juvenal's
strident denunciation of epic is itself overdone, and decidedly 'epic' in tone,
proportion, and bookish-intertextual content. Thus, Juvenal lives up to the very
belatedness he deplores. Again, the joke is on us.
Such is my rendering of (myself via) H., cheating him of his subtlest and best.
If only to prove that I really do not get it. But, if the sky is really falling because of
H., I do not get that either. I am rather grateful for the bump on the head, and the
(non)sense he has knocked into me.
Ohio State University KIRK FREUDENBURG

CATO ON FARMING
A. DALBY: Cato, On Farming (De Agricultura). A Modern Trans-
lation with Commentary. Pp. 243, 11 ills. Totnes: Prospect Books, 1998.
ISBN: 0907325-80-7.
Increasing interest in patterns of landholding and the use of land in the Roman
world has brought greater recognition to the importance of the Roman agricultural
writers, who have sometimes been rather neglected along with other technical writers.
Dieter Flach has recently produced a very detailed commentary on Books 1 and 2 of
Varro'sDe Agri Cultura (2 vols, Darmstadt, 1996-7), and now Andrew Dalby in this
very accessible volume offers the first translation into English of Cato's De
Agricultura since the Loeb edition containing the agricultural writings of Cato and
Varro, published in 1934.
? OxfordUniversityPress, 2000

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74 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

In a short introductory section D. discusses the historical context, Cato's life and
career, his other writings, and the nature and purpose of the De Agricultlra, with a
helpful analysis of Cato's train of thought (pp. 18-21). This is followed by a Latin text
with corresponding translation on the opposite page. The text is that of R. Goujard
(Paris, 1975), without the apparatus criticus, which will not be missed by the general
reader, although it is useful to have the Latin text for reference. There is a short
bibliography, an index, and some useful figures illustrating Cato's descriptions of
buildings and farm equipment.
The translation is reliable, straightforward, and clear, and gives a readable,
idiomatic version of what Cato was trying to say. D. prints in the margin the various
section headings, which were added later when the manuscripts were being copied, but
does not translate them. Brief footnotes explain technical terms and phrases and
Roman farming practices, with useful cross-references to other agricultural writers;
problems of translation are also discussed.
According to Columella, Cato first taught agriculture to speak Latin (De Re
Rustica 1.1.12). The De Agriculturawas a pioneering work and is important not only
as evidence for Roman farming practice, and life and culture in the Republic, but
also for the development of Latin prose writing. The purpose was ostensibly to give
guidance for the running of an estate equipped with slaves, engaged in mixed farming
and particularly the growing of vines and olives for profit. D. does his best to make
sense of Cato's idiosyncratic approach, which includes specimen contracts, recipes,
religious formulae, medical cures, and a curious panegyric on the beneficent properties
of cabbage. According to D., part of this was not written by Cato but added by a later
scribe. D. also produces important new interpretations of the text, e.g. at ?150, on
seasonal markets for luxury produce (pp. 212-4).
Cato remains an enigmatic character. Many fragments from his speeches and
written works survive, and give a fascinating picture of the man who, starting as a
novus homo from Tusculum, went on to have a distinguished war record, celebrate
a triumph, become politically very influential, and, particularly as censor, support
traditional Roman values and morality. But because so much of the evidence is
fragmentary, it is often difficult to set Cato in a clear context. The De Agricultura,
which is his only literary work that survives complete, could thereforebe of great value
in understanding the man. But despite D.'s attempt to make sense of the sequence of
argument, the work remains a strange mixture of sound and intelligent advice, facts
and figures, useful information apparently based on practical experience, but also odd
prejudices and superstitions, such as the spell for curing dislocations (?160); Cato
indeed had little time for Greek doctors-'They have sworn to kill all barbarians with
medicine . .' (Pliny, NH 29.13-14). He is also inconsistent in his attitude to slaves.We
may contrast his seemingly callous advice that the farm owner should sell off a sick or
elderly slave (2.7) with his humane treatment of his own slaves and his confidence in
slave farm managers (see pp. 24, 61).
Cato's praise of farming in the preface-'as to farmers, their offspring are the
strongest men and bravest soldiers; their profit is truest, safest, least envied; their cast
of mind is the least dishonest of any'-suggests that it was a worthy literary subject,
even though the references to coloni and soldiers are unrelated to the type of farming
subsequently described. Perhaps Cato wanted to remind his audience of typical
Roman qualities expressed through a farming context, because traditional farmers
exemplified what he saw as the Roman way of life.
D.'s book will be valuable not only to the general reader, students, and those

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 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 75

interested in ancient society and technology, but also to professional Roman

historians, who will find much here to interest and intrigue them.
The Queen's Universityof Belfast BRIAN CAMPBELL

CICERO'S LETTERS

G. O. HUTCHINSON: Cicero's Correspondence. a Literary Study.

Pp. xv + 235. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Cased, ?35. ISBN: 0-19-
815066-0.
The over 900 letters in the four collections that make up what survives of Cicero's
correspondence are not read as much as they deserve. Their historical importance is
greater than that of most of his speeches, and their human interest far greater. They
are difficult, however, to survey and discuss for a modern reader, if only because
there are so many of them and by so many different writers. Nothing can take the
place of reading them, as on the one hand a continuous commentary on the most
eventful period of Roman history and the personalities involved in it, and on the
other a reflection of private life and private friendships among highly educated and
civilized men.
Hutchinson has made a rare attempt to present the letters to readers.Faced with the
problem of selection, he decided to choose a small number of examples under six
headings: three letters from Cicero'speriod of exile in 58 (Fam. 14.4, Att. 3.7, QF 1.3),
four of consolation to the bereaved(Fam. 5.16, Ad Brut. 1.9, Fam. 5.14, Fam. 4.5), four
containing vivid narratives (Fam. 10.30, Fam. 15.4, Att. 5.21, Fam. 10.32), three that
present conversational dialogue (Att. 13.42, Att. 5.1, Att. 15.11), three under the rather
forced category of 'Time', i.e. letters reflecting on the past and involving political
decisions about the present and the future (Fam. 8.6, Att. 8.3, Att. 9.10), and three
showing Cicero's wit and humour (Fam. 7.18, QF2.9, Fam. 9.20)-twenty in all.
H.'s most impressive discussions are among the longest: Fam. 5.16, Cicero's letter
of consolation to an unknown man called Titius who was mourning the death of
children; Att. 8.3, in which he is consulting Atticus in 49 about what he should do if
Pompey decides to leave Italy; and Fam. 7.18, a series of jokes with his intimate
friend Trebatius.But H.'s breadth of understanding and scholarship in the treatment
of all twenty letters cannot be praised too highly, and on the circumstances and
interpretation of each he should become an acknowledged authority.
There is a considerable dichotomy between on the one hand the text of the book,
apparently written for the general reader and probably for students, with all Latin
translated, and on the other the footnotes, which display a phenomenal erudition,
both in the byways of ancient literature and in modern practice and theory of
epistolography. He quotes verbatim from Kleist and Pushkin, Tolstoy and
Solzhenitsyn. These footnotes can only have been written for scholars, particularly
as they are full of the most remote and allusive references and assume access to a
well-stocked library. On occasion the parade of learning is a little oppressive, as at
p. 108 n. 47, where he gives seventeen references to discussions of Pollio's relations
with his quaestor Balbus.
Apart from the content of the letters, H. is interested in their style; and in the first
chapter, on pp. 9-12, before starting on the six groups of letters, he makes statements
about 'rhythmic' and 'unrhythmic'prose, assuming that these are mutually exclusive
categories and can be distinguished at sight by the informed scholar. He tells us that
? OxfordUniversityPress, 2000

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