The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 66, April, 1863

Putting aside his horsemanship, in which he must have been nearly perfect, there was very much that was grand about the old Greek,—very much that makes us strangely love the man, who, when his soldiers lay benumbed under the snows on the heights of Armenia, threw off his general's coat, or blanket, or what not, and set himself resolutely to wood-chopping and to cheering them. The farmer knew how.

Such men win battles. He has his joke, too, with Cheirisophus, the Lacedaemonian, about the thieving propensity of his townspeople, and invites him, in virtue of it, to steal a difficult march upon the enemy. And Cheirisophus grimly retorts upon Xenophon, that Athenians are said to be great experts in stealing the public money, especially the high officers. This sounds home-like! When I come upon such things, I forget the parasangs and the Taochians and the dead Cyrus, and seem to be reading out of American newspapers.

It is quite out of the question to claim Theocritus as a farm-writer; and yet in all old literature there is not to be found such a lively bevy of heifers, and wanton kids, and "butting rams," and stalwart herdsmen, who milk the cows "upon the sly," as in the "Idyls" of the musical Sicilian.

There is no doubt but Theocritus knew the country to a charm: he knew all its roughnesses, and the thorns that scratched the bare legs of the goatherds; he knew the lank heifers, that fed, "like grasshoppers," only on dew; he knew what clatter the brooks made, tumbling headlong adown the rocks,—

[Greek: apo tus petras kataleibetai ypsothen ydor]

he knew, moreover, all the charms and coyness of the country-nymphs, giving even a rural twist to his praises of the courtly Helen:—

"In shape, in height, in stately presence
fair,
Straight as a furrow gliding from the
share."[3 - Elton's translation, I think. I do not vouch for its correctness.]

A man must have had an eye for good ploughing and a lithe figure, as well as a keen scent for the odor of fresh-turned earth, to make such a comparison as that!

Theocritus was no French sentimentalist; he would have protested against the tame elegancies of the Roman Bucolics; and the sospiri ardenti and miserelli aman of Guarini would have driven him mad. He is as brisk as the wind upon a breezy down. His cow-tenders are swart and bare-legged, and love with a vengeance. There is no miserable tooting upon flutes, but an uproarious song that shakes the woods; and if it comes to a matter of kissing, there are no "reluctant lips," but a smack that makes the vales resound.

It is no Boucher we have here, nor Watteau: cosmetics and rosettes are far away; tunics are short, and cheeks are nut-brown. It is Teniers, rather:—boors, indeed; but they are live boors, and not manikin shepherds.

I shall call out another Sicilian here, named Moschus, were it only for his picture of a fine, sturdy bullock: it occurs in his "Rape of Europa":—

"With yellow hue his sleekened body beams;
His forehead with a snowy circle gleams;
Horns, equal-bending, from his brow emerge,
And to a moonlight crescent orbing verge."

Nothing can be finer than the way in which this "milky steer," with Europa on his back, goes sailing over the brine, his "feet all oars."

Meantime, she, the pretty truant,

"Grasps with one hand his curved projecting horn,
And with the other closely drawn compressed
The fluttering foldings of her purple vest,
Whene'er its fringed hem was dashed with dew
Of the salt sea-foam that in circles flew:
Wide o'er Europa's shoulders to the gale
The ruffled robe heaved swelling, like a sail."

Moschus is as rich as the Veronese at Venice; and his picture is truer to the premium standard. The painting shows a pampered animal, with over-red blotches on his white hide, and is by half too fat to breast such "salt sea-foam" as flashes on the Idyl of Moschus.

Another poet, Aratus of Cilicia, whose very name has a smack of tillage, has left us a book about the weather [Greek: Dosaemeia] which is quite as good to mark down a hay-day by as the later meteorologies of Professor Espy or Judge Butler.

Besides which, our friend Aratus holds the abiding honor of having been quoted by St. Paul, in his speech to the Athenians on Mars Hill:—

"For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said: 'For we are also His offspring.'"

And Aratus, (after Elton,)—

"On thee our being hangs; in thee we move;
All are thy offspring, and the seed of Jove."

Scattered through the lesser Greek poets, and up and down the Anthology, are charming bits of rurality, redolent of the fields and of field-life, with which it would be easy to fill up the measure of this rainy day, and beat off the Grecian couplets to the tinkle of the eave-drops. Up and down, the cicada chirps; the locust, "encourager of sleep," sings his drowsy song; boozy Anacreon flings grapes; the purple violets and the daffodils crown the perfumed head of Heliodora; and the reverent Simonides likens our life to the grass.

Nor will I part company with these, or close up the Greek ranks of farmers, (in which I must not forget the great schoolmaster, Theophrastus,) until I cull a sample of the Anthology, and plant it for a guidon at the head of the column,—a little bannerol of music, touching upon our topic, as daintily as the bees touch the flowering tips of the wild thyme.

It is by Zonas the Sardian:—

[Greek: Ai o agete nxouthai oimblaeides akra melissai, _K.T.L.,]

and the rendering by Mr. Hay:—

"Ye nimble honey-making bees, the flowers are in their prime;
Come now and taste the little buds of sweetly breathing thyme,
Of tender poppies all so fair, or bits of raisin sweet,
Or down that decks the apple tribe, or fragrant violet;
Come, nibble on,—your vessels store with honey while you can,
In order that the hive-protecting, bee-preserving Pan
May have a tasting for himself, and that the hand so rude,
That cuts away the comb, may leave yourselves some little food."

Leaving now this murmur of the bees upon the banks of the Pactolus, will slip over-seas to Tusculum, where Cato was born, who was the oldest of the Roman writers upon agriculture; and thence into the Sabine territory, where, upon an estate of his father's, in the midst of the beautiful country lying northward of the Monte Gennaro, (the Lucretilis of Horace,) he learned the art of good farming.

In what this art consisted in his day, he tells us in short, crackling speech;—"Primum, bene arare; secundum, arare; tertium, stercorare." For the rest, he says, choose good seed, sow thickly, and pull all the weeds. Nothing more would be needed to grow as good a crop upon the checkered plateau under my window as ever fattened among the Sabine Hills.

Has the art come to a stand-still, then; and shall we take to reading Cato on fair days, as well as rainy?

There has been advance, without doubt; but all the advance in the world would not take away the edge from truths, stated as Cato knew how to state them. There is very much of what is called Agricultural Science, nowadays, which is—rubbish. Science is sound, and agriculture always an honest art; but the mixture, not uncommonly, is bad,—no fair marriage, but a monstrous concubinage, with a monstrous progeny of muddy treatises and disquisitions which confuse more than they instruct. In contrast with such, it is no wonder that the observations of such a man as Cato, whose energies had been kept alive by service in the field, and whose tongue had been educated in the Roman Senate, should carry weight with them. The grand truths on which successful agriculture rests, and which simple experience long ago demonstrated, cannot be kept out of view, nor can they be dwarfed by any imposition of learning. Science may explain them, or illustrate or extend; but it cannot shake their preponderating influence upon the crop of the year. As respects many other arts, the initial truths may be lost sight of, and overlaid by the mass of succeeding developments,—not falsified, but so belittled as practically to be counted for nothing. In this respect, agriculture is exceptional. The old story is always the safe story: you must plough and plough again; and manure; and sow good seed, and enough; and pull the weeds; and as sure as the rain falls, the crop will come.

Many nice additions to this method of treatment, which my fine-farming friends will suggest, are anticipated by the old Roman, if we look far enough into his book. Thus, he knew the uses of a harrow; he knew the wisdom of ploughing in a green crop; he had steeps for his seed; he knew how to drain off the surface-water,—nay, there is very much in his account of the proper preparation of ground for olive-trees, or vine-setting, which looks like a mastery of the principles that govern the modern system of drainage.[4 - XLIII. "Sulcos, si locus aquosus erit, alveatos esse oportet," etc.]

Of what particular service recent investigations in science have been to the practical farmer, and what positive and available aid, beyond what could be derived from a careful study of the Roman masters, they put into the hands of an intelligent worker, who is tilling ground simply for pecuniary advantage, I shall hope to inquire and discourse upon, some other day: when that day comes, we will fling out the banner of the nineteenth century, and give a gun to Liebig, and Johnson, and the rest.

Meantime, as a farmer who endeavors to keep posted in all the devices for pushing lands which have an awkward habit of yielding poor crops into the better habit of yielding large ones, I will not attempt to conceal the chagrin with which I find this curmudgeon of a Roman Senator, living two centuries before Christ, and northward of Monte Gennaro, who never heard of "Hovey's Root-Cutter," or of the law of primaries, laying down rules[5 - This mention, of course, excludes the Senator's formulae for unguents, aperients, cattle-nostrums, and pickled pork.] of culture so clear, so apt, so full, that I, who have the advantages of two thousand years, find nothing in them to laugh at, unless it be a few oblations to the gods;[6 - CXXXIV. Cato, De Re Rusticâ.] and this, considering that I am just now burning a little incense (Havana) to the nymph Volutia, is uncalled for.

And if Senator Cato were to wake up to-morrow, in the white house that stares through the rain yonder, and were to open his little musty vellum of slipshod maxims, and, in faith of it, start a rival farm in the bean line, or in vine-growing,—keeping clear of the newspapers,—I make no doubt but he would prove as thrifty a neighbor as my good friend the Deacon.

We nineteenth-century men, at work among our cabbages, clipping off the purslane and the twitch-grass, are disposed to assume a very complacent attitude, as we lean upon our hoe-handles,—as if we were doing tall things in the way of illustrating physiology and the cognate sciences. But the truth is, old Laertes, near three thousand years ago, in his slouch cap and greasy beard, was hoeing up in the same way his purslane and twitch-grass, in his bean-patch on the hills of Ithaca. The difference between us, so far as the crop and the tools go, is, after all, ignominiously small. He dreaded the weevil in his beans, and we the club-foot in our cabbages; we have the "Herald," and he had none; we have "Plantation-Bitters," and he had his jug of the Biblian wine.

M. Varro, another Roman farmer, lies between the same covers "De Re Rusticâ" with Cato, and seems to have had more literary tact, though less of blunt sagacity. Yet he challenges at once our confidence by telling us so frankly the occasion of his writing upon such a subject. Life, he says, is a bubble,—and the life of an old man a bubble about to break. He is eighty, and must pack his luggage to go out of this world. ("Annus octogesimus admonet me, ut sarcinas colligam antequam proficiscar e vitâ.") Therefore he, writes down for his wife, Fundania, the rules by which she may manage the farm.

And a very respectably old lady she must have been, to deal with the villici and the coloni, if her age bore suitable relation to that of her husband. The ripe maturity of many of the rural writers I have introduced cannot fail to strike one. Thus, Xenophon gained a strength in his Elian fields that carried him into the nineties; Cato lived to be over eighty; and now we have Varro, writing his book out by Tusculum at eighty, and surviving to counsel with Fundania ten years more. Pliny, too, (the elder,) who, if not a farmer, had his country-seats, and left very much to establish our acquaintance with the Roman rural life, was a hale, much-enduring man, of such soldierly habits and large abstemiousness as to warrant a good fourscore,—if he had not fallen under that murderous cloud of ashes from Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79.

The poets, doubtless, burnt out earlier, as they usually do. Virgil, whom I shall come to speak of presently, certainly did: he died at fifty-one. Tibullus, whose opening Idyl is as pretty a bit of gasconade about living in a cottage in the country, upon love and a few vegetables, as a maiden could wish for, did not reach the fifties; and Martial, whose "Faustine Villa," if nothing else, entitles him to rural oblation, fell short of the sixties.

Varro indulges in some sharp sneers at those who had written on the same subject before him. This was natural enough in a man of his pursuits: he had written four hundred books!