SOURCE: Tore Janson, "Agricultural Handbooks," in Latin Prose Prefaces: Studies in Literary Conventions, Almqvist & Wiksell, 1964, pp. 83-94.

In the excerpt that follows, Janson examines the rhetorical structure of Cato 's preface to the De agricultura. Its sentence structure, Janson argues, reveals a social and economic purpose at odds with the professed moral purpose of the work.

The entire preface to Cato's book on agriculture is devoted to a comparison between different ways of earning a living, with on the one hand agriculture and on the other trade and banking.¹ The disposition of this brief preface requires some clarification.² In his first sentence Cato states that trade and banking could be (economically) preferable (to agriculture), were it not for their riskiness and dishonesty respectively. The plan of the rest of the preface is clearly to deal first with banking, then with trade and finally with agriculture. The second sentence...