Italy
Italian Agriculture

While in the capital the only object aimed at was to get rid of palpable evils by police ordinances on the greatest scale, it was a far more difficult task to remedy the deep disorganization of Italian economics.  Its radical misfortunes were those which we previously noticed in detail—­the disappearance of the agricultural, and the unnatural increase of the mercantile, population—­ with which an endless train of other evils was associated.  The reader will not fail to remember what was the state of Italian agriculture.  In spite of the most earnest attempts to check the annihilation of the small holdings, farm-husbandry was scarcely any longer the predominant species of economy during this epoch in any region of Italy proper, with the exception perhaps of the valleys of the Apennines and Abruzzi.  As to the management of estates, no material difference is perceptible between the Catonian system formerly set forth(50) and that described to us by Varro, except that the latter shows the traces for better and for worse of the progress of city-life on a great scale in Rome.  “Formerly,” says Varro, “the barn on the estate was larger than the manor-house; now it is wont to be the reverse.”  In the domains of Tusculum and Tibur, on the shores of Tarracina and Baiae—­ where the old Latin and Italian farmers had sown and reaped—­ there now rose in barren splendour the villas of the Roman nobles, some of which covered the space of a moderate-sized town with their appurtenances of garden-grounds and aqueducts, fresh and salt water ponds for the preservation and breeding of river and marine fishes, nurseries of snails and slugs, game-preserves for keeping hares, rabbits, stags, roes, and wild boars, and aviaries in which even cranes and peacocks were kept.  But the luxury of a great city enriches also many an industrious hand, and supports more poor than philanthropy with its expenditure of alms.  Those aviaries and fish-ponds of the grandees were of course, as a rule, a very costly indulgence.  But this system was carried to such an extent and prosecuted with so much keenness, that e. g. the stock of a pigeon-house was valued at 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds); a methodical system of fattening had sprung up, and the manure got from the aviaries became of importance in agriculture; a single bird-dealer was able to furnish at once 5000 fieldfares—­for they knew how to rear these also—­at three denarii (2 shillings) each, and a single possessor of a fish-pond 2000 -muraenae-; and the fishes left behind by Lucius Lucullus brought 40,000 sesterces (400 pounds).  As may readily be conceived, under such circumstances any one who followed this occupation industriously and intelligently might obtain very large profits with a comparatively small outlay of capital.  A small bee-breeder of this period sold from his thyme-garden not larger than an acre in the neighbourhood of Falerii honey to an average annual amount of at least 10,000 sesterces