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!

Of Columella we know scarcely more than that he lived somewhere about the time of Tiberius, that he was a man of wealth, that he travelled extensively through Gaul, Italy, and Greece, observing intelligently different methods of culture, and that he has given the fullest existing compend of ancient agriculture.  In his chapter upon Gardening he warms into hexameters; but the rest is stately and euphonious prose.  In his opening chapter, he does not forego such praises of the farmer’s life as sound like a lawyer’s address before a county-society on a fair-day.  Cincinnatus and his plough come in for it; and Fabricius and Curius Dentatus; with which names, luckily, our orators cannot whet their periods, since Columella’s mention of them is about all we know of their farming.

He falls into the way, moreover, of lamenting, as people obstinately continue to do, the “good old times,” when men were better than “now,” and when the reasonable delights of the garden and the fields engrossed them to the neglect of the circus and the theatres.  But when he opens upon his subject proper, it is in grandiose, Spanish style, (he was a native of Cadiz,) with a maxim broad enough to cover all possible conditions:—­“Qui studium agricolationi dederit, sciat haec sibi advocanda:  prudentiam rei, facultatem impendendi voluntatem agendi.”  Or, as Tremellius says,—­“That man will master the business, qui et colere sciet, et poterit, et volet.”