[Footnote 3:  Donald G. Mitchell made an interesting collation, in his Wet Days at Edgewood, of the large number of books on agriculture which have been written in old age and by men of affairs, in many lands and many languages.]

[Footnote 4:  It is interesting to record, however, that Varro received the Navalis Corona for personal gallantry in the war against the pirates.  This distinction was even more rare than our modern Medal of Honor or Victoria Cross, and was awarded only to a commander who leapt under arms on the deck of an enemies’ ship and then succeeded in capturing her.]

[Footnote 5:  Caesar did not live to accomplish this, but some years after his death a public library was established at Rome by Asinius Pollio, which Pliny says (H.N.  VII, 31) was the first ever built, those at Alexandria and Pergamus having been private institutions of the kings.

In a land where public libraries have been every where founded out of the accumulations of Big Business, it is interesting to note that Pollio derived the funds with which this the first of their kind was endowed, from the plunder of the Illyrians!]

[Footnote 6:  Cf.  Sellar, Roman Poets of the Augustan Age.  Virgil Ch.  V. Boissier, Etudes sur M.T.  Varron, Ch.  IX.  Servius Comm. in Verg.  Georg.  I, 43.

It does not appear that many of the commentators on Virgil have taken the trouble to study Varro thoroughly.  They are usually better scholars than farmers.]

[Footnote 7:  It is not remarkable that Virgil failed to make acknowledgment to Varro in the Georgics when he failed to make acknowledgment to Homer in the Aeneid.  See Petrarch’s Epistle to Homer for a loyal but vain attempt to justify this neglect.]

[Footnote 8:  Cf.  W.H.  Myers’ Classical Essays, p. 110:  “For in the face of some German criticism it is necessary to repeat that in order to judge poetry it is, before all things, necessary to enjoy it.  We may all desire that historical and philological science should push her dominion into every recess of human action and human speech, but we must utter some protest when the very heights of Parnassus are invaded by a spirit which surely is not science, but her unmeaning shadow; a spirit which would degrade every masterpiece of human genius into the mere pabulum of hungry professors, and which values a poet’s text only as a field for the rivalries of sterile pedantry and arbitrary conjecture.”]

[Footnote 9:  It was perhaps this encomium upon the farmer at the expense of the banker which inspired Horace’s friend Alfius to withdraw his capital from his banking business and dream a delicious idyl of a simple carefree country life:  but, it will be recalled (Epode II, the famous “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis”) that Alfius, like many a modern amateur farmer, recruited from town, soon repented that he had ever listened to the alluring call of “back to the land” and after a few weeks of disillusion in the country, returned to town and sought to get his money out again at usury.