“I may possibly appear guilty of some degree of rashness in making mention of a maxim of the ancients which will very probably be looked upon as quite incredible, ’that nothing is so disadvantageous as to cultivate land in the highest style of perfection.’”

And he illustrates by the example of a Roman gentleman, who, like Arthur Young in eighteenth century England, wasted a large fortune in an attempt to bring his lands to perfect cultivation.  “To cultivate land well is absolutely necessary,” Pliny continues, “but to cultivate it in the very highest style is mere extravagance, unless, indeed, the work is done by the hands of a man’s own family, his tenants, or those whom he is obliged to keep at any rate.”]

[Footnote 13:  In this practice has been the delight of men of affairs of all ages who turn to agriculture for relaxation.  Horace cites it with telling effect in the ode (III, 5) in which he describes the noble serenity of mind with which Regulus returned to the torture and certain death which awaited him at Carthage:  and Homer makes an enduring picture of it in the person of the King supervising his fall ploughing, which Hephsestus wrought upon the shield of Achilles (Iliad, XVIII, 540).  “Furthermore, he set in the shield a soft fresh ploughed field, rich tilth and wide, the third time ploughed, and many ploughers therein drove their yokes to and fro as they wheeled about.  Whensoever they came to the boundary of the field and turned, then would a man come to each and give into his hands a goblet of sweet wine:  while others would be turning back along the furrows, fain to reach the boundary of the deep tilth, ... and among them the King was standing in silence, with his staff, rejoicing in his heart.”]

[Footnote 14:  This advice to sell the worn out oxen and the sick slaves justly excited Plutarch’s generous scorn, and has been made the text of a sweeping denunciation by Mommsen of the practice of husbandry by men of affairs in Cato’s time.  “The whole system,” says Mommsen, “was pervaded by the utterly unscrupulous spirit characteristic of the power of capital.”  And he adds, “If we have risen to that little-to-be-envied elevation of thought which values no feature of an economy save the capital invested in it, we cannot deny to the management of the Roman estates the praise of consistency, energy, punctuality, frugality and solidity.”  Without any desire to defend Cato, one may suggest, out of an experience in a kind of farm management not very different from that Cato pictures, that it is doubtful whether even Cato himself was quite as economical and efficient, and so as capitalistic in his farming, as he advises others to be:  certainly a whole race of contemporary country gentlemen was not equal to it.  It is much easier to write about business-like farming than to practise it.]

[Footnote 15:  Hesiod (W. & D. 338) had already given this same advice to the Greek farmer: