[Footnote 54:  Eggs were the first course, as apples were the last, at a Roman dinner, hence the saying “ab ovo usque ad mala.”]

[Footnote 55:  Cf.  Gilbert Murray’s version of Euripides’ Troades, 799: 

  In Salamis, filled with the foaming
    Of billows and murmur of bees,
  Old Telamon stayed from his roaming,
    Long ago, on a throne of the seas;
  Looking out on the hills olive laden,
    Enchanted, where first from the earth. 
  The gray-gleaming fruit of the Maiden
    Athena had birth.

The physical reason why the olive flourished in Attica, as Theophrastus points out (C.P.V.  II, 2), was because it craves a thin soil, and that of Attica, with its out-croppings of calcareous rock, suits the olive perfectly, while fit for little else agricultural.]

[Footnote 56:  In the Geoponica (XIII, 15) there has been preserved a remedy for a similar evil, which, in all fairness, should be credited to Saserna.  In any event, it is what the newspapers used to call “important, if true,” viz:  “If ever you come into a place where fleas abound, cry Och!  Och! ([Greek:  och, och]) and they will not touch you.”]

[Footnote 57:  The editor of an Iowa farm journal, who has been making a study of agricultural Europe, has recently reported an interesting comparison between the results of extensive farming as practised in Iowa and intensive farming as practised in Bavaria.  He begins with the thesis that the object of agriculture is to put the energy of the sun’s rays into forms which animals and human beings can use, and, reducing the crop production of each country to thermal units, he finds “that for every man, woman and child connected with farming in Iowa 14,200 therms of sun’s energy were imprisoned, while for every man, woman and child connected with farming in Bavaria only 2,600 therms were stored up.  In other words, the average Iowa farmer is six times as successful in his efforts to capture the power of the sun’s rays as the average Bavarian farmer.  On the other hand, the average acre of Iowa land is only about one-seventh as successful as the average acre of Bavarian land in supporting those who live on it.  If we look on land as the unit, then the Bavarians get better results than we in Iowa, but if we look on human labor as the unit, then the Iowa farmers are far ahead of those of Bavaria.”

It may be remarked that if the Iowa farmer, who gets his results by the use of machinery, was to adopt also the intensive practice of the Bavarian farmer, he would secure at once the greatest efficiency per acre and per man, and that is the true purpose of agriculture.]

[Footnote 58:  It is one of the charms of Varro’s treatise that he always insists cheerfully on the pleasure to be derived from the land.  It is the same spirit which Conington has remarked cropping out in many places in Virgil’s Georgics—­the joy of the husbandman in his work, as in the “iuvat” of