[Footnote 101:  What the French call, from the same practice, vin de rognure.]

[Footnote 102:  Varro does not mention the season of the olive harvest, but Virgil tells us (G.  II, 519) that in their day as now it was winter.  Cato (XX-XXII) described the construction and operation of the trapetus in detail.  ’It can still be seen in operation in Italy, turned by a patient donkey and flowing with the new oil of an intense blue-green colour.  It is always flanked by an array of vast storage jars (Cato’s dolii now called orci), which make one realize the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.]

[Footnote 103:  The Roman waste of amurca, through ignorance of its value, was like the American waste of the cotton seed, which for many years was thrown out from the gin to rot upon the ground, even its fertilizing use being neglected.  Now cotton seed has a market value equivalent to nearly 20 per cent of that of the staple.  It is used for cattle feed and also is made into lard and “pure olive oil,” being exported in bulk and imported again in bottles with Italian labels.]

[Footnote 104:  Cf.  Fowler, Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero.  “Let us consider that in a large city today the person and property of all, rich or poor, are adequately protected by a sound system of police and by courts of first instance which are sitting every day.  Assault and murder, theft and burglary are exceptional.  It might be going too far to say that at Rome they were the rule:  but it is the fact that in what we may call the slums of Rome there was no machinery for checking them....  It is the great merit of Augustus that he made Rome not only a city of marble but one in which the persons and property of all citizens were fairly secure.”

There are several contemporary references to the crowded and dangerous condition of the streets of Rome at the end of the Republic.  Cicero (Plancius, 7) tells how he was pushed against the arch of Fabius while struggling through the press of the Via Sacra, and exonerates from blame the man who was the immediate cause of his inconvenience, holding that the one next beyond was more responsible:  in which judgment Cicero was of the opinion of Mr. Justice Blackstone in the famous leading case of Scott v.  Shepherd (1 Smith’s L.C., 480), where the question was who was liable for the damage eventually done by the burning squib which was passed about the market house by successive hands.  The majority of the court held, however, against Blackstone and Cicero, and established the doctrine of proximate cause.]

[Footnote 105:  The Roman week (nundinum, or more properly inter nundinum) was of eight days, the last being the market day on which the citizens rested from agricultural labour and came into town to sell and buy and talk politics.  Cf.  Pliny, XVIII, 3.  This custom which Varro regrets had fallen into desuetude so far as Rome was concerned was in his day still practised in the provinces.  Thus the five tenants on Horace’s Sabine farm were wont to go every nundinum to the market town of Varia (the modern Vicovaro) to transact public business (Epist.  I, 14, 2).]