[Footnote 106:  Varro here refers to the great economic change which was coming over Italian husbandry in the last days of the Republic, the disappearance of the small farms, the “septem jugera” which nurtured the early Roman heroes like Cincinnatus and Dentatus, and even the larger, but still comparatively small, farms which Cato describes, and the development of the latifundia given over to grazing.]

[Footnote 107:  The tradition is, says Pliny, that King Augeas was the first in Greece to use manure, and that Hercules introduced the practice into Italy.  To the wise farmer the myth of the Augean stables is the genesis of good agriculture.]

[Footnote 108:  This was the “crowded hour” in Varro’s life, and, as M. Boissier has pointed out, he loved to dwell upon its episodes.  It will be recalled that Pompey divided the Mediterranean into thirteen districts for the war with the Pirates and put a responsible lieutenant in command of each, thus enabling him by concurrent action in all the districts to clear the seas in three months.  Appian gives the list of officers and the limits of their commands, saying:  “The coasts of Sicily and the Ionian sea as far as Acarnania were entrusted to Plotius and Varro.”  It is difficult to understand Varro’s own reference to Delos, but Appian makes clear how it happened that Varro was stationed on the coast of Epirus and so fell in with the company of “half Greek shepherds” who are the dramatis personae of the second book.  As the scene of the first book was laid in a temple of Tellus, so this relating to live stock is cast in a temple of Pales, the goddess of shepherds, on the occasion of the festival of the Parilia, and the names of the characters have a punning reference to live stock.]

[Footnote 109:  The codices here contain an interpolation of the words “HIC INTERMISIMUS,” to indicate that a part of the text is missing, with which judgment of some early student of the archetype Victorius, Scaliger and Ursinus, as well as their successors among the commentators on Varro, have all agreed.  It is a pleasure to record the agreement on this point, because it is believed to be unique:  but many precedents for plunging the reader in medias res, as does the surviving text, might be found in the modern short story of the artist in style.  As M. Boissier points out Varro might have cited the beginning of the Odyssey as a precedent for this.]

[Footnote 110:  This is a paraphase of a favorite locution of Homer’s heroes, whose characteristic modesty does not, however, permit them to apply it to themselves, as Varro does.  Thus in Iliad, VII, 114, Agamemnon advises Menelaos not to venture against Hector, whom “even Achilles dreadeth to meet in battle, wherein is the warrior’s glory, and Achilles is better far than thou.”]

[Footnote 111:  Virgil (Aen.  VII, 314) made a fine line out of this tradition, endowing the sturdy race of Fauns and Nymphs who inhabited the land of Saturn before the Golden Age, with the qualities of the trees on whose fruit they subsisted, “gensque virum truncis et duro robore nata.”]