[Footnote 112:  In the registers of the censors every thing from which the public revenues were derived was set down under the head of pascua, or “pasture lands,” because for a long time the pasture lands were the only source of such revenue.  Cf.  Pliny, H.N. XVIII, 3.]

[Footnote 113:  Olisippo is the modern Lisbon.  This tradition about the mares of the region is repeated by Virgil (Geo. III, 272) by Columella (VI, 27) and by Pliny (VIII, 67).  Professor Ridgeway in The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse describes it as “an aetiological myth to explain the swiftness of horses” for the fleetest horses came out of the West; thus Pegasus was born at the springs of the ocean, and there is the passage in Homer (Iliad, XVI, 149) about the horses “that flew as swift as the winds, the horses that the harpy Podarge (Swift Foot) bare to the West Wind as she grazed on the meadows by the stream of the Ocean.”  Hence we may conclude that there was a race of swift horses in Portugal in the earliest times, which Professor Ridgeway would doubtless like very much to prove, in support of his interesting thesis, were derived from Libya.]

[Footnote 114:  Hypenemia, or barren eggs, are described intelligently by Aristotle (H.A.V. 1, 4, VI. 2, 5), and, with Varro’s confidence in the country traditions, by Pliny, H.N.  X, 80.

If he had known it, Varro might have here cited the fact that the unfertilized queen bee is parthenogenetic, though producing only male bees; i.e., drones:  but it remained for a German clergyman, Dzierzon, to discover this in the eighteenth century.]

[Footnote 115:  Cf.  Plautus Menaechmi, II, 2, 279.  One of the two Menaechmi is, on his arrival at Epidamnus, mistaken for his brother, of whose existence he does not know, and much to his amazement is introduced into the brother’s life and possessions.  At first he expostulates, accusing the slave of the brother, who has mistaken his identity, of being crazy and offers to exorcise him by a sacrifice of weanling pigs, wherefore he asks the question quoted in the text.  Varro was evidently fond of this passage, as he quotes it again, post, p. 221.  The Menaechmi is one of the immortal comedies and has survived in many forms on the modern stage all over Europe.  From it Shakespeare derived the plot of the Comedy of Errors.]

[Footnote 116:  It is interesting to compare these sane therapeutics with Cato’s practice less than two hundred years previous (ante, p. 47), which was characteristic of the superstitious peasant who in Italy still seeks the priest to bless his ailing live stock.]

[Footnote 117:  This Atticus was Cicero’s intimate friend to whom he addressed so many of his charming letters.  He changed his name as stated in the text, the new name being that of an uncle who adopted him, as we learn from his life by Nepos.  As is well known to all students of Cicero, Atticus had dwelt in Athens many years and derived his income from estates in Epirus, which is the point of Scrofa’s jest.]