Roman Farm Management eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 336 pages of information about Roman Farm Management.

Roman Farm Management eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 336 pages of information about Roman Farm Management.

[Footnote 122:  Cf.  Dante, Purg.  XXVII, 79.

      “Le capre
  Tacite all’ ombra mentre che’l sol ferve
  Guardate dal pastor che’n su la verga
  Poggiato s’e, e lor poggiato serve.”]

[Footnote 123:  It will be recalled that when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, was making his way to his house in company with the faithful swineherd Eumaeus, they met the goatherd Melanthius “leading his goats to feast the wooers, the best goats that were in all the herds.” (Odyssey, XVII, 216), and that subsequently he suffered a terrible punishment for this unfaithfulness to his master’s interests.]

[Footnote 124:  Pliny (VIII, 76) calls these excrescences lanciniae, or folds, and attributes them exclusively to the she goat, as Varro seems to do also, but Columella (VII, 6) attributes them to the buck.]

[Footnote 125:  Aristotle (H.A.  I, 9.1) refers to this opinion and denounces it as erroneous.]

[Footnote 126:  The Roman denarius, which has been here and later translated denier, may be considered for the purpose of comparing values as, roughly, the equivalent of the modern franc, or lira, say 20 cents United States money.]

[Footnote 127:  Macrobius (Saturn.  I, 6) tells another story of the origin of this cognomen, which, if not so heroic as that in the text, is entertaining.  It is related that a neighbour’s sow strayed on Tremelius’ land and was caught and killed as a vagrant.  When the owner came to claim it and asserted the right to search the premises Tremelius hid the carcass in the bed in which his wife was lying and then took a solemn oath that there was no sow in his house except that in the bed.]

[Footnote 128:  It would seem, as Gibbon says of the Empress Theodora, that this passage could be left “veiled in the obscurity of a learned language”; but it may be noted that the locus classicus for the play on the word is the incident of the Megarian “mystery pigs” in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, 728 ff.  Cf. also Athenaeus, IX, 17, 18.]

[Footnote 129:  Cf.  Pliny (H.N. VIII, 77):  “There is no animal that affords a greater variety to the palate of the epicure:  all the others have their own peculiar flavour, but the flesh of the hog has nearly fifty different flavours.”]

[Footnote 130:  In his stimulating book, Comment la route cree le type Social, Edmond Desmolins submits an ingenious hypothesis to explain the pre-eminence of the Gauls in the growing and making of pork, and how that pre-eminence was itself the explanation of their early success in cultivating the cereals.  He describes their migrating ancestors, the Celts, pushing their way up the Danube as hordes of nomad shepherds with their vast flocks and herds of horses and cattle, on the milk of which they had hitherto subsisted.  So long as they journeyed through prairie steppes, the last of which was Hungary, they

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Roman Farm Management from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.