’sat all day
  Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love
  To amorous Phillida.’

They were a band of celibates without the vows.  In such huts they dwell all the year round, flaying lambs or shearing sheep, living on bread, ricotta and water, very rarely tasting meat or wine and sleeping on shelves ranged round the hut, like berths in a ship’s cabin.  Thus are the dreams of Arcadia dispelled by realities.”]

[Footnote 151:  In modern Italy the shepherds do not take their women with them to the saltus, but, as Dennis says, lead there the life of “celibates, without the vows.”]

[Footnote 152:  In the Venitian provinces of Italy today the women are still seen at work in the harvest and rice fields with their babes in their bosoms:  but the most amazing modern spectacle of this kind is that of women coaling ships in the East, carrying their unhappy youngsters up and down the coal ladders throughout the work.]

[Footnote 153:  The author of Maison Rustique did not agree with Varro in this opinion.  I quote from Surflet’s translation of 1606 (I, 7): 

“And for writing and reading it skilleth not whether he be able to doe it or no, or that he should have any other charge to looke unto besides that of yours, or else that he should use another to set downe in writing such expences as he hath laid out:  for paper will admit any thing.”]

[Footnote 154:  This temple and fig tree stood in Rome at the foot of the Palatine hill, in the neighbourhood of the Lupercal.  It was under this fig tree that Romulus and Remus were supposed to have been suckled by the wolf.]

[Footnote 155:  ’That is the beste grease that is to a shepe, to grease hym in the mouthe with good meate,’ says Sir Anthony Fitzherbert.]

[Footnote 156:  Pliny (VII, 59) says that most nations learn the use of barbers next after that of letters, but that the Romans were late in this respect.  Varro himself wore a beard, as appears on the coin he struck during the war with the Pirates.  It is reproduced in Smiths Dict.  Gr. and Rom.  Biog., III, p. 1227.]

[Footnote 157:  Cowper’s verse in The Task seems to be all that is happy in the way of translation of Varro’s text, “divina natura dedit agros, ars humana aedificavit urbes”:  but Cowley’s “God the first garden made, and the first city Cain” was probably Cowper’s source.  Cowley was a reader of Varro, as his pleasant and sane essay Of Agriculture shows.]

[Footnote 158:  Following the precedent of the first and second books in the matter of local colour, the scene of this third book, relating to villas and the “small deer,” which were there reared, is laid in the villa publica at Rome, and the characters of the dialogue are selected for the suggestion which their names may make of the denizens of the aviary, the barn yard and the bee-stand.]

[Footnote 159:  This Appius Claudius Pulcher served in Asia under his brother-in-law Lucullus, was Augur in B.C. 59, Consul in 54 and Censor in 50.  He wrote a book on augural law and the habits of birds at which Cicero poked some rather mean fun.  He fixes the date of the dialogue.]