[Footnote 160:  In Varro’s time, as today, the river Velinus drained the fresh pastures of the Umbrian prairie of Rosea, “the nurse of Italy,” which lay below the town of Reate (the modern Rieti), and was originally the bed of a lake.  Its waters are so strongly impregnated with carbonate of lime that by their deposit of travertine they tend to block their own channel.  The drainage of Rosea has, therefore, always been a matter of concern to the live stock industry of Reate, and in B.C. 272 M. Curius Dentatus opened the first of several successful artificial canals (the last dating from the sixteenth century, A.D.), which still serve to lead the Velinus into the Nar at the renowned Cascate delle Marmore.  For two hundred years the people of Interamna (the modern Terni) had complained that their situation below the falls was endangered by Curius’ canal, and finally in B.C. 54 the Roman Senate appointed the commission to which Appius Claudius refers in the text, to hear the controversy.  Cicero was retained as counsel for the people of Reate, and during the hearing stopped, as Appius Claudius did, with our friend Axius at his Reatine villa, and wrote about the visit to the same Atticus whom we met in Varro’s second book, as follows (ad Atticum, IV, 15):  “After this was over the people of Reate summoned me to their Tempe to plead their cause against the people of Interamna, before the Consul and ten commissioners, the question being concerning the Veline lake, which, drained by M. Curius by means of a channel cut through the mountain, now flows into the Nar:  by this means the famous Rosea has been reclaimed from the swamp, though still fairly moist.  I stopped with Axius, who took me also to visit the Seven Waters.”  What was once deemed a danger is a double source of profit to the modern folk of Interamna.  Tourists today crowd to see the same waterfall which Cicero visited, taking a tram from the busy little industrial town of Terni:  and the waters which flow from Velinus now serve to generate power with which armour plates are manufactured for the Italian navy on the site of the ancient Interamna.]

[Footnote 161:  Sicilian honey was famous for its flavour because of the bee pasture of thyme which there abounded, especially at Hybla.  Theophrastus (H.P.  III, 15, 5) explains that the honey of Corsica had an acrid taste, because the bees pastured there largely on box trees.]

[Footnote 162:  These denizens of the Roman villa are all enumerated by Martial in his delightful verses (III, 38) upon Faustinus’ villa at Baiae.  The picture of the barn yard is very true to life in all ages, especially the touch of the hungry pigs sniffing after the pail of the farmer’s wife: 

  “Vagatur omnis turba sordidae cortis
  Argutus anser, gemmeique pavones
  Nomenque debet quae rubentibus pennis,
  Et picta perdix, Numidicaeque guttatae
  Et impiorum phasiana Colchorum. 
  Rhodias superbi feminas prement galli
  Sonantque turres plausibus columbarum,
  Gemit hinc palumbus, inde cereus turtur
  Avidi sequuntur villicae sinum porci: 
  Matremque plenam mollis agnus exspectat.”]