Of marketing grain

LXIX.  The spelt which you wish to have prepared for food should be taken out in the winter to be ground in the mill:  but your seed corn should not be taken out until the fields are ready to receive it, a rule which obtains in respect of all kinds of seed.  What you have for sale should be taken out at the appropriate time also, for some things which cannot be kept long without spoiling should be taken out and sold promptly, while others which keep should be retained so that you may sell when the price is high, for often commodities which are kept on hand a long time, will, if put on the market at the proper time, not only yield interest for the time you held them but even a double profit.

As Stolo was speaking, the freedman of the Sacristan ran up to us with his eyes full of tears and, begging our pardon for having kept us waiting so long, invited us to come to the funeral on the following day.  We all sprang up and cried out together “What?  To the funeral?  Whose funeral?  What has happened?”

The freedman, weeping, told us that his master had been struck down by a blow with a knife, but who did it he had been unable to discover by reason of the crowd, all that he heard being an exclamation that a mistake had been made.  He added that when he had carried his master home and had sent the servants to call a doctor, whom they brought back with them quickly, he trusted that it might seem reasonable to us that he had waited to attend upon the doctor rather than come to notify us at once, and while he had not been able to be of any service to his master, who had given up the ghost in a few minutes, yet he hoped we might approve his conduct.

Accepting these excuses as amply justified, we descended from the temple bewildered more by the hazard of human life than surprised that such a fate should be possible at Rome:[104] and so we went our several ways.

BOOK II

THE HUSBANDRY OF LIVE STOCK

Introduction:  the decay of country life

Those great men our ancestors did well to esteem the Romans who lived in the country above those who dwelt in town.  For as our peasants today contemn the tenant of a villa as an idler in comparison with the busy life of an agricultural labourer, so our ancestors regarded the sedentary occupations of the town as waste of time from their habitual rural pursuits:  and in consequence they so divided their time that they might have to devote only one day of the week to their affairs in town, reserving the remaining seven for country life.[105]

So long as they persisted in this practice they accomplished two things both that their farms were fertile through good cultivation and that they themselves enjoyed the best of health:  they felt no need of those Greek gymnasia which now every one of us must have in his town house, nor did they deem that in order to enjoy a house in the country one must give sounding Greek names to all its apartments, such as [Greek:  prokoiton] (antechamber) [Greek:  palaistra] (exercising room) [Greek:  apodutaerion] (dressing room) [Greek:  peristulon] (arcade) [Greek:  ornithon] or (poultry house) [Greek:  peristereon] (dove cote) [Greek:  oporothaekae] (fruitery) and the like.