“Since it appears that I do not know what a villa is,” replied Appius, smiling, “I wish you would be good enough to instruct me, so that I may not make a fool of myself, as I am planning to buy from M. Seius his villa at Ostia:  for if a mere house is not a villa unless it is equipped with a jackass costing forty thousand sesterces ($2,000), like that you showed me at your place, I fear that I would be making a mistake in buying Seius’ house on the shore at Ostia in the belief that it is a villa.  But it was our friend Merula here who put me in mind of buying this house, for he told me that he had spent several days there and that he had never seen a more delightful villa, and yet he saw there no paintings, nor any bronze or marble statues, neither did he see any wine press, or oil mill, or oil jars.”

“And what kind of a villa is this,” said Axius, turning to Merula, “where there are neither the ornaments of a town house nor the utensils of a farm?”

“Do you consider,” said Merula, “that your house on the bank of Velinus, which neither painter nor architect has ever seen, is any less a villa than the one you have in Rosea so elegantly decorated with the work of an architect and which you share with your famous jackass?”

Axius admitted, with a nod, that a simple farm house was as much entitled to be called a villa as any house which united the characteristics of both town and country, and asked what he deduced from this.

“What?” said Merula.  “Why, if your estate in Rosea is to be approved by reason of the husbandry which you carry on, and is properly called a villa because there cattle are fed and stabled, then, by the same reasoning, all those houses should be called villas in which large profits are derived from husbandry:  for what difference does it make whether you derive your profit from sheep or from birds?  Is the income any sweeter which comes from cattle in which bees are generated, than from the bees themselves, such as work in their hives at the villa of Seius?  Do you sell to the butcher the hogs which you raise at your farm for more than Seius sells his wild boars to the meat market?”

“Am I any less able,” replied Axius, “to have these things at my farm at Reate:  is Sicilian honey made at Seius’ place and only Corsican honey at Reate,[161] and does the mast which he buys for his wild boars make them fat while that which I get for nothing from my woods makes mine lean?”

“But,” said Appius, “Merula does not deny that you can carry on at your villa the kind of husbandry which Seius does at his, yet I myself have seen that you don’t.

“For there are two kinds of husbandry of live stock:  one in the fields, as of cattle; and the other at the steading, as of chickens and pigeons and bees and other such things which are usually kept at a villa.

“About the latter, Mago the Carthaginian, and Cassius Dionysius and others have treated specially in different parts of their books, and it would seem that Seius has read their precepts and so has learned how to make more profit from his villa alone by such husbandry than others make out of an entire farm.”