Part 24 (2/2)
[Footnote 108: This was the ”crowded hour” in Varro's life, and, as M.
Boissier has pointed out, he loved to dwell upon its episodes. It will be recalled that Pompey divided the Mediterranean into thirteen districts for the war with the Pirates and put a responsible lieutenant in command of each, thus enabling him by concurrent action in all the districts to clear the seas in three months. Appian gives the list of officers and the limits of their commands, saying: ”The coasts of Sicily and the Ionian sea as far as Acarnania were entrusted to Plotius and Varro.” It is difficult to understand Varro's own reference to Delos, but Appian makes clear how it happened that Varro was stationed on the coast of Epirus and so fell in with the company of ”half Greek shepherds” who are the _dramatis personae_ of the second book. As the scene of the first book was laid in a temple of Tellus, so this relating to live stock is cast in a temple of Pales, the G.o.ddess of shepherds, on the occasion of the festival of the Parilia, and the names of the characters have a punning reference to live stock.]
[Footnote 109: The codices here contain an interpolation of the words ”HIC INTERMISIMUS,” to indicate that a part of the text is missing, with which judgment of some early student of the archetype Victorius, Scaliger and Ursinus, as well as their successors among the commentators on Varro, have all agreed. It is a pleasure to record the agreement on this point, because it is believed to be unique: but many precedents for plunging the reader _in medias res_, as does the surviving text, might be found in the modern short story of the artist in style. As M. Boissier points out Varro might have cited the beginning of the Odyssey as a precedent for this.]
[Footnote 110: This is a paraphase of a favorite locution of Homer's heroes, whose characteristic modesty does not, however, permit them to apply it to themselves, as Varro does. Thus in _Iliad_, VII, 114, Agamemnon advises Menelaos not to venture against Hector, whom ”even Achilles dreadeth to meet in battle, wherein is the warrior's glory, and Achilles is better far than thou.”]
[Footnote 111: Virgil (Aen. VII, 314) made a fine line out of this tradition, endowing the st.u.r.dy race of Fauns and Nymphs who inhabited the land of Saturn before the Golden Age, with the qualities of the trees on whose fruit they subsisted, ”gensque virum truncis et duro robore nata.”]
[Footnote 112: In the registers of the censors every thing from which the public revenues were derived was set down under the head of _pascua_, or ”pasture lands,” because for a long time the pasture lands were the only source of such revenue. Cf. Pliny, _H.N._ XVIII, 3.]
[Footnote 113: Olisippo is the modern Lisbon. This tradition about the mares of the region is repeated by Virgil (Geo. III, 272) by Columella (VI, 27) and by Pliny (VIII, 67). Professor Ridgeway in _The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse_ describes it as ”an aetiological myth to explain the swiftness of horses” for the fleetest horses came out of the West; thus Pegasus was born at the springs of the ocean, and there is the pa.s.sage in Homer (_Iliad_, XVI, 149) about the horses ”that flew as swift as the winds, the horses that the harpy Podarge (Swift Foot) bare to the West Wind as she grazed on the meadows by the stream of the Ocean.” Hence we may conclude that there was a race of swift horses in Portugal in the earliest times, which Professor Ridgeway would doubtless like very much to prove, in support of his interesting thesis, were derived from Libya.]
[Footnote 114: _Hypenemia_, or barren eggs, are described intelligently by Aristotle (H.A.V. 1, 4, VI. 2, 5), and, with Varro's confidence in the country traditions, by Pliny, H.N. X, 80.
If he had known it, Varro might have here cited the fact that the unfertilized queen bee is parthenogenetic, though producing only male bees; i.e., drones: but it remained for a German clergyman, Dzierzon, to discover this in the eighteenth century.]
[Footnote 115: Cf. Plautus _Menaechmi_, II, 2, 279. One of the two Menaechmi is, on his arrival at Epid.a.m.nus, mistaken for his brother, of whose existence he does not know, and much to his amazement is introduced into the brother's life and possessions. At first he expostulates, accusing the slave of the brother, who has mistaken his ident.i.ty, of being crazy and offers to exorcise him by a sacrifice of weanling pigs, wherefore he asks the question quoted in the text.
Varro was evidently fond of this pa.s.sage, as he quotes it again, _post_, p. 221. The _Menaechmi_ is one of the immortal comedies and has survived in many forms on the modern stage all over Europe. From it Shakespeare derived the plot of the _Comedy of Errors_.]
[Footnote 116: It is interesting to compare these sane therapeutics with Cato's practice less than two hundred years previous (_ante_, p. 47), which was characteristic of the superst.i.tious peasant who in Italy still seeks the priest to bless his ailing live stock.]
[Footnote 117: This Atticus was Cicero's intimate friend to whom he addressed so many of his charming letters. He changed his name as stated in the text, the new name being that of an uncle who adopted him, as we learn from his life by Nepos. As is well known to all students of Cicero, Atticus had dwelt in Athens many years and derived his income from estates in Epirus, which is the point of Scrofa's jest.]
[Footnote 118: This requirement of short legs is the more remarkable because of the long journeys which Varro says the Roman sheep were required to make between their summer and winter pastures. A similar necessity and bad roads created in England, before the eighteenth century, a demand for long legged sheep. Prothero (_English Farming Past and Present_) quotes a description of the ”true old Warwicks.h.i.+re ram” in 1789: ”His frame large and remarkably loose. His bone throughout heavy. His legs long and thick, terminating in large splaw feet.”
One of the things which Bakewell accomplished was to shorten the legs as well as to increase the mutton on his New Leicesters. Of Bakewell, Mr. Prothero justly says, ”By providing meat for the million he contributed as much to the wealth of the country as Arkwright or Watt.”]
[Footnote 119: Shepherds still look for the black or spotted tongue in the mouth of the ram, for the reason given by Varro, but the warning is no longer put in the shepherds' manual.]
[Footnote 120: Varro would still feel at home in Apulia, for there the sheep industry is carried on much as it was in his time, and thence the _calles publicae_, to which he refers, still lead to the summer pastures in the Apennines. Cf. Beauclerk _Rural Italy_, chap. V. ”The extensive pasturages of the 'Tavoliere di Puglia' (Apulia) are of great importance and have a history of their own. This vast domain covers 750,000 acres: its origin belongs to the time of the Roman Conquests and the protracted wars of the Republic, which were fought out in the plains, whence they became deserted and uncultivated, fit only for public pastures in winter time ... the periodical emigrations of the flocks continue as in the past times: they descend from the mountains into the plains by a network of wide gra.s.sy roads which traverse the region in every direction and are called _tratturi_.
These lanes are over 100 yards in width and cover a total length of 940 miles.... Not less than 50,000 animals are pastured on the Tavoliere, requiring over 1,500 square miles of land for their subsistence.... Five thousand persons are employed as shepherds.”]
[Footnote 121: Varro quite uniformly uses words which indicate that he was accustomed to see sheep driven (_abigere, propellere, adpellere_) but we can see the flocks _led_ in Italy today, as they were in Palestine soon after Varro's death, according to the testimony of that beautiful figure of the Good Shepherd (_St. John_, X, 4): ”And when he putteth forth his own sheep he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.” R. Child, in his ”Large Letter” in Hartlib's _Legacie_, gives the explanation of the difference in the custom:
”Our sheep do not follow their shepherds as they do in all other countries: for the shepherd goeth before and the sheep follow like a pack of dogs. This disobedience of our sheep doth not happen to us, as the Papist Priests tell their simple flocks, because we have left their great shepherd the Pope; but because we let our sheep range night and day in our fields without a shepherd: which other countries dare not for fear of wolves and other ravenous beasts, but are compelled to guard them all day with great dogs and to bring them home at night, or to watch them in their folds.”]
[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.]
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