efficacy of manuring? of which I have written in my book on Farm Life,[1] but of which the learned Hesiod, in writing about agriculture, says not a word,—though Homer, who, I think, lived many generations before him, introduces Laertes as relieving his solicitude for his son by tilling and manuring his field. Nor is rural life made cheerful by grainfields, meadows, vineyards, and shrubberies alone, but also by gardens and orchards; then again, by the feeding of sheep, by swarms of bees, by a vast variety of flowers. Nor does one take pleasure merely in the various modes of planting, but equally in those of grafting, than which no agricultural invention shows greater skill.
XVI. I could enumerate many other charms of rural life; but I feel that those which I have named have occupied fully enough of your time. Pardon me; for I am thoroughly versed in everything belonging to country life, and old age is naturally prolix, nor can I pretend to acquit it of all the
- ↑ De Re Rustica,—a work much less sentimental than a "Farmer's Almanac." The Cato who has such an aesthetic appreciation of the charms of rural life, is a myth of Cicero. Cato's own book is a manual of hard, stern, sometimes brutal economy, advising the sale of worn-out cattle, and of old or sick slaves. Vendat boves vetulos . . . . servum senem, servum morbosum, et siquid aliud supersit, vendat. He even carries his niggardliness so far as to recommend that, when a slave has a new garment given him, the old shall be taken from him, to be used for patches. But Cicero is right in representing Cato as wise on the subject of manure, on which, if I am not mistaken, he was in advance, not only of his own time, but even of ours.
