Part 26 (1/2)
[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.”]
[Footnote 163: The _sestertius_ was one quarter of a _denarius_, or, say, the equivalent of five cents. It was also called _nummus_, as we say ”nickel.” The ordinary unit used by the Romans in reckoning considerable sums of money was 1,000 sesterces, which may accordingly be translated as the equivalent of (say) $50. Axius' jacka.s.s thus cost $2,000, while Seius' income from his villa was $2,500 per annum, that of Varro's aunt from her aviary was $3,000, and that of Axius from his farm $1,500. Cicero records that Axius was a money lender, which explains the fun here made of his avarice.]
[Footnote 164: Columella, writing about one hundred years after Varro, refers to this pa.s.sage and says that luxury had so developed since Varro's time that it no longer required an extraordinary occasion, like a triumph, to bring the price of thrushes to three _denarii_ a piece, but that that had become a current quotation.]
[Footnote 165: A minerval was the fee (of Minerva) paid to a school teacher.]
[Footnote 166: The inventor of the auspices _ex tripudiis_ or the feeding of chickens was evidently an ingenious poultry fancier who succeeded in securing the care of his favourites at the public charge.]
[Footnote 167: This was L. Marcius Philippus, the orator mentioned by Horace (_Epist_. I, 7, 46), who was Consul in B.C. 91, and was celebrated for his luxurious habits, which his wealth enabled him to gratify. His son married the widow of C. Octavius and so became the step-father of the Emperor Augustus.]
[Footnote 168: This was _t.u.r.dus pilaris_, the variety of thrush which is called field fare.]
[Footnote 169: The traveller by railway from Rome to Naples pa.s.ses near Varro's estate of Casinum, and if he stops at the mediaeval town of San Germano to visit the neighbouring Badia di Monte Ca.s.sino, where the ”angelic doctor” Thomas Aquinas was educated, he will find Varro's memory kept green: for he will be entertained at the _Albergo Varrone_ (”very fair but bargaining advisable,” sagely counsels Mr. Baedeker) and on his way up the long winding road to the Abbey there will be pointed out to him the river Rapido, on the banks of which Varro's aviary stood, and nearby what is reputed to be the site of the old polymath's villa which Antony polluted with the orgies Cicero described in the second Philippic. Antony's destruction of his library was a great blow to Varro, but one likes to think that his ghost can take satisfaction in the maintenance, so near the haunts of his flesh, of such a n.o.ble collection of books as is the continuing pride of the Abbey on the mountain above.]
[Footnote 170: Varro's Museum, or study where he wooed the Muses, on his estate at Casinum was not unlike that of Cicero at his native Arpinum, which he described (de Leg. II, 3) agreeably as on an island in the cold and clear Fibrenus just above its confluence with the more important river Liris, where, like a plebeian marrying into a patrician family, it lost its name but contributed its freshness. The younger Pliny built a study in the garden of his Laurentine villa near Ostia, which he describes (II, 17) with enthusiasm: ”horti diaeta est, amores mei, re vera amores”: and here he found refuge from the tumult of his household during the festivities of the Saturnalia, which corresponded with our Christmas. In the ante bellum days every Virginia gentleman had such an ”office” in his house yard where he pretended to transact his farm business, but where actually he was wont to escape from the obligations of family and continuous hospitality.]
[Footnote 171: The commentators on this interesting but obscure description of Varro's aviary have at this point usually endeavoured to explain the arrangements of the chamber under the lantern of the _tholus_ with respect to its use as a dining room which Varro frequented himself, and hence have been amused into all kinds of difficulties of interpretation. The references to the _convivae_ are what lead them astray, and it remained for Keil to suggest that this was a playful allusion to the birds themselves, a conclusion which is strengthened by Varro's previous statement of the failure of Lucullus'
attempt to maintain a dining room in his aviary.]
[Footnote 172: Cf. Vitruvius, I, 6: ”Andronicus Cyrrhestes built at Athens an octagonal marble tower, on the sides of which were carved images of the eight winds, each on the side opposite that from which it blew. On the pyramidal roof of this tower he placed a bronze Triton holding a rod in his right hand, and so contrived that the Triton, revolving with the wind, always stood opposed to that which prevailed, and thus pointed with his rod to the image on the tower of the wind that was blowing at the moment.” The ruins of this Tower of the Winds may still be seen in Athens. There is a picture of it in Harper's Dictionary of Cla.s.sical Antiquities in the article _Andronicus_.]
[Footnote 173: One ventures to translate _athletoe comitiorum_ by Mr.
Gladstone's famous phrase.]
[Footnote 174: Reading ”tesserulas coicientem in loculum.”]
[Footnote 175: A French translator might better convey the intention of the pun, contained in the _ducere serram_ of the text, by the locution, _une prise de bec_.]
[Footnote 176: It probably will not comfort the ultimate consumer who holds in such odium the celebrated ”Schedule K” of the Payne-Aldrich tariff, to realize that the American wool grower puts no higher value on his sheep than did his Roman ancestor, as revealed by this quotation from the stock yards of Varro's time. It is interesting, however, to the breeder to know that a good price for wool has always stimulated the production of the best stock. Strabo says that the wool of t.u.r.detania in Spain was so celebrated in the generation after Varro that a ram of the breed (the ancestors of the modern Merino) fetched a talent, say $1,200; a price which may be compared with that of the prize ram recently sold in England for export to the Argentine for as much as a thousand pounds sterling, and considered a good commercial investment at that. Doubtless the market for Rosean mules comforted Axius in his investment of the equivalent of 400 in a breeding jack.]
[Footnote 177: In feudal times the right to maintain a dove cote was the exclusive privilege of the lord of the manor. According to their immemorial custom, which Varro notices, the pigeons preyed on the neighbourhood crops and were detested by the community in consequence.
During the French revolution they were one of the counts in the indictment of the land-owning aristocracy, and in the event the pigeons as well as their owners had the sins of their forefathers justly visited upon them. The American farmer who has a pigeon-keeping neighbour and is restrained by the pettiness of the annoyance from making a point on their trespa.s.ses, feels something of the blind and impotent wrath of the French peasant against the whole pigeon family.]
[Footnote 178: It appears that the Romans actually hired men to chew the food intended for cramming birds, so as to relieve the unhappy victims even of such exercise as they might get from a.s.similating their diet.
Columella (VII, 10) in discussing the diet of thrushes deprecates this practice, sagely saying that the wages of the chewers are out of proportion to the benefit obtained, and that any way the chewers swallow a good part of what they are given to macerate.
The typical tramp of the comic papers who is forever looking for occupation without work might well envy these Roman professional chewers. Not even Dr. Wiley's ”poison squad” employed to test food products could compare with them.]
[Footnote 179: These prices of $10 and $50 and even $80 a pair for pigeons, large as they seem, were surpa.s.sed under the Empire.
Columella says (VIII, 8): ”That excellent author, M. Varro, tells us that in his more austere time it was not unusual for a pair of pigeons to sell for a thousand sesterces, a price at which the present day should blush, if we may believe the report that men have been found to pay for a pair as much as four thousand _nummi_.” ($200.)]