Excerpt from Roman Economic Conditions: To the Close of the Republic Some criticism may be evoked by reason of the detailed treatment of agriculture and the extent to which I have used Varro, Columella and Pliny as my authorities. My desire primarily has been to depict conditions not less than to trace developments, and at the risk of being tedious I have aimed at giving full details. It will not be so easy to acquit these writers of the charge of bookishness. Cato smacks of the soil; Varro has the instincts of the antiquary, and one feels in his laboured expositions the influence of old manuscripts and the library. To keep the reader on his guard, I have refrained from expressing measures, dates and coins in modern terms, even when this is possible. The quaintness of some of Varro's precepts, his evidently unconscious exaggerations, may be laid aside, and yet I feel there will still be left something of worth. I quote Columella and Pliny for conditions under the Republic because methods of husbandry changed slowly. The descriptions, therefore, furnished by these authors of the processes of tillage, harvesting, threshing, etc., I consider a fairly adequate representation even of Republican methods. Their value for a sketch of economic conditions under the Republic exists only in so far as they provide us with a view of the fuller development of economic tendencies operative before the Empire. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.