source for securing their happiness, their honesty and
their usefulness is their food.... One great value of establishing a
comfortable diet for slaves is its convenience as an instrument of
reward and punishment, so powerful as almost to abolish the thefts
which often diminish considerably the owner's ability to provide for
them."]

[Footnote 27: Reading "compitalibus in compito," literally "the cross
roads altar on festival days."]

[Footnote 28: It is evident that Cato's housekeeper would have welcomed
a visit from Mr. Roosevelt's Rural Uplift Commission. We may add to
this Sir Anthony Fitzherbert's description of the duties of a farmer's
wife in sixteenth century England:

"It is a wyues occupation to wynowe all maner of cornes, to make
malte, to wasshe and wrynge, to make heye, shere corne, and in tyme of
nede to helpe her husbande to fyll the mucke-wayne or dounge-carte,
dryue the ploughe, to loode hey, corne and suche other. And to go
or ride to the market, to sel butter, chese, mylke, egges, chekyns,
capons, hennes, pygges, gese, and all maner of cornes. And also to bye
all maner of necessarye thynges belongynge to houssholde, and to make
a trewe rekenynge and acompte to her husbande what she hath payed."

Sir Anthony Fitzherbert (1470-1538) was the English judge whose
law books are, or should be, known to all lawyers. His _Boke of
Husbandry_, published in 1534, is one of the classics of English
agriculture, and justly, for it is full of shrewd observation and
deliberate wisdom expressed in a virile style, with agreeable leaven
of piety and humour. Fitzherbert anticipated a modern poet, Henley, in
one of his most happy phrases: "Ryght so euery man is capitayne of his
owne soule". The Husbandry is best available to the modern reader in
the edition by Skeat published for the English Dialect Society in
1882.]

[Footnote 29: Cato is careful not to undertake to say how this may be
assured; another evidence of his wisdom.]

[Footnote 30: In his instructive discourse on ploughing, Columella (II,
4) gives the key to Cato's warning against ploughing land when it is
in the condition he calls rotten (_cariosa_):

"Rich land, which holds moisture a long time, should be broken up
(_proscindere_) at the season when the weather is beginning to be warm
and the weeds are developing, so that none of their seed may mature:
but it should be ploughed with such close furrows that one can with
difficulty distinguish where the