oats.]

[Footnote 98: Pliny advises that the grain which collects on the
circumference of a threshing floor of this description be saved for
seed because it is evidently the heaviest.]

[Footnote 99: In the Apennines today the threshing floor, or _aja_, is
anointed with cow dung smeared smooth with water, doubtless for the
same reason that the Romans so used amurca.]

[Footnote 100: Between harvests the winnowing basket is quite generally
used in Italy today for a cradle, as it was from the beginning of
time, for there is an ancient gem representing the infant Bacchus
asleep in a winnowing basket.]

[Footnote 101: What the French call, from the same practice, _vin de
rognure_.]

[Footnote 102: Varro does not mention the season of the olive harvest,
but Virgil tells us (G. II, 519) that in their day as now it was
winter. Cato (XX-XXII) described the construction and operation of the
_trapetus_ in detail. 'It can still be seen in operation in Italy,
turned by a patient donkey and flowing with the new oil of an intense
blue-green colour. It is always flanked by an array of vast storage
jars (Cato's _dolii_ now called _orci_), which make one realize the
story of _Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves_.]

[Footnote 103: The Roman waste of amurca, through ignorance of its
value, was like the American waste of the cotton seed, which for many
years was thrown out from the gin to rot upon the ground, even its
fertilizing use being neglected. Now cotton seed has a market value
equivalent to nearly 20 per cent of that of the staple. It is used for
cattle feed and also is made into lard and "pure olive oil," being
exported in bulk and imported again in bottles with Italian labels.]

[Footnote 104: Cf. Fowler, _Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero_.
"Let us consider that in a large city today the person and property
of all, rich or poor, are adequately protected by a sound system of
police and by courts of first instance which are sitting every day.
Assault and murder, theft and burglary are exceptional. It might be
going too far to say that at Rome they were the rule: but it is the
fact that in what we may call the slums of Rome there was no machinery
for checking them.... It is the great merit of Augustus that he made
Rome not only a city of marble but one in which the persons and
property of all citizens were fairly secure."

There are several contemporary references to the crowded and dangerous
condition of the streets of