economics, according to which among a population chiefly subsisting
on vegetables the produce of a piece of land of an acre and a quarter
proves sufficient on an average for the subsistence of a family.

It is indeed asserted that instances occur even in historical times
of colonies founded with allotments of two -jugera-; but the only
instance of the kind (Liv. iv. 47) is that of the colony of Labici
in the year 336--an instance, which will certainly not be reckoned
(by such scholars as are worth the arguing with) to belong to the
class of traditions that are trustworthy in their historical details,
and which is beset by other very serious difficulties (see book
ii. ch. 5, note). It is no doubt true that in the non-colonial
assignation of land to the burgesses collectively (-adsignatio
viritana-) sometimes only a few -jugera- were granted (as e. g.
Liv. viii. ii, 21). In these cases however it was the intention
not to create new farms with the allotments, but rather, as a rule,
to add to the existing farms new parcels from the conquered lands
(comp. C. I. L. i. p. 88). At any rate, any supposition is better
than a hypothesis which requires us to believe as it were in
a miraculous multiplication of the food of the Roman household.
The Roman farmers were far less modest in their requirements than
their historiographers; they themselves conceived that they could
not subsist even on allotments of seven -jugera- or a produce of
one hundred and forty -modii-.

7. I. VI. Time and Occasion of the Reform

8. Perhaps the latest, although probably not the last, attempt
to prove that a Latin farmer's family might have subsisted on two
-jugera- of land, finds its chief support in the argument that Varro
(de R. R. i. 44, i) reckons the seed requisite for the -jugerum-
at five -modii- of wheat but ten -modii- of spelt, and estimates
the produce as corresponding to this, whence it is inferred that
the cultivation of spelt yielded a produce, if not double, at least
considerably higher than that of wheat. But the converse is more
correct, and the nominally higher quantity sown and reaped is simply
to be explained by the fact that the Romans garnered and sowed the
wheat already shelled, but the spelt still in the husk (Pliny, H.
N. xviii. 7, 61), which in this case was not separated from the
fruit by threshing. For the same reason spelt is at the present
day sown twice as thickly as wheat, and gives a produce twice as
great b