Of Cabbages and Kings
I think it’s destiny: if you take a passionate interest in both Latin literature and growing cabbages, you’re going to end up reading Cato’s De Agri Cultura at some point. Latin I got from my father, who had been a priest at the time of the Latin mass. Years after he left the priesthood and started a family, he still would give the principal parts of curse words to alleviate the pain of stubbed toes and hammer-crushed thumbnails: “Dango, dangere, dangi, dangtus” was one of his milder expostulations.
The cabbages came later. I was teaching Latin, and a colleague of mine, a Latin teacher in another school, asked me about Diocletian’s retirement. Did I know anything about it? Not really, I responded; he was a bit tardo-antico for my tastes. Well, he said, one of his students came up to him and asked him if it was true that Diocletian had abdicated the throne in order to raise cabbages. Since I was a collector of trivia and bizarrerie, perhaps I could confirm this story. To this day I still don’t know if it’s true or not, but from that point on I used it as a lament with fellow teachers and a threat with my students: “One day, I’m going to get sick of all this teaching nonsense and go raise cabbages.”
In fact, if you read the Classics long enough, you can get convinced that not only are cabbages a lot easier to deal with than schoolchildren, the calling of cabbager is more honorable too. After all, teaching was slave-work, whereas even Romans of consular and dictatorial rank took an active interest in the well-being of cabbages. We all know the story of Cincinnatus high-tailing it out of a coveted dictatorship (the pay was not great but the perks were fantastic) to get back to plowing, presumably to make the ground ready for cabbages. Manius Curius Dentatus (cos. 290, 284, 275, 274) favored turnips himself, but turnips are brassicas, botanically speaking, so the scientific difference is slight (as are kale, broccoli, rutabagas, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and many other vegetables equally popular with ancient Romans and modern Brooklynites). They say Dentatus was boiling turnips for his dinner when the Samnites showed up to bribe him with gold. “A man content with such a supper,” he replied, showing them the turnips, “has no need of gold.”
Nor, I imagined, did such a man have need of a teaching job, when I decided to quit teaching and move to an off-grid cabin on six acres in the Catskill Mountains. The acres were wooded, but I spent time cutting the trees, burning out the stumps, and building a garden. A friend of mine said she was going to teach a class on the Eclogues and Georgics. I decided I would try to live them. I could see the stars from my dark cabin at night, and I learned to tell the seasons by what stars rose by my window, like Vergil or Aratus. The cabin had no running water, but then again, neither did the homes of most Romans. I went down to the spring on my property with jugs and filled them, right where the water came out of the rock. I called the jugs “hydrias.”
In fact my cabin might not have been larger than the hut of Manius Curius, which Plutarch tells us was a place of pilgrimage for Cato (Cato Maior 2.1):
The little country house of Manius Curius, who had been thrice carried in triumph, happened to be near his farm; so that often going thither, and contemplating the small compass of the place, and plainness of the dwelling, he formed an idea of the mind of the person, who being one of the greatest of the Romans, and having subdued the most warlike nations, nay, had driven Pyrrhus out of Italy, now, after three triumphs, was contented to dig in so small a piece of ground, and live in such a cottage…. Cato, after reflecting upon these things, used to return and, reviewing his own farm, his servants, and housekeeping, increase his labor and retrench all superfluous expenses. (Life of Cato, Clough trans.)
I always find it exciting to see men who were to become Classics in themselves, starting out as mere classicists: we can see them not as something already formed, but still in the process of formation, shaping themselves after the example of others. So also we see Thoreau, in Walden, quoting, in his chapter on finding a place to live, from Cato, and citing him as a kind of Gospel authority on farming (p. 71):
Old Cato, whose “De Re Rustica” is my “Cultivator,” says — and the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage — “When you think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not to buy greedily; nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the more it will please you, if it is good.” I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last.
You can see quite a bit of Thoreau in a mere drop like this: the way he spurns modern translations and modern Cultivators — agricultural manuals common in the day — to get directly to the ancients, and the way he takes their advice so far that it loses all its practical value (waiting until you are dead to purchase a farm, for instance). We all have heard the objections to Thoreau — the fact that it was more of a brief experiment than a lifestyle, the fact that he was going home to nibble his mom’s cookies and drop off his laundry. Cato seemed more like the real deal. I wanted Cato to be my Cultivator too.
So when a Loeb edition of the agricultural works of Cato and Varro appeared at a local used bookstore, you can imagine that I shelled out the ten bucks for it willingly, and took it home, to read my Cato in the original.
The De Agri Cultura of Cato is the oldest surviving work of Latin prose, which might make it important purely on historical grounds, but it has mostly vanished from university curricula. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton don’t put it on even their graduate reading lists (though five paragraphs of it are still required at the University of Michigan). It contains some undeniably strange parts: strange for their style, and strange for their content (§160):
If there is any kind of joint dislocation, it will be healed by the following incantation. Take a green reed four or five feet long, split it down the middle, and have two men hold it to the hips. Begin to chant: MOTAS UAETA DARIES DARDARIES ASTATARIES DISSUNAPITER, until the reed-ends are brought together. Wave some iron over them. When they have come together and the one has touched the other, take them in and and cut from the left and from the right. Apply it to the dislocation or fracture, it will be healed. Still chant every day if there is an opening like this: HUAT HAUT HAUT ISTASIS TARSIS ARDANNABOU DANNAUSTRA.
Such remedies are survivals of great antiquity, and it’s not even clear that Cato himself would have understood what those words mean, so far had his Latin diverged from that Latin. But those relics are the exception in Cato’s work. Most of the work is rational; rational in the fullest sense, in fact, meaning “based on accounting.” After the first chapter on looking for good land, in the second Cato discusses what to do once you have taken possession of your farm: call in the overseer (§2)
Give orders for the completion of what work remains; run over the cash accounts, grain accounts, and purchases of fodder; run over the wine accounts, the oil accounts — what has been sold, what collected, balances due, and what is left that is saleable; where security for an account should be taken, let it be taken; and let the supplies on hand be checked over. Give orders that whatever may be lacking for the current year should be supplied; that what is superfluous should be sold; that whatever work should be let out should be let out. Give directions as to what work you want done on the place, and what you want let out, and leave the directions in writing. (Loeb trans.)
Cato was famous among the Romans for actually taking part in farm operations — but what is instantly apparent is that he was first and foremost not a farmer but a manager. I had dreamed of Cincinnatus pushing the plow. I found your average American management consultant, whose job was to show up and tell the manager how he really should be running things. Cato presumes that an overseer will have excuses, and he lists four: servos non valuisse, tempestates malas fuisse, servos aufugisse, opus publicum effecisse — “that the slaves were sick, the weather was bad, the slaves ran away, they had been conscripted for public duties” (§2) This list says a great deal about the presumptions Cato is making about farming. He then lists tasks for bad-weather days, and work that can be given slaves on holidays; and as for the slaves being sick or running away, he says nothing about improving their conditions and treating them well to prevent future problems. Instead he says that in such a case such large rations should not have been given (cum servi aegrotarint, cibaria tanta dari non oportuisse).
Cato also advises a farmer not to be sentimental. Everything useless needs to go (§2):
Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The paterfamilias should be a seller, not a buyer.
Needless to say it is very striking to see someone equating an old man or sick person with a beat-up wagon or a bag of wool. This is not merely a case of Cato being a “man of his time.” Plutarch — though he lived three centuries later he was similarly immersed in a society where slavery was the norm — thought Cato positively inhuman and took him to task for it (Cato Maior 5.5):
We should not treat living creatures like shoes or pots and pans, casting them aside when they are bruised and worn out with service, but, if for no other reason, for the sake of practice in kindness to our fellow men, we should accustom ourselves to mildness and gentleness in our dealings with other creatures. I certainly would not sell even an ox that had worked for me, just because he was old, much less an elderly man, removing him for his habitual place and customary life, as it were from his native land, for a paltry price, useless as he is to those who sell him and as he will be to those who buy him.
There is no doubt that Cato was abstemious in his habits. But when it came to farming, his goal clearly was profit. You can see this in his evaluation of land itself. He was not looking for land that was good enough for bread and cabbages (§1):
If you will ask me what is the best kind of farm, I will say: a hundred iugera of land, of all sorts of soils and in an excellent position; a vineyard, if it produces good and abundant wine, is the best; the second best is a well-watered garden; third a willow-bed [for making baskets]; fourth an olive orchard; fifth pasture; sixth grainland; seventh a woodlot; eighth an orchard; ninth an oak-grove for mast.
This is not subsistence agriculture for men content with turnips: this is a profit-driven export economy. Wheat, the staple of the Roman diet, occupies the sixth place; already by Cato’s day wheat was imported from Sicily and Africa. Cheap grain from conquered lands bankrupted small Roman farmers already burdened by decades of military service. “Their farms,” says Reginald Bosworth Smith in his Rome and Carthage, “passed into the hands of capitalists, and the rich lands of Italy fell back into pasture, and half-naked slaves tended herds of cattle.”
That the slaves were half-naked can be proven from Cato himself, who recommends issuing one tunic every two years. This is frugal enough, but Cato pushes it further (§59): they get a new tunic only when they turn in the old one (use it for patches, Cato says). Cato was, in a certain sense, turning Manius Curius on his head. Curius had said that a turnip-eater had no need of gold. Cato thought that a turnip-eater could, by controlling his appetites, get a lot more gold. His frugality was not really for the sake of personal independence and increased self-reliance: it was really just to optimize profit margins. It was also probably to some extent a pose. In the end, as the textbook-writer for the age of the latifundia, the massive slave-driven farms of the late Republic, Cato was thoroughly committed to the fine art of living off the sweat of other men’s brows.
So I found most of Cato’s advice (§57) about how much wine you can give the members of your chain-gang (yes, he does talk about compediti, chained slaves) irrelevant for my life in the woods. But there is one section of the book I can thoroughly recommend, the six and a half pages about cabbages. Here Cato writes with genuine passion, and seems to really believe that cabbages are the solution to all the world’s problems. I’m sure he’s completely insane, but it’s quite charming. And his use of the future imperative — “thou shalt do it” — is fabulous (§156):
Cabbage is the vegetable that beats all other vegetables. Thou shalt eat it, cooked or raw. Thou shalt dip it in vinegar, if you will eat it raw. It is marvelous for digestion, it makes for a healthy system, and the urine is wholesome for everything.
That’s right, the urine. After giving pages and pages of things that can be cured by “poultice of cabbage” (including breast cancer, in mammis carcinoma), he claims (§157):
And more than this: if you hold onto the urine of someone who frequently eats cabbage, warm it, and spray it all over a person, you will quickly make him healthy with this cure: this has been tested. And if you wash little children in that urine, they will never be weakly.
The “this has been tested” really is a fabulous touch. I don’t think I’m going to test it myself, but some of Cato’s other claims about the cabbage being good for the digestion and for the body in general strike me as eminently plausible, and not too different from what people are saying about kale nowadays. Unfortunately he doesn’t really say too much about how to grow it well. He was too busy talking about how to run chain-gangs of slaves.
Herodotus tells a tale of the Spartans dining after the battle of Salamis in the tent of Xerxes, how they marveled at the folly of Xerxes, who, “living with such riches, came to rob us of our poverty” (Histories 9.82). The Romans did it more rationally, by starting out poor and robbing others of their riches. It makes little sense to rob men of their riches, if you’re not going to enjoy the riches; but this was precisely the brief period of history that Cato represented. Very quickly the Romans completed the transition to something that made sense, namely, that if you’re going to the trouble of robbing men of their riches, you might as well also enjoy them. But there seems to be a deeper wisdom in the example of Curius and Cincinnatus and others, which perhaps they themselves did not fully live up to: a life where we do not rob others at all, but produce in satisfied simplicity enough for our few needs. The people who lived like this, perhaps, are not the sort whose names are found in history books. But in the meantime, this spring, while watching my cabbages and turnips grow, I’ll start looking for books by Diocletian. Idealism dies hard.
John Byron Kuhner taught Latin for ten years before moving to an off-grid cabin in the Catskill Mountains in 2008. Since then he has spent his time reading, thinking, writing, observing nature and growing plants. More of his writing can be found at www.johnbyronkuhner.com
