Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/261

VIII let him open the earliest Latin prose work which we possess, and if he reads no further than the very first chapter, he will find a sentence or two which should give him a clue never to be lost sight of. Cato wrote his work on agriculture at the close of the period I have been speaking of, when serious changes, both in character and economy, had begun to tell upon the Roman people; but he had the tradition in his mind of an older and better state of things, and acted upon it himself to the best of his ability. Here are two sentences from his brief preface. "When our forefathers would praise a worthy man, they praised him as a good husbandman, and a good landlord; and they believed that praise could go no further." And again: "Husbandmen make the strongest men, and the bravest soldiers; their gain is far less selfish, less uncertain, less open to envy (than that of the merchant)".

Cato's evidence is borne out by all we know from other sources. The older Roman and Latin population had two occupations, agriculture and war, a fact which is reflected in their conception of their great deity Mars, who was essentially the god of the husbandman, yet had from the first characteristics which could easily transform him into a god of war. These farmer-warriors made up that true middle class of which I spoke in the last chapter. They were not densely packed within the walls of a city, but spent their time on their farms, and only came into Rome for marketing or occasional voting in Comitia. They had the virtues of