Roman Farm Management: The Treatises of Cato and VarroCato, Marcus Porcius
History
Roman Farm Management: The Treatises of Cato and Varro
Cato, Marcus Porcius
Agriculture -- Early works to 1800; Farm management -- Early works to 1800
[Footnote 130: In his stimulating book, _Comment la route crée le type
Social_, Edmond Desmolins submits an ingenious hypothesis to explain
the pre-eminence of the Gauls in the growing and making of pork,
and how that pre-eminence was itself the explanation of their early
success in cultivating the cereals. He describes their migrating
ancestors, the Celts, pushing their way up the Danube as hordes of
nomad shepherds with their vast flocks and herds of horses and cattle,
on the milk of which they had hitherto subsisted. So long as they
journeyed through prairie steppes, the last of which was Hungary, they
maintained their shepherd character, but when they once passed the
site of the present city of Vienna and entered the plateau of Bavaria,
they found new physical conditions which caused them to reduce and to
separate their herds of large cattle--an unbroken forest affording
little pasture of grass. Here they found the wild boar subsisting upon
the mast of the forest, and him they domesticated out of an economic
necessity, to take the place of their larger cattle as a basis of food
supply. Until then they had not been meat eaters, and so had known no
necessity for cereals, for milk is a balanced ration in itself. But
this change of diet required them also to take to agriculture and so
to abandon their nomad life.
'By reason of the habits of the animal, swine husbandry has a tendency
in itself to confine those engaged in it to a more or less sedentary
life, but we are about to see how the Celts were compelled to
accomplish this important evolution by an even more powerful force.
Meat cannot be eaten habitually except in conjunction with a
cereal ... and of all the meats pork is the one which demands this
association most insistently, because it is the least easily digested
and the most heating of all the meats.... So that is how the adoption
of swine husbandry and a diet of pork compelled our nomad Celts to
take the next step and settle down to agriculture.']
[Footnote 131: This Gallic _tomacina_ was doubtless the ancestor of the
_mortadella_ now produced in the Emilia and known to English speaking
consumers as "Bologna" sausage.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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