buys an _ager_; the owner makes the lustration of his _ager_ (Cato, 141), that is to say, he perambulates the boundaries of his property. Columella is continually talking about the _ager_ as the property of a man whom he calls _dominus_. More than thirty passages in Cicero show that he drew a distinction between an _ager_, which was the property of a private citizen, and the _ager publicus_, which was the property of the state. Even the agrarian laws, whose real object was to transform an _ager publicus_ into an _ager privatus_, mark clearly the difference between them.[59] It is, therefore, in no sense true that the word _ager_ by itself implied public or common land, or that it was in any way analogous to the word _mark_. So far was this from being the case, that a Roman jurisconsult expressly says that the dominant idea conveyed by the word _ager_ is that of complete ownership.[60] In fact, what a Roman calls _ager_ was very often what we call an estate. In Cato, for instance, the _ager_ is not simply a field; it is a domain of some 60, 75, or 150 acres (c.c. 1, 10), which is cultivated by ten, twelve or sixteen slaves. Columella mentions, as if it were not unusual, that an _ager_ might be so extensive that the owner would have to divide it for purposes of agriculture between several groups of slaves. _Ager_ and _fundus_ are synonymous terms, and they both mean an area of land cultivated for an owner’s benefit.[61] Pliny speaks in his letters of his _agri_; and each of these is a great estate that he either lets out to farmers, or cultivates by means of a body of slaves. Each _ager_ included, to judge from his description, arable land, meadows, vineyards and woods. The jurisconsult Paulus makes use of the two words, _ager_ and _fundus_, in referring to one and the same domain.[62] Another jurisconsult says in so many words that the word _ager_ includes all the land of an estate.[63] Finally, if there were still any doubt, we need only look at the passage from Ulpian in the _Digest_, which gives the formula under which estates were enrolled in the census. We see that such properties are called _agri_, and that each of them comprises land in tillage, vineyards, meadows, and forests.[64] All this has to be borne in mind, if we would know what was the idea that Tacitus associated with the word _agri_; for no doubt Tacitus used the language of the Romans of his own times. To suppose that he attached to this word a meaning it had never had, _viz._, _public_ land, and, going even further, the idea of _common_ land--an idea which never entered the Roman brain--is pure fancy. And this is the error with which Maurer and his followers set out to misinterpret the whole of chapter xxvi. of the Germania.[65]