Aman's character is judged not merely by his public services and his political views but also by his private life and individual interests. Similarly the history of a nation is to be read not only in its military exploits, its constitutional experiments, its art and literature, but also in the social habits and predominant interests of its citizens. Just as a garden mirrors the character of its owner, so the gardens of a nation reflect the character and the degree of advancement of the State. It is no coincidence that the popular garden of the Roman Republic was the simple kitchen garden, while under the Empire pretentious landscape gardens were the vogue. The vitalizing energy of the Republic found an outlet in the productive vegetable plot: the elaborate but sterile gardens of the Empire were symbolic of incipient decay.

Until the first century b.c. almost all Roman gardens were cottage gardens. Their plan and culture were governed solely by practical needs. From them the mistress of the house used to replenish her larder and medicine-chest and adorn the family shrine with flowers. Pliny the Elder reminds the luxury-seeking populace of a later date that in the past at Rome a garden was the poor man's estate: it was the only market he had from which to provide himself with food. The prime function of a garden was to make its owner self-sufficient. This self-sufficiency was more easy of attainment in ancient Italy than in more northerly countries, for the diet of the Romans consisted, for the most part, of salads.

It is hard, at a distance of some two thousand years, to know when a metaphorical word in an ode of Horace is only a faded remnant of its original self, and when it was felt by Horace's contemporaries as a living image on which the poet was relying for a particular effect. Any attempt therefore to assess the force of an image is liable to be not only subjective but possibly unsound as well; we cannot always know enough about the stage of development of a word at the moment of use, nor about the composition of the soil on which that word was designed to fall. Still, it is possible to note some differences in the quality and intention of the imagery employed.

In a previous issue of Greece and Rome (vol. xiii, June 1944) there appeared some remarks on the division of tongues which subsists in Greece to-day, the tongues specified being Katharevousa (‘Purified’ or ‘Purifying’ Greek), Demotiki (Popular Greek), and a newspaper language which is blended from the other two in varying proportions according to the linguistic tastes, and sometimes the political affiliations, of the newspaper proprietors. The territory controlled by the partisans of these rival idioms was also broadly sketched in the same number. ‘Katharevousa is the official and formal language, used in Government publications and statements, business correspondence, non-fictional books and treatises, law courts, University lectures (although not so much at Salonica as at Athens) and formal conversation.’ ‘Demotiki is the language of conversation, of song, of popular novels and periodicals (and also of most serious creative works of literature) and the spoken language of trade and business.’ And then the essay attempted to show the main characteristics of the two idioms and their respective relation-ships with classical Greek.

Nothing, however, was said of the struggle for linguistic supremacy between Katharevousa and Demotiki, which has been one of the out-standing and most stimulating features of life in Greece since the time of the War of Independence. As a rule, political differences are the principal cause of internal dissension among the Greeks, but at more than one point during the last hundred years people were ready to believe that the language problem would oust politics from its post of honour as the predominant Hellenic interest.

In view of the interest of Columella's De Re Rustica it is strange that it is not better known. Indeed, it is difficult to secure a text of it, since the last complete edition was published in the eighteenth century and the nearest approach to an English edition is a short selection from his works published in Dublin in 1732.

As to the man himself our knowledge is derived almost wholly from his own writings. His full name was Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. He was a contemporary and friend of Seneca, who lived from 4 b.c. to A.D. 65 and, like Columella, was a native of Spain, and of Seneca's brother Gallio, proconsul of Achaea, who figures in the Acts of the Apostles (xviii. 12) as ‘caring for none of these things’, and also died in A.D. 65. The elder Pliny (A.D. 23–79) quotes freely from Columella. Without going into further detail, I think we may say that the De Re Rustica was probably published in the sixties of the first century A.D.

Columella was born and spent his early years at or near the town of Gades, the modern Cadiz, in the south-west corner of Spain. He does not mention his parents but often speaks of his uncle Marcus, who was also a keen agriculturist and lived in the Spanish province of Baetica in which Gades was situated. Possibly Columella lived with his uncle during his early years. At some period of his life he found himself on military service at Tarentum, where an inscription has been discovered which describes him as a military tribune of the Sexta Legio Ferrata, which is known to have been recruited at Gades.

Socrates. Good-morning, Eleutheros. Obviously something delightful has happened to you, to make you leave your work so early in the day—and to hurry along too, with your head in the clouds and a smile on your face, not even recognizing your friends! And Polytechnos has thrown down his chisel, too! Whatever is the good news?

The plough, which looks so clumsy and uncouth, changes its character. In conjunction with your team of horses, it becomes a glorious galleon, which you steer proudly over the rolling fields like some mariner of old. It is no longer an ugly, awkward, inanimate thing, but a delicately flexible instrument, which responds to your lightest touch … Not that the poesy of ploughing is continuous. The length of the lines is determined by the head-lands; it is broken into verses by each strike-out, and, if you wish to continue the simile, into different poems by the different fields. Such a nuisance these breaks are! Why cannot one plough one long straight furrow for ever without these petty hindrances ? But, this being impossible, one is forced to turn, to let the plough grate clumsily along the head-land, then to turn again into the work, and swing away on a new tack, happy and interested once more.

'Tis true I am no physician, but I would suggest in all sincerity that three months’ steady ploughing would cure any man of a nervous break-down. For ploughing is a mental tonic of great power. The ploughman is master of the situation. Nothing can stop him. Little by little he changes the surface of the earth. The plough may be slow, but it is so very sure. As the strip of black on the east side of that piece of prairie grew slowly wider and wider until it neared the west boundary, I was forced to marvel at the relentless power of the plough.