ble
profit from it by the sale of its products. Thus Cato is most
particular in urging that a farm should be so placed as to have easy
communication with market towns, where the wine and oil could be sold,
which were the chief products, and where various necessaries could be
bought cheap, such as pottery and metal-work of all kinds.[339] Thus
the farm does not entirely depend on the labour of its own familia;
nevertheless it rests still upon an economic basis of slave labour.
For an olivetum of 240 jugera Cato puts the necessary hands as
thirteen in number, all non-free; for a vineyard of 100 jugera at
sixteen; and these figures are no doubt low, if we remember his
character for parsimony and profit-making.[340] Free labour was to be
had, and was occasionally needed; at the very outset of his work
Cato (ch. 4) insists that the owner should be a good and friendly
neighbour, in order that he may easily obtain, not only voluntary
help, but hired labourers (operarii). These were needed especially at
harvest time, when extra hands were wanted, as in our hop-gardens, for
the gathering of olives and for the vintage. Sometimes the work was
let out to a contractor, and he gives explicit directions (in chs. 144
and 145) for the choice of these and the contracts to be made with
them; whether in this case the contractor (redemptor) used entirely
free or slave labour does not appear distinctly, but it seems clear
that a proportion at least was free.[341] What the free labourers did
at other times of the year, whether or no they were small cultivators
themselves, Cato does not tell us.

For the age with which we are more specially concerned, we have the
evidence of Varro's three books on husbandry, written in his old age,
after the fall of the Republic. Here we find the economic condition of
the farm little changed since the time of Cato. The permanent labour
is non-free, but in spite of the vast increase in the servile labour
available in Italy, there is still a considerable employment of
freemen at certain times, on all farms where the olive and vine were
the chief objects of culture. In the 17th chapter of his first book,
in which he gives interesting advice for the purchase of suitable
slaves, he begins by telling us that all land is cultivated either
by slaves or freemen, or both together, and the free are of three
kinds,--either small holders (pauperculi) with their children; or
labourers who live by wage (conducticii), and ar