e he is easily tamed and once domesticated never
reverts to a wild life.[138]

"Because their young take after their parents, it is important to
choose both jack and jenny of good conformation. The conditions of
buying and selling asses are much the same as for other kinds of
cattle and include stipulations as to their health and against tort.
They are best fed on corn and barley bran. The jennies are bred before
the solstice so that they may have their foals at the same season in
the following year, for their period of gestation is twelve months.
The jennies should be relieved from work while in foal for fatigue at
that time injures the offspring: but the jacks, on the contrary, are
worked all the time, because it is lack of exercise which is bad for
them.

"In the matter of rearing, practically the same rules apply to asses as
to horses. The foals are not separated from their dams for the first
year after they are born: during the second year they are permitted
to stay with their dams at night, but they should then be tied with a
loose halter or some other such restraint. In the third year you begin
to break them for whatever service they are intended.

"As to the number: they are not usually kept in herds unless it may be
for transport service; generally they are used to turn the mill, or
for carrying about the farm, or even for the plough where the soil
is light, as in Campania. Herds of asses are some times employed by
merchants, like those who transport wine, or oil, or corn, or any
other commodity, from Brundisium or Apulia to the sea, by pack
trains."

_Of horses_

VII. Here Lucienus took up the discourse. "It is my turn," he said,
"to open the barrier and drive in my horses: and they are not only
stallions, of which, like Atticus, I keep one for every ten breeding
mares, but mares as well, such as Q. Modius Equiculus, that gallant
soldier, was wont to esteem for use even in war nearly as much as
stallions.[139]

"He who wishes to have such studs of stallions and mares as may be seen
in Peloponnesus and in Apulia should first consider age and see that
he obtains them not less than three nor more than ten years old. The
age of a horse, as also of nearly all animals whose hoofs are not
cloven, even horned animals, may be known from the condition of the
teeth: thus at thirty months of age a colt is said to lose the milk
incisors from the middle of his mouth, two above and two below. At the
beginning of t