Volume 1, Number 8 · December 12, 1963
Bogus Togas
By M.I. Finley
The Civilization of Rome
by Pierre Grimal, translated by W.S. Maguiness
Simon and Schuster, 531 pp., $11.50
The Revolutions of Ancient Rome
by F.R. Cowell
Praeger, 228 pp., $5.75
Towards the middle of the second century B.C., Cato the Censor wrote a manual, De Agricultura, on the management of large estates operated with slave labor. 'Sell the old work oxen,' he recommended, 'the wool, the skins, the old wagon, the worn-out iron tools, the aged slave, the slave that is diseased, and everything else that [you do] not need.' This passage evoked in Plutarch several angry pages: this is not mere miserliness, he insisted, but excessive meanness of character. Professor Grimal, on the other hand, finds no room for the passage in the five pages he devotes to Cato's book. He acknowledges that some of the slaves lived and worked in chains, but, he adds, 'we are not to suppose that the master employed such methods because he liked them.' Elsewhere (in reviewing Michael Grant's The World of Rome) he expanded that point in a most revealing way:
Review, 996 words
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