Needs/Wants (Matter): Villas in Central Italy

Abstract

The good farmer stores seed corn to pass on the vitality of growth to the next sowing season. The good farmer stores grain to protect their family from food shortages. The good farmer does not waste. The good farmer “stores up for himself; he stores up for others. He cares for his assets; he saves for others . . . he saves for the future.” The last predicate belongs to a collection of Aztec knowledge curated by the sixteenth-century Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. But it would equally well describe the bonus agricola as idealized by Cato in his second-century bc De Agri Cultura, which elevates the good farmer to a general template for the good man (vir bonus). And it is not as far removed as its date may suggest from Hesiod’s seventh-century bc Works and Days, or from Xenophon’s fourth-century bc Oeconomicus, in which Socrates’ interlocutor begs him to explain how to generate a large surplus from a patrimony, given Socrates’ apparent ability to save or “store” even based on the little he owns. From Hesiod over Cato to Sahagún, from the Greeks and Romans to the Aztecs, the topos of the good farmer – storing and saving – was inextricably interwoven with the moral landscape of agricultural societies. But unlike the Aztecs, the Greeks and the Romans inhabited an environmental and climatological niche specific to the Mediterranean, with its pattern of micro-ecologies and -geographies and marked intraand inter-annual