We learn from Vopiscus that there was in Etruria much fertile land uncultivated, which the Emperor Aurelian intended to convert into vineyards, in order to furnish the Roman people with a gratuitous distribution of wine: a very proper expedient to dispeople still further that capital and all the neighbouring territories.
It may not be amiss to take notice of the account which Polybius gives of the great herds of swine to be met with in Tuscany and Lombardy, as well as in Greece, and of the method of feeding them which was then practised. “There are great herds of swine,” says he, “throughout all Italy, particularly in former times, through Etruria and Cisalpine Gaul. And a herd frequently contains a thousand or more swine. When one of these herds in feeding meets with another they mix together, and the swineherds have no other expedient to separate them than to go to different quarters, where they sound their horn, and these animals, being accustomed to that signal, run immediately each to the horn of his own keeper. Whereas in Greece, if the herds of swine happen to mix in the forests, he who has the greatest flock takes cunningly the opportunity of driving all away. And thieves are very apt to purloin the straggling hogs which have wandered to a great distance from their keeper in search of food.”
May we not infer from this account that the North of Italy was then much less peopled and worse cultivated than at present? How could these vast herds be fed in a country so thick of enclosures, so improved by agriculture, so divided {p161} by farms, so planted with vines and corn intermingled together? I must confess that Polybius’s relation has more the air of that economy which is to be met with in our American colonies than the management of a European country.