How a Roman ran the farm by the book

The oldest Latin prose is a farm manual

The oldest surviving work of Latin prose is a book on farming, written about 160 BC by Cato the Elder.¹ Its preface sets the tone. The ancestors' laws, Cato says, had "the thief be mulcted double and the usurer fourfold".² A moneylender, in the old Roman view, was worse than a thief.

The book itself is instructions. Most of them are about vines, olives and oxen. The ones that matter here are about the owner, the overseer and the accounts.

Audit on arrival

Cato's second chapter is what a landowner should do when he arrives at his farm. Greet the household god. Walk the land. Then call in the overseer and ask what work has been done and what has not. And then go through the books: the cash accounts, the grain accounts, the purchases of fodder.³ Only after the audit does the owner give orders.

This is an audit in the modern sense: a check of records against reality, by the person whose money it is, at a set time. It is written down as a routine two thousand one hundred years ago.

Sell, don't buy

Cato's rule for the owner is four words in English: "The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit."⁴ A farm that sells is a farm that produces a surplus. A farm that buys is one that is being run for someone else's profit.

The overseer's rules

The rules for the overseer, the paid manager, are stricter. He may give no credit without orders. He may lend no seed, wine or oil. He may buy nothing without the owner's knowledge. And he "must not want to keep anything hidden from the master".⁵ Every one of those rules is about the gap between the person who handles the money and the person who owns it. Cato closes the gap with prohibitions and with the owner's eye, which is the same answer Xenophon had given in Greek a century and a half earlier.

The day-book and the ledger

A Roman householder kept two sets of records. A day-book, the adversaria, recorded transactions as they happened. Each month the entries were posted into a formal ledger, the codex accepti et expensi, with pages for money received and money paid out.⁶ The reference work that describes this says the ledger was "sufficient for the ordinary householder". A daily record and a monthly posting to a ledger of receipts and payments is, in outline, what every household budgeting tool still does.

Receipts from Pompeii

The records themselves rarely survive. One set does. In 1875 excavators in Pompeii found 153 wax tablets in the house of a banker and auctioneer named Lucius Caecilius Iucundus. They date from AD 15 to 62. All are receipts: most for auctions he ran on behalf of clients, a few for contracts with the town. The middle-sized transaction was 4,500 sesterces, at a time when a legionary earned 900 a year.⁷ A banker's files, buried by a volcano, are the best surviving picture of ordinary Roman money changing hands, and every one of them is a written record with witnesses.

The other Roman writers

Cato was not alone. Varro dedicated his farming book to his wife Fundania and listed more than fifty Greek writers on the subject, plus a Carthaginian, Mago, whose twenty-eight books on farming the Roman senate had ordered translated.⁸ His rule for the farmer: aim at "two goals, profit and pleasure".⁹ Columella, writing under the emperors, cited Xenophon's household book in Cicero's Latin version when he set out the housekeeper's duties.¹⁰ And the moralist Plutarch wrote a whole essay against borrowing, in which lenders "give birth to interest before conception": they demand the interest as they hand over the loan.¹¹

What the Romans knew

The Roman farm manual assumes three things that most modern households have lost. The owner audits the books, in person, at a fixed time. The person who handles the money may hide nothing. And the record, not the memory, is what settles a dispute. None of these needed a bank.