The Intimate Bond (15 page)

Roman Plow and Pasture

Aristotle wrote that Nature had made animals for humankind, “both for his service and his food.” Beasts possessed no virtue or vice, for “bestial badness is different in kind from vice.”
¹²
Animals were subservient to human needs; they were unable to tell us their needs. From there it was but a short step to considering uncivilized people as beasts and equating them with animals. The Greek geographer Strabo wrote of Corsican mountaineers brought to Rome: “[You could] see and marvel at the degree to which the nature of wild beasts and grazing cattle is manifested in them.”
¹³

The Romans took a more pragmatic approach to cattle than the Greeks. Author Marcus Terentius Varro wrote in his eighty-fifth year that the ox “is still man's hard-working ally in the cultivation of the soil.”
¹⁴
Varro distilled a lifetime of farming experience into his
De Res Rusticae
. His credentials were impeccable—a lifetime of owning stud farms for horses and mules, produced to generate maximum profit for capital outlay. He farmed on a large scale and ran hundreds of oxen strictly as working animals, so he knew of what he wrote. Much depended upon slave labor, and here again Varro had strong opinions. He recommended older slave foremen, who could read and write. “They are not to be allowed to control their men with whips rather than with words.”
¹⁵

Beef never loomed large in Roman diets, except for flesh from sacrificial animals. Oxen were strictly working beasts, raised for hauling carts and plowing. However, every farmer bred a few head for sacrificial purposes, chosen for their fine appearance. Invariably, breeders sought robust animals, their characteristics varying with Italy's varied environments. Authors such as Varro mention six Italian and four overseas breeds, including small Alpine cattle, said to be excellent milkers and hard workers. Swiss cattle are still some of the finest dairy animals in
the world. Not that the Romans drank fresh milk. They used it to make cheese, especially in the rich pasturelands of the Po Valley.

Greek and Roman farmers had to be efficient, for they fed large and rapidly growing urban populations. The populations they supported were equal to, if not larger than, those of early nineteenth-century Greece and Italy.
¹⁶
Most people ate a remarkably varied diet that included cereals, some meat, wine, olive oil, and fruit. Their skeletons offer eloquent testimony to the efficacy of food production. Romans averaged 168 centimeters (5 feet, 6 inches) in height, a stature regained by Italians only after World War II. Hellenistic Greeks were taller than any modern Greeks until the late 1970s. In dramatic contrast, the mean heights of Spaniards, Italians, and Austro-Hungarians during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shrank to those of Ancient Egyptian peasants during the Old Kingdom of 2500
BCE
. The blame lies with the malnutrition caused by protein- and calorie-deficient cereal diets consumed by western Europeans after the decline of the Roman Empire.

Fortunately, the Islamic agronomists of al-Andalus, formerly Roman Spain, absorbed the rich agricultural knowledge set down by authors Cato, Columella, Varro, and others now lost. Intensive agriculture did not reappear in Europe until cities grew rapidly in thirteenth-century Renaissance Italy. After the fall of Rome, throughout much of western Europe agriculture remained at the subsistence level for centuries. Many centuries later, the eighteenth-century English farming writer Adam Dickson pointed out that Roman agriculture was superior to that of England even in the midst of the Agricultural Revolution unfolding during his lifetime.
¹⁷

Cattle lay at the very center of Roman agricultural endeavors. The farmers handled their livestock carefully, because they were valuable—money on the hoof and a source of backbreaking labor. Above all, they prized them for their nitrogen-rich manure, which enhanced crop yields dramatically. Even smallholders anticipated many innovations in modern agricultural practice, including seed selection and crop rotation. They planted alfalfa, most of the modern fodder crops for their herds, and lesser-known fodders, such as drought-resistant trefoil, a
form of alfalfa ideal for sheep and goats. Roman wheat yields matched or exceeded the best performance of medieval farmers.

Without cattle, the intensification of Greek and Roman agriculture would never have achieved the success it did in supporting prosperous urban markets and underpinning burgeoning trade in such commodities as olive oil and wine. The city-states of Greece, Roman Italy, and Carthage were as highly urbanized as much later Dutch or Italian city-states. They were also powerfully democratic, which led to greater prosperity and a rising demand for luxury products, while the authorities imported cheap grain from Egypt and North Africa for cheap staple foods for the general population. This encouraged greater agricultural intensification, and much greater livestock production.

Cattle were, in large part, the engines that drove this agricultural economy. Farmers purchased the stock they needed, and then maintained their herds from their own resources, selling off weak or barren cows and replenishing the breeding stock from time to time. Everything was carefully managed, even the use of barren cows as draft animals. “Because of their sterility they can work just as hard as bullocks,” adjured Cato. Working cattle spent their lives on the farm, for the system required that they work regularly throughout the year. The critical care periods were in late autumn, when all fresh forage was used up, and March, when spring plowing was in full swing. By spring, the oxen were weak, having been fed for the most part on dry fodder and even acorns and refuse from wine presses. A wise farmer developed a mix of hay and mash, which was quite adequate by modern standards. The most important feed was green fodder, such as legumes or horse-barley, said to be “better food than wheat for all farm animals.” Most farmers had to stall-feed their herds. Above all, oxen preferred green fodder. As Cato remarked, “You mustn't put them to grass except in winter, when they are not ploughing; when they have once eaten green fodder, they are always expecting it, and they have to be muzzled when ploughing to keep them from going for the grass.” A conscientious farmer branded his herd with a personal mark to keep track of them, took care they were watered twice a day in summer, and watched them grazing to prevent crowding. The rewards were strictly financial, in good prices for crops
and for beasts when one sold them. Varro added, “Dogs must be kept as a matter of course, for no farm is safe without them.”
¹⁸
Brigands and cattle rustlers were a constant problem in many remoter areas.

There was a real partnership between human and beast. But this was not teamwork based on emotion, as was the case of the Nuer, who cherished and loved their beasts for both economic and social reasons. Roman owners, many of whom sold grain to Rome and other cities, thought of their cattle in purely economic terms. They may have handled them with care and gentleness, and performed the prescribed rituals before plowing, but in the final analysis, they regarded their beasts as workers who generated profit of all kinds.

The relationship began with training one's beasts for the plow or to haul carts. Such training required gentleness and patience, especially with aggressive beasts. The farmer would often tie the animals to horizontal posts, tethering them with ropes that severely restricted movement to accustom them to the yoke. Unruly beasts might require up to thirty-six hours of such treatment. After this somewhat brutal breaking-in period, which could last several days, the animals had to be taught how to walk slowly and steadily so they could haul plows or wagons. Equally matched pairs of oxen learned “to walk for a thousand paces, in an orderly manner and without fear.”
¹⁹
From the beginning, a pair alternated between hauling on the left and right side, to lessen fatigue. After three days, the animals were usually ready to don the yoke, a process that ended up with their towing an empty wagon. The same step-by-step process applied to plow oxen, with the animals first towing a plow over already tilled ground. Sometimes the trainer teamed up an experienced beast with a newcomer. Columella argued against the use of any form of goad or violence to secure obedience. Just like the first farmers to domesticate the aurochs, the Romans knew well that gentle persuasion worked with their charges.

But ambivalence lingered in a society that took sacrificial rituals very seriously. Sacrifices permeated Roman society—involving everything from crumbs thrown into a hearth to offerings of chickens, sheep, and oxen. Public sacrifices in city forums like that in Rome sometimes involved large numbers of oxen, often with gilded horns. Just as in
Athens, the sacrificial beast processed to the altar, where a priest would scatter grain upon it and then drink a libation. He would then pour the remainder of the wine between the beast's horns, some hair from the area being burnt on the altar as an offering to the gods. The animal was then stunned with a mallet before its throat was cut and the carcass disemboweled. An augur carefully examined the body so predictions could be made from the entrails. With the exception of the vital organs reserved for the deities, the meat was consumed by those attending the ceremony. Every detail of the ritual had to be absolutely correct, or the ceremony and the sacrifice had to be repeated.

Many centuries were to pass before animal sacrifice gave way to Christian ritual, and the symbolic offering of wine as the blood of Christ replaced ambivalent sacrifices of beasts.

How the Donkey Started Globalization

 

CHAPTER 8

“Average Joes”

“Lying there like the dead, he made no effort to rise. Clubs couldn't budge him, nor goads, not the yanking of his tail and ears every way which way.” The ruthless bandits refused “to enslave themselves to an ass.”
¹
They hamstrung the helpless beast and flung him into a nearby ravine. The
Metamorphoses
of the Roman writer Apuleius, which none other than St. Augustine referred to as
Asinus aureus
, the “Golden Ass,” is the only Latin novel to survive in its entirety. The protagonist, Lucius, is insatiably curious about magic. He tries to perform a spell to transform himself into a bird, but accidentally turns into an ass instead. After suffering dire hardships as a pack animal and grinder of grain, Lucius the donkey becomes a human once more, and a devotee of the goddess Isis. “Immediately the offensive form of a brute beast fell from me. . . . My enormous ears resumed their original paltry proportions.”
²

The Golden Ass
epitomizes our cavalier and often cruel attitudes toward these remarkable beasts. Donkeys have worked alongside people for more than eight thousand years—but “alongside” actually means in the background, for they have always been inconspicuous players in history. Plodding asses carried food and water, exotic luxuries, and essential commodities across mountain passes and through deserts, in city streets and at the behest of great rulers. They walked in the background of events both stirring and prosaic, almost completely below the historical radar. Often a sentence in a history books suffices: “The Egyptians used donkey caravans to reach desert mines.” “Black donkeys carried tin to Anatolia from Assur.” Then the donkeys vanish once again into the oblivion of the past, just like illiterate peasants planting
the fields. This humble pack animal was a silent partner to humans, sometimes working in the fields or grinding grain, sometimes even consumed as meat. Hardworking and adaptable, donkeys were among the most important players in the development and spread of civilization. For some reason they come across the pages of history as stubborn, mere beasts of burden, and capable only of loud braying. In fact, they are the unsung heroes of the long human relationship with animals, and we have never given them the credit they deserve. The more we uncover their story, the more significant their quiet roles in history become.

Saharan Origins

The southern Sahara Desert, winter, 5000
BCE
. Four emaciated donkeys plod steadily along the pebbly trail. Heads slightly down, heavily laden, they look neither to the left nor the right at the featureless aridity on either side. Firewood and water—the donkeys carry heaped bundles of dried shrubs or leather water bags suspended on either side of their coarse saddle blankets, collected at a small oasis over the horizon. Wizened, animal-skin-clad women and their beasts find their way with subtle landmarks such as a long, dried-up watercourse, a large boulder, or an unusually conspicuous dune—familiar signposts to people born to desert life, but the travelers never relax. It's easy to get lost in this featureless landscape of sand, gravel, and boulders. The small caravan picks its way across the desert, its destination a large clump of palm trees barely visible on the horizon, where cattle graze. The herders' traditions tell of better-watered times in the past, when springs and shallow lakes abounded and the people moved over short distances. For generations since, humans and their animals have ranged far and wide for sustenance, relying on their donkeys to bring water and firewood to temporary camps.

Quite when and where people domesticated donkeys remains somewhat of a mystery.
³
One likely ancestor is the now nearly extinct African wild ass,
Equus africanus
. Most likely, wild asses were tamed in several
areas of North Africa, one of which was the Sahara, where the donkey's unique qualities came into play at a time of increasingly erratic rainfall and much greater aridity, after about 5000
BCE
.

For thousands of years after the Ice Age, the Sahara enjoyed regular, if sparse, rainfall. The desert supported broad tracts of semiarid grassland. Shallow lakes, springs, and oases provided ample water supplies for hunters and, later, cattle herders. By at least 6000
BCE
, probably earlier, hunters in the southern Egyptian desert and to the west had domesticated
Bos primigenius
, the formidable wild ox. They lived off their herds, and off game and wild plant foods. Both water supplies and grazing were dependable enough that the herders could survive comfortably within relatively limited areas.