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This webpage reproduces an article in The Classical Journal Vol. 11, No. 6 (Mar. 1916), pp323‑332. The text is in the public domain. This page has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know!

p323 The Crooked Plow1
By Fairfax Harrison
Belvoir, Virginia

In the midst of some farm lands in Piedmont, Virginia, there is a garden pleasaunce, orderly and pleasantly planted with trees, with blooming shrubs, with a gay profusion of homely flowers in seasonable procession, amid comfortable expanses of trim turf whereon happy children are at play; and on an eminence in the cool seclusion of green jalousies stands what our English ancestors used to call a "shadow house," a refuge from the heat of the day, looking out on rolling acres of growing corn, of legumes, and of pasture where feed horses and cattle and "golden-footed" sheep. Far to the west are blue hills, the same blue hills of the Appalachian protaxis which make the Piedmont horizon from Pennsylvania to South Carolina, while to the south and east near by are green hills clad largely with chestnut and so revealing the geology of a lime-craving soil.

It is a place which is loved with the passionate love which spells home and aloofness from a selfish world, such as Horace had for his Sabine farm, such as inspired even the cynical Martial in memorable verses, such as guided the pen of the great Antwerp printer Plantin in one of the most delightful sonnets of the sixteenth century: such a place in fine as in all ages and in all lands moves a man of wholesome sentiment to do better work, to look up and forward and not down and backward.

On the walls of that shadow house I see four inscriptions, fur inspirations, four aspirations to the practice of a better agriculture as the oldest and the noblest occupation of a free man.

First, there are at verses from our Hebrew Bible (Gen. 1:2): "And God said: Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed and the fruit-tree yielding fruit, after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth . . . . and God saw that it was good."

p324 Next, there are a few noble lines from the Antigone (340) of Sophocles: "Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man. . . . . Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, the unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of the horses as the plow go to and fro from year to year. . . . . Yea, he hath resource for all . . . . only against Death shall he call for aid in vain."

Then comes a precept from the wise old Roman Varro (R.R I.18): "For nature gave us two schools of agriculture, which are experience and imitation. . . . . We should do both these things: imitate others and on our own account make experiments, following always some principle, not chance."

And, finally, there is an allocution from the gospel of Buddha: "The Blessed One said: 'Faith is the seed I sow; good works are the rain that fertilizes it; wisdom and modesty are the plow; my mind is the guiding rein; I lay hold of the handle of the law; earnestness is the goad I use; and exertion is my draught ox. This plowing is plowed to destroy the weeds of illusion. The harvest it yields is the immortal fruit of Nirvana, and thus all sorrow ends.' "

Meditating the other day, in such an atmosphere and in such surroundings, I saw the inspiring spectacle of a procession of plows fallowing a grain stubble, each turning a deep furrow under the steady quick pull of three heavy Percheron mares, and as I looked my mind went back to Homer's description of the king supervising his fall plowing, which Hephaistos wrought upon the shield of Achilles: "Furthermore, he set in the shield a soft fresh plowed field, rich tilth and wide, the third time plowed, and many plowers therein drove their yokes to and fro as they wheeled about. Whensoever they came to the boundary of the field and turned, then would a man come to each and give into his hands a goblet of sweet wine: others would be turning back along the furrows fain to reach the boundary of the deep tilth. . . . . And among them the King was standing in silence, with his staff, rejoicing in his heart."

Who here cannot sympathize with that king? He had doubtless just come out of the council chamber where he had been listening to the wrangling of his elder statesmen, and it is sheer human understanding which gives us, who have had the same experience, comprehension p325of why he rejoiced in his heart as he stood among the plows, leaning on his staff. Not only was he comforted by the sight of them, but doubtless his nostrils were filled, as ours have been, with the sweet savor of the new turned earth, that best of balms for the weary spirit, which Cicero calls "the divine odor of the earth so peculiarly its own, and to which, imparted to it by the sun, there is no perfume however sweet that can possibly be compared."

And so I was led to think most of all of plows and plowing, and now bring you my thoughts as I have endeavored to bring you my environment.

As good plowing is ever the newest so also is it the oldest of the arts, my thesis today will be that for all our boasted progress we have not greatly improved upon the best practice of those who followed the crooked plow when it was first developed from the bent stick which gave it its name, that even two thousand years ago men knew how to plow well and tend their soil intelligently, for all that their example has been forgotten and their teachings remain unheeded by the average farmer.

Let us, then, examine briefly the plowing practice of the ancient Romans.

First, as to the kind of plow they used. Those who are curious in such matters have doubtless studied the commentaries of the scholars on the two classical descriptions of the ancient plow, that of Vergil (Georgics I.169‑75), and that of Hesiod (Works and Days 425). Vergil, in mellifluous verse, sings: "From its youth up, in the woods, the elm is bent by main force and trained for a plow stock, taking the form of a crooked plow: to suit this a beam is shaped stretching eight feet in front, while behind are attached two mold boards resting on the slade (or sole piece) with a double ridge." Hesiod tells pithily of two kinds of plows, one, what he calls αὐτόγυος, of a single piece of wood serving at once as a share and beam, which was doubtless the original crooked plow, and the other (in a descriptive word pregnant of progress long before Vergil's day) πηκτός, or "built up."

From these meager descriptions, suggestive as they are to the farmer, the learned men, who know more of etymological than of vegetable roots, have discoursed upon the "rude" plows of the p326Greeks and the Romans with an Olympian condescension to the benighted men who used them. They have even, in elaborately engraved illustrations of what they imagine the crooked plows to have been, produced for the modern student weird and wonderful pictures which have sorely puzzled the practical experience of many a college lad fresh from the tail of the paternal plow. Such youths cannot be blamed in their bewilderment, for in all candor it may be said that the descriptions and illustrations of the crooked plow in the dictionaries of antiquitiesa would have puzzled Triptolemus himself, the inventor of the crooked plow, that cheerful and noble youth with the large brow and benign eye whom we see represented in the winged chariot presented to him by Demeter, on a red-figured vase by Hieron dating from 480 B.C. and now preserved in the British Museum.

The truth is that the very plows we use today had in all essentials their prototypes in the ancient fields of Italy, of Greece, of Egypt, and, who knows, even by the waters of Babylon. Throughout the ages there have been many improvements in the plow, but no fundamental changes. The ancients had in fact all the kinds of plows we have today, except gang plows, which is mere multiplication, and disk plows, which are not plows at all. They had plows with wooden socks for light soils, and plows with iron shares for stiff soils: Cato calls them respectively, from the territories in which they were used, campanicus and romanicus, and recommends the latter with the iron share as much the better. They had mold-board plows, plows with coulters (you will recall that the Hebrews under the domination of the Philistine were required to go to the land of the Philistines to get their shares and coulters sharpened); they had wheel plows; plows with broad pointed shares and plows with narrow pointed shares; they had plows with sharp points and sides, and plows with high raised cutting tops. One who can distinguish a plow from a hoe when he reads about it, as some of the learned commentators on the classics do not, can recognize them all in Varro and Vergil and especially in the eighteenth chapter of Pliny's Natural History. The ancients even had two-handled plows, though those we read about in the Latin authors had only a single hand-hold, what they called the maniculata. p327There lived during the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt, say at least 2,000 years before Christ, a gentleman farmer named Tim whose tomb or mastaba at Sakkara, near the ancient city of Memphis, has been explored in our own time. Among many beautiful decorations there is a fine tablet of agricultural scenes, including that of a plow with two handles over which the plowman is bending to make a deep furrow, and this plow is of the general shape of our modern plow, except that the share is straight and without a curved mold board. The plowing practice of Ti could not be illustrated by a picture of the primitive plow still used by the Portuguese peasant, which the handbooks cite so glibly. Ti knew a better tool than that.

The great improvement of the plow, the great labor-saver, which apparently the Romans never imagined, is the curved mold board. The books tell us that a short convex mold board was introduced into England from Holland early in the eighteenth century and was there developed into the so‑called Rotherham plow with a concave mold board, which in turn is the immediate ancestor of our plow of today. The modern iron plow dates only from 1819, when it was perfected by that true successor of Triptolemus, Jethro Wood of New York, who gave us the inestimable boon of interchangeable parts and is rewarded by being ignored in every biographical dictionary to which I have had access; while all the American authorities proudly but inconsistently parade the tenuous and impractical theories about plow construction which were entertained by Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Webster.

The "crooked" plow — the ancient plow — had a straight share, though it also had an attachment of two mold boards which stuck out behind on either side like ears, whence their Latin name aures. Anyone who has ever plowed corn with a double-shovel plow (a practice to be mentioned only in a whisper, for the agricultural colleges now tell us it is anathema, though I venture to say most of us who have ever plowed at all, have done it) will realize what would be the difficulty of turning a furrow in a stiff sod with such an implement, and yet that is what the commentators on Vergil's Georgics, from the grammarian Servius down to some of our contemporary schoolmasters, would have us believe the Romans did. p328The fact is that the Romans did not do their heavy plowing or breaking up with the kind of mold-board plow they had, but used the mold boards not plow for their second or third plowing. This was equivalent to our harrowing, when the soil was sufficiently mellow to admit of the use of such an instrument, just as it is possible to use the double-shovel plow in cultivating a planted crop. The heavy plowing or breaking of a sod was done by the Romans with a straight share. This may seem incredible, but they did it and did it well, if with the expenditure of much more labor, than we use today in the same operation.

I can perhaps best explain this by quoting to you here Columella's discourse on plowing and then comment upon it.

Columella was a Spanish gentleman who lived in the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius and wrote the largest and perhaps the most complete, as it certainly is the most agreeable, of the ancient works on agriculture which have survived the tooth of time. Columella is full of good sense, of good literature, and of real wisdom founded on the combination of a lively intelligence and what was evidently a thorough practical experience in the direction of actual farming operations. So far as I know, he has never been translated into English,b but I will venture a version of what he says on the preparation of a seed bed, both because of its intrinsic interest and because he explains what no other surviving Roman writer does, how the Romans plowed so well with the straight share. In his second book, Columella says:

I venture to say that, in the short chapter which I have given you, Columella has given more sound and immediately applicable instruction in agriculture than is contained in any two publications of the scientists who discourse to us today in farmers' bulletins issued from Washington.

But let us come back to the Roman plowing with the straight share. You will remember that Columella says that the plowman must run alternate furrows, one straight and one sloping; in other words, do, all the time, something equivalent to what we call back furrowing. The purpose of this is obvious on a moment's reflection. With a straight share the ancient plowman, skilled in the mystery of his craft, accomplished in two operations what our plow with its combination of a straight land side and a curved mold board does for us in one; that is to say, it first cut and then turned over the furrow slice. With a straight share laid sloping the furrow slice will turn, because the breadth of the share lifted up on the land side will raise the earth to the opposite side, which, meeting with the flat of the buris or stock of the plow, would be turned over by it. This explanation of Columella is clearly sustained by a sentence of Pliny which has puzzled many scholars: Latitudo vomeris caespites versat, "the breadth of the share turns the turf" — for what Pliny asserts to be the Roman experience is possible with the Roman plow only when it is laid sloping in a furrow the slice p332of which has already been cut, as Columella recommends. Furthermore, it would not be possible, except by following Columella's practice of the alternate furrow, to realize the opinion of the ancient Romans, to which Columella refers and which is so often quoted throughout the whole body of Roman agricultural literature, that the mark of good plowing is that no sign of the plow should appear on the land. This is something the mechanics of the modern plow with the curved mold board could not accomplish even in the mellowest of soils.

My point is, then, that with a less perfect implement than that we now have the Romans plowed well and probably plowed better than many of us do today; at all events they despised the man who laid a crooked furrow and invented the word "prevarication" to describe his act. The witty old Cato, with the barbed tongue, said that the crime of prevarication originated in the field and was translated to the forum, but, however much committed elsewhere, should still be avoided in the field. Unfortunately, many of us who travel through the United States today see evidences that this crime is still practiced in the field, whatever may be the case in the modern forum.

Let us, then, take off our hats to the Roman plowman and to the crooked plow with which he did his work.

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The Author's Note:

1 A paper read at a joint meeting of the American Philological Association and the Archaeological Institute of America at Princeton University, December 29, 1915.

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Thayer's Notes:

a the dictionaries: among them, one of the most prominent at the time was Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities; Prof. Harrison may very likely have been thinking of its article Aratrum, which does, however, have the merit of collecting the sources in ancient literature.

❦

b Columella never translated into English: The Loeb edition of Columella (p. xxix) lists a lone English translation of him: Curtius, M. C., L. Iunius Moderatus Columella of Husbandry in Twelve Books and His Book Concerning Trees, London, 1745. Since Prof. Harrison wrote, another English translation was prepared for that Loeb edition (1941‑1955); it is widely available.

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