Cato the Elder and the "Theoretical Farmers" of 18th- and 19th-century Britain

Abstract

Cato the Elder’s De agricultura, the first farming manual in Latin, inspired a genre of farming manuals and didactic texts; yet Cato’s real-life participation in farming and the accuracy of his knowledge has been called into question. Centuries later, we see the rise in agricultural writing among British gentlemen of the 18th and 19th centuries; here wealthy landowners wrote detailed instructions about menial labor. This paper explores the emergence of the farming genre among elite authors in these two contexts and considers how it reflects the tensions of two nascent empires.