> From the Roman Emperor Tiberius to the Victorian gardeners of a few generations ago, hotbeds are nothing new.
I had no idea Tiberius was a farmer.
I had no idea Tiberius was a farmer.
Also, it was a largely agrarian society, so even an emperor could have had a few turns at managing fields at some point in their life.
When Diocletian, the first of the "Dominate" era emperors, voluntarily left power (the only emperor ever to do so), he returned to his palatial fortress on the Croatian coast to pursue gardening and especially cabbage farming.
At one point after his retirement, a group of senators from Rome was dispatched to visit him and convince him to go back into the purple due to the collapse of the tetrarchic system he'd set up for Imperial administration.
While the senators argued with him, Diocletian famously brought them to his garden and pulled out one of his own cabbages. He then asked the senators how they could expect him to possibly come back to the stresses of Rome when he had managed to raise such beautiful cabbages in the peace of his new home.
Assuming ancient readers were as proficient as modern ones, "reading every book available" was a reasonable ambition back then, and you were almost certainly limited by money and availability more than time.
It is from this that we get Bread and Circuses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae
It was more a moral/identity narrative than a thing they actually did. They certainly owned the villas but whether they engaged in any way with the actual work (even in the capacity of "boss") of such places... maybe their servants, or their wives...
Other fictional writing I read suggests engagement in "trade" was beneath the senatorial classes, and so acquisition of land and it's economic exploitation underwrote what was considered "acceptable" sources of revenue.
Oddly, not entirely unlike the British Landed classes. They didn't like to admit that their land holdings had coal mines, where sheep gently grazing was acceptable.
Cato was, incidentally, a novus homo, not born into a Patrician family. His father was a pleb and a soldier and a farmer, and he was as well.
> Other fictional writing I read suggests engagement in "trade" was beneath the senatorial classes [...] Oddly, not entirely unlike the British Landed classes
Yeah, the vibe I get was that this was a feature of most? pre-capitalist societies.
Yes, commerce and labor are both taboo for elites in most premodern societies.
There are some obvious exceptions; the Phoenicians wouldn't have seen anything wrong with engaging in commerce.
*
On the other hand... Confucianism puts merchants as one of the lower members of society, because they do not add value as artisans. Edo Japan famously had caste of samurai on the top, farmers on the middle, and merchants on the lowest.
My prejudice would be that new money (by trade) is still looked down upon by old money (inherited/landowners/dynasties). By those with low self-esteem.
Exactly the prejudice such old money would (and to your point, still does) hold against "merchants".
Perhaps he was an inspiration to the Avatars cabbage guy.