THE LAND 105strengthened Varro’s point. Moreover, there is no hint of tendentiousness
about the passage, in contrast with that of Columella. Columella is set on
conveying an unfavourable impression of the productivity and profi tability
of cereals – in a mere throw- away sentence, moreover – as part of his
detailed, elaborate apologia for viticulture. There is the additional suspicion
in Columella’s case that the yield fi gure has been plucked out of the air
rather than arrived at following anything that could be called systematic
research. The notion that he has given a genuine maximum, or average, yield
fi gure for Italy as a whole is insupportable; and, as we saw, his fi gure refers
to cereals in general.
Cicero’s fi gures are worthy of close attention, and not only because he is
the only source writing unambiguously about wheat. He supplies two seed:
crop ratios, a sowing rate, a fi gure for land registered as under cultivation
(30,000 iugera or 7,500 hectares), two rival bids for the tithe (36,000
medimnoi or 216,000 modii, and 41,000 medimnoi or 246,000 modii ), as
well as other circumstantial details. He was of course an attorney with a
brief to exaggerate the crimes of the governor Verres and his henchmen, in
this case Apronius. Thus it is possible that he deliberately understated the
wheat yield of the territory of Leontini in order to exaggerate the slice of the
total harvest exacted from the farmers by Apronius. On the surface his
seed:crop ratios, as they apply to good or excellent not average years, point
to a mean ratio of less than 1:8. Yet the bids for the tithe imply an expected
return from the land of twelve- fold or 1,950 kg/ha and 13.66-fold, about
2,225 kg/ha, for the year in question. Cicero regards the bids as high and
that of Apronius as artifi cially high, since he had no intention of exacting
merely a tithe. But he might have been less prepared to impute the same evil
intentions to Minucius, the higher but unsuccessful bidder. The claim that a
ten- fold return in the territory of the Leontini was ‘very rare’ begins to look
a little shaky. A mean yield of eight- fold for this land looks like a reasonable
conjecture.
The land of Leontini was hailed by Cicero as prime cereal land and the
people of Leontini as leading cereal producers ( Verr. 2.3.47,109), though it
turns out that they did not own their land. It was farmed by managers,
typically men from Centuripa, for absentee landlords, among whom we may
suppose were a considerable number of rich Italians. In view of their interest
in Sicilian grain, not to mention the interest of the Roman state, it is likely
that the territory of Leontini was as productive as the existing state of
agricultural technology allowed. There was, however, other good cereal-
producing land in Sicily. Such data as survive from the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries show average yields of seven- to ten- fold from large
estates in the environs of Palermo, Agrigento and Enna, all in the western
sector of the island.^27 The average yield for Sicily as a whole, insofar as this
concept has any meaning or practical utility, might not have been signifi cantly
lower. Six- fold was a common average yield from nineteenth- century Sicily,
at least until the last quarter of the century, which witnessed an agricultural