the poem. This bit of delicate genre-painting, which is as good in its
way as anything in Crabbe's homely poems, has indeed nothing to tell
us of life in an insula at Rome; but it may serve to show what was the
ordinary food of the Italian of that day.[51] The absence of the sides
of bacon ("durati sale terga suis," line 57) is interesting. No doubt
the Roman took meat when he could get it; but to have to subsist on
it, even for a short time, was painful to him, and more than once
Caesar remarks on the endurance of his soldiers in submitting to eat
meat when corn was not to be had.[52]

The corn which was at this time the staple food of the Romans of the
city was wheat, and wheat of a good kind; in primitive times it had
been an inferior species called _far_, which survived in Cicero's day
only in the form of cakes offered to the gods in religious ceremonies.
The wheat was not brought from Italy or even from Latium; what each
Italian community then grew was not more than supplied its own
inhabitants,[53] and the same was the case with the country villas
of the rich, and the huge sheep-farms worked by slaves. By far the
greater part of Italy is mountainous, and not well suited to the
production of corn on a large scale; and for long past other causes
had combined to limit what production there was. Transport too,
whether by road or river, was full of difficulty, while on the other
hand a glance at the map will show that the voyage for corn-ships
between Rome and Sicily, Sardinia, or the province of Africa (the
former dominion of Carthage), was both short and easy--far shorter and
easier than the voyage from Cisalpine Gaul or even from Apulia, where
the peninsula was richest in good corn-land. So we are not surprised
to find that, according to tradition, which is fully borne out by more
certain evidence,[54] corn had been brought to Rome from Sicily as
early as 492 B.C. to relieve a famine, or that since Sicily, Sardinia,