The Roman statesman Marcus Porcius Cato, better known as Cato the Elder, has gone down in history for his insistence that Punic Carthage had to be destroyed, even if Rome had already stripped the North African city of both its overseas and surrounding territories fifty years earlier. He is best known for the expression Cartago delenda est (‘Carthage has to be destroyed’), which may or may not be apocryphal, but contemporary accounts of his speeches relate in any case that Cato marshalled material support on the Roman Senate floor in a major speech in what was probably the year 152 BC: both Plutarch (Cato Maior 27.1) and Pliny the Elder (Naturalis Historia 15.74) describe how he brought a handful of ripe, plump ‘African figs’ to the Senate floor. Even if these figs are likely to have been grown at Cato’s central Italian estate, they still reminded his audience of the rapid and extensive recovery that Carthage had made after its crushing defeat by Rome in the Second Punic War (218–201 BC; Meijer 1984). Carthage had for centuries been renowned for the agricultural richness of its territories and its agronomic skills to exploit these, and Cato’s figs vividly reminded the Roman senators of the formidable power that their predecessors had faced over the two Punic Wars of the past hundred years or so. Whether or not it was Cato’s figs that convinced the Roman senators to go and raze Carthage to the ground in 146 BC remains open to speculation. The point that I would like to make is that rural produce, a horticultural crop, was important enough in Republican Rome, and sufficiently familiar to Roman Senators, to have played a central role in decisions about going to war; it could at least plausibly be presented as having swayed senatorial opinions. Cato is an interesting politician in this regard, as he was also the author of De Agri Cultura, which was as much a farmer’s almanac as a reminder to his Roman contemporaries of the importance of rural production. It is no less relevant in all of this that the most famous Carthaginian author was Mago the Agronomist, whom later Roman writers recognized as the ‘Father of Agriculture’ (Columella, De Re Rustica 1.1.13). Anecdotes and factoids like these readily illustrate what may be a point almost too obvious to make: as a world of preindustrial societies, the Mediterranean of Classical Antiquity was not first and foremost made up of and shaped by city-dwellers, as archaeologists and (ancient) historians such as Collingwood and Finley have long insisted. Major urban centres surely existed, with Rome and Carthage as prime examples, but these societies were also profoundly rural, and the implications of their rural contexts and roots, material and otherwise, were never far away – not even in an institution that was as urban and elitist as the Roman Senate. This observation goes well beyond the ancient Mediterranean and is indeed put into perspective by the sobering statistic that on a global scale less than 10% of people lived in an urban setting as late as the nineteenth century (AD!); it was indeed only a decade ago, sometime in 2009, that the

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农村工作和日子-次要视角

罗马政治家马库斯·波尔乔斯·卡托（Marcus Porcius Cato）（俗称“长者卡托”）因坚称必须摧毁普尼克斯迦太基而被载入史册，即使罗马早在五十年前就已经剥离了北非这座城市的海外和周边地区。他以Cartago delenda est（“迦太基必须被摧毁”）一词而闻名，它可能是也可能不是伪造的，但无论如何，他的演讲的当代叙述都涉及到Cato在罗马参议院的地板上整理了物质支持。在大约公元前152年的一次重要演讲中：普鲁塔克（Clut Maior 27.1）和老普林尼（Naturalis Historia 15.74）都描述了他如何将少量成熟，丰满的“非洲无花果”带到参议院。即使这些无花果很可能是在Cato意大利中部的庄园种植的，他们仍然使他的听众想起了迦太基在第二次布匿战争（公元前218-201年；迈耶1984年）被罗马击败后所取得的迅速而广泛的恢复。迦太基数百年来一直以其领土上的农业富饶和利用这些土地的农艺技术而闻名，而卡托的无花果生动地提醒了罗马参议员，他们的前任在过去一百多年左右的两次布匿战争中都面临着强大的力量。 。是否是卡托的无花果说服罗马参议员在公元前146年把迦太基夷为平地仍然有待猜测。我要说的是，农村产品（一种园艺作物）在罗马共和党中非常重要，并且对罗马参议员也足够熟悉，因此在决定开战方面发挥了核心作用。它至少可以合理地表现为参议员的观点摇摆不定。在这方面，卡托是一位有趣的政治家，因为他还是《德阿格里·库图拉》（De Agri Cultura）的作者，《德阿格里·库图拉》既是农民的年鉴，也提醒了他的罗马同时代人农村生产的重要性。在所有这一切中同样重要的是，最著名的迦太基作者是农学家麦格，后来罗马作家们将其公认为“农业之父”（Columella，De Re Rustica 1.1.13）。像这样的轶事和事实很容易说明这一点，而这一点几乎是显而易见的：作为一个工业化前社会的世界，古典古代地中海并不是由考古学家和（古代的）科林伍德和芬利这样的历史学家一直坚持。确实存在着主要的城市中心，例如罗马和迦太基，但这些社会也深深地陷于农村，其农村环境和根源，物质和其他方面的影响永远不会消失，即使在像城市这样的机构中也是如此。和罗马参议院的精英人士。这种发人深省的统计数据使这一观察远远超出了古代地中海地区，而在全球范围内，直到19世纪（AD！），才有不到10％的人生活在城市环境中，这一事实确实使这一观察成为现实。确实只有十年前的2009年，从来都不远-甚至在像罗马参议院一样城市化和精英化的机构中也是如此。这种发人深省的统计数据使这一观察结果远远超出了古代的地中海地区，并在清醒的统计数据中得到了证实：在全球范围内，只有不到10％的人生活在19世纪后的城市环境中（公元！）；确实只有十年前的2009年，从来都不远-甚至在像罗马参议院一样城市化和精英化的机构中也是如此。这种发人深省的统计数据使这一观察远远超出了古代地中海地区，而在全球范围内，直到19世纪（AD！），才有不到10％的人生活在城市环境中，这一事实确实使这一观察成为现实。确实只有十年前的2009年，