Ancient Latin Writers on Agriculture, Vol. II: Columella

...the dictatorship, and again, having laid down the fasces symbols of magisterial authority—which he had returned to the state more hastily as a victor than he had assumed them as commander—he returned to those same bullocks and his four-jugerum hereditary plot a jugerum was an ancient Roman measure of land, roughly 0.6 acres: likewise, C. Fabricius and Curius Dentatus—the one after driving Pyrrhus from the borders of Italy, the other after subduing the Sabines—accepted the seven jugera of captured land distributed to each man, and cultivated them no less industriously than they had courageously sought them with arms. And not to pursue individuals untimely now, when I behold so many other memorable leaders of the Roman race who always flourished in this double zeal of defending or cultivating their ancestral or acquired borders, I understand that our former custom and manly life have become displeasing to our luxury and delights. For all of us (as M. Varro already complained in the times of our forefathers), having abandoned the sickle and the plow, have crept within the wall, and we move our hands in circuses and theaters rather than among the crops and vineyards. Stupefied, we admire the gestures of effeminate men, because they feign with a womanly motion a sex denied to men by nature, and deceive the eyes of the spectators. Soon after, so that we may be fit for the taverns, we boil away our daily indigestion with Spartan baths Laconicis: likely referring to a type of hot-air bath, and we seek thirst by exuding sweat, and we consume our nights in lusts and drunkenness, and our days in play or sleep, and we count ourselves fortunate because we see neither the rising nor the setting sun. Thus, ill health follows that slothful life. For the bodies of our youth are so lax and dissolved that death seems as if it would change nothing. But, by Hercules, that true offspring of Romulus, exercised by constant hunts and no less by...