Feeding cities has never been easy. Yet, despite their agricultural mishaps, our urban ancestors held the land in deep respect. Cultivation and culture, as we saw earlier, were powerfully connected in the Roman mind. Like the Greeks and Sumerians before them, the Romans considered cultivated land (ager) a rural extension of civitas, the civilised realm of the city.37 Wilderness, in contrast, was viewed with disdain bordering on dread, the home of unruly barbarians who were the very opposite of civilised life.38
