Throughout the history of ancient Rome, few people were valorized as much as the bonus agricola, the good farmer. This archetype is epitomized in the literary character of Cincinnatus, a man who in 460 BCE stopped plowing his small plot and wiped the dirt from his hands in order to go to the Senate and accept command of an army to save Rome in her time of need. The memory of such men, who worked the soil with their own hands and put the affairs of the State before personal ambition, were preserved in a later literary tradition. Prestigious authors of the Late Republic and Empire, such as Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Pliny the Elder all heap praise on these doughty farmers. Indeed, agriculture was considered exclusively a noble pursuit and considered a primary step in education, but as Rome embraced the mantle of Empire and grew in power and wealth during the late Republic, the perception of the elite working land themselves also changed. An influx of cash and slaves reshaped the face of Roman agriculture as wealthy elites amassed large farms (latifundia) powered exclusively by servile labor. Through an investigation of agricultural manuals, such as Cato’s De agricultura we find the bonus agricola still praised as the idealized hero of agricultural practice, but the act of working the land is conflated with land ownership. Thus elite landlords of large agribusiness farms appropriate the status of the good farmer in Roman literature and are conferred all the praise due the heroes of an earlier era.