On Agriculture, Volume II: Books 5-9 (Loeb Classical Library 407) - Hardcover

Columella; E. S. Forster; Edward H. Heffner; Loeb Classical Library

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674994485 ISBN 13: 9780674994485

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1954

Synopsis

A Roman farmer on farming.

Columella (Lucius Iunius Moderatus) of Gades (Cadiz) lived in the reigns of the first emperors to about AD 70. He moved early in life to Italy where he owned farms and lived near Rome. It is probable that he did military service in Syria and Cilicia and that he died at Tarentum.

Columella’s On Agriculture (De re rustica) is the most comprehensive, systematic, and detailed of Roman agricultural works. Book 1 covers choice of farming site; water supply; buildings; staff. 2: Plowing; fertilizing; care of crops. 3–5: Cultivation, grafting, and pruning of fruit trees, vines, and olives. 6: Acquisition, breeding, and rearing of oxen, horses, and mules; veterinary medicine. 7: Sheep, goats, pigs, and dogs. 8: Poultry; fish ponds. 9: Bee-keeping. 10 (in hexameter poetry): Gardening. 11: Duties of the overseer of a farm; calendar for farm work; more on gardening. 12: Duties of the overseer’s wife; manufacture of wines; pickling; preserving. There is also a separate treatise, Trees (De arboribus), on vines and olives and various trees, perhaps part of an otherwise lost work written before On Agriculture.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Columella is in three volumes.

About this title

About the Authors

Edward Seymour Forster (1879–1950) was Lecturer in Classics at the University of Sheffield.

Edward Hoch Heffner (1886–1963) was Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1954
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674994485
• ISBN 13: 9780674994485
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 528