¹ cf. esp. Boldrer, F. (ed., trans., comm.), L. Iuni Moderati Columellae Rei Rusticae Liber Decimus (Carmen de Cultu Hortorum) (1996), esp. 33–50Google Scholar, on the paradosis; E. de Saint-Denis (ed., French trans., comm.), De L'Agriculture, Livre X (De l'Horticulture) (1969), esp. 8–11, on Book 10 ∼ De re rustica.

² For recent scholarship: Martin, R., ‘État présent des études sur Columelle’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römisches Welt II.32.3 (1985), 1959–79Google Scholar.

³ cf. Varro, De Re Rust. 1.14.

⁴ ‘Thus far, I decided, should instruction go, and that's it, on horticulture and the estate manager's duties. Yes, I did opine at the entrée to this work of induction that he must be trained and informed in every single country task. But more often than not it transpires that recollection of what we have learned lets us down, and it all needs frequent renewing from the manual. That is why I have subjoined the contents of all the books of Columella, so that when the need arises it can easily be found what needs checking out in each matter, and what method each matter requires.’

⁵ There is no Oxford, or Teubner Columella, the Budé has no Book 11 so far, the flimsy fascicles of the Uppsala edition begun by Lundström in 1897 and completed in 1968 are not so accessible: Lundström, V., Josephson, Å. and Hedberg, S. (eds), L. Iuni Moderati Columellae Opera Quae Exstant, Fasc. 1–8 (1897–1968)Google Scholar. There are no translations from jolly Penguin vel. sim.

⁶ Ash, H. B., Forster, E. S. and Heffner, E. H. (ed. and trans.), Vols 1–3 (Loeb Classical Library, 1941–1955)Google Scholar. Two editors in a row perished on the way; the third and last volume, with Books 10–12, was by Heffner.

⁷ Fasc. 7: 62, ad loc.

⁸ ‘Continet autem quae intra uillam agi debeat a muliere officio uilicationis praeposita de conditura uinorum. de custodia pomorum. et pleraque alia quae in oeconomicis libris praecipiuntur. Praeter hos duodecim libros singularis est liber ad eprium marcellum de cultura uinearum et arborum. hic liber aliter quam indicem habet inscriptus.’ Note that Lundström excises from his text the argumentum for the Contents of Liber Tertius. ΦΥΤΕΥΤΙΚΟΣ surcularis, plus the breakdown listing its main subjects in order, as given in the MSS. This material he relegates to the apparatus, where it is duly noted.

⁹ I is Qui rusticari uelint. II sementivus (the explicit has the label: de sementibus). IV is surcularis prior, V lacks a title, but VI is surcularis tertius. VII is ΚΤΗΝΙΚΟΣ (the explicit has: ueterinarius medicinalis), teamed with VIII De minore pecore (explicit: ueterinarius medicinalis de minore pecore). IX, De uillationibus pastionibus. auiarius et piscator, pairs with X, De uillationibus pastionibus. macellarius et apiarius. XI De cura hortorum carmen (explicit: ΚΗΠΟΥΡΙΚΟΣ de cultu hortorum). is followed by XII Prosa de cultu hortorum.

¹⁰ Lundström, V., Josephson, Å. and Hedberg, S. (eds), L. Iuni Moderati Columellae Opera Quae Exstant, Fasc. 8, Liber Duodecimus. Vilica (1968), 11–12Google Scholar.

¹¹ Rubrics and index are consistently as one (apart from a very few falterings in the numbering of books and, in a few MSS, some confused entries of titles that prefix the wrong materials to the wrong books). For minute cross-comparison, Schröder, B.-J., Titel und Text. Zur Entwicklung lateinischer Gedichtüberschriften (1999), 132–3Google Scholar. (My thanks to Michael Reeve for drawing my attention to this powerful book.)

¹² cf. R. Goujard (ed., trans., comm.), Columelle, <Les Arbres> (1986), 7–21. Lundström follows suit, excising from his text the argumentum for the Contents of Liber Tertius. ΦΥΤΕΥΤΙΚΟΣ surcularis, plus the breakdown listing its main subjects in order, as given in the MSS. This material he relegates to the apparatus, where it is noted that he (and his continuators) will be silently correcting all the headings for the rest of the books, in order to bring them into line.

¹³ Columella's text manages to notice book numbers on four occasions (8.1.1, 10 Praef. 1, 11.1.12, 12.13.1), each time on the twelve book count. Our Books 3–5, on vines, olives, and other trees, duplicate the subjects, and to a large extent the wording, of the demoted book De arboribus, and that book is the only one without an address to (Publius) Siluinus. So every-thing works out perfectly once we identify the intruder as a relic from an earlier redaction, cast on a briefer scale. Perhaps in four books, it is conjectured, with De arboribus as Book 2 (and with De cultu agrorum for Book 1, as stated at De arb. 1.1, 3.6). Since Cassiodorus apparently refers to sixteen books of Columella (Diu. Lect. 28), the first edition could have been just four books in length, before Columella got established enough to inflate his introductory generalia into a whole book length, before his trees grew from one book to three, and, presumably, before he stretched his farm to include some, much, or all, of the tailpiece material in his later books: somehow, both twelve-book and four-book versions might conceivably have been known to Cassiodorus or his informant? Four to twelve — did Columella start off as didactic farmer Virgil, but wind up as epic hero Virgil?

¹⁴ Schröder, op. cit. (n. 11), 131–42, presents the ingenious but unconvincing thesis that Columella's list of contents was inspired by the Elder Pliny's pioneering indexing system, which persuaded him to re-jig the De re rustica, and Book 12 was written so late in his life that it evaded incorporation into the general Contents. She rightly draws attention to the importance of Columella's network of divisions, numbers, and indexes.

¹⁵ The scholarly scribes, be it said, who must have worked the index of Contents to fit their version, inclusive of De arboribus — where it says it belongs, just after agriculture, only as Book III not Book II, since our Book 1 is taken up with a general introduction to the Country World, and agriculture arrives as Book 2.

¹⁶ Some prefaces are recognized as such in the traditional scheme of reference, some are not.

¹⁷ ‘Claudius, priest of imperial cult, is one of nature's gentlemen. Equally, the young man is highly cultured. Stimulated by discussions with more than a few expert enthusiasts, particularly with farmers, he pounded me into agreeing to draw up a systematic Horticulture in Latin prose. His success in this did not indeed escape me when I was wrapping the aforesaid topic in the code of poetic law.

But you, Siluinus, were persistently requesting a taste of my verse-writing, and I didn't manage to say no. If you felt like me about it, I was at once going to do what I am presently moving on to, a postscript on How to Run a Farm: the Job of Overseer, attached by way of supplement: Garden Care.

True, I felt I had already to a certain extent gone through this in Columella, On the Countryside, Book One. But my imperial priest lobbied for it, over and over, and came on just as strong. So I have overrun the tally of Books that I was just on the point of completing, and I now put into the public domain this Manual of Country Life: Eleven.’

¹⁸ As speaking name, Claudius Augustalis smuggles in ‘Closure as Augmentation’: ‘Le Supplément’.

¹⁹ ‘But now that discussion of the farmhouse animals and their feeding has reached conclusion, the remaining section of Countryside Matters (below), namely: Horticulture, Siluinus, shall next, as both you and our friend Gallio co-plotted, be processed into Columella in Verse.’

²⁰ ‘Your interest, Siluinus. I pledged it you when you did the contract. Now be in full receipt of the outstanding wee dollop of payment. For in my nine books to date I have paid my due, minus this fraction: I do now pay up in full.

So, now, the negative balance outstanding is horticulture. Low energy and neglected by the ancient farmers of old. Today up there with even the most densely visited sites.

The reasons for this? … That is why Garden Care, since produce has an increased role in current practices, must be more carefully prescribed by us than our ancestors handed it down.

Horticulture would now be subjoined to the earlier projects in prose delivery, the way I had planned, if my project had not been taken by storm by your insistent demands. Demands which prescribed that I must fill up in metrical verse the missing fraction of the Georgics, which Virgil, mind, Virgil himself, signalled he was ‘leaving for gardening books’ from authors ‘to come’.

No other way could I ever dare any such thing. Only in line with the wishes of the poet adored above all others. His godlike decree stirred me on. Without doubt I went stubbornly because of the difficulty of the work. But not without hope of a successful outcome. I have set about a subject which is meagre to a degree, virtually deprived of bulk. It is so spare that it could count as a sub-percentage of my task in the total aggregate of the whole work. In its own right, bounded by its own set of goals, it could no way have visible impact.

For although it has many limbs, about which we can hold forth, nevertheless they are so miniscule that, in the Greek phrase, ‘a rope of sand couldn't be wound’ from their ungraspable microscale.

So it is that this stuff — whatever came of my work through the night — claims no credit for itself. So much so, it counts it all to the good if it does not dishonour the legacy of earlier texts preserved as the publications of Columella.

— But now I must end these disclaimers, my Preface.’

²¹ In the first case, accurately promising the running-order Vilicus, and then gardening; but in the retro-spect, when it cannot matter, reversing the sequence.

²² In the other direction, 1.9.2 at once explicitly deferred the duties of herdsmen to the matching panels on cattle and sheep at 6.1–26, 7.1–7.

²³ ‘So the countryman could inaugurate the duties of cultivation from the Ides of January, thereby respecting the first month, emperor of the Roman year — some of them leftovers from earlier that he will complete (consummare), others belonging to time to come that he will begin. No, it will be plenty to carry out each job by the half-month (semestrum), because work got done fifteen days beforehand can't be seen as rushed through too early, and, in return, work that many days behind can't be seen as done too slowly.’ With this, Columella has bridged from our editions' account of Vilicus, ‘11.1’, into the almanac of ‘11.2’.

²⁴ ‘The garden really needs putting in proper concerted order for the year, but it is held back for treatment separately, in its place, so that Columella won't seem to have committed the cardinal sin of neglecting the Gardener's Duties, amidst the present (so to speak) mob of works, or else to have interrupted the cycle I have begun of the rest of the forms of cultivation.’

²⁵ On this critical topic, and the subtlety of its lexicon: K. D. White, Roman Farming (1970), 87–9; Thomas, R. F., ‘Prose into poetry: tradition and meaning in Virgil's Georgics’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 91 (1987), 229–60,CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 251.

²⁶ In a provocative paper, Carroll, P., ‘Columella the reformer’, Latomus 35 (1976), 783–90,Google Scholar opened up enquiry into the role of Siluinus in the structuring of power relations through Columella's text.

²⁷ Comparison with De arboribus shows how rhetorical amplification has inflated the next three books with purple passages of enthusiastic rant and preachy excoriation.

²⁸ The teasing reference is to: primo … uolumine.

²⁹ Punster Pliny matter-of-factly notes that nothing escapes him: ‘uideo Vergilium praecellentissimum uatem … hortorum dotes fugisse et in his quae retttulit flores modo rerum decerpsisse’ (Nat. Hist. 14.7). Cf. R. T. Bruère, ‘Pliny the Elder and Virgil’, Classical Philology 51 (1956), 228–46, at 235.

³⁰ Controversially allowed in by Columella, as he already notes in brief here.

³¹ ‘There is no point in my discussing the world of Country Living as a whole further here and now, since all its departments are for explaining in the considerable number of volumes marked out for them, which I shall carry out, in their proper order, at the moment when I have made my preliminary statement of what I rate as most relevant of all to the whole discipline.’

³² Cato, Res Rust, also introduces the uilicus and his instructions at the outset, winding up the body of his tract by summarizing his officia (4–5; 142); at that point, he produces a complementary list of officia for uilica, too (143). This must be Columella's model.

³³ André, J. (ed., trans., comm.), Columelle, De l'Agriculture. Livre XII (De l'Intendante) (1988), esp. 9–11Google Scholar.

³⁴ ‘The last clause in my treatise, Woody Esq. The right moment to point out to future readers that I never doubted that possible ingredients for this material are virtually infinite, but I resolved to put on record what seemed most essential. … Those regarded as the wisest of men are said to have known many, not all, things.’

³⁵ ‘Now I shall give instructions about the rest of the subjects that were omitted from earlier books because they were (p) reserved for the duties of the Overseeress. And, so that some order may be safeguarded, I shall begin with spring time …’

³⁶ See Fitzgerald, W., ‘Labor and laborer in Latin poetry: the case of the Moretum’, Arethusa 29 (1996), 389–418,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 413: ‘The poetry that describes the work and skill of the gardener also needs the work of the gardener to help the reader imagine the poet's work’. This is the subject of Gowers, E. J., ‘Vegetable love: Virgil, Columella, and garden poetry’, Ramus 29 (2000), 127–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

To mark the predominance of language behind Book 10's living hedge, I shall weed the Latin and grow some English varieties instead.

³⁷ de Saint-Denis, op. cit. (n. 1), 11–15. As in Ovid's Fasti, the year is synonymous — symphytic — with its poem, and so are its seasons, its times, its rushes and pauses, crises and cycles. (Thus ‘conuertitur annus’, 160, is as much editorial diuisio as ‘inuigilate, uiri’, 159, both a wicked misquote of the ‘wrong’ Virgil (Aeneid4.573, ‘praecipites uigilate, uiri’), and a self-incitement to lucubrate, now that the new semester is on its way. Cf., too, 255–7, along with the (advertised) mighty rainbow coalition that lines up so many multi-coloured variations of the concept: ‘now’; and… and … and, the zenith of poetic sentiment, a picnic pastiche of Virgil sandwiches (282–3): ‘mollissimus annus dum Phoebus tener ac tenera’ —

So too this is the poet gardener's thickening, quickening, measured-out wee ‘plot’ — criss-crossed by its intense grid of minscule paths that ground immediacy in obliquity: ‘angustosque foros aduersos limite ducens rursus in obliquum distinguat tramite paruo’, 92–3. That formula from the Callimachus manual (cf. the next note).

³⁸ ‘Principio sedem’, beginning the poem in the first sedes of its first line proper (6), recycles Georgic 4.8. The language of soil — ‘pinguis, putris, resolutus, graciles imitatur harenas, habilis, creat uuida, neque sicca… nee stagnata…, etc.’ (7–11) — clamours louder than the marsh frog choir for registration as poetic quality-check, ‘numeroso horto’ (6) at once promised music, rhythmic pyrotechnics, plenty of it; more specifically, a proliferation of topics, set to pack this emphatically miniaturist domain.

³⁹ On the metapoetics of Virgil's praeteritio: Thomas, R. F., ‘The old man revisited: memory, reference, and genre in Virgil Georgics 4.116–48’, in idem, Reading Virgil and his Texts. Studies in Intertextuality (1999), 173–205.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Boldrer, op. cit. (n. 1), 15–22, de Saint-Denis, E., ‘Réhabilitons Columella poète’, Giornale Italiano di Filologia 31 (1969), 121–36;Google Scholar idem, ‘Columelle, miroire de Virgile’, in H. Bardon and R. Verdière (eds), Vergiliana. Recherches sur Virgile (1971), 328–43. Virgil is flashed up in 1 Praef. 30 and 1.1.12, and quotation begins at 1.3.8; citations are distributed unevenly, a dozen each in Books 2, 3, 7, 9, just two or three in 1, 4, 5, 6, 11; none in 8 or (nb.) 12.

⁴¹ Columella has learned to work agriculturalist data into poetry, and to hold it there, through studying Virgilian techniques of representation: cf. Thomas, R. F., ‘Vestigia ruris: urbane rusticity in Virgil's Georgics’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97 (1995), 197–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² On Columella and epic: P. Toohey, ‘Gardening with god: Columella’, in idem, Epic Lessons. An Introduction to Ancient Didactic Poetry (1996), 176–9; and relevant notes in Boldrer, op. cit. (n. 1).

Of course, every plant is a paragraph, every flower a phrase, every seedling a thought, every seed … an idea. In the making.

⁴³ cf. Stewart, P., ‘Fine art and coarse art: the image of Roman Priapus’, Art History 20 (1997), 575–88,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 575–6; O'Connor, E., ‘Martial the moral jester: Priapic motifs and the restoration of order in the epigrams’, in Grewing, F. (ed.), Toto notus in orbe. Perspektiven der Martial-Interpretation, = Palingenesia 65 (1998), 187–204Google Scholar.

The array of programmatic slogans gives a snap-shot of the writing to come: ‘cultus et tempora quaeque serendis… cura, nascantur flores, gemment, genus aut aliena stirpe… mitis adoptatis’ (35–9): a challenge for poetry's quintessential lightness of being (40).

⁴⁴ Just like deskwork: the poem starts from received plenitude (‘satur autumnus’, 43), undoes the lot, then stuffs it full of new fertility (‘pingui… fimo saturet’, 81–2). Tons of it. Back-breaking. At your keyboard.

⁴⁵ Georgic 1.80: cf. Thomas, op. cit. (n. 25), 236.

⁴⁶ Aeneid 7.664, floruerit, cf. 734 ∼ 134, 762 ∼ 139, and 138, the red flag of Turni lacus.

⁴⁷ mater terra = materia.

⁴⁸ Metamorphoses, 5.552; Columella introduces this metamorphosis reunion at 256–7, ‘uersicoloribus anni ∣ fetibus… pingi’.

⁴⁹ Eclogue 2.18–19, 45–55.

⁵⁰ cf. Thomas, R. F. (ed., comm.), Virgil, Georgics, Vols 1–2 (1988), notes on 1.178–86, 4.228–50Google Scholar. This is the round of birth/death that shapes Lucretius' writing as well as his theorizing: Minadeo, R., The Lyre of Science. Form and Meaning in Lucretius' De rerum natura (1969), passim.Google Scholar

⁵¹ A. Richlin, ‘Pliny's brassière’, in J. P. Hallett and M. B. Skinner (eds), Roman Sexualities (1997), 197–220, at 202–4.

⁵² Columella's cucumber, long and round, serves up a sinister deformity for the fall, where Virgil's garden saw only a joy he could have grown into a greenhouse of delight, no worries (Georgic 4.121–2).

⁵³ These ueteres fontes loop back to the poetics of irrigation introduced at 23–5, ‘sint amnes… aut fons’, sloganized at 40, ‘tenui deducite carmine’, and operationalized for the ‘numerous’ régime of copia at 49, ‘terra bibat fontes, et hiantia compleat ora’. Cf. the emphatic admonition at 143, and the fastidious connoisseur's specifications at 284–5.

⁵⁴ As with the modern symphony, trouble does seem to arrive for productive Roman writers when they leave V and approach X: Martial and Quintilian at 10/12; Lucan and Pliny, Letters cut off at 10/? and 9–10/?.

⁵⁵ ‘Book 1: Agriculture. Book 2: Livestock. Book 3: Farm animals. Things I reckon not to relate to agriculture have been chopped from this tome. So I shall show first what should be distinguished from agriculture, and speak then on these topics following natural categories.’

⁵⁶ See the brilliant essay by Green, C. M. C., ‘Free as a bird: Varro, De re rustica 3’, American Journal of Philology 118 (1997), 427–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁷ cf. Purcell, N., ‘The Roman garden as a domestic building’, in Barton, I. M. (ed.), Roman Domestic Buildings (1996), 121–51, esp. 149–50Google Scholar.