This handsome book is an interesting selection of a wide range of texts in celebration of country living. 24 passages are chosen from: Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, the Orphic Hymns, Cato, Plato, Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, Varro, Pliny (the Elder), Columella, Musonius Rufus, Longus and one telling inscription which ends the book. The passages chosen show different aspects of rural life from the idealised and the idyllic to the shared experience of tilling the land as a source of scientific observations, to the practicalities of naming dogs, choosing rams or appreciating the humble donkey. The agrarian lore contained in it is (Usher admits) of limited practical value to anyone setting up a farm today—he describes it (p. xi) candidly as ‘dated, locale-specific and often outmoded or inaccurate’. The book aims for ‘variety and accessibility’ in making its selections and the result is an engaging mixture of history, philosophy, poetry, prose treatise, epigraphy and satire. Varied it certainly is. In his spirited introduction, Usher makes an apology for the fact that much of the ancient evidence presents us with a world where women and enslaved persons were subordinate to citizen males, and he seeks to rescue from the sources some sense of the joy and the goodness of working the land for oneself.

The text is supported by a facing translation, as in the Loeb Classical Library from which many of the texts are taken. The marrying of the text with the translation is not always managed at the ends of pages; and the publishers have in many places inserted empty spaces into the text-pages to allow the English to catch up (which gives an odd appearance to the text). Usher prints -is accusative plural endings in 3^rd declension nouns and adjectives (rather than the more user-friendly -es).

The translation is uneven in quality. The version of Hesiod (for instance) is stilted and there were places where I had to use the Greek to understand the English rather than vice versa. Doing justice to Virgil's Georgics (‘the best poem by the best poet’ as John Dryden opined) was always going to be impossible, but Usher's version of the makarismos of farming life makes it very hard to see why Dryden got so excited about this text. There are words translated oddly (at 2.464 vestes surely means ‘clothing’ and not ‘carpets’: at 273 vilibus surely means ‘cheap’ rather than ‘ample’) and there are places where the Latin is misconstrued (2.477 caelique vias is the object of monstrent but Usher makes it go with accipiant, turning the accusative into some sort of local ablative (‘on the paths of heaven’) which not only misses the hendiadys but gives a misleading impression of the meaning of the sentence). That said, there are some lovely turns of phrase elsewhere: the description of the town mouse as ‘a mouse haughty of tooth’ (dente superbo at Horace Satires 2.6.87), or ‘roiling’ for tumultuosum at Horace Odes 3.1.26, or the inspired word ‘awash’ in describing how ‘these days … most women are awash with luxury and idleness’ (nunc vero cum pleraeque sic luxu et inertia diffluant (Columella Book 12 Preface 9.2).

There are also some surprises in the selection of texts. There is no Theocritus and no Tibullus for instance, and Usher has to work quite hard to make Lucretius 1.146-264 (which is arguing for the conservation of matter and energy) into a piece on ‘the philosophy of compost’ (when Lucretius does not actually mention compost and the disquisition on early mankind at 5.1361-1411 would surely have been more appropriate for the book). The lengthy excerpt from Plato's Republic arguing for the theory of the division of labour is of only marginal relevance to the farming life. It is a pity that a passage like Horace's account of his Sabine farm (Epistles 1.16.1-16) did not make the cut, whereas Columella is treated to four separate excerpts on a range of animals—but then the point of a book like this is to open our eyes to the unexpected in the world around us, and Usher certainly does that.

Typographical mistakes are few (the most egregious being that Horace only composed one volume of Epodes and so the reference on p. 97 to Epodes 1.2 should simply read Epode 2). This suitably sturdy volume is small enough to fit easily into the knapsack or the pocket of the hill-walker or the eco-tourist and would give him plenty of food for thought as he eats his ploughman's lunch.