Ancient Latin Agricultural Writers, Vol. I

Thus, my mind is in suspense, wondering whether I and the learned Schoettgen have done an injustice to Columella, when at 1, 3, 1 we preferred to demand that Moderatus Columella be more hasty, rather than complain about Cato being lost or truncated. Columella certainly could not have erred in attributing the long recommendation of meadows (2, 17, 2) to Marcus Porcius Cato, since he has Tullius himself as a supporter of that matter. But in these Catonian texts that now exist, the fifth place is finally assigned to the meadow. This is of such a nature that it completely overturns the integrity of the book.

But there are other things as well. Pliny (18, 6, f. 7, n. 2) praises the signs of good land from Cato, which are not held in our books, and which Columella (2, 2, 20) seems to have repeated from the same source. Nor do I find what the same Pliny (18, 6, f. 8) cites from him: Whatever can be done by a donkey costs the least. Truly, who will think Cato was of sound mind if he himself mixed a vow for the oxen (ch. 83) into baking operations, or a precept about dogs shut up during the day (ch. 124) among the wine preparations? Meursius was already annoyed by the former. And we suspected a poor hand at work at ch. 38, 3.

The things noted by the learned Pontedera at the very end (or at 162, 3) regarding the repetitions occurring in this booklet also do not seem to me to be worthy of contempt. I say again: either such a man was not as the ancients describe him with one voice, and as the fragments preserved by Gellius and others speak, or the book De Re Rustica On Agriculture, as it now is, is not Cato’s. Thus, I not only subscribe to the opinion of the one who annotated at the foot of the Rhedingerian manuscript: I believe the work is fragmentary...