PROLEGOMENA.

...these are the things read in the Gromatici original: "Gromatici" (surveyors/land measurers) ed. Lachmann I p. 239: to this must be added the measurements of boundaries and limits from the books of Augustus and Nero Caesar, but also those of Balbus the surveyor, who in the times of Augustus 1 collected and compiled into commentaries the layouts of all provinces, the forms of states, and the measurements found, and distinguished and declared the agrarian law lat. "lex agraria" throughout the diverse provinces. Therefore, the geographical studies of that most practical greek: "πρακτικωτάτου" man, Augustus, are not even proven by the arts of the four surveyors, nor is the name of Augustus to be joined in any way with the name of Agrippa, either in a painted map or in his commentaries, except for the fact that Augustus saw to the execution of the will after Polla, the sister of Agrippa, cf. Pliny III 17. There is much error in this matter among learned men, who—although Pliny himself distinguishes in such a way that we see both Agrippa and Augustus named among the authors of the third and fourth books—have said that some 'description of the earth of Augustus' or 'chorography of Augustus' lat. "Augusti chorographiam" was used indiscriminately and without distinction in place of Agrippa's work. 3 But very correctly, D. Detlefsen, in the Philological Commentaries published in honor of Th. Mommsen p. 23 sqq., has recently shown that the Plinian material derived from Augustus (from the summary of the empire, as he himself thinks) can be separated from that which flowed from Agrippa using the example of Spain, and (so that we may be more cautious) has also taught that Pliny took many geographical things from Varro, which Muellenhoff had vindicated for Agrippa.

Let us see what sources Agrippa used. We are taught already before him, by the places in Varro, Propertius, and Vitruvius, that geographical maps existed at Rome according to Greek examples. Varro, who himself published geographical works, in the first book of Res Rusticae gloss: "On Rural Affairs" 2, 1, which he wrote in the year 717/37, commemorates Italy painted on a wall, and indeed on the wall of the 'Temple of Tellus.' Propertius, however, in V 3, 37—which book learned men judge was not written after the year 738/16—has this most famous verse (but one most alien to the scholastic treatment of geography that some think is designated there):

1) Partsch p. 77 says that no mention of their work exists at all in the Gromatic books.

2) Perhaps one should write "Trajan Augustus": for the surveyor Balbus wrote in his times, cf. Muellenhoff p. 184.

3) So also Th. Mommsen, "On the sections concerning Southern Italy in the Ravenna Cosmography," in Reports of the Saxon Literary Society III (1851) p. 80—117. cf. p. 101, 103. — Most recently, Partsch thinks that after Agrippa died, his commentaries were published under the title of Chorography by Augustus, and from them Pliny took the things he presents about Italy III 46 sqq. from the 'divine Augustus,' he says on p. 36. Why, therefore, I ask, does Pliny not present the remaining parts in the same way from Augustus, but rather from Agrippa?