The Project Gutenberg EBook of Roman Farm Management, by Marcus Porcius Cato

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Title: Roman Farm Management
The Treatises Of Cato And Varro

Author: Marcus Porcius Cato

Release Date: April 25, 2004 [EBook #12140]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Ted Garvin, Josephine Paolucci and the Online Distributed
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[Transcriber's note: The extensive and lengthy footnotes have been
renumbered and placed at the end of the book.]

ROMAN FARM MANAGEMENT

THE TREATISES OF CATO AND VARRO

DONE INTO ENGLISH, WITH NOTES OF MODERN INSTANCES

BY A VIRGINIA FARMER

1918

PREFACE

The present editor made the acquaintance of Cato and Varro standing at
a book stall on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, and they carried him away
in imagination, during a pleasant half hour, not to the vineyards and
olive yards of Roman Italy, but to the blue hills of a far distant
Virginia where the corn was beginning to tassel and the fat cattle
were loafing in the pastures. Subsequently, when it appeared that
there was then no readily available English version of the Roman
agronomists, this translation was made, in the spirit of old Piero
Vettori, the kindly Florentine scholar, whose portrait was painted by
Titian and whose monument may still be seen in the Church of Santo
Spirito: in the preface of his edition of Varro he says that he
undertook the work, not for the purpose of displaying his learning,
but to aid others in the study of an excellent author. Victorius was
justified by his scholarship and the present editor has no such
claim to attention: he, therefore, makes the confession frankly (to
anticipate perhaps such criticism as Bentley's "a very pretty poem,
Mr. Pope, but don't call it Homer") and offers the little book to
those who love the country, and to read about the country amidst the
crowded life of towns, with the hope that they may find in it some
measure of the pleasure it has afforded the editor.

The texts and commentaries used have been those of Schneider and Keil,
the latter more accurate but the former more sympathetic.

F