they are even nice about the kind of water, some grow in ponds like
the reeds at Reate, others in streams like the alders in Epirus, some
even in the sea like the palms and the squills of which Theophrastus
writes. When I was in the army, I saw in Transalpine Gaul, near the
Rhine, lands where neither the vine, nor the olive, nor the pear tree
grew, where they manured their fields with a white chalk which they
dug out of the ground:[62] where they had no salt, either mineral or
marine, but used in place of it the salty ashes obtained from burning
a certain kind of wood."

Stolo here interrupted. "You will recall," he said, "that Cato in
comparing the different kinds of soil, ranked them by their merit in
nine classes according to what they would produce, of which the first
was that on which the vine would grow a plentiful supply of good wine;
the second that fit for an irrigated garden; the third for an osier
bed; the fourth for an olive yard; the fifth for a meadow; the sixth
for a corn field; the seventh for a wood lot; the eighth for a
cultivated orchard, and the ninth for a mast grove."

"I know he wrote that," replied Scrofa, "but every one does not agree
with him. There are some who put a good pasture first, and I am among
them."

Our ancestors were wont to call them not _prala_, as we do, but
_parata_ (because they are always ready for use). The sedile Caesar
Vopicus, in pleading a cause before the Censors, once said that the
prairie of Rosea was the nurse of Italy, because if one left his
surveying instruments there on the ground over night they were lost
next day in the growth of the grass.[63]

(_A digression on the maintenance of vineyards_)

VIII. There be those who assert that the cost of maintaining a
vineyard eats up the profit. What kind of vineyard? I ask. For there
are several: in one the vines grow on the ground without props, as in
Spain; in another, which is the kind common in Italy, the vines climb
and are trained either separately on props or one with another on a
trellis, which last is what is called marrying the vine. There are
four kinds of trellis in use--made out of poles, of reeds, of ropes
and of vines themselves, which are in use respectively in Falerum, in
Arpinum, in Brundisium and in Mediolanum. There are two methods of
training the vine on trellises, one upright, as is done in the country
of Canusium; the other crossed and interwoven, as is the practice
generally throughout Ita