Columella,De Re Rustica

Abstract

Within Neronian literature, two important texts survive from the wide field of instructional technical literature: the elder Pliny's encyclopaedia, Natural History, and Columella's work on agriculture (De Re Rustica). Columella draws on both traditions of agricultural writing, the poetical and the prosaic. The work contains prose and verse sections. Columella is certainly an innovator in his insertion of a didactic poem of some 400 verses into his prose treatise. There is no certainty about which sources Columella used, either for his didactic poem or for the work as a whole. Columella writes in an elegant Latin prose, but some colloquialisms and unclassical usages have also been noted. Though Columella dwells on tradition and moral values and persistently warns against practices in rural life that he deems too modern, he is nonetheless writing for a contemporary audience. Columella was regarded as an authority on agriculture both in antiquity and later.

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