F. has advanced the scholarship on Latin agricultural writers with his English translation of Opus Agriculturae by Palladius, and this contribution will serve as a gateway for a new generation of scholars who seek better to understand the didactic farming manuals of ancient Rome.
F. modelled his translation on the standard edition by R.H. Rodgers, who edited the Teubner edition in 1975. Yet F. diverges from Rodger's Latin text in over six dozen places and has been kind enough to collect his emendations in a very helpful appendix. These deviations are deeply considered and demonstrate F.'s mastery of both the Latin and the complicated manuscript tradition. Also included with the translation are useful sections such as an index of key words and a section of figures with well-drawn images, especially the Gallo-Roman reaping machine (p. 275). Yet it is his compact but informative introduction that stands out as a strong summation of Palladius and his work. Those with a particular interest in Medieval and Early Modern agricultural writing will find F.'s treatment of the vernacular translations from those periods worthwhile.
The introduction does much to rehabilitate the reputation of Palladius. As F. reminds us elsewhere (BMCR 2011.06.22), modern estimation traditionally places Palladius a distant fourth with respect to Cato, Varro and Columella, the three main writers on Roman agriculture. It was not so very long ago that scholars would rob Palladius of his creativity and decry the Late Roman farmer–author as little more than a slavish copyist of Columella. F., however, underscores the nuance that Palladius took in revising and reshaping Columella's words. He credits Palladius with weaving together various and disparate strands of agricultural knowledge, and that this rearrangement ‘was complex and substantial’ (p. 14). As F. points out, one of Palladius' greatest contributions was to reformat the agricultural manual to a calendrical structure. This Farmer's Almanac approach not only became the template for medieval handbooks on farming and gardening, it demonstrates that Palladius wrote from a position of knowledge and practice. Because Palladius advocates organic methods of feeding nutrients to the soil, as organic farmers do to this day, F. supports the idea that Palladius had real experience on a farm, and that his audience was the literate farmer who would either perform or directly supervise labour on the farm.
As part of the rehabilitation effort, F. helps establish Palladius' independence from Columella. In a section on the silences of the farming manual, it is observed that Palladius shies away from the man-days counting of Columella. Such trepidation, it is argued, should be attributed to the wide diversity in region and soil type of his audience. On this point F. touches all too lightly on a thriving topic in late antique studies: the relationship of Opus Agriculturae to the agricultural and social conditions of the late empire. The issue is deftly sidestepped and replaced by the statement that current scholarship is inconclusive. But the door is intentionally left open for other scholars who wish to wade into this dense subject. F. also sharply contrasts these two authors by differentiating their respective motivation for farming. He quotes Palladius as saying the farmer takes up agricultural pursuits not for profit (quaestus), as Columella advocates, but ‘“for the sake of pleasure and productivity” (ratione uoluptatis et fructus, 1.1.2)’. Yet this desire to pursue farming for fructus et uoluptas is not unique to Palladius. As F.'s comments were set in opposition to Columella, it may be that he intentionally overlooked a similar passage in Varro who, in his first book on agriculture, casts in the mouth of the so-called agricultural expert Scrofa essentially the same sentiment (Varro, Rust. 1.4.1). Another marked difference between Palladius and Columella is the very language each uses to describe the practice of agriculture. Functional brevity in plain words is what Palladius sought for the Roman farmer, not the elevated prose of a rhetorician. F. states that Palladius could be taking aim at the high rhetorical style of Columella, an interesting observation that further distances Palladius from Columella. Yet such disparaging remarks by agricultural writers about their predecessors have their own tradition in Latin didactic manuals on farming. Columella seems to cast a similar rhetorical jab at Varro, that counting species does not a good farmer make, and that it is not the farmer's business to wax long on categorisation (Col. Rust. 2.2.2).
As for the translation itself, F. has done a superb job of finding the most apt phrasing, perfunctory with plain prose, very much as Palladius himself strove to write. I can find no fault with the translation and commend F. on his useful and generous footnotes, drawing parallels to other agricultural writers where he could. Prospect Books should also be commended for the production of a solid monograph. This masterful translation should last for the next generation of scholars who seek to tackle such material on Roman Agriculture.
