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Had the gain actually made by such plantations been commonly as great as he imagined it might have been, there could have been no dispute about it. The same point is frequently at this day a matter of controversy in the wine countries. Their writers on agriculture, indeed, the lovers and promoters of high cultivation, seem generally disposed to decide with Columella in favour of the vineyard.
Varro cites fifty Greek authors on the subject whose works he knew, beginning with Hesiod and Xenophon. Mago of Carthage wrote a treatise in the Punic tongue which was so highly esteemed that the Roman Senate ordered it translated into Latin, but, like most of the Greeks, it is now lost to us except in the literary tradition. Columella says that it was Cato who taught Agriculture to speak Latin.
But while Mela, in his style, followed the new fashion, Columella, an enthusiast for antiquity and a warm admirer of the Augustan writers, reverts to the more classical manner, which a little later became once more predominant in the writers of the Flavian period. His simple and dignified style is much above the level of a mere technical treatise.
Virgil had said with reference to gardens: "Verum haec ipse equidem spatiis exclusus iniqnis Praetereo, atque aliis post me memoranda relinquo." These words are an oracle to Columella. "I should have written my tenth book in prose," he says, "had not your frequent requests that I would fill up what was wanting to the Georgics got the better of my resolution.
Columella adds two more interesting bits of advice, that for the comfort of the hens the roosts should be cut square, and for cleanliness their water trough should be enclosed leaving only openings large enough to receive a hen's head.
The shelves where they rest in vellum and in dust are only an arm's-length from the window; so that I can relieve the stiff classicism of Flaxman's rendering of the "Works and Days," or the tedious iteration of Columella and Crescenzio, by a glance outside into the rain-cloud, under which lies always the checkered illustration of the farming of to-day, and beyond which the spires stand in sentinel.
We have a more precise estimate of the expense and produce only in the case of the vine yard, for which Columella gives the following calculation of the cost per -jugerum-: Price of the ground 1000 sesterces.
The twelve principal plates reach the columella, and between each pair there are three secondaries, in all forty-eight. The short intermediate plates which proceed from the columella are not counted. They are called pali. c. Fungia patellaris, Lamarck. Recent; very young state.
Columella, who reports this judgment of Democritus, does not controvert it, but proposes a very frugal method of inclosing with a hedge of brambles and briars, which he says he had found by experience to be both a lasting and an impenetrable fence; but which, it seems, was not commonly known in the time of Democritus.
The elegant treatise of Columella describes the advanced state of the Spanish husbandry under the reign of Tiberius; and it may be observed, that those famines, which so frequently afflicted the infant republic, were seldom or never experienced by the extensive empire of Rome. The accidental scarcity, in any single province, was immediately relieved by the plenty of its more fortunate neighbors.
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