De Agri Cultura  

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De Agri Cultura (On Farming or On Agriculture), written by Cato the Elder, is the oldest surviving work of Latin prose. Alexander Hugh McDonald, in his article for the Oxford Classical Dictionary, dated this essay's composition to about 160 BC and noted that "for all of its lack of form, its details of old custom and superstition, and its archaic tone, it was an up-to-date directed from his own knowledge and experience to the new capitalistic farming." Cato was revered by many later authors for his practical attitudes, his stoicism and his tight and lucid prose. He is much quoted by Pliny the Elder, for example, in his Naturalis Historia.

Manuscripts

All of the manuscripts of Cato's treatise also include a copy of Varro's essay of the same name. J.G. Schneider and Heinrich Keil showed that the existing manuscripts directly or indirectly descend from a long-lost manuscript called the Marcianus, which was once in the Library of St Mark in Florence and described by Petrus Victorinus as liber antiquissimus et fidelissimus ("a book most ancient and faithful"). The oldest existing manuscript is the Codex Parisinus 6842, written in Italy at some point before the end of the 12th century. The editio princeps was printed at Venice in 1472; Angelo Politian's collation of the Marcianus against his copy of this first printing is considered an important witness for the text.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "De Agri Cultura" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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