Translation of the book 15 of Opus Agriculturae by Palladius

Abstract

In this work, we present the translation of a part of Palladius' agronomic work, which he wrote in Rome at the turn of the 4^th to the 5^th century AD. Opus Agriculturae being the name of the Palladian treatise, it contains fourteen prose books and a short poem with didactic characteristics at the end. The theme of the poem, called Carmen de insitione (“Poem about grafting”), is the technique of arboreal grafting. From a formal point of view, we observe that Palladius probably based himself on Columella (1^st century AD), author of De re rustica, when inserting a book in verse in the OA: we know, in fact, that the book 10 of the Columellian treatise was composed in dactylic hexameter meter. However, Insit. is distinguished by having been composed in the form of eighty-five elegiac couplets. In addition to the translation, made in a juxta linear arrangement with the original, containing explanatory notes, we have added introductory explanations to place this author in his milieu and the OA in the context of ancient technical literature.