You know that game where you try to think of the three dead people you'd want to have dinner with, if you had a time machine? Every in middle school always picked Thomas Jefferson and William Shakespeare, and while they would be interesting dinner companions, Columella just rocketed to the top of my dream list.

I have decided that Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella is the most important Roman author never seen in university courses. Being from Cadiz, it is likely that his family was "Roman" for barely 200 years before his birth, and yet his command of the language is native, highly educated, sophisticated, and specific. He was very well educated in the use of language which might have been native for him, but not for his great-grandparents. I think he could even out-barb Cicero, particularly after a few glasses of wine. Columella has written this handbook of farm management for his friend and neighbor, Publius Silvinus, and he opens Book 4 by saying, and I'm only barely paraphrasing here, "So, Silvinus, I heard you read my last book to some friends of yours and they disagreed with a couple of my suggestions, well here is exactly why they are backwards and old-fashioned and basically wrong." He speaks highly of his uncle Marcus, who was a first-class husbandman in his own right, so the knowledge is clearly a familial base he is building on. Reading how he stresses the need for properly trained vinedressers in Book 4, I am boggled by the amount of know-how he demands even in the smallest tasks. It must be something you devote your life to, because there is no way for a man, young enough to have the physical vigor to do the work Columella demands, to have the vast encyclopedic know-how and the experience that he holds everyone too. He clearly has this knowledge himself, meaning that he has probably been learning all the trades of a farm at a successful farm manager's elbow -- probably the same uncle Marcus, taking him around and not just showing him the ropes, but holding him to an exacting standard and impressing on him that in order to oversee a job well done, he must be able to do the work himself to the standard he expects. Columella would probably be the most efficient person I ever met, which makes him my hero.

And he knows what he's talking about. He might not have the scientific we have in the twenty-first century, but he is a keen observer of cause and effect, so he can say with authority "Don't trim your vines in this kind of weather, or with that sort of knife, and make the cut in a horseshoe shape not straight across." He talks about weather, the situations of vineyards, the way to balance site against soil type to maximize the yield while minimizing as closely as possible the expense (but he won't shy away from an expense when it is necessary for the good of the farm). And he talks about how a vineyard should be carved up by paths into sub-plots of one half iugerum each, so that to the eye it appears to be smaller and easier to tackle, and with its paths to invite the proprietor down among the vines to see everything, insisting, without knowing quite why I think, that when the owner passes among the vines they yield better and are frequently in better health. That isn't magic -- when the owner takes an interest and isn't continuously absent, then of course the workers are going to be prouder of the quality of their work and if there are shortcuts taken, the circumspect farmer will see these and be able to correct them. But this is why Columella stresses the encyclopedic mastery of agricultural knowledge -- you have to know how a grapevine frame should be built in order to oversee its correct shape and installation.

Perhaps because he was not a commonly traded author, his work has survived surprisingly intact. A complete copy of all his works was found in Switzerland in the fourteen hundred and teens, so there are very few lacunae in the manuscript, meaning that he is easier to read even in translation because the translator is not constantly stretching to fill gaps with conjecture; and the bright, personable sound of his own voice is crystal clear. Once you get past his use of specialized vocabulary for the serious (not gentleman) farm owner, he is a joy to read in either Latin or English.

Verdict: Can't wait to get my hands on more volumes next year. ( )