page_title: Geoponici
section_title: Greek writers
hierarchical_section_title: Geoponici / Greek writers
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Das einzige noch erhaltene inschriftlich beglaubigte Bildnis von Hesiod auf dem Mosaik des Monnus in Trier
context_page_description: Geoponici, or Scriptores rei rusticae, is a collective term for the Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome writers on husbandry and agriculture. In classical times it was regarded as a branch of economics. On the whole the Greeks paid less attention than the Romans to the scientific study of these subjects.
context_section_description: From the writing of the Roman Varro, it is known that there were more than fifty ancient Greeks authors on the subject of agriculture. Among them were Hesiod, Xenophon, Democritus, Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus. Most of the works Varro enumerated have been lost.
  What we know of the agriculture of Greece is chiefly derived from the poem of Hesiod, entitled Works and Days. All that remain of Democritus are only a few extracts preserved in the Geoponica, an agricultural treatise published at Constantinople by the Greeks of the 10th century. The Oeconomicus by Xenophon is a Socratic dialogue principally about household management and agriculture, contains a eulogy of agriculture and its beneficial ethical effects.
  About the same time as Xenophon, the philosopher Democritus of Abdera wrote a treatise Περὶ Γεωργίας ("On Agriculture"), frequently quoted and much used by the later compilers of the Geoponica. Some incidental remarks on the subject may be found in the writings of Herodotus, Theophrastus, and others. Xenophon, Aristotle, Homer, and others, touch on our subject but very slightly.
  Greater attention was given to the subject in the Alexandrian period; a long list of names is given by Varro and Columella, amongst them Hiero II and Attalus III Philometor. Later, Cassius Dionysius of Utica translated and abridged the great work of the Carthaginian Mago, which was still further condensed by Diophanes of Nicaea in Bithynia for the use of King Deiotarus. From these and similar works, Cassianus Bassus compiled his Geoponica, a source of the later Byzantine Geoponica. Mention may also be made of a little work Περι Γεωργικων by Michael Psellus.
caption: Hesiod, 3-4 c. AD.
exif: {}