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St Photius the Great, tr. Freese, 1920; selections

Codex 163: Vindanius Anatolius of Berytus, A Collection of Agricultural Precepts

Read the work of Vindanius Anatolius of Berytus,¹ entitled A Collection of Agricultural Precepts, compiled by him from the works of Democritus Africanus, Tarantinus, Apuleius, Florentius, Valens, Leo, and Pamphilus, and the Paradoxa of Diophanes.² It is in twelve volumes, and, as our own experience has shown us in many instances, is useful for the cultivation of the land and agricultural works, perhaps the most useful of all treatises on the same subject. However, it contains some marvellous and incredible tales, full of Greek fables, which the/pious husbandman should pass over while gathering up what is useful in the rest of the work. All other writers on agricultural matters, so far as I know, express nearly the same opinions about the same things and differ little from one another; where they do, the experience of Leo is to be preferred to all the rest.

Notes

Fourth or fifth century A.D. About the middle of the tenth century a selection was made from it and similar works by command of the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus.
Of Nicaea, lived in the time of Cicero. The statement that he wrote a volume on Paradoxa is probably an error.