Three or four books are devoted to a very full discussion of the vine, and of wines,—not differing materially, however, from the Columellan advice. In discussing the moral aspects of the matter, this Geoponic author enumerates other things which will intoxicate as well as wine,—even some waters; also the wine made from barley and wheat, which barbarians drink. Old men, he says, are easily made drunk; women not easily, by reason of temperament; but by drinking enough they may come to it.
Where the discourse turns upon pears, (Lib. X. Cap. xxiii.,) it is urged, that, if you wish specially good fruit, you should bore a hole through the trunk at the ground, and drive in a plug of either oak or beech, and draw the earth over it. If it does not heal well, wash for a fortnight with the lees of old wine: in any event, the wine-lees will help the flavor of the fruit. Almost identical directions are to be found in Palladius, (Tit. XXV.,) but the above is credited to Diophanes, who lived in Asia Minor a full century before Christ.
Book XI. opens with flowers and evergreens, introduced (by a Latin translation) in a mellifluous roll of genitives:—"plantationem rosarum, et liliorum, et violarum, et reliquorum florum odoralorum." Thereafter is given the pretty tradition, that red roses came of nectar spilled from heaven. Love, who bore the celestial vintage, tripped a wing, and overset the vase; and the nectar, spilling on the valleys of the earth, bubbled up in roses. Next we have this kindred story of the lilies. Jupiter wished to make his boy Hercules (born of a mortal) one of the gods; so he snatches him from the bosom of his earthly mother, Alemena, and bears him to the bosom of the godlike Juno. The milk is spilled from the full-mouthed boy, as he traverses the sky, (making the Milky Way,) and what drops below stars and clouds, and touches earth, stains the ground with—lilies.
In the chapter upon pot-herbs are some of those allusions to the climate of Constantinople which may have served to accredit the work in the Byzantine court. I find no extraordinary methods of kitchen-garden culture,—unless I except the treatment of musk-melon seeds to a steep of milk and honey, in order to improve the flavor of the fruit. (Cap. xx.) The remaining chapters relate to ordinary domestic animals, with diversions to stags, camels, hare, poisons, scorpions, and serpents. I can cheerfully commend the work to those who have a snowy day on their hands, good eyesight, and a love for the subject.
And now, while the snow lasts, let us take one look at Messer Pietro Crescenzi, a Bolognese of the fourteenth century. My copy of him is a little, fat, unctuous, parchment-bound book of 1534, bought upon a street stall under the walls of the University of Bologna.
Through whose hands may it not have passed since its printing! Sometimes I seem to snuff in it the taint of a dirty-handed friar, who loved his pot-herbs better than his breviary, and plotted his yearly garden on some shelf of the hills that look down on Castagnolo: other times I scent only the mould and the damp of some monastery shelf, that guarded it quietly and cleanly, while red-handed war raged around the walls.
Crescenzi was a man of good family in Bologna, being nephew of Crescenzi di Crescenzo, who died in 1268, an ambassador in Venice. Pietro was educated to the law, and, wearying of the civil commotions in his native town, accepted judicial positions in the independent cities of Italy,—Pisa and Asti among others; and after thirty years of absence, in which, as he says, he had read many authors,[21] and seen many sorts of farming, he gives his book to the world.
Its arrangement is very similar to that of Palladius, to which he makes frequent reference. There is long and quaint talk of situations, breezes, cellar-digging, and wells; but in the matter of irrigation and pipe-laying he is clearly in advance of the Roman writers. He discourses upon tiles, and gives a cement for making water-tight their junction,—"Calcina viva intrisa con olio." (Lib. I. Cap. ix.) He adds good rules for mortar-making, and advises that the timber for house-building be cut in November or December in the old of the moon.
In matters of physiology he shows a near approach to modern views: he insists that food for plants must be in a liquid form.[22]