The Cambridge History of Classical Literature

Columella's Res rustica, 'Agriculture', the fullest treatment of the subject in Latin literature, is a product of wide reading and long personal experience. Pliny is one of the prodigies of Latin literature, boundlessly energetic and catastrophically indiscriminate, wide-ranging and narrow-minded, a pedant who wanted to be a popularizer, a sceptic infected by traditional sentiment, and an aspirant to style who could hardly frame a coherent sentence. The Natural history, dedicated in an unwieldy and effusive preface to the heir apparent Titus, comprises list of contents in relation to medicine, and mineralogy. Frontinus' two surviving works, De aquis and Strategemata, have somewhat limited pretensions to be literature. The De aquisis exactly what it claims to be, a systematic account of the water-supply of Rome. Frontinus asserts that this Strategemata too is practical: the information he has arranged and classified will be of use to generals.