2 VARRO ON FARMING [bk. 



in the hope that my instructions may serve you not 

 only during my life, but after my death as well. 



3 The Sibyl's oracles helped not only her contem- 

 poraries, but also generations of men to whom she 

 had never even given a thought; her books, after 

 so many centuries, are still consulted officially, when 

 some portent occurs and we need to know the proper 

 way to deal with it — so it shall not be said that I, 

 even during my lifetime, could do nothing to help 

 those near and dear to me. 



4 I am, accordingly, about to write three books for 

 your guidance, to which you can refer whenever, in 

 any particular case, you need a detailed knowledge 

 of the practice of farming. And since the gods, they 

 say, help those who pay them due observance, I 

 will begin by invoking not the Muses, as Ennius 

 and Homer did, but the twelve great gods who form 

 the Senate of Heaven. I do not mean those fine 

 city gods, six of either sex, whose statues stand in 

 the Forum, ^ all dressed in gold, but those twelve 

 deities who are the special guides of the farmer. 



5 First in order, then, I call upon Jupiter and Tellus, 

 who by means of the sky and land maintain the 

 various fruits of farming, and this is the reason 



^ Deos Consentis. Their names are given in two well-known 

 hexameters of Ennius, "Juno, Vesta, Minerva, Ceres, Deiana, 

 Venus, Mars, || Mercurius, Jovi', Neptunus, Volcanus, Apollo." 

 The court in which their statues stood, in the north-west 

 corner of the Forum, at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, was 

 discovered in 1834. In a.d. 367 Agorius Praetextatus, prefect 

 of Rome, restored these sacro-sancta simulacra to their ancient 

 state, as the inscription, still to be read there, declares. 



