the author of a treatise
The
It is comprised in fourteen books: the first is introductory, the twelve following contain the duties of the twelve months in succession, commencing with January; the last is a poem, in eighty-five elegiac couplets, upon the art of grafting (
The first writer by whom Palladius is mentioned is Isidorus of Seville, who refers to him
twice, simply as Aemilianus (Orig. 17.1.1, 10.8), the name under which
he is spoken of by Cassiodorus also (Divin. Lect. 100.28). Barthius
supposes him to be the eloquent Gaulish youth Palladius, to whose merits Rutilius pays so
warm a compliment in his Itinerary (1.207), while Wernsdorf, advancing one step farther
into the realms of fancy (Poet. Lat. Min. vol. v. pars i. p. 551),
imagines that he may have been adopted by Rutilius, an idea which, however, he afterwarde
abandoned (vol. vi. p. 20), and rested satisfied with assigning him to the age of
Valentinian or Theodosis. The internal evidence is by no means so copious as to compensate
for the want of information from without. The style, without being barbarous, is such as
would justify us in bringing the writer down as low as the epoch fixed by Wernsdorf,
although he might with equal propriety be placed two centuries earlier; but the controversy
seems to have recently received a new light from the researches of Count Bartolommeo
Borghesi, who, in a memoir published among the Transactions of the Turin Academy (vol.
38.1835), has pointed out that Pasiphilus, the person to whom in all probability Palladius
dedicates his fourteenth book, was praefect of the city in
Although evidently not devoid of a practical acquaintance with his subject, a
considerable portion of the whole work is taken directly from Columella; in all that
relates to gardening, and
Palladius seems to have been very popular in the middle ages, a fact established by the great variety of readings afforded by different MSS., since these discrepancies prove that the text must have been very frequently transcribed, and by the circumstance that nearly the whole of the treatise is to be found included in the well-known "Speculum" of Vincentius of Beauvais. The name, as given at the head of this article, appears at full length both at the beginning and at the end of the Vatican Codices.