Menologia rustica

For the calendar of saints, see menologium.

Ancient Roman farmers' almanacs (in Latin, menologia rustica) are a type of Roman calendar providing month-by-month information on conditions and activities pertaining to agriculture. They were displayed as public inscriptions. Examples that survived to the modern era are the Menologium Rusticum Colotianum and the Menologium Rusticum Vallense, both dating to the period 19–65 AD[1] or 36–39 to the end of the 1st century AD.[2] Both were discovered in the 16th century, but the Menologium Valense has been lost.[3]

Description

The Menologium Rusticum Colotianum was discovered by Angelo Colocci, and is held by the Naples Museum.[4] It appears on a four-sided marble altar base, inscribed in twelve columns. Each column contains:

Villas on working estates often displayed mosaics and wall painting depicting seasonal or monthly agricultural activities, in some sense illustrations of the menologia rustica.[6]

Van L. Johnson conjectured that the four-sided form of the menologia preserved an original four-month Roman "year" or festival cycle.[7]

Text

See also

References

  1. Michele Renee Salzman, On Roman Time: The Codex Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 1990), p. 170.
  2. Joseph Patrich, Studies in the Archaeology and History of Caesarea Maritima (Brill, 2011), p. 84, note 53.
  3. John Edwin Sandys, Latin Epigraphy: An Introduction to the Study of Latin Inscriptions (Cambridge University Press, 1919), p. 174.
  4. Sandys, Latin Epigraphy, p. 174.
  5. James Chidester Egbert, Introduction to the Study of Latin Inscriptions (New York, 1896), p. 368.
  6. Annalisa Marzano, Roman Villas in Central Italy: A Social and Economic History (Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 297.
  7. Van L. Johnson, "Natalis Urbis and Principium anni," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 91 (1960), p. 110.