De Agri Cultura

This is the LacusCurtius digital edition of Marcus Porcius Cato's De Agri Cultura, the earliest surviving complete work of Latin prose, an ancient agricultural manual that also preserves ritual prayers used in Roman farming practice. As a primary ancient text in a careful scholarly digital edition it is the correct source for the content of Cato's own manual, including these preserved prayers. Its limit is that it survives through a manuscript transmission with its own textual history, and English renderings depend on the specific translator's choices, so a claim resting on a fine point of wording needs to note which edition and translation it draws from rather than treating the Latin as self-evidently rendered.