The bougonia in the Geoponica 15.2 and the handling of the latin technical matter

Abstract

The Byzantine treatise composed of 20 books, the Geoponica, offers a set of detailed information about the procedure known in the classical and late world as bougonia, in other words, a kind of popular folklore for the phenomenon of restoring a beehive froma dead ox. Two ancient texts deal with bougonia in more details: Virgil’s Georgics, in Book 4.284-318, and the Geoponica attributed to Cassianus Bassus, in Book 15.2; other texts bring specific mentions, the best known are the treatises of Varro and Columella. This paper intends to explore the traces of bougonia in the Byzantine text, analyzing its constitutive aspects, its compositional and vocabulary resources, and the treatment given to material from the Latin technical literature of the classical period, represented in the varronian and virgilian traditions. The Geoponica, despite the doubts as to their authenticity, is an important testimony of a growing interest, in the middle of the 9th and 10th centuries, in a new historical approach to Antiquity, namely, to compile the knowledge of different authors from the ancient world. In this sense, the Byzantine treatise, written in greek, demonstrates the still striking association – albeit in the process of scholastic adaptation – between technical and scientific forms and themes with literary forms and themes, marks of the legacy of the classical world in the late world.This association, strange for the moderns, influenced by the Romanticism of the century18th, as observed by Perutelli (2010) and Trevizam (2014), constitutes the intercommunication between the natural ways of thinking and writing of ancient texts that proposed to deal with some technical matter.