Credited to Tunisia. The date of Mago's work is uncertain. One account places it around 500 BCE, but the original Punic text is lost and only about 40 fragments survive in Greek and Latin authors.
How it began
Mago was a Carthaginian writer whose long work on agriculture was divided into 28 books. One account places its writing around 500 BCE, in Carthage, on the coast of present-day Tunisia. It was written in Punic and covered practical farming on the estates around the city. Greeks and Romans alike called Mago the father of farming.
How it works
The work gave direct instructions and not theory. Surviving passages advise a landowner to sell his town house and live on the farm, list the points of a good plow ox in detail, describe soaking and pounding wheat and barley before milling, and give a recipe for raisin wine made from sun-dried grapes. Mago also wrote on olives, vines, fruit trees, breeding horses and mules, and beekeeping.
How it spread
When Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE, the treatise was a rare exception to the loss of Carthaginian literature. The Roman Senate paid for a full Latin translation by Decimus Junius Silanus, and Cassius Dionysius adapted it into Greek. Later Roman agricultural authors drew on it.
What lasted
Mago's advice that an owner should live on his land fed the Roman ideal of the gentleman farmer found in Latin literature. The original and the full translations are lost, and the work survives in about 40 fragments quoted by Greek and Roman authors, which remain a main source for how Carthaginian farms were run.
