Vindonius Anatolius of Beirut

Beirut

Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...

 (also known as Vindanius, Vindanionius, Berytius) was a Greek author of the 4th century, and may be identical with the praetor of the Praetorian prefect of Illyricum mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus Marcellinus was a fourth-century Roman historian. He wrote the penultimate major historical account surviving from Antiquity...

.

He was the author of a "Collection of agricultural practices" based on numerous earlier authors including Julius Africanus

Julius Africanus

Julius Africanus was a celebrated orator in the reign of Nero, and seems to have been the son of the Julius Africanus, of the Gallic state of the Santoni, who was condemned by Tiberius in 32 AD. Quintilian, who had heard Julius Africanus, spoke of him and Domitius Afer as the best orators of their...

, pseudo-Democritus, pseudo-Apuleius

Pseudo-Apuleius

Pseudo-Apuleius refers to the author of a Herbarium or De herbarum virtutibus, also referred as Herbarium Apuleii Platonici; it is a medical herbal of the 5th century....

, the Quinctilii, Florentinus

Florentinus

Florentinus was a Roman politician who served as Urban prefect of Rome from 395 to 397 AD.-Career:A native of Augusta Treverorum, Florentinus was possibly a Notarius around 379/380 AD. He was the Comes sacrarum largitionum in the west from 385 to 386 and the Quaestor sacri palatii in 395...

 and Tarentinus. Except for a few fragments, the work of Vindonius is lost. Evidence of its contents includes:

• It was the major source of the 6th century work of Cassianus Bassus
  Cassianus Bassus
  Cassianus Bassus, called Scholasticus was one of the geoponici — the group of writers on agricultural subjects.He lived at the end of the 6th or the beginning of the 7th century. He compiled from earlier writers a collection of agricultural literature; the principal source was Vindonius Anatolius...
  
  ' Eclogae de re rustica, which is also lost but was excerpted in the Geoponica
  Geoponica
  The Geoponica is a twenty-book collection of agricultural lore, compiled during the 10th century in Constantinople for the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus...
  
  , a surviving 10th century text.
• Photius included a notice of Vindonius's work in his Bibliotheca (codex 163).
• A Syriac
  Syriac language
  Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
  
   translation was made in the 6th or 7th century, and Arabic
  Arabic language
  Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
  
   and Armenian
  Armenian language
  The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian people. It is the official language of the Republic of Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The language is also widely spoken by Armenian communities in the Armenian diaspora...
  
   translations were made from this in the 9th and 10th centuries.
• One page of the original work survives in Bibliothèque Nationale MS B.N.Gr. 2313 f. 49v.

External links

• R. Rodgers, "Kêpopoiïa: Garden-Making and Garden Culture in the Greek Geoponica," in Byzantine Garden Culture, ed. A. Littlewood et al. (Washington, 2002), pp. 159–175.