177Now is the place for the natures of soils: what strength each has, what colour, and what nature for bearing produce. 179First, difficult lands and grudging hills, where there is thin clay and pebbles in brushy fields, delight in the Palladian grove of the long-lived olive. 182A sign of this is the oleaster springing up in abundance in the same tract, and the fields strewn with wild berries. 184But a soil that is rich and glad with sweet moisture, and a plain that is thick with grass and fertile in richness — such as we often look down on in a hollow valley of the mountains; 187hither streams flow down from the highest rocks and draw fertile silt with them — and one that rises towards the south and feeds the fern hated by curved ploughs: this will one day furnish you vines exceedingly strong and flowing with plenty of wine, this is fertile in the grape and in such liquor as we pour in libation from bowls and gold, when the plump Tyrrhenian has blown his ivory pipe at the altars, and we offer the steaming entrails on curving platters.
195But if your desire is rather to keep herds and calves, or the young of sheep, or goats that scorch the crops, seek the glades and distant fields of rich Tarentum, and such a plain as unhappy Mantua lost, feeding snowy swans in its grassy river; 200neither clear springs nor grass will be lacking to the flocks; 201and as much as the herds crop in the long days, so much will the cool dew restore in a short night. 203Land that is black, and rich under the pressing ploughshare, and whose soil is crumbly — for this is what we imitate in ploughing — is generally best for corn; 205from no plain will you see more wagons heading home behind slow bullocks; 207or land from which the angry ploughman has carried off the forest and overturned groves idle for many years, and torn up the ancient homes of the birds with their deepest roots; 210they have sought the heights, abandoning their nests, but the raw plain has gleamed beneath the driven ploughshare.
212For the hungry gravel of hilly country scarcely supplies lowly cassia and rosemary for bees; 214and rough tufa, and chalk eaten out by black water-snakes, declare that no other fields furnish serpents with food so sweet, or offer such winding hiding-places. 217Land that breathes out thin mist and flying vapours, and drinks in moisture and gives it back from itself at will, that always clothes itself in its own green grass, and does not harm iron with scurf and salty rust: that land will entwine your elms with luxuriant vines, that land is fertile in oil, that land you will find in tilling both kind to cattle and patient of the hooked ploughshare.
224Such land rich Capua ploughs, and the coast neighbouring the ridge of Vesuvius, and the Clanius, unkind to deserted Acerrae.