Illinois Classical Studies, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring 2016 21 © 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Storing Produce and Staging Dinner Parties: Fruit-Galleries and Genre in Varro’s De re rustica 1 grAnt nelsestuen This article explores the genre and ideological agenda of Varro’s De re rustica by examining the textual representation of oporothecae (“fruit- galleries”). As structures in which fruit could be stored and dinner parties held, the oporothecae not only serve to evaluate and satirize the rural prac- tices of contemporary Roman elites but also programmatically epitomize the tension generated by De re rustica’s synthesis of the technical treatise, philosophical dialogue, and satire. Introduction In many respects Varro’s De re rustica is a curious text. On the one hand, it is—or at least resembles—an agricultural treatise, in which its octogenarian author imparts more-or-less useful knowledge (scientia) to his wife, Fundania, for the cultivation of her recently purchased estate (R. 1.1.1); 1 the work has been generally understood as such until relatively recently. 2 On the other hand, the text takes the form of three discrete philosophical dialogues and incorporates a number of satirical elements, which scholars have long noted but tended to discount in some way or another. 3 How are we to understand the multifarious 1. M. Terentius Varro was born in 116 BCE, which would thus place the year of the composi- tion of the work in 37–36. Note that Varro dedicates the second and third books to, respectively, the otherwise unknown Turranius Niger (2 praef. 6) and Pinnius (3.1.1). The presence of multiple dedications used to be taken as evidence for a “double redaction”: the hypothesis that the frst book was composed sometime in the 50s and the other two books in (or, at least, by) 37. This theory—the primary exponent of which is Martin (1971) 238–43—is no longer accepted by most scholars; see, e.g., Flach (1996) 7–15 and Kronenberg (2009) 100. I am using Flach’s (2006) edition of Varro’s text and Goetz’s (1922) Teubner edition for Cato; all translations are my own. 2. So, e.g., White’s (1973) 488–94 survey of Cato, Varro, and the intervening but no-longer extant Roman agronomists. 3. Skydsgaard (1968) 10: “It is a well-known fact that Varro wrote his agricultural treatise in the form of a dialogue; however, this form, having in itself no direct bearing on the structuralization of the material, will not be given any major consideration in the following study.” With the exception of Heisterhagen’s 1952 dissertation, which argued that the De re rustica was a hybrid of the peripatetic __S __N __L lc ICS_41_1.indd 21 5/10/16 10:38 AM