Volume 52, Issue 1, June 2012
Christophe Guignard
Pages 155-158
Un passage de Méthode d’Olympe parmi des extraits agricoles
The Vaticanus gr. 573 (14th/15th c.) contains some extracts of the Geoponica with a few lines added to the last one. This supplementary material deals with
the properties of the willow against sexual desire and fertility, and invokes the testimony of the Holy Scripture in support of this conception. Its source can be identified as a passage of Methodius of Olympus’s Symposium, that reuses in the exegesis of Ps. 136 (137) the old Greek idea of the willow as "destroyer of its own fruit" (Hom., od. 10, 510).