1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Martialis, Quintus Gargilius

MARTIALIS, QUINTUS GARGILIUS, a Latin writer on horticultural subjects. He has been identified by some with the military commander of the same name, mentioned in a Latin inscription of A.D. 260 (C. I. L. viii. 9047) as having lost his life in the colony of Auzia (Aumale) in Mauretania Caesariensis. Considerable fragments of his work (probably called De hortis), which treated of the cultivation of trees and vegetables, and also of their medicinal properties, have survived, chiefly in the body of and as an appendix to the Medicina Plinii (an anonymous 4th century handbook of medical recipes based upon Pliny, Nat. Hist. xx.–xxxii.). Extant sections treat of apples, peaches, quinces, almonds and chestnuts. Gargilius also wrote a treatise on the tending of cattle (De curis boum), and a biography of the emperor Alexander Severus is attributed by two of the Scriptores historiae Augustae (Aelius Lampridius and Flavius Vopiscus) to a Gargilius Martialis, who may be the same person.

Bibliography.—Gargilii Martialis . . . fragmenta, ed. A. Mai (1846); Plinii secundi quae fertur medicina, ed. V. Rose (1876); De curis boum, ed. E. Lommatzsch (1903) with Vegetius Renatus’s Mulomedicina; “Gargilius Martialis und die Maurenkriege,” C. Cichorius in G. Curtius, Leipziger Studien, x. (1887), where the inscription referred to above is fully discussed: see also Teuffel-Schwabe, Hist. of Roman Literature (Eng. trans.), § 380.