Kitap 2
20
But the word vivaria, which the common people now use—the Greek para\de/isoi The word means an enclosed park, handsomely laid ou and stocked with game; also, a garden, and in Septuagint Gen. 2. 8, the garden of Eden, Paradise. and Varro's leporaria—I do not recall meeting anywhere in the older literature. But as to the word roboraria, which we find in the writings of Scipio, who used the purest diction of any man of his time, I have heard several learned men at Rome assert that this means what we call vivaria and that the name came from the oaken planks of which the enclosures were made, a kind of enclosure which we see in many places in Italy. This is the passage from Scipio's fifth oration Against Claudius Asellus: Orato. Rom. Frag. p. 184, Myer2. When he had seen the highly-cultivated fields and well-kept farmhouses, he ordered them to set up a measuring rod on the highest spot in that district; and from there to build a straight road, in some places through the midst of vineyards, in others through the roborarium and the fish-pond, in still others through the farm buildings.
20
Thus we see that to pools or ponds of water in which live fish are kept in confinement, they gave their own appropriate name of piscinae, or fishponds.
