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[20arg] That for what we commonly call virvaria the earlier writers did not use that term; and what Publius Scipio used for this word in his speech to the people, and afterwards Marcus Varro in his work On Farming.IN the third book of his treatise On Farming, 1 Marcus Varro says that the name leporaria is given to certain enclosures, now called vivaria, in which wild animals are kept alive and fed. I have appended Varro's own words: “There are three means of keeping animals on the farm—bird houses, leporaria (warrens), and fish-ponds. I am now using the term ornithones of all kinds of birds that are ordinarily kept within the walls of the farmhouse. Leporaria I wish you to understand, not in the sense in which our remote ancestors used the word, of places in which only hares are kept, but of all enclosures which are connected with a farm-house and contain live animals that are fed.” Farther on in the same book Varro writes: 2 “When you bought the farm at Tusculum from Marcus Piso, there were many wild boars in the leporarium.” But the word vivaria, which the common people now use—the Greek παρὰδέισοι 3 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
