“Furthermore, he buys eggs and sets them under dunghill hens, transferring the young pea fowls so hatched to the shelter set apart for their kind.  This house should be built large enough for the number of pea fowl to be kept and should be equipped with separate roosting places smoothly stuccoed, so that snakes and such vermin may not be able to get into it:  and, furthermore, it should have attached to it a run in which the pea fowl may feed on sunny days, and both these places should be kept clean, as this kind of fowl demands.  The keeper should make the rounds often with a shovel to collect and preserve their manure, which is not only fit for use in agriculture but serves also as bedding for your pea chicks.

“It is said that Q. Hortensius was the first to serve pea-cocks at dinner, on the occasion of his inauguration as an augur, an evidence of prodigality which was more approved by the luxurious than by good men of simple manners:  but many others quickly followed his example, so that the price of pea fowl was raised until an egg sold for five deniers ($1) and a pea fowl itself readily for fifty ($10), thus a flock of an hundred of them easily yields an income of forty thousand sesterces, ($2,000), or even sixty ($3,000), if, as Abuccius advises, one obtains three chickens from every pea hen.”

Of pigeons

VII.  In the meanwhile an apparitor came to Appius from the Consul and said that the augurs were summoned.  As Appius went out from the villa publica, a flock of pigeons flew in, whereupon Merula said to Axius:  “If you had established a [Greek:  peristerogropheion] you would think that these were your pigeons, although they are wild, for it is the custom to keep both kinds in a [Greek:  peristerotropheion].  One is the wild dove (or, as some call them the rock dove, or saxatilis), such as live in the towers and dormers (columines) of a farm house, whence they get the name columbae, because, on account of their natural timidity, they seek the highest places on the roof.  On this account wild doves usually frequent towers, to which they may fly from the fields of their own accord, and return.[177] The other kind of pigeons is tamer and are wont to seek their food at the very threshold of a house.  This kind is usually white in colour, the wild variety being mottled but without any white.  From these two stocks a third or mixed variety has been developed for commercial profit and these are collected in the place which some call a peristereon (pigeon house), and others a peristerotropheion (place for raising pigeons), where there are often confined as many as five thousand at a time.