1. Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), Roman man of letters called ‘Reātīnus’ because he was born at Reatē in Sabine territory. He was opposed to Julius Caesar in politics and was a Pompeian officer in Spain at the time of the civil war, but was reconciled to Caesar and was to have been the head of the public library whose creation Caesar was contemplating in 47. In 43 he was proscribed by Mark Antony, but escaped with the loss of some property and books. He was a poet, satirist, antiquarian, jurist, geographer, grammarian, and scientist, and wrote on education and philosophy also. Quintilian called him ‘the most learned of Romans’. His enormous literary output ran to more than 600 volumes. Of these only his De re rustica (‘on farming’) survives complete; we also have six books out of the twenty-five of his De lingua Latina (‘on the Latin language’), and some 600 fragments of his Saturae Menippeae (‘Menippean satires’). He died pen in hand.
De lingua Latina is a systematic treatise on Latin grammar, dealing successively with etymology, inflexion, and syntax, a pioneer work showing occasional penetration, amid many absurd derivations. Books 5–10, which we possess, are dedicated to Cicero.
The Saturae Menippeae were satires on the model of Menippus, in a mixture of prose and verse, some of them in dialogue or semi-dramatic form. They were critical sketches of Roman life with a wide range of characters and scenes including some from myth; the language is vigorous, earthy, and inventive. Many of the sketches were directed, with humour and nostalgia for the decencies of the previous century, against the greed, luxury, and sophisticated pretensions of Varro's day, as exemplified by the contemporary Greek schools of philosophy, for example.
His Hebdomadğs (‘sevens’), or Imaginēs (‘portraits’), in fifteen books, now lost, was a collection of character sketches in prose of celebrated Greeks and Romans, accompanied by coloured portraits of the subjects, to each of which an epigram was appended. Much of our knowledge about the lives of eminent Romans derives ultimately from Varro.
Among his other more important works were (i) the antiquarian treatise Antiquitatēs rerum humanarum et divinarum (‘human and divine antiquities’), a historical encyclopaedia, of which roughly speaking the first part dealt with the history of Rome and the second part with Roman religion (the arrangement of facts followed a simple pattern of people, places, dates, and events); (ii) De gente populi Romani (‘on the Roman nation’), concerning the prehistory and early chronology of Rome; (iii) De vita populi Romani (‘on the way of life of the Roman people’), concerning the history and style of Roman society; (iv) Disciplinae (‘studies’), on the liberal arts (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine, and architecture), all except the last two forming the medieval trivium and quadrivium, and subsequently utilized by Martianus Capella; and (v) a treatise on philosophy, De philosophia. Many fragments survive of the Res divinae (‘on religion’) preserved by St Augustine when he attacked it in the City of God. Varro was highly praised by Cicero (who dedicated to him the second edition of his Academica) and by Quintilian. He was influenced by the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon (see ACADEMY), as well as by Stoic and Pythagorean ideas, yet he insisted that an ancient city should adhere to its traditional religion, and accepted that the greatness of Rome had depended in part on its religious observances: at the least, religion, even if untrue, was useful.
2. Publius Terentius Varro, ‘Atacīnus’ (i.e. from the valley of the river Atax in Narbonese Gaul), Latin poet, b. 82 BC. Nothing is known of his life, and his work survives only in fragments. He wrote an epic poem on Julius Caesar's exploits in Gaul in 58 BC called Bellum Sequanicum (‘war against the Sequani’). He also wrote a geographical poem called Chōrographia and a free translation of the Argonautica of the Greek poet Apollonius Rhodius.
