Marcus Terentius Varro

Roman scholar

• Born: 116 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Reate, near Rome (now Rieti, Italy)
• Died: 27 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

Varro contributed to every field of abstract and practical knowledge extant in his day, established the worthiness of intellectual pursuits such as linguistic study and encyclopedism, and left a body of knowledge that, directly or indirectly, has informed and influenced writers and scholars ever since.

Early Life

Marcus Terentius Varro (VAHR-oh) was sometimes called Marcus Terentius Varro Reatinus because he was born in Reate, in the Sabine region of modern Italy. His family, which owned vast estates there, was considered to be of equestrian, or knightly, rank, although certain ancestors had attained noble rank by holding office in the senate. Varro’s parents had the means to obtain for him the best education available at the time. This included a long sojourn in the capital, where he studied under the Stoic Stilo Praeconinus (who taught Cicero ten years later) and afterward a period in Athens, during which he studied philosophy with Antiochus of Ascalon, the academic. Stilo Praeconinus, the first Roman grammarian and philologist, was also a learned historian of Roman antiquity, and under his tutelage Varro soon showed an extraordinary aptitude for these pursuits.

Life’s Work

As a gifted scholar, Varro could have kept himself apart from public life had he so chosen. Until he was nearly seventy, however, he remained deeply involved in both politics and the military. To people of his own era, this was not contradictory, for few of Varro’s contemporaries were inclined to draw a strict boundary between intellectual and public life. Julius Caesar, during his march through the Alps to Gaul, composed a treatise on Latin grammatical inflections that he dedicated to Cicero. Indeed, political leaders such as Cicero and Caesar spent many adult years studying philosophy and ancient history, trying to draw lessons that would help them govern justly and wisely.

Varro’s political and military career was closely allied with that of Pompey the Great. In 76 b.c.e. he served under Pompey in a military campaign against the rebel Quintus Sertorius in Spain. Afterward, Varro entered public office, serving first as tribune (a magistrate of the people with veto power over senate actions), then as curule aedile (roughly, superintendent of public works), and finally as praetor, or judicial officer. In 67, he held a naval command under Pompey in the war against the Cilician pirates, who, for a time, had virtually controlled the Mediterranean Sea. From 66 to 63 Varro served, again under Pompey, in the third war against Mithradates the Great, king of Pontus. From 52 to 48, during the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, Varro commanded two legions for Pompey in Spain. On August 2, 48, two other Pompeian commanders in Spain capitulated to Caesar, and Varro, probably under pressure from his soldiers, was forced to follow suit. Afterward, like Cicero and Cato the Younger, he went to Dyrrachium, a sort of neutral corner, to await the outcome of the Battle of Pharsalus, which decided the entire conflict in Caesar’s favor.

Varro and Caesar had remained on friendly terms during even the bitterest conflict between Caesar and Pompey. In 48 Pompey was murdered by agents of the Egyptian king, and the following year the victorious Caesar pardoned Varro and restored to him lands that had been seized by Marc Antony. Caesar also appointed Varro head of the great public library that was then being planned. Thus began the period of the works and accomplishments for which Varro is best remembered and which earned for him the title (bestowed by Quintilian in the first century c.e.) of “the most learned of Romans.”

A profile of Varro, bearded and wearing a woolen, Greek-style cap, appears on an ancient coin now housed in the Museo Nazionale Romano. Most Roman men did not grow beards, although Greek men did, and Varro may have worn one along with the cap as a sign of his intellectual vocation, which was commonly associated with Greece rather than with Rome. Alternatively, regardless of Varro’s actual appearance, the designer of the coin may have simply portrayed him in this fashion for symbolic purposes.

Varro is remembered, among many other reasons, for compiling in Rome what was to be the first library for public use. He concentrated on three types of prose works: the writings of the antiquarians, treatises by grammarians and philologists (by this time Stilo Praeconinus’s new disciplines had come into their own), and works on practical subjects such as husbandry and domestic economy. His collection served as a kind of stylistic barometer for the times: The Ciceronian style dominated the prose of theoretical works, especially in philosophy, rhetoric, and history, while the sparser, more direct expression of Cato the Censor set the standard for practical treatises. In addition to Latin works in these genres, Varro acquired for his collection many volumes in Greek.

Although he seems generally to have ignored poetry (which was then in temporary eclipse), he is credited with establishing the canon of dramatic verse certifiably written by Plautus—some twenty-one plays, constituting what is called the Fabulae Varronianae—and, according to Aulus Gellius, Varro also wrote literary and dramatic criticism of Plautus.

Varro’s unprecedented collection of books for public use proved of enormous benefit to contemporary scholars. As Rome passed from a republican to an Imperial form of government, interest in Roman antiquity grew rapidly, and there developed a new fraternity of researchers and historians who made whatever use they could of the early records and works by the pioneering annalists of Rome. Before the formation of Varro’s public library—as in Great Britain and the United States at comparable periods of their development—a literary worker had to depend on the generosity of private library owners for a look at such rare works and records.

Though he now was devoted to the pursuits of scholarship and librarianship that were his forte, Varro had one remaining practical challenge to face. In 47, nearly seventy years old, he had retired altogether from political life when he accepted Caesar’s appointment as librarian. Nevertheless, after Caesar was assassinated in 44 b.c.e. and Octavian, Marc Antony, and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate, Antony declared Varro an enemy of the state and had him proscribed, that is, banished from the vicinity of Rome. Varro’s home near the capital was destroyed, as was his private library, containing not only thousands of works by other writers but also many of the hundreds of volumes he himself had written up to his seventy-third year, when he was banished. If not for the proscription, with its destructive aftermath—an all-too-common occurrence in that period of Roman history—more might be known about the exact contents of the famous public library, for which Varro probably had earmarked many volumes in his private collection. Undoubtedly, too, many more of Varro’s works would have survived down to the present day.

Indeed, Varro nearly lost his life during Antony’s proscription—the same proscription that actually did lead to the death of Cicero in 43 b.c.e. Yet with the help of friends, led by Quintus Fufius Calenus, Varro received a pardon from Octavian and spent the rest of his days peacefully in Rome.

The vigorous, hardworking old man now turned most of his energies to his own writing. Varro claimed to have composed, over his entire career, seventy-four works comprising more than six hundred volumes. This assertion is supported by commentators such as Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, and Nonius Marcellus, who all lived and worked within a few centuries after Varro. His work spanned virtually all areas of learning and all genres of writing then known to Rome: poetry, philosophy, history, literary criticism, grammar, philology, science and mathematics, practical handbooks, and the like. Among his lost books are a work on geometry, one on mensuration, and a nine-volume encyclopedia that helped form the basis for what became the medieval program of education.

On the other hand, what Varro did for his contemporaries, in the way of preserving and concentrating sources for antiquarian research, many later scholars have done for certain of his works. For example, it is thanks in large part to quotations by Nonius Marcellus (fl. fourth century c.e.) that some six hundred lines and ninety titles of Varro’s 150 books that form the Saturae Menippiae (c. 81-67 b.c.e.; Menippean Satires) are preserved for the twentieth century. (According to Cicero, Varro himself composed much verse, although Varro allowed little room for poetry in his library collection.)

Actually, the satires were an intermixture of prose and verse in the style of Menippus, a Greek Cynic of the third century b.c.e. The extant titles are greatly varied, some named after gods or persons, some quoting Latin or Greek proverbs—for example, Nescis quid vesper serus vehat (You know not what the evening may bring forth) and the famous Socratic dictum “Know thyself.” The subject matter also varies: eating and drinking, literature, philosophy, politics, and the “good old days.” The general themes are the absurdity of much Greek philosophy and the preoccupation among Romans of Varro’s day with luxury and leisure. Varro expressed his disapproval for the First Triumvirate in a satire he called Trikaranos (the three-headed).

Modern opinion, based on the surviving fragments, varies as to the literary merit of the Menippean Satires. The ancients, however, quoted them so frequently as to make quite evident their popularity with Varro’s contemporaries. In addition to his own poetic compositions, Varro wrote several treatises on literature and literary history, including De poematis (of poetry), De compositione saturarum (on the composition of satire), and De poetis (about poets).

He also made many lasting contributions to science and education, chief of which was to introduce the Greek concept of the encyclopedia, meaning “general education,” into Roman thought. This he did by way of his now-lost De forma philosophiae libri III (on philosophical forms) and Disciplinarum libri IX (liberal arts). The latter set forth all the known liberal arts gathered from Greek sources. It was the Greeks who had originally divided the liberal arts into a trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and a quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music), and the Disciplinarum libri IX contained a chapter on each, as well as on architecture and medicine. Later scholars removed these last two from the scheme and made them professional studies, retaining the others as the basic program of education in the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, the encyclopedia, incorporating excerpts from and synopses of writings by earlier authors, became a respectable genre among the Romans, particularly in scientific circles. Other scientific contributions included two works on geography, De ora maritima (of the seashore) and De aestuariis (of estuaries), as well as numerous works on meteorology and almanacs for farmers and sailors.

Varro brought innovation in yet another area: His fifteen-volume Imagines, also known as Hebdomades, published about 39 b.c.e., introduced the illustrated biography to Romans. (Crateuas, the physician of Mithradates the Great, had earlier published an illustrated book on plants written in Greek.) Varro’s Imagines contained brief life histories of seven hundred famous Greeks and Romans, accompanied by a likeness of each. Varro’s choice of precisely seven hundred biographies is also interesting: He had a powerful attachment to the number seven, and Aulus Gellius quoted him as saying that the virtues of that number are many and various.

By ancient estimates, Varro’s greatest work was one of which no trace now remains: the forty-one-volume Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum libri XLI (of matters human and divine). Its importance lay in the complete account it gave of Roman political and religious life from the earliest times. Because the book displayed immense knowledge of the Roman past, the church fathers used it as a source of information about official Roman religion. Although this work is lost, much information from it is preserved in Gellius, Servius, Macrobius, and Saint Augustine.

Of those works by Varro that are preserved in the original, one, De lingua Latina (On the Latin Language), has come down in mutilated form. Only five of its twenty-five volumes survive, and even these are incomplete. Varro composed the work between 47 and 45 and published it before the death of Cicero, to whom it is dedicated. It has value not only as an early study of linguistic origins and development but also as a source of quotations from early Roman poets. Although some of the etymologies are a bit fanciful, many more evince true wit and insight. Perhaps most important, this work is a pioneering systematic treatment—starting with word origins and the evolution of meanings, moving to a defense of etymology as a branch of learning, treating abstract concepts such as ideas of time and the rare and difficult words that poets often use, then introducing the debate over “anomaly” versus “analogy” (a controversy that survives to modern times). Varro’s approach, the product of independent thought despite its heavy debt to his teacher Stilo Praeconinus, made the subject worthy of attention from other scholars.

His other surviving work, De re rustica (36 b.c.e.; On Agriculture), has come down almost completely intact. On Agriculture is a practical handbook rather than a theoretical treatise; Varro based it on his actual experience of running his family’s three Sabine farms, as well as on lore and science drawn from ancient sources.

On Agriculture is important for several reasons: as an instance of the dialogue form, as a revelation of Roman agricultural ideas, as a source for Vergil’s Georgics (c. 37-29 b.c.e.), and as a harbinger of at least one discovery of modern science. In this work, Varro cautioned farmers to choose a healthy site for their farmhouse and to avoid building near swamps because, as he wrote, “certain minute animals, invisible to the eye, breed there and, borne by the air, reach inside the body by way of the mouth and nose and cause diseases that are difficult to get rid of.” Cicero and his circle, though friendly to Varro, apparently considered this theory of his absurd. Varro was possibly the only Roman who approached the germ theory of disease, which Louis Pasteur would fully develop more than eighteen hundred years later.

Significance

Even the briefest survey of his work reveals how pervasive Marcus Terentius Varro’s influence was—not only on his own age but also on posterity. Cicero praised Varro with the words, “When we were foreigners and wanderers—strangers, as it were, in our own land—your books led us home and made it possible for us at length to learn who we were as Romans and where we lived.” Through the sheer range of his undertakings, he influenced later authors and scholars as diverse as Vergil, Petronius, Gellius, Augustine, and Boethius.

Despite the enormous scope of his abstract knowledge, Varro was primarily a shrewd, practical thinker, and, because the Roman mind looked for the practical significance of all things intellectual, he attempted to absorb and then pass on to his fellow citizens all that could be learned. So intent was he on transmitting what was knowable that he summarized some of his longer works so that less-educated Romans could comprehend them more easily. In this capacity, he became perhaps the world’s first intellectual popularizer.

Bibliography

Duff, J. Wight. A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age from Tiberius to Hadrian. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Contains a discussion of Varro’s place in Roman literature.

Duff, J. Wight. Roman Satire: Its Outlook on Social Life. 1936. Reprint. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964. Includes a discussion specifically focusing on Varro’s Menippean Satires, of which only fragments remain but which is thought by some scholars to have great literary merit.

Skydsgaard, Jens Erik. Varro the Scholar: Studies in the First Book of Varro’s “De re rustica.” Copenhagen, Denmark: Munksgaard, 1968. A lucid discussion of the first part of Varro’s On Agriculture. Written by a respected scholar.

Stahl, William H. Roman Science: Origins, Development, and Influence to the Later Middle Ages. 1962. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978. Includes a discussion of Varro’s contributions to agriculture, mathematics, linguistic studies, geography, and encyclopedism.

Varro, Marcus Terentius. De Lingua Latina X. Translated by Daniel J. Taylor. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. Notes to this translation examine Book 10 of this work and Varro’s work with linguistics.

Varro, Marcus Terentius. On Agriculture. Translated by William Davis Hooper and Harrison Boyd Ash. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Varro’s only complete surviving work. Written in dialogue form, with great descriptive and dramatic power. Cato’s De agri cultura (c. 160 b.c.e.; On Agriculture, 1913) is printed in the same volume.

Varro, Marcus Terentius. On the Latin Language. Translated by Roland G. Kent. 2 vols. Rev. ed. 1951. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Contains the surviving fragments of Varro’s twenty-five-volume work on the derivation, grammar, and popular usage of the Latin language. Provides the Latin original opposite each page of translation.