This article is about the Roman polymath. For the Roman general and consul of the Second Punic War, seeGaius Terentius Varro.
An imagined portrait of an elderly Varro, engraving fromAndré Thevet,Les Vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens (1584).
Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) was a Romanpolymath and a prolific author. He is regarded asancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described byPetrarch as "the third great light of Rome" (afterVirgil andCicero).[1] He is sometimes calledVarro Reatinus ("Varro ofRieti") to distinguish him from his younger contemporaryVarro Atacinus ("Varro ofAtax").[2][3][4][5]
Fasti Antiates Maiores, an inscription containing theRoman calendar. This calendar predates the Julian reform of the calendar; it contains the monthsQuintilis andSextilis, and allows for the insertion of anintercalary month
The compilation of theVarronian chronology was an attempt to determine an exact year-by-year timeline ofRoman history up to his time. It is based on the traditional sequence of the consuls of theRoman Republic—supplemented, where necessary, by inserting "dictatorial" and "anarchic" years. It has been demonstrated to be somewhat erroneous[16] but has become the widely accepted standard chronology, in large part because it was inscribed on thearch of Augustus in Rome; though that arch no longer stands, a large portion of the chronology has survived under the name ofFasti Capitolini.
Varro's literary output was prolific;Ritschl estimated it at 74 works in some 620 books, of which only one work survives complete, although we possess many fragments of the others, mostly in Gellius'Attic Nights. He was called "the most learned of the Romans" byQuintilian,[17] and also recognized byPlutarch as "a man deeply read in Roman history".[18]
His only complete work extant,Rerum rusticarum libri tres ("Three Books on Agriculture"), has been described as "the well digested system of an experienced and successful farmer who has seen and practised all that he records."[19]
One noteworthy aspect of the work is his anticipation ofmicrobiology andepidemiology. Varro warned his readers to avoid swamps and marshland, since in such areas
...there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, but which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and cause serious diseases.[20][21][22]
A modern scholar,Bertha Tilly, assesses Varro's work as follows:
For the immense mass of work completed, for his patriotic fervour, his high moral sentiments, for versatility in forms of writing and in subjects, for the vast range of material, Varro towers above all his contemporaries and his successors: he was distinguished for learning as no other man had ever been or was to be.[24]
Most of the extant fragments of these works (mostly the grammatical works) can be found in the Goetz–Schoell edition ofDe Lingua Latina, pp. 199–242; in the collection of Wilmanns, pp. 170–223; and in that of Funaioli, pp. 179–371.
^"Miscellaneous Publication".Miscellaneous Publication (900). Maryland Agricultural Experiment Station: 10. 1977. Retrieved22 October 2023.The writer Varro, whose book on agriculture was published in 37 B.C., makes it clear that such latifundia existed in those days. Varro discussed some of the problems of latifundia management.
^M.D. Reeve discusses the descent of both Cato's and Varro's essays inTexts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, edited by L.D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 40–42.
Cardauns, B.Marcus Terentius Varro: Einführung in sein Werk. Heidelberger Studienhefte zur Altertumswissenschaft. Heidelberg, Germany: C. Winter, 2001.
d’Alessandro, P. "Varrone e la tradizione metrica antica".Spudasmata, volume 143. Hildesheim; Zürich; New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2012.
Dahlmann, H.M. "Terentius Varro. Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft". Supplement 6,Abretten bis Thunudromon. Edited by Wilhelm Kroll, 1172–1277. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1935.
Ferriss-Hill, J. "Varro’s Intuition of Cognate Relationships".Illinois Classical Studies, volume 39, 2014, pp. 81–108.
Freudenburg, K. "The Afterlife of Varro in Horace'sSermones: Generic Issues in Roman Satire."Generic Interfaces in Latin Literature: Encounters, Interactions and Transformations, edited by Stavros Frangoulidis, De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 297–336.
Kronenberg, L.Allegories of Farming from Greece and Rome: Philosophical Satire in Xenophon, Varro and Virgil. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Nelsestuen, G.Varro the Agronomist: Political Philosophy, Satire, and Agriculture in the Late Republic. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015.
Richardson, J.S. "The Triumph of Metellus Scipio and the Dramatic Date of Varro, RR 3".The Classical Quarterly, volume 33, no. 2, 1983, pp. 456–463.
Taylor, D.J..Declinatio : A Study of the Linguistic Theory of Marcus Terentius Varro. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1974.
Van Nuffelen, P. "Varro’s Divine Antiquities: Roman Religion as an Image of Truth".Classical Philology, volume 105, no. 2, 2010, pp. 162–188.
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