Varro varius: The polymath of the Roman world

Rome produced no man more erudite, eclectic, and energetic than Marcus Terentius Varro (116-24 BC). Over a long and busy life, set against the backdrop of near-constant social and political upheaval, Varro studied and codified almost every conceivable topic for intellectual enquiry. His vast output – of at least seventy works in over 600 books – is breathtaking in its range and ambition: antiquity (in all its aspects), language, literary history, theology, philosophy, sociology, agriculture, geography, music, mathematics – to say nothing of his own poetic and satirical writings. In many of these fields Varro redefined the terms of study for the Roman world (and beyond); in some he founded a scholarly discipline and tradition without any precedent. Yet the greatest scholar of Rome has rarely enjoyed the attention he deserves from the modern world: although the fragmentary state of much of his corpus presents serious obstacles to enquiry, the extant material provides a rich and unparalleled insight into Roman scholarship of the first century BC. This volume of new essays on Varro seeks to analyze this multifaceted polymath from several angles, not only revisiting his better known writings and the problems they raise but also reconstructing his intellectual activity and its influence on the basis of insufficiently examined evidence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: May 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913701000

Book preview

Introduction

David Butterfield

Varro is a figure to whom scholarship has not yet done justice. This shortcoming may partly be explained by the fact that the man and his output are often only accessible by the most painfully indirect of routes. Nevertheless, there are few figures from the ancient world that reward enquirers as much as Varro.¹ To open this collection of essays, I shall attempt in this introduction to lay out some of the known facts – and plausible inferences – about the remarkable scholar at the heart of this book.

Varro’s long and varied life can be analysed as a series of successes and failures, of fervent activity and of tactful retirement. His afterlife, however, from the dawn of the Roman Empire through to the Italian Renaissance, must largely be seen in negative terms: although he was roundly heralded as the most erudite man of his age and, in due course, of the whole history of Rome, his mixed reception by the Church Fathers, combined with the crushing blow to learning dealt by the fall of the Roman Empire, proved fatal to the survival of his sole monuments – his immense corpus of written works. After the period from the mid-sixth to the mid-eighth centuries, the darkest of Dark Ages, it was very probably the case that almost every book that Varro had written was irrevocably lost, his manuscripts having been exposed through neglect to the ever-present hazards of fire, water and war. Over 95% of Varro’s writings do not survive to us, and of over seventy separate works authored by him only one survives in an effectively complete state.² To give a very rough idea of the extent of this loss, it would be analogous, if we take Ovid as a more common, though much less productive, author for comparison, to having just a couple of books of his Fasti and the complete poem Ibis; as regards all the rest of Ovid’s works, including the magnum opus on which his fame rests, some would be preserved in only occasional single-line – or even single-word – fragments, the rest being lost without a trace. Thus in the case of Varro his name and fame as a polymath have reached us with much greater clarity than the actual writings upon which that very prestige was built.

Despite these major difficulties and significant defects, Varro has been a source of continued appeal to scholars since the Renaissance, and many – albeit only those brave enough to tackle so defective and lacunose a corpus – have sought to reconstruct as much as can reasonably be done about this most outstanding individual in Roman intellectual history. The purpose of the present collection, succinctly put, is to continue that important process by asking a number of searching questions about Varro himself, his work, his reception and – unavoidably – his transmission.

Marcus Terentius Varro was probably born at Reate, modern Rieti, in Sabine territory north-east of Rome; the great majority of his education in literature and philosophy, however, he received in Rome itself.³ His most influential teacher was Lucius Aelius Stilo, the Stoic grammarian and antiquarian, who can perhaps be called the first bona fide scholar of Roman descent. Varro later studied in Athens under Antiochus of Ascalon, the celebrated Platonist and reformer of the Academy. Both of these figures were major influences on the intellectual scene of first-century-BC Rome, and it is no surprise that Cicero himself sat at the feet of both. Being not only of senatorial class and appropriate wealth but also of undoubted ambition, Varro enjoyed a string of titles: he was triumuir capitalis in 90 BC, quaestor in 86/85, tribune of the plebs and subsequently praetor, perhaps in 68. In his military career, Varro’s aristocratic leanings brought him into the circle of Pompey – ten years his junior – for whom he served successfully as proquaestor in the war against Sertorius of the mid 70s, and whom he continued to aid thereafter. Indeed, his command in the war against the pirates of 67 BC won him that most coveted of prizes, the Corona naualis, or ‘naval crown’, traditionally awarded to commanders who leapt upon an enemy ship under arms and then succeeded in capturing it. When the ‘first triumvirate’ was eventually established, Varro showed his disapproval by writing a political, and no doubt satirical, pamphlet entitled Trikaranos, ‘The three-headed’. Nevertheless, he went on to serve as one of the twenty men entrusted with carrying out Julius Caesar’s controversial agrarian laws. When at length the civil wars broke out, Varro returned to Pompey and operated as his legate in Spain, but he was subsequently outmanoeuvred and forced to surrender his legions to Caesar. He thereafter moved to join Pompey’s army at Dyrrachium and inevitably suffered defeat at the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC.

Perhaps owing as much to his age as to his impressive scholarly career up to that point, Varro was pardoned by Caesar, and in the early 40s BC, perhaps as a form of apology, dedicated half of his greatest work, the Antiquitates rerum diuinarum, to him in his capacity as pontifex maximus. As a possible quid pro quo, Varro was duly commissioned in 46 as librarian of the ambitious public library that Caesar planned for Rome, which aimed to contain all accessible Greek and Latin literature. Unfortunately for the ancients – as well for us moderns – this great plan did not come into being, for obvious, bloody reasons. However, in its stead, Gaius Asinius Pollio set up in 39 BC his own public library at Rome, which Pliny the Elder (HN 7.115) claimed to be the first truly public institution of its kind, adding that Varro alone among those living was honoured with a commemorative bust in its august hall.

After the death of Caesar, Varro eschewed politics entirely and pursued scholarship full-throttle in a manner akin to a nineteenth-century gentleman amateur. This was not as relaxing a process as it sounds, however, for in 43 BC he was proscribed by Antony and saw his villa at Casinum thoroughly despoiled, including, as Appian informs us (BC 4.47.202), the barbarous destruction of his library and his precious aviary. He himself was able to survive this act of savagery, however, thanks to the intervention of his friend Fufius Calenus, and he went on to spend his last fifteen years at his villas at Cumae and Tusculum.

We may now turn to the core of Varro’s fame, his written works. Varro was unquestionably renowned in antiquity for the immense scale of his output. Cicero (Att. 13.18) termed him πολυγραφώτατος and later Augustine, one of our prime sources for several of Varro’s works, stated with elegant point that ‘Varro read so much that we are amazed he had any spare time to write; but he wrote so much that we can scarcely believe anyone could have read it.’⁴ Given the sheer quantity of his work, however, the quality of its presentation was sometimes found wanting: even in antiquity, Quintilian could observe bitingly that Varro was more useful for knowledge than for eloquence, a view that Augustine, among others, likewise supported.⁵ It is difficult to deny that Varro’s style can be rather harsh when set against his polished contemporaries Cicero, Caesar, Virgil and Horace, from whom the difference in level of craft and care is patent. However, the assertion of as formidable a critic as Eduard Norden, who complained that the greatest extant work on the Latin language – Varro’s De lingua Latina – is itself written in the worst Latin prose style, is open to some debate,⁶ for there is still much to commend in, and much to learn from, Varro’s own direct and energetic form of expression.

We have already recorded that the great majority of Varro’s writings are lost to us. That is true, but, despite the inescapable problem this poses, we are not left entirely in the dark as to the make-up of his extraordinary output as a writer. For it is thanks to St Jerome that we are able to ascertain not only the approximate number of books that Varro wrote but also their titles. Jerome compiled a supposedly complete catalogue of Varro’s works in a letter he wrote to his disciple Paula in 384, which, although lost, was cited in part by Rufinus. In most copies of the text, however, the list contains only a small number of Varronian works and is clearly and gravely incomplete. Renaissance scholars were therefore most uncertain about the full range of Varro’s writings, desperately piecing together what little could be made out from the fragmentary citations of his works. All was not lost, however, for a seemingly complete version of Jerome’s list was turned up in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to an Englishman famous for his own plethora of books – Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872) of Middlehill, renowned for being one of the most prolific book collectors, if not clinical bibliomaniacs, in history.⁷

Philipps chanced to discover a manuscript from Arras in Northern France containing a ‘Preface to Origen on Genesis’. Remarkably, this codex contained the list of Varronian works in full, to the tune of no fewer than 522 books. After some supplementary information provided by the French scholar Charles Chappuis, it was possible, by working methodically through this list and refining the testimonia from other sources, to produce a working total of Varro’s output. This the great scholar of Bonn, Friedrich Ritschl, succeeded in calculating,⁸ and his figures are still generally accepted by scholars: we can reconstruct that Varro wrote at least 74 different works, comprising 620 books in total. Now, although the liber or ‘book’ may only be the length of a chapter in modern terms, this volume of work remains truly staggering: it is greater than that of any other Roman writer, and perhaps exceeded all Greek writers (including Callimachus). We may also be given an idea of Varro’s pace of work: Gellius informs us (3.10) that Varro himself claimed to have written 490 books by the time he was 77. If these figures are accurate, this means that, in the last twelve years of his life, Varro wrote at the rate of almost a book per month. It is thus unsurprising – if that serial anecdotist Valerius Maximus (8.7.3) can be trusted – that Varro died in harness, with stilus in hand.

Jerome’s list attests to the immense variety and incredible range of Varro’s work. His books covered, to list just some of their topics, the history – and even prehistory – of Rome, as well as a historical account of its civilisation, its institutions, its customs and its people, civil law, the history of Roman literature and drama (with especial reference to Plautus), philosophy, grammar, the history of libraries, linguistics – and even sociolinguistics, tidal motion, sea navigation, Greco-Roman biography, as well as a three-book account of his own life, to which self-reflexive item we must add the publication of his speeches and correspondence.

Now it is clear that, for his time, Varro enjoyed a prodigious lifespan in which to bring to fruition this colossal amount of work: for, although he was born ten years before Cicero, he succeeded in outliving him by over fifteen: this allowed him a remarkable perspective of the rapidly changing social, political and intellectual narratives of the late-second and first centuries BC. It is quite astounding to reflect on the fact that Varro could dedicate one of his own books to Accius (170–c.86) during that great tragedian’s lifetime but still himself be alive to witness the appearance of Virgil’s Georgics (29) and possibly even the first elegiac books of Propertius and Tibullus (early 20s?). However, over this rich and varied life, it seems that Varro was only engaged actively in scholarship for two concentrated periods: the first in the 50s, the second for the last fifteen years of his life, that is from 42 BC onwards; but Varro was not always ruminans antiquitates – to use his own phrase (Men. 505): we should therefore remember that effectively half of his life was instead spent engaged in military campaigns or political business.

So what became of this almighty corpus Varronianum? Well, it is obviously difficult to answer that question in general terms without discussion of specifics. But evidently a major portion of the corpus survived for several centuries,⁹ and certain parts apparently until the Fall of the Empire. Yet a considerable number of works very probably fell out of favour – owing to their specific and idiosyncratic learning – before surmounting that crucial hurdle for the survival of a work of Roman literature, namely the transfer from papyrus roll to parchment codex. For the major works, it could well be that several failed to survive rather because of their very importance and centrality for Roman learning: since Varro’s researches were not only so revolutionary but also so detailed and dense in their volume, they were highly susceptible to culling – to careful extraction, polishing and reworking – by later writers. As a result, some of the great Varronian opera would have suffered an unfortunate and paradoxical outcome: to perish through their success, to be rendered otiose by their complete absorption into subsequent scholarly and literary productions at Rome, to the ultimate neglect of themselves.¹⁰ At any rate, whatever happened in those dark days of antiquity, no more than two of Varro’s seventy-four works appear to have survived past the age of Charlemagne.

Although we are thus faced with the complete absence of the vast majority of his output, one can be left in little doubt that we find in the person of Varro the greatest scholar that Rome ever produced.¹¹ The sheer breadth of his learning remains utterly astounding: for not only, as we have seen, did he write on the full gamut of human knowledge (with the possible exceptions of only medicine and serious mathematics¹²) but he did so in a manner so authoritative that his works typically became standard handbooks. His reception by Cicero is particularly instructive on this point. Although the great orator’s relationship with Varro was often undeniably frosty, since he regarded him as suspicious in motives and ‘amazingly odd’ in his character – mirabiliter moratus (Att. 2.25.1) – he was moved to dedicate his Academica of 45 BC to Varro, on the advice of their mutual friend Atticus. As part of the dedication, Cicero casts Varro as a speaker throughout the dialogue, although, as usual, it is difficult to assess how much of the man’s real colouring Cicero added to the interlocutor bearing his name. In the proem to the first book, Cicero gives lavish – and justly famous – praise to Varro for the remarkable service his Antiquitates (and other unnamed works) have done for Rome: we are told that Romans previously wandered around like strangers in a city which seemed in many respects alien in its culture, and indeed that culture’s origins seemed remote and confused; but Varro’s researches restored the city to them in a new light, which duly shone back on them and revealed to them their own true identity.¹³ From Cicero, this is high praise indeed. He could not, however, refrain from adding a barb in the wake of such august commendation: the character of Varro is told: ‘you have touched upon philosophy in many places, sufficiently to provide encouragement, but insufficiently to provide instruction.’¹⁴ A beta-plus performance, then, which must lag behind Cicero’s trailblazing output in the lofty field of philosophy.

Certainly Varro’s role as a philosopher may seem less pronounced to us, but philosophus was the term that Apuleius – for one – used to qualify him (Apol. 42), and several books on explicitly philosophical topics were written, including one in which, influenced as ever by Pythagorean number-theory, he posited that there existed precisely 288 different philosophical schools to which one could adhere, a calculation based upon different modifications of a most simple three-fold division.¹⁵

Of course, Varro’s reception by later scholars was almost invariably glowing (cf. n. 11 above): Quintilian famously spoke of him as almost universally knowledgeable,¹⁶ Plutarch regarded him as the most well-read of Roman historians, and the metrician Terentianus Maurus heralded him with hendecasyllabic hyperbole as ‘the most learned man in every field’, a commendation Augustine went on to cite with approval.¹⁷ For Vitruvius (Arch. 9.pr.17), Varro was the natural authority de lingua Latina, as Lucretius was de rerum natura and Cicero de oratore; several centuries later, for Severus Alexander, Varro was as much the paradigm of learning as Cicero was of oratory and Metellus of filial piety.¹⁸ Despite his eminent forerunner Aelius Stilo, Varro was thus taken by later Latin writers – Verrius Flaccus, Suetonius, Macrobius and even Isidore, seventh-century Bishop of Seville, among others – as the model scholar whose example deserved, if not demanded, emulation. He was also, very understandably, a genuine inspiration to many renaissance antiquarians. However, not quite everyone rejoiced in Varro’s learning without reservation, for Suetonius tells us (Gramm. 23.4) that the controversial grammarian of the first-century AD, Quintus Remmius Palaemon, chose simply to call Varro porcus, a pig, an insult whose exact origin has been much debated.

As well as being a formidable scholar, Varro was himself a poet, and this extra feather in his cap no doubt added further weight to his influence on later literary figures.¹⁹ His learning had a significant effect upon subsequent poets, and it is hard to read any collection of Augustan poetry carefully without turning up traces of scholarship that were very probably drawn from, or filtered through, Varro himself. To take, just briefly, the case of Virgil, it is quite possible that when he was based in Naples he made the acquaintance of Varro, who was then established in Cumae but of course well known throughout Italy. Scholars have shown repeatedly and without any room for doubt that Varronian influences run deep in Virgilian waters.²⁰ For instance, it is very probable that Varro’s schematic methodology underlies much of the structure of the Georgics, and much of the historical learning that pervades the story of the Aeneid was patently drawn from Varro: Servius himself attests in a note to Aeneid 5.704 that Varro’s own treatise De familiis Troianis – which apparently attempted to trace certain Roman families back to their Trojan ancestry – lay behind Virgil’s own treatment. One particular example of Varro’s influence on Augustan poets across the board I will discuss shortly.

The wider importance of Varro’s works for Roman literature, culture and thought can only be touched upon in a brief introduction such as this. But three specific and major contributions deserve particular mention to exemplify the whole.

First, in his work upon literary criticism, Varro determined the twenty-one certainly authentic plays of Plautus, after Aelius Stilo had reduced that number to twenty-five; of the remaining 109 he knew, he dismissed all but nineteen as definitely spurious. These very decisions fundamentally affected which plays succeeded in being transmitted to us and which were to vanish without trace. In the case of Varro, ut scriptum, sic factum. As well as the loss of Varro’s works on Plautine scholarship, we must sorely regret the disappearance of his ambitious survey De poetis, which duly served as the basis of Suetonius’ own important treatise of the same name.

Second, in one of Varro’s latest works, the Disciplinae, written when he was an octogenarian, he allocated one book to each of the nine liberal arts, thus dividing up the sum total of ancient knowledge; his division had an undeniable influence upon late antiquity, which in due course restored the number to seven when incorporating Platonic and Pythagorean elements. On this basis was crafted the mediaeval curriculum of trivium and quadrivium, which went on to become the foundation of modern Western education.²¹

Third, ‘What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?’ This is the question that Alice asked herself as she sat on the river-bank before her adventures in Wonderland began. It seems that a very similar thought had occurred to Varro some two thousand years beforehand, for he regularly chose to set his works in the form of dialogues to retain reader’s interest, though crafted more on the Aristotelian model than the Platonic.²² Furthermore, he even managed to take illustrations into account, for amidst his heaving morass of learning he produced a vast encyclopaedia of notable Greeks and Romans, which was remarkable not only for providing biographies, in verse and prose, of 700 different figures, but also for displaying an image of each of them. It was thus the first illustrated book in Roman history, and a revolutionary landmark in the history of the book. These Imagines, or Hebdomades, if indeed they succeeded in uniting 700 likenesses, serve as a staggering example of both the curiositas and perseuerantia that characterise Varro.

Although many tears have rightly been shed over the loss of so much varied and original material from Varro’s hand, there are four works which survive to a degree that allows a clear, or at any rate intriguing and informing, picture of their content to be painted.

(i)  We may begin with the sole complete work, the three-book De re rustica, a jaunty and impartial survey of Roman farming practice composed in 37 BC, when Varro was already eighty. This text attempts to convey the viability of enjoying a traditional rustic way of life after the heart-rending upheavals of the civil war. Varro’s concern here lies much more in showing the possibility and appeal of the life of a country gentleman rather than in dispensing minute instruction about quite how to achieve and maintain that particular lifestyle choice. All but one of our earliest complete manuscripts of this work all date from the Renaissance and show the scars of its tortuous route of transmission from past to present. ²³

(ii)  The only other work preserved in a considerable and continuous portion are Books 5 to 10 of De lingua Latina, although even amidst this section there lurk significant lacunae. This immense survey of the Latin language originally comprised 25 books and was completed in the mid-40s: the surviving portion treats etymology, poetic words, analogy, anomaly and Varro’s own novel theory of derivation and declension. ²⁴ We thus lack entirely Varro’s treatment of syntax, of which field in Latin he can still fairly be called the founding father. Excluding the first four books, Varro dedicated this great work to Cicero, a privilege for which that undeniable master of Latin style had hoped for some considerable time. Nevertheless, De lingua Latina was almost lost from the world entirely: we owe its survival to the author of The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, who in 1355 chanced upon the neglected library of manuscripts kept, or rather abandoned, by the roguish monks at Monte Cassino. Thanks to his discovery, and subsequent swift action, Boccaccio brought several works to the knowledge of scholars during the incipient Renaissance. ²⁵ Most significantly, Petrarch, the leading light of humanism, was sent a transcript of De lingua Latina and instantly came to hold Varro in the very highest esteem. He went so far as to call him ‘il terzo gran lume Romano’ (Triumphus famae 3.37) – third after the more canonical pairing of Cicero and Virgil.

To a modern eye, of course, many of Varro’s linguistic theories are suspect, and in particular his etymologies – piled before the reader in bewildering fashion²⁶ – can very often be dismissed out of hand: unfortunately, several of these do not differ greatly from the infamous class of lucus a non lucendo and bellum quod non est bellum. For instance, we do not know how Varro would have etymologised his name, but were we to apply the fluid principles evident in De lingua Latina we might say that Varro derives from uarus (because his family suffered from bow-leggedness?), or perhaps from uarius (because of their multifarious interests, as the title of this volume suggests?), or yet uarix (because of the recurrent problem of varicose veins?); even within the range of possibilities would be uerro – or its earlier form uorro (because, we may suppose, in antiquity the family was celebrated for its diligence in limen-sweeping?). Of course, it is easy to poke fun from our position of comparative linguistic enlightenment; yet De lingua Latina remains in many other respects a ground-breaking contribution to the science of the Latin language. Indeed, Varro’s work in this field was so influential, that he can be shown to stand, to some degree major or minor, behind every grammatical work produced by Romans in his wake, and to a lesser degree behind many modern works on Latin grammar. Before I turn to the final two works in this list, I would like to provide an example of the sheer influence of Varro’s etymologising on his immediate and illustrious successors.

At De lingua Latina 5.100, Varro turns to providing etymologies for three animals, the panther, the lion and the tiger. Whereas he is happy enough to derive panthera and leo from the Greek terms, in the case of tigers we are told something far more interesting. He writes: tigris qui est ut leo uarius, qui uiuus capi adhuc non potuit, uocabulum e lingua Armenia: nam ibi et sagitta et quod uehementissimum flumen dicitur Tigris (‘the tiger, which is like a striped lion, and which has still not been able to be captured alive, is a word from the Armenian language: for there both an arrow and a very swift river are called tigris’).²⁷ This sentence, which seems to say that the name tiger arose from the animal’s possessing some of the key qualities found in arrows and rapid water, contains a number of extraordinary elements: first, we may note that this is the earliest appearance of the word tigris in Latin; second, Varro does not, as he could have done, derive tigris from the Greek (< τίγρις). Third, we find here, to judge from what survives of Varro’s writings, his only mention of the Armenian language. We must ask, therefore, is there any truth in the derivation posited? There is indeed a root tig- in Armenian, which seems to mean ‘sharp’, and is evidenced in a word such as teg, meaning ‘lance’. This does look rather promising for Varro’s claim, although this word itself is probably a loanword borrowed from Parthian, from which region the weapon perhaps originated. Unfortunately, the theory is misguided: Latin tigris certainly derives from the Greek term, which itself is generally traced to an oriental root entirely unconnected with the Iranian term for ‘sharp’. As for Varro’s second part of the etymology, the fast river, that probably arose from a natural confusion with the river Tigris, whose derivation is also entirely separate.

Why then do we have this unexplained foray into Armenian etymologies by a non-expert (the same could be asked of this Introduction)? We could offer as one possible answer that, as so often, Varro’s own military and political experience manifested themselves in his scholarship. Armenia was, during the majority of Varro’s lifetime, under the rule of Tigranes the Great, who had emerged from captivity in Parthia. This king, who was at times at war with