Marcus Terentius Varro

116-27 b.c.e.

Statesman, librarian, polymath

Sources

Prolific Author. Varro was one of Rome’s most prolific writers, having written some 490 books, of which only two have survived. The rhetorician Quintilian called him “the most learned of the Romans.” His family was a member of the middle, or equestrian, class. Born at Reate in the Sabine region of Italy, he studied in Rome under L. Aelius Stilo, who was a Stoic grammarian, and in Athens under Antiochus of Ascalon, a philosopher at the Academy. Elected to his first government position in 86 B.C.E., he rose in the offices until he became Praetor. He served in Spain in support of Pompey during the Civil War, but Julius Caesar pardoned him after Pompey’s death. In 47 B.C.E. Caesar appointed him as director of a library, but misfortune followed him when he made an enemy with Mark Antony, who proscribed him. His life was spared but much of his property was confiscated. The remainder of his life was given over to scholarship and writing. His range of interests was astonishing, from history and rhetoric, to law and medicine, to architecture and literature. His two extant works are De lingua Latina, on Latin grammar, and De re rustica, on agriculture.

Sources

Jens Erik Skydsgaard, Varro the Scholar: Studies in the First Book of Varro’s De re rustica (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1968).

G. J. Toomer, “Nicomachus,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 1042.