Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro (b. 116–d. 27 bce) was the most notable polymath of the Roman world. Over the course of his long life, which spanned several of the major events of the late Republic and the birth of the empire, his career brought him to the fore of politics, military service, and (most significantly) scholarship. Educated in Rome by the grammarian L. Aelius Stilo and in Athens by the Platonist Antiochus of Ascalon, Varro produced a remarkably broad spectrum of works that covered almost all areas of intellectual inquiry: history, religion, theology, philosophy, language, literature, metre, music, medicine, geography, agriculture, rhetoric, law, and architecture, all of which were complemented by his own colourful poetic compositions. Not only was Varro’s range of publications enormous, but his scale of output was extraordinary: having declared that he had written 490 books by the age of 78, his subsequent years proved to be among his most productive. Yet, of his vast output, only one work (the three-book De re rustica) survives complete, and the only books that exist intact from any other work (i.e., six of twenty-five books of his monumental De lingua Latina) represent about a fifth of the original treatise. All other works are either represented by small fragments quoted or paraphrased by subsequent ancient authors or entirely lost beyond their title. To piece together the complete picture of Varro’s literary output is therefore inevitably painstaking and tentative and has demanded the formidable labours of generations of scholars ever since Giovanni Boccaccio stumbled across a codex of Varro at Montecassino in 1355; notwithstanding the difficulty of the material, Varronian studies have continued keenly into the 21st century, and significant progress in our understanding of the man and his works proceeds apace. It is now clearer than ever that there are few figures of the ancient world whose study leaves a more vivid and rewarding impression than Varro of Reate.