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14
PROSE AND MIME
I. VARRO
Varro towered over his contemporaries: in literary output, range of achievement
and posthumous influence even Cicero — who admitted as much — does
not compare. He wrote some 620 books, more than any other Roman, more than
most Greeks: they range from satire to theology, from etymology to navigation.
Augustine marvels that he read so much yet had time to write and wrote
so much as to defeat any reader. 1 This same man was a distinguished admiral
and general, decorated for personal bravery at fifty; he administered rich estates,
served numerous magistracies, reaching the rank of praetor, and acted both as
land commissioner and as state librarian. Fate has dealt unkindly with his
survival: we have a complete treatise on agriculture and six damaged books out
of twenty-five 'On the Latin language'. Yet paradoxically, the loss of so much
Varro constitutes a tribute to his achievement, for his systematization of so
much earlier Greek and Roman scholarship made him wholly indispensable as
a factual source for later writers and he has perished by absorption: from Virgil
and Ovid to Ausonius, from Columella to Suetonius and Isidore of Seville his influence,
not always at first-hand, was all-pervasive. One slight but characteristic
example may be given: an annalist about 100 B.C. wrote about the boomerang
(cateia) of the invading Teutones. He was in all probability excerpted by Varro,
whom Virgil later consulted for learned detail in Aeneid 7. This boomeranglore
passed on, perhaps through Suetonius' Prata, to surface in Isidore of
Seville and, desperately garbled, in the commentators on Virgil, as late as the
ninth century A.D. 2 On a wider front, the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic)
and quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music) of medieval
education descend ultimately from Varro's Disciplinae, a work of his eighties;
indeed traces of Varronian systematization still lurk in modern university
syllabuses.
Characteristic methods, of research and of disposition, can be detected in
widely scattered areas: they serve to reveal the Roman polymath at work and
1 Civ. Dei 6.2.
1 Cf. De gente Populi Roman! fr. 37 Fraccaro, Virg. Aen. 7.741 and Horsfall (1969) 197-9.
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