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VARRO
to explain how, in a full life, one man's output could be so colossal. Varro
worked at speed: 'If I had had time, Fundania, I would be writing to you more
agreeably what I shall now expound as I can, thinking I should hurry because,
as it's said, "if a man's a bubble, an old man's more so" ' is how he begins the
Res rusticae. He never allowed didacticism to crush his markedly 'folksy'
humour. Nor was he unaware of the niceties of Latin style, but in his proseworks
there was rarely time to display them; if pronouns and conjunctions got
postponed, relative clauses mislaid, verbs omitted and concords of number and
gender violated, they were casualties of the clock. Facts and interpretations were
set down as they came to hand. Varro lacks the massive elegance of Cicero
because he never sought it. The arrangement of accumulated facts fell regularly
into a simple pattern: people, places, periods and things (de hominibus; de locis;
de temporibus; de rebus). It is discernible even in the long and delightful fragment
of the Menippean satire 'You don't know what the late evening may
bring' preserved by Gellius. 1 A preoccupation with numerology — under
Pydiagorean influence — contributed to excessive rigidity: agriculture has four
divisions (paries) each with two subdivisions (species'); 2 that scheme is not
fully worked out, but clearly such arrangements could provide a long row of
convenient pegs from which to suspend appropriate quotations and observations.
The focus of Varro's interests altered with time; periods of relatively restricted
concentration assisted composition: the Menippean satires are early, the
antiquarian treatises and cultural histories largely late; only the history and
nature of die Latin language retained his attention throughout, from the De
antiquitate Utterarum, dedicated to the tragedian Accius in the early 80s, to
Disciplinae I, De grammatica, over half a century later. Material, once accumulated,
could be re-used indefinitely: the formal procedure for concluding
treaties was, for instance, discussed early in the Res humanae, in the De vita
Populi Romani, in the De lingua Latino, and probably in the Calenus; this was
a Logistoricus, a kind of philosophical and historical dialogue, probably not
unlike Cicero's De amicitia and De senectute.
The working method may be reconstructed from internal evidence and by
comparison with what we know of the elder Pliny's. From reading and from
personal observation Varro made innumerable notes, with, doubtless, the help
of expert notarii, carrying a supply of small tablets, pugillares. On campaign,
he recorded, e.g., the statue of a lion on Mt Ida and the effects of the pirates'
sack of Delos in 69 B.C.; travelling in Italy, he recorded inscriptions at Tarracina
and Praeneste; on his estate at Casinum (mod. Cassino) there was evidently
a magnificent library and Varro read hugely. Excerpts must somehow have
been indexed, but haste shows up even in his library work; 3 study of Varro's
1
N.A. 13.11.
3
Skydsgaard (1968) 64-88.
287
2 Rust. 1.5.4.
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