Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

PROSE AND MIME
Towards the old Roman religion, Varro's attitude was complex and paradoxical:
he was afraid lest the gods perish not by enemy invasion but by
Roman neglect; it was his mission to save them and this would be a greater
service even than that of Aeneas when he saved the Penates from the sack of
Troy. 1 The cults and traditions that he described so minutely belonged to the
theologia ciuilis, the religion of states. For Varro, it was by no means a perfect
system, but he insisted that in an old city one must adhere to tradition: the
populace should worship the gods, not despise them, for the growth of Rome
had depended upon her religious observance. This emphasis upon the national
and traditional value of the state religion was to be expected from the patriotic
antiquary. But Varro's susceptibility to the influences of Antiochus of Ascalon's
Platonism and Posidonius' Stoicism — not to mention his fashionable but deeprooted
acceptance of Pythagorean ideas — made him intellectually critical of the
traditional pieties and it was from the standpoint of the philosophers' natural
theology that he criticized Roman religion and still more the mythical theology
of the poets — to conclude that in a state, religion was useful, even when untrue.
Varro tried to integrate the state religion into a philosophically acceptable
cosmic theory: Roman polytheism had to be explained as representing divisions
(j>artes) or powers (uirtutes) of a universal Jupiter and the wish to reconcile the
religions of Numa and Cleanthes led Varro into remarkable misrepresentations
of early Roman worship. We cannot tell how far his programme for the purging
of religion from accretions and improprieties will have gone and indeed
how Caesar reacted. But his achievements as recorder dwarf his waywardness
as reformer.
2. CORNELIUS NEPOS
Nepos is an intellectual pygmy whom we find associating uneasily with the
literary giants of his generation. Atticus, whom Nepos called friend and to
whom he dedicated his biographies, shared jokes with Cicero at Nepos'
expense. Nepos wrote a large biography of Cicero, helped publish his letters
and paid eloquent posthumous tribute to Cicero's contribution to the development
of Latin style and philosophy, yet declared Cicero's own favourite works
not worth reading and told him bluntly that philosophy was a pernicious waste
of time. Cicero's collected letters to Nepos may well have made choice reading!
Catullus dedicated his libellus to Nepos, himself a writer of risque short poems
and a fellow Cisalpine, yet the honour was tempered by mockery, however
gentle, of Nepos' pedantic learning in the Chronica. Varro, whom Nepos must
have known through Atticus, can have found little to admire in a man of slight
scholarly talents, who pursued no public career. The elder Pliny condemns
Nepos' credulity; Aulus Gellius alone praises him, faintly, for his industry.
1 Varr. ap. Aug. Civ. Dei 6.2.
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