Varro and wide

Yes, the clever Romans did plenty for us, but just who was the cleverest of them all? A tricky question, to be sure, but the Romans were confident about their own answer. The doctissimus was Varro — a man who wrote 620 books, and really is one of the most impressive polymaths that people have never heard of.

Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) was born in the Sabine town of Reate (Rieti) but found his proper education in Rome. There he studied under Lucius Aelius Stilo, the Stoic grammarian and antiquarian, who can perhaps be called the first bona fide scholar of Roman descent. Later he spent time in Athens under Antiochus of Ascalon, the celebrated Platonist and reformer of the Academy. Both proved to be major influences on the intellectual scene of first-century BC Rome (Cicero also studied with both).

Being not only of senatorial class but also of undoubted ambition, Varro climbed the political ladder, scaling the rungs of quaestor, tribune of the plebs, and praetor. Since an aristocrat should not shirk military duties, however, Varro came into the circle of Pompey, for whom he served successfully in Spain against the rebel Sertorius of the mid-70s. His command in the war against the Mediterrean pirates of 67 BC won him that most coveted of sea-based prizes, the Corona Navalis, or “naval crown”, traditionally awarded to commanders who leapt aboard and captured an enemy ship.

Yet this was an age when politics could not be escaped. When the First Triumvirate was formed in 60 BC between Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, Varro showed his disapproval by writing a presumably satirical pamphlet entitled Trikaranos, “The three-header.” Whatever its bite, he later served as one of the twenty men entrusted with carrying out Caesar’s controversial agrarian laws. When at length the Civil War broke out with Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49, Varro returned to Pompey, operated as his legate in Spain, but was outmanoeuvred and forced to surrender his legions to Caesar. He subsequently moved to join Pompey’s army at Dyrrachium and duly suffered defeat at the Battle of Pharsalus. 

Whether because of his reputation or advanced age, Varro won Caesar’s pardon. His apology was to dedicate his greatest work, the Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum (Divine Antiquities), to the Dictator’s religious guise of Pontifex Maximus. As a possible quid pro quo, Varro was duly commissioned in 46 as the librarian of the ambitious public library that Caesar planned for Rome, which aimed to contain all accessible Greek and Latin literature. Alas, that great plan did not come into being, for obvious reasons. In its stead, Gaius Asinius Pollio set up in 39 BC his own library in the city, the first truly public institution of its kind in the world. Pliny the Elder tells us that Varro was the only living figure honoured with a commemorative bust in its august hall. 

After Caesar’s assassination in 44, Varro eschewed politics entirely and threw himself wholesale into scholarship. Still  the past dogged him: in 43 he was proscribed by Mark Antony; his villa at Casinum thoroughly despoiled, including the barbarous destruction of his beloved library and aviary. Thanks to the intervention of his friend Fufius Calenus, Varro escaped and went on to spend his final fifteen years at his villas at Cumae and Tusculum. 

What built Varro’s enduring reputation was his writing. His volume of work remains truly staggering. As Augustine observed, “Varro read so much that we are amazed he had any spare time to write; but he wrote so much that we can scarcely believe he could have read anything.” His output exceeded every other Roman writer, and was scarcely equalled by any Greek writer except Callimachus. He is said to have written 490 books by the time he was 77, which would mean that, in his last twelve years, he wrote almost a book per month. No surprise that he was rumoured to have died with pen in hand.

The sheer breadth of his learning was also astounding: he wrote on the full gamut of human knowledge (with the possible exceptions of medicine and advanced mathematics): the history of Rome, its civilisation, its customs and its people, civil law, Roman literature and drama, philosophy, grammar, the history of libraries, linguistics, tidal motion, sea navigation, Greco-Roman biography, as well as a three-book account of his own life.

But we must now the bad news: over 95 per cent of Varro’s writings do not survive to us, and of over 70 separate works authored by him only one – a three-book treatise on farming (De Re Rustica) – survives in a complete state. Mercifully, we are also able to read several extant books of his fascinating treatise on the Latin language (De Lingua Latina), a work that shows such fervour for its subject that the author completely forgot about his own Latin style.

Varro’s prodigious life-span for a Roman — of ninety years — allowed him to be born ten years before Cicero and outlive him by sixteen. This gave him an unparalleled perspective of the rapidly changing social, political and intellectual narrative of the late-second and first centuries BC. No-one had seen more and learned more than this self-driven scholar.

Although Cicero regarded him as an “amazingly odd” character (mirabiliter moratus), he did bestow lavish praise on Varro for the remarkable contribution of his 41-book Antiquitates: Romans previously wandered around like strangers in a city which seemed alien and confused; but Varro’s rich researches shed new light on the capital, whose reflection in turn revealed to them their own true identity. Cicero’s private letters reveal that he worried greatly about what Varro thought of him: that fact alone is proof that, in the ancient respublica litterarum, Varro really was the apex predator.