14 - Prose and mime

Summary

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. 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 (cateid) of the invading Teutones. He was in all probability excerpted by Varro, whom Virgil later consulted for learned detail in Aeneid 7. This boomerang-lore passed on, perhaps through Suetonius’ Praia, to surface in Isidore of Seville and, desperately garbled, in the commentators on Virgil, as late as the ninth century A.D. 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.