United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But he may be omitting something; I know you have certainly not written anything except what actually occurred. Varro's talk gives me some hope of Cæsar, and would that Varro himself would throw himself into the cause! Which he certainly will do, both of his own accord and under pressure from you. If I have in any way sinned in my conduct to you, or rather since I have done so, pardon me.
Further, that complaints were made of private persons encroaching on places that were reserved for religious worship; and that Varro, when writing his great work on the Roman religion, in many cases was unable to discover what god was the object of an existing cult; and generally, according to his own statement he wrote his work, among other things, in order to save great portions of the old Roman religion from falling into utter oblivion on account of the indifference of the Romans themselves.
"And I what am I, now, but one of his flies caught in the mighty web?" he thought. "Love and its peace have come to me and I shall know them for three days and perhaps no longer." His wealth and rank and influence might, if used with diplomacy, have kept him at home, for, after all, he was a Varro; but Arria had been used to press him into bondage. "Another test!" he said to himself.
To consider Varro's labours as undirected to any practical object would be to misinterpret them altogether. No man was less of the mere savant or the mere litterateur than he. Besides this larger work Varro seems to have written smaller ones, as introductions or pendants to it.
"Do you beware, though, Varro," continued Sergius, "lest, in striving to attain power and place on the wings of calumny against those better than yourself, or by the suggestion of false grievances to those who are ignorant and weak, you may, by these things, incite one riot too many. Beware, above all things, lest you win."
Walter Harte in his Essays on Husbandry says that Cato writes like an English squire and Varro like a French academician. This is just comment on Cato but it is at once too much and too little to say of Varro: a French academician might be proud of his antiquarian learning, but would balk at his awkward and homely Latin, as indeed one French academician, M. Boissier, has since done.
From this lofty eminence the seer-statesman rising far above the philosophical sagacity displayed by Aristotle and Varro, when they discussed the sacred topic proclaims that Capital ought to own, and has a divine right to own, and always more or less does own, Labor; and that, since Labor constitutes the whole humanity of the laboring man, it clearly follows that he himself must be owned, if his labor be owned.
These were the true models for Varro, a man full of old Roman indignation at the pitiful times and full of old Roman humour, by no means destitute withal of plastic talent but as to everything which presented the appearance not of palpable fact but of idea or even of system, utterly stupid, and perhaps the most unphilosophical among the unphilosophical Romans. But Varro was no slavish pupil.
If you are now better I rejoice indeed. I wish you would write to your town house, ordering your books to be at my service just as if you were at home, especially those of Varro. For I have occasion to use some passages of those books in reference to those which I have in hand, and which, I hope, will meet with your strong approval.
"In the interior of Transalpine Gaul on the Rhine," says Scrofa in Varro, De R. R. i. 7, 8, "when I commanded there, I traversed some districts, where neither the vine nor the olive nor the fruit-tree appears, where they manure the fields with white Pit-chalk, where they have neither rock nor sea-salt, but make use of the saline ashes of certain burnt wood instead of salt."
Word Of The Day