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In the course of three or four years, during which I thus applied myself, I had read almost every prose writer of the age of pure Latinity, except those who have treated merely of technical subjects, such as Varro, Columella, and Celsus. I had gone three times through the whole of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus.
Recital of Polybius: "Varro placed the cavalry on the right wing, and rested it on the river; the infantry was deployed near it and on the same line, the maniples drawn close to each other, with smaller intervals than usual, and the maniples presenting more depth than front. "The cavalry of the allies, on the left wing, completed the line, in front of which were posted the light troops.
"Foolish stories, my Caius; the dreams of ignorant rustics," replied Lucius, smiling faintly. "Besides, you remember they were all expiated " "And who knows that they were expiated truly!" croaked an old woman from a booth by the road. "Who does not know that, as Varro says, your patrician magistrates would rather lose a battle than that a plebeian consul should triumph!
He had likewise a critical knowledge of the antiquities of his country, both as to the date and particulars of every new improvement, and every memorable transaction, and was perfectly well read in the ancient writers; a branch of learning in which he was succeeded by our friend Varro, a man of genius, and of the most extensive erudition, who afterwards enlarged the plan by many valuable collections of his own, and gave a much fuller and more elegant system of it to the Public.
Men like Cato, Varro, and in a later age perhaps Juvenal, could understand and digest Greek culture without thereby losing their peculiarly Roman ways of thought; but these patriots in literature, while rewarded with the highest praise, did not exert a proportionate influence on the development of the national mind.
An inquirer of conservative views, such as was Varro for instance, could have no wish to put his hand to such a work; and if a daring freethinker had undertaken it, an outcry would have been raised by all good citizens against this worst of all revolutionaries, who was preparing to deprive the constitutional party even of their past Thus philological and antiquarian research deterred from the writing of history rather than conduced towards it.
And again Cato wrote: "Wherein does a good system of agriculture consist? In the first place, in thorough plowing; in the second place, in thorough plowing; and, in the third place, in manuring." Varro, who lived at the same time as Cato, wrote as follows: "The land must rest every second year, or be sown with lighter kinds of seeds, which prove less exhausting to the soil.
Varro was in the best and fullest sense of the term a local antiquarian, who from the personal observation of many years knew his nation in its former idiosyncrasy and seclusion as well as in its modern state of transition and dispersion, and had supplemented and deepened his direct knowledge of the national manners and national language by the most comprehensive research in historical and literary archives.
Epist. She had a temple without the walls, which gave the name to the Porta Lavernalis. The goddess of eloquence, or persuasion, who had always a great hand in the success of courtship. She was also called Cinxia Juno. She was an old Sabine deity. Some make her the same with Ceres; but Varro imagines her to be the goddess of victory.
Caius Terentius Varro was sent as propraetor into Etruria, in order that Caius Hostilius might quit that province and go to Tarentum to that army which Titus Quinctius, the consul, had commanded, and that Lucius Manlius might go as ambassador across the sea, and observe what was going on there; and at the same time, as the games at Olympia, which were attended by the greatest concourse of persons of any solemnity in Greece, were about to take place that summer, that if he could without danger from the enemy, he might go to that assembly, in order that any Sicilians who might be there, having been driven away by the war, or any Tarentine citizens banished by Hannibal, might return to their homes, and be informed that the Roman people would restore to them every thing which they had possessed before the war.
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