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Updated: May 23, 2025
The two philosophico-historical essays "Laelius or concerning Friendship," "Cato or concerning Old Age," which Cicero wrote probably after the model of those of Varro, may give us some approximate idea of Varro's half-didactic, half-narrative, treatment of these subjects. Varros' Menippean Satires
It is chiefly from the fragments of Varro's work that we learn something of the Stoic attempt to harmonise the old religious beliefs with philosophic theories of the universe . Varro, following his teacher, held the Stoic doctrine of the animus mundi the Divine principle permeating all material things which, in combination with them, constitutes the universe, and is Nature, Reason, God, Destiny, or whatever name the philosopher might choose to give it.
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.
For the age with which we are more specially concerned, we have the evidence of Varro's three books on husbandry, written in his old age, after the fall of the Republic. Here we find the economic condition of the farm little changed since the time of Cato.
The life-breath of this poetry is polemics not so much the political warfare of party, such as Lucilius and Catullus practised, but the general moral antagonism of the stern elderly man to the unbridled and perverse youth, of the scholar living in the midst of his classics to the loose and slovenly, or at any rate in point of tendency reprobate, modern poetry, of the good burgess of the ancient type to the new Rome in which the Forum, to use Varro's language, was a pigsty and Numa, if he turned his eyes towards his city, would see no longer a trace of his wise regulations.
The life-breath of this poetry is polemics not so much the political warfare of party, such as Lucilius and Catullus practised, but the general moral antagonism of the stern elderly man to the unbridled and perverse youth, of the scholar living in the midst of his classics to the loose and slovenly, or at any rate in point of tendency reprobate, modern poetry, of the good burgess of the ancient type to the new Rome in which the Forum, to use Varro's language, was a pigsty and Numa, if he turned his eyes towards his city, would see no longer a trace of his wise regulations.
There is hardly anything more childish than Varro's scheme of all the philosophies, which in the first place summarily declares all systems that do not propose the happiness of man as their ultimate aim to be nonexistent, and then reckons the number of philosophies conceivable under this supposition as two hundred and eighty-eight.
It is apparent from his works that Vergil examined such material, just as he delved into Varro's antiquities and Cato's "origins" for ancient lore. His remarks on Praeneste and Antemnae, his knowledge of ancient coin symbols, of the early rites of the Hercules cult, show the results of these early habits of work.
In another passage, written towards the end of his life, and certainly later than the publication of Varro's work, he goes further and identifies this God with Jupiter. Once more, in the first book of his treatise on the gods, he quotes the Stoic Chrysippus as teaching that the eternal Power, which is as it were a guide in the duties of life, is Jupiter himself.
In the second century B.C. old Cato had described the paterfamilias, on his arrival at his farm from the city, saluting the Lar familiaris before he goes about his round of inspection; and even Horace hardly shows a trace of the agnostic when he pictures the slaves of the farm, and the master with them, sitting at their meal in front of the image of the Lar . We may perhaps guess that with the renewal of the love of country life, and with that revival of the cultivation of the vine and olive, and indeed of husbandry in general, which is recognisable as a feature of the last years of the Republic, and which is known to us from Varro's work on farming, and from Virgil's Georgics, the old religion of the household gained a new life.
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