find themselves compelled to reconstruct the earlier history of the Roman republic from its very foundations. Varro’s greatest predecessor in this field of inquiry, the man who turned over the virgin soil, was Cato the Censor. His example, however, seems to have remained unfruitful till the time of Varro’s master, Lucius Aelius Stilo Praeconinus. From his age to the decay of Roman civilization there were never altogether wanting men devoted to the study of their nation’s past; but none ever pursued the task with the advantages of Varro’s comprehensive learning, his indefatigable industry and his reverent yet discriminating regard for the men and the institutions of the earlier ages. The greatest work of this class was that on Antiquities, divided into forty-one books. Of these the first twenty-five were entitled the Antiquities of Human Things (Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum), while the remaining sixteen were designated the Antiquities of Things Divine (Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum). The book was the fruit of Varro’s later years, in which he gathered together the material laboriously amassed through the period of an ordinary lifetime. The second division of the work was dedicated to Caesar as supreme pontiff. The design was as far-reaching as that of the Natural History of Pliny. The general heads of the exposition in the secular portion of the book were four—(1) “who the men are who act (qui agant), (2) the places in which they act (ubi), (3) the times at which they act (quando), (4) the results of their action (quid agant).” In the portion relating to divine affairs there were divisions parallel to these four, with a fifth, which dealt with the gods in whose honour action in divine affairs is taken. Our knowledge of this great book is to a large extent derived from the works of the early Christian writers, and especially from Augustine’s De Civitate Dei. These writers naturally quote in the main from the religious section. It is a great misfortune that no similar series of citations from the secular part of the Antiquitates has come down to us. Most of the other historical and antiquarian writings of Varro were special elaborations of topics which he could not treat with sufficient fulness and minuteness in the larger book. The treatise on the Genealogy of the Roman People dealt mainly with the relation of Roman chronology to the chronology of Greece and the East. Dates were assigned even to. mythological occurrences, because Varro believed in the theory of Euhemerus, that all the beings worshipped as gods had once lived as men. To Varro’s researches are mainly due the traditional dates assigned to the era of the kings and to that of the early republic. Minor writings of the same class were the De Vita Populi Romani, apparently a kind of history of Roman civilization; the De Familiis Trojanis, an account of the families who “came over” with Aeneas; the Aetia (Αἴτια), an explanation of the origin of Roman customs, on which Plutarch drew largely in his Quaestiones Romanae; a Tribuum Liber, used by Festus; and the constitutional handbook written for the instruction of Pompey when he became consul. Nor must the labour expended by Varro in the study of literary history be forgotten. His activity in this direction, as in others, took a wide range. One of his greatest achievements was to fix the canon of the genuine plays of Plautus. The “Varronian plays” were the twenty which have come down to us, along with one which has been lost.
The third class of treatises, which we have called technical, was also numerous and very varied. Philosophy, grammar, the history and theory of language, rhetoric, law, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, mensuration, agriculture, naval tactics, were all represented. The only works of this kind which have come down to our days are the De Lingua Latina (in part) and the De Re Rustica. The former originally comprised twenty-five books, three of which (the three succeeding the first) are dedicated to a P. Septimius who had served with the author in Spain, and the last twenty-one to Cicero. The whole work was divided into three main sections, the first dealing with the origin of Latin words, the second with their inflexions and other modifications, the third with syntax. The books still preserved (somewhat imperfectly) are those from the fifth to the tenth inclusive. The Latin style is harsh, rugged and far from lucid. As Mommsen remarks, the clauses of the sentences are often arranged on the thread of the relative pronoun like thrushes on a string. The arrangement of the subject-matter, while pretending to much precision, is often far from logical. The fifth, sixth and seventh books give Varro’s views on the etymology of Latin words. The principles he applies are those which he had learned from the philosophers of the Stoic school—Chrysippus, Antipater and others. The study of language as it existed in Varro’s day was thoroughly dominated by Stoic influences. Varro’s etymologies could be only a priori guesses, but he was well aware of their character, and very clearly states at the outset of the fifth book the hindrances that barred the way to sound knowledge. He was thoroughly alive to the importance of not arguing merely from the forms and meanings of words as they existed in his day, and was fully conscious that language and its mechanism should be studied historically. The books from the eighth to the tenth inclusive are devoted to the inflections of words and their other modifications. These Varro classes all under the head of “declinatio,” which implies a swerving aside from a type. Thus Herculi from Hercules and manubria from manus are equally regarded as examples of declinatio. Varro adopts a compromise between the two opposing schools of grammarians, those who held that nature intended the declinationes of all words of the same class to proceed uniformly (which uniformity was called analogia) and those who deemed that nature aimed at irregularity (anomalia). The matter is treated with considerable confusion of thought. But the facts incidentally cited concerning old Latin, and the statements of what had been written and thought about language by Varro’s predecessors, are of extreme value to the student of Latin. The other extant prose work, the De Re Rustica, is in three books, each of which is in the form of a dialogue, the circumstances and in the main the interlocutors being different for each. The dramatic introductions and a few of the interludes are bright and interesting, and the Latin style, though still awkward and unpolished, is far superior to that of the De Lingua Latina.
Authorities.—The fragments of the different treatises have been partially collected in many separate publications of recent date. The best editions of the De Lingua Latina are those by C. O. Müller and by L. Spengel (re-edited by his son in 1885). The most recent and best recension of the De Re Rustica is that of Keil (Leipzig, 1884). Of modern scholars Ritschl has deserved best of Varro. Several papers in his Opuscula treat of the nature of Varro’s works which have not come down to us. The work of G. Boissier, Étude sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. T. Varron (1861), though superficial, is still useful; but a comprehensive work on Varro, on the present level of scholarship, is greatly needed. (J. S. R.)
VARRO, PUBLIUS TERENTIUS, surnamed Atacintis (c. 82–36 B.C.), Latin poet, was born near the river Atax in Gallia Narbonensis. He was perhaps the first Roman born beyond the Alps who attained eminence in literature. He seems to have taken at first Ennius and Lucilius as his models, and wrote an epic, entitled Bellum Sequanicum, eulogizing the exploits of Caesar in Gaul and Britain, and also Satires, of which Horace (Satires, i. 10) speaks slightingly. Accordingly to Jerome, Varro did not begin to study Greek literature until his thirty-fifth year. The last ten years of his life were given up to the imitation of Greek poets of the Alexandrian school. Quintilian (Instit. x. 1, 87), who describes him as a “translator,” speaks of him in qualified terms of praise. Although not vigorous enough to excel in the historical epic or in the serious work of the Roman satura, Varro yet possessed in considerable measure the lighter gifts which we admire in Catullus.
His chief poem of the later period was the Argonautae, closely modelled on the epic of Apollonius Rhodius. The age was prolific of epics, both historical and mythological, and that of Varro seems to have held a high rank among them. It is highly spoken of by Ovid (Am. i. 15, 21, A.A. iii. 335, Tristia, ii. 439) and Statius (Silvae, ii. 7, 77), and Propertius (ii. 34, 85) awards equal praise to his erotic elegies. Varro was also the author of a Cosmographia, or Chorographia, a geographical poem imitated from the Greek of Eratosthenes or of Alexander of Ephesus, surnamed Lychnus; and of an Ephemeris, a hexameter poem on weather-signs after Aratus, from which Virgil has borrowed. Fragments in A. Riese’s edition of the fragments of the Menippean Satires of Varro of Reate; see also monographs by F. Wüllner (1829) and R. Unger (1861).
VARTHEMA (Barthema, Vertomannus, &c.), LUDOVICO DI, of Bologna (fl. 1502–1510), Italian traveller and writer. He was perhaps a soldier before beginning his distant journeys, which he undertook apparently from a passion for adventure, novelty and the fame which (then especially) attended successful exploration. He left Europe near the end of 1502; early in 1503 he reached Alexandria and ascended the Nile to Cairo. From Egypt he sailed to Beirut and thence travelled to Tripoli, Aleppo and Damascus, where he managed to get himself enrolled, under the name of Yunas (Jonah), in the Mameluke garrison—doubtless after adopting Islam. From Damascus he made the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina as one of the Mameluke escort of the Hajj caravan (April–June 1503); he describes the sacred cities of Islam and the chief pilgrim sites and ceremonies with remarkable accuracy, almost all his details being confirmed by later writers. With the view of reaching India, he embarked at Jidda, the port of Mecca, and sailed down the Red Sea and through the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb to Aden, where he was arrested and imprisoned as a Christian spy. He gained his liberty—after imprisonment both at Aden and Radaa—through the partiality of one of the sultanas of Yemen, made an extensive tour in south-west Arabia (visiting Sana, &c.), and took ship at Aden for the Persian Gulf and India. On the way he touched at Zaila
