Rome produced no man more erudite, eclectic, and energetic than Marcus Terentius Varro (116–24 BC). Over a long and busy life, set against the backdrop of near-constant social and political upheaval, Varro studied and codified almost every conceivable topic for intellectual enquiry. His vast output — of at least seventy works in over 600 books — is breathtaking in its range and ambition: antiquity (in all its aspects), language, literary history, theology, philosophy, sociology, agriculture, geography, music, mathematics — to say nothing of his own poetic and satirical writings. In many of these fields Varro redefined the terms of study for the Roman world (and beyond); in some he founded a scholarly discipline and tradition without any precedent. Yet the greatest scholar of Rome has rarely enjoyed the attention he deserves from the modern world: although the fragmentary state of much of his corpus presents serious obstacles to enquiry, the extant material provides a rich and unparalleled insight into Roman scholarship of the first century BC. This volume of new essays on Varro seeks to analyze this multifaceted polymath from several angles, not only revisiting his better known writings and the problems they raise but also reconstructing his intellectual activity and its influence on the basis of insufficiently examined evidence.
