author
Marcus Terentius Varro
-116–-27
A tireless Roman scholar, satirist, and statesman, he tried to map the whole world of Roman learning—from language and religion to farming and everyday life. Though most of his huge body of work is lost, what survives still offers a vivid window into the last years of the Roman Republic.
2 Audiobooks
Roman Farm Management: The Treatises of Cato and Varro
by Marcus Porcius Cato, Marcus Terentius Varro
De M. Terenti Varronis Libris Grammaticis
by Marcus Terentius Varro
About the author
Born in 116 BC at Reate in Italy, Marcus Terentius Varro became one of the most learned writers of ancient Rome. He came from an equestrian family, studied widely, and built a reputation as a scholar with unusually broad interests. Ancient and later writers alike treated him as a major authority on Roman culture, language, and tradition.
Varro was not only a man of books. He also had a public career during the turbulent final decades of the Roman Republic, serving in office and taking part in political life before eventually continuing his work under changing regimes. He wrote on an astonishing range of subjects, including grammar, literature, religion, history, and agriculture.
Only a small part of his output survives, most notably On the Latin Language and On Agriculture. Even so, those works show why he mattered so much: he was deeply curious, practical as well as learned, and determined to preserve Roman knowledge for future generations. For readers today, Varro is one of the clearest guides to how educated Romans understood their world.