Roman Farm Management | Page 4

ruthless Antony
despoiled his villa at Casinum (where Varro had built the aviary
described in book Three), and like Cicero he was included in the
proscriptions which followed the compact of the triumvirs, but in the
end unlike Cicero he escaped and spent his last years peacefully at his
villas at Cumae and Tusculum.
His literary activity was astonishing: he wrote at least six hundred
books covering a wide range of antiquarian research. St. Augustine,
who dearly loved to turn a balanced phrase, says that Varro had read so
much that it is difficult to understand when he found time to write,
while on the other hand he wrote so much that one can scarcely read all
his books. Cicero, who claimed him as an intimate friend, describes
(Acad. Ill) what Varro had written before B.C. 46, but he went on
producing to the end of his long life, eighteen years later: "For," says
Cicero, "while we are sojourners, so to speak, in our own city and
wandering about like strangers, your books have conducted us, as it
were, home again, so as to enable us at last to recognize who and
whence we are. You have discussed the antiquities of our country and
the variety of dates and chronology relating to it. You have explained
the laws which regulate sacrifices and priests: you have unfolded the
customs of the city both in war and peace: you have described the

various quarters and districts: you have omitted mentioning none of the
names, or kinds, or functions, or causes of divine or human things: you
have thrown a flood of light on our poets and altogether on Latin
literature and the Latin language: you have yourself composed a poem
of varied beauties and elegant in almost every part: and you have in
many places touched upon philosophy in a manner sufficient to excite
our curiosity, though inadequate to instruct us."
Of Varro's works, beside the Rerum Rusticarum, there have survived
only fragments, including a considerable portion of the treatise on the
Latin language: the story is that most of his books were deliberately
destroyed at the procurement of the Church (something not impossible,
as witness the Emperor Theodosius in Corpus Juris Civilis. Cod. Lib. I,
tit. I, cap. 3, § I) to conceal St. Augustine's plagiarism from them; yet
the De Civitate Dei, which is largely devoted to refuting Varro's pagan
theology, is a perennial monument to his fame. St. Augustine says (VI,
2): "Although his elocution has less charm, he is so full of learning and
philosophy that ... he instructs the student of facts as much as Cicero
delights the student of style."
Varro's treatise on farm management is the best practical book on the
subject which has come down to us from antiquity. It has not the
spontaneous originality of Cato, nor the detail and suave elegance of
Columella. Walter Harte in his Essays on Husbandry (1764) says that
Cato writes like an English squire and Varro like a French academician.
This is just comment on Cato but it is at once too much and too little to
say of Varro: a French academician might be proud of his antiquarian
learning, but would balk at his awkward and homely Latin, as indeed
one French academician, M. Boissier, has since done. The real merit of
Varro's book is that it is the well digested system of an experienced and
successful farmer who has seen and practised all that he records.
The authority from which Virgil drew the practical farming lore, for
which he has been extolled in all ages, was Varro: indeed, as a farm
manual the Georgics go astray only when they depart from Varro. It is
worth while to elaborate this point, which Professor Sellar, in his
argument for the originality of Virgil, only suggests.[6]
After Philippi the times were ripe for books on agriculture. The Roman
world had been divided between Octavian and Antony and there was
peace in Italy: men were turning "back to the land."

An agricultural regeneration of Italy was impending, chiefly in
viticulture, as Ferrero has pointed out. With far sighted appreciation of
the economic advantages of this, Octavian determined to promote the
movement, which became one of the completed glories of the Augustan
Age, when Horace sang
Tua, Caesar, aetas Fruges et agris rettulit uberes.
Varro's book appeared in B.C. 37 and during that year Maecenas
commissioned Virgil to put into verse the spirit of the times; just as,
under similar circumstances, Cromwell pensioned Samuel Hartlib.
Such is the co-incidence of the dates that it is not impossible that the
Rerum Rusticarum suggested the subject of the Georgics, either to
Virgil or to Maecenas.
There is no evidence in the Bucolics that Virgil ever had any practical
knowledge of agriculture before he undertook