section is devoted to swine (4), and detailed accounts are given of wool-shearing (11.5–12),
the breaking of horses (7.12–14), and the “points” that breeders were to look for in cattle,
horses, and donkeys (5.7–8, 7.5, 9.3–5). His discussions of transhumance (1.17, 2.9), and his
notices regarding the primacy of mules and donkeys as sources of power for ground trans-
port in ancient Italy (6.5, 8.5), are important texts for our understanding of the ancient
economy. In a surprise attestation of rural literacy, he claims to have copied out by hand
texts on veterinary health from Mago the Carthaginian and assigned them to his head-
herdsmen to read (2.20, etc.).
The third book, on uillatica pastio, focuses mainly on the economics of animal breeding for
urban niche-markets, although it also offers observations on the social organization of bees
(16.4–9), patterns of bird migration (5.7) and learned behavior in birds, stags, boars, and
fish (7.7, etc.). Varro exposes the ingenuity that went into the construction of Roman coops
and bird houses, which were built to accommodate the special requirements of each breed
and featured running water as well as elaborate networks of perches and roosts (5.2–6, etc.).
A true tour de force is Varro’s description of the aviary at his villa in Casinum, which included
a stage for ducks to walk across, a lazy-susan bird feeder, and a planetarium (5).
The other Varronian work of which a substantial part survives intact is his De Lingua
Latina (DLL). Published in the late forties BCE, it originally consisted of 25 books: one book
of introduction, followed by six books on etymologies and meanings, six on inflectional
morphology, and 12 dealing with syntax and grammaticality. Only Books 5–10 have sur-
vived complete. The first of these considers etymologies for the names of locations, the
second for names of periods of time, and the third for the words poets use. The lacunose
texts of Books 8–10 document Varro’s major contribution to theoretical linguistics, which
was a coherent account of variation among Latin roots and inflections that harmonized the
contrary principles of anomaly and analogy.
Lost Works: Among Varro’s lost works are many known to have provided impetus to
the study of science at Rome. Perhaps the most important was his Disciplines, an encyclo-
pedia of the artes liberales – the technical disciplines which it was felt proper for a free man to
pursue – in nine books, one for each art: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, music, medicine, and architecture. This classification of sciences exerted a last-
ing influence on later scholarship, which dropped the last two fields due to their banausic
character and consolidated the remainder into what would eventually become the trivium
and quadrivium of medieval tradition. Varro’s known contributions to the scientific subjects
of the quadrivium, as well as medicine and geography, can be summarized as follows.
Geometry: Varro traced the origins of geometria to the needs of surveying and to a
primitive interest in the size of the Earth (C Inst. 2.6.1). He translated into
Latin E’s definitions of “plane,” “solid,” “line” and “cube” (ibid., 1.20), revealed that
in a circle the shortest distance from center to circumference is a line (RR 1.51.1), classified
optics as a geometrical subject, and explained the causes of various optical illusions (Gell.
16.18). The elementary character of this material is patent, yet in RR 3.16.5 Varro betrays a
familiarity with isoperimetry problems.
Arithmetic: Varro devoted a good deal of attention to Latin number terminology, seek-
ing for instance to establish the precise difference in meaning between secundum and secundo
(Gell. 10.1); a subtle examination of the “rule of nines” can be found at DLL 9.86–88.
Beyond that, a deep and abiding interest in arithmology pervades the Varronian corpus. This
comes across in his habit of working elaborate binary and ternary classificatory schemes into
his treatises, as in RR bk. 2, with its 81 subtopics of animal husbandry, or in the lost De
M. TERENTIUS VARRO OF REATE