Varro the Philosopher

In his Menippean Satires, M. Terentius Varro adopted the Cynic persona of his model Menippus of Gadara. In his De lingua Latina, he espoused a Stoic(izing) theory of language, declaring that he had studied "not just at the lamp of [the critic] Aristophanes [of Byzantium], but also at that of Cleanthes" (5.9; cf. Dahlmann 1932). In the same work, however, Varro also avowedly followed Pythagorean numerical schemes (5.11) and invoked Epicurean atomism (6.39). While his wish to be buried Pythagorico modo (Plin.

Varro’s de Rebus Rusticis (henceforth dRR) is the most playfully deceptive, preposterously cryptic, uneasily humorous, and disturbingly dystopian text to have made it out of the Republic. A man deemed the “Most Learned of the Romans” (vir Romanorum eruditissimus, Quint. 10.1.95), Varro is without question among the most literarily influential figures of the final years of the Republic and, in particular, the disastrously dangerous years of the Triumvirate.

The proposition that Varro can be thought of as a “Pythagorean” is commonly assumed in certain strands of recent scholarship (e.g. Flinterman 2014, Lehmann 1997, Boyancé 1975; cf. Volk 2016: 45).

The majority of the voluminous output of Varro has been lost and persists only in fragments or testimonia. This scattered evidence is nevertheless more than sufficient to establish his deep knowledge of the Greek philosophical tradition—Cicero was right to say Varro had sprinkled his works with philosophy (so the interlocuter Varro at Ac. Post. 2). Cicero, furthermore, in private letters and in his Academica viewed Varro as a follower of Antiochus of Ascalon’s revived “Old Academy” (e.g. Att.