Quotes About Varro

It irked St Augustine (CG, 6, 4, 1-2) that Varro put human affairs before divine ones, for - the Latin antiquary explained - cities had existed before religious institutions, 'as the artist exists before the picture and the architect before the building'. Such an attitude was typical of a Roman, for whom religion was not a matter of personal devotion, but concerned a collective interest.

To what purpose, then, is it that this most learned and most acute man Varro attempts, as it were, with subtle disputation, to reduce and refer all these gods to heaven and earth? He cannot do it. They go out of his hands like water; they shrink back; they slip down and fall.

Varro produced an influential encyclopaedia, Nine Books of Disciplines, in which he outlined nine arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine and architecture. Later writers omitted the last two arts.79 In Rome, by the end of the first century AD, education had been more or less standardised and the seven liberal arts identified. In turn, these would become the basis of medieval education