The Romans had no doubt who their greatest intellectual was — the astonishing polymath Marcus Terentius Varro
Yes, the clever Romans did plenty for us, but just who was the cleverest of them all? A tricky question, to be sure, but the Romans were confident about their own answer. The doctissimus was Varro — a man who wrote 620 books, and really is one of the most impressive polymaths that people have never heard of.
Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) was born in the Sabine town of Reate (Rieti) but found his proper education in Rome. There he studied under Lucius Aelius Stilo, the Stoic grammarian and antiquarian, who can perhaps be called the first bona fide scholar of Roman descent. Later he spent time in Athens under Antiochus of Ascalon, the celebrated Platonist and reformer of the Academy. Both proved to be major influences on the intellectual scene of first-century BC Rome (Cicero also studied with both).
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What built Varro’s enduring reputation was his writing. His volume of work remains truly staggering. As Augustine observed, “Varro read so much that we are amazed he had any spare time to write; but he wrote so much that we can scarcely believe he could have read anything”. His output exceeded every other Roman writer, and was scarcely equalled by any Greek writer except Callimachus. He is said to have written 490 books by the time he was 77, which would mean that, in his last twelve years, he wrote almost a book per month. No surprise that he was rumoured to have died with pen in hand.
The sheer breadth of his learning was also astounding: he wrote on the full gamut of human knowledge (with the possible exceptions of medicine and advanced mathematics): the history of Rome, its civilisation, its customs and its people, civil law, Roman literature and drama, philosophy, grammar, the history of libraries, linguistics, tidal motion, sea navigation, Greco-Roman biography, as well as a three-book account of his own life.
But we must now the bad news: over 95 per cent of Varro’s writings do not survive to us, and of over 70 separate works authored by him only one – a three-book treatise on farming (De Re Rustica) – survives in a complete state. Mercifully, we are also able to read several extant books of his fascinating treatise on the Latin language (De Lingua Latina), a work that shows such fervour for its subject that the author completely forgot about his own Latin style.
Varro’s prodigious life-span for a Roman — of ninety years — allowed him to be born ten years before Cicero and outlive him by sixteen. This gave him an unparalleled perspective of the rapidly changing social, political and intellectual narrative of the late-second and first centuries BC. No-one had seen more and learned more than this self-driven scholar.
Although Cicero regarded him as an “amazingly odd” character (mirabiliter moratus), he did bestow lavish praise on Varro for the remarkable contribution of his 41-book Antiquitates: Romans previously wandered around like strangers in a city which seemed alien and confused; but Varro’s rich researches shed new light on the capital, whose reflection in turn revealed to them their own true identity. Cicero’s private letters reveal that he worried greatly about what Varro thought of him: that fact alone is proof that, in the ancient respublica litterarum, Varro really was the apex predator.
David Butterfield, “Varro and wide”, The Critic, 2026-07-21.
October 29, 2026
QotD: The Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro
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