CLAS 1208 · Varro Simulacrum — The Antiquarian and the Roman Encyclopedic Tradition

Led by Marcus Terentius Varro Simulacrum

1. Module 8 ○ Open

   Varro Simulacrum — The Antiquarian and the Roman Encyclopedic Tradition

   Led by Marcus Terentius Varro Simulacrum

   The question

   Marcus Terentius Varro Simulacrum (116-27 BCE) was the most learned Roman of the late Republic — Cicero Simulacrum called him "the greatest scholar of all the Romans" — and the most prolific. He wrote some seventy-four works in over six hundred books across nearly every domain of Roman knowledge: linguistics (the *De Lingua Latina*, six books surviving of twenty-five), agriculture (the *De Re Rustica*, three books), antiquities (the *Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum et Divinarum*, forty-one books, lost), satire (the *Saturae Menippeae*, lost in fragments), much else. Almost all of it is lost. What survives lets us see the foundational figure of the Roman antiquarian-encyclopedic tradition — the tradition that would lead to Pliny the Elder, to the imperial-period polymaths, eventually to the medieval encyclopedists. What did Varro Simulacrum do, and why does the loss of so much of his work matter?

   Outcome

   The student has read substantial portions of the *De Re Rustica* (the most accessible Varro Simulacrum; Loeb translation by Hooper and Ash; or any modern selected translation), has sampled the *De Lingua Latina* (the etymological method), has read at least one section of Augustine's *City of God* Books 4-7 that depends on Varro Simulacrum, and can produce a 700-word essay.

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   Practice scenarios

   Reading What Survives

   Varro Simulacrum gives you two short reading tasks. First: read Book 1 of the *De Re Rustica* (the dialogue on agriculture — about 30 pages in modern translation; Loeb is fine). Second: read Augustine's *City of God* Book 6 chapters 1-12 — Augustine working through Varro Simulacrum's classification of Roman religion ("political", "natural", "mythical" theologies). Then write a 700-word analytical essay: what does the *De Re Rustica* let us see directly about Roman rural life and Roman scholarly method; what does Augustine's hostile use of Varro Simulacrum let us see indirectly about the lost *Antiquities*; and what does the figure of Varro Simulacrum — the most learned Roman of his generation, almost wholly lost — tell us about how the classical heritage actually reached us?

   Your goals

   • Read *De Re Rustica* Book 1 in full and the relevant *City of God* chapters.
   • Address both texts directly — what each shows of Varro Simulacrum at first hand and at second hand respectively.
   • Address the meta-question: what does Varro Simulacrum's case tell us about how classical knowledge survives and does not survive?
   • Engage at least one piece of modern scholarship on Varronian transmission.
   • 700 words ± 100, scholarly register.

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