LANDMARKS OF BOTANICAL HISTORY — GREENE I47 



Pirus Aniciana Vitis aminea minuscula. 



Pirns cucurbitina Vitis Apiciana. 



Pirus mustea Vitis gemina. 



Pirus sementiva Vitis helvola. 



Pirus Tarentina Vitis helvola minuscula. 



Pirus volena Vitis Lucana. 



Vitis Murgentina. 

 All this would pass readily for good twentieth-century botanical 

 nomenclature ; but these names are easily two-and-twenty centuries 

 old. 



No fewer than five genera dedicated to Cato have been proposed, 

 by as many different botanical authors, each apparently unaware 

 of the attempts of the others. The Catonia of Patrick Browne 

 (1756) has priority. 



Marcus Terentius Varro (b. c. 117-27). — In so far as the 

 mastery of human learning gives distinction, Rome had in Varro 

 the most distinguished personage of all whose names adorn the 

 pages of her ancient history. One Symmachus, who lived four 

 centuries later, and whose letters are extant, wrote to a friend: 

 "You know the writings of Terentius, not the comedian, but the 

 Reatine, the father of Roman learning." ^ This Terentius was 

 sometimes called the Reatine in allusion to his birthplace, which 

 was the small village of Reate — now Rieti — some ten miles north 

 of Rome. The family was plebeian, but there had been gifted scions 

 of it before this one, and there were others after him. A century 

 before him there had been a consul Caius Terentius Varro, chosen 

 by the tribunes of the people for the reason that he was of the 

 common people. ^ 



Concerning the childhood, youth, and even the early manhood 

 of Varro, and under what conditions the passion for learning was 

 developed, nothing seems to have been recorded; and we seem to 

 obtain our first certain view of him as in the public service under 

 Pompey in the war against Mithridates; but he is then fifty years 

 of age. Also at seventy he is still a naval commander. Being 

 a man of great wealth, owning extensive landed possessions in 

 several provinces, and having acquired so costly a thing as a great 

 library was at that time, the fact of his having devoted his energies 

 to the military service of the Pompeys and Caesars for so long a 

 period has not seemed easy to account for. In these chances of 

 war certain of his richest estates were confiscated, and his library 



« Quoted by Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, vol. i, p. 356. 

 ' Livy, vol. xxii, chs. 34, 35. 



