I 



INTRODUCTION 



It is most singular that out of the enormous mass 

 of writings which Varro left behind him — in the 

 preface to the Hebdomades he tells us that he was 

 eighty-four years old and had then written four 

 hundred and ninety books — this treatise on farming 

 is the only one which remains to us in anything 

 approaching completeness. Of the De Lingua 

 Latina, which consisted of twenty-five books, we 

 have now only six, and these terribly lacerated, 

 while all his other works — poetry, satire, literary 

 criticism, grammar, philology, science, history, 

 education, philosophy, law, theology, geography, 

 antiquarian research — have perished except for a 

 few disjected fragments salvaged by Dionysius, 

 Pliny, Gellius, Macrobius, and the Christian apolo- 

 gists. There would be little cause for wonder had 

 his work been poor in quality, but all antiquity is 

 unanimous as to its incomparable value; in many 

 branches of science and literature he was during his 

 life-time and for many hundreds of years after his 

 death the supreme authority. The great men who 



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