INTRODUCTION xix 



to his old master, who under stress of poverty had 

 pawned them, and died before they could be found 

 and redeemed. They were never heard of again. And 

 our text narrowly escaped a similar fate, for although 

 in the sixteenth century there existed several MSS. 

 and printed editions of the Rerum Rusticarum — so 

 corrupt as to be frequently unintelligible — they all 

 descended from a very ancient manuscript then 

 lying in the library of St. Mark at Florence, which 

 was lost in the seventeenth century. Fortunately 

 Angelo Politian (1482) and Petrus Victorius (1541) 

 had preserved the reading of the archetype, so that 

 the great German scholar Keil has of late years 

 been able to give us a respectable text — which, 

 however, it seems possible to improve greatly by 

 conjectural emendation. 



As the Rerum Rusticarum is thus the sole treatise 

 of the most industrious, the most learned, and, with 

 two exceptions, the most famous of all Latin writers, 

 which has come down to us practically entire, it is 

 worth while, perhaps, to examine in detail the con- 

 ditions of its production. In 46 B.C. Varro, who 

 was then seventy years old, ceased from political 

 activity and, after making his peace with Caesar, 

 who treated him with great kindness and gave him 

 congenial work to do, devoted himself entirely to 

 literature. He lived for nearly twenty years after 



