xxvi INTRODUCTION 



ugliness in everything of his which remains with 

 perhaps the exception of such earlier works as the 

 Menippeae. The truth is probably that Varro ad- 

 mired too greatly the ''adorable rust" of antiquity, 

 and ruined his style by pondering over and making 

 excerpts from pre-Ennian writers who cared nothing 

 for form in prose expression, and that while many 

 current country words and homely proverbs are 

 preserved in the Rerum Rusticarum, its stiffness 

 and dryness are transmitted through Varro from a 

 time when no prose literature in Latin existed. This 

 harshness of style is frequently noticed by the 

 ancients. Quintilian mentions it, and Augustine 

 (De Civ. Dei, vi, 2) writes about Varro, "al- 

 though he has no sweetness of utterance, he is yet 

 so full of learning and of wise precepts that in the 

 whole field of knowledge which we call secular, and 

 pagans liberal, he is as full of information for the 

 student of facts as Cicero is of charm for the lover 

 of style." There is little doubt that the difficulty of 

 reading Varro's work — St. Augustine (xix, i) is 

 obliged frequently to paraphrase — goes far to ex- 

 plain why so little of it remains to us, as people 

 naturally preferred the writings of those who, using 

 his facts, presented them more gracefully, and we 

 need not have recourse to the story, probably in- 

 vented by Machiavelli or Cardan, that Gregory the 



