(b ?Reate [now Rieti], 116 bce; d 27 bce). Roman scholar and poet. During four decades he took an active part in political life, but his passion was for scholarship. Educated at Rome and Athens, he made available to his countrymen much of the entire range of Hellenic and Hellenistic erudition. Varro is the first Roman example of the polymath, and he remained deeply Roman. His eclecticism continued to be subservient to an abiding concern for the virtues of earlier generations, even as his prodigious learning was lightened and made palatable for ordinary readers by a strong feeling for earthy realities. He has been called the ‘most learned of the Romans’.
The 55 known titles constitute but a partial list of Varro's major works. Of these, only On Farming survives in a complete form; six books remain of the 25 originally comprising the systematic treatise On Latin, as well as 600 fragments of his Menippean Satires, written on the model of the Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara. These exemplify both the author's moral concern and his gift for the common touch. Among them is the Onos lyras (‘When the ass hears the lyre’), a defence of music against the stock charges of its low esteem and effeminate practitioners. Even though the champion is a personified figure taken from the everyday practice of music (phōnaskia, i.e. ‘vocal training’), the actual defence goes well beyond considerations of utility for the statesman and others: cosmic harmony, rhythmic ethos and the power of music to calm wild beasts are also included. With reference to men, who are said to have an inborn affinity for the musical, the ethical power of music is exemplified by the effect of tibiae (double reed pipes; the Greek auloi) upon audiences in public performance. Notably un-Platonic, this may echo the doctrines of the Politics. The high praise accorded to Aristotle's celebrated pupil Aristoxenus does not seem merely coincidental. It is noteworthy that the individualizing approach to musico-ethical theory, well established in Stoic doctrine by Varro's time, has no place in the scattered remains of the Onos lyras. Several of the fragments contain coarse or obscene references; one, involving string tension, has its prototype in Hellenistic comedy.
Varro's lost Disciplines dealt with the liberal arts, with medicine and architecture added, in nine books. The contents of book 7, on music, have been surmised from references in the work of later theorists and scholars of sundry kinds, from Pliny and Quintilian to Isidore of Seville, but only the most general outline can be recovered. The topics of the Menippean dialogue reappeared, with elaborations and additions. Further, Varro discussed the liturgical, military and therapeutic uses of music. There was also a section devoted to consonances and dissonances. The definition of music itself as ‘scientia bene modulandi’, stated by Censorinus (On the Day of Birth, 10), Augustine (De musica, i.2), Cassiodorus (Institutiones, ii.5), Pseudo-Odo (Dialogus) and in the Scolica enchiriadis and closely paraphrased by Aurelian of Réôme (chap.2: ‘scientia recte modulandi’), has commonly been attributed to Varro. None of these authors, however, associated the definition with Varro and the attribution is certainly doubtful.
Varro united Greek theorizing with Roman practical experience. His influence was enormous on later Latin authors, in whose writings faint traces of his erudition can still be discerned.
F. Buecheler and W. Heraeus, eds.: Petronii saturae … Varronis et Senecae saturae (Berlin, 1862, 6/1922/R), 181ff
E. Holzer: Varroniana (Ulm, 1890)
H. Abert: ‘Zu Cassiodor’, SIMG, iii (1901–2), 439–53
H. Dahlmann: ‘M. Terentius Varro’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, suppl.vi (Stuttgart, 1935), 1172–1277, esp. 1259, 1275–6
L. Richter: ‘Griechische Traditionen im Musikschrifttum der Römer’, AMw, xxii (1965), 69–98
M. Simon: ‘Zur Abhängigkeit der spätrömischen Enzyklopädien der artes liberales von Varros Disciplinarum libri’, Philologus, cx (1966), 88–101
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967), 410ff, 642ff, 705ff
M. Vogel: Onos Lyras: der Esel mit der Leier (Düsseldorf, 1973)
W.R. Bowen: ‘St Augustine in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Science’, Augustine on Music, ed. R.R. La Croix (Lewiston, NY, 1988), 29–51
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN