Works
Varro's literary output was very large; Ritschl estimated it at 74 works in some 620 books, of which only one work survives complete, although we possess many fragments of the others, mostly in Gellius' Attic Nights.
Called "the most learned of the Romans" by Quintilian (Inst. Or. X.1.95), Varro was recognized as an important source by many other ancient authors, among them Cicero, Pliny the Elder, Virgil in the Georgics, Columella, Aulus Gellius, Macrobius, Augustine, and Vitruvius, who credits him (VII.Intr.14) with a book on architecture.
His only complete work extant, Rerum Rusticarum Libri Tres, has been described as "the well digested system of an experienced and successful farmer who has seen and practised all that he records." One noteworthy aspect of the work is his anticipation of microbiology and epidemiology. Varro warned his contemporaries to avoid swamps and marshland, since such areas "breed certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, but which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and cause serious diseases." (R.R. I.12.2)
Read more about this topic: Marcus Terentius Varro
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“It [Egypt] has more wonders in it than any other country in the world and provides more works that defy description than any other place.”
—Herodotus (c. 484–424 B.C.)
“The family that perseveres in good works will surely have an abundance of blessings.”
—Chinese proverb.
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)