Marcus Terentius Varro
Roman scholar, polymath and author (116-27 BC) · Italy · Academics · Lived 116 BC to 27 BC · aged 89
Marcus Terentius Varro is read about 283 times a day, in 55 languages.
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Something wrong?Rome's greatest scholar wrote more books than almost anyone in antiquity - and nearly all of them vanished. What survives is fragments, quotations in other writers, and the ghost of an encyclopedic mind that tried to catalog everything Rome knew.
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About this person
Marcus Terentius Varro was born in 116 BC and lived through the collapse of the Republic into the early years of the Empire. A polymath who ranged across grammar, agriculture, philosophy, history, and religion, he produced a staggering volume of work - later writers counted hundreds of volumes. Petrarch would call him "the third great light of Rome," ranked behind only Virgil and Cicero. To separate him from a younger contemporary also named Varro, he's sometimes called Varro Reatinus, after the town of Rieti. He died in 27 BC, having outlasted the Republic he'd spent a lifetime documenting.
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