INTRODUCTION

...to his old master, who, in his poverty, had pawned them and died before they could be found and redeemed. They were never seen again. Our current text narrowly escaped a similar fate. Although several manuscripts and printed editions of the Rerum Rusticarum On Farming existed in the sixteenth century—often so corrupt as to be nearly unintelligible—they all descended from a very ancient manuscript once kept 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 original readings, allowing the great German scholar Keil, in recent years, to provide us with a respectable text—which, however, still seems capable of significant improvement through educated guesswork.

Since the Rerum Rusticarum is the only surviving, practically complete work by the most industrious, learned, and (with two exceptions) most famous of all Latin writers, it is worth examining the conditions under which it was produced. In 46 B.C., Varro, then seventy years old, withdrew from political life. After making peace with Caesar—who treated him with great kindness and provided him with congenial work—he dedicated himself entirely to literature. He lived for nearly twenty years after...