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Who has investigated those things more carefully than Marcus Varro?
Who has discovered them more learnedly? Who has considered them more
attentively? Who has distinguished them more acutely? Who has
written about them more diligently and more fully?, who, though he is
less pleasing in his eloquence, is nevertheless so full of instruction
and wisdom, that in all the erudition which we call secular, but they
liberal, he will teach the student of things as much as Cicero
delights the student of words. And even Tully himself renders him
such testimony, as to say in his Academic books that he had held that
disputation which is there carried on with Marcus Varro, "a man,"
he adds, "unquestionably the acutest of all men, and, without any
doubt, the most learned." He does not say the most eloquent or the
most fluent, for in reality he was very deficient in this faculty, but
he says, "of all men the most acute." And in those books, that
is, the Academic, where he contends that all things are to be
doubted, he adds of him, "without any doubt the most learned." In
truth, he was so certain concerning this thing, that he laid aside
that doubt which he is wont to have recourse to in all things, as if,
when about to dispute in favor of the doubt of the Academics, he had,
with respect to this one thing, forgotten that he was an Academic.
But in the first book, when he extols the literary works of the same
Varro, he says, "Us straying and wandering in our own city like
strangers, thy books, as it were, brought home, that at length we
might come to know of who we were and where we were. Thou has opened
up to us the age of the country, the distribution of seasons, the laws
of sacred things, and of the priests; thou hast opened up to us
domestic and public discipline; thou hast pointed out to us the proper
places for religious ceremonies, and hast informed us concerning sacred
places. Thou hast shown us the names, kinds, offices, causes of all
divine and human things."
This man, then, of so distinguished and excellent acquirements,
and, as Terentian briefly says of him in a most elegant verse,
"Varro, a man universally informed," who read so much that we
wonder when he had time to write, wrote so much that we can scarcely
believe any one could have read it all, this man, I say, so great in
talent, so great in learning, had he had been an opposer and destroyer
of the so-called divine things of which he wrote, and had he said that
they pertained to superstition rather than to religion, might perhaps,
even in that case, not have written so many things which are
ridiculous, contemptible, detestable. But when he so worshipped
these same gods, and so vindicated their worship, as to say, in that
same literary work of his, that he was afraid lest they should perish,
not by an assault by enemies, but by the negligence of the citizens,
and that from this ignominy they are being delivered by him, and are
being laid up and preserved in the memory of the good by means of such
books, with a zeal far more beneficial than that through which
Metellus is declared to have rescued the sacred things of Vesta from
the flames, and Æneas to have rescued the Penates from the burning of
Troy; and when he nevertheless. gives forth such things to be read by
succeeding ages as are deservedly judged by wise and unwise to be unfit
to be read, and to be most hostile to the truth of religion; what
ought we to think but that a most acute and learned man, not, however
made free by the Holy Spirit, was overpowered by the custom and laws
of his state, and, not being able to be silent about those things by
which he was influenced, spoke of them under pretence of commending
religion?
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