Descended from a plebeian gens which had its home in the Sabine land but had belonged for the last two hundred years to the Roman senate, strictly reared in antique discipline and decorum,( 21) and already at the beginning of this epoch a man of maturity, Marcus Terentius Varro of Reate (638-727) belonged in politics, as a matter of course, to the institutional party, and bore an honourable and energetic part in its doings and sufferings.

He supported it, partly in literature--as when he combated the first coalition, the "three-headed monster," in pamphlets; partly in more serious warfare, where we found him in the army of Pompeius as commandant of Further Spain.( 22) When the cause of the republic was lost, Varro was destined by his conqueror to be librarian of the library which was to be formed in the capital.

The troubles of the following period drew the old man once more into their vortex, and it was not till seventeen years after Caesar's death, in the eighty-ninth year of his well-occupied life, that death called him away.
Varros' Models The aesthetic writings, which have made him a name, were brief essays, some in simple prose and of graver contents, others humorous sketches the prose groundwork of which was inlaid with various poetical effusions.

The former were the "philosophico- historical dissertations" (-logistorici-), the latter the Menippean Satires.

In neither case did he follow Latin models, and the -Satura- of Varro in particular was by no means based on that of Lucilius.