Speaker: Joseph McAlhany University of Connecticut

In praising the intellectual achievements of his contemporary Marcus Terentius Varro, Cicero emphasized that Varro’s writings allowed Romans, who previously experienced the physical landscape of their city as nothing more than tourists, to finally know where and who they were. But if Cicero viewed these compilations of antiquarian information as a guidebook of sorts to the city and its sacred spaces, for Varro they were the creation of an alternative Eternal City he could inhabit, beyond the corruption and decay of Rome. Throughout his mostly fragmentary and wide-ranging corpus, including his major scholarly works on the Latin language and Rome’s religious and historical traditions, Varro fashioned a second life in letters not as savior of the city’s past, but prophet of its doom, culminating in his odd swan-song to his homeland, the pseudo-agricultural treatise De re rustica.