pae-, --peri egkomios--.
The plastic dress, which in this case might not be wanting,
is of course but seldom borrowed from the history of his native country,
as in the satire -Serranus-, --peri archairesion--. The Cynic-
world of Diogenes on the other hand plays, as might be expected,
a great part; we meet with the --Kounistor--, the --Kounorreiton--,
the 'Ippokouon, the --'Oudrokouon--, the --Kounodidaskalikon--
and others of a like kind. Mythology is also laid under contribution
for comic purposes; we find a -Prometheus Liber-, an -Ajax
Stramenticius-, a -Hercules Socraticus-, a -Sesqueulixes-
who had spent not merely ten but fifteen years in wanderings.
The outline of the dramatic or romantic framework is still discoverable
from the fragments in some pieces, such as the -Prometheus Liber-,
the -Sexagessis-, -Manius-; it appears that Varro frequently,
perhaps regularly, narrated the tale as his own experience;
e. g. in the -Manius- the dramatis personae go to Varro and discourse
to him "because he was known to them as a maker of books."
as to the poetical value of this dress we are no longer allowed
to form any certain judgment; there still occur in our fragments
several very charming sketches full of wit and liveliness--
thus in the -Prometheus Liber- the hero after the loosing
of his chains opens a manufactory of men, in which Goldshoe the rich
(-Chrysosandalos-) bespeaks for himself a maiden, of milk and finest wax,
such as the Milesian bees gather from various flowers, a maiden
without bones and sinews, without skin or hair, pure and polished, slim,
smooth, tender, charming. The life-breath of this poetry is polemics--
not so much the political warfare of party, such as Lucilius
and Catullus practised, but the general moral antagonism of the stern
elderly man to the unbridled and perverse youth, of the scholar
living in the midst of his classics to the loose and slovenly,
or at any rate in point of tendency reprobate, modern poetry,(24)
of the good burgess of the ancient type to the new Rome in which
the Forum, to use Varro's language, was a pigsty and Numa, if he turned
his eyes towards his city, would see no longer a trace of his wise
regulations. In the constitutional struggle Varro did what seemed to him
the duty of a citizen; but his heart was not in such party-doings--
"why," he complains on one occasion, "do ye call me
from my pure life into the filth of your senate-house?" He belonged
to the good old