time, when the talk savoured of onions and garlic,
but the heart was sound. His polemic against the hereditary foes
of the genuine Roman spirit, the Greek philosophers, was only
a single aspect of this old-fashioned opposition to the spirit
of the new times; but it resulted both from the nature of the Cynical
philosophy and from the temperament of Varro, that the Menippean lash
was very specially plied round the cars of the philosophers
and put them accordingly into proportional alarm--it was not
without palpitation that the philosophic scribes of the time
transmitted to the "severe man" their newly-issued treatises.
Philosophizing is truly no art. With the tenth part of the trouble
with which a master rears his slave to be a professional baker,
he trains himself to be a philosopher; no doubt, when the baker
and the philosopher both come under the hammer, the artist of pastry
goes off a hundred times dearer than the sage. Singular people,
these philosophers! One enjoins that corpses be buried in honey--
it is a fortunate circumstance that his desire is not complied with,
otherwise where would any honey-wine be left? Another thinks
that men grow out of the earth like cresses. A third has invented
a world-borer (--Kosmotorounei--) by which the earth will some
day be destroyed.

-Postremo, nemo aegrotus quicquam somniat
Tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat philosophus-.

It is ludicrous to observe how a Long-beard--by which is meant
an etymologizing Stoic--cautiously weighs every word in goldsmith's
scales; but there is nothing that surpasses the genuine
philosophers' quarrel--a Stoic boxing-match far excels any encounter
of athletes. In the satire -Marcopolis-, --peri archeis--,
when Marcus created for himself a Cloud-Cuckoo-Home after his own heart,
matters fared, just as in the Attic comedy, well with the peasant,
but ill with the philosopher; the -Celer- -- -di'-enos- -leimmatos-logos--,
son of Antipater the Stoic, beats in the skull of his opponent--
evidently the philosophic -Dilemma---with the mattock.

With this morally polemic tendency and this talent for embodying it
in caustic and picturesque expression, which, as the dress of dialogue
given to the books on Husbandry written in his eightieth year shows,
never forsook him down to extreme old age, Varro most happily
combined an incomparable knowledge of the national manners
and language, which is embodied in the philological writings
of his old