domestic life, finance,
and culture in the regal, the early republican, the Hannibalic,
and the most recent period. These labours of Varro were based
on an empiric knowledge of the Roman world and its adjacent Hellenic
domain more various and greater in its kind than any other Roman
either before or after him possessed--a knowledge to which living
observation and the study of literature alike contributed.
The eulogy of his contemporaries was well deserved, that Varro
had enabled his countrymen--strangers in their own world--to know
their position in their native land, and had taught the Romans
who and where they were. But criticism and system will be sought for
in vain. His Greek information seems to have come from somewhat
confused sources, and there are traces that even in the Roman field
the writer was not free from the influence of the historical
romance of his time. The matter is doubtless inserted
in a convenient and symmetrical framework, but not classified
or treated methodically; and with all his efforts to bring tradition
and personal observation into harmony, the scientific labours of Varro
are not to be acquitted of a certain implicit faith in tradition
or of an unpractical scholasticism.(38) The connection with Greek
philology consists in the imitation of its defects more than
of its excellences; for instance, the basing of etymologies
on mere similarity of sound both in Varro himself and in the other
philologues of this epoch runs into pure guesswork and often
into downright absurdity.(39) In its empiric confidence
and copiousness as well as in its empiric inadequacy and want of method
the Varronian vividly reminds us of the English national philology,
and just like the latter, finds its centre in the study
of the older drama. We have already observed that the monarchical
literature developed the rules of language in contradistinction
to this linguistic empiricism.(40) It is in a high degree significant
that there stands at the head of the modern grammarians no less a man
than Caesar himself, who in his treatise on Analogy (given forth
between 696 and 704) first undertook to bring free language
under the power of law.

The Other Professional Sciences

Alongside of this extraordinary stir in the field of philology
The small amount of activity in the other sciences is surprising.
What appeared of importance in philosophy--such as Lucretius'
representation of the Epicurean system in the poetical c