Antony was not a person to be satisfied with robbing Varro of his property. At the formation of the memorable triumvirate, the name of Varro appeared in the list of the proscribed, among those other friends of Pompey whom the clemency of Cæsar had spared. This illustrious and blameless individual had now passed the age of seventy; and nothing can afford a more frightful proof of the sanguinary spirit which guided the councils of the triumvirs, than their devoting to the dagger of the hired assassin a man equally venerable by his years and character, and who ought to have been protected, if not by his learned labours, at least by his retirement, from such inhuman persecution. But, though doomed to death as a friend of law and liberty, his friends contended with each other for the dangerous honour of saving him. Calenus having obtained the preference, carried him to his country-house, where Antony frequently came, without suspecting that it contained a proscribed inmate. Here Varro remained concealed till a special edict was issued by the consul, M. Plancus, under the triumviral seal, excepting him and Messala Corvinus from the general slaughter(60).
But though Varro thus passed in security the hour of danger, he was unable to save his library, which was placed in the garden of one of his villas, and fell into the hands of an illiterate soldiery.
After the battle of Actium, Varro resided in tranquillity at Rome till his decease, which happened in 727, when he was ninety years of age. The tragical deaths, however, of Pompey and Cicero, with the loss of others of his friends,--the ruin of his country,--the expulsion from his villas,--and the loss of those literary treasures, which he had stored up as the solace of his old age, and the want of which would be doubly felt by one who wished to devote all his time to study,--must have cast a deep shade over the concluding days of this illustrious scholar. His wealth was restored by Augustus, but his books could not be supplied.
It is not improbable, that the dispersion of this library, which impeded the prosecution of his studies, and prevented the composition of such works as required reference and consultation, may have induced Varro to employ the remaining hours of his life in delivering those precepts of agriculture, which had been the result of long experience, and which needed only reminiscence to inculcate. It was some time after the loss of his books, and when he had nearly reached the age of eighty, that Varro composed the work on husbandry, as he himself testifies in the introduction. "If I had leisure, I might write these things more conveniently, which I will now explain as well as I am able, thinking that I must make haste; because, if a man be a bubble of air, much more so is an old man, for now my eightieth year admonishes me to get my baggage together before I leave the world. Wherefore, as you have bought a farm, which you are desirous to render profitable by tillage, and as you ask me to take this task upon me, I will try to advise you what must be done, not only during my stay here, but after my departure." The remainder of the introduction forms, in its ostentatious display of erudition, a remarkable contrast to Cato's simplicity. Varro talks of the Syrens and Sibyls,--invokes all the Roman deities, supposed to preside over rural affairs,--and enumerates all the Greek authors who had written on the subject of agriculture previous to his own time.