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This chapter focuses on Augustine's Book VI and VII of The City of God, which refutes the pagans' claims that the Roman deities had ensured unbroken success in the acquisition and growth of empire. It adverts to the topic of life after death and devotes close attention to Marcus Terentius Varro's distinguished research on Roman religion. It also provides a description of Terentius Varro, who was born at Reate in Sabine territory and became a praetor who fought on Pompey's side in the Civil War. The chapter mentions Julius Caesar, who commissioned Terentius Varro to establish the first public library at Rome. It looks at Terentius Varro's writings that covered virtually all disciplines — philosophy, religion, language, law, social history, geography, and agriculture.

This chapter discusses Arnaldo Momigliano's ‘The Theological Efforts of the Roman Upper Classes in the First Century bc’, and merits his Roman writing in theology with sympathetic dispassion. As a result, Momigliano sees with uncommon clarity the radical differences that characterise the writings on the gods of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Terentius Varro and Nigidius Figulus, and rejects the temptation to classify them all under ‘rationalism’ or ‘philosophy’. In speaking of the gods, Varro employs a cluster of terms that resonate in many fields, but two in particular. First, he assigns to gods and mortals specific duties in relation to each other and their communities; and, like Cicero, he charges them with cultivating each other, though for that action Varro and Cicero employ quite different terms.

Caesar formed a ‘a conspiracy [conspiratio] with Pompey and Crassus’. The crux of the agreement — a private agreement, but with clearly stated mutual responsibilities, and in this sense a true conspiracy — was described by Suetonius, who plainly had a reliable source: ‘that no step should be taken in public affairs which did not suit any one of the three’. There is no historical source that does not comment critically on this pact. Pollio, who saw in it the origin of the civil war, was broadly in agreement with Velleius, who warmly welcomed the rise of Augustus and was also an admirer of Caesar. Marcus Terentius Varro even wrote a satire about the triumvirate, with the title The Three-Headed Monster. In the judgement of the historians, in what concerns this fundamental turnabout by Caesar, the opinion of the Cato school — one of total rejection and condemnation — has held sway. They had feared the rise of another princeps like Sulla, and all of a sudden they had three.

Rome's religion is not so much about the objects of worship but the institutions that made possible Rome's greatness, among them the two key sacerdotal colleges, the pontifices, who supervised the sacra, the ensemble of rules and rituals which loosely group under the word ‘religion’, and the augures, who had responsibility for the auspicia, a major axis of communication between men and gods. This emphasis upon the importance of the priestly colleges to the maintenance of Roman religion and so of the Roman state reappears elsewhere in the late Republic and early Empire. In keeping with his basic assumption that, though a God of some sort truly pre-exists, civic religion is a thoroughly human creation, Marcus Terentius Varro devotes the three books after the general introduction to an account of the three major sacerdotal colleges. There follow three books on shrines and sacred places, three on festivals and three on rituals public and private.