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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 provides the text and translation for Book VII of St. Augustine's The City of God, which resumes his analysis of Terentius Varro's Res Diuinae with a systematic scrutiny of his choice of the select gods, since worship of them occupies the preponderant part of the Roman religion. It records the catalogue of the twenty most important deities and challenges the appropriateness of the selection, suggesting that Vitumnus (life-giver) and Sentinus (sensation-giver) play more important roles than many of the twenty. Statues of the gods in human form, Varro argues, indicate the close relationship between the human and the divine mind. Augustine argues strongly against this view, claiming that such portrayals in human shape convey an unworthy notion of the gods. It also offers further detail of Varro's theology, in which the world is composed of mind and body, and the mind is God.

This chapter includes the commentary on Book VII of St. Augustine's The City of God. It mentions superiores libri...sufficient, in which Augustine argues that the Roman gods can afford no help in the attainment of happiness in the future life and reverts to their inadequacy in aiding the present existence. It also discusses the identification of the select gods and clarifies whether they are to be regarded as exempted from the duties of the lesser deities. Since the gods of lower rank incur no disgrace through any scandals, they have fared better than the select gods, whose monstrous indecencies are widely publicised. The chapter looks at Terentius Varro's belief, which made him regard the world-soul as God, though it contains within its different parts many souls whose nature is divine.

This chapter provides the text and translation for Book VI of St. Augustine's The City of God, which adverts to the topic of life after death and changes tack to devote close attention to Terentius Varro's distinguished research on Roman religion. Augustine pays lip-service to his proclaimed theme of the pentad, the rebuttal of the claim that the Roman religion had been efficacious for the conferment of eternal happiness after death. It talks about Augustine's discussion with Varro and praise of his learning, appending Cicero's celebrated tribute in the Academica. It also gives a resumé of the content of Varro's Antiquitates, with the subdivisions of Res Humanae and Res Diuinae. Augustine exploits Varro's learning to condemn the illogicalities of the religious system in general and in particular of worship of the select deities.

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.

This chapter argues that Cicero is simultaneously our major source for Roman intellectual life (including philosophy) in Republican Rome and the major obstacle to gaining an accurate picture of it. Not only does Cicero exaggerate his own importance, giving little significance to other writers of philosophy, but according to this chapter he also represents only one way—historical and doxographical—of writing about philosophy. In reality, the chapter argues, there was a much wider range of philosophical thought at Rome, and conversation about ideas was hardly restricted to the villas of the elite. The alternative “street”-discourse that the text here discerns finds its closest literary reflection in Roman satire, and particularly in Varro’s Menippean satires, written in the 70s and 60s bce. The chapter concludes with a discussion of their underestimated significance for the history of Roman philosophy.

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.

This chapter explores a chapter in the history of philosophy at Rome that falls outside the more familiar narrative of the Roman reception and adaptation of Greek philosophical systems in the wake of the conquest of the Greek east from the second century BCE onward. From early on, the chapter demonstrates, the Romans felt a special affinity to the philosophy of Pythagoras, an intellectual movement that was perceived as authentically Italian, not an importation from abroad. In tracing the evolution of this tradition down to the end of the Republic, the chapter focuses not on the history of Roman Pythagoreanism as such, but on the role that this philosophy played in the Romans’ construction and understanding of their own intellectual formation.