part, known only from notices in the writings of later commentators and
encyclopedists. Foremost among the voluminous authors of this class was
the celebrated antiquarian, Marcus Terentius Varro, whose long and
laborious life, reaching from two years after the death of the elder Cato
till the final establishment of the Empire, covers and overlaps the
entire Ciceronian age. Of the six or seven hundred volumes which issued
from his pen, and which formed an inexhaustible quarry for his
successors, nearly all are lost. The most important of them were the one
hundred and fifty books of _Saturae Menippeae_, miscellanies in prose and
verse in the manner which had been originated by Menippus of Gadara, the
master of the poet Meleager, and which had at once obtained an enormous
popularity throughout the whole of the Greek-speaking world; the forty-
one books of _Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum et Divinarum_, the standard
work on the religious and secular antiquities of Rome down to the time of
Augustine; the fifteen books of _Imagines_, biographical sketches, with
portraits, of celebrated Greeks and Romans, the first certain instance in
history of the publication of an illustrated book; the twenty-five books
_De Lingua Latina_, of which six are extant in an imperfect condition;
and the treatise _De Re Rustica_, which we possess in an almost complete
state. This last work was written by him at the age of eighty. It is in
the form of a dialogue, and is not without descriptive and dramatic
power. The tediousness which characterised all Varro's writing is less
felt where the subject is one of which he had a thorough practical
knowledge, and which gave ample scope for the vein of rough but not
ungenial humour which he inherited from Cato.

Other names of this epoch have left no permanent mark on literature. The
precursors of Sallust in history seem, like the precursors of Cicero in
philosophy, to have approached their task with little more equipment than
that of the ordinary amateur. The great orator Hortensius wrote _Annals_