Early in his literary career Marcus Terentius Varro urged his readers to forge out their lives by reading and writing, and for the next half century he followed his own advice so successfully that he became a prolific polymath and the most highly acclaimed intellectual figure of ancient Rome. It was Varro who established 753 B.C., by present-day calculations, as the conventional date for the founding of Rome. Varro also determined the canonical list of twenty-one comedies indubitably authored by Plautus, and he contributed long-lasting, influential accounts of the nine liberal arts (the usual seven--grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music--plus medicine and architecture). The loss of his Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum (Antiquities, 46 B.C.) is one of the most lamented losses in all of Latin literature, for it was a de facto encyclopedia of Roman religious and cultural institutions and customs. Varro's Imagines vel Hebdomades...