At places like Baiae
serious work was of course impossible, and would have been ridiculed.
There was no original thinker in this age. Caesar himself was probably
more suited by nature to reason on facts immediately before him than
to speculate on abstract principles. Varro, the rough sensible scholar
of Sabine descent, was a diligent collector of facts and traditions,
but no more able to grapple hard with problems of philosophy or
theology than any other Roman of his time. The life of the average
wealthy man was too comfortable, too changeable, to suggest the
desirability of real mental exertion.
Nor has this life any direct relation to material usefulness and the
productive investment of capital. Cicero and his correspondents never
mention farming, never betray any interest in the new movement,
if such there was, for the scientific cultivation of the vine and
olive.[406] For such things we must go to Varro's treatise, written,
some years after Cicero's death, in his extreme old age. In the third
book of that invaluable work we shall find all we want to know about
the real _villa rustica_ of the time,--the working farm-house with its
wine-vats and olive-mills, like that recently excavated at Boscoreale
near Pompeii.
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