Book 3
10
These remarks of Varro about the number seven show painstaking investigation. But he has also brought together in the same place others which are rather trifling: for example, that there are seven wonderful works in the world, that the sages of old were seven, that the usual number of rounds in the races in the circus is seven, and that seven champions were chosen to attack Thebes. Then he adds in that book the further information that he has entered upon the twelfth hebdomad of his age, and that up to that day he has completed seventy hebdomads of books, Only 39 titles have come down to us, through Hieronymus, De Vir. Ill. 54, whose catalogue is unfinished and also includes ten libri singulares under one head. Ritschl estimated Varro's publications as 74 works, comprising 620 books. of which a considerable number were destroyed when his library was plundered, at the time of his proscription. By Antony in 43 B. C. Varro was saved from death by Fufius Calenus, and died in 27 B.C., at the age of nearly ninety.
11
The weak arguments by which Accius in his Didascalica attempts to prove that Hesiod was earlier than Homer.
