Cæsar appreciated Varro’s extensive learning and intrusted to him the formation of the great public library.[881] Henceforth he shunned the perils of political life,[882] and in the retirement of his villas devoted himself zealously to the pursuit of literature. Nevertheless he could not escape the unrelenting persecution of political party; for in that proscription to which Cicero fell a victim, his name was in the list until it was erased by Antony.[883] Although he was seventy years old, his industry was unabated, and he continued his literary labours until his death, which took place in the eighty-ninth year of his age.[884] Varro was a man of ponderous erudition and unwearied industry,[885] without a spark of taste and genius. No Roman author wrote so much as he did, no one read so much except Pliny; yet, notwithstanding all this practice and study, he never acquired an agreeable style. He dissected and anatomized the Latin language with all the powers of critical analysis; but he was never imbued with its elegant polish or its nervous eloquence. Wherever, as in the case of his treatise on agriculture, he had access to sound information and good authority, his habits of arrangement, the clearness with which he classified, and the careful judgment with which he adduced his facts, render his works valuable. Few men have possessed greater powers of combining and systematizing: his mind was, as it were, full of compartments, in which each species of knowledge had its proper place, but it was nothing more. Whenever he left the beaten track of other men’s discoveries, and indulged in free conjecture or original thought, as in his grammatical works, his learning seems to desert him; and etymology, which has tempted so many mere conjecturers to go astray, led him also into absurdity. One of his works, _Antiquitates Divinarum Rerum_, acquires a peculiar interest from the fact of its having been the storehouse from which St. Augustine, who was a great admirer of his learning, derived much of his treatise _De Civitate Dei_. How this laborious compilation was lost it is impossible to say. We can only lament the accident which deprives us of the work to which especially the author owes his reputation. In the treatise, which together with this forms one work, namely, _Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum_, he investigated the early history and chronology of Rome,[886] and fixed the date of the building of the city in the year B. C. 753, a date which is now commonly received by the best historians.[887] A catalogue of his numerous books and tracts on almost every subject which then engaged the attention of literary men—on history, biography, geography, philosophy, criticism, and morals—would be uninteresting, but his principal works were as follows:— I. _De Re Rustica, Libri_ III. II. _De Lingua Latina, Libri_ XXIV., of which only six are extant, and these in a mutilated condition.