This entire section (VI, 2) is a panegyric, and proves St. Augustine a great admirer of Varro. Quintilian, Inst., x, 1, 95, is much briefer: “plus tamen scientiae conlaturus quam eloquentiae.”
[59]. Petrarch (Vol. III, p. 276) quotes verbatim from St. Augustine, De civ. dei, VI, 2. The sense, at any rate, is perfectly clear in both passages, but seems to have escaped Fracassetti, who, after correctly rendering “tanto aver letto da far meraviglia che ti restasse tempo di scriver nulla,” continues, “e scritto aver tanto che non s’intende come trovassi tempo per leggere alcuna cosa” (Vol. 5, p. 156).
We are reminded, too, of Cicero’s similar boast regarding his own literary activity at Astura in 45 B. C., “Legere isti laeti qui me reprehendunt tam multa non possunt quam ego scripsi” (ad Att., xii, 40, 2).
[60]. William Ramsay, in Smith’s Dict. of Grk. and Rom. Biogr., s. v. “Varro,” says:
It has been concluded from some expressions in one of Petrarch’s letters, expressions which appear under different forms in different editions, that the Antiquities were extant in his youth, and that he had actually seen them, although they had eluded his eager researches at a later period of life when he was more fully aware of their value. But the words of the poet, although to a certain extent ambiguous, certainly do not warrant the interpretation generally assigned to them, nor does there seem to be any good foundation for the story that these and other works of Varro were destroyed by the orders of Pope Gregory the Great, in order to conceal the plagiarism of St. Augustine.
And, to the opposite effect, J. A. Symonds, The Revival of Learning, (Scribner, 1900), p. 53, n. 3: “cf. his Epistle to Varro for an account of a MS of that author.” P. de Nolhac is of the opinion that Petrarch’s remembrances of the Antiquitates went through the same evolution as those of the De gloria (cf. the second letter to Cicero, n. 10).
[61]. With this sentiment compare the words of another enthusiastic humanist, John Addington Symonds, who writes (Preface, op. cit., written in 1877): “To me it has been a labor of love to record even the bare names of those Italian worthies who recovered for us in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ‘the everlasting consolations’ of the Greek and Latin classics.”