Marcus Terentius Varro

Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC) was a Roman scholar regarded in antiquity as Rome's greatest scholar, called by Petrarch the third great light of Rome after Virgil and Cicero. He studied under the philologist Lucius Aelius Stilo and wrote extensively on language, most importantly De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language) in twenty-five books, of which six survive in part; the work examined word formation and the regularity of Latin word forms, laying groundwork for later linguistic analysis. His Nine Books of Disciplines organized knowledge around the liberal arts, with grammar as a primary discipline, and became a model for later encyclopedists such as Pliny the Elder, helping to shape the seven classical liberal arts of medieval education. Quintilian called him the most learned of the Romans.