When looking for the origin of microbiology, it is typical to refer to the latter part of the 19th century, when it developed as a science due to researchers like Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Martinus Beijerinck, Sergei Winogradsky, and Ferdinand Cohn. Nonetheless, there were trailblazers in ancient times, and in the West, the initial mention pertains to a quite unexpected Roman scholar, more renowned for his grammar writings: Marcus Terentius Varro.

In fact, the idea of the existence of beings so small that they cannot be perceived with the naked eye persisted for centuries, with notable contributions in the Modern Age from Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Eugenio Espejo, Robert Hooke, Athanasius Kircher, and Girolamo Fracastoro, among others; there were also early attempts during the Middle Ages (Avicenna, Avenzoar), and even in Antiquity.

In the 6th century BC, the Indian Jain tradition combined science and religion to explain the nigodas, countless ephemeral microscopic beings that exist throughout the universe, encompassing plant and animal tissues.

varro microorganisms ancient rome
Anton van Leeuwenhoek, first man to see microbes with a microscope. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Marcus Terentius Varro is occasionally referred to as Varro Reatinus to differentiate him from his peer Publius Terentius Varro Atacinus; Reatinus and Atacinus are cognomina indicating their respective hometowns, Rieti and Atacia. Certainly, our Varro was born in the initial of these cities in Latium, previously referred to as Reate and historically regarded as the Umbilicus Italiae, meaning the heart of Italy.

He was born in 116 BC into a family of the Ordo equester, the equestrian order, a social stratum between the senatorial class of patrician aristocrats and the common people who made up the plebeians. Its members were the equites or knights, so called because they had the financial means to afford a horse and join the cavalry ranks in the legions.

This was possible because most of them engaged in trade through societates publicanorum (companies of publicans), taking advantage of the legal restriction that barred patricians from accessing certain public contracts unrelated to agriculture: manufacturing, mining, shipbuilding, army supplies, and especially tax collection.

Thus, Varro enjoyed a comfortable position from birth and benefited from the immense fortune provided by a large villa near Lake di Ripa Sottile, all of which allowed him to hold several magistracies throughout his life. In his cursus honorum, he started out as tribune of the plebs and quaestor, subsequently rising to aedile curule and finally praetor.

varro microorganisms ancient rome
Bust of Pompey. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Even though these were elective positions, it was typical to establish a reputation beforehand, and he managed to do so due to the political and military circumstances of his era: the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey from 49 to 45 BC, after Crassus’s death which ended the triumvirate.

Varro supported the latter, having already served under him against the pirates and Mithridates, now commanding two legions in the Ilerda campaign in Hispania, where he covered the retreat of Lucius Afranius and Marcus Petreius in the face of the advancing Caesarian troops. The first two, surrounded, had to surrender, and Varro had no choice but to do the same, taking advantage of the offer of pardon extended to all three by the opposing proconsul.

Nonetheless, they confronted Caesar again at Pharsalus, and the defeat led to different ends. Afranius would fight in another battle, Thapsus, after which he was executed; Petreius also fought there and later, after clashing with the Numidian king Juba II, took his own life.

As for Varro, quite unexpectedly, he was pardoned again after capitulating at Pharsalus, and Caesar even appointed him supervisor of the public library of Rome, as well as including him in a commission of twenty members tasked with studying and designing an agrarian plan for the settlements that were expected to be established in Campania and Capua.

Obviously, it follows that his intellectual prestige saved his life and smoothed his political career; after all, Plutarch considered him the most cultured Roman of his time. But in 44 BCE, circumstances altered his future in that regard, as Julius Caesar was assassinated at the entrance to the Senate, and Rome was once again shaken by the specter of civil war.

varro microorganisms ancient rome
Imaginary portrait of Marcus Terentius Varro in an engraving. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Varro was one of those repressed by Mark Antony, because his former support for Pompey placed him under suspicion of having taken part in the conspiracy. This cost him not only his position but also his property, including the well-stocked library he had been building.

He endured difficult years, but his adversaries also fell into internal discord, and when Octavian defeated Mark Antony, finally imposing peace, the new leader founded a different regime under which Rome would enter a period of splendor. And a small part of that was thanks to the fact that Augustus, as Octavian was now called, placed Varro under his protection and restored what he had lost. Varro abandoned any political or military aspirations to devote himself to study and writing.

Having had the distinguished Lucius Aelius Stilo (a philologist and historian who also taught Cicero) as a teacher, and also having studied under the philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon in Athens (where Cicero accompanied him), it made sense that he would be influenced by them in the subjects he would later explore.

His more than prolific output totals seventy-four works in six hundred twenty volumes, although only two survive in partial form. On the creative side, he authored six pseudotragic plays, ten books of poems, four satires in the style of Lucilius, and one hundred fifty Menippean satires, of which fragments remain in both prose and verse.

But it was in the essay genre where he truly became significant. That category includes Imagines (seven hundred biographies in verse) and Antiquitates rerum (forty-one books of history), with two works considered of particular value: the compilation of the so-called Varronian chronology, which places the founding of Rome in 753 BCE and provides a valuable list of consuls; and the Nine Books of Disciplines, a sort of encyclopedia dealing with that number of fields of knowledge: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, architecture, and medicine.

varro microorganisms ancient rome
Edition of De re rustica preserved in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. Credit: Sailko / Wikimedia Commons

However, only fragments or references to their titles and/or paragraphs remain for most of them, with only two of his writings surviving, and even then only partially: De lingua latina, of which six of the original twenty-five volumes remain, and Rerum rusticarum libri III, three books that were part of De re rustica.

The latter, which is dedicated to his wife Fundania, deals with agriculture and everything related to rural life, and in it we can find the content we mentioned at the beginning, which constitutes a pioneering approach to microbiology and epidemiology. Specifically, starting from chapter X, in which he establishes the necessary conditions for fields to be productive.

It’s not an extensive treatment, but among his advice—such as location based on sunlight and wind, the presence of pastures, or water supply—he also recommends avoiding crops near marshes and similar environments:

Precautions should be taken near swamps, both for the reasons already given and because certain animals grow there, so tiny that they cannot be seen with the eyes and float in the air, entering the body through the mouth and nose, causing serious diseases.

Since in 36 BCE, when he wrote De re rustica, microscopes were still sixteen centuries away from being invented (that instrument was created in 1590 by the Dutch lens maker Zacharias Janssen), Varro could not have seen the microorganisms he spoke of, so it was still speculative—but he was right, and today we know that while not all spread through the air, there are indeed species that do.

varro microorganisms ancient rome
Anaxagoras in a detail of a mural by Edouard Lebiedzki. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Even so, some authors also credit him with intuiting the role of mosquitoes and other insects in contagion, something Columella explained a few decades later with greater conviction and specificity, linking it to the frequent malaria epidemics suffered by Rome.

In truth, when he was in Athens, Varro had likely encountered the philosophy of Anaxagoras, who had a work titled Physics in which he conceived the world as made up of an infinite number of homeomeries—particles too small for the human eye—that constituted the substance of things (except for a principle of motion he called noûs, but that is another story). In fact, in his De rerum natura, Lucretius also embraces this idea but gives it a twist by claiming that the particles cause diseases, an idea later supported by Vitruvius.

This was, then, the Roman capacity for assimilation embodied by several generations of scholars to whom Varro paved the way—that man of whom it was said that “he wrote so much that it seems impossible he could have read anything, and read so much that it seems incredible he could have written anything.”

It helped that he nearly reached the age of ninety, of course, as he died in 27 BCE—the same year Octavian assumed the title of Augustus and transformed the republic into an empire.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on October 22, 2019: Marco Terencio Varrón, el erudito romano que concibió la existencia de microorganismos dieciséis siglos antes de que se descubrieran

SOURCES

Marco Terencio Varrón, De las cosas del campo

Samuel Finkielman, Marco Terencio Varrón y la causa de las enfermedades

Walter Ledermann, ¿Hubo infectólogos en la Antigua Roma?

Mª Luisa Gómez Lus, José González, La teoría microbiana y su repercusión en Medicina y Salud Pública

Wikipedia, Varrón

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