As remote from literature in the higher sense were the innumerable writings of the Ciceronian age on science, art, antiquities, grammar, rhetoric, and a hundred miscellaneous subjects, which are, for the most part, known only from notices in the writings of later commentators and encyclopedists. Foremost among the voluminous authors of this class was the celebrated antiquarian, Marcus Terentius Varro, whose long and laborious life, reaching from two years after the death of the elder Cato till the final establishment of the Empire, covers and overlaps the entire Ciceronian age. Of the six or seven hundred volumes which issued from his pen, and which formed an inexhaustible quarry for his successors, nearly all are lost. The most important of them were the one hundred and fifty books of _Saturae Menippeae_, miscellanies in prose and verse in the manner which had been originated by Menippus of Gadara, the master of the poet Meleager, and which had at once obtained an enormous popularity throughout the whole of the Greek-speaking world; the forty- one books of _Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum et Divinarum_, the standard work on the religious and secular antiquities of Rome down to the time of Augustine; the fifteen books of _Imagines_, biographical sketches, with portraits, of celebrated Greeks and Romans, the first certain instance in history of the publication of an illustrated book; the twenty-five books _De Lingua Latina_, of which six are extant in an imperfect condition; and the treatise _De Re Rustica_, which we possess in an almost complete state. This last work was written by him at the age of eighty. It is in the form of a dialogue, and is not without descriptive and dramatic power. The tediousness which characterised all Varro's writing is less felt where the subject is one of which he had a thorough practical knowledge, and which gave ample scope for the vein of rough but not ungenial humour which he inherited from Cato.
Other names of this epoch have left no permanent mark on literature. The precursors of Sallust in history seem, like the precursors of Cicero in philosophy, to have approached their task with little more equipment than that of the ordinary amateur. The great orator Hortensius wrote _Annals_ (probably in the form of memoirs of his own time), which are only known from a reference to them in a later history written in the reign of Tiberius. Atticus, who had an interest in literature beyond that of the mere publisher, drew up a sort of handbook of Roman history, which is repeatedly mentioned by Cicero. Cicero's own brother Quintus, who passed for a man of letters, composed a work of the same kind; the tragedies with which he relieved the tedium of winter-quarters in Gaul were, however, translations from the Greek, not originals. Cicero's private secretary, Marcus Tullius Tiro, best known by the system of shorthand which he invented or improved, and which for long remained the basis of a standard code, is also mentioned as the author of works on grammar, and, as has already been noticed, edited a collection of his master's letters after his death. Decimus Laberius, a Roman of equestrian family, and Publilius Syrus, a naturalised native of Antioch, wrote mimes, which were performed with great applause, and gave a fugitive literary importance to this trivial form of dramatic entertainment. A collection of sentences which passes under the name of the latter was formed out of his works under the Empire, and enlarged from other sources in the Middle Ages. It supplies many admirable instances of the terse vigour of the Roman popular philosophy; some of these lines, like the famous--