Varro begins the De Re Rustica by apologizing to his wife, conveniently named Fundania, for writing so hastily and not as elegantly as he could if he had the “leisure” (otium) (1.1.1). The reason, he explains, is that “as the saying goes, if man is a bubble, the old man is more so. Indeed, my eightieth year warns me to pack up my things before departing from life” (ut dicitur, si est homo bulla, eo magis senex. Annus enim octogesimus admonet me ut sarcinas conligam, antequam proficiscar e vita, 1.1.1). In other words, he could die any time and thus must write fast! Traditionally, Varro's professed haste at the outset of his work has been used to explain away all the “peculiarities in the treatise” that I would argue are instead clues to the satiric nature of his work. Varro's characters, including the persona of Varro himself, might commit blunders and produce flagrant inconsistencies in the course of the dialogue, but Varro the author crafts a subtle, satiric drama for his readers to untangle, and the satirical tone begins in the preface.

In the next three chapters, I will present a reading of the De Re Rustica that is quite different from previous interpretations of the work. Instead of reading the De Re Rustica as representative of elite Roman ideology, I argue that it is a subversive work, which uses farming as a vehicle to expose the hypocrisy and pretensions of Roman morality, intellectual culture, and politics in the Late Republic.