Publius Terentius Varro Atacinus (82 BC - c.35 BC) was an early Romanpoet. He was born in Gallia Narbonensis (now Narbonne), near the river Atax (now the Aude). His surname Atacinus indicates his birthplace. His first known works are Bellum Sequanicum, a poem on Julius Caesar's campaign against Ariovistus, and Satires. He translated the Alexandrian poet Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica into Latin. He also published love poems, The Tombs of the Great (a poem), Cosmographia or Chorographia (a work on geography, referred to by Virgil), Ephemeris, an agricultural calendar after Aratus, and Rerum Rusticarum.
Accordingly to Jerome, Varro did not begin to study Greek literature until his thirty-fifth year.
The age was prolific of epics, both historical and mythological, and that of Varro seems to have held a high rank among them.
Varro was also the author of a Cosmographia, or Chorographia, a geographical poem imitated from the Greek of Eratosthenes or of Alexander of Ephesus, surnamed Lychnus; and of an Ephemeris, a hexameter poem on weather-signs after Aratus, from which Virgil has borrowed.
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