Alfenus Varus

Alfenus Varus was an ancient Roman jurist and writer who lived around the 1st century BC.¹

Life

Alfenus Varus (whose praenomen might have been Publius) was a pupil of Servius Sulpicius Rufus, and the only pupil of Servius from whom there are any excerpts in the Pandects. He composed 40 books of Digesta (‘Ordered Abstracts’), a title he was the first to employ. Of this work 70 excerpts survive in Justinian's compilation of the same name, the earliest coherent passages of legal writing to be preserved.²

A story about him is preserved by the scholiast Helenius Acron, in his notes on the satires of Horace.³ The scholiast assumes the "Alfenus Vafer" of Horace to be the lawyer, and says that he was a native of Cremona, where he carried on the trade of a barber or a botcher of shoes,⁴ that he came to Rome to become a student of Servius, attained the dignity of consulship, and was honored with a public funeral.

It is believed that Alfenus Varus the jurist is the same as the "Varus" who is addressed in Virgil's Eclogue 9 with a plea for him to save Virgil's home town of Mantua from losing its land in the confiscations of 40 BC and promising to honour him with a poem if he succeeded. Another of Virgil's poems, Eclogue 6, is indeed addressed to Varus, but it is not known to what extent Varus was able to help Mantua.⁵ It seems that Varus was the land commissioner appointed to distribute lands of northern Italy to veteran soldiers in 40 BC. A sentence of a speech by survives criticising Varus for extending the confiscations almost up to the walls of Mantua despite having been ordered to leave a three-mile tract of land around the city. Virgil mentions Varus's military achievements ( 6.7) but politely passes the task of describing them to other poets.