Art & Creativity Quote by Marcus Terentius Varro

Varro’s line is a tidy Roman flex: nature is generous, but it’s Rome that turns generosity into dominion. “Divine Nature” hands over the raw materials - fields, fertility, the baseline promise of survival. “Human art” doesn’t just add decoration; it imposes form, concentrates power, and makes permanence. The sentence stages a transfer of authority from the gods to the builder, from gift to design. In a culture obsessed with virtus, engineering, and order, that’s not an observation. It’s a worldview.

The subtext is political as much as philosophical. Fields suggest the older moral economy Rome loved to mythologize: the citizen-farmer, the Republic’s hardy simplicity, bread earned by labor. Cities, by contrast, are the visible infrastructure of empire: walls, roads, aqueducts, markets, courts. They are where taxes are tallied, armies supplied, status performed. To say cities are “built” is to praise the capacity to organize bodies and resources at scale - a softer word for control.

Varro lived through Rome’s late-Republic crisis, when land was being consolidated, small farmers displaced, and urban crowds growing. So the line also carries a faint defensiveness: if cities are artificial, they need a moral alibi. Calling nature “divine” keeps the agrarian ideal sacred, while crediting “human art” makes urban expansion sound like genius rather than greed. It’s Roman ideology distilled: reverence for the pastoral past, plus a confident claim that civilization’s real miracle is what humans can construct over it.