At places like Baiae serious work was of course impossible, and would have been ridiculed.
There was no original thinker in this age.

Caesar himself was probably more suited by nature to reason on facts immediately before him than to speculate on abstract principles.

Varro, the rough sensible scholar of Sabine descent, was a diligent collector of facts and traditions, but no more able to grapple hard with problems of philosophy or theology than any other Roman of his time.

The life of the average wealthy man was too comfortable, too changeable, to suggest the desirability of real mental exertion.
Nor has this life any direct relation to material usefulness and the productive investment of capital.

Cicero and his correspondents never mention farming, never betray any interest in the new movement, if such there was, for the scientific cultivation of the vine and olive.[406] For such things we must go to Varro's treatise, written, some years after Cicero's death, in his extreme old age.