varius

Varius, varia, varium. First and second declension. The core idea is not "several" but "not all the same": mottled, streaked, shifting. A varius animal is a piebald one, and varia fortuna is luck that keeps changing its mind.

Virgil's varium et mutabile semper femina uses the neuter deliberately, passing a verdict on a category rather than describing a person, which is why the line grates in translation. The trap for an English reader is that "various" has drifted towards plain "several", so varii homines gets under-read: it means men of different kinds, not merely a number of them. The verb is vario, variare, to make or become different, and the family gives variety, variation and variegated.