This paper aims at examining some problematical articles of Festus’ Lexicon, the De uerborum significatione (2nd cent.), in order to reevaluate Festus’ working methods – or rather the working methods of Festus’ model, Verrius Flaccus (55 BCE – 20 CE), whose own lexicon is almost entirely lost. I particularly intend to show that the modern reader of Festus largely underestimates the place of ancient etymology and of “Mehrfacherklärungen” (manyfold explanations, cf. J. Loehr, Ovids Mehrfacherklärungen, Stuttgart 1996) and that most of Festus’ obvious “mistakes” simply derive from misreading.
Festus is indeed rather considered as a ready-to-use source of information than as a miscellany of etymological researches and of sometimes contradictory versions. The editors, for example W. M. Lindsay (Teubner, Stuttgart 1913), tried to give a forced coherence to repetitions of articles – e. g. two series of dates when mundus patet merged into one in Lindsay’s edition (p. 124, 20L and 144, 14L: cf. A. Bendlin, “Mundus Cereris,” in C. Auffarth and J. Rüpke, Epitomè tès oikoumenès, Stuttgart 2002, 37-73 – the other dates appear in the apparatus criticus). Misreading may date back from Paul the Deacon, who dedicated to Charlemagne an epitome (800) on which we largely rely to guess what we lost in the only manuscript of Festus, the mutilated Farnesianus (11th cent.) Paul, dealing with words or realities he no longer understood, often merged pieces of the same notice, such as for the two etymologies of ambarvalia (P-Fest. p. 5,01L: J. Scheid, Romulus et ses frères, Rome 1990, 26-35). These are some of the methodological mistakes of the receptors, ancient and modern, of the text.
Verrius Flaccus, coping with rare, archaic, or technical words he did not master, resorted to etymology and comparison, and some articles must not be mistaken for definitions, as they are only hypotheses, non-explicit etymologies, or versions among others. What is more, the world presented in these articles is not a snapshot of the Augustan era, but a reconstitution of an idealized and traditional world: as far as the religion is concerned, there is no precise description of recent renovations, but only traces of the erudite researches before the restorations (Lhommé, “Lectures traditionnelles et relectures augustéennes,” in A. Bendlin and J. Rüpke, Römische Religion im historischen Wandel, Stuttgart 2009, 143-156). There can be nevertheless genuine errors, and, for example, the articles on Italic words may be the product of the preconceptions Augustan erudites had of these languages, as a forthcoming study by Barbora Machajdikova (thesis – Paris IV) seems to show.
Festus’ Lexicon is an extremely rich treasury, but very dangerous for people not accustomed to use it properly: the very aim of this paper will be achieved if it helps to understand which are Festus’ or Verrius Flaccus’ mistakes, and which are our own.