Cato the "antiquarian"

This paper explores the record of Cato’s Origines in relationship to ancient scholarship as practiced at Rome in the second and first centuries BCE. The branch of scholarship in question is that high-stakes mode of inquiry which constructs relationships between present enigmatic phenomena (be they manifest in lexical form, in material remains, in the practice of cult and custom, or by any other means) and the past, purporting thereby to explain salient realities. In the modern era, this mode of inquiry, which is traceable as the earliest form of scholarship practiced at Rome and which remained vital throughout antiquity, has sometimes been termed “antiquarianism.”

Cato’s record invites this exploration by the nature of the interests in evidence among the fragments of his work and by the company his fragments keep in the course of their secondary transmission. The latter is a phenomenon almost entirely masked by editions, given that their creators eliminate material not obviously relevant to the target author’s texts. It is thus not readily apparent to readers today that Cato more frequently appears in the company of “antiquarian” scholars (Varro, Nigidius Figulus; Hyginus, although his relationship to traditional Roman scholarship is more ambiguous than that of the previous two [Zetzel 2018: 62–6]; Pliny the Elder is also a recurrent companion) than he does in the company of historians such as Sallust or Livy.

One passage illustrating both these features of Cato’s transmission is that offered by the “Danieline” Servian commentary on the Vergilian phrase vane Ligus at Aen. 11.717. There, the commentator has: Nigidius de terris: “nam et Ligures, qui Appenninum tenuerunt, latrones, insidiosi, fallaces, mendaces;” Cato originum cum de Liguribus loqueretur: “sed ipsi, unde oriundi sunt, exacta memoria inliterati mendacesque sunt et vera minus meminere.” The way DS presents the material effectively proposes an equivalence between Nigidius’ and Cato’s content and texts (de terris [a controversial title; Klein 1861: 26, Swoboda 1889: 44] and origines): it shows ancient readers treating the two works in parallel. The phenomenon recurs in sources across the board. Reflexes of it are recurrent throughout late antiquity, where Cato is presented, for example, as the originator of the practice of distinguishing differentiae, i.e., finer distinctions of meaning among near-synonyms (Zetzel 2018: 104), a practice born early and closely related to the antiquarians’ etymological efforts.

The question this raises is whether the sources thus reveal a feature of Cato’s enterprise in its original manifestation, i.e., whether Cato’s interests and modes of inquiry overlapped with those of contemporary scholarly investigations; or whether his record was mined early and extensively enough by antiquarian scholars that their intervention effectively re-cast Cato’s work in a new mold, one that went on to define the transmission entire. Cato’s title, unique in Roman historiography but common to Isidore’s much later etymological work, is thought-provoking in this light. This paper, part of a larger project, will detail when and in whose company Cato is cited, and will offer an analysis and provisional interpretation of the resulting data.