Varro, De Lingua Latina, and Intellectual Culture in the Late Republic

My paper considers together Varro's two great works of the early to mid-40s, the Antiquitates rerum diuinarum and the De lingua Latina. Though ostensibly about quite different subjects—Roman religion and the Latin language—the two works not only show extensive overlaps in content (as when, in ARD, divine names are explained etymologically or, conversely, when a fair amount of the Latin vocabulary discussed in LL turns out to refer to religious sites or institutions), but also exhibit similar methodologies and comparable goals.

When looking for literary fasti, Ovid’s elegiac six-months is the obvious prize. But look back half a century before Ovid, and Varro’s study De Lingua Latina got there first. Varro’s calendar in de Lingua Latina is striking in its apparent separation of civic from religious time. He sets the gods first: their ‘days’ precede the legal, political schedule (Ling. 6.12-24) and Varro makes no concessions to an audience unsure of how and why the civic and natural years might be storyboarded differently. It is from this premise that the paper commences.

Varro presents Latin as a language of great historical complexity and geographic reach. He distinguishes, for instance, at least three layers of Greek influence that predate the founding of Rome (Pelasgian Greek, Doric brought by Hercules, and Arcadian brought by Evander; Stevens 2006) and identifies significant contributions of loanwords from Rome’s neighbors on the Italic peninsula, notably from Sabellian, Etruscan, and Celtic sources, and from further afield (e.g., “Armenian” tigris).

In this paper I argue that Varro’s highest form of etymology traces the origins of words coined by Rome’s kings to reconstruct their understanding of the archaic Rome they established. Further, Varro’s ‘kinship’ metaphor for the relations of words and of the things they name derives from Chrysippus and the Stoic theory of ‘appropriation’.