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Varro: De lingua Latina Marcus
Terentius Varro
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VA R R O : D E L I N G UA L AT I NA
Varro: De lingua
Latina
Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary
Volume I
Introduction, Text, and Translation
Edited and Translated by

WO L F G A N G DAV I D C I R I L O D E M E L O
1
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To my wife and my daughter

Preface
On a cool, foggy autumn morning in Eichstätt twenty-one years ago, I was

sitting in a lecture on Lucretius. I cannot fully remember what Professor
Tschiedel was saying about Lucretius that day, but as so often, there was a
learned excursus on other authors. Varro was mentioned in passing, and our
professor remarked that we students should be grateful that so much of his
work had been lost because our degrees were taking long enough as it was. I was
mildly outraged at the time, but in retrospect I can understand the sentiment.
Varro wrote about seventy-four works in 620 books, and although an ancient
book corresponds to a modern book chapter in length, this is still an enormous
output, especially for someone who was also politically active and ran a farm.
Of Varro’s linguistic output, the De lingua Latina was undoubtedly the most
important work. There were twenty-five volumes originally, with a clear and
straightforward structure: an introductory volume was followed by six books
on etymology, six on morphology, and twelve on syntax. What we now have
is Books 5–10 in direct transmission, as well as a relatively small number of
fragments from the other books. In other words, we have half of the etymology,
half of the morphology, and very little of the syntax. The De lingua Latina is not
only fragmentary but also highly technical, and so I am under no illusion that
my work will end up on an undergraduate syllabus any time soon. However,
I have tried to present this work in such a way that it is not just geared towards
the handful of Varro specialists worldwide, but so that anyone with an interest
in Latin or in linguistics can read it. Like Varro, I have divided it into three
major parts: a critical edition accompanied by a fairly literal translation; an
introduction that deals with Varro’s life and works, his approach to linguistics
and our modern linguistic methods, and Varro’s sometimes idiosyncratic style;
and, finally, a chapter-by-chapter commentary that is kept as brief as possible.
Not everybody is going to have the time or inclination to read my work
from cover to cover. For those for whom this is their first introduction to
Roman grammarians, I recommend starting with the introduction rather than
the edition and commentary. Those with more ample experience of Roman
grammarians and their peculiarities may prefer to do it the other way round.
We do not know what piqued Varro’s interest in grammar. However, what
is clear to anyone who has ploughed through the endlessly repetitive pages of
Keil’s Grammatici Latini is that Varro is different. Varro does not treat Latin
grammar as a tool that can help the budding orator or poet; for Varro, Latin
grammar is an end in itself, something that is worth studying regardless of its
other potential applications. There is a great deal of Greek learning in Varro,
but there is also a very noticeable pride in Roman culture. The former is
viii Preface
particularly obvious in the morphological part, while the latter is especially

visible in the etymological part; here, we see a very Roman obsession with pork
products and sausages, with weapons and the Roman army, and with Roman
public office. Varronian linguistics may often be more naïve and less advanced
than the approaches of his successors, but we can see in his work a degree of in-
dependent thought and originality that is sorely lacking in later grammarians.
I should at this point state that I have approached Varro’s work as a linguist,
not as a historian of culture. Space is limited, and my work is already lengthy as
it is. I do explain Roman geography and feasts, but undoubtedly not in as much
detail as some readers might hope. No commentary can satisfy everyone, and
I hope that such readers will also consult older commentaries, which are often
more explicit on these points while providing less linguistic material. By the
same token, I do not consider an ample or complete bibliography a goal in
itself. My references contain only those works that I have cited. What is not
cited was not accessible to me, or was not relevant for my purposes.
I have been working on Varro for a little more than five years now, and
just as at the beginning, Varro fills me with admiration and exasperation in
equal measure. There is indeed much to admire about Varro, who at times
reads like a modern linguist—not that that is necessarily a good thing. In
the morphological part, Varro talks about the learnability of language; he is the
first to make the distinction between derivation and inflection; and he is the
only Roman grammarian to realize that the future perfect is not a subjunctive.
The etymology is less advanced by our standards, but here, too, there are many
valuable insights, and also many quotations of early texts that would be lost to
us otherwise. On the other hand, exasperation is also a normal reaction; the De
lingua Latina was clearly composed in haste, and this shows not only in Varro’s
style, but also in the contents, where many slips could have been avoided. What
is more, Varro can be quite repetitive. However, reading Varro should at least
on some level be an edifying undertaking, and I hope that my admiration will
be more visible than my occasional exasperation.
My work would have taken a great deal more time had it not been for
a generous grant from the Leverhulme Foundation, which freed me from
undergraduate teaching and many of my administrative duties during the
whole of 2017. This gave me a wonderfully productive year in which I wrote
nearly as much as in the preceding four years. The grant also enabled me to go
to Florence and examine the most important Varro manuscript in person.
Four scholars have influenced me greatly over the last two decades. In
chronological order, they are Fritz Heberlein, John Penney, Anna Morpurgo
Davies, and Jim Adams. Jim in particular has generously supported this work
with advice and help from its inception to its completion.
I have benefited greatly from older bibliographies such as Collart (1964)
and Cardauns (1982), but the biggest bibliographical help came from Philipp
Brandenburg in the form of his website (http://www.varro-grammaticus.de/).
Preface ix
At an early stage, John Trappes-Lomax read the entire Latin text and trans-
lation and provided many corrections and insights. Sarah Mahmood read the
entire morphological discussion in the study twice and gave clear and extensive
feedback that has helped me a lot. Over the last two years, many people gave
expert feedback on the smaller, individual etymological sections: John Penney
helped me with Tocharian and Celtic; Mary McRobert and Jan Fellerer, with
Slavonic; Robin Meyer, with Armenian; Don Ringe, with Germanic; Kazuhiko
Yoshida, with Anatolian; and Elizabeth Tucker, with Indo-Iranian. Panagiotis
Filos answered many Greek queries.
I owe much to discussions with Jim Benson and Louise Mycock. Articles that
were hard to come by were sent to me by Michele Bianconi, Rolando Ferri,
Anna Zago, Gregor Bitto, Robert Maltby, and Giorgio Piras. The staff at the
Sackler Library and at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana were always helpful
and kind.
My Erasmus partners have provided me with excellent discussions
whenever I visited Eichstätt and Ghent. In particular, I would like to thank
Fritz Heberlein, Gregor Bitto, Bardo Gauly, Gernot Müller, Mark Janse, and
Giovanbattista Galdi.
This book would not be what it is without the sure hand of my copy-
editor, Miranda Bethell, whose expert guidance made the last months before
publication easy and straightforward.
My family, in particular my wife and daughter, have probably had to hear
more about Varro than they bargained for. I am grateful for their patience and
support and love.
And now, Varro, my friend and foe over half a decade, farewell!
W. D. C. de M.
Oxford,
31 December 2017
Contents
Abbreviations xv
VO LU M E I
Introduction 1
1. Varro’s Life and Works 1
1.1 A Full Life 1
1.2 Varro’s Works 2
1.2.1 The grammatical works 4
1.2.2 The date of the De lingua Latina 4
2. The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 5
2.1 F, Our Most Important Witness 6
2.2 F as a Source for Varronian Spelling? 7
2.2.1 Latin pronunciation in the first century bc 7
2.2.2 Varro’s spelling 10
2.3 Later Manuscripts of the De lingua Latina 18
2.4 Editions of the De lingua Latina 19
2.5 Indirect Transmission 22
2.6 My Apparatus 24
3. An Overview of Greek and Roman Grammatical Studies 25
3.1 The Stoics 27
3.2 The Alexandrians 28
3.3 The χνη γραμματικ and Apollonius Dyscolus 29
3.4 Varro’s Immediate Environment 30
3.5 Latin Grammar in the First Century ad 31
3.6 Donatus, Priscian, and the Genres of Late Antique Grammar 32
3.7 Excursus: The Duties of the Grammarian and the Question
of ηνισμ/Latı̄nitās 34
4. Etymology 35
4.1 Varro’s Approach to Etymology 36
4.1.1 Varro’s etymological theory in Books 2–4 36
4.1.2 Varro’s etymological practice in Books 5–7 40
4.1.3 Varro’s treatment of loans 43
4.1.4 What can modern etymology learn from Varro? 45
4.2 The Structure of Books 5–7 45
4.2.1 Book 5 45
4.2.2 Excursus: The geography of Rome 47
4.2.3 Book 6 51
xii Contents
4.2.4 Excursus on the Roman calendar 52

4.2.5 Book 7 54
4.2.6 Excursus on Latin metre 55
4.3 Modern Etymology 60
4.3.1 The Neogrammarian hypothesis 60
4.3.2 Actuation and spread of sound changes 61
4.3.3 Sound change and analogy within paradigms 63
4.3.4 The comparative method and internal reconstruction 63
4.3.5 Subgrouping within Indo-European 66
4.3.6 Where does this leave us? 67
4.4 Sound Changes in Individual Branches of Indo-European 68
4.4.1 Indo-European phonology 68
4.4.2 Ablaut 71
4.4.3 Indo-European phonology and sound changes 72
4.4.4 Italic sound changes 73
4.4.5 Greek sound changes 80
4.4.6 Indo-Iranian sound changes 87
4.4.7 Balto-Slavic sound changes 92
4.4.8 Germanic sound changes 99
4.4.9 Celtic sound changes 103
4.4.10 Anatolian sound changes 108
4.4.11 Tocharian sound changes 111
4.4.12 Armenian sound changes 115
4.4.13 Albanian sound changes 119
4.4.14 Excursus: A list of common derivational suffixes 123
5. Morphology 126
5.1 General Remarks 126
5.1.1 Varro’s morphological books and their aims 126
5.1.2 Basic terminology 128
5.2 The Individual Morphological Categories 129
5.2.1 Parts of speech 129
5.2.2 Parts of speech in Varro 131
5.2.3 Derivation and inflection 133
5.2.4 Derivation and inflection in Varro 136
5.2.5 Case 137
5.2.6 Case in Varro 145
5.2.7 Number on nouns and pronouns 148
5.2.8 Number on nouns and pronouns in Varro 150
5.2.9 Gender 152
5.2.10 Gender in Varro 156
5.2.11 Diminutives 157
5.2.12 Diminutives in Varro 160
5.2.13 Gradation of adjectives 161
Contents xiii
5.2.14 Gradation of adjectives in Varro 164

5.2.15 Definiteness and specificity 167
5.2.16 Definiteness and specificity in Varro 170
5.2.17 Inflection classes 171
5.2.18 Inflection classes in Varro 174
5.2.19 The Latin third declension 175
5.2.20 The Latin third declension in Varro 177
5.2.21 Tense and aspect 178
5.2.22 Tense and aspect in Varro 184
5.2.23 Mood 186
5.2.24 Mood in Varro 191
5.2.25 Voice 192
5.2.26 Voice in Varro 195
5.2.27 Person and number on verbs 197
5.2.28 Person and number on verbs in Varro 200
5.2.29 Morphological integration of loanwords 200
5.2.30 Morphological integration of loanwords in Varro 204
5.3 The Structure of Books 8–10 205
5.3.1 Book 8 206
5.3.2 Book 9 207
5.3.3 Book 10 209
5.4 Varro’s Grammatical Terminology 211
6. Varro’s Language and Style 236
6.1 Deviant Nominal Morphology 238
6.2 Quibus and quı̄s 240
6.3 Adverbs in -tim 241
6.4 Non-Agreeing Pronouns 242
6.5 Impersonal Constructions 246
6.6 Mood in Indirect Questions 247
6.7 Word Order: Position of Subordinators 250
D E L I N G UA L AT I NA
Text and Translation 256
LIBER V 256
LIBER VI 356
LIBER VII 416
LIBER VIII 492
LIBER IX 534
LIBER X 594
FRAGMENTA 635
xiv Contents
VO LU M E I I
Commentary 651
Book 5 651
Book 6 804
Book 7 895
Book 8 1036
Book 9 1106
Book 10 1196
The Fragments 1249

Book 3 1252
Book 4 1253
Book 8 1253
Book 11 1256
Book 13 1264
Book 18 1264
Book 22 1265
Book 23 1265
Book 24 1266
Fragments of Uncertain Place 1267
References 1273
Index of Etymologies 1299
Index of Passages 1318
Index of Personal Names, Objects, and Languages 1321
Abbreviations
Abbreviations of ancient authors are by and large as in the Thesaurus Linguae

Latinae. Bold is used for words in the native alphabets; italic is used for Latin
script. For more detail on the manuscripts, see pp. 6–7 and 18–19.
Sigla
F Codex Laurentianus LI. 10, fos 2–34

Fv variant readings of F recorded by Petrus Victorius and Iacobus Diacetius
in their copy of the editio princeps
(Fv) F in agreement with the editio princeps according to Petrus Victorius and
Iacobus Diacetius
f Codex Laurentianus LI. 5
B 15th-c variant readings recorded by Petrus Victorius in copy of the Editio
Gryphiana; this or similar used by Augustinus
G Codex Gothanus
H Codex Havniensis
M Codex Guelferbytanus 896
V Codex Vindobonensis LXIII
a Codex Parisinus 7489
b Codex Parisinus 6142
c Codex Parisinus 7535
p Codex Basiliensis F. iv. 13
α two different MSS but here, Codex Vaticanus 1556
Frag. Cass. a single folio of the Codex Cassinensis 361
<> addition
[] deletion
add. addition
del. deletion
Dictionaries
DV Vaan, M. A. C. de (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other

Italic Languages (Leiden and Boston)
Frisk Frisk, H. (1960), Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2 vols (Heidel-
berg)
Maltby Maltby, R. (1991), A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (Melksham)
OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd edn (2012)
W-H Walde, A. and Hofmann, J. B. (1965), Lateinisches etymologisches Wörter-
buch, 2 vols, 4th edn (Heidelberg)
xvi Abbreviations
Editions
Barwick (1925) Charisius

Skutsch (1986) Ennius’ Annals
Jocelyn (1967) Ennius’ tragedies
Bakkum (2009) Faliscan
Lindsay (1913) Festus and Paul the Deacon
Keil (1857–80) Grammarians other than Charisius
Marx (1904–5) Lucilius
Ribbeck (1897) Naevius and Accius
Schierl (2006) Pacuvius
de Melo (2011–13) Plautus
Rix (2002) Sabellic
Introduction
1. VARRO’S LIFE AND WORKS
1.1. A Full Life
No more than the briefest sketch of Varro’s life can be given here. Readers
interested in proper biographies should consult Dahlmann (1935) or Della
Corte (1970; despite the criticism by Dahlmann (1955) levelled against an
earlier edition). Butterfield (2015b) is a pleasantly written, intelligent outline
of Varro’s life and works that is succinct and learned.
Marcus Terentius Varro was born in 116 bc in Reate, modern-day Rieti,
and thus on Sabine territory, hence his second cognomen Reātı̄nus, given to
him partly in order to distinguish him from Publius Terentius Varro Atacinus,
a younger contemporary and poet. Varro was born into the senatorial class;
Della Corte (1978: 228) stresses his financial independence, which allowed him
to pursue his studies for the sake of studying rather than as a means of earning
a living, a fact which set him apart from many contemporary grammarians
and scholars.
Reate is not far from Rome, and so it comes as no surprise that Varro did
most of his studies at Rome, under the guidance of the greatest Roman scholar
at the time, Lucius Aelius Stilo, who also taught Cicero. And, like young Cicero
and any other Roman teenager of good family, he was sent off to Athens, where
he continued his studies under Antiochus of Ascalon, head of the Academic
school of philosophy, who reformed the Platonists’ teachings by eclectically
integrating Stoic and Peripatetic elements into them.
Varro was destined to a political career, a career which was smooth only
in his earlier years. In 90 bc, Varro became a triumuir capitālis, a member of
a board overseeing punishments, including capital punishment. In 86/85, he
became a quaestor, and shortly thereafter, tribune of the plebs. In 68, probably,
he became a praetor and thus one of the highest-ranking officials.
This political career cannot be divorced from his military career. In military
matters, Varro was close to Pompey and served as his proquaestor in the war
against Quintus Sertorius, a fellow Sabine who had taken it upon himself to
lead the Lusitanians in their anti-Roman revolt in what is now Portugal and
western Spain. This was in the mid 70s. Not much later, in 67, he was active in
2 Introduction
the war against the pirates, where he won the much coveted corōna nāuālis, a
decoration awarded to a leader of supreme bravery.
Although Varro was close to Pompey, he was not keen on the first tri-
umvirate, the informal alliance from 59 to 53 between Pompey, Caesar, and
Crassus. Despite his distrust of Caesar, he joined the board of twenty that
saw through Caesar’s controversial agrarian laws (for a perhaps overly harsh
view on Varro’s behaviour towards Pompey, see Laughton 1956: 37). However,
when civil war broke out between Caesar and the optimate faction of the
senators led by Pompey, Varro rejoined Pompey and became his legate in Spain,
where he eventually had to surrender to Caesar. He managed to join Pompey
again at Dyrrhachium, in what is now Albania, but was ultimately defeated at
Pharsalus in 48.
In his desire to appear generous, Caesar pardoned him, which led Varro to
dedicate half of his Antiquities, the ‘divine’ part, to Caesar, a clever move that
ensured that he was commissioned as librarian for the enormous public library
that Caesar had planned. This, however, never came to fruition, as Caesar
was assassinated in 44. Varro retired from public life to dedicate the rest of
his time to scholarship, which did not spare him from proscription by Mark
Antony, who persecuted supposed enemies of Caesar in order to get hold of
their money. Varro’s villa at Casinum was destroyed, but his life was saved by
his friend Quintus Fufius Calenus (for a negative view on this friendship, see
again Laughton 1956: 37). Varro spent the rest of his life in his villas in Cumae
and Tusculum, studying and writing. He died an old man in 27 bc.
Collart (1954a: 365) sums up the main traits of Varro’s character and schol-
arship as independence, eclecticism, encyclopaedic knowledge, and method;
but even though we may sympathize with his love of antiquity and his ‘purely
Roman empiricism’ (Ferrante 1962: 171), we must also acknowledge his oppor-
tunism. While I agree with this assessment, I also believe that people should
be judged for their finest achievements rather than for their behaviour in their
weakest hours; and Varro had a great many fine achievements.
1.2. Varro’s Works
Varro’s literary output was extremely large and had already gained him a name
in antiquity: Cicero (Att. 13.18) describes him as πουγρα τατο ‘writing
enormous amounts’; Quintilian (inst. 10.1.95) calls him the uir Rōmānōrum
ērudı̄tissimus ‘most learned man of the Romans’; and Augustine (civ. 6.2) states
that ‘he read so much that we must be surprised that he had time left to write;
and he wrote so much that we can hardly believe anyone could have read it all’.
However, apart from Varro’s agricultural work and the De lingua Latina, we
only have fragments of the remainder, and these are difficult to collect and to
assess. When Ernout (1972: 162) states that an edition of all Varro’s work in a
Varro’s Life and Works 3
single place would be desirable, it has to be said that this is as impossible now
as it would have been when all Varro’s works were still available.
The distinguished reputation Varro had in antiquity has to some extent
been shattered in the more recent past: Boissier (1875: 28–9) says that it is
not surprising that Varro wrote so much because most of his works were little
more than compilations and summaries of what he had read. And Laughton
(1965: 64) is even harsher: ‘One might even venture the outrageous suggestion
that Varro would be less highly thought of if his work had been better pre-
served.’ As so often, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and we have to be
as cautious not to be carried away in our praise of Varro’s achievements, as we
have to be careful not to see him as a mere copyist.
Dahlmann (1973) provides a good overview of Varro’s works, but Cardauns
(2001) is more up to date and focuses on what we have rather than reconstruc-
tion of what we no longer have. It is now commonly assumed that Varro wrote
about seventy-four works in 620 books (see Ritschl 1848); even if we consider
that the average book was no longer than a chapter in a modern book, this is
an astonishing output for anyone, let alone someone who was not a full-time
writer. Only a snapshot of Varro’s work will be provided here before we move
on to his grammatical treatises.
The only complete work we have of Varro is his De re rustica, a work on
agriculture in three books, written in 37 bc and thus in Varro’s old age. For the
text, see Rodgers (2015).
Of the many linguistic works composed by Varro, the De lingua Latina was
without doubt the most important one. We will look briefly at the others in the
next section.
The De lingua Latina has strong antiquarian elements in the etymological
sections. Varro was very strongly drawn to antiquarianism and his most
important work overall was the Antiquitates rerum humanarum et diuinarum,
in forty-one volumes. The Antiquities were begun in about 55 bc and finished
in 47. The first twenty-five volumes dealt with Rome, the Roman people,
and Roman customs, while the final sixteen volumes were about religion as
instituted for the gods by men. Many fragments of the work survive, but mostly
from the final sixteen books, quoted by Christian authors. How reliable these
Christian authors are as a source for Varro is not clear, since some of them
very obviously distort him for polemical and ideological reasons. Lactantius
and Arnobius seem to remain objective, by and large, while Augustine
provides an account that is at times highly misleading (Holford-Strevens
2015: 153–7).
Despite the fragments that we have, roughly 600 and mostly transmitted
by Nonius, the prosimetric Menippean satires remain somewhat elusive. They
were originally in 150 books and named after the Cynic philosopher Menippus
of Gadara. Butterfield (2015b: 14) describes them as ‘a new type of ethical
or satirical discourse, mixing moral, paraenetic preaching with streaks of
subversive humour and verbal playfulness’.
4 Introduction
Finally, the Logistorici, in seventy-six books, were dialogues in prose. Each

one took the name of a famous historical person and the specific virtue he
embodied, and constituted an antiquarian and moral discussion of this virtue.
Many more of Varro’s works would deserve discussion, but these are the
most significant ones either because of their length or because of their impact.
We move on to his linguistic publications.
1.2.1. The grammatical works

Apart from the De lingua Latina, Varro wrote several other grammatical
treatises (testimonia and fragments in Funaioli 1907: 179–371). With Götz
(1909: 89), we can distinguish three periods. The grammatical works of the
early period dealt with specialized topics. Thus, his De antiquitate litterarum
was a history of the alphabet; Della Corte (1981: 154) shows that Varro
considered the aspiration H not to be a letter, and argued for the elimination of
K and Q as being superfluous. The De utilitate sermonis discussed analogy and
anomaly. And of his De similitudine uerborum, we have only one fragment,
so nothing certain is known. Towards the end of this early period, Varro
composed his De origine linguae Latinae, a work dedicated to the relationship
between Latin and Greek.
In the middle period, we find the De lingua Latina, but also the De sermone
Latino, in five volumes, a work which treated orthography, accent, quantity,
metre, and style. Götz believes that the ερ χαρακτρων also fell into the mid-
dle period; the work was about word formation and contained three or more
volumes.
The only relevant work in the late period was the Disciplinae liberales,
meant as an educational handbook in nine volumes. Only the first of these
volumes was about grammar. Barwick (1922: 18) believes that this first book
also included a short sketch of morphology.
1.2.2. The date of the De lingua Latina

We can now look at the composition date of the De lingua Latina. For this,
we have external sources in the correspondence between Cicero and Atticus,
but there are also internal criteria that help us narrow down the time frame in
which our work was written. The most important discussions of this topic are
Barwick (1957) and Rösch-Binde (2001).
Let us begin with the correspondence between Cicero and Atticus and the
question of the dedication. As 5.1 shows, Books 2–4 discussing the theory of
etymology were originally dedicated to Septumius. Based on Varro’s statement
in the same chapter that he wants to write three books for Cicero, Barwick
(1957: 301) concludes that Books 5–7 were also originally an independent
work. However, ultimately the entire work was dedicated to Cicero, and later
The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 5
grammarians quoting even Books 2–4 cite them as ad Cicerōnem (Barwick

1957: 298, testimonia in Rösch-Binde 2001: 228–30 n. 13).
The correspondence between Cicero and Atticus is quite straightforward.
Cicero had dedicated his four books of Academica to Varro, hoping that
Varro would dedicate something to him in return. From Cic. Att. 13.12.3,
a letter dated to 23 or 24 June 45 bc, we learn that Varro had promised
to dedicate something big to Cicero, but that nothing had happened in two
years. Cic. fam. 9.8.1, dated to 11 or 12 July 45, is a polite reminder by
Cicero to Varro that he would please like to have this dedication now. Barwick
(1957: 298) concludes that Varro began his work in 47 and finished before 7
December 43, when Cicero was murdered, as otherwise the dedication would
not make sense.
Based on internal evidence, Rösch-Binde expands and modifies Barwick’s
findings. Books 2–4 were originally dedicated to Septumius, Varro’s quaestor,
and Rösch-Binde (2001: 242) assumes that he was quaestor during the Civil
War, which lasted from 49 to 45 bc. We can conclude that this triad was
dedicated to Postumius shortly afterwards.
For Books 5–7 we have more evidence, but not all of the same quality.
In 5.100, the recent exhibition of a giraffe in Rome is mentioned. Plin. nat.
8.69 tells us that this event took place at the end of 46 bc. Less significant
in my opinion is the fact that in 5.169–74, only bronze and silver coins are
mentioned, but not the gold coins introduced by Caesar in 46/45 bc (Rösch-
Binde 2001: 238–9); Varro with his antiquarian interests would not bother
about the most recent developments. Similarly, unlike Rösch-Binde (2001: 239)
I do not find it very important that in 6.34, Varro fails to mention the change
of the name Quı̄ntı̄lis ‘July’ to Iūlius, a change which happened in 44 bc; this
would not matter so much for the antiquarian, although a mention would
not have been out of place. Rösch-Binde concludes that Varro probably had
completed a draft of this triad at an early stage but finished it after 46, yet
before 45/44.
Finally, in 5.165, we are told of all the closures of the gate of Janus, but the
closure by Octavian in 29 bc is not mentioned. However, all this tells us is that
the work was not modified for a second edition later, after Cicero’s death.
2. THE TRANSMISSION OF THE DE LINGUA LATINA
We can now turn to issues of textual transmission. Of the original twenty-five

books, only Books 5–10 survive in direct transmission and thus more or less
intact. Of the remaining books, we have a small number of fragments from
grammarians and similar sources. They pose their own set of problems and
will be dealt with separately at the end of this section. Before that, we need to
6 Introduction
look at the direct transmission; here, manuscript F deserves special discussion.

This will be followed by a brief outline of the most important later manuscripts,
and by a list of the most significant editions.
2.1. F, Our Most Important Witness
A moderately large number of manuscripts transmit Books 5–10. However,

despite Antonibon (1899a: 22–3), they all go back, directly or indirectly, to
a manuscript still extant in Florence, the Codex Laurentianus LI. 10, folios
2–34, abbreviated to F. F was written in Beneventan minuscule in the eleventh
century; there are forty lines per page. The problems of F are summarized by
Taylor (1996b: 33–34):
Its errors betray a scribe who was careless by nature and perhaps also by volition;
whose manifestly poor eyesight was undoubtedly worsened by the conditions
in which he had to work; whose mispronunciation of Latin, nervousness, and
independently minded fingers exacerbated his afflicted vision; and whose other
physical and mental infirmities, whatever they may have been, cannot fully explain
the plethora of errors we find on every page in F.
It is perhaps unfair to be quite so hard on our copyist; I have spent many
hours working with F, and the biggest problem I encountered is faded ink,
not scribal incompetence. I would go so far as to say that where the ink is
not faded, reading F is not particularly difficult. Besides, mistakes accumulate
over the centuries, and not all go back to the last person copying the text.
In fact, some mistakes clearly go back a long way. For instance, in 10.62 we
have to read initium with Groth, but F has inillum; original initium is misread
more easily as inillum in earlier capitals than in later minuscule. Other errors,
such as the frequent confusion of a and t, must have arisen from an exemplar
in Beneventan script, but this need not have been the direct ancestor of F.
One might also add that Varro’s text was mangled by Varro himself (Serbat
1985: 271), who composed in haste and certainly did not create a tidy text. We
must resist the temptation to emend and rewrite Varro in a nice style (Flobert
1978b). Vetter (1958) contains a sensible typology of errors in F; even if I often
disagree with his proposals, the principles are sound and deserve to be taken
seriously. For example, Vetter shows that many ‘difficult’ words were trivialized
in the transmission process; that small words like sı̄c ‘thus’ and sit ‘it may be’
were mixed up; that often lines were left out by accident; and that in turn editors
have overly ‘emended’ by expanding Varro’s compressed style.
F often contains corrections. As already recognized by Dahlmann (1957),
these corrections are by a different scribe, and they are not based on manuscript
readings, but are his own ideas.
The remaining manuscripts, being direct or indirect copies of F, can offer
interesting conjectures, but no more than that. The exception to this concerns
5.119–6.61, a long piece of text that got lost from F when a quaternion went
missing. It is not clear when exactly this loss took place, but it happened after
1521, the year in which Petrus Victorius and Iacobus Diacetius collated F with
the editio princeps. Where F is lost, their collation must take the place of a
manuscript. However, it should be pointed out that in those parts where F
is still available, the collation can be shown to contain errors, so in the lost
portions of F it must contain errors as well. Where F disagrees with the editio
princeps, the readings of F as recorded by the two scholars are referred to as Fv;
where there is agreement between the two, it is marked (Fv).
2.2. F as a Source for Varronian Spelling?
An important question that has been answered differently by different scholars

is whether F reflects Varronian spelling. However, before we can turn to
ancient and medieval spelling conventions, we need to look at Varronian
pronunciation, as speech is primary and writing secondary.
2.2.1. Latin pronunciation in the first century bc

We have a very good idea of what Latin sounded like in the first century bc. All
phonological contrasts can be reconstructed fairly accurately, and in most cases
we also know a great deal of the phonetic realizations of individual phonemes.
This is because we have many different sources that allow us to examine Latin
pronunciation (details in Allen 1978).
In the first place, there are explicit statements by grammarians and laymen
with grammatical interests. None of them was trained in phonetics, of course,
and so their statements are somewhat impressionistic. But they do remain a
valuable resource, even if, to give just one example, Roman grammarians never
found out how voiced and voiceless consonants differ from each other. On the
other hand, the Elder Pliny (in Prisc. gramm. ii. 29) and other grammarians
do describe well how the two allophones of /l/ differ from each other. Latin
had a variant that was tenue ‘thin’ and one that was pingue ‘fat’; today we
speak of ‘clear’ and ‘dark’ or velarized l. The somewhat artificial ‘Received
Pronunciation’ of English, as well as many of the dialects, like Mancunian, have
the same alternation, with clear l found at the beginning of a syllable (light)
and dark l found at its end (dull). Roman grammarians even tell us that the
distribution of the two allophones differed according to dialect; African Latin
was renowned for having only the dark variety, just as some American varieties
of English only have the dark type.
Latin metre is another great source for learning about pronunciation. Much
of what we know about vowel quantities comes directly from Roman poetry.
Roman poetry with its rules of elision also teaches us that final -m did not have
8 Introduction
full consonantal value, as it does not prevent elision; the same goes for word-
initial h-.
Latin spelling also tells us a great deal, especially the spelling of those at
the lower end of the educational spectrum. Latin spelling was never fully
standardized, so even the most formal inscriptions can contribute to our
knowledge, but there were some conventions, and wherever these were broken
consistently, it is significant. For instance, the frequent confusion between
the letters i and e in later texts is indicative of the merger of ı̆ and ē in
pronunciation, a merger reflected in Italian and Spanish; ı̄ and ĕ remained
qualitatively distinct, but also lost the length distinction, resulting in three front
vowels differing in height.
Absence of spelling mistakes does not necessarily indicate that sound
changes have not taken place; the writers in question may simply have had
more education. Only occasionally is the absence of poor spelling significant.
For instance, North African inscriptions do not confuse the letters i and e,
despite abounding in all sorts of other spelling errors. That is an indication
that the absence of confusion is not simply the result of superior education. St
Augustine tells us that the African ear cannot distinguish between long and
short vowels (doctr. christ. 4.10.24; Adams 2007: 260–5), and this statement in
conjunction with the absence of confusion between i and e indicates that the
North African vowel system was different; North African Latin lost phonemic
vowel length, like other varieties of Latin, but merged ı̄ and ı̆ into i, and ē and
ĕ into e, without creating three distinct front vowels.
Neighbouring languages that are well understood can provide support-
ing evidence through transliterations from Latin into them or vice versa, or
through loanwords. Thus, the Latin name Caesar is transliterated in Greek as
ασαρ, with unaspirated κ rather than aspirated χ. This demonstrates handily
that Latin voiceless stops were unaspirated, as they still are in French or Italian.
Further evidence comes from Punic, where the name Caesar had initial q rather
than k. This is interesting because q was a uvular stop, like the Arabic qāf, rather
than a velar stop like Latin c. Punic k, on the other hand, was velar but, like its
biblical Hebrew counterpart, aspirated. Speakers of Punic must have regarded
the absence of aspiration in the Latin stop as more important than its place of
articulation.
However, there are limits to the usefulness of such transliterations. At some
point they can become conventional, without taking further sound changes
into account. We know that in Rome, the diphthong -ae- monophthongized
to -ē- in the first century ad. The Greek spelling ασαρ may reflect stable
transliteration conventions or parallel sound change; the Greek diphthong -αι-
underwent a similar monophthongization. Similarly, Latin -n- was lost before
-f- or -s-, leading to nasalization and lengthening of the preceding vowel. The
spelling, as in Cōnstantı̄nus, remained conservative, and is reflected in Greek
ωνσταντνο , where the nasal is pronounced because of the spelling. But the
hypocoristic form στα is based on the earlier, spoken form and shows the
absence of the nasal.
Finally, the fact that sound change is regular, by and large, helps us to
reconstruct Latin pronunciation. Evidence from Romance as well as Indo-
European can be used profitably. Metre is not particularly useful for vowel
quantities in closed syllables, which count as heavy regardless of whether the
vowel in question is long or short. But we know that Italian i goes back to Latin
ı̄ rather than ı̆, so Italian villa must go back to Latin uı̄lla ‘farmhouse’ with a
long vowel. Similarly, we know that in non-initial syllables only short vowels
were weakened in the prehistory of Latin. Thus, next to agere ‘to do, act’, we get
āctus as a participle, but the long vowel, the result of Lachmann’s law, can only
be proven to exist when we look at the prefixed variant redāctus; the contrast
with facere ‘to do, make’, făctus, and weakened refĕctus is instructive.
Latin has the following consonantal phonemes:
Bilabial Labio-dental Dental / alveolar Palatal Velar Labio-velar Glottal
Stops pb td kg kw g w
Nasals m n [ŋ]
Fricatives f s h
Liquids lr
Glides u i
̑ ̑
All consonantal phonemes other than h and the voiced labiovelar can be
geminates. The voiced labiovelar stop only occurs after nasal. The velar nasal
is an allophone of the other nasals before a velar stop. The glottal fricative is a
marginal phoneme, prone to early loss, at least in some registers; no Romance
language has any traces of it. The glides are here treated as separate phonemes,
but they could also be interpreted as non-syllabic variants of the short high
vowels. It should be mentioned that in Greek loans we also find aspirated
versions of p, t, and c, but in pre-classical Latin such aspirates were mostly
rendered as unaspirated stops. In the classical period, a handful of native words
also acquired aspiration, such as sepulchrum ‘tomb’, probably because speakers
wrongly believed them to be of Greek origin.
Latin has five short vowels, ă, ĕ, ŏ, ı̆, and ŭ, and five long ones, ā, ē, ō, ı̄,
and ū. The low vowels, ă and ā, only differed in length, but, among the other
pairs, the short vowels were slightly more open, as is common for short vowels
(Gussenhoven 2007). In Greek loans, we also find y̆ and ȳ, rounded high front
vowels, but especially in the early period these were rendered as ŭ and ū. In
some environments, syllable-final nasals can be lost, and here the vowels are
lengthened by compensation and nasalized.
One last question that deserves brief discussion is how loanwords are han-
dled in phonology. To some extent, the answer must be sociolinguistic. Loans
from languages that are generally poorly known and/or do not enjoy much
10 Introduction
prestige tend to be nativized phonologically. Languages that are widely taught

and/or are considered prestigious have a better chance of being pronounced
according to the rules of the language of origin. We can see this in English. In
Britain, until very recently the foreign language that was taught most widely
and enjoyed the greatest prestige was French. Accordingly, Britons often make
an effort to pronounce such words in a French way. Less effort is generally
made with German or Italian words, and words from languages from outside
Europe are regularly pronounced as if English.
The situation in Latin is not very different. Latin has loans from a wide range
of languages, but most of them get nativized in phonology and morphology.
The situation is different for Greek. In the early period, Etruscan was the
language of prestige, and Livy informs us that Romans used to send their
children to Etruria for education (9.36.2–4). Greek still had connotations of
servility in Plautus, and inscriptions of the time did not use y or z or the letter
combinations ph, th, and ch to represent Greek sounds absent from Latin. In
pronunciation, loans were probably fully nativized. We see this in many loans
which subsequently underwent Latin sound changes: māchina is from Doric
Greek μαχαν ‘device’, and it has undergone vowel weakening; similarly, Italian
colpo is from fully nativized colapus ‘blow’, a loan from κα ο pronounced
without aspiration.
All this changed in the second century bc. Greeks were still viewed with
suspicion, but the Romans could not help but recognize their cultural and
scientific achievements. Philhellenism became more widespread, and many
people tried their best to pronounce Greek in Greek fashion.
2.2.2. Varro’s spelling

Now that we have looked at the phonology of the Latin spoken in Varro’s day,
we can turn to spelling. Latin spelling is often considered to be near-phonemic,
and while it is generally considered good to have a near-phonemic spelling
system, a fully phonemic one can also have downsides (overview and details
in Coulmas 1989). Let us look at some of them before turning to spelling
conventions in Varro’s time.
Italian spelling may not follow the phonemic principle in that the same
sound can sometimes be written in two ways; for instance, /k/ is written <c>
before back vowels (cosa ‘thing’), but <ch> before front vowels (chi ‘who’).
However, the foreign learner of Italian only needs to master a handful
of spelling conventions before being able to know how most words are
pronounced. That said, the orthography is underspecified in a few areas.
For instance, in stressed syllables, standard Italian, which is based on the
dialect of Tuscany, has seven vowel phonemes, but only five letters. The letter
<e> can stand for a closed and an open front vowel, and the letter <o>
can similarly stand for a closed and an open back vowel. This is generally
unproblematic, as there are few minimal pairs, such as pesca, which means
‘fishing’ when said with a closed vowel (/e/) and ‘peach’ when said with an
open one (/ɛ/). As there are so few minimal pairs, it may seem superfluous
to add two vowel letters. What is more, there would be serious downsides to
it. Many Italian dialects do not distinguish between these two phonemes, and
many dialects which do make such a distinction have a distribution of the
two phonemes that differs from standard Italian. A spelling system which is
fully phonemic for standard Italian would make life more difficult for most
inhabitants of the country. As a more general point, a fully specified phonemic
spelling system forces us to pick one dialect as the standard language, which
may not be desirable.
Latin spelling is underspecified in that it does not systematically mark vowel
length. There are some methods of indicating the length of vowels: the apex
could be used on any vowel sign (Márcus); vowels could be written double,
in Oscan fashion, but this usage, sometimes ascribed to Accius, never caught
on and was no longer used in Varro’s time (for the inscriptional evidence,
see Lazzeroni 1956); ı̄ could be written as a longer I, the so-called I longa; or
it could be written as a digraph ei, a phenomenon which we will discuss in
more detail below. None of these methods was used systematically, and in the
standardized Latin spelling we use today, only the apex is occasionally used for
disambiguation.
Another important point is that many languages have phonologically re-
duced ‘weak’ forms. Was is pronounced differently in these two sentences:
Were you at home yesterday?—I was.
When were you at home?—I was at home yesterday, but not today.
In the first sentence, was is pronounced as an unreduced form. In the second
sentence, there is phonological reduction; the vowel, if pronounced at all, is a
schwa (ə). Should these two forms be spelled differently? If we want a fully
phonological spelling system, the answer must be yes. Some languages do
indeed have different spellings for strong and weak forms. Thus, Dutch has
jij as second-person singular pronoun, but if the form is not stressed, it can
also be written as je (where <e> stands for ə). English has do not in formal
contexts, at least in writing, and don’t in informal ones. Similarly, Latin es and
est have clitic counterparts without vowel. In many cases these forms are then
written s and st, without graphic separation from the phonological host word
(details in Pezzini 2015).
Sometimes morphology and phonology interact in ways that make a perfect
spelling system impossible. For instance, in Dutch, final stops and fricatives
devoice. The plural forms handen ‘hands’ and druiven ‘grapes’ have hand and
druif as corresponding singulars. These singulars are pronounced with final /t/
and /f /, respectively, and in earlier Dutch, hand was often spelled hant. Spelling
the word as hant respects the phonology, but the morpheme is now spelled
12 Introduction
in different ways. The modern spelling hand keeps the morpheme constant
but does not respect the pronunciation. There is no right or wrong solution to
the problem, and we notice that Dutch privileges morphology over phonology
where final stops are concerned, but phonology over morphology where final
fricatives are involved.
On a more general note, English spelling, which fits the pronunciation
of about 1400 reasonably well but is not particularly phonemic nowadays,
nonetheless has some upsides. Despite the great changes in pronunciation that
have taken place over the centuries, we are still able to read old documents
with comparative ease, even without training. And we do not have to get used
to new spellings every few years; the fact that Dutch spelling is relatively close
to pronunciation means that a ‘green book’ with reformed spellings has to be
released quite regularly.
Chinese writing is often described as logographic, which is an oversim-
plification. A competent Chinese reader will take in Chinese characters as a
whole, without analysing every stroke individually. Interestingly, any compe-
tent reader of languages written in alphabetic scripts does exactly the same.
We do not ‘sound out’ words internally, and our brains auto-correct any
spelling mistakes that may be there, which is why proofreading is generally
a difficult task.
Let us now turn to Varro’s spelling. The first remark that must be made is that
Latin never had a standardized spelling. There were some rules and tendencies,
but genuine spelling standardization post-dates the invention of the printing
press. Since copyists cared little for earlier orthography, Varro’s text was ‘nor-
malized’ many times, and we cannot trust manuscript spellings to reproduce
Varronian spelling. Nonetheless, the situation is not entirely hopeless.
In early Latin, ı̆, ı̄, and ei were distinct in pronunciation, as were the corre-
sponding back vowels, ŭ, ū, and ou. They were spelled , , and <ei>,
and , , and <ou>. However, in the second century, the diphthongs
merged with the long vowels. Spelling remained somewhat conservative, and
so <ei> and to a much lesser extent <ou> persisted. But since the average
person was not familiar with the etymology of each and every word, word-
internal long vowels were spelled and . In endings the older spellings
are easier to preserve, as lexical items form an open class, while there is a fairly
limited set of endings to be learned.
Thus, in the second declension, the genitive singular -ı̄ was mostly written
<-i>, as it had never been a diphthong, while the nominative plural -ı̄ and
the dative and ablative plural -ı̄s were commonly written <-ei> and <-eis>,
again in accordance with their etymology. We know that Varro wrote at least
the nominative plural with <-ei> from 9.80, where he states this explicitly. In
8.50, F has the spelling <infeineiteis>. Could this be Varronian? The answer
is mixed. In the case ending, Varro probably did write <-eis>, but word-
internally this is unlikely, especially since both instances of <-ei-> are his-
torically incorrect and go back to monophthongs. Incidentally, the first vowel

is also long, by compensatory lengthening accompanying the loss of nasal
before fricative, but here Varro almost certainly wrote <i-> in order to retain
a consistent vowel spelling for the morpheme in-. In 9.106, Varro contrasts
lauāre ‘to wash (something)’ and lauārı̄ ‘to wash (oneself)’. The medio-passive
infinitive ending -ı̄ goes back to a diphthong -ei; the form started as the dative
of a verbal noun. However, Varro’s phrasing suggests that he regularly spelled
it <-i> rather than <-ei>. Again, this makes sense: the second-declension
nominative plural and dative/ablative plural are very frequent, while medio-
passive infinitives are quite rare. Spelling archaisms have to be learned, and
are preserved more commonly in high-frequency forms. Finally, if in 10.10
the spelling eidem for nominative singular ı̄dem is old, it shows that ei could
be used in contexts where there was never a diphthong; the form goes back
to ∗ is-dem, with loss of -s- before voiced stop and subsequent compensatory
lengthening of the vowel.
We can turn to the spelling <ou> for long vowels; the first point to be made
is that it is very rare. The reason is that most instances of this old diphthong
occurred word-internally, and again, people cannot be expected to know the
etymology of every word. In endings, the diphthong only occurred in the
genitive singular of the fourth declension, -ous > -ūs. But apparently, Varro
would not use an old spelling here because for him the genitive ended in
-uis. Incidentally, there is some evidence that Varro did not use <ou> for
long vowels. In ouis ‘sheep’, -u- is not part of a diphthong ou, but rather the
onset u of the second syllable. In 9.76, Varro tells us that we do not say ous
̑
for reasons of euphony; this is why we insert -i-. This reasoning is, of course,
wrong, but it shows us that Varro would have pronounced <ous> as ous
rather than as ūs, because ous and ouis are said to differ only in the absence or
presence of -i-.
There is one more diphthong that needs to be discussed. Kent (1938: i. xviii)
argues that ‘Varro, as a countryman, may in some words have used E where
residents of the city of Rome used AE’. As becomes clear from what follows,
Kent is speaking about spelling more than pronunciation, and his theoretical
discussion has no bearing on his edition, where he sticks to the standardized
orthography found in modern dictionaries. His assertion is based on the
well-known fact that in pronunciation, areas outside Rome monophthongized
inherited ae to ē earlier than Rome itself, where the spellings <e> for <ae>
and hypercorrect <ae> for <e> begin to occur only in the early empire
(cf. Adams 2007: 78–89).
Is Kent right? In 6.11, Varro derives saeclum ‘century’ from senex ‘old man’,
a derivation which might make more sense if Varro actually said and wrote
sēclum. However, we need to be careful. In 7.96, Varro discusses words in which
some people use ae and others ē. Five pairs are listed: scaena / scēna ‘stage’,
scaeptrum / scēptrum ‘sceptre’, faenerātrı̄x / fēnerātrı̄x ‘female moneylender’,
14 Introduction
faenisicia / fēnisicia ‘mown hay’, and Maesius / Mēsius, a personal name. Only
in the last pair does Varro ascribe the variant with ē to rustics, and with good
reason. The first two pairs are Greek loans with original η, so ae is clearly
hypercorrect. The next two pairs are native words, but ē is inherited, so the
variants with ae are hypercorrections as well (see W-H i. 479). Interestingly,
Gellius (16.12.5–8) tells us that according to Varro, Cato wrote these words
with e, and that Varro derived them from fētus ‘birth’. We must conclude
that Varro was perfectly able to make a distinction between ae and ē, at least
in writing. The manuscript confusion between <e> and <ae> is medieval
negligence: both were pronounced identically, but the spelling differed; the
diphthong was written <e˛> in Beneventan script, and the diacritic was often
simply forgotten. Kent was one of the best editors of Varro, but in this instance
he was led astray by his own learning; he knew about rural monophthong-
ization as well as Varro’s provenance, and drew a biased conclusion which
looks logical only if we ignore the fact that Varro was a highly educated
person.
Another vowel issue concerns the so-called ‘intermediate’ vowel (details in
Allen 1978: 56–9). When short vowels in medial open syllables were weakened,
the normal outcome was -i-, but in certain environments there may be other
outcomes. Thus, from ικεα we get Latin Sicı̆lia, but an inhabitant of the
island is called Sicŭlus because prehistorically, intervocalic -l- was ‘dark’ or
velarized if the second vowel was a back vowel. Similarly, if the vowel to
undergo weakening was followed by a labial consonant, -p-, -b-, -m-, or -f-,
the outcome was regularly spelled -u- in early Latin, for instance maxumus
‘biggest’. In the classical period, the spelling varied between -u- and -i-, which
is why we speak of an ‘intermediate’ vowel. Its exact phonetic quality remains
uncertain; it is commonly assumed that we are dealing with a rounded front
vowel, as in French lune /lyn/ ‘moon’. Such a vowel would have the frontness
of Latin ı̆ and the rounding of Latin ŭ. Whatever the phonetic quality of the
‘intermediate’ vowel was, in the classical period some conservative texts prefer
the spelling -u-, while in other, less formal texts there is more spelling variety.
Modern school books generally prefer -i-, but this spelling became ubiquitous
only in late antiquity, even if Cassiod. gramm. vii. 150 tells us that Caesar
preferred the spelling -i-. Our most important manuscript of Varro has -u- and
-i- in free variation, and we do not know what Varro did.
We move on to the sequences <uo> and <uu>. By the classical period,
the second vowel was pronounced -ŭ-, regardless of spelling. Quintilian (inst.
1.7.26) states that his teachers still preferred the former spelling in words like
seruos / seruus ‘slave’, while in his generation the latter spelling was preferred,
but the reality is more complex. The sequence <uo> is indeed older, but
it persists inscriptionally until much later than Quintilian, while the more
recent <uu> is already found in the first century bc, albeit rarely. For Varro’s
generation we may assume variation, with a preference for <uo>. F has

both spellings in random variation, but this variation need not reflect Varro’s
spelling at all. In early Latin, the subordinator quom ‘when, because’ was
distinct from the preposition cum ‘with’ in both spelling and pronunciation,
but by the classical period both were pronounced /kum/. Here there was a
greater incentive to keep the spelling distinct because of the different meanings
of these homophones, but we find that quom, while still being very common,
was gradually being ousted by cum, with a few inverse examples of quom with
the meaning ‘with’. F generally has cum for the preposition, but both spellings
for the subordinator. In later texts, the spelling cum becomes normal for both
words, so that the grammatical distinction cannot be gleaned from the spelling;
English prefers to keep such homophones distinct in spelling, compare or and
oar, or but and butt.
The issue of morpheme consistency versus phonological realism comes up
in two contexts, in prefixes and in final consonant clusters. For instance, if a
prefix ended in a nasal, like in- or com-, that final nasal was assimilated in
place to a following stop or nasal (impōnere, immānis), and in both place and
manner of articulation to a following liquid (illicere). Before -s- or -f-, that nasal
was lost and the preceding vowel was nasalized and underwent compensatory
lengthening (cōnsul, abbreviated cos.). Prefixes ending in stops or -r- or conso-
nant clusters underwent other processes of assimilation. However, while such
assimilations were probably the norm in spoken Latin, in written Latin the
prefixes were often not assimilated. This is a complex issue, and much depends
on which prefix we are dealing with or the formality of the text, as formal texts
preferred lack of assimilation. We can see that assimilation goes back a long
way: in Plautus, there is a pun on adsum / assum ‘I am present’ and assum
‘roasted’ (Poen. 279), and this indicates that the two words were homophones.
But we cannot know how Plautus spelled the verb form. In Varro, in 9.83, the
text must have had as sit ‘it should be an as’, and this is what Aldus restored.
However, it becomes clear how untrustworthy our textual transmission is when
we look at what F has; it has adsit ‘it should be present’. Varro wrote as sit, this
was turned into assit either by accident or because a scribe thought that he
was dealing with a verb with a prefix, and a later scribe introduced the non-
assimilated spelling. While we do know that Varro wrote two words here, as
sit, we do not know whether he would have written the prefixed verb adsit or
assit; and it is actually quite possible that he used both spellings.
The issue of assimilation at word end is similar in principle, but treated
differently in modern dictionaries. The genitives urbis ‘of the city’ and lēgis ‘of
the law’ show that the noun stems are urb- and lēg-, respectively. However, if
we replace the genitive ending -is with the nominative ending -s, the stem-final
consonant assimilates in voicing, giving us /ps/ and /ks/ in pronunciation. How
are such clusters spelled?
16 Introduction
Let us begin with the type urbs. Modern dictionaries are very inconsistent
as far as the assimilation or lack of assimilation in prefixes is concerned. To
some extent, this mirrors ancient practice. But modern dictionaries invariably
print the type urbs without assimilation, even though ancient practice was
very variable in this respect. Our word is written urbs as well as urps, and
grammarians differ in which spelling they recommend. It is not really clear
what Varro’s recommendation was. Cassiod. gramm. vii. 159.22–3 explicitly
tells us that Varro wrote trabs ‘beam’ and similar words with -b- rather than
-p-, but then Non. 262 transmits Varro Men. 391 as having traps; however,
the Nonius passage is not about spelling. F shows no traces of this kind of
assimilation at all, and whatever Varro did or said, we do not know how
consistent he was.
The devoicing of stem-final -g- before -s should be more straightforward
because the letter <x> stands for the sound sequence /ks/, so that the issue of
<gs> versus <cs> should not even come up. However, the Romans were never
really comfortable with the concept of one letter standing for a combination of
two sounds, and so we occasionally find as alternatives for <x> the spellings
<cs>, <xs>, <cx>, and even <cxs>. Varro mentions the neutralization of
contrast between /g/ and /k/ in 8.44, where he looks at crux ‘cross’ and Phryx
‘Phrygian’. He says that the last letter in the two words sounds identical, even
though crux has a stem ending in -c-, while Phryx has a stem ending in -g-. Not
only is this a nice testimony for the assimilation in voicing, it also shows that
Varro used the spelling <x> rather than any of the alternatives. But was Varro
consistent in the use of <x>? There is at least one indication that he was willing
to use alternative spellings on occasion. In 7.44, the arx ‘citadel’ is spelled ares
in F. This looks like a corruption of arcs that arose in minuscule script. Is the
spelling with <cs> just a medieval quirk? Probably not. Not only are such
spellings rarer in the medieval period than in antiquity, but Varro also glosses
the word as tūtissimum ‘safest place’, which only makes sense if he derived arx
from arcēre ‘to ward off ’. This makes it virtually certain that Varro wrote arx
with <cs> in 7.44. While we should take this as a warning not to consider
Varronian spelling uniform, it is equally true that the spelling with <cs> was
probably unusual for Varro and only used in order to help with the etymology.
F consistently spells geminate consonants double. This may reflect Varro-
nian practice, because in the classical period (unlike the archaic) geminate
consonants were mostly written double, but again we do not know how
consistent Varro was; even in the first century bc traces of the older single
spelling of geminates persist. One point deserves special discussion. Geminate
-ss- was simplified after a long vowel or diphthong in the second century bc;
earlier caussa ‘reason’ became causa in pronunciation and quite commonly
in spelling. However, geminate spellings persisted for a long time and were
often considered a mark of correctness. Such geminate spellings are still found
regularly in the Vindolanda tablets in the first and second centuries ad, at a
time when there was certainly no longer a geminate in pronunciation. On the

other hand, many documents of the first century bc already have the single
spelling. What did Varro do? F preserves few cases of <ss> after a long vowel
or diphthong. Causa and various case forms of the word are found seventy-
five times, yet never spelled caussa. Cāsus ‘case’ and cāsuālis ‘connected with
case’ are spelled with single -s- 126 times, while it is only in 8.39 that F has
the spellings cassu and cassum. These spellings may be old. Since the geminate
spelling <ss> after a long vowel or diphthong becomes rarer and rarer as time
goes on, it is unlikely to have been introduced at a later date. That means that
Varro may have used the geminate spelling, but again we cannot know whether
he was consistent or not.
The last question to be addressed in this section is to what extent we should
follow Varronian spelling in an edition of Varro. For an author like Plautus,
we have a large number of manuscripts, from late antiquity to the Humanist
period. Different editors have different goals. The Sarsina editions, for instance,
follow the most archaic manuscript readings, but normalize as little as possible.
Any reading that is not a mistake is accepted, from whatever period it comes,
and the editors are as happy with a medieval spelling in one passage as they
are with an archaic one in another, so long as the manuscripts do not provide
us with a variant that is pre-medieval in the former passage. There can be little
doubt that Plautus did not have a uniform spelling system, but this procedure
means that the Sarsina texts have more variation than Plautus himself did;
the same person in the Casina is written Lysidamus, with a classical spelling,
Lusidamus, with a pre-classical or post-classical spelling, and Lisidamus with
a late spelling. In my Loeb edition, I followed a different procedure. I used
a completely uniform spelling system with some old-fashioned features, but
I did not intend to reproduce Plautine spellings at all. The reasoning behind
this choice was that I wanted a text that should be as accessible to beginners
as it is to experts, and I did not want to confuse the reader with variant
spellings, especially since we do not know exactly how Plautus would have
spelled individual words in individual contexts.
For this present edition of Varro I follow a procedure that is similar to
what is done in the Sarsina editions. My reasoning is threefold. First, we
cannot know how Varro would have spelled individual words in each and
every context. Second, while my translation and commentary are meant to
make this work more reader-friendly, I am under no illusion that Varro’s De
lingua Latina might become a text read by beginners. And third, the De lingua
Latina is special insofar as for the vast majority of the extant text, F is the basis
for all later manuscript readings. Thus, it makes sense to reproduce the text
found in F as closely as possible and not to overburden the critical apparatus
with issues of spelling. The reader will understand that I aim to reproduce
Varro’s wording as closely as possible, without even trying to follow his spelling
conventions.
18 Introduction
2.3. Later Manuscripts of the De lingua Latina
Given that F is the archetype of all other extant manuscripts of the De lingua
Latina, F is the only ‘essential’ manuscript (Marouzeau 1939: 201), and any
readings in these later manuscripts that are textually superior are to be regarded
as conjectures by the copyists. Where folios went missing after F was copied,
that is, in 5.119–6.61, or where F has become less legible over time, the other
manuscripts are of genuine interest, but given that we have early copies of high
quality, such as f (for doubts about the importance of f, see Piras 2000: 762),
I agree with Salvadore (1990) that there is not much point in meticulously
recording all the readings of the minor manuscripts even there, so in my text
I give no more than a selection.
Only a brief outline of the most important later manuscripts will be given
here. Readers who want a fuller list should consult Götz and Schöll (1910:
xi–xxxv) or Kent (1938: i. xii–xiv); for the Humanist tradition, see the excellent
work of Piras (2000). I make no attempt to create a stemma here.
We begin with f, the Codex Laurentianus LI. 5, written in Florence in 1427
and kept at the library there to this day. It was examined by Keil and is one of
our best copies of F.
B was a manuscript probably written in the fifteenth century. We can no
longer identify it. Its variant readings were recorded by Petrus Victorius
in a copy of the Editio Gryphiana. The editor Augustinus used B or a very
similar manuscript when preparing his edition.
G is the Codex Gothanus of the sixteenth century, written on parchment;
it is now in Gotha. It was examined for Müller by Regel, and later for A.
Spengel by Georges; Müller’s edition conveniently contains the variants.
H, the Codex Havniensis, dates to the fifteenth century and is written on
paper, small quarto, containing 108 folia; it is now in Copenhagen. It was
examined for Koeler by B. G. Niebuhr; L. Spengel used Koeler’s records.
M is the Codex Guelferbytanus 896, written in the sixteenth century and
now kept in Wolfenbüttel. It was examined for Müller by Schneidewin,
and was re-examined by L. Spengel.
V, the Codex Vindobonensis LXIII, written in the fifteenth century, is now
in Vienna. It was examined by L. Spengel, and A. Spengel lists the variant
readings in their edition.
Manuscript a is the Codex Parisinus 7489, written on paper in the fifteenth
century and now kept in Paris. It was examined for L. Spengel by Don-
ndorf, and Spengel lists the variants.
Manuscript b is the Codex Parisinus 6142, again from the fifteenth century
and kept in Paris. It breaks off in 8.7. It, too, was examined for L. Spengel
by Donndorf; Spengel lists the variants.
Manuscript c is the Codex Parisinus 7535, from the sixteenth century,

again kept in Paris. It contains 5.1–122. Again, L. Spengel had Donndorf
examine the manuscript for him and listed the variants.
Manuscript m, not quoted here, is the Codex Mutinensis no. 212, from the
fifteenth century, and mostly important because Müller wrongly believed
it to be valuable. For a description, see Antonibon (1889a).
Manuscript p is the Codex Basiliensis F. iv. 13, now kept in Basle. It was
examined by L. Spengel, who noted that it is very similar to V, but unlikely
to be a copy thereof (Spengel 1858: 4–5).
The letter α refers to two different manuscripts. On the few occasions I refer to
α, I mean the Codex Vaticanus 1556, the manuscript that is α in Müller. This
manuscript belongs to the fifteenth or sixteenth century and was examined for
Müller by Kellermann. Antonibon (1899) contains the variant readings. Canal
uses α for the Codex Chisianus (description in Antonibon 1889b: 181–2).
The Fragmentum Cassinense is one folio of the Codex Cassinensis 361,
a parchment codex of the eleventh century and thus older than most of
the manuscripts listed here. The folio contains 5.41–56, the section on the
geography of Rome. The codex also contains other works on Roman geography
and is reproduced in Inguanez (1930); a transcription can be found in Spengel
(1855: 475–81). It is sometimes argued that F and this folio go back to the
same archetype (thus tentatively Spengel 1855: 481–2), but Keil (1848), who
describes the folio, argues convincingly that F is prior.
Other manuscripts exist, mostly not looked at thoroughly and, according
to Götz and Schöll (1910: xxxiii), not worth looking at thoroughly for our
purposes. For instance, Van Rooij (1987a) shows that Guelf. 24. Gud. Lat.
(4329) and Guelf. 23. Gud. Lat. (4328) form a unit; such studies are interesting
and important for the history of the dissemination of Varro’s text in the early
modern period, but they do not help us much to establish what Varro actually
wrote. Similarly, Van Rooij (1987b) shows that the Codex Vallicellianus D. 49. 3
is a direct copy of F, following it very closely, but since this manuscript contains
virtually no conjectural corrections of F, the main interest of the manuscript
lies in the question of whether it was copied by Boccaccio, which Van Rooij
expresses doubts about.
2.4. Editions of the De lingua Latina
While the later manuscripts contain various interesting and good conjectures,
the most significant textual improvements come from the many editors of the
De lingua Latina, and this is where the modern editor’s main task lies. However,
it also needs to be said from the outset that the importance of F was recognized
fully only in the modern period.
20 Introduction
The first edition of our work dates back to 1471. Pomponius Laetus (Pom-
ponio Leto) based it on a manuscript similar to M. As Ferrero (1950) shows,
the Codex Latinus I. III. 10 predates Laetus and contains much that is in Laetus,
so that not everything that is good in Laetus is necessarily his own conjecture.
In his annotations, Laetus used various sources; Moscadi (1992) emphasizes
Festus for the etymological annotations, and Accame Lanzillotta (1998) argues
that it is Quintilian who predominates in the morphological part.
Not long after Laetus’ edition, in 1475, the edition by Franciscus Rholan-
dellus Trivisanus appeared in Venice. While Laetus’ edition was good, Rholan-
dellus’ is better, partly owing to his own conjectures and partly owing to the
fact that he consulted better manuscripts. The Editio Veneta of 1483 is based
on Rholandellus’ edition and also contains the works of Nonius and Festus.
Baptista Pius’ edition appeared in Milan in 1510/1511, based on earlier
editions, but with some new emendations of his own. In 1513, an edition
by Aldus Manutius came out in Venice, again with some emendations of his
own, but also with new manuscript evidence. Aldus was helped a great deal
by Michael Bentinus, who collated manuscripts for the revised edition of the
Aldina, so that Bentinus’ own edition of 1529 does not differ much from the
later versions of the Aldina.
Perhaps the most influential edition of the sixteenth century was made not
by an Italian, but by a Spaniard, Antonius Augustinus, who worked in Rome
between 1546 and 1557 and published it there in 1554. It is normally said
that for his Editio Vulgata, Augustinus used a manuscript closely related to B;
Hernández Miguel (1997) argues that he worked on B itself. Augustinus was
supported by friends quoted in his edition; the most significant among these
were Angelus Colotius, Octavius Pantagathus, and Gabriel Faernus. A notable
feature of Augustinus’ edition is that he tried to use Varronian orthography,
replacing the subordinator cum by quom, and using -ei / -eis in the endings of
the nominative and dative/ablative plural.
Vertranius Maurus published his edition in Lyons in 1563. While he based it
on Augustinus, he discarded his orthography, and, more importantly, he made
a number of important conjectures.
Joseph Justus Scaliger’s Coniectanea, published in Paris in 1565, do not by
any means constitute an edition, but are an invaluable source of emendations,
especially for the etymological books.
The seventeenth century was marked by less progress. Ausonius Popma’s
text appeared in Leiden in 1601; it contains a number of good emendations.
Gaspar Scioppius’ edition (Ingolstadt 1605) has a greater number of excellent
corrections, but many of them go back to Ursinus, and also to Turnebus, who
had a posthumous edition in 1566.
The nineteenth century saw a renewed interest in Varro, and now genuinely
critical editions began to appear. We can ignore the unsuccessful attempt
by Giuseppe Melchiorri and Pietro Visconti to create an edition, mentioned
by Giacomo Leopardi in 1822 and described in Bajoni (1984). The first of

the big critical editions was by Leonhard Spengel (Berlin 1826), an edition
which took various manuscripts into account, but rightly emphasized F (even
if only via Fv, see Spengel 1846: 143–4). Leonhard Spengel kept working on
Varro, as did his son Andreas, and their joint edition, which appeared after
Leonhard’s death, is a mature work of scholarship (Berlin 1886). A rival edition
was printed in Leipzig in 1833, by Karl Ottfried Müller, who often had brilliant
insights, but also more idiosyncratic ideas. The work of the Spengels and of
Müller represents the best of nineteenth-century scholarship on Varro, but
other good work can be found. Often overlooked is the lovely edition by Canal
(Venice 1874), with often unnecessary emendations, but more than occasional
improvements that deserve to be taken more seriously.
In 1910, the Teubner edition by Götz and Schöll appeared. The edition by
Götz and Schöll is one of a kind and of greatest importance to any editor
of Varro. It is conservative in the extreme and does not even attempt to
emend many clearly corrupt passages, but the text and apparatus allow the
reader to see exactly what F contains, including oddities of punctuation and
abbreviations. While the apparatus may not replace F itself, it contains very few
mistakes. To give just one example, in 5.49, two groves are mentioned, and in F,
one is written lacus rather than lucus, but Götz and Schöll mix these two up. As
can be seen, this is a minor mistake that does not have any real influence on the
constitution of our text. Because Götz and Schöll make few attempts to emend,
the text they produce is often untranslatable; while an edition of this kind
was clearly needed, one edition of this kind was enough. Subsequent editors
have worked closely with Götz and Schöll’s edition, but have been happier to
emend.
In 1938, Roland Grubb Kent published the Loeb edition of our work. Kent
based his text on Götz and Schöll, but emended in a very sensible way, mostly
following earlier conjectures, but occasionally offering corrections of his own.
The edition also contains a useful introduction and translation.
Since Kent, no complete critical edition has appeared, but individual books
have been edited on occasion. For Book 5 we now have the thorough and
sensitive work of Collart (1954c), and for Book 6 there are Riganti (1978) and
Flobert (1985). Riganti in particular has been criticized; Laughton (1979: 231)
believes that she conjectures too much, and Traglia (1979) thinks that she is
too reliant on Giardina and Pasoli (similar views in Della Casa 1979). But
whatever one may think of her edition, her commentary is pleasant, even if
Serbat (1984: 460) says that she writes too much and too little at the same time.
Mette (1952) contains a useful edition of all three morphological books, but,
for Book 8, Dahlmann (1940) is preferable, and, for Book 10, Taylor (1996b) is
helpful, by and large. However, especially among the morphological books, one
serious shortcoming of these more recent editions is the fact that the editors’
ideological biases can to some extent influence textual choices. For instance,
22 Introduction
Dahlmann looks at Varro as no more than a compiler of half-understood lost

Greek sources and would preferably discuss these Greek sources instead of
the Latin work that we actually have. Taylor, by contrast, treats Varro as some
sort of linguistic genius whose every utterance is the product of deep thought
and insight. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and the reader must
carefully check where the editors’ preconceived ideas have unduly influenced
the constitution of the Latin text. I shall end this section with two pessimistic,
but sadly appropriate remarks made by L. Spengel. He commented that it is
easy to make suggestions for improving Varro’s text, but difficult to get things
right (1861: 289); and he added that while copyists did some damage to Varro’s
text, the misplaced erudition of some editors often gave us an even worse text
(1861: 297; see also Müller (1865: 800) for a similar sentiment).
2.5. Indirect Transmission
Now that we have looked at F and later manuscripts transmitting our text,
as well as editors and editions, it is time to turn to the problematic topic of
indirect transmission. In principle, we can distinguish four different types, each
posing its own challenges. First, we have quotations of Varro from Books 5–10,
for which we also have the direct transmission. Second, there are quotations
of Varro from the lost books. Third, many of Varro’s poetic quotations from
Ennius and other fragmentary authors recur in other grammarians and men
of letters. And finally, Varro also quotes Plautus and other writers for whom
we have a direct line of transmission.
The first category is relatively straightforward. On occasion, ancient authors
quote or paraphrase from Books 5–10, and their text can help us emend corrupt
passages in the direct transmission. For instance, Priscian (gramm. iii. 410)
quotes Varro on financial terms (5.169 to the beginning of 5.174), and he does
so verbatim. F has certain problems, and Priscian is of great use to us. As
Kent (1936b) points out, the earliest manuscript of Priscian dates to the ninth
century, two centuries before F was written, so this is by definition an inde-
pendent branch of transmission. Elsewhere, we are dealing with paraphrases;
for example, Gellius has an entire chapter dedicated to Cicero’s avoidance of
nouissimus ‘last’ (10.21), and excerpts ling. 6.59. Again, the paraphrase is useful
for restoring Varro’s text, but we have to be more careful. More serious issues
arise when we are not certain whether the De lingua Latina was used or not.
This is especially common in other ancient etymologists. We can see from
the many overlaps that Isidore, Festus, and countless others relied heavily on
Varro, whether they acknowledge this debt or not. On occasion, a Varronian
etymology has been transmitted poorly in F, as in 6.9, where the seasons are
discussed, but autumnus ‘autumn’ is not etymologized. Festus seems to have
taken the etymologies of the other seasons from Varro; are we then allowed to
restore the Varronian etymology of autumnus based on Paul. Fest. 21? In this
case, I am inclined to say yes, but in many other cases, I am hesitant.
The second category, fragments from other books of the De lingua Latina,
poses two questions: first, are we dealing with direct quotation or with para-
phrase, and in the former case, how reliable is the wording? And second, how
representative are these fragments? In a way, we have already encountered
the first problem in the preceding paragraph. If we accept that Paul. Fest. 21
contains the Varronian etymology of autumnus, we can restore the contents of
ling. 6.9, but we cannot be certain if the wording in Paul. Fest. reliably renders
Varro’s wording (Salvadore (1999: 124–33) has more etymological material of
this kind). The second problem is an issue especially for the syntactic part of
Varro’s work. Since nothing of that part survives in direct transmission, and
since we have very few fragments in indirect transmission, these tend to be
over-interpreted. The best example of this is a longer fragment from Book 24,
transmitted in Gellius (16.8). It deals with a logico-semantic question rather
than with syntax in the modern sense. But was all Varro’s syntax like that?
Collart (1975: 484) believes that Varro’s syntax was not syntax in our sense
of the word; Dahlmann (1956: 39–40) thinks that Varro’s syntax was probably
real syntax, not logic; and earlier, Wilmanns (1864: 20) argued that of the twelve
books on syntax, the first set of six probably focused on the oblique cases and
how they are combined with verbs, while the second set of six dealt with simple
and complex sentences. The reality is that the little we have of Varro’s syntax
does not allow us to draw any far-reaching conclusions, and we have to resist
the temptation to see in them what we think Varro should have discussed.
As a side note, the fragments from the other books of the De lingua Latina
come from a variety of sources, and I have not been able to look at the
manuscripts of the authors in which they are transmitted. Instead, I have
examined the apparatuses of the standard editions in order to create a text that
I believe comes closest to what Varro said.
In our third category, we find fragments of ancient authors quoted by Varro
and at the same time by other authors like Cicero or Festus, but there is no
direct transmission for the ancient authors. Most fragments in this category
belong to Ennius, as he has no direct transmission, but was famous enough
to be quoted by many. In such cases, the text provided by F may be of higher
quality or of lower quality than the text of our other transmitters; sometimes
these other transmitters quote more of a line than Varro or give more context,
and sometimes the opposite is the case. In the absence of a direct manuscript
tradition for such fragmentary authors, sometimes it is only metre that helps
us to decide whether a Varronian quotation is more correct or of better quality
than a Ciceronian one. For instance, in 7.87 we get a quotation from Pacuvius,
but it is the more complete parallel transmission in Cicero (div. 1.80) which
allows us to assign the quotation to the Teucer. As can be seen, this third
category is not as straightforward as the first two and requires a case-by-case
24 Introduction
assessment. As a general tendency, however, it should be pointed out that

Varro’s poetic quotations in Book 7 are more complete and careful than those
in Books 5 and 6.
Our final category consists of Varronian quotations of authors who also
have a direct transmission. Plautus is the most quoted author in this category,
although he also belongs to the preceding one, given that only twenty-one
of his plays were unanimously considered genuine and were subsequently
transmitted together, while the doubtful plays have all been lost except for
the fragments preserved in authors like Varro. This fourth category gives us
the golden opportunity to check how carefully Varro quotes his texts, and
thus, by extension, to see how reliable the fragments in our third category
are. A few examples will suffice. In 5.14, Varro quotes Plaut. Aul. 191, but
replaces uirginem ‘girl’ by fı̄liam ‘daughter’, which is more trivial; Traglia (1974:
275–6) assumes quotation from memory. In 7.84, Varro quotes Ter. Ad. 117,
but instead of opsōnāt ‘he buys (luxury) food’, he has scortātur ‘he goes to
prostitutes’. In the discussion of this chapter, I argue that the direct transmission
gives us what Terence wrote, but here it should be pointed out that we are
unlikely to be dealing with a careless quotation from memory because Varro
is commenting precisely on the verb scortārı̄; it seems improbable that he
bungled up the part he is actually interested in, and thus I believe that he had a
different text of Terence than the one preserved in direct transmission (for an
explanation of the error, see Spengel 1885: 268–70). Finally, in 6.7 and in 7.79,
Varro quotes Plaut. Asin. 685. In both cases he leaves out hūc ‘hither’, which
is found in the direct transmission and which, though not strictly needed
metrically or semantically, is undoubtedly correct. In 6.7, Varro uses uidēbimus
‘we shall see’, while in 7.79, he has uidēbitur ‘it shall be seen to’. The latter
is correct, not only because it is also found in the direct transmission, but
also because it fits better with Plautine idiom. What we can see from this
is that, except in Book 7, the poetic quotations are somewhat sloppier and
possibly drawn from memory. That said, the text provided by Varro is not
always inferior to what we find in the direct transmission, and again we need
to decide on a case-by-case basis.
2.6. My Apparatus
It is finally time to say a few words about the structure of my critical apparatus.
For Books 5–10, F is, wherever it is available, our only vital manuscript, and so
it is given preference over all others. The remaining manuscripts are deliber-
ately quoted sparingly. For the portions where F is no longer available, I give a
privileged position to the work of Petrus Victorius and Iacobus Diacetius, but
also to f. Here, other manuscripts are quoted more generously, but again I want
to keep the apparatus neat.
An Overview of Greek and Roman Grammatical Studies 25
Owing to the special status of F, I follow its orthography as far as possible,

which leads to a fair amount of spelling variation; whether this amount is
greater or less than what Varro himself had, we cannot know. I do not normal-
ize variation between subordinating quom and cum, or between in- and im-
before -p-, and so on. Only where the spellings of F are at odds with educated
forms found in the classical period (broadly conceived) do I normalize; this
affects for instance Greek names, where I turn pytagoras into Pyt<h>agoras,
or Dyon into Dion. But in such cases I make sure that the spelling found in F can
be recovered, either in the text itself or in the apparatus, but without necessarily
reproducing abbreviations or ligatures. Where such adaptations are trivial, I do
not ascribe them to any editor or manuscript; little is gained from examining
who first restored the genitive Iouis ‘of Jupiter’ for transmitted iobis.
In Books 5–10 we also get some parallel transmission, either for Varro’s own
words or for the texts he quotes. Here again I try to keep things simple. For
instance, where Varro quotes Plautine plays transmitted directly, I quote Plau-
tine manuscripts only where they deviate from F, and I distinguish between
different manuscripts of Plautus only where this is necessary.
Conjectures by modern authors are quoted sparingly, and only where I either
adopt them or believe that they are adoptable, even though I do not take them
on board. I want a simple apparatus that is helpful, not a learned display of
scholarly monstrosities. If I do not quote something, it does not mean that I
am not aware of its existence; some things are better left unquoted.
In the apparatus, I do not follow one and the same order of manuscripts
and scholars consistently. Sometimes I use the format ‘X F, Y L. Spengel’, and
sometimes I do the opposite and write ‘Y L. Spengel, X F’. While the order is
not consistent, it is not random either. The form on the left is what I put in the
text; the form on the right is the transmitted manuscript reading that I have
not adopted, or a conjecture that is interesting, but not adopted here.
For the fragments of the lost books I establish a text based on other editions
rather than my own manuscript research. As always, I try to keep the apparatus
straightforward and minimal.
3. AN OVERVIEW OF GREEK AND ROMAN

GRAMMATICAL STUDIES
Now that we have looked at the transmission of the De lingua Latina, we can
move towards its content. But in order to understand the nature of Varro’s
contributions to linguistics, we first need to position him within Graeco-
Roman grammatical thought. Varro did not invent the subject, nor was he
a mere copyist of other linguists; Taylor (1988), who thinks of Varro as an
26 Introduction
original linguist, is as mistaken as Fehling (1956 and 1958), who treats him
as an incompetent imitator. The truth is in the middle, as Ax (1996: 117)
has recognized. This section is meant to outline as briefly as possible what
foundations Varro could build on, and how linguistics moved on after him.
Much of our knowledge of Greek linguistics is built on relatively few fragments.
Préaux (1955: 573) states that a purely internal analysis of Varro without
reference to the history of etymology is dangerous, and to some extent I agree;
however, given the paucity of our sources, we also have to be careful not to
build a huge edifice on a foundation of cards.
There are many histories of linguistics dealing with antiquity. Four stand out
for me: Robins (1997) is a very broad introduction that covers everything from
the Greeks to modern times. Law (2003) is similar in conception, but slightly
more detailed. Nettleship (1895) is a brief tour de force focusing on Roman
grammarians and is by no means outdated. And finally, Kaster (1997) shows
us how grammarians lived and worked in late antiquity.
Naturally, we will begin with the Greeks. Their focus was almost exclusively
on the Greek language; while there were ancient Greeks interested in foreign
words, there was little scholarly interest in foreign languages (Rochette 1996:
100). And so it is surprising only at first sight that a distinguished grammarian
like Apollonius Dyscolus probably did not know Latin or any other foreign
language (see Egger 1854: 49–52).
Histories of western linguistics, like Robins (1997), usually begin with Plato’s
Cratylus. The reason is that the Cratylus asks what the origins of words are;
for Plato, this is less of an etymological question and more of a philosophical
one, and this is why I find Coleman’s statement somewhat unfair (Coleman
2001): ‘From Plato to Isidore of Seville stretches an unbroken tradition of
preposterous etymologies as whimsical in the formal connexions that they
assume between words that have as little as one or two letters in common as
they are ingenious in manufacturing a semantic relationship.’ It is true that the
connections between words are often preposterous; and it is equally true that
by the time we reach late antiquity, someone like Isidore could have done better
in places. But Plato was not interested in linguistics as such, and this is why it
seems overly harsh to criticize him for his linguistic shortcomings. For Plato,
the real question is whether words are created based on some extra-linguistic
reality, by nature ( σει), or by convention (νμ). No real conclusion is
reached. What should be pointed out, however, is that for the ancients the
contrast between σι and νμο or !σι was not always as absolute as it may
seem to us. Even those who believed that words were created by an important
‘name-giver’, a νομο !τη , and that they thus came about by convention ( !σει),
could still believe that this early name-giver had a deeper insight into the σι
of things than their contemporaries did, leading to a large overlap between
convention and nature. Similarly, even if we believe in a stricter dichotomy, as
Reischl (1976: 98) does, we have to accept that when we derive a word from a
pre-existing word, we have both σι from the first word and !σι from the
derivational process (Ronconi 1971: 83).
Greek grammatical studies progressed much further in Hellenistic times.
Modern historians normally draw a sharp contrast between the Stoics and
the Alexandrians. The former are believed to have focused on ‘anomaly’, the
irregularity inherent in language; the latter are said to have concentrated on
‘analogy’, the regularity found in language. The Stoics started from philosoph-
ical principles; the Alexandrians based their studies on Homeric philology.
But while there is undeniably some truth in this opposition, it should not
be exaggerated. The two schools of thought had different starting points and
studied language for different reasons, but that does not mean that their
methods and concerns were far apart (cf. Blank 1982: 5). What is true of both
schools is that the pupils ended up knowing more than their teachers, but that
this increase in knowledge was one-sided and that they were also far more
dogmatic than their predecessors (Steinthal 1891: 135). In many ways, this is
true of modern linguistic schools as well. One of Varro’s great achievements
was finding a sensible compromise between the extremes (Flobert 1989: 742).
3.1. The Stoics
As we enter the Hellenistic period, it makes sense to begin with the Stoics; when
Varro refers to ‘philosophy’, he always seems to mean Stoic philosophy, and in
particular Stoic etymological theory (Laughton 1983: 325; Pfaffel 1987: 209).
The Stoa, founded by Zeno of Citium (c.334–262), is mostly known for
its ethics, but this system of ethics was based on a specific understanding
of nature and the world around us. This understanding comes from physics
on the one hand and from logic on the other. Language and linguistics falls
into the domain of logic; logic is divided into dialectic and rhetoric. As Law
(2003: 38) points out, grammar is not a separate discipline for the Stoics,
not a subject worth studying in its own right. Despite this, the Stoics made
valuable contributions to linguistics. However, we do not have these contri-
butions in the form of Stoic treatises; rather, we have to rely on fragments
transmitted by other writers, and as always in such cases, the question is
how reliable these fragments are. Deliberate and involuntary distortions were
bound to occur.
On a fundamental level, the Stoics believed that language arose σει ‘by
nature’ rather than !σει ‘by imposition’ (Dam 1930: 37). But if language
arose by nature, why are Greek and Latin different from each other? One
school of thought argued that the differences are the result of language decay
(Reitzenstein 1901: 34–5).
Baratin (1991) is a good overview of Stoic doctrine on language. The Stoics
came up with the concept of a predicate, with valency and voice, with the
28 Introduction
distinction between transitive/intransitive/impersonal, and at the sentence

level they distinguished between assertion and inference. They differentiated
between signifié and signifiant. The former comprises not just lexical meanings,
but everything that is represented by the combination of words, including
sentence types and syllogisms. The latter comprises sounds and letters, parts
of speech, euphony and music, and so on; interestingly, and uniquely in Greek
grammar, in the Stoic parts-of-speech system, the participle is part of the verb,
not a separate word class (Lersch 1840: 144). The Stoics also discussed virtues
and faults of speech, a topic that lived on in later Roman grammarians as well.
For the Stoics, the four virtues are "#ηνισμ , equivalent to correct speech,
elegance, clarity, and brevity.
The first important contributions to Stoic linguistics came from Chrysippus
of Soli (279–206 bc), a famous logician and the third head of the school. As
Callanan (1987: 109) notes, Chrysippus realized that the privative $- often
does not denote στ!ρησι ‘deprivation’, but that we do find στ!ρησι in words
without this preverb. However, the fact that Chrysippus noticed irregularities
does not make him an anomalist as such.
Another important Stoic quoted by Varro was Crates of Mallus or Crates of
Pergamum (born in the former city and resident in the latter). He lived from
200 to 150 bc and was the head of the library of Pergamum. He was a famous
Homeric scholar. Philosophically, he was a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon and
the teacher of Panaetius.
3.2. The Alexandrians
Unlike the Stoics, the Alexandrians did not start from philosophy. Rather, a
group of scholars in charge of the great library at Alexandria became heavily
engaged in Homeric scholarship and philology (Robins 1997: 23).
The Alexandrians used four-part analogy as a tool for emending corrupt
passages in Homer. To give a made-up example, if we have a Homeric nomi-
native %!ιο ‘sun’ and a corresponding genitive %εοιο, and we find in Homer
a nominative κο ‘wolf ’ and an unmetrical genitive κου, we can assume
that the latter is a modernization of the text based on the contemporary form,
and we can check whether a genitive κοιο, analogical to %εοιο, scans. This
kind of four-part analogy was seen as a useful tool, but it does not mean that
the Alexandrians were ‘analogists’ pure and simple.
The first Alexandrian to make philological contributions of note was Aristo-
phanes of Byzantium (257–180 bc), the fourth head of the library and a
Homeric scholar and grammarian associated with the introduction of the
accent marks now used in Greek editions. For him, analogy was a tool used
to separate correct Homeric forms from corrupted ones. The fragments of
his work are now conveniently collected in Slater (1986), and a useful study
is provided by Callanan (1987). Aristophanes had a particular interest in the

parts of speech and in "#ηνισμ or ‘correct Greek’ (Ax 1991: 278–9). That
said, where Aristophanes quotes morphological doublets, he does so mostly
without judging, and where he does judge, it is always etymology that is his
criterion for correctness (Callanan 1987: 22–5). For example, Aristophanes
believes the correct form to be &επτο ‘not to be touched, invincible’ rather
than &απτο because the word is supposed to be from 'πο ‘word’ or (πομαι
‘I follow’. We today believe the second form to be correct, deriving the word
from negative $- and )πτομαι ‘I touch’.
Aristophanes was succeeded by his pupil Aristarchus of Samothrace
(216–144), who worked further on the parts of speech and looked at cases
and tenses (Ax 1991: 284–5). He also used four-part analogy and was aware of
irregular morphology (Callanan 1987: 116 and 121–2). However, it is unlikely
that he already had a fully developed practical morphology (Matthaios 1999:
26–7).
3.3. The *!χνη γραμματικ and Apollonius Dyscolus
Our first extant grammar of Greek, the *!χνη γραμματικ ‘Art of grammar’, is
ascribed to Dionysius Thrax (170–90 bc), an Alexandrian and former student
of Aristarchus of Samothrace. The name ‘Thracian’ refers to the origins of
Dionysius’ father rather than to his own birth place. The best edition of this
treatise is now Lallot (1998b), who uses the old text by Uhlig (1883), but
provides a good translation and commentary. As Lallot (1995b) points out, we
cannot know whether this work is authentic or not.
Dionysius’ *!χνη is rather dry and simple. It moves from letters to syllables
and word classes. There is always a definition, then further characterization
(more details in Fuhrmann 1960: 29–33). Unlike Apollonius, who has the
cases in the order nominative, vocative, accusative, dative, genitive, Dionysius
has the order nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative (Belardi 1976:
294–7). This matters because Dionysius, despite being an Alexandrian by
training, is following the Stoic order here (Calboli (1971: 122).
Varro is rather different from the *!χνη. For example, the latter has the eight
word classes that became standard in Greek grammar, while Varro only accepts
four basic ones. Nevertheless, there are, as Traglia (1976: 177–8) shows, some
significant overlaps that indicate that Varro probably knew the *!χνη, even if
in his day it did not exist in the form in which we have it today.
Apollonius Dyscolus is mentioned here chiefly because he represents, in
many ways, the high point of Alexandrian grammatical scholarship. Apollo-
nius was born and died in Alexandria and was active in the first half of the
second century ad. Of his twenty books, four still exist: three on morphology
and one on syntax. For the best edition of one of the morphological books, see
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
[Inhoud]
Amstelveen herbouwd
Gulhartig Medelijden
Moog’ niet van smart bevrijden,
Het lenigt echter smart,
Verstrekt ten balsem voor ’t verdrukt of zuchtend hart:
Werd amstelveen van ’t vuur als woedende aangegrepen;
Zat menig dorpeling in diepe smart benepen;
Het schetsjen dat men hier beschouwt,
Toont hoe door Medelij ’t verbrandene is herbouwd.
AMSTELVEEN
HERBOUWD.
Daar wij alles wat mogelijk is toebrengen, ter volmaakinge van onzen
Nederlandschen Stad- en Dorp-beschrijver, met welken wij zulk een
onvoorbeeldig genoegen geeven, hebben wij niet kunnen afzijn
nogmaals onze aandacht te vestigen op het Dorp Amstelveen, om het
te beschouwen, zodanig als het zig thans bevindt—eer het zo
vermaaklijk Dorpjen door den noodlottigen brand, tusschen den 25 en
26 Junij des jaars 1792, geteisterd was, hebben wij in ons
bovengemeld werk, eene uitvoerige beschrijving, en naauwkeurige
afbeelding van hetzelve geplaatst; daarna, bij gelegenheid van
gezegden brand, ook eene beschrijving en afbeelding van dat
jammerlijk voorval gegeven, bij wijze van aanhangzel aan gemelde
eerste beschrijving, immers dit aanhangzel behoorde tot de historie
des Dorps, gelijk hetzelve dan ook met een ongemeene graagte
ontvangen is——thans, nu de verbrande erven tot zo verre weder
herbouwd zijn, dat men verwachten kan dat er verder niet van belang
meer aan gedaan zal worden, zouden wij het gedeelte van ons werk,
Amstelveen betreffende, niet volkomen kunnen noemen, indien wij
onze geëerde Intekenaaren en verdere tijdgenooten 1, ook niet eene
beschrijving van de wijze der gezegde herbouwinge mededeelden
——’t was dan met dat oogmerk dat wij Amstelveen onlangs een
bezoek gaven, en de ons aldaar medegedeelde informatiën, maaken,
met de aantekening van ’t geen wij in oogenschouw genomen hebben,
den hoofd-inhoud van de tegenwoordige weinige bladzijden uit. [2]
Alvoorens echter de hand daaraan te slaan, moeten wij nog een enkel
woord zeggen van het loflijk gedrag onzer tijdgenooten omtrent de
ongelukkige dorpelingen, wier haven en goed een prooi der vlamme
geworden waren; onze beschrijving van den brand volgde te kort op
het voorval zelf, dan dat wij toen reeds zouden hebben kunnen
boeken, dat geen waarvan de tijd de juiste waarheid eerst moest
openbaaren; wel wisten wij toen reeds, dat vooral onze stadgenoten
hunne nijvere handen niet slooten voor de ongelukkigen; de faam
verbreidde welhaast hun loflijk gedrag in deezen; dit tekenden wij ook
aan; maar thans kunnen wij er meer bepaaldlijk, meer met zekerheid
van spreeken; thans zijn wij overtuigd, dat het nakroost van Civilis
getoond heeft, hoe het in hun charakter één der hoofdtrekken van ’t
charakter eens rechtaarten Bataviers, nog bewaard heeft; dat vooral
de Patriotten, in beantwoording van onze oprechte aanmaaning 2, in
deezen getoond hebben den naam van Vaderlanders zig tot eenen
eernaam te rekenen; dat zij den ongelukkigen overtuigd hebben,
waarlijk Patriotten te zijn; en zeker, Amstelveen lag te onuitwischbaar
in hun hart en hoofd geprent, dan dat zij ongevoelig omtrent hetzelve
zouden hebben kunnen weezen.
Zo dra men van den schrik eenigzins bekomen was, werden er

schikkingen beraamd, om eenig herstel van de geledene schade te
verkrijgen; men kent den menschlievenden aart der Nederlanderen;
ook openbaarde dezelve zig weldra, in het toezenden van veelerleie
middelen ter vervullinge van de algemeene behoeften der menschen;
geld en goed, spijs en drank, alles werd in grooten overvloed
aangevoerd, vooral uit het nabijgelegen Amsteldam: duizenden zakten
van allen kanten af, om ooggetuigen van de verwoesting te zijn; om
hunne traanen met die der lijdenden te mengen, en hunne milde
handen ter vertroostinge te openen; op dat nu de giften, uit onkunde,
niet te ongelijk uitgedeeld mogten worden, werden er hier en daar
bossen gesteld, en in dezelven werd zo ongemeen rijklijk geofferd, dat
men ze verscheide keeren daags, en dat verscheide dagen na
elkander, moest ledigen: de Magistraat van Amsteldam veroorloofde
eene collecte binnen zijne muuren, ten voordeele van de ongelukkige
dorpelingen, en het daarbij ingezamelde was, zo men zegt, niet
minder dan eene som van drie-en-twintig duizend Guldens; men
voege daarbij het ingekomene op het Dorp zelf, en men zal zekerlijk
kunnen gelooven, dat er een ongemeen aanzienlijke som gegaderd
moet weezen.
Het besef van die aanzienlijkheid der ingezamelde somme, [3]maakt

ook eenigen der dorpelingen, of liever de dorpelingen over ’t
algemeen, zeer te onvreden over de reeds voltooide herbouwing: de
Hemel weet hoe men op het denkbeeld gekomen is, dat de penningen
niet behoorelijk.… wij veroorloven ons niet desaangaande meer
natevertellen; dit mogen wij zeggen, dat de eigenaars der verbrande
woningen, zo verzekert men desaangaande, te weinig vergoeding
gekregen hebben, om het dorp weder zulke aanzienlijke gebouwen te
schenken als het vóór den brand had; hunne eigene beurzen waren
tot het geen hun aan de ontvangene vergoeding, daartoe nog ontbrak,
niet toereikende, en derhalven hebben zij moeten besluiten, om, bij
wijze van spreeken, een hutjen te bouwen daar een huis gestaan
heeft—dit nu zou in alle gevallen mogelijk zeer natuurlijk hebben
kunnen weezen; maar in deezen opzichte denkt men er zeer
onaangenaam over, uit aanmerking van het besef, gelijk wij reeds
zeiden, dat men heeft van de capitaale som welke voor de herbouwing
van het dorp gecollecteerd is—hoe jammer is het, dat er zulke
denkbeelden bij de ingezetenen, met betrekking tot hunne
bestuurderen, plaats hebben!—en hoeveel te meer jammer is het bij
de Nederlanders, daar zij geheel geen grond, vasten grond, voor zulke
booze opvattingen kunnen aanvoeren—wat denkbeeld zou men
moeten maaken van een Nederlandsch Volksbestuurder, in welke
classe hij moge staan, al ware het ook in de minste, die harts genoeg
zoude hebben, of liever geweetenloos zoude kunnen zijn, om, ter
bevorderinge van zijn eigen belang, of van dat zijner vrienden, den
ingezetenen te bederven!—hij zou den naam van mensch niet mogen
draagen, en althans dien van Nederlander niet waardig zijn—Is er een
land waarin recht en gerechtigheid in de harten der Bestuurderen
huisvest; waarin de penningen, uit de beurzen des Volks aangebragt,
naar behooren geadministreerd worden; ’t is in Nederland; en geen
wonder! een Regent is aldaar alleenlijk bestuurder van zijnen
landsbroeder, geen Souverain Vorst over een onderworpen Volk; wel
is Nederland eene Souverainiteit, zo wel als de magtigste
Alleenheerscher die op Aarde bestaat; maar Regenten en Volk
maaken zamen den Souverain uit; want deezen worden jaarlijks uit
geenen verkozen, en keeren ook, na afloop van hunnen amtstijd in
den boezem van geenen weder, ’t welk bij een Souverain Monarch
geen plaats heeft; de Regent is derhalven slechts handhaver der
wetten, en daar geen wetten zijn volgt hij het besluit van veele
verlichte en braave mannen, derhalven het besluit der wijsheid; hoe
zoude een volk in zulk een Land, onder zulk een regeeringsbestuur,
dan onderdrukt of benadeeld kunnen worden?—Zeker het doet ons
van harten leed, dat er zulke denkbeelden, als wij boven wegens
Amstelveen aanstipten, bij den Nederlander plaats [4]hebben, zij zijn
hoogstnadeelig aan de algemeene rust—derhalven, waarde
Landgenooten!.… maar waaraan noem ik u!—gij zijt in ’t algemeen
thans de voorwerpen mijner bemoejingen niet—gij inwooners van
Amstelveen! gelooft toch, wat denkbeeld gij ook van de ingezamelde
penningen moogt opgevat hebben—gelooft toch, dat die penningen
naar de voorschriften van deugd en reden geadministreerd, en
uitgedeeld zijn—hoe zou ’t mogelijk kunnen weezen, dat eenig
bewindsman, met giften van menschlievendheid en medelijden,
kwalijk zoude handelen?
Wat hier intusschen ook over gedacht worde, dit is zeker, dat het dorp
Amstelveen door den brand veel van zijnen ouden luister verloren
heeft; want de herbouwde huizen zijn ongelijk veel minder, dan zij
waren die door het vuur verteerd zijn—men telt niet meer herbouwden
dan zeven, een zeer kleine smeederij, een niet minder kleinen stal, en
een werkplaats voor een’ schilder: allen zijn zij laage daken, daar
onder anderen, vóór den brand, één, waarin herberg gehouden wordt,
een capitaal gebouw van verscheide verdiepingen was: nog zijn onder
gezegde laage daken twee, welke ieder over twee woningjens
strekken.
’T geen waarbij het nog meer in aanzien verliest, is, dat men besloten
heeft het verbrande Armehuis niet weder optebouwen; des mist
Amstelveen thans boven den gemelden luister van particuliere
gebouwen, ook een der Godsdienstige gestichten.
De waschbleekerij van den Heere Dregman, alwaar het vuur zijnen

aanvang genomen had 3, wordt ook niet weder opgebouwd, ’t geen
zekerlijk zeer goed mag genoemd worden, om het gevaar, ’t welk zulk
een fabriek vergezelt, evenwel is ’t ook waar, dat een Dorp niet weinig
in zijn aanzien verliest, wanneer er een gantsche fabriek van daan
gaat.
Zie daar, waarde leezers! ’t geen ik oordeelde bij mijne bladen over
Amstelveen te moeten voegen, om ze een volkomen geheel, dat Dorp
betreffende, te doen uitmaaken—nog kan ik daar bijvoegen, dat men
thans ten einde des Dorps aan het sluisjen, een batterij vindt, ter
wederzijde van de brug aangelegd, tegen de Franschen, om dezelven,
indien ze tot zo ver waren gekomen, te keeren, en Amsteldam voor
hun legergeweld te dekken—deeze batterij schiet vijf stukken.
Te Amsteldam, bij H. A. Banse, in de Hartestraat, over den vergulden

Kop. [1]
1 Ofschoon onze Stad- en Dorp-Beschrijver, volstrekt niet afgeleverd wordt dan aan
de Heeren Intekenaaren op denzelven, hebben wij echter de beschrijving van den
brand ook buiten intekening gedebiteerd; en vermids niemand van gezegde
Intekenaaren zich daaraan heeft gestoten, oordeelen wij, ook omtrent dit blaadjen,
als tot de beschrijving van den brand behoorende, die vrijheid te mogen gebruiken. ↑
2 Zie onze beschrijving van meergemelden brand, bladz. 4. ↑
3 Zie onze beschrijving van den brand, bladz. 2. ↑
[Inhoud]
’t Dorp Diemen
DIEMEN, dat om GYSBRECHT’s wraakzucht,

onder ’t jok der Graaven kwam,
Vaak een prooi van vuur en water,
dikwyls ook van de Oorlogsvlam;
DIEMEN mag nog, hoe ’t moest lyden,
Door schoonheid en door trouw, ’t Batavisch hart verblyden.
HET
DORP
DIEMEN.
Onder de Nederlandsche dorpen, zijn er zekerlijk maar weinig van

welken, naar evenredigheid der grootte, zo veel kan gezegd worden,
(ofschoon er bij anderen bijzonder weinig van gezegd zij,) als van dit
vermaaklijk dorp; de inhoud der volgende bladzijden zal onze Leezers
daarvan ten vollen overtuigen; zij zijn, als ik, denzelven verschuldigd
aan de vriendlijkste mededeeling, die zekerlijk de ongeveinsdste
erkentelijkheid vordert.
LIGGING.
Het ambacht Diemen, waarbij ook Diemerdam behoort, ligt in

Amstelland, gedeeltelijk tusschen de ban van Amstelveen, en de
Diemer- of Watergraafsche meir ten westen, de banne van Muiden ten
oosten, en ten zuiden en zuidwesten aan de Bijlemer meir en de
Groot-Duivendrechtsche polder: ’t ligt voords één uur van Amsteldam,
zijnde ook eene Ambachtsheerlijkheid van die stad.
Over ’t algemeen is ’t geheele Ambacht zeer aangenaam gelegen: van

den dijk af heeft men een schoon gezicht op Waterland, [2]Amsteldam
en Muiden, en aan de landzijde op de Diemermeir, Bijlemermeir, de
steden Weesp, Naarden, Abcoude, Ouderkerk, en andere plaatzen.
De geheele Diemerban heeft laage darrige of venlanden, waarvan

eenigen, die dijkplechtig zijn, reeds merkelijk tot verhooging van den
Diemer Zeedijk zijn vergraven, en des niettegenstaande, liggen de
laagste landen nog verscheide voeten hooger dan de bedijkte Diemer-
of Watergraafsche meir.
Zeer waarschijnelijk zijn de landen in de Diemerban voor veele eeuwen
bosschen geweest, (gelijk zulks op meer plaatzen van ons Vaderland
het geval is,) dewijl men onder het graaven menigvuldige boomen
ontdekt, die, om hunne taaiheid, alleenlijk tot rietdekkers werk gebruikt
worden; zij liggen allen zodanig, dat men kan besluiten, dat zij door
een storm en hoogen vloed uit het noordwesten, voor deeze ban altoos
zeer gevaarlijk, losgespoeld en nedergesmeten zijn geworden.
Men ontmoet in deezen oord de vruchtbaarste moes- en schoonste

weilanden, voor welken considerabele sommen betaald worden; er is
in deeze banne ook zeer goeden jagt op watersneppen en eendvogels;
sedert eenige Jaaren vindt men er ook veele haazen: de visscherij is er
niet minder rijk; men vangt er ongemeen groote snoeken, de
smaaklijkste baars, post, paling en carpers, alle welken door de
liefhebbers verre boven anderen geschat worden.
Van ouds hebben door de Diemerban twee heerewegen geloopen, die

nog in wezen zijn; de eene van de afloop naar Diemen, door Diemen
en Diemerbrug naar Ouderkerk, en de andere van Diemerdam, langs
den Diem, over de Vinkebrug, langs de Bijlemermeir en Gaasp, naar
Weesp.
In dit Ambacht liggen nog twee zandpaden; een naar Muiden en een
naar Weesp, op welken tolhuizen staan.
NAAMSOORSPRONG.
Veelen oordeelen dat het Ambacht zijn’ naam ontleent aan een
riviertjen, de Diem genaamd, welk oudtijds, vóór het droog maaken der
Diemer- of Watergraafsche-meir, gedeeltelijk [3]uit dezelve, door de
Rijkersloot, nu de Weespervaart, de Bijlemermeir en Gaasp, zijn
oorsprong nam, en door de Diemerdammersluis in het Y loosde;
anderen echter, die het Ambacht niet Diemen, maar, volgends de
oudste papieren, Deemen willen genoemd hebben, leiden dien naam
af van de woorden De Mens, die dan den staat waarin dat land lag, als
zijnde door overstroomingen en doorbraaken van één gerukt, en door
de Diem in twee deelen gescheiden, te kennen geeven: „Wat van
beide de waarheid zij”, voegt onze geëerde begunstiger er bij, „zal,
vertrouwt men, niemand met zekerheid kunnen gissen”.
Wegens de stichting des Dorps, kan volstrekt niets gezegd worden,

derhalven staat ons alleenlijk te spreeken van de
GROOTTE,
En om in deezen voldoende te kunnen zijn, moeten wij eerst

aantekenen, wat de Ambachts-heerlijkheid in zig bevat.
Het Ambacht wordt dan, vooreerst, gedeeld in twee deelen, naamlijk

Diemen en Diemerdam, (ook wel Diemendam genaamd,) liggende het
eerste ten westen de Diemer- of Watergraafsche meir en de ban van
Amstelveen, en het andere ten oosten de ban van Muiden, en worden
gescheiden door het water den Diem: deeze verdeeling maken Hunne
Edele Groot Mogenden, de Heeren Staaten van Holland en West-
Friesland, sedert onheugelijke tijden, schrijvende niet aan die van den
Gerechte van Diemen, maar van Diemen en Diemerdam.
Diemen wordt wederom in drie deelen gedeeld, als Outersdorp,

Buitenkerk, en Bovenkerk, welk laatste gedeelte wederom
onderscheiden wordt door Bovenrijkersloot en Benedenrijkersloot.
Diemerdam werd oudtijds gedeeld in Diemerdam en Overdiemen, doch
na dat Diemerdam op een klein gedeelte na is weggespoeld, begrijpt
men door Overdiemen, Diemerdam mede, als ook de buurt de
Vierhuijzen, die voormaals aan Overdiemen, vóór het graaven der
vaart naar Muiden, gehecht was: op deeze wijze wordt de gaêring der
dorps- en andere lasten gedaan, Outersdorp, boven gemeld, is eene
zeer aangename buurt, [4]waarin verscheide moestuinen, en
wèltoegemaakte weilanden en plaisierplaatzen liggen; bij dezelven is
een kerkhof voor de Hoogduitsche Joodsche Natie, die geene
lidmaaten, of armoedig zijn: digt hierbij is een herberg, Zeeburg
genaamd; voor dezelve ligt een steenen redout, alwaar de beesten
voor rekening van het Oude Zijds Huiszittenhuis te Amsteldam worden
ontscheept, en de varkens, door iemand van het Gerecht daartoe
gesteld geschouwen: Jaap Hannes, daaraan grenzende, is thans een
gedeelte land en dijk: het ontleent zijn’ naam aan een zeer groote
buurt, weleer aldaar gelegen, doch die door een inbraak, in den vloed
bedolven is, en waarvan men wil, dat het water, het Nieuwe Diep, zijn
oorsprong voor het grootste gedeelte heeft.
Buitenkerk, of, zo als sommigen willen, Buiten de Kerk, is mede een

zeer vermaaklijke en welvaarende buurt, waarin, behalven veele
buitenplaatzen, boerderijen en herbergen, extra schoon wei- en moes-
land wordt gevonden: buitendijks ligt nog een weiland, groot 61
morgen, 670 roeden, ’t geen ’s winters onder water staat, en daardoor
gemest wordt.
Bovenkerk of Bovendekerk, is wel de aanzienlijkste buurt, vermits in

dezelve verre de meeste huizen, plaatsen, en het beste land wordt
gevonden; als mede om dat er de buurt Diemerbrug onder behoort:
deeze buurt is in 1640 grootlijks aangegroeid, toen naamlijk aldaar de
vaart naar Muiden en Weesp werd gegraven, en is, zo wegens haare
ligging, als passage van rijtuigen en schepen, zeer vermaaklijk.
Diemerdam was oudtijds een dorp dat zig zeer verre in zee uitstrekte,
en ’t is beweezen, (hoe zeer Wagenaar in zijne beschrijving van
Amsteldam daaraan twijfele,) dat Diemerdam zo nabij aan Waterland
was gelegen, dat men met een plank of pols van het eene naar het
andere dorp konde komen; de Pastoor, die in Overdiemen de Capel
bediende, was tevens Pastoor te Durkerdam; indien nu het water zo
groot hadde geweest als thans, zou het voor dien man ondoenlijk
geweest zijn om op beide plaatzen, bij alle gelegenheden, den dienst
te kunnen waarneemen: tot den jaare 1787 was er in Overdiemen nog
een vers voorhanden, gedrukt op wit satijn, en, ofschoon zeer oud, wèl
geconserveerd, waarin de [5]nagedachtenis van een’ Pastoor, die 40
jaaren Diemen en Durkerdam bediend had, eenige eer werd
aangedaan.
Diemerdam had niet alleen zijn Capel, waarvan het land, waarop
dezelve stond nog Capelleland genoemd wordt, maar was met
verscheide huizen en boerderijen voorzien, welke alle door de
watervloeden zijn verzwolgen: men vindt nog, dat in 1463, diverse
morgens land bij de Diemerdammersluis lagen.
Van geheel Diemerdam is nog slechts één huis overig, dat op den dijk
staat, en het huis Diemerdam genaamd wordt.
Overdiemen, weleer een zeer schoon gebuurte, waarin veele rijke

menschen woonden, diverse fabrieken, scheepstimmerwerven, als
anderzins waren, is thans zeer vervallen; eensdeels doordien
sommigen dat quartier niet begeerden te bewoonen, anderdeels door
het droogmaaken der Diemermeir, sterfte van rundvee, en laatstlijk om
dat de Roomsche Kerk, die te Overdiemen in ’t midden van de buurt
stond, naar Diemerbrug is verplaats geworden.
De buurt Vierhuizen, alzo genaamd naar zekeren Vierhuizen, is dat

gedeelte van Overdiemen, het welk door het graven der vaart naar
Muiden en Naarden daarvan is gescheiden: men vindt aldaar
welgestelde lieden, schoone boerenplaatzen en landerijen; onder
dezelve munt uit de van ouds bekende plaats van den Heere Kanter,
Vinken-Hofstede genaamd.
Onder alle de bovenstaande districten telt men de volgende polders.
Oetwaaler polder, hierin ligt Diemen met Morg. 65 —

Diemer polder — 334 — 71
R.
De Bovenrijkerslooter polder — 334 —
Diemerdammer polder — 29 — 350
R.
School en Hopmans-polder — 195 — 500
R.
De Gemeenschaps polder, voor zo veel — 304.6 hond. 75
onder Diemen behoort R.
Buitendijksche polder — 61.6 hond. 70
R.
Morg. 1324.6 hond. 66
R.
[6]
In oude tijden was het Dorp veel grooter, doch in 1632 telde men
slechts voor Diemen en Diemermeir 91 huizen; honderd jaren laater,
(1732.) werden 113 huizen voor Diemen en Diemerdam op de
verpondingslijsten gebragt, en in 1782 werd Diemen op 147
huisgezinnen en 477 ingezetenen gesteld, zonder de kinderen
medeterekenen.
Het
WAPEN
Van Diemen is een groen veld, waarin een water verbeeld wordt, met
drie bruine zwemmende eenden.
KERKLIJKE en GODSDIENSTIGE GEBOUWEN.
De Kerk van Diemen was eertijds een Parochie-Kerk, aan de H.

Maagd opgedragen, die er des ook als Patronesse werd gevierd;
deeze Pastorie werd beurtlings door den Paus en de Proost van
Oudmunster vergeven: ’t gebouw is zeer oud, staande in het Dorp, dat,
gelijk gezegd is, voorheen veel grooter was: rondsom dezelve stonden
een menigte huizen, die door de brand weggeraakt zijn: de Kerk was
oudtijds met een Orgel en schoone Capellen voorzien, van welke thans
één tot een Consistorie en Kerkmeesters Kamer dient; het gewelf,
waarvan nog eenige duistere overblijfsels zijn, is beschilderd met de
verbeelding van eenige aloude voorzeggingen, en van de vervulling
derzelver in de persoon des Zaligmaakers: het gebouw is zeer ruim
doch oud, en dreigt, gelijk de toren, die al eenige voeten overhangt,
intestorten: de grond van de Kerk, dienende tot begraaving der lijken,
is vóór den tijd der reformatie voor allerheiligst gehouden, en veele
menschen uit Amsteldam kochten, om die reden, aldaar de graven
voor ongemeen hooge prijzen: de klokken, die in den toren hangen,
zijn (zo men zegt,) door den Paus zelven gewijd, waardoor ieder goed
Roomschgezinde, in gevalle van afsterving, dezelven, veel langer dan
op andere plaatzen, laat luiden. [7]
Rondsom de Kerk is een zeer groot Kerkhof, op ’t welk, dewijl men ’t,
gelijk gezegd is, voor zeer heilig houdt, veel begraaven wordt, zo van
bewooners dier banne als van elders.
Achter dit Kerkhof stond weleer een huis voor den Predikant; dan,
dewijl het zelve zeer vervallen was, en geene huizen daarbij stonden,
is het afgebroken; in den jaare 1770 is op den kerkweg naar Diemen,
een nieuwe Pastorie gezet, voorzien van een zeer groote tuin: dit huis
heeft beneden vier, en boven zes kamers, allen zeer net beschilderd,
gestucadoord en behangen, behalven een zeer groote zolder en
vliering; naast hetzelve is een huisjen getimmerd, dienende zo tot een
tweede keuken, als tot berging van goederen.
Diemen werd in 1595 met Ouderkerk gecombineerd, en had met

hetzelve één’ Predikant; in 1607 werd Daniel Plancius, als eerste en
bijzondere Predikant voor Diemen, bevestigd.
De Roomsche Kerk, die, in den jaare 1786, van Overdiemen naar de

Diemerbrug verplaatst werd, is een schoon gebouw, welks wederga
zeker zelden op het platte land gevonden wordt, daar bij staat een huis
voor den Pastoor, met een groote tuin, alles aan de fraaiheid der Kerk
beantwoordende: deeze Kerk is aan St. Pieters banden toegewijd.
Het Schoolhuis van deeze ban, staat te Diemen, en is, even als de
Kerk, een zeer oud gebouw.
De Predikant van deeze plaats behoort onder het Classis van

Amsteldam, wordt door den Kerkenraad genomineerd, en door den
Ambachtsheer geapprobeerd.
Bij vacature van een’ Schoolmeester, worden door het Gerecht en den
Predikant eenige Schoolmeesters gehoord en geëxamineerd; het
Gerecht maakt als dan alleen een drietal, en geeft hetzelve den
Ambachtsheer over, om daaruit een’ Schoolmeester te nomineeren.
Men vindt aan de Diemerbrug nog een Schoolmaitres, die de kinderen

slechts spelden en leezen leert.
In Overdiemen was weleer een school, waarna de plaats Schoolpolder

genoemd werd, dan door verval dier buurt is het school weggeraakt.
Een Arm- of Wees-huis is in het Ambacht niet voorhanden: [8]de

ongelukkige voorwerpen, waarvoor men zulke huizen aanlegt, worden
aldaar bij de opgezetenen besteed.
WERELDLĲKE GEBOUWEN.
In de eerste plaats moet onder dit artijkel geteld worden het

Gemeenelands huis, waarin de gedeputeerde Waarsluiden, thans
Hoogendijks-Heemraaden, vergaderen: hetzelve staat op den dijk bij
Jaap Hannis, niet ver van de Yperslootersluis, en wordt bewoond door
een’ Opzichter, die bij voorschrevene Heeren aangesteld wordt: het is
een schoon gebouw met twee vleugels, en werd in 1726 herbouwd: in
den voorgeevel staat
A I C De fret I bato VI furore
ar Cendo agrIs t Ven DIs
ag It Vr
’T voorhuis van het gebouw is van boven en ter wederzijden

gestucadoord, en prijkt, behalven met een Nephtunis op zijn’ wagen,
met de wapens der Provinciën Holland, Utrecht, en dertien steden en
plaatzen, uit welken de Hoogedijks-Heemraaden zijn gedeputeerd: aan
elke zijde ziet men een ruim vierkant vertrek.
Bij dit huis behoort een spatieuse tuin, die in 1789 merkelijk vergroot is,
door het aankoopen van de plaats Ruimzicht, daar nevens gelegen.
Men vindt in Diemen nog een herberg, die aan particulieren behoort,
en het Rechthuis genoemd wordt: deeze herberg, die weleer het
Ambacht toebehoorde, was oudtijds het Rechthuis: men ziet er nog
verscheide oude wapens van het Gerecht: het plagt voorzien te zijn
van een boejen, die thans weggeraakt is.
Voor dit huis staat een justitiepaal: des zomers wordt dikwijls rechtdag
gehouden, doch des winters aan de Diemerbrug. [9]
Bij gezegde brug, aan de Weespervaart, ontmoet men een nieuw

aangelegd kerkhof voor lieden die niet in de kerken begraaven willen
worden: het zelve is geplaveid met groote zerken, en afgesloten door
een schoon hek, met doodshoofden versierd: dit kerkhof, heeft een
privilegie, inhoudende, dat al wie van buiten deeze Jurisdictie daarop
begraven wordt, slechts éénmaal het landsrecht behoeft te betaalen.
Er liggen twee sluizen aan den Hoogendijk; als de IJperslooter sluis en

Diemerdammer sluis, de eerste wordt voornaamlijk onderhouden door
Amsteldam.
Bijleveld voor ¼ in de lasten,

Proosdij ¼ in de lasten.

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Varro: De lingua Latina Marcus

Edited and Translated by

To my wife and my daughter

On a cool, foggy autumn morning in Eichstätt twenty-one years ago, I was

particularly obvious in the morphological part, while the latter is especially

4.2.4 Excursus on the Roman calendar 52

5.2.14 Gradation of adjectives in Varro 164

The Fragments 1249

Abbreviations of ancient authors are by and large as in the Thesaurus Linguae

F Codex Laurentianus LI. 10, fos 2–34

DV Vaan, M. A. C. de (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other

Barwick (1925) Charisius

1. VARRO’S LIFE AND WORKS

1.1. A Full Life

1.2. Varro’s Works

Varro’s Life and Works 3

Finally, the Logistorici, in seventy-six books, were dialogues in prose. Each

1.2.1. The grammatical works

1.2.2. The date of the De lingua Latina

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 5

grammarians quoting even Books 2–4 cite them as ad Cicerōnem (Barwick

2. THE TRANSMISSION OF THE DE LINGUA LATINA

We can now turn to issues of textual transmission. Of the original twenty-five

look at the direct transmission; here, manuscript F deserves special discussion.

2.1. F, Our Most Important Witness

A moderately large number of manuscripts transmit Books 5–10. However,

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 7

2.2. F as a Source for Varronian Spelling?

An important question that has been answered differently by different scholars

2.2.1. Latin pronunciation in the first century bc

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 9

Bilabial Labio-dental Dental / alveolar Palatal Velar Labio-velar Glottal

prestige tend to be nativized phonologically. Languages that are widely taught

2.2.2. Varro’s spelling

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 11

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 13

torically incorrect and go back to monophthongs. Incidentally, the first vowel

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 15

generation we may assume variation, with a preference for <uo>. F has

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 17

time when there was certainly no longer a geminate in pronunciation. On the

2.3. Later Manuscripts of the De lingua Latina

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 19

Manuscript c is the Codex Parisinus 7535, from the sixteenth century,

2.4. Editions of the De lingua Latina

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 21

by Giacomo Leopardi in 1822 and described in Bajoni (1984). The first of

Dahlmann looks at Varro as no more than a compiler of half-understood lost

2.5. Indirect Transmission

The Transmission of the De lingua Latina 23

assessment. As a general tendency, however, it should be pointed out that

An Overview of Greek and Roman Grammatical Studies 25

Owing to the special status of F, I follow its orthography as far as possible,

3. AN OVERVIEW OF GREEK AND ROMAN

An Overview of Greek and Roman Grammatical Studies 27

3.1. The Stoics

distinction between transitive/intransitive/impersonal, and at the sentence

3.2. The Alexandrians

An Overview of Greek and Roman Grammatical Studies 29

is provided by Callanan (1987). Aristophanes had a particular interest in the

3.3. The *!χνη γραμματικ and Apollonius Dyscolus

Zo dra men van den schrik eenigzins bekomen was, werden er

Het besef van die aanzienlijkheid der ingezamelde somme, [3]maakt

3.3. The *!χνη γραμματικ and Apollonius Dyscolus