s iiiilllhlj STUDIA IN THE LIBRARY of VICTORIA UNIVERSITY Toronto THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY FOUNDED ay JAMES I.OEB, LL.D. EDITED BY t T. E, PAGE, C.H., LITT.D. E. CAPPS, PH.D.. LL.D. W. H. D. ROUSE, Lrrr.D. VARRO ON THE LATIN LANGUAGE VAREO ON THE LATIN LANGUAGE WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY ROLAND G. KENT, Ph.D. PROrESSOR OF COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY IJJ THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA IN TWO VOLUMES I BOOKS v.- VII. LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS MCMXXXVIII Printed in Great Britain CONTENTS Introduction page \'arro's Life and Works . vii Varro's Grammatical Works . , . viii \'arro's De Lingua Latina . , ix The Manuscripts of the De Lingua Latina . xii The Laurentian Manuscript F . , xv The Orthography of the De Lingua Latina x\ii The Editions of the De Lingua Latina . xxvii Bibliography ..... .xxxiii Our Text of the De Lingua Latina . xliii The Critical Apparatus .... xliv The Translation of the De Lingua Latina xlv The Notes to the Translation . , xlvi S}Tnbols and Abbre\iations . xlix De Lingu.\ Latina, Te.\t and Translation BookV 2 BookVL 172 Book VII 266 INTRODUCTION VARRO'S LIFE AND WORKS Marcxs Terentius ^'ARRO was born in 116 B.C., probably at Reate in the Sabine country, where his family, which was of equestrian rank, possessed large estates. He was a student under L. Aelius Stilo Praeconinus, a scholar of the equestrian order, widely versed in Greek and Latin literature and especially interested in the history and antiquities of the Roman people. He studied philosophy at Athens, with Anti- ochus of Ascalon. With his tastes thus formed for scholarship, he none the less took part in public life, and was in the campaign against the rebel Sertorius in Spain, in 76. He was an officer with Pompey in the war with the Cilician pirates in 67, and presumably also in Pompey 's campaign against Mithradates. In the Ci\il War he was on Pompey 's side, first in Spain and then in Epirus and Thessaly. He was pardoned by Caesar, and lived quietly at Rome, being appointed librarian of the great collec- tion of Greek and Latin books which Caesar planned to make. After Caesar's assassination, he was pro- scribed by Antony, and his ^illa at Casinum, with his personal library, was destroyed. But he himself escaped death by the devotion of friends, who con- cealed him, and he secured the protection of Octavian, vii INTRODUCTION He lived the remainder of his life in peace and quiet, devoted to his ^^Titings, and died in 27 B.C., in his eighty-ninth year. Throughout his life he wrote assiduously. His works number seventy-four, amounting to about six hundred and twenty books ; they cover virtually all fields of human thought : agriculture, grammar, the history and antiquities of Rome, geography, law, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy, education, the history of literature and the drama, satires, poems, orations, letters. Of all these only one, his De Re Rustica or Treatise on Agriculture, in three books, has reached us complete. His De Lingua Latino or On the Latin Language, in twenty-five books, has come down to us as a torso ; only Books V. to X. are extant, and there are serious gaps in these. The other works are represented by scattered fragments only. VARRO'S GRAMMATICAL WORKS The grammatical works of Varro, so far as we know them, were the following : De Lingua Latina, in twenty-five books, a fuller account of which is given below. De Antiquitate Litierarum, in two books, addressed to the tragic poet L. Accius, who died about 86 b.c. ; it was therefore one of Varro 's earliest writings. De Origine Linguae Latinae, in three books, ad- dressed to Pompey. Uipl XapaKT'jpcov, in at least three books, on the formation of words. Quaestiones Plautinae, in five books, containing INTRODUCTION interpretations of rare words found in the comedies of Plautus. De Similitudine Verhorum, in three books, on re- gularity in forms and words. De Utilitate Sermonis, in at least four books, in which he dealt with the principle of anomaly or irregularity. De Sermone Latino, in five books or more, addressed to Marcellus, which treats of orthography and the metres of poetry. Disciplinae, an encyclopaedia on the Uberal arts, in nine books, of which the first dealt with Grammatica. The extant fragments of these works, apart from those of the De Lingua Latina, may be found in the Goetz and Schoell edition of the De Lingua Latina, pages 199-242 ; in the collection of Wilmanns, pages 170-223 ; and in that of Funaioli, pages 179-371 (see the Bibliography). VARRO'S DE LINGUA LATINA \ arro's treatise On the Latin Language was a work in twenty-five books, composed in 47 to 45 B.C., and pubhshed before the death of Cicero in 43. The first book was an introduction, containing at the outset a dedication of the entire work to Cicero. The remainder seems to have been divided into four sections of six books each, each section being by its subject matter further divisible into two halves of three books each. Books Il.-Vn. dealt with the impositio vocabulorum, or how words were originated and applied to things INTRODUCTION and ideas. Of this portion, Books 1 1. -IV. were prob- ably an earlier smaller work entitled De Etymologia or the like ; it was separately dedicated to one Septumius or Septimius, who had at some time, which we cannot now identify, served V^arro as quaestor. Book II. presented the arguments which were advanced against Etymology as a branch of learning ; Book III. presented those in its favour as a branch of learning, and useful ; Book IV. discussed its nature. Books v.-VI I. start with a new dedication to Cicero. They treat of the origin of words, the sources from which they come, and the manner in which new words develop. Book V. is devoted to words which are the names of places, and to the objects which are in the places under discussion ; VI. treats words denoting time-ideas, and those which contain some time-idea, notably verbs ; VII. explains rare and difficult words which are met in the writings of the poets. Books VIII. -XIII. dealt with derivation of words from other words, including stem-derivation, de- clension of nouns, and conjugation of verbs. The first three treated especially the conflict between the principle of Anomaly, or Irregularity, based on con- suetudo ' popular usage,' and that of Analogy, or Regularity of a proportional character, based on ratio ' relation ' of form to form. VIII. gives the arguments against the existence of Analogy, IX. those in favour of its existence, X. Varro's own solution of the con- flicting views, with his decision in favour of its exi- stence. XI. -XIII. discussed Analogy in derivation, in the wide sense given above : probably XI. dealt with nouns of place and associated terms, XII. with time- ideas, notably verbs, XIII. wdth poetic words. INTRODUCTION Books XIV.-XIX. treated of syntax. Books XX,- XXV. seem to have continued the same theme, but probably with special attention to stylistic and rhetorical embellishments. Of these twenty-five books, we have to-day, apart from a few brief fragments, only Books V. to X., and in these there are several extensive gaps where the manuscript tradition fails. The fragments of the De Lingua Latina, that is, those quotations or paraphrases in other authors which do not correspond to the extant text of Books \\-X., are not numerous nor long. The most considerable of them are passages in the Nodes Atticae of Aulus Gellius ii. 25 and x\i. 8. They may be found in the edition of Goetz and Schoell, pages 3, lid, 192-198, and in the collections of Wilmanns and FunaioU (see the Bibliography). It is hardly possible to discuss here even summarily \'arro's linguistic theories, the sources upon which he drew, and his degree of independence of thought and procedure. He owed much to his teacher Aelius Stilo, to whom he refers frequently, and he draws hea\'ily upon Greek predecessors, of course, but his practice has much to commend it : he followed neither the Anomalists nor the Analogists to the extreme of their theories, and he preferred to derive Latin words from Latin sources, rather than to refer practically all to Greek origins. On such topics reference may be made to the works of Barwick, Kowalski, Dam, Dahlmann, Kriegshammer, and Frederik Muller, and to the articles of Wolfflin in the eighth volume of the Archil' fiir lateinische Lexikographie, all listed in our Bibliography. INTRODUCTION THE MANUSCRIPTS OF THE DE LINGUA LATINA The text of the extant books of the De Liiigua Latina is believed by most scholars to rest on the manuscript here first listed, from which (except for our No. 4) all other known manuscripts have been copied, directly or indirectly. 1. Codex Laurentianus li. 10, folios 2 to SA>, parch- ment, written in Langobardic characters in the eleventh century, and now in the Laurentian Library at Florence. It is known as F. F was examined by Petrus Victorius and lacobus Diacetius in 1521 (see the next paragraph) ; by Hieronymus Lagomarsini in 1740 ; by Heinrich Keil in 1851 ; by Adolf Groth in 1877 ; by Georg Schoell in 19O6. Little doubt can remain as to its actual readings. 2. In 1521, Petrus Victorius and lacobus Diacetius collated F with a copy of the editio princeps of the De Lingua Latina, in which they entered the difFerences which they observed. Their copy is preserved in Munich, and despite demonstrable errors in other portions, it has the value of a manuscript for v.