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TWO TEXTUAL PROBLEMS IN BOOK 7 OF VARRO'S DE LINGVA LATINA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2015

Wolfgang D.C. De Melo*
Affiliation:
Wolfson College, Oxford

Extract

In this contribution I wish to tackle two corruptions in Book 7 of Varro's De lingua Latina that have hitherto gone unnoticed or been corrected inadequately.

Type
Shorter Notes
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2015 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Philipp Brandenburg and an anonymous referee for some very helpful comments on this piece.

References

1 Thus also Reynolds, L.D. (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), 430–1Google Scholar.

2 For uerbum vs. uox, see Taylor, D.J., Declinatio: A Study of the Linguistic Theory of Marcus Terentius Varro (Amsterdam, 1974), 119–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Verbum is used in 9.53 of nouns; uox, in 8.76, of adjectives and adverbs; nomen, in 8.5, of all words that can be inflected; and uocabulum, in 9.50, of nouns. These four words can be used non-specifically of various word classes, but also more specifically as technical terms, in which case they are no longer interchangeable.

3 Hinc [sc. ab dicendo] appellatum dictum in mimo ac dictiosus, ‘from this [sc. dicere “to speak”] dictum, “witty word”, and dictiosus, “witty”, were named in mime’.

4 Among more recent works, see e.g. Müller, K.O., M. Terenti Varronis De lingua Latina librorum quae supersunt (Leipzig, 1833)Google Scholar; Spengel, L. and Spengel, A., M. Terenti Varronis De lingua Latina libri (Berlin, 1885)Google Scholar; Götz, G. and Schöll, F., M. Terenti Varronis De lingua Latina quae supersunt (Leipzig, 1910)Google Scholar; Kent, R.G., Varro: On the Latin Language: with an English Translation (Cambridge, MA and London, 1938)Google Scholar.

5 The other tokens are in 5.171, 6.60, 6.63, 7.14, 7.69, 7.99 and 9.54.

6 See 5.159, 5.165, 5.177, 6.11, 7.31, 7.85; the token in 5.129 is ambiguous.

7 The epicrocum was normally a garment for women, but amictus is masculine. Non. p. 498 Lindsay informs us that, according to Varro, the epicrocum could also be worn by men.

8 This is particularly obvious in Ling. 6.96, where Varro discusses Latin words supposedly taken from Greek. The Greek words in F are partly written in the Latin alphabet, partly in the Greek; capitals and lower-case letters are used almost randomly; various words are mangled to such an extent that it is only the Latin equivalents that allow us to restore the Greek words.

9 Rholandellus, F., M.T. Varronis De lingua Latina (Venice, 1475)Google Scholar.

10 For Varro, see again the editions in n. 4. For Naevius see e.g. Ribbeck, O., Scaenicae Romanorum poesis fragmenta, I: Tragicorum Romanorum fragmenta (Leipzig, 1897 3; same text in earlier editions)Google Scholar; Warmington, E.H., Remains of Old Latin, Vol. 2: Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Pacuvius and Accius (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1936)Google Scholar; Marmorale, E.V., Naevius poeta: introduzione bibliografica, testo dei frammenti e commento (Florence, 1959)Google Scholar; Schauer, M., Tragicorum Romanorum fragmenta, I: Livius Andronicus; Naevius; Tragici minores; Fragmenta adespota (Göttingen, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For details, see Questa, C., La metrica di Plauto e di Terenzio (Urbino, 2007), 213–44Google Scholar.

12 Details in ibid., 279–99.

13 Bergk, T., ‘Kritische Bemerkungen zu den römischen Tragikern’, Philologus 33 (1874), 249313CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 281, conveniently reprinted in Bergk, T., Kleine philologische Schriften von Theodor Bergk: herausgegeben von Rudolf Peppmüller, vol. 1: Zur römischen Literatur (Halle, 1884)Google Scholar.

14 Cf. Catull. 61. 9.

15 For this abbreviation and its use in F, see Flobert, P. (ed.), Varron: La langue latine, livre VI. Texte établi, traduit et commenté (Paris, 1985), 67Google Scholar.

16 A particularly convincing example of emendation by transposition is Dahlmann, H., ‘Zu Varro, De lingua Latina VI 12’, RhM 132 (1989), 307–13Google Scholar.