Language and Authority in De Lingua Latina: Varro’s Guide to Being Roman by Diana Spencer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Language and Authority in De Lingua Latina: Varro’s Guide to Being Roman by Diana Spencer Joseph McAlhany Diana Spencer. Language and Authority in De Lingua Latina: Varro’s Guide to Being Roman. Wisconsin Studies in Classics. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. Pp. xxix, 387. $119.95. ISBN 978-0-299-32320-2. In this dizzying and at times exhilarating study, Spencer offers a novel reading of Varro’s De Lingua Latina intended to reveal its latent possibilities and sociopolitical implications. A writer of panache whose prose shows dashes of Hendersonian wit, Spencer subjects various passages of the LL to what she describes as “through-reading,” attentive to the text’s “associative possibilities” and “loud silences” (55). The ultimate claim is that Varro constructed the LL in a way that demands the reader follow “leaps of imagination” (78), because he intended to write far more than an etymological encyclopedia or an unwieldy meditation on Latinitas. Rather, he wished to educate his readers, the ideal of whom is Cicero, in “Romespeak,” a mode of discourse (or a “uniquely authoritative skillset,” 67) that recognizes Latin’s past roots but lays out a way forward to political consensus. The utility of Varro’s project is thus to provide a “toolkit” (a term used frequently by Spencer) for the mastery of “Romespeak,” or, as the subtitle has it, a guide to being Roman. [End Page 104] The argument is suggestive rather than convincing, and as Spencer allows, her readings at times require an acute sensitivity to when Varro avoids an “obvious and contextually relevant narrative catalyst” (85). The method shines in close readings of individual passages, and even when she might be accused of Olympian triple-jumps, it is far better that Spencer be overly daring as a corrective to earlier readings constrained by scholarly tradition, based upon Varro’s reputation as a mere Übermittler. Instead, Spencer’s Varro is a middleman of a more interesting sort, always negotiating between Rome’s linguistic past and political future, between the authority of elite oratory and poetry and the power of popular usage. While roughly following the surviving books of the LL in order, the chapters are arranged thematically to highlight the “literary and metapoetic quality of Varro’s organization” (80). Varro’s own structuring principles, from divine to human and cosmos to street-corner, are largely set aside. After a detailed outline of the LL’s surviving books (“A Roadmap for a Ruinous Text,” xi–xxix), the Introduction (3–18) gives a helpful overview of the book, reprised in a Conclusion (“Ending Up With Varro,” 248–260). After chapter 1’s admittedly imaginative and rather breezy biographical overview, teasing out Varro’s politics and his relation with Cicero, chapter 2 opens with the thesis of the book: the LL “led Varro’s audience on a journey of discourse enrichment, at the end of which all Rome-speakers could contribute actively and consciously to a consensual civic ideal” (42). The remaining chapters, each with numerous subsections, work their way through various passages of the LL. Chapter 3 analyzes etymologies associated with poetic creation and authority (e.g., fingo, cano, carmen), while chapter 4 is a proper “through-reading” of the LL on oratio, sermo, and double-sided lego, evidence for Varro’s privileging of dialogue over monologue in his development of a linguistic as well as civic “consensus model.” The remaining chapters become increasingly diffuse. Chapter 5 covers Varro’s etymological landscape of Rome, in particular the seven hills (“Sevenheights”) and the religious procession of the Argei, less an authoritative account of the city’s history than a demonstration of its fluidity. Chapter 6 traces the notions of order found in the etymologies of political and religious magistracies, while chapter 7 is a sprawling examination of “family” relations in grammatical terminology, the Trojan legend, gods, time-words, and word-pairs such as lupus/lepus and socer/macer. The final main chapter, “Varro’s Fasti,” explores in a free-form commentary the etymologies of Rome’s religious festivals. In spinning out webs of possible associations, Spencer stretches the threads of her interpretation to tenuous extremes, and clever observation often substitutes for coherent...