Movement and the Linguistic Turn: Reading Varro’s 'de Lingua Latina'

(2011) in R. Laurence and D. J. Newsome (eds.) Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 57-80. ISBN 9780199583126.

[from Chapter intro.]
The late Republican polymath Varro set his second triad of ‘books’ on the Latin language (De Lingua Latina) the task of exploring the semiotic relationship between time, space, and movement in the development of Latin. These books explore how langue (the conventions and rules of language) relates to parole (the speech act) over time.

This chapter identifies and analyses key passages from this section of Varro’s study in order to show how the discourse of movement, and in particular urban movement, was an important feature in elite communication and helped to shape a particular view of what society and citizenship meant, in Varro’s circle at least. Varro’s De Lingua Latina offers a unique opportunity. It shows how one influential individual, acutely aware of the tangible changes taking place in the city and the res publica on a day-to- day level and also alert to the radical breaches occurring in the cultural traditions that defined elite identity, perceived a connection between linguistics, language in use, and the acts that constituted citizenship.

For this reason, this chapter also investigates how the terminology of movement intersects with the terminology of memory. Ultimately, this chapter proposes that Varro makes language, identity, and action into a nexus whereby thinking about citizenship took movement as a key epistemological tool, and made the right kind of movement a sine qua non for well-informed and appropriate participation in the discourse of public life.

῾Ρωμαίζω… ergo sum: Becoming Roman in Varro’s de Lingua Latina

(2011) in M. Bommas (ed.) Cultural Memory and Identity in Ancient Societies (London: Continuum), 43-60. ISBN 9781441120502

This chapter investigates how ‘cultural memory’ enriches understanding of ancient Rome. It focuses on de Lingua Latina (mid-40s BC), the (now mostly lost) work on Latin written by the politico and author Marcus Terentius Varro (ca. 116-27 BC), and explores this linguistic study’s packaging of memory, monuments and sites in a mashup with phenomenology and semantics to give a new depth of meaning and vitality to core citizen discourse.i Only a small portion of de Lingua Latina survives reasonably intact—Books 5-10, plus some fragments, out of an original twenty-five book scheme—and in this chapter we shall primarily be looking at some material from Books 5 and 6 (that is, from the second half of the six-book unit, 2-7), dealing with the origins and applications of words, the relationship between place-words, their effect on placial entities (that is, entities intimately connected to a sense of place), and the vocabulary and semiotics of time.

Horace and the con/straints of translation

(2011), in S. McElduff and E. Sciarrino (eds.) Complicating the History of Western Translation (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing), 101-116. ISBN 9781905763306.

At the heart of this volume is the cultural and linguistic multivocality of the ancient Mediterranean. At Rome, the political and ideological stresses of first century BCE made choice of language, and choice of discourse within language, into far more than a matter of personal taste (as noted by Cicero, for example, at de Oratore 1.35). For the litterateurs of the late Republic and early Principate, composing in Latin meant developing new linguistic registers and modes of self-expression which were always and inevitably read against an overwhelmingly Greek canon and its genres.

To participate in the project of creating Latin verse in particular was to confront a dilemma: to be distinctive and to accrue cultural capital meant tackling the acknowledged doyens—from Homer to Theocritus onwards, Greek voices controlled the centre—and beating them at their own game. But in a world where reading was a minority, élite activity, this also meant composing for an audience whose education had familiarised them intimately and structurally with the texts at the heart of this struggle. Hence, these poets wrote for audiences for whom the educational system made allusivity part of the process of composition and reception. Not just versed in the canon, their horizons of expectations drew Greek texts and epistemologies into the frame even when direct translation was not at issue.

To escape from the margins, or to redefine the centre and locate it at Rome, is a project that finds its way through most of the extant cultural production of this era, and in one poet in particular, Horace, we find it informing almost every aspect of his verse. This essay is particularly interested in translation and topographic appropriation as a feature of Horace’s verse, and asks how Horace addresses the issues of performance context and site-specific qualities that characterised Greek lyric verse, and how he reinvents them for an audience alert to the linguistic and scenographic shift.

Motifs from and echoes of these authors flicker more or less strongly throughout Horace’s verse. Eschewing word-for-word translation these allusions parade a poet at work in a milieu in which direct translation (replicating one text as fully and closely as possible in the language of another) spoilt the intertextual game. Instead, Horace’s success suggests, burying fragments of the target texts of the Greek canon in a self-consciously new lyric idiom transformed them from looming works of art into raw materials for a new Latin agenda.

'You Should Never Meet Your Heroes...': Growing Up with Alexander, the Valerius Maximus Way

(2010), in E. Carney and D. Ogden (eds.) Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and Son, Lives and Afterlives (New York, NY: Oxford University Press), 175-91. ISBN 9780199738151 (hbk).

Roman Alexanders: Epistemology and Identity

(2009), in W. Heckel and L. Tritle (eds.) Alexander the Great: A New History (Chichester: Blackwell), 251-74. ISBN 9781405130810 (hbk); 9781405130820 (pbk).

Singing in the garden: Statius’ plein air lyric (after Horace)

(2008), in J. Blevins (ed.) Dialogism and Lyric Self-Fashioning: Bakhtin and the Voices of a Genre (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press), 66-83. ISBN 9781575911205.

Rome at a gallop: Livy, on not gazing, jumping or toppling into the void

(2007), in D. H. J. Larmour and D. Spencer (eds.) The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory (Oxford: OUP), 61-101

Roma, recepta: A Topography of the Imagination

(2007), with D. H. J. Larmour, in D. H. J. Larmour and D. Spencer (eds.) The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory (Oxford: OUP), 1-60

Horace’s garden thoughts: Rural retreats and the urban imagination

(2006), in R. M. Rosen and I. Sluiter (eds.) City, Countryside, and the Spatial Organization of Value in Classical Antiquity (Leiden: Brill), 239-74. ISBN 9004150439

‘Good men who have skill in speaking': performing advice in Rome

(2006), with E. Theodorakopoulos, in D. Spencer and E. Theodorakopoulos (eds.) Advice and its Rhetoric in Greece and Rome (Bari: Levante), 1-29

Telling it like it is…: Seneca, Alexander and the dynamics of epistolary advice

(2006), in D. Spencer and E. Theodorakopoulos (eds.) Advice and its Rhetoric in Greece and Rome (Bari: Levante), 79-104

Lucan’s Follies: Memory and ruin in a civil war landscape

(2005) Greece and Rome. 52.1: 46-69

Perspective and Poetics in Curtius’ Gorgeous East

(2005) Acta Classica 48: 121-40

Horace and the Company of Kings: Art and Artfulness in Epistle 2.1

(2003) Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici. 51.2: 135-60

Propertius, Hercules, and the Dynamics of Roman Mythic Space in Elegy 4.9

(2001), Arethusa 34.3: 259-84