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

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.