Varro: On the Latin Language (De Lingua Latina)

from the Antiquitates, from which Varro drew in grammatical matters, and that Verrius also depends on them—whose methods were otherwise completely different from the Varronian ones—will be taught more accurately below. Remmius Palaemon, a leader in treating Latin grammar with a new method, even if we miss certain traces of Varro in his fragments—for one could hardly say whether Varro invented or propagated the grammatical terms1 by which he agrees with him, using long-discovered ones—it is consistent that he read his books: whether the words of Suetonius (p. 217), by which we are taught that he called him a "pig"—which epithet Norden ('Antike Kunstprosa' p. 195) plausibly conjectures refers primarily to a rough style of speaking—pertain to those books or elsewhere seems uncertain. Perhaps the things which Quintilian, not without mockery, offers about Varro’s etymologies in book V (inst. or. I 6, 37; cf. test. ad 12, 6), like other things about which it has long been agreed in the same book, return to the teacher Remmius Palaemon: although Spengel, in that commentary to be used soon, p. 469, assumed that Quintilian himself read Varro. The Varronian things that Columella hands down are to be referred to the Antiquitates, and for the most part, the traces of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch are certainly to be recalled to the same source. How Valerius Probus used Varro’s books we do not know; the same must be said about Pliny: although certain testimonies of later grammarians will not be rashly recalled to either Pliny or Probus as the primary author. More certain traces are discovered in Gellius, who, that he unrolled Varro’s books himself, there is no reason to doubt: and we have more than once used the Gellian readings in correcting Varro’s words (cf. 78, 1 sqq. 190, 29; al.). The grammarians and scholiasts of the fourth and also the fifth century depend on older sources: but Priscian (p. 52, 2 sqq. = GL. III 410) or his author drew from Varro himself, as no one else preserved a larger fragment: by whose testimony the errors of the Florentine codex could more often be corrected (see p. XXIII, XXIV bis). Isidore, who mentions Varro in not a few places in his Etymologiae, transcribed most things from Servius’ commentary, and even in those places whose source lies hidden, we do not think it probable that anything was drawn from Varro himself. That Haupt (Hermae t. I p. 44) opined that Rhabanus Maurus read Varro in de computo c. 3, Spengel (praef.² p. II adn.) rightly warned that this is false, as the words are to be attributed to Priscian. The things that Osbern brings forward are partly owed to Isidore, partly to Priscian, partly to Macrobius. It is entirely certain that no one of the Middle Ages drew from Varro himself, except that in the eleventh century someone propagated the Florentine codex, and in the century after

1 Cf. L. Jeep, 'Zur Gesch. der Lehre von den Redeteilen' p. 12 sqq.