7.42: OLLI VALET DICTVM ILLI

In 7.42, Varro quotes an Ennian hexameter (Enn. Ann. 113 Skutsch) containing the form olli, ‘to him’. This old dative requires a gloss, and naturally Varro provides one. In F, it reads as follows:

An appositive phrase with ab is unproblematic. We can find a parallel in the following example (7.67):

However, the phrase ualet dictum, provisionally translated as ‘stands for the word’, is unsatisfactory. Varro has a variety of expressions for ‘word’ – uerbum, uox, nomen, and uocabulum – all used with slightly different connotations, but dictum is not among them.Footnote ²Dictum is attested as a noun in 6.61, yet not as ‘word’ in the linguistic sense, but as ‘witty word/saying’ in mime.Footnote ³ Taking dictum in our passage as a participle rather than a noun would be equally difficult; we would have to translate ualet dictum illi as ‘means (as if) illi was said’.

Despite these problems, all editions leave the phrase unaltered.Footnote ⁴ Kent, whose translation is normally helpful and convincing, renders ualet dictum illi as ‘is the same as illi’, which glosses over the difficulty without solving it. Under these circumstances, it may be better to leave dictum aside for the moment and to concentrate on ualet. Valere is used in four different ways in the De lingua Latina:

1. (a) as a participle functioning like an adjective; in this usage it means ‘strong’, is not combined with any complements, and is rare (9.11; in 7.74 we are dealing with a quotation);

2. (b) as a finite verb with the meaning ‘to have monetary value’; in this usage it does take a complement, but is attested only twice (5.173, 5.174);

3. (c) as a finite verb, combined with idem, translatable as ‘to have the same meaning’; this occurs three times (6.58, 6.81, 9.87);

4. (d) as a finite verb or an infinitive, used for glosses of the type x ualet y ‘x means y’; this occurs eight times, as in the following example:

   Creui ualet constitui. (7.98)

   Creui, ‘I have decided’, means constitui, ‘I have established’.Footnote ⁵

Only the linguistic meanings (c) and (d) are relevant here, and, although the material is limited, it is telling that they are never combined with a noun meaning ‘word’ or with a participle. What can be done? The Codex Vindobonensis LXIII (fifteenth century, abbreviated to V) and the Codex Basiliensis F.IV.13 (fifteenth or sixteenth century, abbreviated to p) leave out ualet altogether, whether through negligence or on purpose. This seems to improve the situation, but unfortunately only at first sight: the normal order for ‘x used to be called y’ in Varro is x dictum y, not the other way round, so we should expect illi dictum olli.

Thus, it is probably dictum rather than ualet that needs to be removed from the phrase; olli ualet illi , ‘olli means illi’, is in keeping with Varro's diction. However, it is hard to see how dictum could have intruded into our text, as it is not a gloss. The most elegant solution for 7.42 does not consist of a deletion, but of a transposition of dictum and illi:

This transposition restores the proper usage of ualere and leads to an appositive phrase with dictum ab, for which there are several parallels in Books 5–10.Footnote ⁶

7.53: ‘HE HAD SLIPPERS ON HIS SHEEP’

In 7.53, Varro transmits a verse from Naevius because of two words, diabathrum (‘slipper’) and epicrocum (‘saffron robe’). In F, the text reads as follows:

Varro does not gloss these words, presumably because they would be familiar to his readers. While he normally explains the etymological origins of native words, he typically makes less of an effort in the case of loanwords and merely says what languages they come from. As he follows the same procedure here, the copyist would know that he was dealing with Greek words, but, given the mess that he normally makes of anything written in Greek letters,Footnote ⁸ it is a safe assumption that he understood little or no Greek. Thus, since he probably did not know that diabathra are a type of shoes, he would not realize that one does not put them on sheep. A mistake of this sort was unlikely to persist for too long, and Rholandellus corrected in pecudibus, ‘on his sheep’, to in pedibus, ‘on his feet’.Footnote ⁹

With this minor correction in place, the verse has made it into all editions of Varro and Naevius.Footnote ¹⁰ However, it does not scan. Ribbeck is the only editor who makes his scansion explicit and divides the line, a trochaic septenarius, into feet:

With this scansion, pedibus violates the law of Hermann and Lachmann, which states that a disyllabic element (here –dibus) may not be formed from a word beginning before the element and ending together with it. Violations of this law are extremely rare and occur mainly at the beginning of a line or after the main caesura, places in which other laws are similarly observed less strictly.Footnote ¹¹

Ribbeck clearly had misgivings about his scansion and as an alternative proposed dividing pedibus as pedi|bus. While this does not violate the law of Hermann and Lachmann, it now leaves us with –bus as a heavy syllable. As parallels he quotes Plaut. Mostell. 402 and Titin. com. 45, both trochaic septenarii; the former ends in aedibus habitet licet and the latter in aedibus absterrui. In both cases –bus counts as a heavy syllable. However, the situation is completely different in these proposed parallels: –bus stands in the eleventh position in a trochaic septenarius, which can be treated as a virtual line end, a ‘locus Jacobsohnianus’; not only can we find hiatus quite commonly here, but we can also get a light syllable instead of a heavy one.Footnote ¹² On the other hand, in the Naevian line there are no excuses for letting pedibus violate the law of Hermann and Lachmann or for counting its final syllable as heavy.

Previous attempts at emendation have been rather drastic. Bergk suggested deleting habebat, regarding it as a gloss.Footnote ¹³ This would yield an iambic senarius, but the syntax would be obscured: diabathra cannot depend on erat amictus, and understanding erant with diabathra would lead to a clumsy change of subject. An anonymous scholar quoted by Ribbeck suggests replacing habebat with gerebat, which would yield a correct septenarius; habebat would be a gloss that replaced gerebat. While gerere can indeed be used of footwear,Footnote ¹⁴ and while this usage is admittedly rare, gerere in general is such a common verb and would be so readily understood here that I find it hard to see why it should have been glossed.

A different solution needs to be found. I propose a simple transposition, after which the line scans as a perfect septenarius:

Two mistakes in one sentence is not an unusual count for our scribe. But, despite the plethora of mistakes we find in F, it is on occasion worthwhile to ask why individual errors exist. Pecudibus instead of pedibus is certainly strange enough to warrant this question, as pes is not a rare or unusual word naturally prone to corruption. So what happened?

The genesis of the corruption is quite straightforward. An earlier copyist accidentally transposed the words, yielding diabathra in pedibus habebat. The corrector who went through the text afterwards spotted the mistake, marked diabathra and in pedibus, and wrote c' over pedibus (or possibly in the margin). C' is an abbreviation for conuerte (‘transpose/change’),Footnote ¹⁵ but either the scribe of F or someone before him did not understand the meaning of the verse, misread the correction mark as cu, and inserted these letters into pedibus.