As the subtitle makes clear, this collection of papers, which also serves as a festschrift for R.A. Kaster, aims to commemorate and celebrate his book Guardians of Language, first published in 1988. Although Kaster is rightly celebrated for his many contributions to Latin textual and literary studies, Guardians of Language is a fitting focus for a collaborative volume. It is still possible to come across the view that Roman grammarians are largely unreflective transmitters or corrupters of Greek grammatical thought, useful for their access to and citations from now lost Latin texts, and perhaps occasionally giving a linguistic nugget for the historian of the Latin language, but little worth studying on their own terms. Kaster’s careful collection and analysis of the names and careers of grammarians clarified the position and function of the grammarian in ancient society, and has been followed by increased attention to what the grammarians were doing and what they thought they were doing.
The volume under review is a fitting tribute to Kaster and to the impact of Guardians of Language. The papers together are impressive in their range and stimulating in their approach and include contributions from leading scholars in the discipline. It is especially pleasing to note in these papers the gradual demise of the view that ancient grammarians are either imperfect forerunners to modern linguistic theory or well-meaning but rather dim undergraduates, to be congratulated on their rare successes amid generally disappointing work. Even so, there are still some traces of this earlier attitude. Thus, in a generally excellent discussion of Consentius’ views on language variation and change, including observations on the grammarian’s own linguistic usage, by T. Mari, the most recent editor of De barbarismis et metaplasmis, we find statements such as ‘Consentius does a better job of discussing geographic variation’ (p. 107). T. Denecker’s comprehensive survey of the Roman grammarians’ use and discussions of the dual, a prominent example of a category in Greek but not Latin grammar, is also not above updating the grammarians by rephrasing their arguments with modern terminology (p. 135).
In contrast, most of the papers in the volume show the virtues of treating Latin grammatical work on its own terms. I found particularly rewarding two papers that take a fresh look at metaphors employed by Roman writers on language: Gitner on the Roman conception of foreign words acquiring citizenship in Latin, used where modern writers speak of ‘loan vocabulary’, and A. Zanker on Varro’s use of the metaphor of roots, trees and planting when applied to words. Zanker demonstrates, both through sketch drawings and through comparison with Varro’s agricultural works, the ways in which the root metaphor was used by Varro, which do not correspond to the conception of lexical roots in modern linguistic thought. This chapter can be profitably read with W. de Melo’s discussion of Sabine words in Varro, which includes a number of interesting observations on the often complicated interchange of vocabulary between Latin and other languages of ancient Italy. It is worth noting that de Melo may be too hasty to conclude that Latin idus cannot be a borrowing of what Varro gives as the Etruscan word for ‘ides’, itus, because Etruscan has t and Latin d (p. 42). Latin speakers sometimes heard what is represented by the letter <t> in between two vowels in Etruscan as equivalent to their d, as seen by the writing of Tidi in the Latin script for the Etruscan name titi in an inscription from Chiusi (CIL 11.2457).
The title of J. Zetzel’s contribution, ‘Counterfeit and Coinage: Gresham’s Law and the Grammarian’, undersells the riches within it. Zetzel uses ample citations from guardians and others to explore how the need for rules for the grammatical instruction of the young was in tension with the richness of expression within key Latin texts, and hence the grammarian came to be seen as the enemy to the full range and expression of Latin. A similar point is made, with equal elegance and erudition but from very different source-material, by L. Holford-Strevens, in a contribution looking at changing attitudes towards grammarians between Gellius and Macrobius.
K. Volk and A. Zago consider not attitudes towards grammarians, but the attitudes of grammarians towards the past. Volk focuses on Varro, arguing against a common view of him as a reactionary conservative devoted to the past for its own sake. Zago, who recently edited the Prologue to Pompeius’ Commentum using fresh manuscript evidence, writes on the collocation of antiquus with squalidus used by Pompeius to describe the grammatical rules of Caesar. Other topics addressed in the volume include B. Rochette on Diomedes’ use of Greek in his Ars grammatica; R. Ferri on the use of grammatical theory in Roman legal texts; and the detailed discussion of the annotations in four different hands of a papyrus text of Juvenal from Egypt by A. Garcea and M.C. Scappaticcio.
The volume closes fittingly with a charming (and characteristically modest) short memoir by Kaster on how he came to write Guardians of Language, followed by nine pages of prosopographical addenda to the catalogue of grammarians in that work. There is a general index and an index of passages cited, which will be especially useful given the wide range of references of many of the contributions. Although I spotted a couple of very minor typos, there is nothing that will detract from the pleasure of reading this volume.
