Seneca was the first to describe the grammarian as a guardian of the Latin language, custos Latini sermonis (Ep. 95.65). Kaster, however, put this concept on the map with his 1988 Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity. This edited volume springs from a 2018 conference dedicated to the thirty-year anniversary of Guardians. It contains twelve chapters and a preface by Gitner, and Kaster᾽s charming biographical epilogue. For the young scholar it is encouraging to read Kaster᾽s narration of the twists and turns it took for Guardians to emerge.
In the preface, Gitner describes the volume᾽s focus on ‘how Roman grammarians — as well as scholars and intellectuals more broadly — described, made sense of, and sometimes resisted linguistic diversity within the Roman Republic and Empire’ (x). Unlike Kaster᾽s Guardians, which focused explicitly on Late Antiquity and grammarians, there is here a welcome expansion of scope: the timespan of this volume encompasses the late Republic, the Empire and Late Antiquity, as well as a wider range of individuals, i.e. both general scholars and intellectuals in addition to grammarians.
The twelve contributions are arranged into three parts: I. Varro (three chapters by Volk, de Melo and Zanker); II. Professional Grammarians (the longest section; five chapters by Rochette, Mari, Zago, Denecker and a joint chapter by Garcea and Scappaticcio); III. Scholars and Intellectuals (three chapters by Gitner, Holford-Strevens and Ferri). Setting the scene preceding part I is Zetzel᾽s introductory chapter ‘Counterfeit and Coinage: Gresham᾽s Law and the Grammarian’.
The pride of place afforded to Varro is understandable, given the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in him. Volk, in ‘Varro the Conservative?’, looks at Varro in the round, taking his wider intellectual opinions into account in her readable assessment of Varro᾽s ideas about language and language change which are characterised by curiosity rather than conservativeness. De Melo᾽s chapter, ‘Varro and the Sabine Language in the De Lingua Latina’, is also valuable and informative. Here, de Melo systematically explores the position of the Sabine language in Varro᾽s DLL and shows that later scholarship has greatly exaggerated Varro᾽s zeal for Sabine. There is a brief exploration of how Varro envisaged Sabine and its relationship to Latin; it would be interesting to see this explored in greater detail.
It is, however, somewhat disappointing that no other Republican figure makes it into the focus of the volume. It may have been felt that Cicero has been covered well enough by Adams, The Regional Diversification of Latin (2007: 123–43), but Cicero᾽s otherwise towering presence when it comes to Latin metalinguistic commentary makes the absence here all too noticeable.
Several chapters provide fascinating ancient perspectives on linguistic diversity. Mari᾽s chapter, ‘The Grammarian Consentius on Language Change and Variation’, focuses on the fourth-/fifth-century grammarian Consentius. His discussions of barbarisms (faults found within one word in prose) and metaplasms (poetic licences within a single word) are interesting indications of ongoing variation and change, which Consentius has sometimes helpfully ascribed to certain groups or regions. The hypocrisy often inherent to prescriptive grammar becomes apparent when Consentius᾽ own language is examined; from the perspective of classical grammar, Consentius᾽ language contains several late features. Ferri᾽s chapter, ‘Language Variation and Grammatical Theory in Roman Legal Texts’, provides a novel perspective on linguistic diversity and idiosyncratic uses of language by looking at legal scholars commenting on the language of Roman law texts. Linguistic diversity can, naturally, cause difficulties with legal interpretations. For instance, Ferri highlights a comment, in which Pomponius explains that in wills, phrases similar to si quid filio meo acciderit (‘if anything happens to my son’) refer not to minor accidents, but stand as an informal euphemism for death. Our attention is also drawn to a (surprisingly modern) discussion about the inclusiveness of masculine nouns and whether the masculine gender is always inclusive of the feminine; interestingly, legal resolutions show that this was not always felt to be the case.
The importance and influence of Guardians is duly felt throughout. Several chapters develop aspects of it further. Gitner, in ‘Civic Metaphors for Lexical Borrowing from Seneca to Gellius’, explores an intriguing metaphor only briefly mentioned in Guardians: that of loanwords being compared to citizens. This metaphor has received some interest in twenty-first-century scholarship — see also Elder, JRS 112 (2022), 79–94 on the same topic. Zago examines the North African grammarian and schoolteacher Pompeius in ‘Antiquus = squalidus? Pompeius᾽ Attitude toward Antiquity’. She takes her starting point from the end of a previously unknown missing part of the prologue that she found and published (Zago in A. Chahoud, M. Rosellini and E. Spangenberg Yanes (eds.), Latin Grammarians Forum 2018–2019 (2019), 141–92). In this part of the prologue, Pompeius indicates that Caesar᾽s grammatical rules are squalidae and antiquae, and thus no longer in use. An examination of squalidus and related words (squalor, squaleo and squalidius) indicates that Pompeius really does mean that Caesar᾽s rules are rough-and-ready. This turns out to describe Pompeius᾽ attitudes relatively well as he is, somewhat surprisingly, not afraid to dismiss certain precepts of the previous grammatical tradition. This newly discovered text nicely marries with Kaster᾽s earlier conclusions, that Pompeius᾽ firm rules can even outweigh the auctoritas of the maiores. Garcea and Scappaticcio discuss a fascinating Juvenal fragment from Antinoöpolis, containing Satires 7.149–98 with extensive annotations in both Greek and Latin, through which we get a glimpse of the ancient classroom and the social environment of education in antiquity.
Generally the editing is careful and consistent. The usage of technical vocabulary is clear. However, there is some inconsistency as to whether shorter quotations of Latin are left in the original, though longer passages are consistently translated. One also finds the usual quotations of untranslated German and French intervowen into some authors᾽ discussions. Apart from the figures accompanying Zanker᾽s chapter which have sometimes been carried over onto the next page, the overall presentation is excellent, with very few typos or mistakes. Cross-references are largely thorough, although occasionally missing. This stretches to the index — e.g. it only refers to a brief mention of the 4th conj. in -ibam in n. 11 on page 104, but this is also discussed by de Melo (34–5).
Unfortunately, the thematic focus highlighted in the title does not quite stretch to all chapters; at times the volume has instead the air of a Festschrift, due to the heterogeneity of the chapters. This is not inherently negative, but those interested in linguistic diversity à la J. N. Adams may have limited interest in some chapters. Zanker᾽s chapter on ‘Varro᾽s Word Trees’ is, for instance, only marginally related to the theme; while there is a short discussion of how fields and roots are used as metaphors describing related words across languages, the paper as a whole tells us little about linguistic diversity.
However, in sum, there is a wealth of material here which should appeal to scholars working on the Latin grammatical tradition in its widest sense, or raise the interest of those unfamiliar with it.
