This book began life as a doctoral thesis supervised by C. Moatti and M. De Nonno. When my own dissertation met the critical eyes of a copy-editor, certain elements were considered ‘dissertationistically pedantic’. L.'s book has lost these elements of pedantry, if it ever had them, and is a pleasant read, while remaining informative. As indicated by the title, which is based on a Varronian fragment (Sat. Men. 167 Ast.), L. wants to find out what antiquarianism meant to Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 bc), and why and how he conducted his research into the Roman past.

Of Varro's 74 works in 620 short books, we now only have the three books on agriculture as well as 6 out of 25 books on the Latin language, in addition to numerous quotations and paraphrases preserved in other authors. Given this state of affairs, Varro has traditionally been approached in two ways. Some scholars have focused on the extant books, which is a safe way to proceed, but cannot give us a complete picture of the ancient polymath. Others have concentrated on the fragments, which cover a much wider range of topics, but can be problematic in other ways. In many respects, L. makes a compromise, looking at the extant works as well as the fragments, but focusing on key concepts.

A brief introduction, providing a biographical sketch of Varro as well as an overview of his most important works, is followed by five separate but connected chapters, a short conclusion and a detailed bibliography. The first chapter discusses what mos (‘custom, tradition’) means to Varro. In Top. 31 Cicero divides justice into three components: lex (‘law’), aequitas (‘fairness’) and mos, a category mediating between the other two. L. constrasts this with the two Varronian definitions of mos. The first, transmitted in Servius (ad Virg. Aen. 7.601), defines mos as common consensus of people living in the same locality, which creates a tradition over time. The second, transmitted in Macrobius (Sat. 3.8.9), adds an element of sound judgement that is required for a tradition to turn into mos. On p. 50 L. wonders why in his linguistic books Varro always speaks of consuetudo (‘usage’) rather than mos; the answer to this strikes me as rather obvious: mos is not a value-neutral term, while consuetudo is. Varro generally prefers regular paradigms over irregular ones and likes to see clear etymological and morphological connections between words, so that better usages may be more regular, more concise or clearer; but despite his occasional rhetorical flourishes and exaggerations, Varro does not consider better usages to be morally superior, which means that mos would be an odd term to use.

The second chapter describes nicely how for Varro the political crises of his times are triggered by forgetting the native traditions and values. L. points out that it was in Varro's lifetime that the Twelve Tables, the most foundational legal text dating back to the mid-fifth century bc, were no longer learned by heart at school (pp. 67–8). However, for Varro, remembering the past does not simply mean sticking to outdated customs and traditions; it means an active engagement with tradition, picking the good customs and letting the bad ones disappear. This active engagement is described with the term ruminare, which literally means ‘to chew over’, but can be used metaphorically for ‘meditating, thinking over’. L. notes that the verb inflects in the active when used in its literal meaning, but in the medio-passive when used metaphorically. I am hesitant to make much of this pattern. There are not many attestations, so that what seems like a pattern may not be one after all. And when we compare manducare, ‘to chew, to eat’, we can again find active and medio-passive inflections, but this verb has no metaphorical meanings.

The third chapter outlines how in Roman society knowledge and expertise were intimately connected with power originally, but how in the late Republic this connection dissolved, so that it was no longer the legal and religious experts who ran the state. Varro is aware that the study of the past may not lead to absolute truths and is content with approximations. We can see this particularly clearly in the etymologies, where he is often hesitant to present one etymology per word, but prefers to give potential alternatives. On one point I have to disagree with L. She argues that for Varro impositio, the naming of things and therefore the creation of new words, precedes declinatio, inflection, by a long time, because impositio happened centuries ago, while declinatio is a current phenomenon (p. 133). It is true that he believes the majority of words to go back a long way; but he is also aware that new names can still be given to people and things (8.21), so that impositio is by no means purely a thing of the past and there is no indication that he believes Latin to have had a stage without inflection.

In the fourth chapter L. draws parallels between Varro and Philo of Alexandria, the Jewish philosopher of religion who lived not much later than Varro. Building on a great deal of earlier scholarship, she shows that for Varro there are three types of religion: mythical religion, espoused by poets; philosophical religion, advanced by scholars; and traditional religion, supported by the state as a means of holding the community together. The myths are often frivolous and shameful, while the masses cannot understand the more philosophical approaches. Varro's antiquarianism is meant to help with an understanding of traditional religion and to reconcile the different strands, but this synthesis is often forced and tries to reconcile what cannot be reconciled.

The final chapter takes a more differentiated view and shows that Varro is not simply an admirer of antiquity, a laudator temporis acti, as Horace would put it. Varro believes that there is a certain cultural and moral decline, but at the same time he can appreciate the technical progress over the last centuries.

L. presents a convincing analysis of the antiquarian elements in Varro. Occasionally, more care could have been taken with the Latin and Greek quotations; for instance, on p. 29, Ter. Phorm. 454 is misquoted, and medioximus p. 59 is not a hapax legomenon, but also attested in Plaut. Cist. 512 and 611 (and later in his imitator Apuleius). But these are minor issues. What worries me more is that there is little reflection on how accurate the quotations in ancient authors are. (On this topic, see especially L. Holford-Strevens, ‘Varro in Gellius and Late Antiquity’, in D.J. Butterfield, Varro Varius: the Polymath of the Roman World [2015], pp. 143–60.) On p. 145 L. notes that Augustine, one of our main sources of the Antiquitates, may not always be impartial, which is an understatement; and on p. 57 she trusts Gellius, even though the long fragment of Book 8 of the De lingua Latina, presented as a direct quotation in NA 2.25.5–10, is no more than a pastiche that is not particularly precise. Given that much of L.'s work is based on such fragments, their accuracy should be an issue of major concern. However, despite this worry, I have enjoyed the book and have been able to learn a great deal about an aspect of Varro that I have only dared to touch on in my own work.Footnote ¹