Movement and the Linguistic Turn: Reading Varro’s 'de Lingua Latina'
(2011) in R. Laurence and D. J. Newsome (eds.) Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 57-80. ISBN 9780199583126.
[from Chapter intro.]
The late Republican polymath Varro set his second triad of ‘books’ on the Latin language... more
[from Chapter intro.]
The late Republican polymath Varro set his second triad of ‘books’ on the Latin language (De Lingua Latina) the task of exploring the semiotic relationship between time, space, and movement in the development of Latin. These books explore how langue (the conventions and rules of language) relates to parole (the speech act) over time.
This chapter identifies and analyses key passages from this section of Varro’s study in order to show how the discourse of movement, and in particular urban movement, was an important feature in elite communication and helped to shape a particular view of what society and citizenship meant, in Varro’s circle at least. Varro’s De Lingua Latina offers a unique opportunity. It shows how one influential individual, acutely aware of the tangible changes taking place in the city and the res publica on a day-to- day level and also alert to the radical breaches occurring in the cultural traditions that defined elite identity, perceived a connection between linguistics, language in use, and the acts that constituted citizenship.
For this reason, this chapter also investigates how the terminology of movement intersects with the terminology of memory. Ultimately, this chapter proposes that Varro makes language, identity, and action into a nexus whereby thinking about citizenship took movement as a key epistemological tool, and made the right kind of movement a sine qua non for well-informed and appropriate participation in the discourse of public life.