Venus, Varro and the vates: toward the limits of etymologizing interpretation

Abstract

This paper began life a long time ago as a kind of response to Robert Maltby's Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (Leeds 1991); it took shape on the conference circuit at the same time that James J.O'Hara's True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymological Wordplay (Ann Arbor 1996) was nearing completion. 1 It had an even more remote reference point in a working out of some unresolved feelings about Frederick Ahl's Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca 1985). A combination of new department chairing and new parenthood caused the paper to miss its appointment with a publisher back in 1998. It then sank into the dormancy from which I am here rescuing it, encouraged on the one hand by a number of friends and colleagues who have read and commented on privately-circulated copies over the years, and on the other by the hoped-for hospitality of an electronic journal to work of a slightly irregular kind. It may now appear just in time to mark the next major event in Latin etymologizing interpretation: John Henderson's Isidore's Creation: Truth from Words (Cambridge) will be published soon. Although I have updated individual references where appropriate, I have not tried to recast the argument in any major way, nor to offer full bibliographical back-up for every passing generalization: the paper is intentionally presented as what it is, a lightly annotated lecture and a mid-1990s period-piece.Venus, Varro and the vates: toward the limits of etymologizing interpretation the bondage of love is a quite literal statement of the agency of Venus. Let the late-Republican polymath and grammarian Varro explain, in a passage of his De Lingua Latina which describes how heat and moisture are embodied, respectively, in the male and the female reproductive forces (LL 5.61-2):… et mas ignis, quod ibi semen, aqua femina, quod fetus ab eius humore, et horum vinctionis vis Venus. Hinc comicus: "huic victrix Venus, videsne haec?" Non quod vincere velit Venus, sed vincire. ipsa Victoria ab eo quod superati vinciuntur 3 … and fire is male, which the semen is in the other case, and water is female, because the embryo develops from her moisture, and the force that brings their vinctio "binding" is Venus "Love'. Hence the comic poet says, "huic Venus victrix …"not because Venus wishes (or signifies) vincere "to conquer", but vincire "to bind'. Victory herself is named from the fact that the overpowered vinciuntur "are bound'.In a footnote here, the Loeb editor Roland Kent, on behalf of mid 20 th century classical linguistics, offers a brisk reprimand to Varro for the high-handedness of these etymological explanations: 4 'Apparently Venus is said to be the basis of the word vinctio; wrong.' No meeting of minds across the millennia here, evidently. But Varro's words make a good deal of sense in a Roman poetic context. Consider Propertius again, four poems earlier in Book 3, resolving to take the time to negotiate a kind of lovers" contract before going to bed with his girl (3.20.19-23):...

Tarpeia the Vestal

“…See also Miller 2011: 347–50 for Propertius’ emphasis on amor , clearly inappropriate for a virgin priestess. We cannot use Propertius to reconstruct lost bits of Varro; see Hinds 2006: 13, ‘[Propertius] do[es] not so much reproduce Varro's patterns of explanation as rather usurp them’; Spencer 2019: 135–7 on Varro's comparative optimism about Rome's past. See Wiseman 1979: 37–8 for examples of ‘dramatic irony’ similar to Propertius’ tale; for example, that L. Metellus, who saved the Palladium, was also punished with blindness for seeing the Palladium.…”

“…5.41: ‘The area now called “Rome” was once called “Septimontium” [i.e. “Seven Hills”] from the number of the hills which the city embraced within its walls’ (‘ubi nunc est Roma, Septimontium nominatum ab tot montibus quos postea urbs muris comprehendit’); see, for example, Palombi 2006: 22–9; Vout 2012; de Souza 2017 on the concept of Roman hills; Hinds 2006: 38–48; Spencer 2011: 73; 2019: 135–7; MacDonald 2016: 209–10 on this passage. Varro will continue to discuss the various Roman hills (there are in fact more than seven) until §56, providing names that are explicitly historicised to (usually) the era of Romulus.…”

Play on the Proper Names of Individuals in the Catullan Corpus: Wordplay, the Iambic Tradition, and the Late Republican Culture of Public Abuse

“… 9 Michalopoulos 1996, a wonderful study of etymologizing wordplay on proper names in Catullus, is nevertheless an example of what Hinds 2006: 13, labels the ‘dominant aestheticizing tendency in Roman literary studies’.…”

“… 38 For ‘speaking names’ used in literary texts in Latin, see Hijmans 1978, and on etymologizing play in Latin literature, see (e.g.) Ahl 1985; Cairns 1996; Michalopoulos 1999; Hinds 2006 (the last of which contain much further bibliography).…”

Catullus 61: Epithalamium and Comparison

“…3.62, with other examples in Maltby (1991) s.v. ; discussion of a wide range of poetic examples in Hinds (2006) 183–8.…”