As part of a bigger project to investigate the history and features of Roman culture, Varro set out to study the Latin language in all its components: where its vocabulary came from, and what such derivation revealed about the history of Latin speakers; how its words were arranged into classes based on their morphological features, and to what extent this arrangement was rationally motivated and self-consistent; and how various people used language differently, some employing distinct sections of its lexicon depending on their backgrounds or professions, others bending grammatical rules either out of ignorance or for literary purposes.

My thesis focuses on some of the main subjects explored in Varro’s linguistic writings: “nature” as a criterion for Latinitas; the notion of “kinship” in language; etymology (both the theories underpinning it and the methods used to reconstruct the origin of a word); analogy and anomaly (notoriously the focal points of an ancient controversy and a vexata quaestio in Varronian scholarship). For each of these subjects, I inquire into how Varro engaged with the scholarship produced before him, what principles and methods he absorbed, and how he re-worked previous material to make it suitable for his own goals and readership. I use my findings to piece together a portrait of Varro as a scholar who had extensive knowledge of previous treatments of the subjects he tackled and drew on a multitude of sources, combining philosophical, literary critical, philological, and historical-antiquarian influences. I also highlight how Varro’s production was aimed at contributing to the conversations ongoing in cultural circles in his own time, in which he was actively involved.