Sub uoce: The text de uerborum significatu and the hidden intellectual labor of lexicography

Stephen Blair, University College London

Knowledge production and other forms of intellectual labor by enslaved and formerly enslaved scholars in the Roman world were frequently submerged in the authorial personality of an enslaving aristocrat. By a process of “masterly extensibility” (Reay), the enslaved intellectual becomes a prosthetic appendage of the enslaver’s thought and work. Calvisius Sabinus, wanting to seem erudite, bought a large retinue of enslaved grammarians and philologists: “he thought that whatever anyone in his household knew, he knew himself” (Sen. epist. 27.8). Through a “fiction of voluntarism” (Geue), expropriations and erasures of freedpersons’ intellectual labor were represented as friendly collaborations. So the historiography of Sallust and Asinius Pollio was based on notes compiled by the freedman Ateius Philologus (Suet. gramm. 10); the once-enslaved Parthenius conducted mythographic research for Gallus’ learned poetry (amat. narr. 174r); Ciceronian polish depended on Tiro’s work as editor (Howley 2011).

Despite such patterns in the ancient evidence, scholars are slow to recover the traces  of subaltern intellectual activity obscured by processes of Roman “epistemicide” (Padilla  Peralta 2020), whether misled by Romantic fictions of individual authorship (Moss 2023) or by a prejudicial distinction between subaltern “schoolteachers” and elite “scholars” (Zetzel). Only recently has research begun to emphasize the contributions of subaltern intellectuals to the formation of texts (Moss 2021, 2023; Howley 2020) and to consider how the material  conditions under which marginalized intellectuals produced knowledge in the Roman world  shaped the body of knowledge itself (Padilla Peralta 2022, Uden).

Little attention is paid, from this perspective, to the lexicon de uerborum significatu by the Augustan antiquarian M. Verrius Flaccus—arguably the most significant and most  copiously preserved work of Roman erudition authored by a formerly enslaved person. Above all, Verrius (with his epitomators Festus and Paulus) has attracted the attention of source critics because of the tantalizing irregularities the lexicon presents (Reitzenstein; Kriegshammer; Strzelecki; Bona 1964, 1982, 1992; Pieroni; Scappaticcio). The alphabetization is not uniform; lemmata on related subjects sometimes begin with a telltale formula; some sources are only quoted in segments where the lemmata are least rigorously alphabetized, etc. It was once thought that Festus himself had added to Verrius in the process of epitomizing (Müller), but it is now almost universally accepted that Verrius left the text unfinished, dying before he could smooth out the kinks.

Rather, I argue that the evidence for scholarly knowledge production in Verrius’ day  unambiguously points to a collaborative project within a massive workshop of enslaved or  low-status scholars, secretaries, and amanuenses. The unevennesses visible in the lemmata do  not reflect different stages in Verrius’ revision, but multiple specialized hands engaged in a  project of intellectual Fordism. In the case of de uerborum significatu, the tools of Quellenkritik can be applied to the novel purpose of identifying individual signatures among its anonymous contributors. This helps to paint a picture of a new post-Republican episteme  (Wallace-Hadrill), in which enslaved and low-status scholars can be seen dismantling the “pyramidic” (Rawson) structures of Varronian systematic erudition and reorganizing knowledge along new lines.

Bibliography

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——— (1982), Opusculum Festinum, Pavia.

——— (1992), “Il ‘de uerborum significatu’ di Festo e le XII Tavole, 1. Gli ‘auctores’ di  Verrio Flacco”, Quaderni Camerti di Studi Romanistici 20: 211–28.

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——— (2023), ‘The Secretary: Enslaved Workers, Stenography, and the Production of Early  Christian Literature’, Journal of Theological Studies, NS, 74: 20–56.

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