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Sextus Pompeius Festus

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Sextus Pompeius Festus, usually known simply as Festus, was a Roman grammarian who probably flourished in the later 2nd century AD, perhaps at Narbo (Narbonne) in Gaul.

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Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome

In modern historiography, Ancient Rome refers to Roman civilisation from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom, Roman Republic and Roman Empire until the fall of the western empire.

Grammarian (Greco-Roman)

Grammarian (Greco-Roman)

In the Greco-Roman world, the grammarian was responsible for the second stage in the traditional education system, after a boy had learned his basic Greek and Latin. The job of the grammarian was to teach the ancient poets such as Homer and Virgil, and the correct way of speaking before a boy moved on to study under the rhetor. Despite often humble origins, some grammarians went on to achieve elevated positions in Rome, though few enjoyed financial success.

Narbonne

Narbonne

Narbonne is a commune in Southern France in the Occitanie region. It lies 849 km (528 mi) from Paris in the Aude department, of which it is a sub-prefecture. It is located about 15 km (9 mi) from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and was historically a prosperous port.

Gaul

Gaul

Gaul was a region of Western Europe first clearly described by the Romans, encompassing present-day France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and parts of Switzerland, Germany, and Northern Italy. It covered an area of 494,000 km2 (191,000 sq mi). According to Julius Caesar, who took control of the region on behalf of the Roman Republic, Gaul was divided into three parts: Gallia Celtica, Belgica, and Aquitania.

Work

He made a 20-volume epitome of Verrius Flaccus's voluminous and encyclopedic treatise De verborum significatione. Flaccus had been a celebrated grammarian who flourished in the reign of Augustus. Festus gives the etymology as well as the meaning of many words, and his work throws considerable light on the language, mythology and antiquities of ancient Rome. He made a few alterations, and inserted some critical remarks of his own. He also omitted such ancient Latin words as had long been obsolete; these he apparently discussed in a separate work now lost, entitled Priscorum verborum cum exemplis. Even incomplete, Festus' lexicon reflects at second hand the enormous intellectual effort that had been made in the Augustan Age to put together information on the traditions of the Roman world, which was already in a state of flux and change.

Of Flaccus' work only a few fragments remain; of Festus' epitome, only one damaged, fragmentary manuscript. The remainder, further abridged, survives in a summary made at the close of the 8th century by Paul the Deacon.

The Festus Lexicon Project has summed up Paul's epitome of Festus' De Verborum Significatu as follows:

The text, even in its present mutilated state, is an important source for scholars of Roman history. It is a treasury of historical, grammatical, legal and antiquarian learning, providing sometimes unique evidence for the culture, language, political, social and religious institutions, deities, laws, lost monuments, and topographical traditions of ancient Italy.[1]

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Epitome

Epitome

An epitome is a summary or miniature form, or an instance that represents a larger reality, also used as a synonym for embodiment. Epitomacy represents "to the degree of." An abridgment differs from an epitome in that an abridgment is made of selected quotations of a larger work; no new writing is composed, as opposed to the epitome, which is an original summation of a work, at least in part.

Verrius Flaccus

Verrius Flaccus

Marcus Verrius Flaccus was a Roman grammarian and teacher who flourished under Augustus and Tiberius.

De verborum significatione

De verborum significatione

De verborum significatione libri XX, also known as the Lexicon of Festus, is an epitome compiled, edited, and annotated by Sextus Pompeius Festus from the encyclopedic works of Verrius Flaccus. Festus' epitome is typically dated to the 2nd century, but the work only survives in an incomplete 11th-century manuscript and copies of its own separate epitome.

Etymology

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of the form of words and, by extension, the origin and evolution of their semantic meaning across time. It is a subfield of historical linguistics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, semiotics, and phonetics.

Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital city of Italy. It is also the capital of the Lazio region, the centre of the Metropolitan City of Rome, and a special comune named Comune di Roma Capitale. With 2,860,009 residents in 1,285 km2 (496.1 sq mi), Rome is the country's most populated comune and the third most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. The Metropolitan City of Rome, with a population of 4,355,725 residents, is the most populous metropolitan city in Italy. Its metropolitan area is the third-most populous within Italy. Rome is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio (Latium), along the shores of the Tiber. Vatican City is an independent country inside the city boundaries of Rome, the only existing example of a country within a city. Rome is often referred to as the City of Seven Hills due to its geographic location, and also as the "Eternal City". Rome is generally considered to be the "cradle of Western civilization and Christian culture", and the centre of the Catholic Church.

Latin

Latin

Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area around present-day Rome, but through the power of the Roman Republic it became the dominant language in the Italian region and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Even after the fall of Western Rome, Latin remained the common language of international communication, science, scholarship and academia in Europe until well into the 18th century, when other regional vernaculars supplanted it in common academic and political usage. For most of the time it was used, it would be considered a "dead language" in the modern linguistic definition; that is, it lacked native speakers, despite being used extensively and actively.

Paul the Deacon

Paul the Deacon

Paul the Deacon, also known as Paulus Diaconus, Warnefridus, Barnefridus, or Winfridus, and sometimes suffixed Cassinensis, was a Benedictine monk, scribe, and historian of the Lombards.

Manuscript

The 11th-century Codex Farnesianus at Naples is the sole surviving manuscript of Festus. It was rediscovered in 1436 at Speyer by the Venetian humanist and bishop Pietro Donato.[2] When he found it, half of the manuscript was already missing, so that it only contains the alphabetized entries M-V, and not in perfect condition. During the 15th century it has been scorched by fire and then disassembled by the antiquarian humanist Julius Pomponius Laetus.

Collating these fragmentary abridgments, and republishing them with translations, is a project being coordinated at University College London, with several objectives: to make this information available in usable form, to stimulate debate on Festus and on the Augustan antiquarian tradition upon which he drew, and to enrich and to renew studies on Roman life, about which Festus provides essential information.

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Naples

Naples

Naples is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's administrative limits as of 2022. Its province-level municipality is the third-most populous metropolitan city in Italy with a population of 3,115,320 residents, and its metropolitan area stretches beyond the boundaries of the city wall for approximately 20 miles.

Speyer

Speyer

Speyer is a city in Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany with approximately 50,000 inhabitants. Located on the left bank of the river Rhine, Speyer lies 25 km south of Ludwigshafen and Mannheim, and 21 km south-west of Heidelberg. Founded by the Romans, it is one of Germany's oldest cities. Speyer Cathedral, a number of other churches, and the Altpörtel dominate the Speyer landscape. In the cathedral, beneath the high altar, are the tombs of eight Holy Roman Emperors and German kings.

Pietro Donato

Pietro Donato

Pietro Donato (1380–1447) was a Venetian Renaissance humanist and the Bishop of Padua. He was a noted bibliophile, epigraphist, collector, and patron of art.

Julius Pomponius Laetus

Julius Pomponius Laetus

Julius Pomponius Laetus, also known as Giulio Pomponio Leto, was an Italian humanist.

University College London

University College London

University College London, which operates as UCL, is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. It is a member institution of the federal University of London, and is the second-largest university in the United Kingdom by total enrolment and the largest by postgraduate enrolment.

Editions

  • Wallace Martin Lindsay (éd.): Sexti Pompei Festi De verborum significatu quae supersunt cum Pauli epitome. Teubner, Leipzig 1913 (online). Reprint Olms, Hildesheim 1965.

Source: "Sextus Pompeius Festus", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, March 9th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextus_Pompeius_Festus.

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References

Citations

  1. ^ Festus Lexicon Project, Department of History - University College London (archived from the original)
  2. ^ Stinger, Charles L (1998). The Renaissance in Rome. Indiana University Press. p. 64. ISBN 0253212081 – via Google Books.

Bibliography

Further reading
  • Acciarino, D. 2016. "The Renaissance Editions of Festus: Fulvio Orsini's Version." Acta Classica 59: 1-22.
  • Cornell, Timothy J. 2014. "Festus." In The Fragments of the Roman Historians. Vol. 1, Introduction. Edited by Timothy J. Cornell, 67–68. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  • Dahm, Murray K. 1999. "A Hendiadys in the Breviarum of Festus: A Literary Festus?" Prudentia: A Journal Devoted to the Intellectual History of the Ancient World. 31.1: 15–22.
  • Glinister, Fay, and Clare Woods, with John A. North and Michael H. Crawford. 2007. Verrius, Festus, and Paul: Lexicography, Scholarship, and Society. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London Supplement 93. London: Institute of Classical Studies.
  • Lamers, Han. 2013. "Creating Room for Doubt: A Reexamination of the editorship of Festus’ “Collectanea” (Rome, 1475)." Philologus 157:374–378.
  • Lindsay, Wallace Martin. 1996. Studies in Early Mediaeval Latin Glossaries. Edited by Michael Lapidge. Variorum Collected Studies Series 467. Aldershot, UK: Variorum.
  • Loew, Elias Avery. 1911. "The Naples MS. of Festus: Its Home and Date." Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift 31:917–918.
  • Marshall, Peter K. 1983. "Sex. Pompeius Festus." In Texts and transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Edited by Leighton D. Reynolds, 162–164. Oxford: Clarendon.
  • North, John. 2008. "Restoring Festus from Paul’s Epitome." Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 48.1–2: 157–170.
  • Schmidt, Peter Lebrecht. 2004. "Festus." In Brill's New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. Vol. 5, Equ–Has. Edited by Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider, 407. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill.
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