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This dissertation is a historical analysis of Varro’s De Lingua Latina, a linguistic treatise composed in the 40s BCE during Rome’s transition from oligarchic Republican government to the monarchic settlement of the Augustan Principate. I advance a reading which restores contemporary political and intellectual context to the treatise, complementing and revising previous scholarship which has traditionally focused on the Greek philosophical pedigree of Varro’s work. As such, I explore Varro’s thematic emphasis on natura (‘Nature’) in his linguistic programme, which, as a term with wide-ranging intertextual functions, embodies its complex philosophical, political, and literary character. This five-chapter dissertation is subdivided between the surviving books on etymology (Chapters 1-3) and inflection (Chapters 4-5). In Chapter 1 (“Organisation and Meaning in Varro’s Etymologies”), I explore Varro’s etymologies in De Lingua Latina, Books 5-7, and explain how his programmatic emphasis on natural philosophy conveys his unique etymological authority. In Chapter 2 (“Grammatical Discourse in De Lingua Latina”), I consider Varro’s reception of grammatical techniques of etymological exegesis, elucidating his preference for philosophical readings of poetry and the social value of literary sophistication in the late Republic. Chapter 3 (“Ethnography and Identity in Varro’s Etymologies”) develops Varro’s etymological project as a kind of ethnography of the Roman people, which contextualises Varro’s philosophical intervention in the changing circumstances of his era. Chapters 4-5 are devoted to an analysis of Books 8-10, in which Varro describes his theory of morphological inflection (declinatio naturalis) as a platform for Latin linguistic standardisation. In Chapter 4 (“Declinatio and Linguistic Standardisation in the late Republic”), I survey the politics of linguistic standardisation in the late Republic. Mediating in a debate between Cicero and Caesar, I describe Varro’s nuanced revision of existing models of analogical inflection, and characterise his use of natura to explain linguistic standards. In Chapter 5 (“Linguistic Analogy and Natural Ratio in De Lingua Latina, Books 8-10”), I relate Varro’s linguistic innovations to contemporary shifts in cultural authority, and demonstrate how his transference of linguistic standardisation to philosophy entails a radical reorganisation of the existing political status quo. / text

The primary role of this report is to provide an in-depth analysis of all the instances of the word vidua, its meanings and uses in Latin literature from the last two centuries B.C. This close examination of the word vidua in the literary sources of this period has resulted in a number of important modifications to its definition. The word vidua, which is commonly translated by ancient scholars as widow, is not sustained by the contextual evidence of the majority of the passages that do no state explicitly the reason for the women's deprived status. Instead the word is most commonly used to mean a much broader social group of Roman women, all no longer married women, a category which includes various groups of women such as widows, divorcees, abandoned women and women whose husbands have been away for long periods of time. Furthermore the English word unmarried should not be used to translate the Latin word vidua since, as I demonstrate throughout my paper, there is a clear distinction in the Roman minds between women who are no longer married, vidua, and women who are not yet married, virgines an important distinction that gets lost with the more inclusive and broader social category meant by the word unmarried. / text