VIII - VERRIUS FLACCUS

Summary

The great work of Verrius Flaccus De Verborum Significatu, which may, I suppose, claim the title of the first Latin lexicon ever written, is unfortunately only known to us in fragments and abridgments. Of these abridgments one is completely, the other only incompletely, preserved. I will speak of the latter first. Its author, Pompeius Festus, probably lived not later than the second century a.d., as he is quoted by Julius Romanus, a grammarian of the beginning of the third century (ap. Charisium, 2. 220, Keil). The work of Festus now exists only in fragments, for the text of which we are dependent upon a single manuscript. If we may judge by his own utterances, his pretensions to scholarly endowment must have been small. He goes about his business in the truly destructive spirit of utilitarian learning. Festus, p. 218 (Müller) cuius (Verrii) opinionem neque in hoc neque in aliis compluribus refutare mihi nunc necesse est, cum propositum habeam ex tanto librorum eius numero intermortua iam et sepulta verba atque ipso saepe confitente nullius usus aut auctoritatis praeterire, et reliqua quam brevissime redigere in libros admodum paucos. Festus, it will be seen, has a pedantic contempt for all information not useful in his own time, and no scruple in setting up his own judgment against that of Verrius Flaccus. And thus he has evidently omitted much which in the second century would perhaps have been thought profitless, but which in the nineteenth would be regarded as invaluable.