Benjamin W. Fortson

This project constitutes the first-ever full English translation and commentary on the Latin text “De verborum signficatu (On the Meaning of Words)” by Sextus Pompeius Festus, a grammarian of the second century C.E. This is the earliest known alphabetically arranged encyclopedic reference work, comprising around 3,300 entries that each define and discuss a particular word or expression. These items mostly relate to traditional Roman culture and the Latin language—focal interests of antiquarian scholarship in ancient Rome. Among the numerous areas represented are Roman religion and ritual, the military, history, law, mythology, etymology, and semantics. In keeping with the antiquarians’ interest in linguistic and cultural origins, Festus often speculates on the sources—etymologies—of the entry words, and frequently illustrates them with quotations from early authors whose works do not otherwise survive. In addition, many of the words themselves and attendant pieces of information are also found nowhere else in our extant corpus. The prodigious amount of material preserved uniquely here makes this text of great significance for several fields—including Classical Studies, Classical and Indo-European linguistics, and the history of information—nevertheless, no reliable modern translation or commentary hitherto existed, a gap that this project now remedies.