Marcus Verrius Flaccus

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Marcus Verrius Flaccus (* around 60 BC in Praeneste ) was a Roman grammarian and teacher at the time of the emperors Augustus and Tiberius . He was regarded as a philologist and an archaeologist.

He was a freedman ; his manumissor was identified as Verrius Flaccus, an authority of priestly law. However, for chronological reasons, a Veranius Flaccus was suggested, author of prophecies.

Verrius Flaccus gained such a good reputation as a teacher that he was brought to the court to educate Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar , the grandsons of Augustus. He then moved his entire school, whereupon his salary was raised significantly so that he did not take on new students. He died at an advanced age in the time of Emperor Tiberius ( Suetonius , De Grammaticis , 17). A statue in his honor was placed in a marble niche in Praeneste , which was provided with inscriptions from his Fasti . Some fragments of this Roman festival calendar ( Fasti Praenestini ) were rediscovered in 1771 outside the city of Rome on a Christian building from a later period, and in 1778 more in their original location. The collection was later expanded to include two more fragments.

His most important work is the first Latin dictionary De verborum significatu . The work offers explanations of the meaning and grammatical-historical explanations for alphabetically arranged words. It is thus a forerunner of the lexicon or the alphabetical encyclopedia . It was edited by Sextus Pompeius Festus in the second half of the 2nd century . While only a few fragments of the work of Verrius Flaccus have survived, there is a single - albeit badly damaged - manuscript from the work of Festus, the Codex Farnesianus in Naples from the 11th century (Biblioteca Nazionale IV.A.3). Only the letters M – V (volumes 12–20) have survived from this manuscript, which was rediscovered during the early Renaissance and was partially burned. There is also a complete excerpt from the work of Festus made by Paulus Diaconus at the end of the 8th century, as well as medieval glossaries that go back to Festus.

Other lost works of Flaccus are:

  • De Orthographia: De Obscuris Catonis , an explanation of ambiguities in the writings of Catos the Elder
  • Saturnus , on questions of Roman cults
  • Rerum memoria dignarum libri , an encyclopedic work widely used by Pliny the Elder
  • Res Etruscae , presumably about prophecies.

Text output

  • Karl Otfried Müller : Sexti Pompei Festi de verborum significatione quae supersunt cum Pauli epitome emendata et annotata. Leipzig 1839

literature

personal data
SURNAME Flaccus, Marcus Verrius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Roman grammarian and teacher
DATE OF BIRTH around 60 BC Chr.
PLACE OF BIRTH Praeneste
DATE OF DEATH 1st century