‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?’ (Hamlet 2.2, 536–7), asks Hamlet, watching a player’s tear-filled recital of Hecuba’s sufferings. Priam and Hecuba make a briefer appearance in Varro’s De lingua Latina: while we immediately grasp that lego and legi both express the same action, each at a different time, were one of them expressed as ‘Priamus’ and the other as ‘Hecuba’, they would not additionally signify their unity (8.3). Hence the necessity of inflexion in speech: we could never remember enough words, if they were all different and ‘unrelated’.

One of the key questions in language studies, both ancient and modern, concerns the relationship between language and reality: how has extra-linguistic reality influenced the emergence, development, and structures of language? This question is at the core of several advances in the last century, including the development of theories arguing for the biological regulation of the structures of language (generative grammar) and the pioneering investigation of the neuro-biological mechanisms regulating language use (neurolinguistics). This question is no less productive in ancient thought, both Greek and Roman. Ancient theorists conceived of the question in terms of the relationship between language and nature (physis /natura), and the essays gathered in this volume deal with theories from the Roman world according to which linguistic facts, structures, or behaviours are in some significant sense determined by nature. We refer to such theories as instances of ‘linguistic naturalism’.

The importance of Posidonius of Apamea (c. 135–c. 50 BC) for the Roman intellectual life of the late Republic and the Empire (especially in its first two centuries) can hardly be overestimated. His philosophical and scientific work, of which we now have only fragments, ranged from the traditional fields of Stoicism – natural philosophy, logic, ethics (including moral psychology) – to the painstaking investigation of disciplines which either were considered by the earlier Stoics only in an insignificant way (meteorology, astronomy), or were completely beyond their interests (history, physical, mathematical, and ethnic geography). This encyclopedic approach won for him already during his lifetime and soon after his death the authority of the maximus omnium Stoicorum (Cic. Hort. fr. 50 Grilli = test. 33 E.–K.),1 among both professional philosophers and Roman dilettanti like Pompey. The influence of his innovative work, and the polemical reaction to it (the two often going hand in hand) is found in later centuries in moral philosophy and psychology (Seneca, Galen), natural philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics (Geminus, Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Cleomedes), as well as history and geography, both mathematical and physical (Caesar, Diodorus of Sicily, Strabo).

The Greek rhetorician and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus was active in Rome at the end of the first century BC.2 His extant works include a history of early Rome, critical letters, and rhetorical treatises with a focus on style: On Composition, On Imitation, On Thucydides, and On the Ancient Orators, including separate essays on Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, and Demosthenes. Engaged as he was in the oratory, history, and poetry of the classical Greek past, Dionysius himself lived in the Golden Age of Latin Literature. Born before 55 BC, he was a contemporary of Virgil and Horace. When Dionysius arrived in Rome in 30 BC, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) had been dead for more than a decade, but Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) was still alive.

The Academica is a dialogue completed in 45 BC, near the beginning of the second of the two phases in his life when Cicero produced – broadly speaking – philosophical dialogues. The work is devoted to epistemology, and specifically the question of whether there is empirical knowledge as the Stoics defined it, an issue which had been debated by Stoics and Academics since the third century BC. There are speakers for the Stoic side, in particular Stoic epistemology as adopted by Antiochus of Ascalon (previously an Academic sceptic, who then turned to dogmatism), and speakers who represent Academic scepticism. Each side advances arguments for its position, as well as offering a historical account of the Academic tradition as they construe it (only one of them is extant in full). Cicero published the work in two editions, changing the speakers and shifting the fictional date of the dialogue from 62 or 61 BC to a time near the date of composition. Of these, the second book of the first edition in two books and part of the first book of the second edition in four books are extant. While some modification of the material beyond the necessary changes of speakers and scenery is likely, there is little reason to suspect substantial differences in subject matter between the two editions.1

The earliest pronouncements on Latin spoken and written usage come to us from a literary figure in the late second century BC, i.e. the Roman satirist Gaius Lucilius (180 / 168?–103 / 102), who had a pervasive influence on authoritative writers on Latin of the late Republic. Lucilius’ personal poetry – the first of the kind to appear on the Roman stage since Ennius’ experimental miscellaneous saturae – was characterized by an assertive voice delivering views on an unprecedented variety of themes. That language was a favourite theme is evidenced by the significant number of metalinguistic comments in the fragmentary remains of Lucilius’ notoriously large production, which included a systematic treatment (Book 9) of Latin orthography and morphology.

‘A frustratingly mysterious figure, though he was a friend of Cicero and praetor in 58’ (Rawson 1985: 94), Nigidius Figulus died in exile, in May or June 45, before Cicero could utter any oratio ad clementiam Caesaris in his favour. Nevertheless, in the extant beginning of his Timaeus (§1 = test. 9 Swoboda), Cicero included a vibrant eulogy of his friend, whose character well suited that of the Pythagorean Timaeus of Locri Epizephyrii.1

The various chapters in this volume have shown how ubiquitous is the appeal to nature in writings about language in the first century BCE; several of them have explored further the place of linguistic naturalism in the overall structure of the philosophies, notably Stoicism, on which that naturalism was based. At the same time, however, even a rapid survey of the volume shows equally clearly not only how inconsistent the various claims about the relationship between nature and language are among one another – scarcely surprising, since they derive from widely divergent philosophical systems – but also how inconsistent the most important surviving text, Varro’s De lingua Latina, is in itself. Does naturalism have any meaning? Or rather, does ‘nature’ have any meaning? And what good is an appeal to nature if that nature is in itself as uncertain and unintelligible as it often seems to be?