Census and Religio
Jd North
Abstract
This paper is a study of a single entry in the second-century CE Lexicon of Festus, which seems to use the word religio in a particularly puzzling way.The entry, now sadly fragmentary, told a series of stories about the doings of censors in Rome in the second century BCE, which the original author of the text must have thought showed how the office of the censor had a special religio.Can we reconstruct what he was trying to prove and what sense of the word he was assuming in his argument?Only the content of the successive narratives offers clues.The fragmentary MS (the Farnesianus or F) 2 of the lexicographer Festus seems to have been discovered somewhere around the middle of the fifteenth century and was the subject of intensive study already in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Rather more leaves of the MS were found initially than are now preserved in the Library of Naples, but all the leaves were apparently already damaged. 3 The fragment to be discussed here 4 is unusual in the context of Festus' lexicon.It is not the longest entry to be extant or partially extant, 5 but it is far longer than the average and consists of a single long quotation from a named source, Varro the great first-century BCE antiquarian.It contains, as was already established by the time of Orsini's edition of 1582, ten short notices each of them commenting on a single pair of censors; the censorships covered are successive, starting from that of 179 BCE and ending with that of 131 BCE, ten censorships in all.Festus himself makes it explicit in another passage of the Lexicon 6 that his whole 1 This is offered as a tribute to Hannah, not because its subject will have been her favourite, but because it intersects with many of her interests in a different but not too remote, field of scholarship.It raises issues of language and law, of religion and politics; of the place of ritual in social relations; above all, of the possibility of using fragmentary texts to increase our understanding or to raise new questions, even when they cannot be restored with any certainty.2 Bibl.Naz.IV.A.3. 3 For an account of the history of the text, see the introduction to Glinister and Woods (eds.)2008: 1-9.The standard edition of the text is the Teubner text of W.M. Lindsay 1913, which includes the text of F, a text of the lost pages, based on various humanist copies, and the text of Paul the Deacon's summary.4 Festus 358-62 L, s.v.religionis.5 which is Festus 326-330 L, s.v.Romam.6Festus 242-4 L, s.v.poriciam: 'It is hardly necessary to refute Verrius' opinion, either in this case or in many others, since my plan is to omit from his large number of books the words that are half dead and buried, and such as he himself often admits have no use or authority, and to collect the rest as concisely as possible into just a few books'.That he is summarizing seems quite clear, despite the surprisingly dismissive tone of the whole comment.