The Lexicon of Festus: text, translation and full scholarly commentary

Project start date: 2004-01

Project end date: 2007-12

"The Lexicon of Festus (de uerborum significatu) is a Latin dictionary compiled in the Roman imperial period which preserves a great deal of priceless information about the history, society, religion and topography of Rome and Italy in earlier centuries. It draws on a rich series of studies by the writers of Cicero's day, who collected and analysed information about the traditions of their past and the institutions of their own day, which they believed were in a state of serious decay. These were encyclopaedic works, familiar in antiquity, but now almost completely lost, so that Festus provides a crucial link to this whole tradition of learning. The Lexicon itself has come down to us in a fragmentary state: some of it is preserved in a single, damaged, manuscript; the rest in a summary form made at the end of the eighth century AD. For modern readers, there is a critical text, published in the early part of the twentieth century; but no translation or commentary is available and the text itself needs modern re-assessment. Many individual entries from the dictionary have been much debated and play a major role in our understanding of the republican period; but there has been no collection of this bibliography and little attempt to look at the dictionary itself or at the information it provides as a coherent whole. The objectives of this project are: to make this mass of information available to researchers in a usable form; to stimulate debate on Festus' own work, on the antiquarian tradition from which he was drawing and on the subsequent history of the text in the Renaissance and thereafter; and to enrich and renew studies on the many particular areas of Roman life on which Festus provides such essential information". (See project web site for more details).