Varronianus. A Critical and Historical Introduction to the Ethnography of Ancient Italy and to the Philological Study of the Latin Language.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Somewhat rubbed and slightly scuffed, annotations and stamp on inner cover and endpaper, pages slightly stained/yellowed, occasionally loose binding, but overall clean, well readable and intact. - Etwas berieben und leicht besto�n, Anmerkungen und Stempel auf innerem Einband und Vorsatzblatt, Seiten leicht angeschmutzt/vergilbt, vereinzelt l�sende Bindung, aber insgesamt sauber, gut lesbar und intakt. - Preface: This work, as it originally appeared, was a first J- attempt to discuss the comparative philology of the Latin Language on the broad basis of general Ethnography, and to show historically how the classical idiom of ancient Rome resulted from the absorption or centralisation of the other dialects spoken in the Peninsula. My motto was: licet omnia Italicapro Romanis habeam; and I did not content myself with a survey of the Italian races, but endeavoured to prove that the elements of this cisalpine population might be recognised in the Scythia of Herodotus, either in juxta-position or in some degree of fusion; and thus, that they might be traced back to the primary settlements of the Indo-Germanic family. In maintaining the composite structure of the Latin language, I assert also that the different elements, of which it is made up, are to be found in the fragmentary languages which have come down to us. When Lepsius proposed (de Tabulis Eugubinis, pp. 102, 105) to defend the thesis : Latinam linguam non esse mixtam, he must have had in view, either an opposition to the doctrine that Latin may be divided into a Greek and non-Greek part, which Lassen calls one-sided and erroneous, for we might as well speak of the German and non-German, or the Indian and non-Indian parts of Latin (Rhein. Mus. 1833, p. 361); or else a confutation of one of those untenable theories, which represent this language as an imperfectly combined assemblage of heterogeneous ingredients. Admitting that in Italy, as in other peninsulas and islands of Europe, there must have been a Celtic substratum, this book undertakes to prove that the old Italian tribes were either Sclavonians, Low-Germans, or that well-fused compound of these two, the Lithuanians. Thus all the elements were homogeneous, and a perfect combination or absorption of idioms was a natural result of the political centralisation occasioned by the conquests of the Imperial City on the Tiber. In order to arrive at this conclusion, it was necessary to examine all the details of Italian ethnography; and I am quite sure that, if Niebuhr thought a long series of essays on the old tribes of the Peninsula a proper introduction to his researches in Roman history, a similar investigation, supported by an analysis of the linguistic fragments, must be a still more indispensable preliminary to a treatise on Latin philology.