Reading Plato’s Laws to Understand Varro’s Antiquarianism. Possible New Evidence for Reconstructing the De Gente Populi Romani

One of the strategies to overcome the capital loss of Varro’s antiquarian works is to try to recollect themes, content, and even specific expressions from his own preserved works (the Rerum Rusticarum libri and, in parts, the De lingua Latina). This material, as was common in his writing practice, was reused and readapted from other contexts. Pursuing this strategy, the paper reconsiders two passages of the dialogue on Res Rusticae by reading them in light of Plato’s Nomoi. The study will argue that the antiquarian quoted from two passages of the Platonic dialogue. Some evidence will shed light on Varro’s famous theory about the tria discrimina temporum, originally contained in De gente populi Romani and partly preserved in a later source, Censorinus’ De die natali.