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Chapter 5 - What’s Hecuba to Him?

Varro on the Natural Kinship of Things and of Words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2019

By
David Blank
Edited by
Giuseppe Pezzini  and
Barnaby Taylor
Giuseppe Pezzini
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Barnaby Taylor
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

‘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’.

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Language and Nature in the Classical Roman World , pp. 121 - 152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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