Remarks on Varro’s Word-Order

The aim of the study is to offer a hypothesis that, among other defects of Marcus Terentius Varro’s style, it might have been also his word-order that contributed to not very high appraisal of aesthetic values of his work by his contemporaries and successors. Very frequently, Varro uses word-order that defies both logic of the text and natural sentence intonation. His sentences often do not end in rheme proper, which is a common pattern for unmarked expository texts: a rheme proper is followed by a thematic constituent of low informative value. Such technique can give an impression that text is incoherent, or it makes readers go back and read the text again with different, not spontaneous, intonation. This might have been one of the reasons why Varro’s phrasing was seen clumsy and not elegant enough.

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