The stories behind names

This paper analyses theoretical and methodological aspects of the practice of etymology as it was employed by ancient Roman antiquarians to serve their research. Based on a corpus of selected antiquarian etymologies dating to the last two centuries of the Roman Republic, the paper firstly surveys the views on the origin and function of names implied by those etymologies and contends that those views were rooted in Stoic philosophy of language. Subsequently, the paper interrogates the method through which antiquarians reconstructed their etymologies, which mostly consisted of arbitrary manipulation of letters with little awareness of or concern for morphological boundaries, similarly, again, to Stoic etymologising. Drawing attention to the fact that, in late Republican Rome, superior (by modern standards) etymological methods were available which had been developed in other traditions, the paper speculates on the reasons why, despite that, the Stoic approach became canonical in Roman antiquarianism.