Irene Leonardis

After an original foreword from Andreas Musolff setting the stage of the book, Crises We Live By offers a series of case studies that highlight different ways of conceptualizing and speaking about crisis, above all metaphorically. Its title echoes Lakoff and Johnson’s famous Metaphors We Live By (1980) and speaks to the unprecedented awareness of the theme of crisis and its conceptualization that has emerged in contemporary media and discourse. The book makes an innovative contribution to crisis studies and to Cognitive Metaphor Theory (CMT) by extending its historical reach back to antiquity and by adopting a transdisciplinary approach that takes into account the specific cultural context and framing of each metaphor for crisis.

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.