Cornelius Labeo

Cornelius Labeo was an ancient Roman theologian and antiquarian who wrote on such topics as the Roman calendar and the teachings of Etruscan religion (Etrusca disciplina). His works survive only in fragments and testimonia. He has been dated "plausibly but not provably" to the 3rd century AD.[1] Labeo has been called "the most important Roman theologian" after Varro, whose work seems to have influenced him strongly.[2] He is usually considered a Neoplatonist.[3]

Labeo and Censorinus are the only authors with demonstrable interests in writing about Roman religion during the Crisis of the Third Century, a time of "military anarchy" between the death of Caracalla and the accession of Diocletian when scholarship seems mostly to have ground to a halt.[4] Because religious and civil law in ancient Rome may overlap, the fragments of this Labeo are sometimes confused with those of the jurists Pacuvius Labeo and Marcus Antistius Labeo.

  1. ^ C. Robert Phillips III, "Approaching Roman Religion: The Case for Wissenschaftsgeschichte," in A Companion to Roman Religion (Blackwell, 2007), p. 15, citing HLL 4.78; Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (University of California Press, 1986), p. 250.
  2. ^ Attilio Mastrocinque, "Creating One's Own Religion: Intellectual Choices," in A Companion to Roman Religion, p. 384.
  3. ^ Mastrocinque, "Creating One's Own Religion," p. 384; R. Majercik, "Chaldean Triads in Neoplatonic Exegesis: Some Reconsiderations," Classical Quarterly 51.1 (2002), p. 291, note 119, citing P. Mastandrea, Un Neoplatonico Latino: Cornelio Labeone (Leiden, 1979), 127–34 and 193–8; Robert A. Kaster, Studies on the Text of Macrobius' Saturnalia (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 39; Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, p. 249 (where he is ranked among "the Latin authors of greatest importance for the development of Platonism in late antiquity").
  4. ^ Phillips, "Approaching Roman Religion," p. 15.