The Varro Paradox
The tension between motion and place
This is an excerpt from an unpublished paper, “A Brief Roman Social History of Streets and Sidewalks.” The term “Varro Paradox” is my own, but the interpretation is largely drawn from David J Newsome.
Two contemporaries, Varro and Cicero, engaged in conceptual analysis of motion and place. Both writers studied the Latin language and Greek philosophy. Both subscribed to the Roman ideal of the gentleman farmer, but both found themselves with obligations to Rome. Cicero seemed interested in identifying good real estate investments. Despite their antipathies to city life, both wrote about Rome in ways that may reveal insights about urban streets through their conceptual analysis of motion and place. The Latin term translated as “place” is locus (plural: loci), with familiar use in contemporary geometry and also the source for the familiar cognate in English, “location.” In turn, “place” is cognate with familiar words with identical meanings in various Romance languages: piazza in Italian, plaza in Spanish, and the identically-spelled place in French. However, these words perform a very specific duty in Italian and Spanish, referring just to a public, urban area. In French, place has this identical meaning, but also has the broader use meaning of “location.” To express the idea of an urban public area in English, we appropriate piazza or plaza, while reserving the use of “place” to mean “location.” Contemporary urban theorists, however, developed a new meaning, as with the now common expression, “a sense of place.”
A Google Streetview of the Plaza de las Fundadores in Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico. A public plaza is associated both with movement and with lingering.
Varro posits two seemingly contradictory propositions about place. Varro wrote, “ubi quodque consistit, locus” or “where anything comes to a standstill is a place.”[1] Though Varro defines place in terms of non-movement, he also indicates that there is movement to a place, or perhaps to a destination, “neque motis, ubi non locus et corpus, quod alterum est quod movetur alterum ubi.” (“Nor is there motion where there is not a place and a body, because the latter is that which is moved, the former is where to.”)[2] However, Varro also writes, “ubi agitator, locus,” or “where there is motion there is a place.”[3] Here are the English translations restated as a simple list which make up the Varro Paradox:
(1) Where anything comes to a standstill is a place. (Varro, De Lingua Latina 5.15.)
(2) Where there is motion there is place. (Varro, De Lingua Latina 5.11.)
Varro’s primary concern in these passages, according to Newsome, was not in defining locus/loci; rather, his primary concern was with movement. Is Varro anticipating modernist conceptions of space and movement in these passages? Newsome probes this tension, “Simply, if loci are destinations, then streets are not loci; if they are not loci, they cannot be central places. Yet this would be inaccurate and would deny movement in its role in place making, other than in enabling the movement from one place to the next.”[4] Do we really need to regard (1) as requiring an object to come to complete rest and remain, for a time, completely motionless? Also, (1) would be easy to interpret as the post-modernist idea of a destination. The tension between (1) and (2) is palpable, but they are not contradictions. “Comes to a standstill” implies an object in motion which later ceases motion. Therefore, (2) could be interpreted as a special case of (1): objects in motion at a place contain the set of objects that arrived at that place in motion, but ceased motion at that place. Newsome resolves the seeming paradox of (1) and (2) by asserting that they, “cover the whole spectrum of movement and emphasize the importance of understanding both movement through and movement to a particular space.”[5] I believe this resolution is incomplete. Neither Varro nor Newsome have exhausted all of the possibilities of space and movement: there is also moving within.
We can certainly read Varro as making a distinction between “moving to” and “moving through.”[6] If nobody lingers at a location, it cannot be a place, yet there is no inconsistency in admitting that (2) is also true; that is, that places allow for people going through. So if (1) and (2) are both required for place-making, Roman streets would make perfect loci. Yet this interpretation has an unfortunate consequence for the interiors of the shops and restaurants, which facilitate (1), but not (2). While moving through a place implies that someone has not lingered there. On the other hand, lingering at a place does not imply that motion has ceased, either. Lingering at a place could mean standing or standing still, or it could mean rocking back and forth while gesticulating. It could mean walking a few feet to talk to someone, and walking back to talk to someone else. These are all cases of moving within. I am also making a point about lingering, which can be either vital and active, or passive.
So if we interpret the Varro couplet disjunctively, then an area is a place if there is moving to, moving through, or moving within. This would seem to allow that places include a country road, a farm, or even a prison cell. What would a conjunctive interpretation look like? If an area is a place only if (1) and (2) are both satisfied, then there are both objects coming to rest within that area and there are objects in motion within that area.[7] We should not think of Varro as anticipating modern or post-modern notions of movement, space, and place. Instead, we should consider the ancient notion that streets are places.
However, I propose imagining a hypothetical street as the domain of pedestrians. Roman cities had such streets, so Varro would have been familiar with them. Places facilitate human activity. Walking is a human activity. As a form of motion or moving, it is the mode with superior stopping and starting ability. Pedestrians are agile, since a pedestrian can stop, start or change direction at will.[8] This is the intersection of the concepts of place and access. To access a place, you need to be able to cease movement, so the ease in stopping is as important as the ease of movement. A place is an area where there is “moving to” and “moving through.” The contemporary mind overvalues speed. This is why it struggles to grasp place and access: high-speed does not matter. Motion matters, but higher speeds are not helpful. In fact, place and access favor slow modes of transportation because it is easier to stop.
When we are looking at the Varro pair, it forms not just the basis for a theory of place, from it you can derive a theory of access. If access measures the opportunity for a range of human activities and transportation access measures the ease in arriving at a destination, these both require the ability to move and the ability to stop, just as with Varro’s concept of place. For example, you cannot access a restaurant without moving, then stopping. The urban transportation options in Varro’s world were walking, riding an animal, lounging in a litter, or being pulled by a carriage. For most Romans, the only option was walking. On urban streets, walking had its advantages. Pedestrians did not need to concern themselves with parking. And if Plautus’s and Juvenal’s stories about street congestion are believable, horses and carriages may not have moved any faster in urban areas than pedestrians.
To press the argument a step further (or perhaps to re-appropriate Varro a bit more), a place is where you find pedestrians amassing. Perhaps Varro was not thinking about “pedestrians,” which is a concept that carries importance in the contemporary world, and perhaps had no counterpart in classical Latin. More likely he just imagined people. A pedestrian is just a person moving under his own power, and without the aid of equipment. To Romans, it was so normal that they did not need to express it directly. Walking was the presumptive mode of transportation. Conversely, I have heard many people ask, “Do you have transportation?” when they really mean “Do you have a car?” When I say, “I went to pick up groceries,” just about any American would assume that I drove a car to a grocery store.” “Going” and driving” are virtually coextensive in the United States. Just as we have an automobile bias, Varro must have had an equally strong bias toward walking. Place is where you find people, and the easiest way to access a place is on foot. Therefore, Varro’s statements about place are closely related to and are consistent with the modern concept of transportation access (how easily you can get to a place).[9] Pedestrians have a unique ability to stop and start at will, so Varro’s concept of place clearly favors pedestrian agility.
[1] Citation and translation from David J. Newsome “Making Movement Meaningful,” in Ray Laurence and David J. Newsome, ed., Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20 fn. 60: Varro De Lingua Latina 5.15; cf. Spencer, Diana. “Movement and the Linguistic Turn,” in Laurence and Newsome, 57–80.
[2] Varro De Lingua Latina 5.12. Translation and citation from Newsome, “Making Movement Meaningful,” 20 fn. 61.
[3] Varro, De Lingua Latin 5.11. Translation and citation from Newsome, “Making Movement Meaningful,” 21, fn. 64.
[4] Newsome, “Making Movement Meaningful,” 21.
[5] Ibid.
[6] According to Newsome, “Movement and Fora in Rome” in Laurence and Newsome, movement through and movement to is a critical distinction; however, he does not invoke it in his introductory essay while he discusses Varro. Cf. Newsome, “Making Movement Meaningful.” The second answers a crucial question raised by the first: what I call the Varro Paradox.
[7] Newsome, “Making Movement Meaningful,” 20, quotes Yi Fu Tuan, “[I]f we think of space as that which allows movement, then space is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.”
[8] For the idea of pedestrian agility in an early 20th-century context, see Peter G. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 4, 259.
[9] Todd Litman, “Evaluating Accessibility for Transportation Planning: Measuring People’s Ability to Reach Desired Goods and Activities.” The Victoria Transport Policy Institute, updated 20 April 2017. http://www.vtpi.org/access.pdf; Jarrett Walker, Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Lives and Our Lives (Washington: Island Press, 2011), Chapter 4; Jarrett Walker, “transit’s product: mobility or access?” Human Transit blog. 26 January 2011. http://humantransit.org/2011/01/transits-product-mobility-or-access.html