54. Why do they call the meat-markets macella and macellae?
Is this word corrupted from mageiroi (cooks) and has it prevailed, as many others have, by force of habit? For c and g have a close relationship in Latin, and it was only after many years that they made use of g, which Spurius Carvilius introduced. And l, again, is substituted lispingly for r when people make a slip in the pronunciation of r because of the indistinctness of their enunciation.
Or must this problem also be solved by history? For the story goes that there once lived in Rome a violent man, a robber, Macellus by name, who despoiled many people and was with great difficulty caught and punished; from his wealth the public meat-market was built, and it acquired its name from him. (277D-E, trans. Babbitt).
You may be a bit thrown off by the genre of this work of Plutarch. The Roman Questions is literally a series of questions, 113 in total, each of which is given at least one answer. The most possible number of answers that Plutarch gives is six. The questions concern Roman religion, customs, law and language, as question 54 demonstrates. The work is an example of antiquarianism. The distinction between history and antiquarianism can be fuzzy (Nietzsche, in his description of the three types of history, describes antiquarianism as one form of historical research), but the main difference has to do with the use of narrative, causality and change. History seeks to find the causes of change, whether that change be the fall of the Roman republic or the rise of Augustus, and frequently uses narrative in order to accomplish this task.
The fuzzy distinction between history and antiquarianism is evidenced in this question in the Roman Questions. Plutarch identifies something about the Romans, their vocabulary for meat markets, macella, and provides two different explanations for where this word comes from. One explanation is linguistic, that is a corrupt form of a Greek word, the other is eponymous, that the word is derived from a man’s name. In the course of discussing these two possibilities he throws us the antiquarian detail that it was a certain Spurius Carvilius who invented the Roman letter G. Prior to that time the Romans had represented the G sound of the Latin language with the letter C. It is only in the other passage on Spurius Carvilius that Plutarch reveals that he was a freedman.