Статья: GREEK PERFECTS IN ROMAN EPISTOLOGRAPHY (2020)

Justin the Philosopher, a second-century Christian author, discusses the cult of Mithras in his works First Apology on behalf of the Christians and Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. Justin’s portrayal of Mithraic customs is traditionally interpreted in the light of his conception of imitatio diabolica, as the ἀρχή of pagan myths and beliefs. To illustrate the theory of diabolical imitation, Justin touches upon several features of Mithraic rituals and provides us with a few indications of Mithraic ethical teachings. Two curious accounts of Mithraic cave shrines in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew (Justin. Dial. 70, 1–3; 78, 6) have not been closely examined by previous researchers and require our special attention. Justin draws a parallel between the Mithraic cave shrines and the prophecy of Isaiah (Isa. 33, 13–16), focusing on the prophet’s words concerning a cave and a cliff as he finds them analogous to Mithraic sanctums. Remarkably, Justin never refers to Mithraic temples as caves, but only as places, called so by Mithraists. He does not claim that the devil has taught Mithraists to perform rituals in caves, but insists that he has taught them to name their sanctuaries caves. Justin’s wording exposes his effort to accentuate the difference between the object (a shrine) and its name (cave). This indicates that Justin believed that Mithraists did not use natural caves as their sanctuaries, despite his knowledge of other aspects of this cult

One of the most famous academic conflicts in 17 th century Sweden was a quarrel between Johannes Schefferus and Olof Verelius in the 1670s concerning the original position of the city of Uppsala and its heathen temple, mentioned by Adam of Bremen. After a series of publications with mutual attacks Verelius published in 1678 a document entitled Annotationes ex scriptis Karoli Episcopi Arosiensis excerptae, pretending to go back to a lost medieval source. Schefferus answered with an analysis of the document, proving it to be a forgery. Despite Schefferus’ brilliant and convincing philological investigation, Annotationes have often been regarded as a genuine medieval source, especially after the publication of a monograph by the Swedish historian Kjell Kumlien in 1967. Recently, several historical and philological surveys have opposed Kumlien’s views, providing additional arguments in favour of Schefferus’ claims. This article aims at adding one more: an odd juncture in the text of Annotationes — ‘opus trium deorum’ that is to be understood as ‘a temple of three gods’ — can be explained by an ambition of the forger to imitate Adam of Bremen, whose text belonged to the central ones in the controversy.

В статье исследуются восточнославянские (русские и украинские) переводы фрагментов из поэм Гомера, входивших в исторические и политические сочинения М. Стрыйковского, А. Ф. Моджевского, Юста Липсия и др., переводившихся в Киеве, Москве и Санкт-Петербурге с начала XVII до середины XVIII вв. Особый интерес представляют переводы, выполнявшиеся в той или иной стихотворной форме. Выбор переводчиками именно стихотворной формы для перевода позволяет лучше понять пути адаптации русской культурой относительно новой для нее стихотворной формы. Тщательное изучение контекста появления стихотворных переводов из Гомера в составе обширных прозаических трудов позволяет увидеть мотивы, руководившие переводчиками (Гомер предстает автором древнейших свидетельств по истории славян; учителем политической риторики, моделью интеллектуала в конструируемых отношениях интеллектуала и государства). Восточнославянские культуры имели опыт стихотворной передачи текстов Гомера и филологического интереса к ним (во всяком случае — интереса, требующего обращения к альтернативным изданиям и греческому тексту) задолго до того, как фрагментарный стихотворный перевод из Гомера, выполненный М. В. Ломоносовым, был в 1748 г. опубликован в Петербурге. Впервые публикуются стихотворные переводы из Гомера, содержащиеся в московском переводе Хроники Мацея Стрыйковского (1660-1670-е) и «Увещаниях и прикладах политических» (Monita et exempla politica) Юста Липсия, переведенных в Киеве, Петербурге и Москве в 1712-1722 гг. Публикация текста сопровождается существенными уточнениями истории текста памятников.

Following the first edition of Manuel Álvares’ De institutione grammatica libri tres (Lisbon, 1572), the Portuguese text tradition of the celebrated grammar was completed with the 1573 pupil’s manual. Both the precise number of editions that appeared thereafter and what in a distant future might be developed into a stemma editionum remain unknown. In the context of ongoing bibliographic research, the present article offers an outlook on the beginnings of Alvaresian grammar in late 16th-century Europe by means of a presentation of how the grammars’ national text traditions emerged in Czech, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish and Spanish editions. Álvares’ grammar started to take on divergent national forms since its first publication for the purposes of the Bavarian Jesuit University of Dillingen, in which the volumes were distributed according to the official syllabus, thus moving beyond the division between teacher’s manual and pupil’s manual made by the author. Even though the more comprehensive ars maior also appeared in German and Italian editions, in the late 16th century the ars minor became particularly important due to its editions in France, Italy and Spain. There also appeared the Czech variant of the ars minor as well as the Lithuanian and Polish partial editions, whose textual constitution seems to correspond to the requirements of the respective syllabi.

This paper aims to revise the status quaestionis of the title of a play by Seneca preserved in two commonly recognised variants — Phoenissae and Thebais — and two less well-known variants — Phoenissa and Antigona. It has been generally accepted that only the title Phoenissae is correct, and that this title was modelled on Euripides’ drama of the name. This view, however, can hardly be deemed plausible, considering the substantial differences between Seneca’s and Euripides’ Phoenissae. Moreover, it has been widely held that there is no analogy for the title Thebais in the dramatic tradition but that it has equivalents in epic texts, which has led to the conclusion that Thebais is an ill-chosen interpolation. The other variants of the title have not been discussed at all. In this article we scrutinise previously disregarded sources and argue that all the play’s titles may have originated in Classical Antiquity and may be regarded as synonyms. We also demonstrate that the interpretation of the title Phoenissae as referring to a Chorus of Tyrian maidens is purely speculative, since the links between Seneca’s and Euripides’ Phoenissae cannot be unequivocally defined. We posit that the Romans may have understood both the title of Euripides’ play and of its probable imitation written by Accius as alluding to the heroines, Jocasta and Antigone. The examples found in Statius’ verse may be used as evidence that the adjective Phoenissus was understood by the educated Roman public as Thebanus. In the final part of the paper, we analyse the dramatic action of Phoenissae, which leads us to the conclusion that the interpretation of the title as a metonymic term describing Jocasta and Antigone is accurate

The article investigates an early theological justification of the radical detachment from society expressed in a saying by the famous Egyptian hermit Arsenius the Great (4 th‒5 th century) who avoided contacts not only with lay people, but even with his fellow monks in the desert of Sketis. This justification is to be seen in connection with the phenomenon of monastic secluded life which suddenly emerged in the second part of the 3 rd century, in sharp contrast with traditional views of the catholic Christians of the 1 st‒3 rd centuries on the way of life suitable for the followers of Christ. In this article, the radical break with this early paradigm is called the “revolution of the solitaries”. Arsenius, who lived about eighty years after the first monks in Egypt started to be recognized as a distinct phenomenon in public space, does not necessarily draw on the oldest layers of the traditions justifying and explaining the religious motivation for being alone. Nevertheless, his statement is one of the first pieces of theological reflection on the subject transmitted in full which opens a number of intriguing possibilities for further research on this widely neglected field. The article provides the historical context of Arsenius’ justification which includes criticism of the anachoretic monasticism in the pagan and Christian communities. Some critics of the secluded life consider it as contrary to the Jewish and pagan wisdom as well as to the revelation of Christ, a statement making Arsenius’ apology most precarious. Of special inrerest is that Arsenius, when staying away remaining secluded from all kinds of people, was to a certain degree guided by the example of Socrates

New Testament scholars have long argued that in Acts 17:16–34 Luke depicts Paul in such a way as to evoke Socrates’ modus philosophandi and to echo his trial and apology. While this argument can be based on sufficiently clear philological indications, there are other, comparatively vague and more general Socratic reminiscences in Luke-Acts, e. g. in the Gethsemane episode which shows that for the Lukan Jesus death is not a terrifying prospect. This study reads Luke’s portrayal of the apostle Peter through the lens of the exemplum Socratis as presented by Greek and Roman intellectuals in the first and early second centuries CE, including Dio Chrysostom, Epictetus, Plutarch, and Seneca. The author argues that the humble origins of Peter, his non-academic profession, his poverty, his lack of formal education, and his unbreakable commitment to obey God and to spread the Christian message in spite of the threat of judges are reminiscent of major elements of the reception of Socrates in the period that Luke-Acts was probably composed (c. 80–100 CE). Highlighting the subtle Socratic components in Luke’s depiction of Peter not only helps to shed new light on Peter’s alleged lack of education (Acts 4:13). It also helps to understand, firstly, how the literary depiction of early Christian teaching figures is shaped by roughly contemporaneous philosophical discourses, and secondly, that Peter’s literary image, although it presents a totally different type of teaching figure than Paul, serves in its own way to exemplify the compatibility of the Christian religion with particular strands of ancient philosophy.

Heraclides of Pontus, a versatile philosopher whose work still remains largely unexplored, wrote several pieces on Homer including “Solutions of the Homeric problems”, to which some of the extant fragments are attributed. One of these (F. 171 Wehrli = 99 Schütrumpf) concerns the Iliad and the Odyssey being discrepant in the number of the cities on Crete: the Catalogue of Ships refers to the island as ἑκατόμπολιν (Il. 2.649) while Odysseus in his ‘Cretan Lies’ states that people dwell ninety great cities on Crete (Od. 19.174). To explain this inconsistency, Heraclides tells a dramatic story about Idomeneus which he probably made up himself, being an eminent author of dialogues and even tragedies (provided that the relevant testimonies are reliable) with an interest in mythology. His version of Idomeneus’ homecoming was not supported by contemporary historians, and, although later picked up by some poets and scholars, did not end up as a part of the commonplace Idomeneus tradition as we know it today

The paper analyzes Ch. 24 of the 11th book of Aelian’s De natura animalium devoted to the so-called sea-leopard (πάρδαλις) and the oxyrrhynchus fish, both living in the Red Sea. Aelian compares the body colour of the sea-leopard to the mountain leopard, i. e. the snow leopard or the ounce (Panthera uncia Schreber, 1775). This comparison clearly demonstrates that the sealeopard is to be identified with the sand tiger shark or the spotted ragged-tooth shark (Carcharias taurus Rafinesque, 1810). This fish usually resides and hunts in the depths of the sea, but also swims to the coast and sometimes attacks the swimming people. The attacks of sand tiger sharks must have taken place in ancient times, so the fish was easily recognizable not only by the Greeks but also by the inhabitants of the Red Sea’s seashore. The Greek ichthyonym ὀξύ(ρ)ρυγχος refers to five different species of fish, but Aelian uses it to denote an oriental kind of shark existing in the Red Sea (NA 11, 24). The oxyrrhynchus shark has an elongated mouth, golden eyes and white eyelids, i. e. nictitating membranes, typical of sharks belonging to the order Carcharhiniformes. Its tail is oblong in shape and its fins are black and white. There are also pale and green parts of its body. On the basis of Aelian’s description it is possible to suggest that the unknown fish should be identified with the bignose shark (Carcharhinus altimus S. Springer, 1950).

An attempt to interpret the famous ancient musical composition known as ὄρθιος νόμος requires an analysis of all available evidence connecting ὄρθιος with sounds. The most extensive description of this nome (Dio 1. 1) ascribes it a military (or generally stimulating) character. This conforms with a number of passages, where an ὄρθιος sound ‘makes one stand up’ to help, or to fight, i. e. it stimulates dynamic activity. Perhaps, then, this was the initial meaning of the adjective, from which it eventually morphed to mean ‘sonorous’ or ‘piercing’. It seems that a sound could be made piercing and pervasive both by its volume and by its pitch, therefore ὄρθιος as a quality of sound frequently correlates with ‘loud’ and ‘high’. Nevertheless, a common interpretation that equates ὄρθιος with ὀξύς is unwary: the conventional metaphor in ancient Greek concerning a sound’s pitch is ὀξύς — βαρύς (‘sharp’ — ‘heavy’), whereas the spatial metaphor of vertical (‘high’ — ‘low’) is not reliably attested. Another characteristic of sound that our sources correlate with ὄρθιος is ‘strained’ (ἔντονος, ἀνάτασιν ἔχων, ἀνατεταμένος), which in its turn likely indicates loudness (but does not literally translate as either ‘high’ or ‘swift’) and physical effort on behalf of the performers, or else the ethos of a musical piece, which transmitted tension to the audience

This article discusses an intriguing text in Stobaeus’ Ecl. 1.25.3i about the sun’s movement as a spiral on a cylinder. The author offers an interpretation of this text and argue that it is about Empedocles’ conception of the solar trajectory during the year. After a preliminary attempt, an interlude is inserted on some strange theories, ascribed to Empedocles, about the two hemispheres of the heaven and two suns. Two of the more reliable theories attributed to Empedocles that are relevant in the context of this paper, namely the tilting and the eggshape of the heaven, as well as the problems of the size of the sun and the shape of the earth, are discussed in successive sections. This allows the author to illustrate some of his ideas on Presocratic flat earth cosmology. Prior to offering a visualization of the cosmos according to Empedocles, Bollack’s earlier attempt is subjected to a critical examination. In two additional sections of the article, the author claims that, according to Empedocles, the moon must move on a cylinder as well and that the image of the cylinder for movements of the sun and moon dates back to Anaximander