Выпуск: Т. 14 № 1 (2019)

This article argues that in the first verse of Catullus’ epigram 85, the commonly found translation of quare as ‘why’ in English versions since the 17th century, but particularly in translations produced in the last fifty years, cannot be accepted. In the context of Catullus’s poetry, with poems 72 and 75 offering an explicit background to and rationale for the contradiction in the poet’s feelings between love and hate, and in the light of the incontrovertible connotation of quare (or qua re) as ‘how’ in a passage of Terence’s Eunuchus, the correct translation of the word can only be ‘how’. Some suggestions are made to account for the origins and the persistence of the mistranslation. The translation as ‘why’ in the prose version in the 1912 Loeb edition edited by F. W. Cornish is suggested to have influenced a generation of English-speaking students, and Martial’s epigram 1.32 is invoked as a cause. But it is further argued that in taking Catullus’s epigram as a model for his own, Martial may have expressly intended to suggest that the meaning of quare as ‘why’ that was current in his time was different in that very respect from the connotation ‘how’ clearly intended by his predecessor.

In Poetics 25 (1461b1–3), Aristotle mentions critics who tend to misunderstand the text or read it inaccurately and thus criticise not the actual work, but rather their ideas on it. Some of the extant fragments of Zoilus (4th c. BC), the best-known and the most notorious critic of all the Aristotle’s contemporaries, imply that his critique was sometimes based on misreading and misinterpreting of the text so he could be one of those whom Aristotle meant. This article deals with three fragments attributed to Zoilus (two of them are found in the Scholia to the Iliad, the third one is quoted in Ps. Longinus’ De Sublimitate), each containing criticism towards certain passages in Homer’s poems. On closer examination it turns out that all the inconsistencies Zoilus postulated can be explained, should we read the text more carefully. Hence Zoilus dealt not with what is written but rather with what seemed to him to be convenient for his criticism

In this piece, attention is once again drawn to the locus classicus of Euripidean sententious outbursts, lines 599–602 put in the mouth of Hecuba mourning her daughter Polyxena. Suggested for bracketing by W. M. Sakorraphos in 1893 and athetised by J. Diggle (1984) and D. Kovacs (1995) in their respective editions (although not in the editions of J. Gregory (1999) and K. Matthiessen (2010), the lines (and the whole passage 592–602) have also shouldered a weight of Euripidean Weltanschauung doctrines built on their slender frame. A brief overview of scholarly judgment, often overexacting, prompts one to occupy the middling ground allowing both for the possibility of the genuine character of the lines 599–602 and their relevance in context (and not only expressing the ideas current in Euripides’ times) with both birth and upbringing contributing to virtuous character. The metaphor in line 603 should not be considered a brave mannerism, or a marginal remark of some critic, but a marker of a change of topic, its archery imagery well on the side of trite

The post-Renaissance copies of Aristotle’s Poetics were mostly made for scholarly use. The copyists such as Anton Salvini, a Florentine polymath, librarian and professor of Greek, drew on MSS as well as on printed editions in an attempt to establish the text they could use for translation or academic teaching. Still uncertain remains the rationale of the latest known manuscipts — from the Vatopedi monastery on Mt. Athos (ca. mid 18th cent.) and from Bucharest (of the early 19th cent.). Several similarities these copies display suppose common provenance. The Greek diaspora in Bucharest blossomed around 1800 and Romania is linked to Vatopedi by a long tradition of orthodox learning. The MSS in question provide an overall impression of a schoolwork. The Athoan is of supreme quality while the Romanian often resembles an abstract. The first MS was probably written soon after the foundation of the Athonite Academy near Vatopedi. Aristotle’s Poetics is hardly suitable for monastic learning, but Eugenius Bulgaris who was the headmaster of Athonias from 1753 to 1758 introduced ancient texts into its curriculum: from one of his letters we conjecture that Plato and Aristotle were studied there. It is thus reasonable to suppose that the cod. Vatopedius was made in the Athonias for learning purposes. By 1800 the Academy was in decline but they still taught disciplines and read texts introduced by Bulgaris. So, the Bucarestensis could have been written in the same place. Judging by the composition of the codex its maker was nurturing interest in ancient and modern Greek literature

Three ancient Greek epigrams by Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), dedicated to renown classical scholars Tadeusz F. Zieliński, Mikhail I. Rostovtzeff, and to religious philosopher and literate G. A. Rachinsky (1859–1939), were published in the collection of poems Nezhnaja tajna [‘Soft Secret’], ΛΕΠΤΑ, Humaniorum studiorum cultoribus (SPb, 1912, 112–113). This article provides a commentary on the Greek poem to Rachinsky based partly on archive materials. Rachinsky, of whose personality we know mostly from memoirs by Andrey Bely, N. A. Berdyaev and from correspondence and diaries of his contemporaries, chaired the Moscow Religious Philosophic Society ‘in memory of Vl. Solovjov’. He translated into Russian, inter alios, Nietzsche, Goethe, Maupassant and Balzac. Ivanov’s archives in Rome and Moscow keep some unpublished letters written by Rachinsky to Ivanov in 1910–1914. The correspondence allows to suppose that cordiality and even friendship between them developed in 1910. In the ‘Soft Secret’, Ivanov also dedicated to Rachinsky a Russian poem ‘On Receiving a Greek Prayer’. On December 25, 1910, Rachinsky sent to Ivanov from Moscow to St. Petersburg a card, most probably his Christmas greeting, with the Ode 5 for Choir, Irmos of the morning service for Christmas, in Greek. Conceivably, this text is a key to understanding of Ivanov’s quite dark Greek and Russian poems, which formed a poetic answer in gratitude for Rachinsky’s Greek prayer. In Ivanov’s Greek poem, there is a deliberate mixture of pagan and Christian vocabulary. It starts with the pagan πρόμαντις ‘prophet’ and goes on to οἰκτιρμῶν τε τοῦ Πατρός… εἰρήνης τε ‘Father of mercies and peace’. This recalls the wording of the NT and the Prayer for Christmas: Θεὸς ὢν εἰρήνης, Πατὴρ οἰκτιρμῶν. A scholarly poet, Ivanov expressed his thanks to a friend who could reveal insight into his complicated style. The author of the present contribution specifies the date of Ivanov’s Greek poem as between December 26, 1910 and January 28, 1911, and of his ‘On receiving a Greek Prayer’ between the 17th and the 28th of January, 1911

In this paper, a methodological issue is considered concerning the corpus of texts bearing witness to “spoken Latin”. Within this corpus there are also some texts that have been neglected up until now, stemming from shorthand records of spoken utterances: all of them — either dialogal or monologal — share a conversational allure, that allows the singling out of both universal and historical features of spoken (late) Latin. One of these texts, the Gesta concilii Aquileiensis, is then examined: the shorthand report of a Church council summoned in AD 381, where a lively debate is recorded among bishops supporting opposite views — Catholic vs. Arian — of the divinity of Christ. The survey on the universal traits of orality surfacing in the Gesta focuses on the textual-pragmatic, the syntactic and the semantic levels. It leads to interesting results, concerning above all syntax (prominence of parataxis, and of descendent order of the phrasal constituents within the complex sentence, i. e. independent clause > dependent clause) and semantics (lack of lexical innovation; inclination for expressive words). Despite the undeniably formal — and sometimes even formulaic — character of the dialogue, I would argue that the Gesta allow us to listen as it were to the voices of a group of cultured bishops animatedly discussing subtle theological matters

This present paper is concerned with the causal/instrumental uses of faciente + (pro)nominal head within an ablative absolute. We only examine the instances in which the participle does not govern a direct object and is not accompanied by further arguments and/or satellites, as in Jer. In psalm. 89 l. 28 qui per peccatum cecidit, diabolo faciente, rursum per Christum resurgat ad gloriam (“he who fell through sin under devil’s influence, shall soon be reborn to the Glory through Christ”). The analysis is restricted to the imperial and late period because the construction is not attested until Ovid (Met. 2, 540–541 lingua faciente loquaci / qui color albus erat, nunc est contrarius albo “through his tongue’s fault the talking bird, which was white, was now the opposite of white”, transl. Loeb). The discussion consists of four main sections. After a short survey of the main studies on the topic, we introduce the analysed corpora, the selection criteria of the data and the overall results. In section 5 we discuss some possible reasons behind the origin of the syntagm. Subsequently, the use and expansion of the syntagm in later centuries is analysed in the light of recent studies on the reanalysis of participles as prepositions. We show that faciente began a categorial shift into the class of causal/instrumental prepositions, but for reasons that shall be explained, this process remained unaccomplished. In the last section, we make a brief comparison with other absolute ablatives that include semantically related participles (operante, instigante, praestante), pointing out the main differences between them

The paper analyzes the function of the prefix inter-, which allows to reduce the 15 main senses (described in the OLD) to the basic two. The sense of the prefix depends on the situation described with the compound: a) the situation of dividing space: ‘a border between two or more points disconnecting them’ (inter hostes flumen erat). Most of the verbs in this group are transitive and accompanied by a countable object: intercalare ‘to insert a day or month into the calendar’; interloqui ‘to interrupt, to speak between’. b) the situation of connected space: ‘all the space (or time) between two points connecting them within the same situation’ (inter arma tacent musae). The majority of these verbs are transitive and are used with an uncountable object: interbibere ‘to drink dry, drain’; interlegere ‘to pick off here and there, to thin’. Some verbs can have either sense depending on the context (interesse: a. ‘to lie between, intervene’ modo inter me atque te murus intersit (Cic. Cat. 1. 10.), b. ‘to be in the company of, to take part’ legit scripta de se carmina, legit historias, et posteritati suae interfuit (Plin. Ep. 2.1.2). On the basis of this classification principle four verbs are analyzed in which the meaning of the prefix inter- is unclear: interire, interficere, interimere, intellegere. Three of them have the prefix inter- in the sense of division and form pairs of compounds (an intransitive verb of state interire — a verb of action interimere, interficere). The verb intellegere has two senses as different stages of its semantic development: 1. ‘to choose between’, ‘to notice, discern’ and 2. ‘to collect together (all the parts)’ > ‘to grasp, understand (the whole picture of an object or a situation)’.

The article examines two expressions for the new moon in Latin, luna silens and luna sicca (or sitiens). Despite the unusual imagery behind the choice of these epithets, the expressions appear in unremarkable, technical contexts (mostly, in works on agriculture by Cato, Columella, Pliny the Elder) and denote this particular phase of the lunar cycle without any indication that the metaphors were perceived by speakers. The paper aims at explaining this paradox. It is shown that neither of these expressions was based on superstitions or popular lore. They reflected, in fact, an attempt to present the phase of the lunar cycle when the moon is invisible in contrast to other visible phases, which are easier to identify. Thus, luna silens was created by opposition to luna crescens “the waxing moon”, as denoting the moment before active, visible growth will begin. Luna sicca, on the other hand, was created by opposition to luna plena, “the full moon”, where the moon would be imagined as a vessel, gradually filled to its fullness by white light. Finally, luna sitiens was an expression, synonymic to luna sicca, created by analogy with luna silens. While these expressions were used as terms without any artistic effect, Augustan poets seem to have recognized their poetic potential and, on some occasions, put it to use (in particular, Verg. Aen. 2, 255 and Prop. 2, 17, 15).

According to Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus announced during the election campaign of the 133 BCE, that he would pass a number of laws, and among them — the law granting the right of appeal to the people (provocatio) ἀπὸ τῶν δικαστῶν. Ti. Gracchus has died before he passed the alleged law. Besides Plutarch, his last reform programme is attested only by Cassius Dio, who mentions no law on appeal. The whole programme is very similar to the laws of Gaius Gracchus, and there is suspicion, that it consists of the laws of Gaius which were ascribed to Tiberius to depict him as a power-seeking demagogue. What could be the aims of the law on appeal and what it meant exactly? Firstly, both Gracchi could consider an appeal against the senatorial extraordinary commissions which would protect the Gracchans against political persecution. This measure seems to be more appropriate after the advocates of Tiberius Gracchus were prosecuted in senatorial courts. But Gaius Gracchus, instead of it, prohibited appointing the extraordinary courts iniussu populi. Secondly, if the aim was to gain the electors, Tiberius could promise them appeal against murder courts, though it would be pernicious for the public order. Finally, in all other cases the bill on appeal would be of no use for the Gracchans, but would make them a good target of criticism. Such a measure could well be invented by an anti-Gracchan source

In this contribution, we present a representative corpus of similia similibus formulae attested in ancient Greek and Latin curse tablets or defixiones. The simile formulae, attested in about 80 tablets in widely differing states of preservation and legibility, are introduced in the context of sympathetic magic and, in contradistinction to literary similes, as performative utterances that are based on a persuasive analogy. This analogy operates in the general form of “just as X possesses property P, so let also Y possess property P”, in which Y is the target or victim of the curse, while X and P are variables that change in accordance with the intended results. We provide a provisional taxonomy of simile formulae, offer new readings and interpretations of some defixiones, and compare Greek and Latin documents. Due to its length, the paper has been divided into two parts. In the first part, presented here, we focus on comparata that reference the materiality of the tablet itself and comparata referencing corpses or ghosts of the dead. The remaining comparata, namely animals, historiolae and rituals, aversus formulae and unusual orientations of the script, “names”, and drawings, will be presented in a follow-up paper, to be published in the next issue of Philologia Classica

The present contribution examines the relationship between ancient Greek comic poets, who worked in different periods and cultural contexts. The study considers the specific case that binds Epicharmus (Syracuse, 5th century BC), Nikophon (Athens, 5th century BC) and Hegesippus (native of Taras, 3rd century BC). The comparison of fragmentary texts casts new light on the connection between these authors, highlighting the reuse of subjects previously known and developed. The main part of this work analyses a long fragment from Hegesippus, where a boastful chef compares his own culinary skills to the seduction technique of the Homeric Sirens. The juxtaposition of these monstrous beings with food is not only a parody of Homer and does not constitute a new image in the Greek comic literature. Instead, it seems to be part of a shared repertoire, since it was used by Epicharmus and Nikophon two centuries earlier. It is therefore possible that the ancient Greek comic poets had at their disposal a number of models and situations already tested and deemed good for the success of the pieces. The paper considers the importance of Epicharmus’ image and examines the function of the Homeric parody as well as the meanings that it conveys. Hegesippus refers to this subject with an allusion which should be easily understood by his audience

Plutarch cited Simonides’ elegy with toponyms Corinth and Ephyra as proof that Corinthians had participated directly in the battle of Plataea (Plut. De malign. 872D–E). Though several places in Greece bore the name Ephyra (Strab. 8, 3, 5), a number of features in Simonides’ text allows us to identify Ephyra with Corinth, but the juxtaposition of two names of the same city needs to be explained. On the one hand, Ephyra could denote a territory adjacent to Corinth, but it is difficult to localize it; attempts were made to identify the historical Ephyra with one of the settlements of the Mycenaean period in the vicinity of Corinth (Korakou and Aetopetra). On the other hand, several sources mention the fact that Ephyra could be used as the ancient name for Corinth, and Aristarchus remarked that in Homer Corinth was called Ephyra in the characters’ speeches (i. e. by Glaucus); to be sure, in literary texts, and especially in poetry, the toponyms Ephyra and Corinth are virtually interchangeable. It thus seems probable that Simonides mentioned Ephyra as the ancient name of Corinth, implying by the use of this toponym, as well as by the mentioning of Glaucus, that the Corinthians who fought at Plataea were equal in prowess to the Homeric heroes