This article compares the use of two similar ways of expressing relative future tense in Latin: the future passive infinitive and the construction fore/futurum (esse) ut. This construction is regularly found in the same contexts as the future infinitives, and may serve as an alternative for verbs lacking a supine form. What appears to be of particular interest is its widespread use in cases where a supine is available, and the future infinitive could have been used. Up to the present day, there have been very few studies on this topic. In the present study, the author aims to fill this gap and to examine the relevant syntactic constructions in the passive voice, to begin with a limited corpus of examples. Cicero’s texts were chosen as the material for the study, since they preserve the largest number of these forms, furthermore, such material allows us to conduct the study within the language of one author. The study was conducted with the help of the computer database PHI-5. Having examined the resulting sample, the author identifies tendencies typical for the use of the infinitive and the construction, as well as their pragmatic features and differences. The infinitive is used in objective contexts with a high degree of epistemic support and, as a rule, when there are valid reasons to believe that a certain event will happen. The fore ut construction in our corpus is chosen either to denote the events that were not destined to happen or to convey someone else’s opinion, and introduces a subjective and sometimes counterfactual overtone into the embedded predication. The set of verbs that occur as future infinitives and those used in the predication embedded under fore ut does not overlap, with few exceptions, which may be due to the different aspectual characteristics of these verbs.
This article examines the testimonia concerning Aeschylus’ purported brothers — Cynegirus and Ameinias — both of whom are said to have distinguished themselves during the Greco-Persian Wars. Cynegirus, a strategos, met a heroic death at the Battle of Marathon, while Ameinias earned renown for his bravery at Salamis. Although modern scholarship widely accepts Cynegirus as Aeschylus’ brother, the earliest extant testimony of their kinship derives from Heraclides of Pontus, later reiterated by an anonymous scholiast on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The alleged kinship between Aeschylus and Ameinias, however, remains a subject of debate. This study aligns with the view that their association may stem from later conflation or errors within the ancient historiographical tradition. Regarding Aeschylus and Cynegirus, while Heraclides provides the primary testimony and the subsequent tradition is based on much later sources, their alleged fraternal relationship must be treated with due historiographical caution
In the second book of the Histories, Herodotus recounts a legend that attributes the establishment of the oracle of Dodona to Egypt’s influence: a more fantastical variant of the tale features a black dove capable of human speech, while a more realistic rendition identifies an abducted Egyptian priestess as the founder. Notably absent from Herodotus’ account are the Selloi, a group of ascetic diviners mentioned in the Iliad’s brief depiction of Dodona, where they are said to sleep on the ground and refrain from washing their feet, presumably to maintain a spiritual connection to earth. This absence of the ancient priesthood from the Histories led some scholars to conclude that the Selloi must have disappeared by the time of Herodotus, fully replaced by a college of priestesses said to derive their sacred knowledge from the Egyptian Thebes. This point of view was challenged lately, as more evidence for the continued presence of male priests in Dodona had been uncovered and cataloged. Hence it seems consequent to suppose that the exclusion of the Selloi from the Histories may have been entirely intentional on Herodotus’ part, since the existence of this college and its acknowledgement in the Iliad could be difficult to reconcile with a theory proposed in the second book, which suggests that Dodona had a foundational role in the early development of the Greek religion as a conductor of the Egyptian influence in the pre-Homeric Greece
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