Re: VIRGIL: bullet-proof fix

2007-02-23 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Since I didn't receive the original spam I'm not sure whether it merited 
more than instant deletion like the anatomical extension and 
pump-and-dump share offers one expects to get; but if it is really a 
problem, by all means let us go to Google Groups.


Leofranc Holford-Strevens

In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], 
David Wilson-Okamura david@virgil.org writes

The software that runs Mantovano is old and far from bullet-proof. A
possible solution is to move the list to a free mailing list service
such as Google Groups. This would simplify my job, certainly!

The main disadvantage is that everyone who wants to continue receiving
messages would need to register with Google Groups. It's easy (and
free), but it is an additional step. Right now, it's extremely easy to
join the discussion -- and also easy to send spam. I do what I can
behind the scenes, but some kinds of spam I can't intercept.

What are your thoughts?

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East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
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VIRGIL: Garland and bough: PS

2007-02-17 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Further to my comments on the lines from Meleager cited by Martin: Gow 
and Page, in _Hellenistic Epigrams_ ii. 604 ad loc., do their best to 
botanize the golden bough: 'chrusánthemon is the name of more than one 
flower, and if one of these is meant there is no way of deciding which. 
Klw^na however suggests shrub or tree rather than flower and we should 
consider also chrusókarpos, _ivy_, and chrysóxulon, _fustic_, _Rhus 
continus_. Since _aei_ presumably qualifies chrúseion these seem more 
suitable than a flower.'


Not a hint that the expression may be figurative, but also (which is 
more significant) not a hint that the phrase is paralleled elsewhere. 
Plato they refer to a note on the epigrams ascribed to him (and 
declaring 'Plato the Younger', AP 9. 13, 748, 751 to be too late for the 
Garland); but by saying of the participial clause 'perhaps bright with 
the author's excellence', but the phrase is flat' they eliminate any 
reference to Plato as a moral philosopher.


A search on the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae produced only one other golden 
bough, in 'political verses' [i.e. accentual iambics of 15 syllables to 
the line] by Theodore Prodromos on the birth of Alexios, son of the 
Sebastokrator Anronikos, grandson of the Emperor John II (1118-43), 
great-grandson of the Emperor Alexios I (Alexius Comnenus, 1081-1118). 
John, called 'flourishing, very broad, and great tree' is informed that 
he has


tw^n chruoklw'nwn aúxhsin ek tw^n paraphuádwn
kaì tw^n blastw^n tw^n eugenw^n kaì tw^n apoblastídwn:

(Carmina historica, 44: 39-40),

which appears to mean 'increase of the golden boughs (the imperial 
house) from the offshoots (his brothers), the noble shoots (his sons), 
and the shoots of shoots (his grandsons)'; for the continuation runs 
'Count with your children and your children's children this newborn 
Sebastokratorid too, the offspring of your sweetest child Andronikos. 
Add another new Komnenos to the Komnenoi, and attach another general to 
your generals.'


It seems impossible to relate this to any image that might have been 
used by, or derived from, either Meleager or Vergil; but in so literary 
a culture as the Byzantine that suggests that Theodore knew no more of a 
golden-bough tradition than poor Cornutus, who alas did not know about 
the clipping of the deceased's hair either.


Leofranc Holford-Strevens



'



Meleager (whom Vergil can hardly not have known) is describing the 
poets whose works he has included in his collection as flowers or other 
delights for his garland. Some of the phrases seem more specific than 
others; they include 'Sappho's slight things, but roses' and 'the sweet 
myrtle of Callimachus, ever full of stinging honey'. The Plato intended 
is undoubtedly Plato the philosopher, but as the ascriptive author of 
epigrams whose authenticity we no longer believe in; there is no reason 
to read anything special into the phrase so far as Meleager is 
concerned, nor single out one couplet rather than set it against all 
the other impressionistic judgements in the poem. So far as Vergil is 
concerned, however, there is no reason why it should not have given him 
ideas; if he blended it with the Pythagorean Y and the Aureum Carmen, 
that would be entirely within his method, to draw on two or more 
sources and make something of his own.


Leofranc Holford-Strevens

In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Rosemary Grayston 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

Finding a literary origin for the Golden Bough has been very difficult,
as is generally acknowledged.  Servius, as I remember, says that the
image comes from Pythagoras' belief that the bough or Y-shape
represents the sharp divergences of fate.  This is interesting but fails to
say anything about gold.  The only clear verbal parallel comes as far as
I know from Garland, a poem by Meleager of Gadara who died about
when V was born and who was quite well known: the golden branch of
the ever-divine Plato, shining all through with virtrue.  Mackail, who
worked on both Meleager and V, remarks that this is one of the
best-ever few-word critical judgements, assuming that the great Plato
not some lesser poet of the same name is meant, and that it might have
contributed to V's conception of the Bough - David West makes this
phrase the key to a Platonist interpretation of much of the Katabasis
story.  For my less qualified part I find it hard to think that V did not
know of Meleager's phrase; moreover we are aware that V, from his
treatment of Berenice's Lock of Hair, which left Berenice's head as
unwillingly as Aeneas left Dido's realm, was well prepared to take
Hellenistic phrases which had been merely charming and turn them into
something much more stern and dramatic. Perhaps the word charming
underestimates Meleager, but I would think in spite of Mackail's praise
that M was not really trying to be profound.  His theme is the
association of a series of poets with a series of flowers and fruits making
the Garland: quite common botanical things

Re: VIRGIL: Garland and bough

2007-02-14 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Meleager (whom Vergil can hardly not have known) is describing the poets 
whose works he has included in his collection as flowers or other 
delights for his garland. Some of the phrases seem more specific than 
others; they include 'Sappho's slight things, but roses' and 'the sweet 
myrtle of Callimachus, ever full of stinging honey'. The Plato intended 
is undoubtedly Plato the philosopher, but as the ascriptive author of 
epigrams whose authenticity we no longer believe in; there is no reason 
to read anything special into the phrase so far as Meleager is 
concerned, nor single out one couplet rather than set it against all the 
other impressionistic judgements in the poem. So far as Vergil is 
concerned, however, there is no reason why it should not have given him 
ideas; if he blended it with the Pythagorean Y and the Aureum Carmen, 
that would be entirely within his method, to draw on two or more sources 
and make something of his own.


Leofranc Holford-Strevens

In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Rosemary Grayston 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

Finding a literary origin for the Golden Bough has been very difficult,
as is generally acknowledged.  Servius, as I remember, says that the
image comes from Pythagoras' belief that the bough or Y-shape
represents the sharp divergences of fate.  This is interesting but fails to
say anything about gold.  The only clear verbal parallel comes as far as
I know from Garland, a poem by Meleager of Gadara who died about
when V was born and who was quite well known: the golden branch of
the ever-divine Plato, shining all through with virtrue.  Mackail, who
worked on both Meleager and V, remarks that this is one of the
best-ever few-word critical judgements, assuming that the great Plato
not some lesser poet of the same name is meant, and that it might have
contributed to V's conception of the Bough - David West makes this
phrase the key to a Platonist interpretation of much of the Katabasis
story.  For my less qualified part I find it hard to think that V did not
know of Meleager's phrase; moreover we are aware that V, from his
treatment of Berenice's Lock of Hair, which left Berenice's head as
unwillingly as Aeneas left Dido's realm, was well prepared to take
Hellenistic phrases which had been merely charming and turn them into
something much more stern and dramatic. Perhaps the word charming
underestimates Meleager, but I would think in spite of Mackail's praise
that M was not really trying to be profound.  His theme is the
association of a series of poets with a series of flowers and fruits making
the Garland: quite common botanical things, like violets, spurge,
cyclamen and pears.  When he comes to Plato does his golden branch
come from a mythical or supernatural context unlike all the other ones?
  Or is he again referring to something quite common?  The obvious
candidate seems to me to the plant we know as Golden Rod, solidago
virgaurea, which does have a pleasantly bright appearance and also has
inner goodness in form of medicinal properties (good for kidney stones,
apparently).  The point I was thinking of is that if V is exploiting an
inherited, rather charming, comparison of Plato to a common garden
flower he is also transforming the idea that he inherits, raising it to
another plane, and one should not assume that he retains from the tone
of his original an uncritically flattering view of political Platonism. 
How nice it would be to find another source that took us out of the
garden and into a rather more sacred and mythological realm where V's
Bough seems to belong. Unless Meleager is using his anthology to
encode some deeper ideas. - Martin Hughes 


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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: Virgil passages for comparison

2006-10-22 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Helen 
Conrad-O'Briain [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
What passages are generally used as test passages for manuscript 
affiliation for Vergil?  I have a list somewhere, but 1. I cannot  find 
it, and 2. I suspect it might not have been a list that was 
necessarily generally accepted.


At 08:40 PM 4/24/03 +0100, Helen COB wrote:
What would the list suggest as passages to use for tests of text
affiliations in manuscripts or early printed books ?

To which David replied:

Matteo Venier uses the following passages in Per una storia del testo 
di

Virgilio nella prima età del libro a stampa (1469-1519):

- E 1.6, 8; G 1.1-200; A 5.484-600
- incomplete verses: A 2.614, 640, 767; 3.340, 661; 8.41; 10.284, 728, 
876)

- interpolated verses: G 4.338; A 2.76, 567-88; 3.204abc; 4.273, 528;
6.242, 289abcd, 702; 8.46; 9.29, 121, 529; 10.278, 872
- interesting verses from the standpoint of early printed editions: G
1.321, 336, 2.126-30, 168, 449-51, 523, etc.

Is that what you meant?

Leofranc
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: boiling the must

2006-09-30 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John 
O'Flynn [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

Greetings to the list.

Why, in Georgics 1.295, is the peasant woman boiling the must?

Thomas's note ad loc. leaves me entirely mystified:  The boiling down
of must was a means of bypassing fermentation.  How on earth can you
make wine without fermentation?  If you boil down the must you'll simply
end with concentrated grape juice.
In reading the _Georgics_, the first resource, especially on these rural 
matters, should always be Mynors, who writes on p. 68 of his posthumous 
edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990):


'we turn back from the long winter evenings to a busy spell in October, 
when selected must from the wine-press is boiled down into a sweet syrup 
of various strengths, to blend with natural wines in order to improve 
them and make them keep (Col[umella] 2.21.4 'uinum defrutare'), or for 
use in home medicine or in the kitchen, or for sale. Varro [De Vita 
Populi Romani lib. I, cited by Nonius p. 551M [= p. 885 Lindsay, s.v. 
sapa], says that reduction by one-half produced _sapa_ (which is a 
festive drink in Ovid _fasti_ 4.780), and by two-thirds the _defrutum_ 
of _G[eorgics] 4.269. Pallad[ius] 11.18 adds _caroenum_, from redction 
by one-third; but there is some variety in the names used. In the full 
description in Col. 12.19-21, the boiling liquor is skimmed with bunches 
of fennel tied on sticks (V's _follis_), or with strainers plaited from 
rushes or broom. _dulcis_ is noted by Quintilian 8.2.10 as an example of 
the well-chosen epithet.'


Mynors goes on to discuss the use of _Volcano_ as metonym for fire and 
the hypermetric elision _umor(em)_. On the next line he notes at _aëni_:


Col. 12.20.2 and Pliny 14.136 advise the use of lead for the vessel 
rather than bronze.


and considers a possible echo from the _Erga_ of Menecrates of Ephesus.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: *** SPAM *** Re: VIRGIL: Nefarious conjugals with fortunate race

2006-09-14 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Rosemary Grayston 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
By 'racism' I mean 'irrational prejudice on grounds of race or 
nationality',
As opposed to a rational one? But of course if one believed the 
scientific theories in fashion before the Second World War, rational is 
precisely what racial hostility was.
I quite agree that the legal story, as far as the Young Caesar was 
concerned, of the Actium campaign was of a war of Rome against Egypt, 
where certain traitors appeared, most nefariously, on the Egyptian 
side.  But this story is not quite what we get in V's account of the 
Shield, which I suppose puts a case to Republican sympathisers that 
they have a better deal from the Augustan than they could ever have 
obtained from the Antonian system.
Which was indeed an Augustan line, at least in Latin literature, as Syme 
shows; true, a great temple of Mars Ultor celebrating Augustus' avenging 
of Caesar is not the stuff to give Republicans, but it was aimed at a 
wider public than the narrow readership of literature.


Antony does not appear as a love-slave tied to Cleo's ample apron but 
as a vigorous and menacing leader, using his position as a Roman victor 
in the East to carry the Eastern peoples (some reluctantly, perhaps) in 
an attempt to secure domination for himself in Rome.  She follows him, 
not he her.  No one thinks it nefarious for a wife to follow her 
husband and within the scheme of the Aeneid it is not forbidden for 
women to appear on a battlefield for a cause she believes in: Cleo and 
Antony would seem to have a Camilla-Turnus, rather than a Dido-Aeneas, 
relationship.
Certainly by then (even by Actium, if one took seriously the speech Dio 
puts in Imp. Caesar's mouth) there was no need to maintain the pretence 
that the enemy was Egypt; but Antony's relation with Cleopatra is 
symptom, or cause, of his treasonable alliance with the Orient--at best 
Greek-speaking, at worst barbarians--against Rome, all Italy, and all 
decent Latin-speakers everywhere.




I would think that the nefarious act in this passage, for the sales 
pitch to the Republican diehards, seems to be the introduction not just 
of a form of monarchy but of a form that brings Eastern political and 
religious forces into the Roman political equation: a sudden and 
unmanageable transition.  It is better for everyone, including the 
easterners, whose rivers will now run more gently under Augustan 
tutelage, to establish a regime that will from now on respect 
Western-style religious restraints.  The unpleasantness of the 
Triumviral period is over, and was Antony's fault anyway.

Certainly.


Yet the reference to Egypt in the Georgics as the home a fortunate race 
that Eastern influences of all kinds on a united Empire would 
inevitably arrive and we should make the best of them.
But is that meant to be present in the mind? If Theseus can have two 
different fates in one book (Aeneid VI), it seems a little much to worry 
about what might have been said in another work all those years ago. And 
moderns are quite capable of doublethink about foreign countries too. 
France, in early nineteenth-century Britain, was both the deadly enemy 
and the source of wine; Grandfather Buddenbrooks heartily damns the 
French, but quite unselfconsciously uses the French expressions of his 
eighteenth-century education that no subsequent generation would have 
dreamt of uttering. Come to that, in more recent times much American 
culture and ways of thought have been imported into other countries by 
left-wingers who denounce American policies at every turn.


Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: *** SPAM *** Re: VIRGIL: Nefarious conjugals with fortunate race

2006-09-14 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens

As a matter of interest, how came *** SPAM *** into the header?

Leofranc Holford-Strevens

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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Nefarious conjugals with fortunate race

2006-09-10 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Rosemary Grayston 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

.
 
What was the sentiment to which V appeals in the Shield passage of A8
when he accompanies mention of 'the Egyptian wife' of Antony with an
expostulation about the nefarious nature of the partnership?  The racism
and fear of Caesarian 'tota Italia' propaganda, as advertised by Syme? 
What is meant here by 'racism'? The scientific theories that were all 
the rage (not least amongst progressive eugenicists) until the Second 
World War and then dropped like a hot potato afterwards? Or simply the 
belief that certain other peoples, especially those against whom one is 
fighting, are inherently decadent or vicious, which is normal in all 
wars? (Think of the stuff the British told each other about the Germans 
in both World Wars; anyone who imagines the Second was fought only 
against the Nazis needs to grow up fast.) Retrospective moral judgements 
are for prigs, the kind of people who used to rebuke Martial for 
obscenity and then when the fashion changed for obsequiousness; or else 
for those who


Compound for sins that they've a mind to
By damning those they're not inclin'd to.

Even if one happens to believe that some moral principle or other is 
timeless, one can no more blame those who lived before its revelation 
for not abiding by it than the most zealous Christian blames those who 
lived before the Incarnation for not being Christians.


Augustus had declared war on Cleopatra, not on Antony, in order that the 
conflict should be with a foreign enemy with whom (as could be foreseen) 
Antony would treasonably ally himself, rather than a civil war against 
someone whose right to power was no worse than his own. Once the war was 
on, of course the enemy would be vilified: for the spirit in which 
Cleopatra could be viewed see (in a poet who had seen the dark side of 
Octavian at Perugia, and who sometimes plays at a dandyish sympathy for 
his opponent) Propertius 3. 11, especially v. 41 'ausa Ioui nostro 
latrantem opponere Anubim', even though in the previous verse he has 
acknowledged that Cleopatra was of Macedonian blood, and therefore not a 
native Egyptian (unlike Apion if you believe Josephus' defence of the 
Jews against his *racial* attack). But in Vergil the point of Aegyptia 
coniunx is surely less to tarnish her than to damn Antony, who (nefas!) 
had taken a foreign wife and thrown in his lot with her; had committed 
the crime, in fact, from which Aeneas had drawn back.


Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: Ancient Geography

2006-09-07 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Hippolyte 
Menshikov [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I have been trying to make some sense of the geographical place names 
listed by Meliboeus at Eclogue 1.64-66. In his commentary, Page 
suggests that they constitute the 4 points of the compass: North 
(Scythia), East (Oaxes), South (Africans) and West (Britons).


This took me somewhat by surprise. According to modern cartography,
Which has nothing to do with the case; not even ancient cartography. 
What we need is neither the Barrington Atlas nor Strabo, but a poetic 
map in which the barbarian peoples are located where they need to be, 
because it is barbarians amongst whom Meliboeus, in disgust or despair, 
must go. The Africans are obvious; Oaxes is a portmanteau of Oxus and 
Araxes (if Shakespeare can speak of 'Ariachne's woof', why can't Vergil 
blend names too), and therefore stands for the east; obviously not 
Crete, a Mediterranean island in the empire, which as Clausen puts it 
would not 'be compatible with the African desert, distant Britain, and 
the frozen North'. The West has to be the cut-off Britons because Spain, 
due west of Italy as it lies, and even Gaul are under Roman rule. 
Scythia did indeed stand for the frozen North in the classical imaginary 
(think of the Riphaean mountains) because it was cooler than Greece or 
Italy; after all, the Straits of Kerch had frozen over in the lifetime 
of Vergil's father.


Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Loeb for student text?

2006-09-05 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Christine Perkell 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
why not order two different paperbacks--one Aeneid, one Eclogues/ 
Georgics. I should think the Loeb would be deadly.


I admit to knowing nothing about what students want, even in Britain let 
alone in America, nor have I ever looked at the Loeb in question beyond 
seeing what Goold had to say about some difficulty, but what is being 
sought in an English translation: something that gives a reasonable 
approximation to the surface sense, or something that has literary life? 
I can imagine that the former, if in workaday prose, would be deadly, 
and the latter convey too much of the wrong life; personally I find (for 
instance) Dryden a lot easier to take than Day Lewis, but that is 
because I appreciate seventeenth-century poets more than twentieth, not 
because in either case I feel I am reading Vergil.


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Re: VIRGIL: seduction by Aeneid

2006-05-12 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David Wilson-Okamura 
david@virgil.org writes
I'm sorry no one has picked up the Christianus Maro query. This is 
the exactly the right place for that kind of question.


I did not reply because I supposed that someone else must have had more 
dealings with Mantuan than I had: I quote his counter to leap-year 
superstition in _The Oxford Companion to the Year_, p. 681 and note at 
p. 128 (on his day 20 March) that 'He is the good old Mantuan 
misquoted by Holofernes in _Love's Labour's Lost_, IV. ii' (though some 
editions clean up the quotation). But when no-one had written, David's 
kind words prompted me to contribute.


I have just finished watching a Spanish film, Son de mar (1998), 
directed by Bigas Luna. The main character, Ulises, teaches literature 
at a high school by the sea and wins the love of his landlord's 
daughter by reciting lines (in Spanish, not Latin) from the Aeneid. 
There's the cave, of course, and a passage which never seemed sexy to 
me, the description of two snakes breasting the waves and squeezing 
Laocoon. This second passage is apparently the girl's favorite, and he 
recites it to her at key points in the story (either prior to or during sex).
Well, (near)-strangling is attested as an erotic practice, not least for 
its effect on the male member...


Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Aeneas' Character

2005-09-14 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Melanie 
Austin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

I suspect that Virgil intended Aeneas to be a hero Augustus would have
viewed as ideal.  The degree to which his epic is ironic has been the
subject of much debate.  I was taught (by a prof who ignored the irony)
that Creusa dies so that Aeneas may found a new Troy via a new
marriage.  It was not wrong of Aeneas to tell Creusa to follow him;
rather, it was an assertion of the patriarchal notion of male power,
control, and continuity.   One can always find another wife, after all.
Creusa seems to cooperate with the patriarchal order when she appears
to Aeneas after her death.
Which Vergil after all was not challenging. Besides, for the purposes of 
the plot he needed Aeneas to be wifeless when he arrived in Carthage; he 
could have made him a widower before the fall, but the loss described is 
more pathetic. (And Creusa, like its masculine counterpart Creon, was 
the favoured name for a genealogical item invented at need.)

  She does not accuse him, as Dido will; she
just points him in the direction he must take to fulfill his mission.

And that is part at least of what she is there for.

In both ancient and modern literature, it is the fault of 
'Anglo-Saxons' to focus on characters as if they were real human beings 
to the exclusion of their function within the work of literature. It is 
easy enough to read Homer for real human beings; but was Vergil so 
concerned? Dido, who has negative features often overlooked, is 'real', 
or rounded, enough; but it is precisely when Aeneas steps out of the 
Idealized Roman to be an individual that he is, at least morally, most 
fallible: falling for Dido, killing Turnus. But there again, historical 
aetiology requires Dido to have ground for cursing him; and can anyone 
envisage Turnus settling down as either a private citizen or the First 
Minister of Aeneas' government without nurturing his resentment or being 
the focus for any malcontents? Neither poetically nor politically is the 
individual the be-all and end-all that English-speakers seem to wish.


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Re: VIRGIL: Dis = dis 'wealthy'?

2005-07-17 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David Wilson-Okamura 
david@virgil.org writes
Commentators in the Renaissance routinely explain the proper name Dis 
as dis 'wealthy'. Cf. Plouton from Ploutos in Plato, Crat. 403a. I 
have two questions about this.


1. Is the Dis etymology valid?

Ernout-Meillet accept it; and I don't know of an alternative.

2. How old is it?
At least as old as Cicero (De natura deorum 2. 66), though Quintilian 
(1. 6. 34) took it to operate by contraries (quia minime dives).


Leofranc Holford-Strevens

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Re: VIRGIL: Comparetti's Virgilio nel Medioevo available online

2005-06-30 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Emma T.K. 
Guest-Consales [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

Thanks for posting the Comparetti link, David.

Also, I would like to inform the list that I recently completed my
dissertation in art history at Rutgers University:  The Illustration of
Virgil's Bucolics and its influence in Italian Renaissance Art.  I would
be happy to post the abstract to the list, if that would be appropriate.


Excellent topic. Please do. Leofranc Holford-Strevens

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Re: VIRGIL: Virgil's knowledge of the underworld (Dante)

2005-06-27 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David Wilson-Okamura
david@virgil.org writes
I've been writing this month about the underworld. Here's something
I'm curious about: when Dante and Virgil are going through hell, Dante
asks his guide whether anyone from limbo ever visits the lower circles.
That was 35 years ago. To my knowledge, no one has discovered a
source for the episode, and I think B. d. I. was probably right: this was
Dante's invention. But why does he drag Erichtho into it? The
connection between Aen. 6 and Phars. 6 is obvious, interesting, and
one that commentators in the Middle Ages had a lot to say about. But
whom did Virgil draw forth from the circle of Judas, and did
Erichtho animate Virgil's corpse to do it?

The commentaries I own do not answer these questions, though Tommaso Di
Salvo sees in the story an answer to the rationalizing reader's
question, how Vergil knows his way around, even as Vergil provided an
answer to the question how the Sibyl knew. Let us take it from there.
Lucan's Erictho, in the same-numbered book as Aeneas' katabasis and all
the more a kind of anti-Sibyl, could also substitute for Hecate (who as
a heathen goddess was not available for Dante), since as Lucan tells us
(6. 513-15):

coetus audire silentum,
nosse domos Stygias arcanaque Ditis operti
non superi, non uita uetat.

Neither the gods above nor her own way of life forbid her to hear the
assemblies of the silent dead, to know the Stygian halls and the secrets
of hidden Dis.

However, since unlike Hecate she does not reside in the underworld, she
operates by power of magical command, bringing a dead man back to life
in order that he may prophesy to Sextus; she picks over the unburied
corpses; wolves and carrion-birds while she chooses one to be her
soothsayer:

dum Thessala uatem
eligit.

Dante, I suggest, while no doubt being fully aware of the real meaning,
creatively reinterpreted this as 'when [a standard medieval use of
_dum_] she chooses the inspired poet', namely Vergil, who is made to
fetch the deceased soul so that he shall know the way when Dante needs
him to do so. The soul so fetched is no more in need of identification
than the dead soldier whom Lucan's Erictho restores to life.

I offer this to be improved upon.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: The Importance of Creusa

2005-03-24 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Zara Hayat 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Apart from telling Aeneas his destiny in the form of a ghost (an event 
that, together with her death, is crucial to move the story along), is 
Creusa an important character?

She is also important as the mother of Iulus/Ascanius, who remembers her 
(9. 297); but if you mean is her individual character important, beyond 
that of being a loving wife who releases her husband from his grief, and 
a loving daughter-in-law who helps persuade Anchises to leave Troy, the 
answer appears to be no. Neither is Lavinia of much importance as an 
individual human being, rather than a fulfilleress of function 
(gender-suffix deliberate, as indicating a role women are liable to be 
assigned); the one was, and the other will be, a Good Wife. Contrast 
Dido.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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VIRGIL: Re: VIRGIL: conceptions of time (was ein Weihnachtsgruß)

2004-12-26 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David Wilson-Okamura 
david@virgil.org writes
What is the purpose of these ruined cities (which are mentioned only 
briefly)? Are they a prophecy of what Rome will come to in the end? In 
which case there is not going to be much progress after all...
There was a prophecy that Rome would one day perish; and Scipio the 
younger had thought on those lines, or so Polybius tells us.
I don't think you have to read it that way: for me (and perhaps for 
Virgil also) ruins are romantic as well as melancholy, because they 
connect us with the past. Insofar as they are ruins, they are monitory. 
Where is the horse and rider? / Where is the horn that was blowing? 
And so on. But ruins are also remnants. And they invite continuation, 
in a way that the finished monument, intact and imposing, does not.

There is a similar puzzle at the end of Met. XV: will the Golden Age of 
Augustus really last forever, or will it give way to the Changefulness 
that Pythagoras has just finished saying (at the beginning of Met. XV) 
is the abiding principle of the universe?
All part of the Pythagoras problem in that book: when Ovid introduces 
his speech with the words

docta quidem soluit, sed non et credita, uerbis
are we meant to reflect on human blindness in the face of wisdom, or to 
write the philosopher off as a silly old fool? As with Janus' 
denunciation of rampant greed in book 1 of the Fasti, do we really want 
to live the abstemious and impoverished life of virtue--do you, 
hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère?

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
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Re: VIRGIL: Mantovano

2004-12-03 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Phillip 
Harris [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I am not familiar with the name Mantovano as it relates to Virgil.  Can
you tell me the connection?
Tennyson so addressed Vergil, using the modern Italian form of the 
ethnic:

I salute thee, Mantovano,
I that loved thee since my day began,
Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Remember me?

2004-02-24 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], 
Patrick Roper [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
In regard to the current discussion on teaching the Aeneid in translation,
an expression that seems to have become embedded in the English-speaking
psyche since the time of Purcell's Dido  Aeneas (and maybe before) is
remember me as a special request.  Does Virgil actually put any such words
into Dido's mouth (I tried to find such and failed)?
No, nothing so resigned: a good round curse, other revenge having been 
contemplated (4. 563-4) but not executed (4. 600-6). It is Aeneas who 
says he will not be sorry [i.e. be very happy] to remember her (4. 335).

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Re: VIRGIL: Virgil in translation

2004-01-14 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Simon Cauchi 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes


because the phrase
exactly conveys the feeling of a poetic nightpiece---which, by the way, I'm
sure must be a form antedating Virgil, but I can't cite examples.
Try Apollonius Rhodius 3. 744-50 (setting up the contrast with the 
sleepless Medea)

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: the anchises, aeneas group

2003-05-22 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
See too Jane Davidson Reid with Chris Rohmann, _The Oxford Guide to 
Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s_, 2 vols. (New York and 
Oxford), 1993, vol. i, pp. 43-5, covering all the arts.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], 
Johan Hanselaer [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
In A. Pigler, Barockthemen. Eine Auswahl von Verzeichnissen zur
Ikonographgie des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Budapest, 1974 (2n edn), vol.
II:
pp. 283ff: Geschichte des Äneas.  pp. 286-289: Äneas trägt seinen Vater
Anchises aus dem brennenden Troja. List of works from antiquity to 18th c.
Yours truly,
Johan HANSELAER
http://home.tiscalinet.be/beledimar
(Editions, printed in Belgium before 1801, on the Market)
* - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - * -
Johan HANSELAER
Koning Albertlaan 71
B-9000 Gent
België/Belgique/Belgien/Belgium
http://home.tiscalinet.be/beledimar
(Editions, printed in Belgium before 1801, on the Market)
-Oorspronkelijk bericht-
Van: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Dave Emes
Verzonden: vrijdag 23 mei 2003 8:42
Aan: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Onderwerp: VIRGIL: the anchises, aeneas group
Besides Raphael's painting Fire in the Borgo, Bernini's sculpture
Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius, and Preti's painting Aeneas,
Anchises, and Ascanius Fleeing Troy, what other artists in what works
have employed this subject?
Thanks for any help.
Ex animo,
David Emes
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Re: VIRGIL: Rome founded by Trojan women?

2003-05-06 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
I participated in an earlier discussion of this problem on another list;
there seems to be no new papyrus involved, and if the piece is meant to be
serious at all, it is probably the result of confusing Stesichorus'
connection with the Tabula Iliaca and a tradition mentioned in Dionysius of
Halicarnassus on, I believe, a woman Rhome founding the City
(unfortunately, I do not have the exact reference at hand).

I thought that might be it: see Dionysius Halicarnassus, _Roman 
Antiquities_ 1. 72. 2, ascribed to 'the man who collected the 
priestesses in Argos and the events of their individual tenures'. It is 
clearly incompatible with the Tabula Iliaca, if in despite of Horsfall 
we allow that to illustrate Steschorus' Iliou Persis.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Rome founded by Trojan women?

2003-05-05 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], 
Patrick Roper [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Subscribers, if they are not aware of it already, may be interested in
knowing that, according to Rome's Il Messaggero newspaper, a fragment of
writing by the Graeco-Sicilian poet Stesichorus (638-555 BC) recounts how a
woman named Roma arrived with a Trojan fleet in an idyllic place that could
easily be Rome, burnt her boats and founded the eponymous city there.
The story is here:
http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/22/wrome22
.xmlsSheet=/news/2003/04/22/ixworld.html
When I tried it, the page was said not to be available. Is this said to 
be a new fragment, or have I forgotten something?

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
(Don't forget to join the two bits of the link together)
One wonders if Virgil was aware of this alternative version of the founding
of Rome.
Patrick Roper
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Re: VIRGIL: Ugly reeds?

2003-02-07 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Patrick Roper [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
In Georgics IV, 478/9, Virgil writes deformis harundo/Cocyti.  This has
been translated unsightly reeds of Cocytus.

I wonder if it would be possible to interpret this as deformed reeds of
Cocytus.

The question is whether deformis designates a universal quality of reeds
or a particular quality of *these* reeds, the reeds growing by the River
of Lamentation, ugly and misshapen to match the black mud and stagnant
water of the unlovely mere. 

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: What others say about Virgil

2002-10-18 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Hieronymus
Prechtl [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Halifax, Nova Scotia
October 17, 2:00 pm


DONATUS: a few things here and there, like that Cicero,  having familiarized
himself with every nuance of the Bucolics, was so impressed  that he
declared Virgil  the second great hope of Rome, as if he himself were the
first hope of the Latin language and Virgil the second. 

Where does Donatus say that? and what time had Cicero to read even a
single eclogue before being murdered?

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Kaster volume?

2002-09-23 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Helen Conrad-
O'Briain [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

Venier's 'Per una storia del testo di Virgilio nella prima eta del libro 
a stampa' arrived this morning, and I stumbled across something quite 
interesting in the bibliography:  R. A. Kaster, The tradition of the 
text of the Aeneid in the ninth  century, New York, 1990.  I assume that 
this is his Harvard dissertation published -, but I have never seen a 
reference to it before.  Has anyone seen it?  Does anyone know the 
publisher
Garland; ISBN 0824033051

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Early Vergil printings and another request

2002-08-23 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Helen Conrad-
O'Briain [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

Could someone suggest to an unreconstructed early medievalist a good 
discussion of incunabula Vergils?

Matteo Venier, _Per uns storia del testo di Virgilio nella prima età del
libro a stampa (1469-1419) (Udine: Forum, 2001), ch. 2; for Venice see
too Craig Kallendorff, _A Bibligraphy of Venetian Editions of Virgil,
1470-1599_ (Littera Antiqua, 3; Florence: Olschki, 1991), 17-52.

You might find something in Paola Casciano, 'L'edizione romana del 1471
di Virgilio di Sweynheym e Pannartz', in Massimo Miglo with P. Farenga
and A. Modigliani (ed.), _Scrittura biblioteche e stampa a Roma nel
Quattrocento: Atti del 2o seminario 6-8 maggio 1982_ (Vatican Cit:
Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia, Diplomatica e Archivistica, 1983),
653-68.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: naming conventions

2002-08-08 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Emma Guest [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Great question, David, and as an art historian I haven't the least idea of
how to answer it!  I do have a second part to it.  Who decides or how does
one decide whether to use Virgil or Vergil?  Is it an American v English
question?  In Italian he is always Virgilio I don't recall ever seeing
Vergilio even though in the 15th c. Poliziano proved that the correct
spelling is Vergilius not Virgilius.  Thoughts on i v e would also
be most appreciated.
I had always blamed the i on interference from virgo_, cf. the poet's
nickname Parthenias (and Milton, the Maid of Christ's). So too the
sweetest maid in Rome became Virginia instead of Verginia.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Did Aeneas inhale?

2002-04-27 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], James Butrica
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
By the way, in other traditions of catabasis, how do living mortals return
from the Underworld? 

In the so-called Orphic Catabasis of P. Bon. 4, the last legible
letters, a few lines from the end of the poem, are sigma kappa alpha
phi, which would appear to come from either skaphion or skaphis; one
would presume that this meant not 'bowl' but 'boat', suggesting that the
visitor departed the same way as he had come, on Charon's skiff.

As for Aeneas, what hypothesis does not run into obstacles? If the false
dreams in any way represent the foreshadowings of Rome's future in
Anchises' speech, how is it that his account fits well enough with
standard Roman tradition? (If anything might have raised eyebrows
outside the Palatium it was the lament for the young Marcellus, whose
death, a setback for the project of hereditary monarchy, would hardly
have been a cause for grief amongst those who still harboured republican
sentiments.) If the idea is that military glory etc. are in some way a
false path, then why didn't Augustus let the _Aeneid_ be destroyed in
accordance with the poet's own wishes? (Or are we robust enough to
declare the whole tale of the violated _fideicommissum_ a fiction?) If
anything at all can be saved of the self-referential theory, it would
have to be based on the fuzzy logic of dreams: of course what I am
telling you is a myth, for the Muses know how to tell lies that resemble
truth (Hesiod, _Theogony_ 27). In the cold light of day, or prose
paraphrase, that cannot withstand the arguments that Jim O'Hara has
deployed; does that mean it is false, or that that is not the light to
view it in? As Jim says, Aeneas is somehow associated with false dreams;
that 'somehow' must, one presumes, be rather more than the fact of
leaving by the same gate, as if anyone who left Rome by (say) the Porta
Capena were an associate or confederate of everyone else who did so. But
precisely how. or are we not allowed to ask precisely? And if ever we
know how, then why? (Suppose for instance that the wink theory could
somehow be made to stand up, why should Vergil wish to play that game?)

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Barbarico auro

2002-04-15 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message Pine.GSO.3.95-960729.1020118110908.24173A-
[EMAIL PROTECTED], M W Hughes [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
This is mainly a reply to a reply of some time ago (I've been disrupted
by my wife's death). I mentioned the reference to
'pillars decorated with gold, barbarian-style' (A II 504; following, I
think, words attributed to Cassandra by Naevius and admired by Cicero) as
problem illustrating V's use of 'focalisation', or as an indication of V's
readiness to exploit variant focalisation - uncertainty about whose point
of view certain words represent - in order to create an interesting
effect.  ()Is Aeneas focalising 'barbarico' so that it refers to how the
Greek conquerors think or is he beginning, after seven years of exile
mainly amid Greek cultural influences, to think that there was something
barbaric about Troy?
Since the verse as a whole runs 'barbarico postes auro spoliisque
superbi', a hendiadys denoting spoils consisting in barbarian gold, the
reference, at the most literal level, is to gold (a metal in which
barbarians were known to rejoice) captured from the Trojans' subject
peoples such as the barbarous-voiced Carians of Iliad 2. 867; likewise
in Ennius (not Naevius) 'adstante ope barbarica' means 'with your
barbarian auxiliaries for bodyguards'. On that footing, the Trojans
would not themselves be barbarians; there need be no more contempt or
disrespect than in images of fine manly Indian and African soldiers in
our own imperial days, but it would seem unduly reductive to interpret
the word as simply 'speaking foreign languages'.
On the other hand, if we assume a self-inclusive sense ('our
fellow barbarians'), the question is whether the appropriate parallel is
the use by Aeschylus' Persians of barbaroi to denote themselves, a term
put in their mouths by a Greek, or the Romans' self-referential use of
_barbarus_ in Plautus' day, which in principle might be due to ignorance
or to acceptance of a Greek view of things but in my opinion is far
likelier to be the proud appropriation of an insult (like 'Whig',
'Tory', 'Old Contemptibles', and more recently 'Iron Lady', a badge of
honour proffered to a grateful Mrs Thatcher by some dunderhead on TASS).

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Helen's robe

2002-03-07 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Patrick Roper [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Thanks to Leofranc and David for help on Helens' robe and Mrs
Swancourt's rings.

The passage in Thomas Hardy finishes with a heniadys of his own which
can scarcely be accidental: Beyond this rather quaint array of stone
and metal Mrs Swancourt wore no ornament whatever.  (But is 'stone
and metal' really a hendiadys?)

Not really: the sense is not 'stony metal' or 'metallic stone'.

I suspect all this was aimed at his friend and Classics tutor Horace
Moule, rather than the general public whom he hoped would be reading
his novel.

Between the mass public and the old tutor there stands that very large
body of educated general readers who had done their school Latin would
have read the early books of the Aeneid, even if little other Latin
poetry apart from Horace and some Catullus; but why take a minimalist
view when even knowledge of Greek was more widespread amongst educated
men, and indeed educated women, than at any time before or since?
(Indeed, competence in both was required for admission to Oxford and
Cambridge.)

Leofranc
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Helen's robe

2002-03-03 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Patrick Roper [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
In chapter 12 of 'A Pair of Blue Eyes, the novel by Thomas Hardy, the author
says of Mrs Swancourt She had held out to Elfride hands whose fingers were
literally stiff with rings, signis auroque rigentes, like Helen's robe

The Latin is from The Aeneid

Book 1, verse 648

 and, I think, should read signis auroque rigentem.

Indeed, but Hardy naturally changed it to agree with the plural
'fingers'.


  I have seen this translated as stiff with rings and gold and
stiff with golden wire.

Neither is right: it means 'stiff with golden embroidery', or more
expansively 'with figures embroidered in gold thread': _signis auroque_
is a hendiadys, equivalent to _signis aureis_.

I am not quite sure how either of these two version was arrived at, but it
seems most likely to me that Helen's robe or 'palla' would have been woven
with gold filigree and thus somewhat rigid.  Hardy's comparison therefore
seems rather inappropriate, especially as he goes on to describe Mrs
Swancourt's rings as heavy and grotesque and far from anything attributed by
Virgil to Helen.

_Signum_, amongst its many other meanings, may be a signet-ring; hence
the humorous application to Mrs Swancourt's rings. 'Inappropriate'
misses the point: the reader is expected to observe the incongruity and
smile.

I wonder if Hardy had translated the Latin himself 

Of course; it's hardly a difficult achievement.

and if he really thought
his average 19th century reader would be well enough versed in the Aeneid to
enjoy his quotation.

Certainly yes, and certainly rightly.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: trojan horse story

2002-02-20 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Simon Cauchi
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Besides the Aeneid, in how many other ancient writings (pre- and
post-Virgil) does the story of the Trojan Horse and, particularly, the
role of Sinon, appear?

Lempriere in his Classical Dictionary cites the following references at the
end of the article on Sinon:

Dares Phrygius; Homer, Odyssey 8.492 and 11.521; Virgil, Aeneid 2.79ff.;
Pausanias 10, chap. 27; and lastly Q. Smyrn. 10 (whoever and whatever
that is).
Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica; a late imperial poem on events after
the Iliad, not very wonderful but with a rather good episode in book 10
when the wounded Paris begs Oenone to heal him; she gives him the brush-
off ('Get out of my house and go to Helen'), then decides too late that
she does still love him after all and throws herself on his funeral
pyre.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens 
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
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Re: VIRGIL: Annius of Viterbo

2002-02-19 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Mike
Gascoigne [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Can anyone tell me if Annius of Viterbo (late 15th century) went to 
Mantovano and discovered some documents which he attributed to Berosus? If 
so, were there any academic institutions where he might have found that 
type of document?
No, he made them up.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Virgil's Influence on Rural Art In the Roman Era

2002-02-17 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Carson G Manzer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] enquires about landscape paintings inspired by
the Bucolics and Georgics; some will be found under 'Arcadia' in _The
Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s_, ed. Jane
Davidson Reid with the assistance of Chris Rohmann (New York, 1993). It
covers all the arts, and is arranged by mythological subject.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: 5-word hexameters

2001-12-06 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David
Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
 message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura 

From: Tim Saunders [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 21:48:29 +

This came in when I was about to leave the country; I hoped when I came
back to find a discussion in full swing. As it is, I had better try to
get one going myself.

I have been re-reading Aeneid 8.306-341 and was struck by the 6
instances of 5-word hexameters contained within this passage alone.
Seeing that I could not entirely pin down quite why these instances
seemed significant to me, I wondered whether anyone on the list had any
thoughts on the significance (or otherwise) of the number of words that
appear in any one line of Virgil?

I THINK my attention to the 5-word hexameters in this passage was
probably spurred by a dim recollection of Eclogue 2.24:

AMPHION DIRCAEUS IN ACTAEO ARACYNTHO

Clausen declares this to be a verse of the most precious Alexandrian
sort. By this is he pointing solely to the learned allusions and the
distintive rhythm of Actaeo Aracyntho - or do the number of words in
the line have any part to play in this assessment?

The line would go straight back into Greek with nothing but the odd
vowel changed; in fact five-words hexameters are harder to find in Greek
because of the greater number of small particles and pronouns. But this
raises the question of whether they should be called words, to which I
shall return below; we print Latin _-que_ together with what precedes
and its Greek counterpart _te_ separately, but what right does that give
is to say the former is not a word and the latter is?

There is another notable line in the Eclogues (5.73):

SALTANTIS SATYROS IMITABITUR ALPHESIBOEUS.

Here of course the effect is of cheerful galumphsome rustic dancing. 

Clausen remarks on this line that 4 word hexameters are rare in Virgil (he 
cites 7 other examples). So I suppose the more general question becomes: 
when does the number of words in a line become significant?


Anyway, back to 5-word hexameters and the particular passage I had in mind, 
Aeneid 8.306-341. I can see that a line with 5 words in it can attain a 
certain symmetry (esp. in a Golden Line). As for instance in:

8.334: FORTUNA OMNIPOTENS ET INELUCTABILE FATUM

and (esp if we read the variant Romano rather than Romani)

8.338: ET CARMENTALEM ROMANO NOMINE PORTAM

and 8.341: AENEADAS MAGNOS ET NOBILE PALLANTEUM

But is there any greater significance than the patterning of words here?
And how about the other examples that do not display so obvious an ordering:

8.309: INGREDIENS UARIOQUE UIAM SERMONE LEUABAT.

8.312: EXQUIRITQUE AUDITQUE UIRUM MONIMENTA PRIORUM.

8.322: COMPOSUIT LEGESQUE DEDIT, LATIUMQUE UOCARI.

When the line is syntactically self-contained (as in the first three),
the effect is surely one of solemnity, appropriate to the pre-foundation
(as one might call it) of Rome; I am not so sure about the last three,
all of which are enjambed. However, if we are to talk about these
matters, we had better agree on what a word is. If a group of syllables
under a single stress, then prepositions and conjunctions do not count
as words (and indeed may until modern times be found written together
with what follows); if that which is contained between two spaces or
other word-dividers, then in ancient usage enclitic -que- may be a word.



I have to admit that my access to the usual reference books is rather 
limited at the moment, so I must apologise if some of these questions could 
readily be answered elsewhere. However, if this query sets off a more 
general discussion about Virgil's use of metre then it would have been worth 
it for that alone.

Many thanks

Tim Saunders
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Re: VIRGIL: Anthrax

2001-10-26 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message Pine.GSO.3.95-960729.1011025205254.19521A-
[EMAIL PROTECTED], M W Hughes [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
 I
think V generally tries to get his scientific facts right,

A very good subject for debate, pitting the late-antique 'It's all there
in Vergil' school against the likes of Horsfall,

 but he is
always more interested in making moral and religious 

and literary, cf. the apt comment on the book-endings.

rather than
scientific points.  His description: [...]

As everyone since Servius has seen, this is the counterpart amongst the
beasts to the Great Plague at Athens, which no one has diagnosed and not
for want of trying. If we can't identify an undoubtedly historical
disease, what chance have we with one that may have been made up?
Mynors, though formally leaving the question of historicity open, makes
no attempt to identify the Noricum plague; can any listmember in cattle
country do better, or is the very attempt as fatuous as asking how many
children had Lady Macbeth?

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: why Virgil wanted to burn his poem

2001-10-18 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David
Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
At 11:03 AM 10/18/01 +0100, Patrick Roper wrote:
I thought that that might be the case, after all most creative people
feel they could have done better - the stuff on the page, isn't quite
what seemed to be in the mind.  But do we know this is what Virgil
thought?  Did he say so somewhere?  Or did one of his contemporaries
say that of him?

As Patrick Roper and Jim O'Hara point out, we need to be skeptical. In
addition to Thomas, see, for instance, Nicholas Horsfall, Virgil: His Life
and Times, in _A Companion to the Study of Virgil_, ed. Nicholas Horsfall,
Mnemosyne Supplement 151 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 1-25.

Exactly. The all but explicit conclusion of Horsfall's analysis is that
we do not even know *whether* Vergil wanted the _Aeneid_ burnt, never
mind why. But the story is attractive on so many grounds: perfectionist
poet, enlightened monarch, the rights of posterity against an author's
wishes; after all, even those of us who are neither poets nor princes
will be posterity to more and more authors as we grow older. (And if you
rebel against the enlightened Augustus, then you can apply a different
_color_, or in modern parlance spin, as Broch did.) It has also, from
Hyginus onwards, licensed adverse criticism of particular passages
within the supreme masterpiece: since Vergil recognized that his poem
had faults, he must have agreed with the critic that this or that
expression or assertion was one of them, and would have corrected it had
he lived. The psychological utility of this safety-valve is rather more
evident than its scientific value, since there is always someone else to
say it isn't a fault at all (even in the case of the half-lines);
readers just need the story to be true.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: question

2001-09-02 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Robert T. White
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
LH-S scripsit:

A few years ago our listowner (I think) posted some interesting
comments about the strength and weaknesses of Dryden's version;
unfortunately I cannot find them now. I was struck by his rendering of
Aen. 6. 651-8:

Dulces exuuiae, dum fata deusque sinebat,
accipite hanc animam meque his exsoluite curis.
Vixi et quem dederat cursum Fortuna peregi,
et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago.
Urbem praeclaram statui, mea moenia uidi,
ulta uirum poenas inimico a fratre recepi;
felix, heu nimium felix, si litora tantum
numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae.

This is Book 4, I think...

Oops! Lapsus digiti. LAH-S
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Re: VIRGIL: Turnus ~ Mark Antony?

2001-06-25 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In the same spirit, the duel might be thought to represent both the
actual battle with Antony at Actium and the duel that Imp. Caesar
refused to fight and could not have fought without upsetting the fiction
that the war was being fought not between himself and Antony but between
Rome and Egypt.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens

In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Bob Cowan
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Another possible angle could be the destruction of alternative routes
which Rome could take. Just as the different aspects of Dido are
refracted and split into Amata and Lavinia, so that the former can be
safely isolated and destroyed, while the latter remains as a tabula
rasa for the imprint of imperial destiny, so the duality of Aeneas in
Carthage - pius Octavian or decadent Antony - can be split into an
Augustan Aeneas whose Antonine qualities are displaced onto Turnus and
safely eliminated.

Or maybe I'm getting carried away...

Bob
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Re: VIRGIL: Virgil's mistakes

2001-05-30 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Hello all:
I'm writing on paper on the influence on Virgil's lfe on his writing of the 
work. I've decided to base one of my arguments on his death and how it left 
the Aeneid incomplete. I've read about there being half-lines in the book, 
but only two have been listed specifically (Book I l.534  and Book I l.560), 
and I doubt if that will serve to prove my point. I was wondering if any of 
you knew of any more. Any info. would be greatly appreciated. 
Lenora
There are a lot more, which you will immediately see on reading the
poem; there is also a well-known study of them by John Sparrow.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Dido's lament

2001-05-30 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Patrick Roper [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I was reading Christina Rossetti's well-known poem 'Remember'
yesterday and wondered if she had Purcell's famous aria 'Remember me'
from Dido and Aeneas in mind when she wrote it.  Or Marlowe's 'Dido
Queen of Carthage', or, indeed, the Aeneid itself.  Any of these could
have been quite fresh in her mind as she wrote 'Remember' when she was
only nineteen and therefore not long out of education.
It may be taken for granted that she had read Vergil; it wouldbe
interesting to show she knew the early modern works mentioned. Marlowe
seems likelier than Tate/Purcell at that date.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: Virgil's mistakes

2001-05-30 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I am currently doing a study of Virgil's half lines or unfinished 
lines.  I 
have merely touched the surface of these lines, but my initial 
reactions are 
such: most of the unfinished lines are unfinished by choice on 
Virgil's 
part to draw greater attention to these lines; however, some lines 
are 
obviously not unfinished by choice for they make little or no 
sense.  Any 
insight about the unfinished lines? 

No-one in antiquity ever imitated them, though almost everything else in
Vergil was imitated; the notion that they were intended has long since
been exploded, by Sparrow if not before. We may find some of them
striking, but so did the nineteenth century find the damaged limbs of
the Melian Aphrodite (called the Vénus de Milo by those who make an icon
of the ruin); at most we can say that because they make so fine an
ending for their sentence, the poet could not at once see how to
continue. By Seneca's time people were filling in the gaps.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Re: VIRGIL

2001-05-29 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], James Butrica
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
   
¿Podría alguien ayudarme a localizar una pgina donde exista algún tipo de
foro de discusión sobre Lorenzo Valla y su obra en latín? Estoy buscando
el comentario que realiza el autor al término latino Testamentum (quiz se
encuentre en sus Elegantiae...pero no he podido consultarlas). Gracias de
antemano por vuestra colaboración.

I am unable to direct you to a web-page where Valla is discussed, but if
you need the actual words that he wrote about the word Testamentum at 6.36
of the Elegantiae, I can provide that for you from the text of the editio
Gryphiana of 1538:
[. . .]

In that of 1543, the chapter is followed by a note from Andreas
Alciatus, De verborum significatione 2:

Iustinianum inridet, qui testamentim dixerit, testaionem mentis esse,
auctoritateque Gellii nititur, alioquin et ornamentum, uestimentum,
pauimentum, idque genus similia, a mente deducerentur. respondeo, non
etymologiam ibi Iustinianus adducit, sed allusionem, qualem Grammatici
paronomasian, Rhetores parison habent, solumque in ea nominis
conformitas spectatur: quod et Fab(ium) Quintil(ianum) non latuit, cum
non ad originem uocis, sed ad soni similitudinem referatur, ut hoc casu
eo melior fuit allusio, quod ueritatem etiam respicit.in testamentum
enim mens potissimum dominatur.

Since Justinian, Institutiones 2. 10. pr. writes 'Testamentum ex eo
appellatur, quod testatio mentis est'. I am not sure this defence holds;
but if it holds for Justinian against Valla, it holds for Ser. Sulpcius
against Gellius (see _Noctes Atticae_ 7. 12, which to Valla and Alciatus
was 6. 12)'.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Virgil's tomb; archaeology

2000-02-28 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Gregory Hays
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
This morning I rec'd the following query:

From an archeological perspective I am trying to find a book/literature that
physically describes/shows pictures etc. of Virgil's tomb at Naples.  Can
you
offer any advice?

You can find a photo of something so designated at:

http://wings.buffalo.edu/AandL/Maecenas/italy_except_rome_and_sicily/naples/ac88
0803.html

I tried it, but was told it was not available, either by expiry or by
error. Leofranc
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Re: VIRGIL: Double Firsts

1999-10-26 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dr Helen Conrad
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
ThanksLeofranc, I finally understand the reference in the Sword in the
Stone where Madame Mim had a double first from - what was it Dom Daniel
under the sea?
By my day a double first was in Mods and Greats, i.e. langauge and
literature (after five terms) and history and philosophy (after another
seven, or twelve in all). So still now, except that the separation is
less rigid.

A few more comments before I depart these shores for musicological
conferences in the USA; at one I am giving a paper on the influence of
humanism on the language of Latin music treatises.

Best wishes,

Leofranc

`165v-6v: Ars rhetorica Clodiani statibus'

Thus?

`Stokes and Strachan note the identification by Stern of mac Cialláin
with a deacon Niall mac Giallain (Fiallain, Iallain) a reputed visionary
who died in 854/8.' Non-Celticists deserve reassurance that the same man
can have so many alternative consonants.

`For its relationship to other manuscripts see Waldrop (1934). Waldrop
(1934, 212) suggests'. Please let it be 'see Waldrop (1934), who
suggests (212)'.

`the names of Irish scholars and the passages they are apparently
written against - usually identifiable by the appearance of enlarged
letters in the text in a general study of all the Irish names and a
close study of the more than seventy references to John Scottus.' Second
dash needed after `text'.

`Ellergy to Macenas': Ellery McQueen?

`(Lindsay (1915), p. 234)'. Thus within a text of 1934?

`Wolfenbüttel, Aug.20 7.10 [W] for Sevius [g] for Vergil'

Presumably Servius not Sevius Nicanor.

`Discussion: A direct copy of V made before its losses Mynor's [g] a
close copy of [P] Vat.. Pal. lat 1631 in Lorsch in the ninth century'

Mynors's, but the rest is a mite incoherent.
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Re: VIRGIL: RE: Vergilian seances

1999-10-25 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Peter Bryant
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
As for post-mortem meetings with Virgil, I have collected a few examples 
of which the following is probably the most entertaining.
The novel Penguin Island(L'ile des pingouins (1908)) by Anatole 
France (1844-1924)

Is indeed well worth reading. But the translator was deceived by a _faux
ami_: although both come from the same Celtic phrase for 'white head',
_un pingouin_ is not a penguin (a bird confined to the Southern
Hemisphere, in French _un manchot_) but a Great Awk; hence of course the
name of the aristocratic house 'Greatauk ducs du Skull'.


   Virgil mentions that he had received another visitor about a century 
and a half before, who had come from an ancient Etruscan colony founded 
by Sulla near Fiesole on the banks of the Arno. Virgil had not been 
impressed and considered him to be a barbarian.

In particular he isn't much impressed by rhyme: 'Cet artifice ne me
semble point ingénieux; mais ce n'est pas aux morts à juger les
nouveautés.'

Query (for another list, when you want to be philosophical but not too
serious): _why_ is it not for the dead to judge of innovations?

Leofranc
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: The Devil Knows Latin: A Further Word

1999-10-22 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], JAMES C
Wiersum [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
 I too think that mathematics and the classics go
together.

They used to do at Oxford; in the early nineteenth century a 'double
first' meant a first in Literae Humaniores and a first in mathematics.

It is not for me to say what America needs, but I do wonder why people
on the list are so dogmatic about criticizing ancient values from the
standard of modern liberalism (never vice versa) without even wondering
what right they have to be judge in their own cause. 

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: Bucolic 2: umbrosa cacumina

1999-10-11 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Neven Jovanovic [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Dear Vergiliani,
working on a Croatian translation of Vergil's Bucolica, I was not 
satisfied with Clausen's commentary (or reticence) on B. 2,3:

tantum inter densas, umbrosa cacumina, fagos (assidue ueniebat...)

How can _cacumina_, that is, the tree-tops, be _umbrosa_? They're on 
top, aren't they? Would you prefer to take _umbrosa_ as passive or active 
adjective?

Isn't it both, in the poet's characteristic manner: they cast shadows
not only on the ground but on each other (the trees are close together),
and therefore receive shadows too. We ought not to be too rigorously
logical in these matters.


Yours,

Neven
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Another Virgilius Maro?

1999-09-22 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Philip
Thibodeau [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
The collection of quotations regarding P. Virgilius Maro was very
entertaining.  I recall reading a review of a book on PVM and wondering
whether this was an April Fool's edition of the journal it was in!  At any
rate, the book might be worth mentioning:  it's by Vivien Law, and is
called, Wisdom, authority, and grammar in the seventh centruy : decoding
Virgilius Maro Grammaticus (Cambridge University Press, 1995).  She tries
valiantly to place PVM within his context, and does something useful in that
respect, as I recall.

No poisson d'Avril by her or by the journal; but PVM had his tongue in
his cheek all right. The debate between 'Terrentius' (sic, a frequent
Irish spelling; but remember how Varro is always working his _nomen_ in)
and 'Galbungus' on the vocative of _ego_ recalls the debate in Gellius
14.5 on the vocative of egregius.

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Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: Aeneas' treason?

1999-07-11 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
About a month ago a gentleman from Oxford commented  on Dido's  mention  of  
impia facta  as  possibly  referring  to  Aeneas'  treason?
Would  the Oxford gentleman kindly  elaborate  on  
I can't  think of  any such instance, nor can I imagine that Vergil would 
want the Roman reader to  regard him as guilty of treason, something
very contrary to his main  character quality, pietas. Laomedon, an
ancestor of Aeneas, certainly had a very untrustworthy character. His record 
with Hercules, etc. indicates it clearly.

This is the story that Aeneas (who felt under-valued by Priam, Iliad 13.
461, cf. Achilles' words to him at 20. 178-86) secured his escape from
Troy by handing the city over to the Greeks: see Menecrates of Xanthos
(Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 799 F 3 quoted by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, _Roman Antiquities_ 1.48.3) Greek writers made much of
it during the period of Roman conquest; see Casali's footnote in the
article I cited, Classical Quarterly, new series 49, 1999, 206 n. 6.
Dido, it is argued, had heard the story (the queen of Juno's city would
know all about Trojan crimes), and wishes she had remembered it at the
right time. There is of course no reason to take her view of the matter;
but it was a very well established story, mentioned more than once by
Servius.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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VIRGIL: Apologies

1999-06-25 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Dear colleagues,

Many apologies for posting a private message to the list; I have already
apologized to the intended recipient. My only excuse is that it was 1
a.m. in England.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: teaching Latin verse in grammar schools

1999-06-21 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David
Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Forwarded message from: Robin Sowerby [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 1999 15:42:40 +0100

I decided to make contact via the internet with other Virgilians because I
am rather isolated at my university where there is no classics department
and I have come up against a problem to which so far I have not been able to
find the answer. Part of my current project requires that I find evidence
for the teaching of Latin verse in grammar schools in the Renaissance and
beyond. Virgil and Ovid, then as now, must have been the main models for
neo-Latinists as they made their own verse compositions. I have browsed the
British Library catalogue and drawn a blank; I can find no manuals of verse
composition for the earlier period at all. This material must exist if I
knew the right place in which to look. Do you know of any scholars who might
be able to help me?

- Robin Sowerby

In the Middle Ages there was the Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa Nova;
from the seventeenth century onwards the Gradus ad Parnassum.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: translations

1999-06-17 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], James M. Pfundstein
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

James Pfundstein writes:

I hope I didn't give the wrong impression-- I'm a big reader of 19th
Century stuff-- I'm very fond of Tennyson, for instance, and Morris. (I
also read a lot of Dashiell Hammett-- Hemingway I take in smaller doses.)
But the translation style which larded each line with awkward and
innaccurate English, is bad, was bad then, will always be bad. The early
Loebs of A.S. Way are a perfect example of this stuff.

Horses for courses; he was arguably the right man to do Quintus
Smyrnaeus, but not Euripides.

Leofranc H.-S.
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: translations

1999-06-16 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
David Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 13:42:28 -0400
From: Lena Friesen [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Hello all--

I'm new here, so pardon me if this has been discussed before - I was
wondering what the better translations are of the Aeneid, I own the Knight
and West prose versions already, are there any else?  I came across a Dover
edition but I didn't like it as it was too old-fashioned, done in
Victorian-era language.  Virgil (as I understand it) wrote in a plain
style.  Am I right?


Absolutely not; and no-one would have cared for him if he had.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: re: Why A Horse?

1999-04-06 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
I seem to remember seeing a vase, or sherd of a vase, in West Berlin, as
it was then, in which Athena is fashioning a horse. I haven't got LIMC
beside me at the moment, but someone may know what I'm talking about.
Leofranc
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: paid for propaganda?

1999-03-16 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Timothy Mallon
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes



At what historical moment was anything of the kind first thought? It
doesn't match anything I have read in classical or other pre-modern
authors; it seems to me a product of the socio-economic alienation of
the intellectual. (Only an intellectual could envisage the redesign of
reality; only an alienated one would be interested in so doing. But of
course we first have to define reality; and 'real', like 'free', is one
of those words most easily understood from their opposites in any given
context.)


Wouldn't Plato fit the definition of an alienated or disaffected
intellectual? He certainly contemplated the redesign of much of the society
he was born in.

Indeed he was an alienated intellectual who hated democracy and whose
personal connections lay with that gang of alienated intellectuals whose
government had discredited oligarchy for two generations. But he was not
concerned with redesigning what he understood to be reality, but with
finding out what it was.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: Re: Cornix, Georgics and Alliteration

1999-03-16 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Neven Jovanovic [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

The easy solution, or interpretation, of G. 1,388 would be to read 
_crow's s's_--and C's and H--as the sound of _sand_, harena:

et Sola in SiCCa SeCum Spatiatur Harena

There probably are strong reasons to resolutely reject the very existence 
of any _Tonmalerei_ in all poetry.

I cannot think even of weak ones: at best one may doubt a particular
instance, but poetry is written neither for nor by cloth-eared
logicians.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: paid for propaganda?

1999-03-16 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Philip Thibodeau
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
There can be no doubt that there is a great difference between the social
and economic conditions for patronage in antiquity and for more modern
critics; and the a priori notion that the poets' rightful place is in
opposition to the establishment does seem to be characteristically modern.
On the other hand, the projection of this idea onto ancient Rome, and onto
the Augustan Age in particular, is not as anachronistic as some make it out
to be.  Consider that,

1) while most poets, then as now, were little more than producers of cacata
carta, the fact is that a great or even a popular poet was regarded as a
marvellous, somewhat uncanny figure - 'divine', as an ancient might say.  A
major poet was seen as doctus, prudens, sapiens; informed, canny, and wise.
For this reason, poets on the level of Vergil and Horace possessed a
certain power.  Readers knew that they were great men, even if they could
not always say why (cf. Propertius' nescio quid maius Iliade).  The safest
course was simply to praise them, to kick them upstairs into a snug
canonicity.

2) Part of their power resided in their unpredictability.  Major poets are
the constant object of requests for panegyric; most of these commissions
they refuse, and they have the luxury of choosing the ones they want.  When
they accept a commission, the inevitable result is never *just* a piece of
panegyric.  Callimachus wrote in praise of his patrons on a number of
occasions; no doubt Ptolemy and Berenice expected their requests to be
fulfilled with something to make the heart throb.  Instead what they get
are things like a chattering lock of hair, lamenting its apotheosis.  The
praise is there, sure; but the poem itself is surprising and comes ever so
close to being - crazy.

But why can't the patrons ever be sophisticated enough to appreciate it,
and to see that it did them more good than the uninspired panegyric?
Consider Choerilus of Iasos, the notoriously bad poet who accompanied
Alexander on his conquests and is set up in shameful contrast to the
great painter Apelles and great sculptor Lysippus who alone were
permitted to represent the great man visually. (Not that our sources
ever say whom Alexander ought to have commssioned to write about him
instead.)

  Vergil's and Horace's panegyrics can have the same
over-the-top character (cf. the prologue to the first Georgic and H's
Cleopatra Ode.)

Is the Cleopatra ode over the top? Not nearly as much as Ode 1.2; but it
is significant that these poems, like the Georgic prologue, seem to be
from early in the reign. Perhaps Augustus dropped a hint that he would
rather not be assassinated by people thinking he wanted to be a
Hellenistic god-king, thank you very much.

  Are they being serious?  Comic?  Laudatory?  Cynical?  You
can't pin them down.  That is not an accident of scholarship; it is an
essential characteristic of their poems.

3) Precisely because it is so unpredictable, good poetry always has the
*potential* to serve as an expression of dissent.  'Dissent', of course, is
a broad term - it has to cover phenomena as diverse as Ovid's cheerfully
immoral poems (and the carmen that won him exile),

Hasn't Ovid recently been represented as an ultra-loyalist whose loyalty
was not appreciated?
 Catullus' tiff with
Caesar over some lines of poetry, Lucan's hyper-republican epic, with its
ambiguous praise of Nero,

Not half so subversive in that as it is of its own Republicanism: Pompey
was by no means the past-it feebleton whom Lucan depicts, nor did Cicero
urge battle at Pharsalus because he longed to hear the sound of his own
voice (he wasn't even there). Personally I see Lucan as Nero's crony
(cf. L'incoronazione di Poppea) till Nero became jealous of the better
poet; when Lucan cited Nero's 'sub terra tonuisse putes' in the public
lavatories that may not have been dissent, but the (possibly ill-judged)
self-confident of the favourite.

 and Curiatius Maternus, the star of Tacitus'
Dialogus, who 'broke the power of Vatinius' in Nero's time by 'reading
tragedies'. 

These (and the rest of Philip's message) make good points; but don't
court poets usually spend most of their capacity for dislike or dissent
on each other, only turning against the ruler when he fails to take them
at their own valuation?

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford   scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ

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Re: VIRGIL: paid for propaganda?

1999-03-15 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], michell pre-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
 The need is psychological; even a bad review is
better than none.


But that's just mentioning a delight in any form of progress, as long as
anything is happening. A med-student might cut his finger in dissection, but
this is not so bad.  Language.  Its not a social drive, its not a drive to
be social, but to get rid of sociality, to resignify reality.

At what historical moment was anything of the kind first thought? It
doesn't match anything I have read in classical or other pre-modern
authors; it seems to me a product of the socio-economic alienation of
the intellectual. (Only an intellectual could envisage the redesign of
reality; only an alienated one would be interested in so doing. But of
course we first have to define reality; and 'real', like 'free', is one
of those words most easily understood from their opposites in any given
context.)

  Praise or
harrassment, the poet at least feels it is getting somewhere, perhaps, would
the poet recieve nothing, no bad nor good review, the poet would be content.
But no one ever gives the poet nothing.  They either ignore the poet, praise
it, or harrass it. Its always something deliberate.  Perhaps the poet just
wants people to stop deliberating? Something to do with language.  Can you
describe the psychological need,

Being neither a poet nor a psychologist, no; I can only observe,

 or will this put the list off terribly?
Probably, but I can't anyway.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Sabine Women

1999-03-11 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], john dwyer
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Can anyone furnish me with name of an artist who has portrayed the Rape of
the Sabine Women (viii 822ff)?

The first who comes to mind is David (Les Sabines, 1799, in the Louvre).

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Re: VIRGIL: Aeneid Jokes

1999-03-09 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Simon Cauchi
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
More humour in Vergil invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi (Bk 6)
reference to Catullus' Lock of Berenice invitus, regina, tuo de cervice
cessi, a singularly incongruous intertextualism at a singularly inapposite
moment.

I have always thought invitus, regina to be as bad as W. S. Gilbert's a
thing of shreds and patches. But a closer analogy would be if The Yeoman
of the Guard were an Elizabethan operetta and Hamlet a 19th cent. tragedy,
so that we would find fault with Shakespeare's line rather than Gilbert's.
Or rather, as Fletcher puts it better, the sense of incongruity is much as
we should feel if we came upon a line from Pope's Rape of the Lock in
Keats' Hyperion. I don't think Virgil intended the line to be humorous,
though. Despite the source from which it is taken, the effect is pathetic
(I mean, pathos is the intended effect). Isn't it?

Aeneas does express a sense of desperation in this speech, and there's
always something a bit ridiculous about any male -- let alone an epic hero
-- making excuses and vowing he had no choice in the matter. But I suspect
there is a bimillennial cultural gulf here (as in so much else to do with
the Aeneid), and that interpretation is necessarily uncertain.

Indeed; there is a parallel in Horace's _recusatio_ to Augustus at
_Epist._ 2.1/250-7: I would much rather write an epic in your honour
than these earth-bound _sermones_ if I had the talent.

nec sermones ego mallem 250
repentes per humum quam res componere gestas
terrarumque situs et flumina dicere et arces
montibus impositas et barbara regna tuisque
auspiciis totum confecta duella per orbem
claustraque custodem pacis cohibentia Ianum 255
et formidatam Parthis te principe Romam,
si quantum cuperem possem quoque.

Hands up anyone who can say what verse 255 reminds him or her off. Yes,
that's right, Cicero's infamous line

O fortunatam natam me consule Romam.

Subversion? A sly but friendly jest? Inadvertence? Or was _O fortunatam_
not yet the stock example of bad verse it had become by Silver times?

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VIRGIL: Aeneid Jokes

1999-03-08 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Many thanks to Neven for Nicholas Modrussiensiensis; but if I may expand
on my own dissertation, where I had occasion to comment on 'facetiis' at
Gellius 2. 23. 3 'ita Graecarum, quas aemulari nequiuerunt, facetiis
atque luminibus obsolescunt' [i.e. Roman comedies are not a patch on the
Greek originals]:

To the English reader _facetus_ is a 'faux ami': it implied not
schoolboyishness but polished elegance; not always even humour; cf.
Quintilian 6.3.20: Facetum quoque non tantum citca ridicula opinor
consistere; neque enim diceret Horatius facetum carminis genus concessum
esse Vergilio. Decoris hanc magis et excultae cuiusdam elegantiae
appellationem puto. Ideoque in epistulis Cicero haec Bruti refert uerba:
ne illi sunt pedes faceti ac +deliciis ingredienti mollius+ [text
corrupt, but reference is to mincing gait]. Quod conuenit cum illo
Horatiano molle atque facetum. It is allied to _urbanitas_; cf.
Catullus 36. 19 'pleni ruris et inficetiarum', 22. 14 'idem infaceto est
infacetior rure'. To be sure a sense of humour is not excluded (see
Fordyce on Catullus 43. 8), but 'hoc etiam animaduertendum est, non esse
omnia ridicula faceta' (Cicero, _De oratore_ 2. 251).

In Horace, if 'facetum' is to be translated 'witty', let it be in the
eighteenth-century sense rather than the twentieth.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: VERGIL: ekphrasis in Book VI

1999-03-08 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Clare
Studwell [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I brought up this question about a week ago about the ekphrasis in Book VI 
(lines 20-36) of Vergil's Aeneid.  Unfortunately I received NO responses.  If 
you have any opinion on the role of this ekphrasis on the temple doors which 
Daedalus created, please let me know.  

Thanks.  Clare

I had been meaning to find a moment to think about the passage, but for
the time being: a journey through the air counterpoises one to the
underworld; and the ekphrasis before this major episode recalls that
before another, in Carthage. Quite inadequate, but perhaps it will
stimulate someone else, like the crystal that seeds a supersaturated
solution into precipitating.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: source of quotation please

1999-02-25 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dan King
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I can't find it as yet, but Amores i.3.18 is rather similar, so it's
probably Ovid, but I'm pretty sure it's not Amores


Neither have I found it yet, but what classical author writes 'sicque'?

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Re: VIRGIL: Juno's supplication

1999-02-04 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dan King
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Sorry, this is probably a bit of a basic question. But I was shown recently
how Juno's supplication at Aen 1.65-75 is , generically speaking, in the
form of a standard prayer (is euktikon the right term, or kleticon?

Euktikon: kletikon is the 'Come hither' type of prayer.
), but
that certain topoi are omitted. Thus Juno does not invoke her past services
to Aeolus as a good reason for his support, but Aeolus himself then
mentions them anyway in his reply. This sophistication highlights the
rather paradoxical supplication going on, where Juno is really superior to
Aeolus.  Can anyone comment on anything more complex in it, or on other
sophistications. I'd also be interested in finding some good examples of
fairly 'normal' prayers of the same genre in earlier Greek poetry to
compare it with.


Try Chryses' prayer to Apollo after his rebuff by Agamemnon, _Iliad_ 1.
36-42, which likewise sets in motion the action of the epic, and does
contain the reference to past service.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Re: Appendix

1999-02-01 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Geyssen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes

While we're on the topic--Is there anything close to an accepted date for the
Culex or Ciris?

Culex: first century AD, before Lucan, if you believe Sootiness' report
that he 'initia sua cum Vergilio conparans ausus sit dicere: 'et quantum
mihi restat ad Culicem?'; otherwise before Statius, _Silvae_ 2. 7. 74
'ante annos Culicis Maroniani'. Either way, you have to allow the
forgery time to be believed in; but not much time, since people wanted
to believe in it (see Fraenkel, JRS 1952).

Ciris: some people say first century AD, some second. The 'back to
Catullus' feel about it might support the retro-chic of the second.

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Re: VIRGIL: Re: Appendix

1999-02-01 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Leofranc Holford-
Strevens [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Geyssen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes

While we're on the topic--Is there anything close to an accepted date for the
Culex or Ciris?

Culex: first century AD, before Lucan, if you believe Sootiness'

Oops: rogue spellchecker for Suetonius; I thought I'd turned it off--and
now I see it doesn't even recognize 'spellchecker'! Sorry

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VIRGIL: Aen. IX 371

1999-01-25 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In reply to Caroline Butler:

Where are Euryalus and Nisus? We have just read 'excedunt castris et
tuta capessunt'; then comes the Latin mission, which M. Valerius Probus
in the first century, followed by C. Sulpicius Apollinaris in the
second, found to contradict 7. 600. So we needn't feel too badly if we
don't make sense of it all; but are we meant to? Did Vergil intend to
describe a realistic war and fail, or simply to give a poetic impression
of war? Even in Homer, it is easier to appreciate the portrayal of the
martial spirit (brutality and all) than the technical exactness of the
fighting; the only bit that convinces me is the Doloneia, notoriously an
addition to the story and composed by one who was not quite master of
the formulaic language, but who (I think) knew whereof he spoke.

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Re: VIRGIL: B.6,62-3: bitter bark

1999-01-22 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Neven Jovanovic [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

 Isn't the point that the bark exudes the musk, i.e. the amber? (Cf.
 Ovid,_Met._ 2. 344-66 for a fuller account.)
 
You see, this is the point where my _hubris_ started; I have seen the 
_muscus_ = musk note in the Lewis-Short; but OLD is silent on this point, 
and Vergil in other places writes _muscus_ and _muscosus_ always meaning 
_moss_. I have checked, and my beautiful idea had to evaporate.

Oops: of course you're right: 'the moss that belongs to (i.e. grows on)
the bitter bark', i.e. the bitter bark with its moss. Clausen, Williams.
and Coleman see no difficulty, perhaps for the same reason that Nelson
saw no signal.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: B.6,62-3: bitter bark

1999-01-19 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
Neven Jovanovic [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Dear Mantovanae and Mantovani,

Reading Eclogue 6 I have come to the vv. 62-3:
_tum Phaethontiadas musco circumdat amarae
 corticis atque solo proceras erigit alnos_.

Why should the bark be bitter? The commentaries I consulted (old Latin one 
based on Heyne, and German Tusculum edition, and Klingner) raise no 
question about it. Servius ad loc. notes on _amarae_: _et est epitheton 
naturale_.
On the contrary, my students suggested that _amarae_ can be taken 
metaphorically -- standing for the pain which torments the Phaethon's 
sisters.

What do the other commentators say (unfortunately, I have no Clausen at 
hand)? What seems to me even more important -- how would you read these 
verses?

Not only is this bark bitter, but so is the celery in l. 68 (apio . . .
amaro): Unde epitheton?, asked the admirable La Cerda, or so Clausen
reports; for his part Clausen refers to line 47:

a uirgo infelix, quae te dementia cepit,

which as Deutero-Servius points out alludes to 'Caluus in Io:

a uirgo infelix, herbis pasceris amaris

and suggests that Vergil had _amarus_ on the brain: 'Twice below, as if
thinking of herbis pasceris amaris, V. uses the adjective _amarus_
(62, 68)'. Calvus' line was also imitated by Ovid, _Met._ 1. 632-4,
where once more the subject is Io,

frondibus arboreis et amara pascitur herba,
proque toro terrae non semper gramen habenti
incubat infelix.

_Musco_ also bothers me; the picture seems somewhat clumsy, not 
substantial enough.

Isn't the point that the bark exudes the musk, i.e. the amber? (Cf.
Ovid,_Met._ 2. 344-66 for a fuller account.)

Leofranc
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Re: VIRGIL: de rosis nascentibus

1999-01-03 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Miryam  Cesar Libran Moreno
[EMAIL PROTECTED] write:
Could you please inform me whether De Rosis Nascentibus is considered to
be a part of the Appendix Vergiliana? I always thought that Decimus
Magnus Ausonius wrote it, but to my surprise I found it listed in the
Appendix in a Latin Literature Textbook.

The textbook was right, but you may well be right too. The poem is
transmitted with other poems of the Appendix Vergiliana; it was claimed
for Ausonius in the sixteenth century by Hieronymus Aleander and (on MS
evidence now lost) by M. Accursius. No-one imagines it is by Vergil; the
attribution to Ausonius is contested, but favoured by R. P. H. Green in
his edition, _The Works of Ausonius_ (Oxford, 1990), 669. Some of the
MSS containing it also contain the poems _De institutione viri boni_ and
_De est et non_, which are undoubtedly Ausonian (they are XIV. 20 and 21
in Green, but otherwise allocated by other editors). Nevertheless, all
three are also edited in the OCT of the Appendix Vergiliana (Oxford,
1966); in the preface, signed by Wendell Clausen (who edited all three)
ahead of his colleagues, it is stated: Poematia quoque 'Ausoniana'
Vergilio olim perperam attributa Appendici appendiculae loco subiungere
placuit.

Leofranc
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Re: VIRGIL: furor

1998-12-11 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Dan
Knauss [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Is it likely that there was
a common Greek and Roman sentiment toward the barbarian tribes that classed
them as what a civilized person might become if overcome by extreme
passions like love and hate? 

Certainly: Greeks (and Romans when they can no longer be called
barbarians) are distinguished, in their own eyes at least, by the
ability to givern themselves by reason. A Gaul or Thracian, say, may
have more brute courage than a Greek or Roman, because he will charge
into battle where a civilized person would have thought better of it;
but if the charge doesn't carry all before it he is disheartened and
gives up where a Greek or a Roman would have stuck to it. That is to
say, he cannot rationally judge which dangers are to be risked and which
avoided, which hardships are to be endured and which refused.

-- 
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: beyond the limits of nature?

1998-12-11 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
David Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
From: Ramon Sevilla [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 19:31:17 -0600

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit .  Aeneid I, 203.

I marvel how Virgil in Aeneid I, 195 ss. recalls the hardships he and his
comrades have formerly endured.  He doesn’t mention anything successful or
prosperous.  However sharing wine with his company Aeneas speaks hopefully
looking forward to a future prosperity which will be the effect of a
painful parturition.  Furthermore Aeneas refers to a deity sine nomine,
an unknown god:  Dabit deus his quoque finem.

Is it appropriate to find out here something akin to a biblical Anamnesis?

David R. Slavitt writes about the fourth book of the Georgics, that it is a
book already nudging at the limits of nature...  he (Virgil) is
deliberately venturing beyond the borders of ordinary experience and into
the realm of the supernatural. Or, putting it another way, he is exploring
the confines of reason and stepping, or leaping, beyond and into the
territory of faith.  D.R. Slavitt, Virgil, Yale University Press,1991.

I wonder what does Virgil mean when he mentions an unnamed god as in
Georgics I {immo 4] 221:  deum namque ire per omnia. Or in Aeneid I,
199: dabit
deus his quoque finem.

Unspecified _deus_ in Vergil may mean, at any given point, either the
all-pervasive god of the Stoics and other philosophers or the indefinite
_daimon_ ('some god, but who knows which one?') of Homer.
-- 
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Seeking translation---one sentence.

1998-12-09 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], George Heidekat
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
  Reply to:  Seeking translation---one sentence.
Hi (Heus!)

My Franklin Day Planner quote for the day is, They can because they think 
they can. —Virgil.  Can anyone confirm that this is a real quotation, tell me 
where it occurs, and provide the Latin? 
Thanks!
Possunt quia posse videntur: _Aeneid_ 5. 231, from the boatrace episode.
-- 
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: Lost poem

1998-12-09 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Gregory Hays
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I don't know the poem your referring to. But I thought you might find a
poem called the Pervigilium Veneris which is made up of half-lines and
lines from Vergil but on a rather more humorous topic interesting.
Unfortunately, I cannot remember who it is by. Anyone?

Adrian Pay

I think you may be confusing the Pervigilium Veneris, an anonymous original
poem (perhaps by the late 3d/early 4th c. poet Tiberianus) with works such
as the _Medea_ of Hosidius Geta or the biblical cento of Proba, which *are*
made up of half-lines and lines from Vergil. None of these are particularly
humorous, however, 


Apart from Ausonius' _cento nuptialis_...
-- 
Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Re: VIRGIL: deaths in the Aeneid

1998-11-19 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
David Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
From: Adrian Pay [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 23:53:19 -

I find Mezentius a very interesting character in the Aeneid. One bit that's 
particularly striking is lines 10.689f At Iovis interea monitis Mezentius 
ardens / succedit pugnae Teucrosque invadit ovantis (But meanwhile on the 
*instructions of Jupiter* burning Mezentius Now have a look at the 
scene where Jupiter replies to the complaints of Juno and Venus at the 
beginning of book 10. Jupiter says at 104ff that he will be completely 
impartial in the coming fight - Tros Rutulusne fuat, nullo discrimine 
habebo ... rex Iuppiter omnibus idem and he swears this by the Styx.

The way I read it, bits like this undermine the superficial picture of a 
moral Jupiter; the deaths of both Trojans and Rutulans are part of the 
plan of Jupiter, just like the countless deaths of Greeks are part of 
Zeus' plan in the Iliad (1.1 and elsewhere).

Have a look also at the bit where Jupiter holds up the scales to decide 
whether Turnus or Aeneas is to die (12.725ff). And its by *Jupiter's* th  
rone that the Dirae sit (one of whom is sent against Turnus) not, as one 
might expect, Juno's.

I think you're quite right that this is intimately connected with Vergil's 
Augustan agenda. Generally speaking there is a balance in the Aeneid 
between patriotic pro-Augustan stuff (which I find a genuine and integral 
part of the poem) and a deep exploration of the negative side of 
imperialism. 

Very well put.

The death of Turnus is an excellent example - it is the 
crowning moment of the Aeneid and marks both Aeneas' success and the 
founding of Rome, but the tone is disquieting. Homer's Iliad finished with 
the incredible scene of reconciliation between Achilles and Priam - the old 
Trojan king eats with the Greek who killed and mutilated his best son and I 
think Vergil wanted his readers to bear in mind how that epic finished. 
Remember as well Anchises words to Aeneas at 6.852f Remember, Roman, to 
rule over peoples with 'imperium' (these will be your arts), and to add 
civilized values to peace, *to spare those who are thrown down* [parcere 
subiectis] and war against those who are arrogant. And Aeneas almost does 
have mercy on Turnus (lines 12.938ff). But it is noticing Pallas' belt 
which incenses him (saevi...doloris; furiis accensus et ira terribilis; 
fervidus - words with great resonance through the Aeneid).

I hope some of that will be thought provoking.

Adrian Pay

Indeed. The problem I have with much Vergilian comment is the demand
that gods, and men, live up to Platonic (sometimes even Christian)
expectations; as if what was good enough for Homeric gods and heroes
weren't good enough for Vergil. It is true that V. could not wipe away
700 years (shall we say) of intellectual and religious development; but
he was also an epic poet, who was entitled to the Homeric conceptions
whenever they served his turn. A furher complication is that he was a
Roman with Roman expectations of how men and gods should behave, above
all in relation to the cause of Rome. Here indeed is one of the
complexities of the Dido episode: _pius Aeneas_ behaves like a true
Roman, but the gods are not the Roman collective of _di inmortales_, but
individual Homeric deities with their own agendas. (The contrast is
grossly oversimplified, but I think there is something in it.)

Leofranc Holford-Strevens 

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Re: VIRGIL: Virgil's religion or lack of

1998-10-20 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Stephanie Spaulding
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

 in reply to the message

From: Shannon Merlino [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 1998 19:09:22 EDT
  To Whom it may Concern:
  Recently in my Latin class I was involved in a discussion of Virgil's 
'piety' or lack thereof.  I was told that despite his traditional use 
of 
the divine/supernatural in his works, Virgil, much like many of the 
patricians of the time, 

[V. of course was neither a patrician nor a _nobilis_. L.A.H.-S.]
was not very religious at all and hardly 
believed in the Roman gods at all-a near-atheist, if you will.  I 
disagreed- am I correct in this?  Surely Virgil, had he not been a 
devout Roman or even one with a marginal belief of the gods, would not 
have stuck to tradition and composed an epic glorifying Aeneas among 
others for their purely terrestrial endeavours?  Please let me know 
what 
you think-
  Shannon Merlino

Shannon, 

you're going to have to be very careful when you use the English word 
'piety' in this context because the Roman concept of 'pietas' is not the 
same as the related word (which has picked up many connotations and is 
often coupled with 'religious' or moral piety).  The Roman concept of 
pietas has much to do with the carrying out of certain obligations to 
family, country, and also religion.  This is deffinately a crucial issue 
for Aeneas throughout the Aeneid.  Aeneas is 'pious Aeneas' not because 
he closes his eyes when he prays, but because he fulfills his duties to 
family, country, and with ritual observance of religion.  One must also 
remember that believing in religion and carrying out the duties and 
obligations may be totally separate things, an oversight many people 
make.  

That is a very good point. Nowadays in most Western countries if you
don't believe you don't conform because there's no social pressure
(except on politicians?); it used to be otherwise. There was a time when
at an Oxford college, even after the abolition of religious tests fir
entrance, you were expected to attend chapel on Sunday unless you
positively belonged to another denomination or another faith; naturally
Roman Catholics, Jews, and other non-Anglicans would attend their own
services, but if you didn't come into those categories it was your
business what you believed, but not to take part was letting the side
down. Ancient Romans would have taken such an attitude for granted.

As for Vergil, the tradition that he flirted with the Epicureans, who
believed in gods who took no interest in human affairs (but who, if they
followed their founder, were most diligent in public conformity) seems
now to have been confirmed by a contemporary papyrus; but whatever he
may or may not have supposed to be true at any one stage in his life
(and however deeply he may or may not have been affected by the
religious revival under Augustus), in his poetry he adopted poetically
attractive rather than philosophically rigorous standpoints (as
commentators on Silenus' song and Anchises' speech have long since
recognized). After all, Milton adopted the Ptolemaic cosmogony for
_Paradise Lost_, even though in civilian life he knew it had been
superseded, and even though it was being upheld by the hated Papacy.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens

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OX2 6EJ


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Re: VIRGIL: wirgil and augustus/result of aeneid

1998-10-16 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED]
edu, RANDI C ELDEVIK [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Misinformation like this should not go uncorrected on Mantovano, but I
can't remain any longer at my desk right now.  Would someone like to
explain what is wrong here? 
Thanks,
Randi Eldevik
On Wed, 14 Oct 1998, KIMBERLY ANN SANTORA wrote:

 All I know is that augustus asked him to write it, and I know from
 translating it last yr that there are certain passages in it alluding to
 and praising him. I do not know them offhand, could look though if u need
 it. I dont know about political sit. at that time, but had affect
effect?
 on
 later medieval life: most books from virgils time burnt b/cause of pagan
 beliefs in them,

No they were not. A lot of texts weren't copied because they no longer
seemed relevant, but that is quite different. There are odd cases of
censorship by scribes, such as a branch of the Martial tradition that
suppresses heterosexual but not homosexual obscenity; there are also
places where Christian words slip into a scribe's mind in place of the
one he should have copied, but that is a matter of words, not of ideas.
Proof: in Manilius 1. 742

laudatique cadit post paulum gratia ponti

and the beauty of the sea, which has (just) been praised, soon falls
away

the words 'paulum' and 'gratia' caused a scribe to write 'christi'
instead of 'ponti'; had he been attempting to say (like modern trendies)
that the grace of Christ falls away after Paul, i.e. that Paul denatured
Christianity, he would have been playing with fire.

Perhaps other listmembers would like to contribute scribal Christianism
they have encountered (I have some others).

I do know an old tale that a Patriarch of Constantinople (I think)
destroyed the poetry of Sappho as immoral, but it is no longer taken
seriously; it is certainly true that in the fifteenth century Gennadios
Scholarios read, admired, and burnt an allegedly neo-pagan work by his
late friend George Gemistos Plethon.

 but not aeneid b/c many thought there was a paragraph
 prophesizing christ

No: it was the fourth eclogue of the Bucolics.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens


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Re: VIRGIL: alternatives to Galinsky, Augustan Culture

1998-09-27 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message Pine.GSO.3.95-960729.980926184149.23630D-
[EMAIL PROTECTED], M W Hughes [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I don't think that I need to accuse RSyme of the modern version of Medism,
since I don't think that I need to accept the 'Antony=Caesar' formula.   I
did begin by saying that RS regards all dictatorship as a menace.
RS tells us that on the 17th March 44 Antony restored a rough and ready
form of constitutional government, something which the foolishly
ideological Cicero was to help subvert.   Is there is a contemporary 
analogy, and hence a message directed by RS patriae suae?   If there
is, would it not be the message that, if we encountered any force in
Germany prepared to restore the constitution after the (quite
likely violent) death of the dictator, we should not be stopped by
ideology from doing business with it?

That would have been more relevant in 1938, when there were
possibilities, had we been firmer at Munich, of encompassing a military
coup against Hitler; but among our motives for spurning the German
opposition was the fact that Hitler's enemies were demanding, by way of
reward for being decent people, the same concessions to Germany as he
was.
I don't know how far we ought, biographically, to be pushing
these analogies, though I believe that Syme's thoughts on the New Order
were coloured by observing mass rallies led by the Duce. In any case,
what would _patriae_ in his case? Not the United Kingdom, but either the
British Empire as a whole or else New Zealand.

  But as for V on kingship: surely
there is no venom in V's usage of 'rex' or (just as interestingly)
'tyrannus' (I 544, VII 266).

Indeed: one thinks of those neutral uses of _tyrannos_ in tragedy:
Ennius' _O Tite tute Tati tibi tanta tyranne tulisti is hostile.
 I think V portrays Augustus as one who holds
office by a means in which divine, rather than merely human, election (of
which heredity is one indication) play a part.   This sort of office is
contrary to Libertas as defended by Cato.   I don't see any Claudian-style
synthesis of monarchy and Libertas.   Brutus' action 'pulchra pro
libertate' of VI 821 is action against monarchy and in the service of an
attractive ideal.   But it caused the Republic to be born and to live its
life amid family strife, a theme of the next passage. 
That is a very fair account; the Republic and _libertas_ were fine
things, but . . .

After the First World War, a German general (I think) was heard to
define himself thus: 'Ich bin Vernunftrepublikaner aber
Herzensmonarchist.' Many a Roman of Augustus' time might be called
'Herzensrepublikaner aber Vernunftmonarchist'--that way round, to allow
the last word to reason.

Leofranc

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Re: VIRGIL: Silver Age

1998-06-22 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], JAMES C Wiersum
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
Just a note to say how much I appreciated the comment on the Silver
Age. It was very insightful. How would Tennyson, who has been called
virgilian, fit in though? Or, is this why Tennyson has always been a
bit suspect by the intelligentsia from the time of the Victorian era? He
was more Latin than Greek in his poetry.

If a Silver poet was not a flashy rhetorician, he could always be
brought down by the other barrel as a servile imitator; Silius Italicus
was the obvious candidate (the younger Pliny having led the way), but
Statius was, quite unjustly, tarred with this brush by persons who
simply couldn't see the wit (in its eighteenth-century sense of
ingenuity). Anyone who found Tennyson suspect would take this course.

Although the British did not suffer from the anti-Latin disease
as the Germans did, it should be remembered that Gladstone, in his
writings on Homer, exalted him above Vergil as one-sidedly as Julius
Caesar Scaliger had done the opposite. Those writings were cited as
proof of English philological incapacity by a disappointed candidate for
a German classical chair who loathed Gladstone politically but had a
distinctly Romantic view of the ancient Greeks, namely Karl Marx.

L.A.H.-S.

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Re: Thebaid (was: VIRGIL: Mystery)

1998-06-21 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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I say, could anybody explain that statement at more length? Explain what
Silver Literature means, (although I can, of course, guess) and explain
why the Victorian disapproval. It sounds interesting.

Robin Kornman
By Silver literature I mean literature of the Silver Age, roughly from
Ovid and the elder Seneca to Juvenal. The nineteenth century--which in
English literature was in full reaction against the neo-classical
eighteenth--regarded it as derivative, showy, and shallow, all polish
and no substance; it was at this point that 'rhetorical' came to be a
bad word. Macaulay's comment that reading Seneca was like dining on
anchovy sauce is the most memorable and perhaps also perceptive
statement of that view. ('Annaee, quis finis?', as Fronto was to
apostrophize a different Annaeus; and the epigrams of Oscar Wilde tend
to provoke a similar reaction when taken in excess.) The Victorians also
disliked the cynicism and pessimism of the Julio-Claudian age scarc1ely
less than the 'immorality' of Ovid or the more scabrous parts of Martial
and Juvenal. 

A simplistic summary? Perhaps, but a fair picture of the stuff I was
served by histories of Latin literature and standard reference-books at
school. In Germany the period was also despised for much the same
reasons, but all Latin literature, even Vergil and Horace, was found
wanting in the eyes of Romantic _Deutschhellenentum_, firm in the
conviction that the Greeks had been the perfection of the ancient world,
and were now spiritually reborn as Germans.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens

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Re: Thebaid (was: VIRGIL: Mystery)

1998-06-17 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Geyssen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 
 Is it a good read (in any language)?

The Thebaid is a great read.  But, like everything else, it suffers in
translation, although Melville's is good (there's a review of it in
BMCR).  The main problem is that most expect it to be the Aeneid and are
disappointed/frustrated/bent out of shape when they realize it's not;
consequently it is frequently derided.  It is, in fact, *explicitly* not
another Aeneid and, i think, Statius sets himself (much the way Ovid
did) to 'correcting' the Aeneid.  It presents a very different view of
the gods and any grand design, of civil war, of hero and of closure.  If
you do read the Thebaid, it's important to keep the Aeneid not far from
the front of your mind.

Many of these considerations were brought up at an excellent Statius
Workshop organized by Kathyleen Coleman at Trinity College Dublin last
March. It has taken Statius longer than say Lucan to emerge from
Victorian disapproval of Silver literature, but he seems to have done
now. LAH-S


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Re: VIRGIL: nemo Hercule, nemo

1998-05-01 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Laura
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes

For example you can find this expression in very late

Not late but early; it is Ennodius who is very late.
 latin poets, as Ennius

   Malo hercle magno suo convivat sine modo

In Saturarum lib. I, 1 (I took the line from Vahlen's second edition of
Ennius works).

See now Edward Courtney, _The Fragmentary Latin Poets_ (Oxford, 1993),
where this verse is Ennius fr. 7.

But probably it wasn't used very much in arcaic literature, because I found
this expression only in this line. There is NO other example in any of the
fragments of the Annales or of the Scenica.

It is beneath the dignity of epic as Romans understood it (Sander
Goldberg's contrast between Roman and Greek attitudes in this respect
has already been cited on this list), and likewise of tragedy, but it is
easily found in Plautus, Terence, and the comic and mimic fragments in
vol. ii of Ribbeck, which is just what you would expect a colloquial
word. Likewise one may look for it in satire; after all it is Persius
whose use of it sparked off this discussion--not Vergil, who never uses
it.

I will take a look on Naevius fragments, probably there are more examples

There are two in the comic fragments (117 and 129 Ribbeck).


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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
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Oxford  scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ


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Re: VIRGIL: nemo Hercule, nemo

1998-04-30 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED],
David Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
That's right: the author I cited (Lipsius) was an ardent Dutch Protestant,
so I don't think he was really swearing by Hercules. I would translate it
as by gum or something generic like that. But the contracted form is old:
see Lewis  Short, Hercules, 1b.
When a Roman said 'hercle' he was swearing by Hercules, and I mean 'he',
for women didn't say it; conversely mean didn't say 'ecastor', 'by
Castor', though both sexes said 'edepol', by Pollux: see Aulus Gellius
11. 6. Similarly it is Greek men who say Herakleis. However, 'hercle'
found its way into literary prose as _ne Dia_, by Zeus, did in Greek,
and was used as a classicism at the Renaissance. (That is nothing to the
letter in the British Library from Vida to Bembo congratulating him on
being made a cardinal, which thanks 'the immortal gods'. It is
Additional MS 21520, folio 19; the MS is a collection of autographs,
including a Michelangelo drawing.)
Leofranc Holford-Strevens

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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Roadusque adeone
Oxford  scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ


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Re: VIRGIL: spelling: Virgil or Vergil?

1998-04-25 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Simon Cauchi
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
As I understand it, 'Virgil' (or French 'Virgile', etc.) is the traditional
spelling in modern languages.

'Vergil' (despite Heinze) is normal in modern German.

 'Vergil' is preferred by some (a minority) on
the ground that in Latin the name is 'Vergilius', 'Vergilii', etc.. The
'Virgil' spelling perpetuates a medieval custom, rather like the wearing of
academic gowns and hoods. We write and speak of 'Horace', 'Cicero' (pron.
'Sisero'), 'Martial' (pron. 'Marshall'), etc.; why not also 'Virgil'?

Because that sdpelling has given generation of schoolboys the notion
that he was a girlie drip? Or because it suggests the writer is an old-
style man of letters who can't be bothered with dull facts?

Of course that's fighting talk, just like 'the spelling Vergil marks the
fussy pedant' on the other side; one might also, more coolly, ask:
precisely because it *doesn't* affect the English pronunciation, what is
the point of not changing?

Perhaps those list-members who are native English-speakers might be
polled on their preference: my hunch is that e is more common in the USA
than in Britain, among academics than non-academics, among classicists
than non-classicists, and among younger than older writers; these and
any other categories might be tested, insofar as they are not thought to
intrude on privacy

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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Roadusque adeone
Oxford  scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ


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Re: VIRGIL: Augustus and Vergil

1998-04-17 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Michael Ehrman
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I'm am working on a research paper that hopes to arrive at some 
conclusion that relates Augustus patronage of Vergil to the Aeneid.  My 
feeling is that one of the purposes of writing the Aeneid was so that 
the Romans could feel good about themselves, and also that Augustus 
would be able to take and maintain control of the empire.  I see the 
Aeneid as being a powerful tool of Augustine Propoganda.  My paper also 
seeks to relate other works of literature in more modern times to 
political issues (ex: _Uncle_Tom's_Cabin_ and the issue of slavery).  
Any comments, suggestions, of direction towards research materials would 
be GREATLY appreciated.  

If you mean that Vergil was, in some sense, commissioned to write the
_Aeneid_, you will have to engage with Peter White, _Promised Verse:
Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome' (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1993), which denies this widely accepted model of
Augustan literary life. Of course, there is nothing to stop Vergil
writing 'Augustan propaganda' on his own initiative; the notion that
poets are natural oppositionists and support the government only when
they have been bought is sheer bosh. List-members will know I have made
no secret of my own view that Vergil (a) was sincerely pro-Augustus and
(b) had no earthly reason not to be; so of course I am sympathetic to
your account of his purpose, but I emphasize the word 'his'.

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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Roadusque adeone
Oxford  scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ


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Re: VIRGIL: Siro's Epicurean Garden

1998-04-11 Thread Leofranc Holford-Strevens
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], David Silvio Pantano
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes
I am having difficulty finding any substantial information on Siro and 
the Epicurean circle of philosophers that formed his famous Garden. I 
would appreciate any book or article information on this subject. 
thank you, Silvio Pan

This whole complex is something of a growth area at the moment with all
the work that is being done on Philodemus and the Herculaneum Papyri.
See

Marcello Gigante, 'I frammenti di Sirone', _Paideia_, 45 (1990), 175-98

and also

David Sider, _The Epigrams of Philodemos_ [note spelling] (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15-24.

For a more general survey (though Siro is hardly mentioned):

Marcello Gigante, _Philodemus in Italy: The Books from Herculaneum_,
trans. Dirk Obbink (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

The Italian edition, _Filodemo in Italia_ (Florence: Felice Le Monnier,
1990), was itself a revision of _La Bibliothe`que de Philode`me et
l''epicurisme romain' (Collection d''etudes anciennes, 56; Paris:
Socie'te' d''Edition Les Belles Lettres, 1987); by comparing them you
will find certain changes of opinion.

It has to be said that there is a considerable degree of scholarly
disagreement about these questions: at the Amsterdam Lucretius
conference in 1966 I heard Kurt Kleve (the man who discovered fragments
of Ennius and Lucretius at Herculaneum) stating a maximalist view of
Lucretius' involvement with the Epicurean circle and Tiziano Dorandi a
minimalist one.

Philodemus _On Flattery_ (P.Herc.Paris 2) addressed 'Plotius and Varius
and Vergil and Quintilius'; this links Vergil with the Herculaneum
school, which in turn is linked with Siro by P.Herc.312, _c_.50 BC: 'he
was minded to return with us to Naples to the very dear Siro and the way
of life he taught/practised there [ten kat' auton ekei diaitan, 'the
according to him there way of life'] and to engage in philosophical
discourse and join with others in studying at Herculaneum'. Who 'he' and
'we' might be is, alas, uncertain; but it no longer seems unreasonably
credulous to accept the link, despite the very proper warning of
Horsfall, _Companion_, 7-8; whether that means formal study is another
question, let alone adherence to the doctrine, though I see Vergil as
studying many things, assimilating much, but always blending and
compounding it into something of his own.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens

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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Roadusque adeone
Oxford  scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ


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