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Si cerca di restituire le lezione genuina di un passo di Pomponio Mela. An attempt is made to convey the genuine lesson of a passage by Pomponio Mela.

A treatise on rhetorical tropes is attributed in manuscripts to the first-century grammarian Trypho: this article considers for the first time a fifteenth-century manuscript of this work (Leiden, BPG 74G), which turns out to be the only complete witness of its hitherto unknown original version; this version (very fragmentarily transmitted by a fifth-century papyrus scrap) is also partly found in another fifteenth-century manuscript now kept in Olomouc (M 79). Four interesting poetic fragments are quoted in this newly discovered, fuller version of Ps.-Trypho'sDe Tropis: some lines from Callimachus’ fifth and fourthIambi(23–9 and 90–2 respectively: a radically new light is shed by this new witness on the parallel papyrus fragments carrying Callimachus’ text), an epigram dubiously attributed to Simonides (FGE44 Page, probably to be dated to the Hellenistic period: the text can be now restored to its complete form), and some enigmatic lines of “Hesiod”'sWedding of Keyx, which the new witness finally makes fully understandable.

The paper is the first part of S. Barbantani’s contribution Lyric for the Rulers, Lyric for the People: The Transformation of Some Lyric Subgenres in Hellenistic Poetry, in E. Sistakou (ed.), Hellenistic Lyricism: Traditions and Transformations of a Literary Mode (Trends in Classics 9, 2), Berlin - Boston 2017, 339-399 (which discusses encomiastic lyric, epinikion in Callimachus, Posidippus and inscriptional epigram, literary epithalamia, threnoi and epikedeia, poems in stichic lyric meters, Carmina popularia, anthologies for symposiastic use and mimes). This contribution analyses how some of the main lyric genres, developed in archaic and classical Greek poetry, underwent transformation in the Hellenistic period, following social, political and cultural changes. The paper specifically explores lyric poetry produced ‘for the gods’ (hymns, esp. paeans, preserved on stone and on papyrus).

In Tb 1,11–14 the words that Hannah says to her husband resemble in many aspects those of Job’s wife (Job 2,9). That of Hannah is the defiance of a lively faith, attentive to people and to the situations of life, more that in complying with the law, in the rites and works of justice. This was the primitive sense of her words; in fact, the author of Tobit constructed her portrait on the original archetype of Job’s wife, that can be seen in Old Greek (og) and in his addiction in v. 9a–e, by contaminating them. So, here she urges Job to cry out to God his hopelessness for so unfair a trial, and to seek in him a living interlocutor, no longer resigning himself to the events. A reworking of Hannah’s image is totally positive in vv. 11–13: there it’s reinterpreted in the light of the new portrait of Job’s wife, reworked with misogynist accents by Jewish tradition and incorporated in the mt and in the ecclesiastical Greek of the lxx, where her words, rather than an exhortation, they are a curse against Yhwh, responsible for Job’s suffering. In Tobit, however, it is just an ideological reading, that is a reworking of the meaning of Hannah’s words (v. 14), as sometimes the tradition did, assimilating her role to that of Job’s wife in the mt and lxx.

One of Bertolt Brecht’s most famous poems, Mein Bruder war ein Flieger, is often invoked as a manifesto for pacifist ideals, but some essential questions (who is the lyric I? what is the literal meaning of the poem?) have hardly received any attention. By evoking the poem’s nature as a Kinderlied, the context of its first publication, and its relationship with Brecht’s play Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar, this article tentatively identifies the source of its final pointe in a famous passage of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, thereby suggesting—on the basis of textual comparisons—an example of far-reaching, ideological Antikerezeption in Brecht’s oeuvre, working all the way down to his Kalendergeschichten and to his Antigone.

This paper aims at showing how integrating the Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages (ALIM) into the ILC4CLARIN repository can provide mutual benefits. Making ALIM available to a large community of scholars and researchers, on the one side, represents the first step to reduce the lack of resources for Medieval Latin in CLARIN and, on the other side, constitutes an unprecedented contribution to not only linguistic investigations, but also to the studies of the culture and science at the basis of the Western European society. The paper describes the adopted approach aiming to keep intact the structure of the archive and its metadata, which are both accurately mirrored into the ILC4CLARIN repository in order to maintain existing access practices of the users. This structure can be found in exactly the same state within the CLARIN VLO. Finally, the paper illustrates the advantages of experimenting with some ALIM data, once introduced within the CLARIN Language Resource Switchboard service: first results are shown from the analysis of some texts with the UDPipe tool suite and the distant reading tool Voyant.

Undramma satiresco in latino. IlCiclopenell’Italia del CinquecentoThis article is concerned with an artistic Latin translation of Euripides’ Cyclops, which was published in 1556 by the Calabrian humanist Coriolano Martirano (1503-1557). It illustrates the way in which Euripides’ text is reworked in the broader context of the reception of the satirical drama in sixteenth-century Italy. An analysis of the work shows that Martirano intervenes on the text, modifying and integrating it, not only under the influence of other ancient sources dedicated to the figure of the Cyclops, ranging from Homer to Ovid and from Theocritus to Virgil, but also in a dialogue with the Neo-Latin and vernacular production that other exponents of Calabrian humanism, such as Antonio Telesio and Coriolano’s brother Bernardino, dedicated to the Cyclops in the 1520s and 1530s.

Knocking on Charon’s Door. Andrea Dazzi’s Epigram for Julius II, and the Iulius exclususA Greek epigram by Andrea Dazzi on the death of Pope Julius II looks like a satire in the fashion of Lucian, Aristophanes, and the Greek Anthology: the wording of this text brings to mind not only Pontano’s Charon and, more specifically, some popular polemical texts against Julius, but also Erasmus of Rotterdam’s dialogue Iulius exclusus e coelis, with which it shares some startling similarities.

In 17-18th plays regarding Hercules’ death the character of Iole is deeply reinvented compared to ancient dramas: Iole is no longer just an unfortunate prisoner of war, victim of her own beauty, but a proud and strong-willed woman, able to stand up to her fierce conqueror, while Hercules is represented as an elegiac lover, totally subjugated by the girl’s charm and even disposed to a sort of servitium amoris to please her. In some prose and music dramas the aspect of the ‘submission’ of Hercules to Iole is further enhanced by attributing to her the characteristics of Omphale, who most embodies the mythical projection of the elegiac domina. This article reconstructs the origin of the overlapping of the characters of Iole and Omphale, tracing it back to a misunderstanding of the text of Ov. Her. IX documented in medieval comments and translations and widespread through the interpretation of Iole’s character proposed by Boccaccio.

In Silv. 4.4 Statius pays homage to Vitorius Marcellus, the young dedicatee of the poem (for this small but meaningful detail, see Stat. Silv. 4.4.45 iuuenes … annos; 4.4.74 iuuenemque … parentem), praising his skills as an orator (4.4.39–45) and foreseeing a brilliant military career for him (4.4.61–4). The last point is highlighted in a brief portrait of Marcellus as a perfect foot soldier and horseman (4.4.64–9):… nec enim tibi sola potentiseloquii uirtus: sunt membra accommoda bellis 65quique grauem tarde subeant thoraca lacerti.seu campo pedes ire pares, est agmina supranutaturus apex, seu frena sonantia flectes,seruiet asper equus.

This article discusses a passage in Athenaeus (14.620d) that refers to the performance of Herodotus’ work in a theatre in Hellenistic Alexandria. In his edition of Athenaeus, highly valued and still influential, August Meineke replaces Herodotus’ name (unanimously transmitted in Athenaeus’ manuscripts) with Hesiod’s. In this article I set out to overturn a widespread tendency to accept Meineke’s emendation of Athenaeus 14.620d, reconsidering the possibility that Athenaeus did in fact name Herodotus in the light of (a) the difficulty of explaining the origin of the alleged mistake in Athenaeus’ manuscript tradition and (b) the ancients’ tendency to draw parallels between Herodotus’ style and language and Homeric poetry. The fact that Athenaeus refers to theatrical performances of both Herodotus’ work and the Homeric poems will be shown to be very much in line with the ancient rhetorical, historiographical and biographical tradition which regarded Herodotus as the most Homeric of all prose writers.

Analyzing Homer and Aristotle, the Author faces the ancient Greek origin of the organicist model (introduced since 1920 in system theory) presenting its features. In Homer there is still no term to indicate the living body as a whole, but is present the idea of a principle capable of giving “shape” (eidos) to body elements and to counteract the natural tendency to disintegration: the soul (psyche). Only with Aristotle the living body begins to be understood as “organism,” thanks to a hylomorphic and non-dualistic vision of the relationship of the soul with matter, which explains the living organism. The soul itself, in Aristotle, has the characteristics of a system. From this analysis, the organicist model seems to be enriched by the indispensable notion of “form” which, in turn, calls for the need for an efficient cause outside the system.

Even Job's wife (Job 2:9-10), like the minor characters of the Hebrew Bible stories, does not play at all an insignificant role in the story of her husband, but she is however functional to better understand the author's design. In the traditional interpretation, based mostly on the Masoretic Text (MT), she was caught in a pattern that drew the negative opinion of the critics, perhaps the result of a misogynistic view, of Judeo-Hellenistic matrix, and then she appeared as hostile to Job, the righteous sufferer, for the aversion to the unconditional faithfulness of this man. Now, here we wanted to re-read this controversial figure, first of all starting from the received witnesses by both streams of the textual tradition, Jewish (MT) and Greek (Old Greek = OG). In the first case, the words of his wife sound like an invitation to Job to curse Yahweh, responsible for his unjust suffering; in the second, however, they urge him to cry out to God his innocent suffering, even if he should be at the cost of being punished by death. So, two different portraits of woman - if not opposites - are derived from that, and her role in Job's story is defined negatively or positively, according to the archetype that is supposed.Tampoco la mujer de Job (Job 2,9-10), como sucede con otros personajes menores de las historias de la Biblia hebrea, juega un papel insignificante en la historia de su marido, sino que es relevante para entender mejor la intención del autor. En la interpretación tradicional, principalmente basada en el Texto Masorético (TM), ella estaba encuadrada dentro de un esquema que le atraía el juicio negativo de la crítica, fruto tal vez de una visión misógina de matriz judeo-helenística, y aparecía como hostil a Job, el justo sufridor, por la aversión a la fe incondicional de este. Ahora queremos revisar aquí esta controvertida figura, primero de todo a la luz de los testimonios de las dos ramas de la tradición textual hebrea (TM) y griega (Old Greek = OG). En el primer caso, las palabras de la mujer de Job suenan como una invitación a su marido a maldecir a Dios, como responsable de sus injustos sufrimientos; en el segundo, sin embargo, se muestran como una exhortación a proclamar ante Dios su dolor inocente, aun a costa de ser castigado con la muerte. Encontramos así dos retratos diferentes, si no opuestos, de la mujer de Job, cuyo papel en la historia de Job se define negativa o positi¬vamente según el arquetipo presupuesto.

This article suggests that a possible source of inspiration for Cavafy's poem ‘Waiting for the barbarians’ can be identified in a passage of the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates concerning the arrival of German ambassadors at the court of Alexios III in Constantinople in 1196. The context of diplomacy, the city's decadent atmosphere, the emperor's self-humiliation and the unsuccessful ostentation of luxury and royal attire are prominent features linking both texts.

In one of the fragments of encomiastic poetry which is most difficult to interpret, Suppl . Hell . 958 ( P . Hamb . 312 inv. 381, 3 rd cent. BCE), a king (most probably Ptolemy II) compares his two arch-enemies, the «Medes» and the Galatians, those already defeated and those about to receive due punishment for their impiety. Comparison with contemporary and late-antique Greek encomia from Egypt may suggest that here are at play two levels of assimilation with the 5 th century Persians: on the one hand, every barbarian enemy of a Greek state can be seen as a reincarnation of the Persian spectre (even the Galatians are often assimilated to the invading army of Xerxes in Hellenistic art and literature); on the other hand, the Seleucids, having inherited the land once dominated by the Achaemenids, can be presented by their enemies as «the New Persians». That a Ptolemy could play the role of a defender of the cultural identity of his subjects (both Greeks and Egyptians) against the Persians, is no surprise. We have to assess, however, if the Seleucids really did care less about advertising their Greek/Macedonian cultural inheritance than the rival dynasties. A review of the surviving Greek literature from the Seleucid empire (generally overlooked by scholars, who are most interested in the marvels of Alexandrian poetry) can be useful to reply to this question.

The final words of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris are vexed by several difficulties concerning the distribution of lines to speakers. In IT 1490-1, the problem affects the general interpretation of the ending, which seems to suggest clearly that the Chorus survives and returns to Greece. If 1490-1 are delivered by the Chorus, as Seidler suggests, it is to be assumed that the Greek women are not allowed to go back home with Iphigenia, Orestes and Pylades: this explicit does not square with the evidence of the drama as a whole. The restoration of L’s attribution of the lines to Athena (Kovacs) would fit well with the ultimate destiny of the Chorus, yet it raises the problem of admitting an unparalleled metrical transition from trimeters to anapaests by the same speaker; moreover, it creates an awkward repetition and reduplication of the content of 1487-9. The attribution to Thoas, who is in any case unable to leave until 1489, solves the problem and gives a better sense to 1490-1: Thoas is here urging the Chorus to leave the stage and sail towards Greece, trusting Athena’s recent deliberations. The mistake of attribution in L may reflect an original distribution in which changes of speaker were marked at 1486 (or 1487), 1490 and 1492.

This article re-examines P.Oxy. 2174 fr. 5 (Hipponax fr. 74 West = Degani), offers an improved transcription of its text, and questions its relevance to the other fragments of the papyrus, suggesting instead that it may belong to a papyrus of the Odyssey.

This is a meticulous survey of the reception of some lyric subgenres in Hellenistic poetry and it is meant to be the first of a series of contributions on the subject. Leaving aside lyric in a religious context, the paper is divided into two main sections, namely lyric poetry composed for rulers and lyric poetry written for everyday people. In the new social context lyric poetry was intended for presentation in the royal symposia. The Alexandrians wrote all types of occasional lyric poetry (

The analysis of political language in Aeschylus’ Suppliants confirms the hypothesis that the form of government here represented is strongly influenced by contemporary Athens: prehistoric Argos turns out to be a sort of mirror of democratic Athens. It is no coincidence that the sequence running from the entrance of Pelasgus at l. 234 to the Danaids’ song of benediction (ll. 625-709) presents a dramatic pattern similar in several respects to that underlying in Eumenides 397-1002 (the scenes between the entrance of Athena and the Chorus’ prayer of blessing). Pelasgus (likewise Athena in Eumenides) imparts a sort of lesson on ‘democratic paideia’ to the Danaids, in view of their integration as metoikoi in the institutional structures of the polis.

This thesis provides a new critical edition of the scholia to Euripides’ Hippolytus with an apparatus of loci similes. The first chapter of the introduction briefly discusses the exegesis and the critical interpretation of the euripidean text in antiquity as well as creation and development of this scholiastic corpus. The second one investigates the manuscripts and the medieval tradition of the scholia to Hippolytus. Indices have been added at the end. This work also offers, for the first time, an edition of the metrical scholia by Demetrius Triclinius to this tragedy.

Son numerosas las analogías entre los grandes protagonistas de las páginas bíblicas y los héroes griegos de la épica arcaica y las heroínas del teatro clásico. En particular, la figura de la mujer del justo, perseguido injustamente e incomprendido precisamente por su incondicional fidelidad, está muy próxima a la del anti-héroe del teatro sofocleo, que se opone con fuerza a la elección del héroe en nombre de la mentalidad del hombre común; en ambos casos, de hecho, el resultado obtenido es exactamente el contrario de las expectativas, dado que ratifica la elección del justo/héroe, contribuyendo a acentuar aún más su aislamiento. Sobre este modelo literario, en consecuencia, podría haberse situado el personaje de su mujer en la historia de Job; de hecho, ella está ausente en la leyenda antigua que sirve de base al prólogo y al epílogo del libro bíblico. La Septuaginta antigua (Old Greek = OG) lo atestigua claramente con el añadido (vv. 9a-e) mediante el cual, algo después, la intervención de la mujer de Job quedó definida de manera más favorable, haciendo de ella una especia de anti-heroína, sobre el esquema dramático de Ismene y Crisótemis frente a sus respectivos héroes, en el teatro trágico de Sófocles. El Testamento de Job apreció esta elección y acentuó el papel de la mujer, reelaborando de manera benévola la imagen que de ella se muestra en la tradición de la Septuaginta.

The Periplus preserved in the manuscript Parisinus suppl. gr. 443, and erroneously ascribed to Scylax of Caryanda (sixth century BC), is the oldest extant specimen of ancient Greek periplography: it belongs to the second half of the fourth century. In the present article, all the testimonies on the ancient tradition of both Scylax and the Paris Periplus are carefully evaluated. The aim is to determine when and why the Paris Periplus was mistakenly ascribed to Scylax and to clear any doubts on the alleged authorship of this ancient geographic work. The confusion, or the wilful falsification, is evident in Strabo: he knew of Scylax’s voyage in the East and at the same time was acquainted with the text of the Paris Periplus, which he ascribed to this famous ancient seafarer. Greek and Latin authors of the Roman Imperial age knew the Paris Periplus, but many followed slavishly the erroneous ascription to Scylax of Caryanda. When Marcianus of Heraclea in the early Byzantine age collected his corpus of ancient Greek geographers he also ascribed the Paris Periplus to Scylax, thus handing down the error to the copyist of the Paris. suppl. gr. 443

Textual, literary and dramaturgical notes to Eur. Hypp. 271, 626, 680-1, 1045, 1123, 1153.

Apollo must leave the stage sometime after line 753 in the Eumenides, but the question of when exactly he does so is perplexing. A simple solution proposed but rejected by O. Taplin assigns lines 775-777, transmitted as the last three lines of Orestes' speech, to Apollo. Orestes' speech of gratitude is followed by a speech of farewell by Apollo. Once Apollo has said goodbye, Orestes and he can leave together.