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CAMBRIDGE CLASSICAL TEXTS A N D C O M M E N TA R I E S
J. D I G G L E N. H O P K I N S O N J. G. F. P OW E L L M. D. REEVE D. N. S EDLEY R . J. TA R R A N T
DECIMUS LABERIUS: THE FRAGMENTS
D ECIMU S LABERIUS THE FRAGMENTS E D I T E D W I T H I N T RO D U C T I O N, TRAN SLATION, AND C OMMENTARY BY
COS TA S PA NAYOTA KI S Senior Lecturer in Classics University of Glasgow
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521885232 © Costas Panayotakis 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2010 ISBN-13
978-0-511-67555-3
eBook (NetLibrary)
ISBN-13
978-0-521-88523-2
Hardback
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CONTE NTS
II
xiii
I N T RO D U C T I O N I
page vii
Defining the Roman mime
Origins and chronological development of the genre
III
Testimonia on Laberius
IV
Facts and problems
V Laberius’ language and themes
VI Laberius’ prosody VII The history of the text of Laberius’ mimes
VIII An overview of anthologies containing Laberius’ mimes
SIGLA CODICUM
T H E F R AG M E N T S : T E X T, T R A N S L AT I O N, C O M M E N TA RY
(A)
Concordances of Laberius
(B)
Laberius’ vocabulary
v
P RE FACE AND ACKN OWLEDGE MENTS My interest in the Roman mime originated in the early s when, as a PhD student at the University of Glasgow, I studied under the supervision of P. G. Walsh the episodic novel of Petronius from a theatrical point of view (a revised version of my PhD Thesis appeared with the title Theatrum Arbitri: Theatrical elements in the Satyrica of Petronius (Leiden )). During my analysis of theatricality in Petronius I realised how important to the author of the Satyrica, and to ancient novelists in general, mime was as a structural device, and how inadequate our primary sources were for an understanding of this unique theatrical form. Its significance can be seen both in the frequent exploitation of various mime-motifs by authors of widely divergent literary genres such as love-elegy, satire, and the novel, and in the prominent role mime played in the shaping of medieval and modern popular theatre. What survives from the scripts of the Roman literary mime today comprises some titles of plays, a number of literary fragments (not all of them considered to be genuine extracts) which amount to about lines, and a collection of over sententiae, some of which are attributed to the mimographer Publilius. It is far from certain that all of these one-line apophthegms, which lack a theatrical context and were composed in iambic or trochaic metres, were written by him. The length of the remaining mime-fragments, composed usually in senarii or septenarii, varies from one word to lines. The fragments are cited mainly by grammarians and lexicographers on account of their linguistic features and their literary value. The overwhelming majority of these mime-fragments, titles and about lines, is currently attributed to the Roman knight and mimographer Decimus Laberius, a contemporary of Cicero and Caesar, both of whom Laberius is reported to have confronted in public. It is therefore unsurprising that Laberius’ work, which vii
PR EFACE A N D ACKN OWL ED GEMEN TS
almost eclipses in number all the other Latin mime-fragments put together, forms the foundation on which many of the generalisations made by scholars in relation to mime are based. However representative Laberius’ plays are of the Roman mime as a whole, any sweeping statements based on his fragments alone are potentially misleading, because they illuminate only to a small extent our understanding of the development of mime as a literary and theatrical phenomenon; for this reason his work needs to be complemented by careful consideration of the documentary evidence on the Greco-Roman mime. About documents of material culture survive and shed light on the geographical expansion of this type of theatre and on the mechanics of the mime-profession with its acting specialisations, financial arrangements, and honourable rewards. These documents have been usefully edited, translated, and thoroughly commented on in the invaluable but unpublished PhD Thesis of R. L. Maxwell, The documentary evidence for ancient mime (Department of Classical Studies, University of Toronto ); a small number of literary and archaeological sources on mime is also included in E. Csapo and W. J. Slater, The context of ancient drama (Ann Arbor ) –. The inscriptions on tombstones of mime-actors and mime-actresses, the graffiti on the walls of temples visited by mimes, the receipts of payment made out to mime-troupes, the dedicatory monuments set up to honour distinguished mimeplayers, and the visual images of scenes apparently pertaining to mime-plays should function as a salutary reminder that the fragments of the literary plays of Laberius and Publilius, as well as the titles and fragments of many other unspecified Roman mimographers, should be appropriately viewed as extracts of scripts destined for live performance. However, in spite of its profound influence on the cultural and political spheres of classical and late antiquity, the literary Roman mime has been unduly neglected by modern scholars. The most recent critical edition (M. Bonaria, Romani mimi (Rome )), with a translation into Italian, and a brief commentary on the genre’s scanty remains, leaves a lot to be desired, viii
P R E FACE AN D ACKN OWL EDGEM EN TS
especially in linguistic analysis and in the discussion of the fragments as parts of theatrical scripts now lost. The only English monograph on mime as a literary and theatrical genre is more than half a century old (A. Nicoll, Masks, mimes and miracles: Studies in the popular theatre (London, Sydney, and Bombay )). E. W¨ust’s concise entry on mime, in RE ..–, is admittedly much more accurate and useful than H. Reich’s detailed but confusing monograph on the subject (Der Mimus (Berlin )); but even W¨ust’s scholarly contribution is outdated now. By the end of the twentieth century all the Greek mime-texts found in literary papyri had been re-edited and studied by D. L. Page (Select papyri III (Cambridge, Mass. and London )), H. Wiemken (Der griechische Mimus (Bremen )), I. C. Cunningham (Herodae mimiambi cum appendice fragmentorum mimorum papyraceorum (Leipzig )), and M. Andreassi (Mimi greci in Egitto (Bari )), while many works on the literary history of the Roman mime and its influence (especially by L. Cicu, R. E. Fantham, and T. P. Wiseman) called for a re-examination of this theatrical form. Special mention should also be made of the unpublished PhD Thesis of P. E. Kehoe, Studies in the Roman mime (University of Cincinnati ). Despite these developments in the field of the Greco-Roman mime, there was no monograph that would offer an up-to-date introduction to the Roman mime and its main issues from a theatrical perspective, a new edition of Laberius’ literary fragments, their first-ever English translation, and a detailed commentary on them. This was a scholarly gap that needed immediate attention. Therefore, at one of the meetings of the Classical Association of Scotland (in Aberdeen), I suggested to W. S. Watt, who had by then retired from the Chair of Humanity in the University of Aberdeen, that he might produce a new critical edition of the mime-fragments. He responded jovially but firmly that, having edited Cicero’s letters, he would never undertake the edition of an author whose text was transmitted in fragments (he held the same opinion in a note sent to me on July ). He then recommended, with a smile on his face, ix
PR EFACE A N D ACKN OWL ED GEMEN TS
that I embark on this task. I foolishly accepted the challenge immediately. When I began the project, I was extremely ambitious in my demands, even though I had decided quite early on not to deal with the sententiae attributed to Publilius, both for reasons of space and because of the different problems inherent in an examination of these apophthegms, which had their own MSS tradition. But, setting the sententiae aside, I wanted in my project to cover everything in relation to mime and to solve all the problems associated with it. Now I see that I cannot account for all the stages of the development of the mime from an artless dramatic form into a fully-fledged theatrical genre which ousted the plays of Plautus and Terence from the Roman stage; nor can I provide definite answers to the questions posed by the interpretation of many mime-fragments. I have more often raised questions than answered them, and the reader ought not to be irritated that I use the verbs ‘may’ and ‘seem’ excessively. My aims in this volume were to offer a comprehensive as well as concise account of the development of the Roman mime, to consider why it occupied an undignified position in the literary and dramatic hierarchy of the Roman republican and early imperial eras, to situate the mimographer Decimus Laberius and his work within the relevant historical and literary context, to speculate (whenever possible) on the meaning of the mime-fragments from a theatrical perspective (an original approach to the study of this literary corpus), and to make available to a wide audience material that has never before been presented in English. I will be happy if scholars and students of Latin literature, language, and popular culture are alerted through my work to what we do not know about mime, and if I convey the message that most of our literary evidence is precarious, and needs to be treated with extreme caution. A lot of work remains to be done in order for us to understand fully the reciprocal influence of mime and other forms of Greco-Roman literary and material culture. This book is only a small contribution towards the achievement of this larger goal. x
P R E FACE AN D ACKN OWL EDGEM EN TS
My researches on mime have been made possible with the award of both the Snell Visitorship for Martinmas Term , which enabled me to spend my period of study leave at Balliol College, Oxford, and an Arts and Humanities Research Board grant for Candlemas Term . I am grateful to the librarians of several colleges at Oxford (Balliol, Pembroke, Christ Church) and Cambridge (Clare, Trinity), as well as to the staff in the Bodleian Library (especially, Duke Humfrey) and the British Library, for dealing with my requests to see MSS and early editions of authors who cited mime-fragments. J. N. Adams at All Souls was generous both with his hospitality and with his feedback on an early draft of this book, while Anthony Esposito of the OED devoted a lot of his time to the scrutiny of the translation of Laberius’ fragments. Various aspects of the project were discussed with Mario Andreassi, Ilias Arnaoutoglou, Susanna Morton Braund, Peter Brown, Adrian Gratwick (who kindly allowed me to cite his unpublished translation of the lines Macrobius attributes to Laberius (= ), and gave me invaluable guidance in matters of Latin orthography), Roger Green, Stephen Harrison, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, the late Harry Jocelyn, Matthew Leigh, the late Oliver Lyne, Eric Martin, Jonathan Powell, Michael Sharp, Niall Slater, William Slater, Friedrich Spoth, Catherine Steel, Peter Walsh, David West, and Peter Wiseman. I thank them all for their encouragement, guidance, and helpful comments. Michael Sharp, Elizabeth Hanlon, and Jodie Barnes at Cambridge University Press have been very efficient and supportive throughout the production of this volume, and Malcolm Todd was careful, alert, and effective as copy-editor; he helped greatly in improving the presentation of the material in the book and in correcting many infelicities in the commentary. I am especially grateful to Michael Reeve, whose vigorous criticism urged me to revise the layout of the text and to clear the apparatus criticus of readings and conjectures which need not be recorded. His acute observations saved me from many glaring errors and his opinion on the presentation of the material in the volume helped me to position the xi
PR EFACE A N D ACKN OWL ED GEMEN TS
commentary in an effective way. Many of the views that appear in the introduction and the commentary were originally aired in papers I gave at Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lampeter, Leeds, Manchester, Maynooth, Montreal, Munich, Newcastle, Nicosia, and Pretoria. The contribution of the audience of these meetings to my understanding of Roman mime and of Laberius’ work is gratefully acknowledged here, but any factual and interpretative errors are entirely my own. My twin brother, Stelios Panayotakis, kindly provided me with copies of works on the mime which were not easily accessible to me. My former colleague Douglas MacDowell gave me a lot of sensible advice and vigorous encouragement throughout the various stages of this long and frustrating project. He has also read the whole typescript and made various helpful suggestions. I thank him for his unfailing support during the past years, and I dedicate this volume to him.
xii
A B B R E V I AT I O N S A N D S E L E C T BIBLI OGRAP H Y ANCIENT AUTH OR S The abbreviations used for ancient authors and their texts can be obtained from Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English lexicon, revised by Jones (which I abbreviate to LSJ) and from the Oxford Latin dictionary (which I abbreviate to OLD). The following special points should be noted: (i) Pl. = Plautus (not Plato); (ii) L., fr. (or frs.), and edn = Laberius, fragment (or fragments), and edition, respectively; (iii) reference to standard modern commentaries is made by the commentator’s name only (e.g. Camps on Prop. ..); (iv) the frs. of Greek comic playwrights are cited according to the numeration of KA, PCG: so, for example, ‘Sophilus ’ = fr. (not line) of Sophilus’ extant plays in the edition of KA; (v) the frs. of Roman playwrights other than Plautus and Terence are cited in the numeration of Ribbeck (see § (ix) below), unless otherwise indicated. For instance, ‘Pomponius ’ = line (not fr.) of Pomponius’ plays in Ribbeck’s third edn. DAT E S All three-figure and two-figure dates are BC unless otherwise indicated. TITLES Titles of mimes in bold style refer to the relevant note on them; e.g., Aries = see my comments on the title of the mime Aries attributed to L. Figures in bold style refer to my numbering of xiii
AB B R E VI AT I O N S A N D S EL ECT BI BL I OG RAPHY
frs. attributed to L.; for example, = see my comments on fr. of L. in this edn. A ‘n.’ added to a figure in bold type refers to a note in my commentary; for example, n. inplastrum = see my note on the word inplastrum in fr. of L. in this edn; .n. gurdus = see my note on the word gurdus in line of fr. of L. in this edn. It must not be assumed that L. wrote the fr. concerned (whether it is a word or a line or a group of lines). PERIO DI CALS AND REFER ENCE WORKS The abbreviations used for titles of periodicals can be found in the list printed in each of the recent volumes of L’Ann´ee Philologique. The following reference works are cited by initials only: ANRW CAF CCSL CGF CGL
CIL CSEL DS
EM
Aufstieg und Niedergang der r¨omischen Welt (Berlin and New York –) Comicorum Atticorum fragmenta, ed. T. Kock (Leipzig –) Corpus Christianorum series Latina (Turnholt –) Comicorum Graecorum fragmenta, ed. G. Kaibel (Berlin ) Corpus glossariorum Latinorum, ed. G. Loewe and G. Goetz (Leipzig – [vols. –], [vol. ]) Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum (Berlin –) Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna –) C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquit´es grecques et romaines (Paris –) A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire ´etymologique de la langue latine (Paris [vol. ], [vol. ]) xiv
AB B R E V IAT I O NS A N D S EL ECT B I B L I OG RAPHY
EphEp FGrH GL Gramm. Rom. Fr. IEph
IG IGRR ILLRP
ILS KA KS
LHS
LS LSJ ML NH
Ephemeris epigraphica: Corpus inscriptionum Latinarum (Rome and Berlin –) Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, ed. F. Jacoby (Berlin –) Grammatici Latini (Leipzig –) Grammaticae Romanae Fragmenta, ed. H. Funaioli (Leipzig ) Die Inschriften von Ephesos = Inschriften griechischer St¨adte aus Kleinasien – (Bonn –) Inscriptiones Graecae (Berlin –) Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes, ed. R. Cagnat et al. (Paris –) Inscriptiones Latinae liberae rei publicae, ed. A. Degrassi (Florence (vol. ), (vol. )) Inscriptiones Latinae selectae, ed. H. Dessau (Berlin –) see PCG R. K¨uhner, C. Stegmann, and A. Thierfelder, Ausf¨uhrliche Grammatik der lateinischen Sprache (Leverkusen ) M. Leumann, J. B. Hofmann, and A. Szantyr, Lateinische Grammatik, : Lateinische Laut- und Formen-lehre (Munich ); : Lateinische Syntax und Stilistik (Munich ; repr. ) C. Lewis and C. Short, A Latin dictionary (Oxford ) H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, and H. S. Jones, A Greek–English lexicon (Oxford –) W. Meyer-L¨ubke, Romanisches etymologisches W¨orterbuch (Heidelberg ) R. G. M. Nisbet and M. Hubbard, eds., A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book I (Oxford xv
AB B R E VI AT I O N S A N D S EL ECT BI BL I OG RAPHY
NW OLD ORF PCG PG PL RE
TGL TrGF TLL WH
); and A Commentary on Horace: Odes Book II (Oxford ) F. Neue and C. Wagener, Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache (Leipzig ) Oxford Latin dictionary (Oxford –) Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta, ed. H. Malcovati (Turin ) Poetae Comici Graeci, eds. R. Kassel and C. Austin (Berlin –) Patrologia Graeca (Paris –) Patrologia Latina (Paris –) Paulys Real-encyclop¨adie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, eds. G. Wissowa et al. (Stuttgart –Munich ) Thesaurus Graecae linguae (Paris –) Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, ed. A. Nauck (Leipzig ) Thesaurus linguae Latinae (Leipzig –) A. Walde and J. B. Hofmann, Lateinisches etymologisches W¨orterbuch (Heidelberg –) EDITIONS
In the apparatus criticus and in the commentary the abbreviation ed. princ. is used to designate the first edn of Charisius (Naples ), Diomedes (Venice c. ), Gellius (Rome ), Macrobius (Venice ), and Nonius (?Milan ). I cite by the editor’s name the following editions: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)
Charisius: Putschius (Basle ); Barwick (Leipzig ) Diomedes: Keil (Leipzig ) Fronto: Mai (Milan ); van den Hout (Leipzig ) Gellius: de Quaietis (Venice ); Beroaldus (Bologna ); Aldobrandus (Florence ); Egnatius (Venice ); Cratander (Basle ); Ascensius (Paris ); xvi
AB B R E V IAT I O NS A N D S EL ECT B I B L I OG RAPHY
(v) (vi) (vii)
(viii)
Mosellanus (Paris ); J. F. Gronovius (Leiden ); Hertz (Berlin –); Marshall (Oxford ) John the Lydian: Fuss (Leiden ); Bekker (Bonn ); W¨unsch (Leipzig ) Macrobius: Camerarius (Basle ); Ianus (Leipzig ) Nonius: Laetus (Rome ); Bentinus (Venice ); Iunius (Antwerp ); Mercerus (Paris , Sedani ); Gothofredus (Paris ); Gerlach and Roth (Basle ); Quicherat (Paris ); L. Mueller (Leipzig ); Onions (Oxford ); Lindsay (Leipzig ) Priscian: Hertz (Leipzig ).
Similarly, I refer only by editor’s name to the following editions of comic frs. which include frs. of L.: (ix) Bonaria (Genoa – , Rome ); Bothe (Halberstadt , ); Burmannus (Amsterdam ); Crinitus (Paris , Lyon ); Maittaire (London ); Meyerus (Leipzig ); Orelli (Leipzig ); Pithoeus (Paris , Lyon ); Ribbeck (Leipzig , , ); Stephanus (Geneva ); Zell (Stuttgart ); Ziegler (G¨ottingen ). (x) Aldina = the Aldine edn of Nonius (Venice ) and Corpus = Corpus omnium veterum poetarum Latinorum (Geneva , , ). The following editions are cited by date of publication only: (xi) Macrobius: Brescia , Paris Nonius: Venice , Parma , Paris Priscian: Venice , Rome , Venice , Milan . The emendations of Salmasius found in Bothe’s edn of L. are cited in the apparatus criticus as ‘Salmasius’ without further details; the same method of reference applies to the conjectures of Buecheler, Gesner, and Schraderus (which are cited from Ribbeck’s edn of L.); Baehrens, Damst´e, Jordan, and Skutsch xvii
AB B R E VI AT I O N S A N D S EL ECT BI BL I OG RAPHY
(from Marshall’s edn of Gellius); Buttmann, Cornelissen, Heindorf, Hildebrand, Klussmann, and Nov´ak (from van den Hout’s second edn of Fronto); Fleckeisen, Klotz, and Lambecius (from Hertz’s edn of Gellius); Studemund, and Marquardt and Mau (from Bonaria’s edn of L.); Heinsius and Lambinus (from Burmannus’ edn of L.); Oudendorpius (from Meyerus’ edn of L.); Anon. Bern. [= Anonymus Bernensis] (from Hertz’s edn of Priscian); and Gifanius (from Mercerus’ edn of Nonius). Scioppius’ conjectures are cited from Gronovius’ edn of Gellius (Leiden ), rev. by J. L. Conradi (Leipzig ). Turnebus’ are cited from Thysius’ and Oiselius’ edn of Gellius (Leiden ). Falsterus’ are cited from Valpy’s edn of Gellius (London ). Gulielmus’ are cited from Pontanus’ edn of Macrobius (Leiden ). Guietus’ are cited from Carilli Note (see below). Rhenanus’ are cited from Gerlo’s edn of Tertullian, De Pallio, CCSL II (Turnholt ). Gratwick’s unpublished emendation in fr. originates from a research seminar he delivered in Glasgow in . I list here abbreviations which appear in the apparatus criticus and may cause doubt. Bentley
Bergk
Fabricius
Fruterius
Haupt
[for fr. ] emendation cited from Marshall’s edn of Gellius; [for fr. ] cited from Willis’ edn of Macrobius (Leipzig ) [for fr. ] Philologus () ; [for frs. , , , , , , ] NJhb f¨ur Phil. und Paed. () , , [for fr. ] Bibliotheca latina I (Leipzig ) –; [for frs. (b), , ] cited from Barwick’s edn of Charisius [see § (i) above] [for frs. , (b)] RhM () ; [for fr. ] cited from Burmannus’ edn of L. [see § (ix) above] [for fr. ] cited from Barwick’s edn of Charisius [see § (i) above]; [for fr. ] xviii
AB B R E V IAT I O NS A N D S EL ECT B I B L I OG RAPHY
Heraeus
Lachmann
Leo
Scaliger [Jos.]
Wase
Hermes () –; [for fr. ] Opuscula I (Leipzig ) [for fr. ] Die Sprache des Petronius und die Glossen (Leipzig ) ; [for fr. ] cited from van den Hout’s second edn of Fronto [see § (iii) above] [for fr. ] In T. Lucretii Cari de rerum natura libros commentarius (Berlin ) ; [for fr. ] cited from Ribbeck’s edn of L. [see § (ix) above] [for fr. ] Analecta Plautina de figuris sermonis II (G¨ottingen ) ; [for fr. (b)] Hermes () [for frs. , , , , , , (b)] cited from the marginalia in Iunius’ edn of Nonius [see § (vii) above]; [for frs. , ] Catalecta Virgilii et aliorum po¨etarum Latinorum veterum poematia (Leiden ); [for fr. ] cited from Thysius’ and Oiselius’ edn of Gellius (Leiden ); [for fr. ] cited from A. Gerlo’s edn of Tertullian, De Pallio, CCSL (Turnholt ); [for fr. ] cited from Burmannus’ edn of L. [see § (ix) above] Stricturae Nonianae (Oxford ) [for fr. ] , [for fr. ] , [for fr. ]
In the apparatus criticus I also record the conjectures of the following scholars which appeared not in editions of ancient authors but in the following books and periodicals: Brakman Brock Carassa Carrion Dziatzko
C. Brakman, Mnemosyne () A. Brock, Quaestionum grammaticarum capita duo (Dorpat ) M. V. Carassa, Dioniso () L. Carrion, Emendationum et observationum liber primus (Paris ) K. Dziatzko, RhM () – xix
AB B R E VI AT I O N S A N D S EL ECT BI BL I OG RAPHY
Froehner Keulen Leopardus
Lipsius Luchs
Muretus Palmerius Passeratius Perottus Schneidewin Valmaggi Wagner Woelfflin Zic`ari
W. Froehner, Philologus () – B. Keulen, Mnemosyne () P. Leopardus, ‘Emendationes et miscellanea’, in J. Gruterus, ed., Lampas sive Fax artium liberalium (Frankfurt ) I. Lipsius, Opera omnia quae ad criticam proprie spectant (Antwerp ) A. Luchs, ‘Quaestiones metricae’, in G. Studemund, ed., Studia in priscos scriptores Latinos collata (Berlin ) M. A. Muretus, Variae lectiones (Leiden ) J. Palmerius, Spicilegiorum commentarius primus (Frankfurt ) J. Passeratius, Coniecturarum liber (Paris ) N. Perottus, Cornucopiae sive linguae Latinae commentarii (Venice ) F. G. Schneidewin, RhM () – L. Valmaggi, BFC () – C. Wagner, De Plauti Aulularia (Bonn ) E. Woelfflin, Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () M. Zic`ari, Hermes ()
SELECT MODERN BIBLIOGR APHY The following list is not a complete bibliography, but it includes books and articles for which abbreviated references are used throughout this book. Details of works cited only once or twice are given in the introduction and the commentary. The book by R. Webb, Demons and dancers: Performance in late antiquity (Cambridge, Mass. and London ), appeared too late for me to take it into account in my discussion of mime and elite culture. Adams Bilingualism
J. N. Adams Bilingualism and the Latin language (Cambridge ) xx
AB B R E V IAT I O NS A N D S EL ECT B I B L I OG RAPHY
Pelagonius
Vocabulary Andreassi Mimi Arnott Alexis Bacherler W¨orter
Barsby Bacchides Eunuchus Beacham Theatre
Beare Stage Bernini Mimo Bieber History Bonfante Lingua
Buecheler Carmina Carilli Hapax
Pelagonius and Latin veterinary terminology in the Roman empire (Leiden ) The Latin sexual vocabulary (London ) M. Andreassi, Mimi greci in Egitto: Charition e Moicheutria (Bari ) W. G. Arnott, Alexis: The fragments (Cambridge ) M. Bacherler, ‘Die griechischen W¨orter in Roms Atellane und Mimus und die Frage der etruskischen Heimat der Atellane’, BBG () – J. Barsby Plautus: Bacchides (Warminster ) Terence: Eunuchus (Cambridge ) R. C. Beacham, The Roman theatre and its audience (London ) W. Beare, The Roman stage (London ) F. Bernini, Studi sul mimo (Pisa ) M. Bieber, The history of Greek and Roman theater (Princeton ) G. Bonfante, ‘La lingua delle Atellane e dei Mimi’, Maia () – F. Buecheler, Carmina Latina epigraphica (Leipzig ) M. Carilli ‘Artificiosit`a ed espressivit`a negli “hapax” di Laberio’, Studi e xxi
AB B R E VI AT I O N S A N D S EL ECT BI BL I OG RAPHY
Note
Christenson Amphitruo Cicu Problemi Cooper Formation
Courtney Poets Dalmasso
Duckworth Comedy
Ernout Adjectifs Fantham Imagery Mime
Fischer Observations
Fowler Festivals
ricerche dell’Istituto di Latino (Genova ) – ‘Note ai frammenti di Laberio tramandati da Nonio’, Studi Noniani () – D. Christenson, Plautus: Amphitruo (Cambridge ) L. Cicu, Problemi e strutture del mimo a Roma (Sassari ) F. T. Cooper, Word formation in the Roman sermo plebeius (New York ) E. Courtney, The fragmentary Latin poets (Oxford ) L. Dalmasso, ‘Aulo Gellio lessicografo’, RFIC () –, – G. E. Duckworth, The nature of Roman comedy: A study in popular entertainment (Princeton , repr. Bristol ) A. Ernout, Les adjectifs latins en -¯osus et en -ulentus (Paris ) R. E. Fantham Comparative studies in republican Latin imagery (Toronto ) ‘Mime: the missing link in Roman literary history’, CW () – I. Fischer, ‘Observations sur le vocabulaire du mimographe D. Lab´erius’, in Acta Conventus XI ‘Eirene’ (Breslau ) – W. W. Fowler, The Roman festivals of the period of the republic (London ) xxii
AB B R E V IAT I O NS A N D S EL ECT B I B L I OG RAPHY
Fraenkel EP Garcea and Lomanto
Garton Aspects Giancotti
Gow Gratwick Menaechmi Terence Green Gryzar Mimus
Henriksson B¨uchertitel
Hofmann Umgangssprache
Holford-Strevens Gellius
E. Fraenkel, Elementi plautini in Plauto (Firenze ) A. Garcea and V. Lomanto, ‘Gellius and Fronto on loanwords and literary models: their evaluation of Laberius’, in L. Holford-Strevens and A. Vardi, eds., The worlds of Aulus Gellius (Oxford ) – C. Garton, Personal aspects of the Roman theatre (Toronto ) F. Giancotti, Mimo e gnome. Studio su Decimo Laberio e Publilio Siro (Messina and Florence ) A. S. F. Gow, Theocritus (Cambridge ) A. S. Gratwick Plautus: Menaechmi (Cambridge ) Terence: The brothers (Warminster ; ) R. P. H. Green, The works of Ausonius (Oxford ) C. J. Gryzar, ‘Der r¨omische Mimus’, Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Akademie der Wissenschaften () – K.-E. Henriksson, Griechische B¨uchertitel in der r¨omischen Literatur (Helsinki ) J. B. Hofmann, Lateinische Umgangssprache (Heidelberg ) L. Holford-Strevens, Aulus Gellius: An Antonine scholar and his achievement (Oxford ) xxiii
AB B R E VI AT I O N S A N D S EL ECT BI BL I OG RAPHY
Hollis FRP
Hordern Sophron Horsfall Mime
Jocelyn Ennius Jory Competition
Kehoe Adultery
Studies Kidd Aratus Kroll Laberius Langslow Medical Leppin Histrionen
A. S. Hollis, Fragments of Roman poetry, c. BC – AD (Oxford ) J. H. Hordern, Sophron’s mimes (Oxford ) N. Horsfall, ‘The literary mime’, in E. J. Kenney, ed., The Cambridge history of classical literature, Latin literature (Cambridge ) – H. D. Jocelyn, The tragedies of Ennius (Cambridge ) E. J. Jory, ‘Publilius Syrus and the element of competition in the theatre of the republic’, in N. Horsfall, ed., Vir bonus discendi peritus: Studies in celebration of Otto Skutsch’s eightieth birthday (London ) – P. E. Kehoe ‘The adultery mime reconsidered’, in D. F. Bright and E. S. Ramage, eds., Classical texts and their traditions: Studies in honor of C. R. Trahman (California ) – Studies in the Roman mime (University of Cincinnati ) D. Kidd, Aratus: Phaenomena (Cambridge ) W. Kroll, ‘Laberius’, RE . – D. R. Langslow, Medical Latin in the Roman empire (Oxford ) H. Leppin, Histrionen: Untersuchungen zur sozialen Stellung von xxiv
AB B R E V IAT I O NS A N D S EL ECT B I B L I OG RAPHY
Lindsay Language Verse MacCary and Willcock
McKeown Elegy
Marzullo Mimo
Maxwell Mime
M¨uller Prosodie
Nicoll Masks
Olcott Formation
Olivieri Frammenti
B¨uhnenk¨unstlern im Westen des r¨omischen Reiches zur Zeit der Republik und des Principats (Bonn ) W. M. Lindsay The Latin language (Oxford ) Early Latin verse (Oxford ) W. T. MacCary and M. M. Willcock, Plautus: Casina (Cambridge ) J. C. McKeown, ‘Augustan elegy and mime’, PCPhS () – A. Marzullo, ‘Il mimo latino nei motivi di attualit`a’, Atti e Mem. Accad. di Scienze, Lett. e Arti di Modena () – R. L. Maxwell, The documentary evidence for ancient mime, unpublished PhD (Department of Classical Studies, University of Toronto ) C. F. W. M¨uller, Plautinische Prosodie (Berlin ; repr. Hildescheim ) A. Nicoll, Masks, mimes and miracles: Studies in the popular theatre (London, Sydney, and Bombay ) G. N. Olcott, Studies in the word formation of the Latin inscriptions, substantives and adjectives with special reference to the Latin sermo vulgaris (Rome ) A. Olivieri, Frammenti della commedia Greca e del mimo nella xxv
AB B R E VI AT I O N S A N D S EL ECT BI BL I OG RAPHY
Otto Sprichw¨orter
Panayotakis Baptism
Theatrum
Questa Metrica Rawson Life Vulgarity
Reich Mimus
Reynolds Texts
Reynolds Adultery Verrius
Sicilia e nella Magna Grecia (Napoli ) A. Otto, Die Sprichw¨orter und sprichw¨ortlichen Redensarten der R¨omer (Leipzig ) C. Panayotakis ‘Baptism and crucifixion on the mimic stage’, Mnemosyne () – Theatrum Arbitri: Theatrical elements in the Satyrica of Petronius (Leiden ) C. Questa, Introduzione alla metrica di Plauto (Bologna ) E. Rawson Intellectual life in the late Roman republic (London ) ‘The vulgarity of the Roman mime’, in H. D. Jocelyn and H. Hurt, eds., Tria Lustra: Essays and notes presented to John Pinsent (Liverpool Classical Papers ) (Liverpool ) – H. Reich, Der Mimus: Ein litterar-entwickelungsgeschichtlicher Versuch (Berlin ) L. D. Reynolds, ed., Texts and transmission: A survey of the Latin classics (Oxford ) R. W. Reynolds ‘The adultery mime’, CQ () – ‘Verrius Flaccus and the early mime at Rome’, Hermathena () – xxvi
AB B R E V IAT I O NS A N D S EL ECT B I B L I OG RAPHY
Richlin Priapus
Rieks Mimus
Ritschl Parerga
Robert Roscher
Schwartz Anecdotes
Scullard Festivals
Shackleton Bailey EF Skutsch Ennius Sommer Handbuch
Soubiran Essai
Stephanis
A. Richlin, The garden of Priapus: Sexuality and aggression in Roman humor (rev. edn, New York and Oxford ) R. Rieks, ‘Mimus und Atellanae’, in E. Lef`evre, ed., Das r¨omische Drama (Darmstadt ) – Fr. Ritschl, Parerga zu Plautus und Terenz (Leipzig ; repr. Amsterdam ) L. Robert, ‘ARCAIOLOGOS’, ´ () – REG W. H. Roscher, ed., Ausf¨uhrliches Lexikon der griechischen und r¨omischen Mythologie (Leipzig –) J. Schwartz, ‘Sur quelques anecdotes concernant C´esar et ´ () – Cic´eron’, REA H. H. Scullard, Festivals and ceremonies of the Roman republic (London ) D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Epistulae ad familiares – (Cambridge ) O. Skutsch, The Annals of Quintus Ennius (Oxford ) F. Sommer, Handbuch der lateinischen Laut- und Formenlehre (Heidelberg ) J. Soubiran, Essai sur la versification dramatique des Romains: S´enaire iambique et sept´enaire trocha¨ıque (Paris ) I. E. Stephanis
xxvii
AB B R E VI AT I O N S A N D S EL ECT BI BL I OG RAPHY
Choricius
Technitai Till Caesar Traglia Lingua
van den Hout Fronto
Wiemken Mimus
Wiseman Catullus Drama Flora
Ovid
Woelfflin Titel
W¨ust Mimos
Corik©ou sojistoÓ Gzhv Sunhgor©a m©mwn (Thessaloniki ) Dionusiakoª tecn±tai (Heraklion ) R. Till, ‘Laberius und Caesar’, Historia () – A. Traglia, ‘Sulla lingua dei frammenti delle Atellane e dei mimi’, in Studi Classici in onore di Quintino Cataudella (Univ. di Catania ) – M. P. J. van den Hout, A Commentary on the Letters of M. Cornelius Fronto (Leiden ) H. Wiemken, Der griechische Mimus: Dokumente zur Geschichte des antiken Volkstheaters (Bremen ) T. P. Wiseman Catullus and his world: A reappraisal (Cambridge ) Roman Drama and Roman History (Exeter ) ‘The Games of Flora’, in B. Bergmann and C. Kondoleon, eds., The art of the ancient spectacle (Washington DC ) – ‘Ovid and the Stage’, in G. Herbert-Brown, ed., Ovid’s Fasti: Historical readings at its bimillennium (Oxford ) – E. Woelfflin, ‘Atellanen- und Mimentitel’, RhM () – E. W¨ust, ‘Mimos’, RE . – xxviii
AB B R E V IAT I O NS A N D S EL ECT B I B L I OG RAPHY
ADDENDUM At the stage of reading the proofs I obtained copies of two important volumes on Latin grammar and syntax: W. D. C. de Melo, The early Latin verb system: Archaic forms in Plautus, Terence, and beyond (Oxford ); D. Langslow, ed., Jacob Wackernagel. Lectures on syntax: With special reference to Greek, Latin, and Germanic (Oxford ). I have not been able to include references to these works in my commentary. During the same period I was made aware of a series of ‘Princeton/Stanford working papers in Classics’, which were published in at . They contain collations of the MSS of Macrobius’ Saturnalia by R. A. Kaster, who is currently preparing a new edition of this text for the OCT series. I revised all my sections on Macrobius’ text in accordance with Kaster’s excellent research. The titles of the papers and their version numbers are as follows: ‘A collation of British Library Cotton Vit. C. III and Vatican Palatinus latinus (Macrobius’ “Saturnalia”)’, version ; ‘Four manuscripts of Macrobius’ “Saturnalia”’, version ; ‘A collation of Cambridge Corpus Christi College (Macrobius “Saturnalia”)’, version ; ‘A neglected witness to Macrobius’ “Saturnalia”’, version ; and ‘The medieval tradition of Macrobius’ “Saturnalia”’, version , which contains a revised stemma of the MSS of the Saturnalia.
xxix
INTRODUCTI ON I D E F I N I N G T H E RO M A N M I M E Nowadays the word ‘mime’, when used as a verb, indicates the acting of a play or a role, normally without words, by means of gestures and bodily movement. When used as a noun, it signifies the play that is being performed and the performer himself. This form of modern theatre should not be confused with what the Romans understood by the term ‘mime’, despite the features which both the Latin mimus and contemporary mime share. Mime in Roman culture was primarily a type of popular entertainment which covered any kind of theatrical spectacle that did not belong to masked tragic and comic drama, and in which actors and actresses enacted mainly low-life situations and used words in their performances. The theatrical term mimus existed in the Latin vocabulary from at least the late third century BC, and had four possible meanings, not all of which are attested in sources belonging to the same era. It denoted an actor in a form of drama which was normally simple in structure and farcical in content (CIL , ; Varro apud Aug. De civ. dei ., .; Rhet. Her. .), the improvised spectacle or the literary play which a mime-actor performed (Varro LL .; Cic. De orat. .), See OED s.v. and J. Lawson, Mime: The theory and practice of expressive gesture with a description of its historical development (London ); T. Leabhart, Modern and post-modern mime (London ); and the articles in J. Redmond, ed., Themes in Drama (Cambridge ). There is also an exciting website dedicated to the promotion of modern mime as theatrical art: see www.mime.info/index.html. Among the numerous studies on the history of Roman mime see introduction in the edn of Bonaria –; Beacham Theatre –; Beare Stage –; Cicu Problemi; Duckworth Comedy –; Fantham Mime –; Giancotti Mimo –; Horsfall Mime –; Kehoe Adultery –; McKeown Elegy –; Nicoll Masks –; Rieks Mimus – and – (with bibliography); W¨ust Mimos –; and F. Dupont, L’acteur-roi ou le th´eaˆ tre dans la Rome antique (Paris ) –. My brief account of the characteristics of mime owes much to these studies.
I N T RO D U C T I O N
the literary genre to which mime-plays belonged (Cic. Pro Cael. ), and (metaphorically) a hoax or sham or pretence which was staged at someone’s expense (Sen. Contr. ..). The Greek noun m±mov in the sense of ‘an imitator’ goes back to Aeschylus (TrGF . Nauck), and by the fourth century BC we find it in the sense of ‘an actor’ (Dem. .) and ‘a form of drama’ (Arist. Po. b). Was the Roman mime a theatrical product imported from Greece? The significant literary contribution to the development of farcical comedy made by Sophron and Epicharmus in Sicily in the fifth century BC and by the erudite ‘Alexandrian’ poets Theocritus and Herodas in the third century BC, as well as the lively presence of mime-actors in the courts of Macedonian and Eastern royal palaces (Dem. .; Diod. Sic. ..) and in the private banquets of wealthy Roman patrons in the first century BC (Plut. Sull. .–, ., .), demonstrates that the Roman mime was not a purely Greek theatrical phenomenon transported to Italy by travelling mime-performers. From the third to the first century BC there existed a strong native Italian theatrical tradition, with which the mime from the East was blended to form what should be more correctly termed the Greco-Roman mime. Any discussion of how Roman authors defined mime-drama ought to be preceded by a warning and a distinction. The warning concerns the conceptual fluidity and the dramatic flexibility For more instances of each of these meanings see TLL .–.. One of the quotations cited by TLL ( .) regarding mime as genus ludi scaenici is Lucil. M = W (dum mimi conscius: mimi vel dicimus mimi codd.), cited by a scholiast on Persius .. If the text printed by Marx is accepted, this instance is probably the earliest extant literary reference to mime as a distinct form of theatrical entertainment. But the reading mimi has been rejected by other editors of Lucilius, who print dici mihi (Buecheler, Terzaghi, Krenkel) or Decimus mihi (Warmington). The entry on mime in the OLD does not mention the Lucilian passage and groups together examples of mimus designating a literary play and examples of mimus indicating mime as a literary genre. This is discussed in detail by E. Rawson, ‘Theatrical life in republican Rome and Italy’, PBSR () –, reprinted in Roman culture and society: Collected papers (Oxford ) –.
D E F I NI N G TH E ROM A N M I M E
which characterised the Roman mime as a form of entertainment. It is perhaps because of the great variety of performances called mime in antiquity that an exact definition of this genre is so difficult. In our literary and documentary sources mimeperformers are often named alongside street-actors and popular entertainers whom we would nowadays associate with a circus. The targets of mime-satire included social mores, philosophy, religion, and politics, and the extraordinary style of mime-plays combined instances of vulgar obscenity happily co-existing with sophisticated apophthegms of highly moral standards. Because of the heterogeneous nature of the Roman mime, which seems to defy any attempt at literary categorisation or generic classification, a scholarly distinction was drawn between the nonliterary, ‘popular’ form of mime, which was brief and crude, and depended mostly on improvisation, and its development, mainly during the late republic, into a form of literature in the hands of Laberius and Publilius. The literary mime was composed in verse and performed in theatres. The ‘popular’ mimes may have been enacted in streets, squares, theatres, and private houses, and had words, but possibly not a fixed script, which could have been copied by later scribes and assessed on literary grounds. This distinction between the two strands of mimedrama is helpful because it underlines the varied nature of the spectacles covered by the generic title mimus. But it can also be misleading and ought to be made with caution, because it is far from clear that the repertory of the ‘literary’ mimes was different See Cic. Ad fam. ..; P.Oxy. (sixth century AD; see Maxwell Mime no. ); Nicoll Masks –; and Beare Stage , –. On the scena ‘the theatre-platform’ see Isid. .; Amm. Marc. .; CGL ., ., and .. On the proscenium see CGL ., ., and .. On the orchestra see Isid. . and Festus .– L. On the siparium ‘small curtain or screen’ see Cic. De prov. consul. .; Iuv. .– and schol. Iuv. . Wessner; Apul. Met. .; Festus .– L; and Paul.–Fest. . L. On the scabillum ‘a kind of hinged clapper attached to the sole of the foot, and used for beating time for dancers in the theatre’ (OLD s.v. ) see Cic. Pro Cael. –; Auct. de dub. nomin. = GL ..– K. On the choragium ‘stage properties’ see Paul.–Fest. . L; CGL . and ..
I N T RO D U C T I O N
to that of the ‘popular’ ones, or that the ‘literary’ mimes developed from the ‘popular’ ones and did not co-exist with them. Moreover, it is not always obvious that authors such as Ovid and Petronius were influenced by only one of these mime-strands, and it is instructive to note that the differentiation between ‘literary’ and ‘popular’ was not made by ancient authors, whose testimonies normally betray an obvious contempt for all of these shows. The usual starting-point in modern discussions of the features of the Roman mime as a literary genre is the definition of mimus found in the treatises of late antique grammarians and commentators. But mime as a literary form of scripted theatrical entertainment was commented on by educated Romans long before the time of Donatus, Diomedes, Evanthius, and Isidore (whose definitions I discuss below), and it is instructive to see what the explicit comments or implicit statements of the earlier sources were on this matter before we evaluate the information offered by writers of late antiquity. Of special value is the evidence which deliberately differentiates mime from other types of comedy. Already in the middle of the first century BC Cicero seems to treat the Roman mime as a loosely constructed form of comic drama, whose plot abounded in tricks (fallaciae or praestigiae) borrowed from the degenerate life of Alexandria (Cic. Pro Rab. Post. ); mime is a type of theatre that, Cicero believes, should be juxtaposed to formal comedies (fabulae), which had a structured plot and a proper ending (Cic. Pro Cael. ). This is not entirely true. Cicero in his speeches on the defence of Rabirius Postumus and Caelius was not interested in describing accurately the format and content of mime-plays, but in demolishing the credibility of the Alexandrian witnesses supporting his opponents and the sincerity of the story put forward
This does not necessarily mean that all mime-plots presented dramatic inconsistencies; see Quint. ..: Est autem quidam et ductus rei credibilis, qualis in comoediis etiam et in mimis. Aliqua enim naturaliter secuntur et cohaerent, ut si bene priora narraveris iudex ipse quod postea sis narraturus expectet.
D E F I NI N G TH E ROM A N M I M E
by Clodia; he achieves this by associating the members of the opposite party with a form of drama that was generally regarded as insubstantial and disreputable. Moreover, some scenes from the extant fragments of Laberius (for instance, (a)) resemble closely story-lines from fabulae palliatae. Even so, Cicero’s invective must contain at least a grain of truth, otherwise it would not have made sense in the context of the speeches. His remarks are also supported by papyrological finds and by other literary sources which link Egypt (and specifically Alexandria) with mime, and confirm that at least some mime-plays had an abrupt ending and a plot that depended on improvisation. Cicero draws extensively on mime in order to create a detailed negative example for those wishing to achieve the ideal of the perfect orator. His instructions include constant warnings to future public speakers to avoid excessive mimicry, ‘for, if the imitation is exaggerated, it becomes a characteristic of mime-actors who portrayed characters, as also does obscenity’ (De orat. .). Quintilian follows Cicero’s doctrine almost to the letter (..). In the same section of his rhetorical treatise (De orat. .–) Cicero conveniently singles out the characteristics of mime-wit as follows: ridicule of human figures who exhibit particular vices, emphasis on mimicry, exaggerated facial expressions (perhaps our strongest evidence that, in most cases during Cicero’s time if not always, mime-actors and actresses did not wear masks), and
See R. G. Austin, ed., M. Tulli Ciceronis pro M. Caelio oratio (Oxford ) –; M. Siani-Davies, Cicero’s speech pro Rabirio Postumo (Oxford ) . In addition to the literary mimes of Herodas and Theocritus, several papyri and other literary sources testify to the presence of mime-activities in Egypt and especially in Alexandria: P.Oxy. ; P.Oxy. ; P.Oxy. ; P.Osl. ; Dio Chrys. Orat. ., .; Philo In Flac. ; Pallad. Laus hist. ; HA, Verus .. The mime of the ‘Adulterous Wife’ (P.Oxy. verso) occasionally makes sense only if we assume that the protagonist embellished her lines with actions that are now irretrievable, and has an ending which seems dramatically contrived and abrupt. To my knowledge, only Nicoll Masks is sceptical about this assumption: ‘There is not . . . a single statement made by an earlier writer which stamps the whole mime drama as maskless; it seems probable that some parts at least required the use of exaggerated and comic masks.’ This may be the case
I N T RO D U C T I O N
obscenity. Although these features square with what we know about mime-drama in the republican era, it should be emphasized that our primary source for mime in this period is Cicero himself, and it is thus difficult to disentangle what is accurately reported on mime-practice from the distorted or even invented mime-details which suit the argument of Cicero’s case. It should also be stressed that these characteristics are articulated from a rhetorical perspective, and that they allow us to observe mainly not how mime-actors acted but how vital it was for the Roman male citizen with political ambitions to act in public within the acceptable social norms. A feature peculiar to the mime-stage, and surely linked with its low reputation, was the employment of women for female roles. Although it may be argued that the voice of a female character portrayed by an actress is ‘a real woman’s voice’ (that is, the expression of – and an insight into – what a woman of that time would have felt about certain issues, such as adultery, presented on the stage), such a view is seriously undermined by the surviving evidence of the mimes of Laberius and Publilius, and the non-dramatic references to lost mime-plays, according to which the female characters of Roman mime are as conventional and artificial in their behaviour as their female counterparts in the other genres of popular theatre. The reliability of the majority of our evidence on historical women who acted in mimes is somewhat compromised by the image of the ‘starlet’ that was deliberately created and projected onto these women, who functioned as attractive, even seductive, social scapegoats. in Tertullian’s account of mythological mimes (Apolog. .): Imago dei vestri ignominiosum caput et famosum vestit ‘The image of your god covers the head of a shameless and infamous person.’ Mime-performances were traditionally associated with obscenity (from Cicero to the Church fathers), even when viewed in the context of a religious festival. See Cic. De orat. .; Ad fam. ..; Ovid Tr. .–, .–, .– ; Val. Max. ..b; Mart. Epigr. praef.; Tert. De spect. .–; Aug. De civ. dei .; . = . Wessner; Choric. Apol. Mim. . But this bad reputation was not always justified, and often served a specific social and moral purpose (discussed below).
D E F I NI N G TH E ROM A N M I M E
Their function was to preserve the chastity of decent wives, whose role was to be faithful to their husbands and produce legitimate children. In fact, the body of the mime-actress seems to have been exploited to such an extent that it became a stereotypical source of entertainment; this was the case especially in the festival traditionally associated with the mimes, the Floralia, which became annual in or after (Val. Max. ..; Ovid F. .–; Lact. Div. inst. ..). The striptease of women in these shows (whether they were actresses or prostitutes is beside the point) was allegedly designed to fulfil the theatrical conventions of the time, but in reality functioned as a means of control of the behaviour and the moral standards of aristocratic Roman matronae. Bearing in mind the above features of mime-theatre and the distinction which the ancients themselves made between mime and pantomime – a form of drama in which a solo actor was telling a story, usually taken from Greek mythology, by means of skilful dancing and elaborate movements to the accompaniment of a chorus or a cantor singing the plot – it is not surprising to find weak points in the well-known definition of mime offered by the grammarian Diomedes, who was writing in the fourth century AD, and was paraphrasing a Hellenistic source
For a detailed discussion of the portrayal of mime-actresses in literary sources see D. R. French, ‘Maintaining boundaries: The status of actresses in early Christian society’, Vigiliae Christianae () –; R. Webb, ‘Female entertainers in late antiquity’, in P. Easterling and E. Hall, eds., Greek and Roman actors: Aspects of an ancient profession (Cambridge ) – (especially – ); and C. Panayotakis, ‘Women in the Greco-Roman mime of the Roman republic and the early empire’, Ordia prima: Revista de estudios cl´asicos () –. See Isid. . (De histrionibus . . . hi autem saltando etiam historias et res gestas demonstrabant), . (De saltatoribus), and Maxwell Mime –. On pantomime see E. W¨ust, ‘Pantomimus’, RE . –; V. Rotolo, Il pantomimo: Studi e testi (Palermo ); M. Kokolakis Platon () –; E. J. Jory BICS () –; Jory in A. Moffatt, ed., Classical, Byzantine and Renaissance Studies for Robert Browning (Canberra ) –; I. Lada-Richards, Silent Eloquence: Lucian and Pantomime Dancing (London ); and the contributions to E. Hall and R. Wyles, eds., New Directions in Ancient Pantomime (Oxford ).
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(possibly Theophrastus) on drama. Diomedes lays emphasis on the spoken word (sermonis), imitation (imitatio and mimus dictus par t¼ mime±sqai, quasi solus imitetur) and bodily movements (motus) as the primary means by which mime-actors performed their roles, and makes it clear that obscenity (factorum et dictorum turpium cum lascivia) was a standard ingredient in these performances, which drew their material from uncensored everyday life (m©mhsiv b©ou t te sugkecwrhmna kaª sugcÛrhta pericwn), not from heroic or divine subjects. Diomedes was not a theatrical critic and was in no position to ascertain what mime was like centuries before his time. His definition contains information which could easily have been obtained from performances of his own era, or could have been copied from his unacknowledged Greek source. There is no mention of the religious context of mime-performances, of the maskless appearance of mime-actors, of the employment of women for female roles, of the unrealistic and grotesque presentation
Diomedes De arte gramm. = GL ..– K: mimus est sermonis cuius libet imitatio et motus sine reverentia, vel factorum et dictorum turpium cum lascivia imitatio; a Graecis ita definitur m±m»v stin m©mhsiv b©ou t te sugkecwrhmna kaª sugcÛrhta pericwn. mimus dictus par t¼ mime±sqai, quasi solus imitetur, cum et alia poemata idem faciant; sed solus quasi privilegio quodam quod fuit commune possedit: similiter atque is qui versum facit dictus poihtv, cum et artifices, cum aeque quid faciant, non dicantur poetae. Diomedes does not render faithfully the Greek definition which he cites, since he omits from his version the Greek words t te sugkecwrhmna. For him mime can only be vulgar and obscene, but the impression that mime-performances contained nothing but sex and violence is inaccurate and misleading (see Rawson Vulgarity for an excellent discussion of this). Diomedes’ passage and its possible source are discussed by Giancotti Mimo –, Reich Mimus –, and R. Janko, Aristotle on comedy: Towards a reconstruction of Poetics II (London ) –. Cf. Chor. Apol. Mim. : peª d kaª m©mhsiv Ëprcei t¼ pitdeuma, katrav d «dav metcei – nÓn mn gr oÉ semn schmat©zontai, nÓn d pshv a«scÅnhv phllagmna. Cf. Evanth. exc. de com. ., p. Wessner: mimos ab diuturna imitatione vilium rerum ac levium personarum; ., p. Wessner: planipedia autem dicta ob humilitatem argumenti eius ac vilitatem actorum.
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of low situations, and of the importance of dance in these plays. The definition of Isidore of Seville, writing in the seventh century (Orig. .), is even less original, reliable, and detailed than that of Diomedes. Isidore identifies the harmony between plot and bodily movements (motui corporis) as the key to the success of a mime-performance (is he thinking about pantomime?), and relates the Greek etymology of the word mimus to imitation of human affairs without giving further explanation as to why this should be so. His use of imperfect tenses (habebant, agerent, pronuntiare(n)t, componebantur) suggests that he refers to spectacles of a bygone age, but his mention of a mime-‘composer who announced in advance the plot before the performance of the play’ is surely a garbled version of having a prologuespeaker informing the audience about the plot-line in some fabulae palliatae. On mime-caricature see G. M. A. Richter, ‘Grotesques and the mime’, AJA () –; J.-P. C`ebe, La caricature et la parodie dans le monde romain antique des origines a` Juv´enal (Paris ) –, . That mime-actors, like pantomime-actors, danced is confirmed by Ovid AA .– (dancing in an adultery mime), Gell. .. (ut planipedi saltanti), Diod. Sic. .., Ath. F (dancing mimes at the court of Antiochus IV Epiphanes), Philo De agr. , and Porph. on Hor. S. .. (the harmonious combination of Lepos’ speech and dancing). Dance was a common feature in the description of the activities of the mime-performers Bassilla, Eucharis, and C. Caecilius Chariton Iuventius (IG . and add. on p. of that volume; CIL . = ILS = ILLRP = Buecheler Carmina ; B. Gentili Archivio storico siracusano () –). See also Chor. Apol. Mim. (de± gr kaª jwnn eÉjra©nousan cein kaª çousan glättan to©mwv . . . de± kaª coreÅein p©stasqai kaª m jqggesqai m»non pidex©wv, ll kaª blmmati qlgein) and Stephanis Choricius ad loc. In addition to these attempts at a definition of mime-drama, there exist some references in which mime seems to be linked with comedy. The emperor Marcus Aurelius (..) views farcical mime not as a variety of comedy but as its successor (especially as the successor of New Comedy). In the fourth century, mime is considered by Evanthius (exc. de com. .) as a form of comedy together with fabula togata, fabula palliata, fabula Atellana, and others. The sophist Choricius of Gaza, writing in the sixth century AD, defended the theatre of the mimes and stressed the benefits for its audience. Reversing the formula of Donatus, Choricius regarded comedy as a form of mime, and he was justified
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According to the definition of Diomedes and his unnamed Greek source (cited above), mime – unlike epic, tragedy, and comedy proper – dealt with both licit and illicit subjects. This vague description is unhelpful because it covers a vast range of topics from all spheres of life and culture. Moreover, there is some evidence that mimographers borrowed from the realms of epic, tragedy, and myth stories which they then exploited for humorous effect. Can we be more precise about the plotlines of the plays performed on the mime-stage? Were there in mimes stories of recognition and reunion between parents and long-lost children, of reconciliation between estranged spouses, and of trickery and deceit between masters and servants? The fragmentary evidence of Roman mimes does not allow anything more than speculations on the mime-repertoire, although the scanty references to this subject in our primary (theatrical and non-theatrical) sources do enable us to compile with caution a list of some plot-elements of mime-plays. A host of pagan and Christian authors, from Horace and Ovid to John Chrysostom and Choricius, allude to or describe mimes featuring the themes of adultery (perhaps the most popular stock theme of a mime-script), mock weddings, staged trials, staged shipwrecks, the fugitive slave, anti-luxury, false deaths, cunning schemes, poison-intrigues, and reversals of fortune. Moreover, in doing this, since mime had virtually driven comedy off the stage many centuries before his time. See Kehoe Studies –. Adulterous affairs: Hor. S. ..–; Ovid Tr. .–, .; Sen. Contr. .., ..; Iuv. .– and schol. Iuv. . = . Wessner; Iuv. .– and schol. Iuv. . = . Wessner; Iuv. .–; Tert. Ad nat. ..–; Minucius Felix Octav. .; HA, Heliog. .; Cyprian Ad Donatum ; Lactant. Div. instit. ..; Donat. on Verg. Aen. .; Salvianus De gubern. dei .(.) = PL .; John Chrysostom . = PG . and .; Choric. Apol. Mim. , ; Kehoe Adultery; Reynolds Adultery. Weddings: Sen. Contr. ..; Ps.Quint. Decl. . Winterbottom. Trials: Philo De Legat. ; Choric. Apol. Mim. , . Shipwrecks: Sen. De ira ... The fugitive slave: Suet. Gaius .; Sen. Ep. .; Petr. Sat. .; Iuv. .– and schol. Iuv. . = . Wessner. Against luxury: Sen. De brev. vitae .. False deaths: Petr. Sat. .–. Cunning schemes: Cic. Pro Rab. Post. ; Petr. Sat. .; Ps-Quint. Decl. .– Winterbottom; Artem. Oneir. . = . Hercher. Poison-intrigues: Plut.
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ridicule of mythological scenes, satire of philosophical theories and schools, literary parody, and caricature of public figures and political events were subjects which a mime-producer and protagonist (the so-called archimimus or archimima) did not hesitate to perform with his or her troupe in order to make an audience laugh. Mime was regarded as inferior not only to other types of Roman theatre (usually tragedy, the highest type of drama) but also to the rest of Latin literature, and pejorative adjectives such as turpis, vilis, and levis often accompany the word mimus in our testimonies on the mime throughout the centuries. Even in the De sollert. animal. = Mor. E; P.Oxy. (‘The MoiceÅtria-mime’), – Page. Change of fortune: Cic. Phil. ... Mythological satire: Varro Ant. div. fr. Cardauns; Cyprian Ad Donatum ; Tert. Ad nat. .; Tert. Apol. ; Aug. De civ. dei .; Arnob. Adv. nat. .; Lactant. Div. instit. .., ..; Hilar. De trinit. .. Parody of Christian ceremonies: Panayotakis Baptism. Political satire: Cic. Ad fam. ..; Ad Att. .., ..; Dio ..; Suet. Otho .; HA, Maximini duo .–. Philosophical doctrines are targeted in at least four Laberian mimes (; ; (a).–; ). Euripides’ IT and Cyclops are parodied in the plot of the Greek Car©tion-mime: see S. Santelia, Charition liberata (P.Oxy. ) (Bari ); M. Andreassi Groningen Colloquia on the Novel () –; E. Hall, ‘Iphigenia in Oxyrhynchus and India: Greek tragedy for everyone,’ ch. of Adventures with Iphigenia (Oxford and New York ). Virgil’s works seem to have been especially exploited by mime-actors. We are told that the mime-actress Cytheris gave recitals from the Eclogues in the theatre, with Cicero in the audience, to huge popular acclaim (Serv. ap. Ecl. .). This is not an isolated theatrical event in the history of the reception of the Eclogues, if we are to judge from (and believe) the author of the vita Vergili (Suet. De poetis – Rostagni), who refers to repeated theatrical performances of the Eclogues. Such an impression is corroborated by the speaker in Tac. Dial. . (referring to Virgilian verses heard in the theatre in Virgil’s presence), and the irate Jerome, who castigates Christian priests for abandoning the study of the Gospel, reading comedies, and knowing by heart the bucolic love-affairs of Virgil (Jer. Epist. ..). On a similar front, it is not surprising that specific episodes from the Aeneid (the death of Turnus, the unfortunate love-affair of Dido) were taken up as themes presented time and again on the pantomime-stage (Suet. Nero ; Macr. ..), while the conversation between Aeneas and Anchises in the underworld is, according to Augustine (Serm. . = PL .–), a familiar theatrical scene in the minds of his readers; for a recent discussion of this topic see C. Panayotakis, ‘Virgil on the popular stage’, in E. Hall and R. Wyles, eds., New Directions in Ancient Pantomime (Oxford ) –.
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accounts of grammarians and antiquarians of late antiquity, which seem to be structured on a strictly hierarchical basis reminiscent of the divisions in Roman society, mime almost always comes last in the list of theatrical genres examined and defined by them. This is hardly surprising. Mime with its low-life stories and worthless characters was pre-eminently the genre of crude realism in antiquity: a maskless actor or actress, usually a slave or freedman/freedwoman, would expose himself/herself to the public gaze, and satirise people and contemporary events with inelegant and uncouth words that belonged to the vocabulary of the lower classes. Such performances did not seem to have any moral message to convey to their audience. As far as we know, a mime aimed only at making its audience burst out laughing. This laughter (mimicus risus) was characterised by Quintilian (..) as ‘a light thing, aroused generally by buffoons, mimes and brainless characters’. The hierarchical presentation of various types of Roman drama in the treatises of grammarians is due both to the uneven amount of literary material that survives from each of the extant forms of Roman theatrical entertainment, and to the artistic worth traditionally attributed to them. But an arrangement that places mime last in the list of spectacles available to the Romans gives a misleading picture of the development of Roman theatrical culture, and reveals how anxious the Roman literary e´ lite was to keep ‘sub-literary’ genres such as mime at the margin On the social significance of the dramatic hierarchy in Latin literature see the insightful remarks of K. Freudenburg European Studies Journal & (/) –. See Donat. ad Ter. Ad. = .– Wessner; [Caes. Bassus] Poeticae species Latinae = GL . K; [Caes. Bassus] Excerpta de poemate = GL . K; Diom. De arte gramm. = GL . K; . = .– Wessner; .– = .–. Wessner; I. Lydus Perª xousiän . = . Bandy. See also Cat. .–; Petr. Sat. .; Quint. ..; Apul. Flor. ; I. Lydus Perª xousiän . = . Bandy, . = . Bandy; Choric. Apol. Mim. .
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of the literary canon in order to maintain and reinforce the literary merit of its own intellectual preoccupations. In other words, the depiction of mime as low, trivial, and vulgar ensured the continuing existence of other literary genres (such as epic, oratory, philosophy, tragedy, and formal comedy) as high, elevated, and sophisticated. It is true that upper-class Romans such as the knight Laberius engaged in the composition of low mimes, but it is equally true that Laberius was far from happy when made by Caesar to act in his own plays (Macr. Sat. ..–): as a skilful mimographer Laberius was providing entertainment for others of his own class and for the masses, but by having to play a part in his mimes he himself became the source of entertainment, and this was a social gap that was not meant to be bridged. Educated Romans such as Laberius may have experimented with mime as a literary form, but it does not follow from this that they wanted to elevate the mime-genre as a whole to the literary heights of epic and tragedy. The contempt felt for mimes in antiquity may militate against a generous assessment of their literary value and artistic merit. But this contempt may often be explained both as intellectual snobbery and as a reaction to the potential (and often actual) threat mime posed to the social and political status quo. Mime was attacked on stylistic, linguistic, and moral grounds, but its satirical spirit against authority remained unchallenged. The exclusion of even literary mimes from ‘serious literature’ was both convenient and safe, because mime with its huge popularity could become an important political weapon that might manipulate and influence people’s feelings concerning public figures, social norms, and prestigious institutions. Its inferior status and its ‘sub-literary’ label meant that it could be controlled and that its subject-matter was not meant to be taken very seriously. Sulla was really the first to diagnose the usefulness of mime as a strategic tool for political propaganda, and so not only maintained close (sometimes quite intimate) relationships with actors and actresses, but is also thought to have
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composed mimes himself. In fact, Sulla is also the first clear example of the long-standing tension that may be detected in the feelings of the Romans towards mime. For although most mimes were regarded as low both in social status and in literary value, there is evidence that throughout the period from Philip of Macedon to Domitian important politicians patronized mime, that educated people enjoyed watching unrefined mime-shows, and that they sometimes engaged in writing mimes designed for the stage. See Plut. Sulla .–, ., .; Nicol. Damasc. lib. apud Athen. C = FGrH , Jacoby; and C. Garton Phoenix () –; Garton Aspects –, . Our literary sources are almost consistently disparaging towards mimes, but Maxwell Mime – is invaluable for gathering the documentary evidence which demonstrates that some mime-actors and actresses not only were honoured with theatrical rewards but also could hold public offices. In addition to the archmime L. Acilius Eutyches, who was a decurion at Bovillae (CIL . = ILS ; see Leppin Histrionen –, Maxwell Mime no. ):
the archmime T. Uttiedius Venerianus evidently held an official position at Philippi [CIL . = ILS ; see Maxwell Mime no. ]; Tiberius Claudius Philologos Theseus was a member of the boule of ‘many cities’ [IEph and A; see Stephanis Technitai no. ; Maxwell Mime no. ]; Flavius Alexander Oxeidas was a member of the boule of Antioch and Heraclea and of the gerousia of Miletus [see Robert –; Stephanis Technitai no. ; Maxwell Mime no. ]; the part actor C. Norbanus Sorix may have held the office of magister pagi Augusti Felicis at Pompeii [CIL .; see RE . s.v. Norbanus ; Bieber History , , fig. ; Garton Aspects , –; Leppin Histrionen –; Maxwell Mime no. ]. (Maxwell Mime n. ; the additions in square brackets are mine)
A list of powerful men favouring mime, each no doubt for their own reasons, would include Philip (Dem. .), Alexander (Ath. A), Agathocles of Syracuse (Diod. Sic. ..), Antiochus II Theos (Ath. C), Antiochus IV Epiphanes (Ath. F, D; Diod. Sic. ..), Ptolemy II Philadelphus (Ath. F), Sulla (Ath. C; Plut. Sulla .), Julius Caesar (Macr. Sat. ..), Mark Antony (Cic. Phil. ., ., .; Plut. Ant. .), Caligula (Dio Cass. ..), Nero (Tac. Ann. .; Suet. Nero ., ; Iuv. .–), Domitian (Suet. Dom. .), Commodus (Herod. ..), Elagabalus (Herod. ..–), Gallienus (HA, Gall. duo .), Carinus (HA, Car. .), Justinian (Chor. Apol. mim. ), and Theodosius (Zosimus ..). In addition to Cicero, who admired word-plays in mime, see Suet. De gramm. (referring to L. Crassicius from Tarentum, probably a contemporary
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A good case-study of this tension is none other than Cicero. He often saw mime-plays, and even more often expressed contempt for them. This scorn frequently appears both in his speeches, in some of which references to mime are used as terms of abuse against his political opponents, and in his correspondence. Yet it is not easy to decide what weight should be attributed to Cicero’s opinion as an accurate indicator of the general public’s feelings towards mime, nor should his dismissive remarks be interpreted as indicative of the low literary value of the poemata of Laberius and Publilius. For occasionally Cicero’s attitude towards mime is less unfriendly. In the De oratore, especially, he acknowledges the wit of mime-actors, and in fact cites several fragments of Roman mimes older than those of Laberius (., .–). The topical nature of mime-satire seems to frighten and attract him at the same time. In he fears that his glorious consulship may come to resemble a ridiculous mime entitled ‘The Bean’ (Ad Att. ..), while in January he jokingly expresses his anxiety for the subject-matter of a new mime of Valerius (Ad fam. ..). In two other letters, written shortly after the assassination of Caesar, Cicero implies that the mimes reflect popular sentiments about this event, and is highly interested in them (Ad Att. .., ..). The uncouth language of the mime, its vulgar subject-matter, and some of its stage-conventions (acting without masks, women playing female roles) are usually given as the main reasons for the generic inferiority attached to mime in the literary hierarchy of Roman theatrical entertainment. These reasons conveniently obscured the fact that mime could exert strong influence in Roman politics, and should not be taken to mean that of Sulla, who is said to have ‘helped’ mimographers and taught in a school), Ovid Trist. .– (an indication that adultery mimes were composed by some poets, but not by Ovid, who could have done so had he wished it), and Seneca the Elder and Seneca the Younger (for their approval of the moral qualities of mime and of Publilius’ apophthegms see Sen. Contr. ..; Sen. Epist. .–, ., ., .–, .–; De tranq. an. .; and Consol. ad Marc. .).
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mime-texts never observed high literary standards. Laberius is mentioned – along with Plautus, Ennius, Accius, Caecilius, Naevius, and Lucretius – in Fronto’s correspondence as a poet Marcus Aurelius is urged to study in order to polish his literary style (Ad M. Caes. et invicem .. = .–. van den Hout ). II O RI GI N S AND CH RONOLOGICAL DEV ELO P MENT OF THE GENRE The exact date of the first appearance of a mime-actor or actress on the stage of a Roman theatre during a festival or in an event that formed part of the entertainment at a private dinner-party is unknown. That the mime-profession, however, was clearly associated in the Roman mind with Greek-speaking lands is clearly inferred from literary and documentary sources, and formed an assumption which was fruitfully exploited in Roman rhetoric, historiography, and fiction as part of political invective, satirical abuse, and moral warning against the influence of foreign cultures. The connection the Romans made between mime and Greek culture is not unjustified, because a large amount of the terminology employed for the specialisations attributed to mime-actors and actresses (e.g. archaeologus, archimimus / archimima, biologus, ethologus, mimologus, mimographus, mimus / mima), and the stage-names borne by many mimes (for instance, Protogenes, who had died by the early third century BC; Eucharis, who, according to her epitaph (CIL . = ILS ), performed Graeca in scaena; Ecloga; Cytheris; Thalassia) are Greek in origin, while some mime-plays produced at Rome may even have been performed in Greek. But which Greek-speaking lands did mime-actors come from, before they emigrated to Rome and other parts of Italy? This has been a much debated See Suet. Iul. .; Aug. .. Cf. CIL . = ILS (dated to the early third century AD), which mentions an archimimus Grecus, two scenici Greci and two stupidi Greci: could the geographical adjectives be due to the language in which these mime-actors performed rather than to their country of origin? The question is discussed by Maxwell Mime –.
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question since the early eighteenth century, but the scholarly views on this issue reveal more about cultural prejudices concerning Eastern and Western civilisations than about Roman drama at the time of the early republic. We know that, by the fifth century BC, mime was a distinct literary genre, apparently established in Sicily by the Syracusan playwright Sophron, who wrote short and bawdy dramatic sketches in literary prose, focusing on scenes from everyday life and on the portrayal of both male and female characters (m±moi ndre±oi and m±moi gunaike±oi). His poems are said to have been popular with Plato and the Athenian public in general (Ath. B; Chor. Apol. mim. –; Arist. Po. b). There is also evidence that his work was known to members of the Roman educated upper classes from at least the early first century BC (Varro LL .; Val. Max. ..ex.; Quint. ..), and two of his plays have titles (%kstriai, Qunnoqrav) which resemble titles of the extant fragments of Laberius (Belonistria, Reich’s culturally prejudiced views about an ‘Eastern’ and a ‘Western’ mime were severely criticised by A. K¨orte NJklAlt () –, W¨ust Mimos, and Bernini Mimo. Before Reich, the topic was discussed by N. Calliachius, De ludis scenicis mimorum et pantomimorum (Padua ); O. Ferrari, De pantomimis et mimis dissertatio (Wolfenbuettel ); Ziegler; Gryzar Mimus; J. A. Fuehr, De mimis Graecorum (G¨ottingen ); and C. Magnin, Les origines du th´eatre antique et du th´eatre moderne (Paris ). Cicu Problemi n. and – offers an excellent account of the scholarly contribution of these early studies. See Solinus . Mommsen (= Sophron test. in PCG ): hic [i.e. in Sicily] primum inventa comoedia, hic et cavillatio mimica in scaena stetit. The Sicilian tyrant Agathocles, who ruled from to his assassination in /, is said to have been kaª jÅsei gelwtopoi¼v kaª m±mov (Diod. Sic. ..). On Doric comedy, including Sophron’s plays, see Hordern Sophron, and S. D. Olson, Broken laughter: Select fragments of Greek comedy (Oxford ) –. Chor. Apol. mim. : smen d pou kaª tn SÛjronov po©hsin Þv pasa m±moi prosagoreÅetai. kaª toÓto mn pasi gnÛrimon, ke±no d tv tän pollän dilaqen kov. lgetai Pltwna t¼n %r©stwnov toutwnª tän suggrammtwn Þv k Sikel©av %qnaze taÓta kom©sai mga ti däron o«»menon gein ti qreyamnhi kaª p»lin k toÅtwn kosme±n Pltwn»v te patr©da kaª pshv mhtra soj©av; and Stephanis Choricius –. Choricius’ testimony is late and depends on earlier anecdotes (see, for example, Diogenes Laertius .); nonetheless, it supports the long-standing view that Sophron was the heuret¯es of mime.
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Piscator). The Sicilian connection with mime continues well into the fourth century BC, for Xenophon, writing in or later, talks of a Syracusan (Symp. . Surak»si»v tiv nqrwpov; . ¾ Surak»siov) presenting a spectacle with the story of Dionysus and Ariadne at Callias’ private banquet, whose dramatic date seems to be . This spectacle, which tells of the loving union of the god of wine with the Cretan princess, in addition to exquisite gesticulation and dancing, included speech used by the principal actors during the performance (. kaª gr ¢kouon toÓ DionÅsou mn perwtäntov aÉtn e« jile± aÉt»n, tv d oÌtwv pomnuoÅshv), and for this reason should not be regarded as an early example of pantomime, but as a mime-performance of a mythological theme in the form of ‘dinner-entertainment’. The contribution of symposia to the emergence of mime as a distinct kind of theatre has perhaps been underestimated. It may well be that some Roman mimes found their way to the stage after they were successfully performed in the houses of wealthy and influential patrons (such as Sulla). In the second Olynthiac, dated to /, Demosthenes (.) rebukes Philip for welcoming at the royal court low comedians and composers of indecent songs (m©mouv gelo©wn kaª poihtv a«scrän ismtwn) – a tradition followed by Philip’s son Alexander (Ath. A). More importantly, an Athenian terracotta lamp, dated to the late third The date of composition of Xenophon’s Symp. is uncertain, but, if it is later than Plato’s Symp. (as is usually thought), it will have been composed later than . See K. J. Dover Phronesis () –. L. Robert Hermes () and Hordern Sophron take the performance of ‘Dionysus’ and ‘Ariadne’ to be a pantomime. E. Hall, ‘Introduction’, in E. Hall and R. Wyles, eds., New directions in ancient pantomime (Oxford ) is rightly sceptical. On ‘theatre dinners’, i.e. meals accompanied by visual entertainment, see the contributions of C. Corbato and G. Brugnoli in F. Doglio et al., eds., Spettacoli Conviviali dall’antichit`a classica alle corti Italiane del ’ (Viterbo ) – and –; and C. P. Jones in W. J. Slater, ed., Dining in a classical context (Ann Arbor ) –. ndoxoi d ì §san kaª par ì %lexndrwi qaumatopoioª SkÅmnov ¾ Tarant±nov, Filist©dhv ¾ SurakoÅsiov, ëHrkleitov ¾ Mutilhna±ov. geg»nasi d kaª plnoi ndoxoi, æn Khjis»dwrov kaª Pantalwn, Fil©ppou d toÓ gelwtopoioÓ Xenojän mnhmoneÅei.
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century BC, preserves our earliest representation of a mimedrama (Ëp»qesiv; see LSJ s.v. .). It is entitled ‘The motherin-law’, and could have required at least four characters in its cast (the three unmasked and beardless male figures represented on the lamp, one of them clearly being the stereotypical bald mime-fool, and an actress playing the mother-in-law of the title); for all we know, they may have belonged to an official mimetroupe. The inscription on the back of the lamp, which may have been baked to commemorate the successful performance of the play, reads MIMOLGOI H UPOQESIS EIKURA. But mime also flourished in the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Eastern Mediterranean, and it is from cultural centres such as Antioch in Syria and Alexandria in Egypt that mimes are reported to have travelled to Italy and Rome (see Macr. Sat. ..–; HA, Verus .; Maxwell Mime ), either individually or as members of travelling troupes and as associates of an official theatrical guild (the Parasiti Apollinis or a commune mimorum). Already in the third century BC mime-jesters entertained the court of Antiochus II Theos (–; Ath. C ëHr»dotov d ¾ log»mimov, ãv jhsin ëHgsandrov, kaª %rclaov ¾ ½rchstv Plutarch (E) distinguishes between what people (of his time?) call Ëp»qesiv (mimes with a complicated plot needing a lot of equipment) and pa©gnion (mime-sketches too obscene to be enacted at banquets): m±mo© tinv e«sin, æn toÆv mn Ëpoqseiv toÆv d pa©gnia kaloÓsin. rm»zein d ì oÉdteron o²mai sumpos©wi gnov, tv mn Ëpoqseiv di t mkh tän dramtwn kaª t¼ duscorghton, t d pa©gnia pollv gmonta bwmoloc©av kaª spermolog©av. It is unlikely that this distinction, which is not attested elsewhere, applied to The mother-in-law (or to any other mime). Plutarch’s passage is extensively discussed by Kehoe Studies –, who is not critical enough of the validity of the information. The image on the lamp has been clearly reproduced in C. Watzinger Ath. Mitt. () pl. and Bieber History fig. . The scene it represents is discussed by Watzinger (above) –; O. Crusius in Festschrift f¨ur Theodor Gomperz (Vienna ) –; O. Crusius, Herondas mimiambi (Leipzig ) –; R. Herzog Philologus () –; Bieber History ; Cicu Problemi –; Maxwell Mime –; Nicoll Masks ; Reich Mimus –; Robert n. ; and W¨ust Mimos . See Festus M = L, Mart. ., CIL ., EphEp ., CIL . = ILS ; E. J. Jory Hermes () –; Maxwell Mime –.
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par %nti»cwi täi basile± mlista timänto tän j©lwn), and of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (–; Ath. F), who is said to have participated naked in licentious dancing spectacles during a banquet. The actor and mimographer Publilius probably came from Antioch (Pliny NH . talemque Publilium Antiochium (Jahn: lochium vel locium vel lucilium codd.), mimicae scaenae conditorem). The actors Porphyry and Gelasius, who became Christian martyrs, came from Ephesus and Heliopolis respectively (see Panayotakis Baptism), while Syria’s reputation for being a training centre for professionals of low entertainment becomes almost a clich´e in authors of late antiquity (see HA, Verus ., ., .–; Julian Misopogon b; Amm. Marc. ..; Expositio totius mundi et gentium ; and Maxwell Mime –). Cicero’s disparaging statement about the mimicae fallaciae of Alexandria has already been noted; wishing to denigrate the reputation of his opponents, he presents Alexandria as a den of cultural debauchery, where mime and trickery reign supreme, but he deliberately omits in his tirade the long-standing connection of the Egyptian royal capital with the erudite compositions of Theocritus (working at the Alexandrian court in the s) and Herodas (writing probably in the mid-third century BC). Syracusan in origin and follower of the Callimachean style of composition, Theocritus is the author of thirty carefully constructed and allusively learned poetic vignettes, two of which ( and ) are reported to be indebted to Sophron’s mimes.
Diod. Sic. .. kaª d pote prokoptoÅshv pª polÆ tv stisewv kaª tän plei»nwn ¢dh kecwrismnwn, ¨ken Ëp¼ tän m©mwn kjer»menov perikekalummnov. teqeªv d pª tn gn Ëp¼ tän sumpaiz»ntwn, met taÓta tv sumjwn©av prokaloumnhv nepda gumn¼v kaª to±v m©moiv prospa©zwn Ýrce±to tän ½rcsewn tv glwta kaª cleuasm¼n e«wqu©av pispsqai. Pro Rab. Post. ; see also HA, Verus . and T. P. Wiseman, ‘“Mime” and “pantomime”: some problematic texts’, in E. Hall and R. Wyles, eds., New directions in ancient pantomime (Oxford ) . S Arg. () tn d Qestul©da ¾ Qe»kritov peiroklwv k tän SÛjronov metnegke m©mwn; S . tn d tän jarmkwn Ëp»qesin k tän SÛjronov m©mwn metajrei (and Gow –); S Arg. () parplase d t¼ poihmtion k tän par SÛjroni ï Isqmia qemnwn (and Gow –). On Theocritus’
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The motif of the scorned and, consequently, vindictive woman and the episode of two female visitors at a temple appear also in two of the eight intellectually demanding mimes of Herodas, whose extraordinary style comprises realistic subject-matter presented in a stylised fashion, and combines the portrayal of low-life situations with very learned (some would say artificial) language, which may have been addressed to a coterie of educated readers rather than to the culturally varied audience of a live performance. These mimiamboi in choliambics co-existed with the scurrilous spectacles of jugglers, magicians, and other entertainers who were explicitly or implicitly associated with the mime-profession, but there is not enough evidence to suggest that they influenced in any substantial way the style and language of the so-called literary mimes of Laberius, Publilius, and their Latin colleagues. The Roman mimes, like the work of Sophron and Herodas, seem to draw their material from everyday life, and exploit colloquialisms, vulgarisms, and sententious moral statements, but there is no clear evidence to show that they reached the very high literary standards required for the appreciation of their Hellenistic counterparts. Nor is it possible to see whether Herodas’ mimiambs exerted any influence on the mimiambi of Mattius or Matius (who wrote before Varro) and of Vergilius Romanus (a contemporary of the Younger Pliny), about whose mime-careers we know next to nothing; ‘it is poetry see J. B. Burton, Theocritus’ urban mimes: Mobility, gender, and patronage (Berkeley ); and R. Hunter, Theocritus and the archaeology of Greek poetry (Cambridge ). For the text of Herodas see I. C. Cunningham, Herodae mimiambi (Leipzig ). A. Cameron, Callimachus and his critics (Princeton ) – and Hordern Sophron n. do not rule out the possibility that the works of Herodas and Theocritus were performed at a banquet. G. Mastromarco, The public of Herondas (Amsterdam ) and R. Hunter Antichthon () – argue for full-scale staging of Herodas’ mimes. The participial adjective doctus appears several times in relation to mimes, but it means ‘skilled’, not ‘learned’. See CIL . (Eucharis docta erodita), Macr. Sat. .. (docta cavillatio), Amm. Marc. ... The word doctus in Sen. apud Aug. De civ. dei . (Doctus archimimus) is probably the stage-name of an archmime (cf. C. Fundilius Doctus in CIL . = ILS ).
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possible that Matius (whose choliambics are the first at Rome) was translating parts of the œuvre of Herodas which we no longer possess, and the calques may favour this view, but he may also have been creating independently, as later in this genre Pliny’s friends Vergilius Romanus (Ep. ..) and (in Greek) Arrius Antoninus (..)’. Even the Greek mime-play which depicts the wrath of an adulterous wife (P.Oxy. verso, dated to the second century AD), a motif paralleled in the works of both Theocritus () and Herodas (), is a far cry from the elaborate representation of unrequited love in the Alexandrian mimes. In the light of this rich tradition of mime, a term which by the Hellenistic period could signify a poem of superior literary qualities, a dramatic composition of unspecified length and high literary value, or an artless spectacle of actors performing tricks, dancing lasciviously, and making improvised, obscene jokes, it is frustrating to be unable to point with certainty to the means by which (and the form in which) mime was transferred from Greek-speaking lands into Italy and Rome. There is no doubt, however, that the Romans had witnessed performances of mimes of some kind at least by the end of the third century BC, the Courtney Poets . On Matius see Gellius . (Cn. Matius, vir eruditus, in mimiambis suis non absurde neque absone finxit ‘recentatur’ pro eo quod Graeci dicunt naneoÓtai, id est ‘denuo nascitur atque iterum fit recens’. Versus in quibus hoc verbum est hi sunt: ‘iamiam [codd. praeter X Z: iam X : nam Z] albicascit Phoebus et recentatur | commune lumen hominibus voluptatis [Hertz: et voluptatis codd.]’. Idem Matius in isdem mimiambis ‘edulcare’ dicit quod est ‘dulcius reddere’, in his versibus: ‘quapropter edulcare convenit vitam | curasque acerbas sensibus gubernare’); Terentianus Maurus De Metris – = GL . K (hoc mimiambos Mattius dedit metro: | nam vatem eundem est Attico thymo tinctum | pari lepore consecutus et metro); RE . s.v. Matius ; and especially Courtney Poets , –. On Vergilius Romanus see Pliny Ep. ..– (Atque adeo nuper audivi Vergilium Romanum paucis legentem comoediam ad exemplar veteris comoediae scriptam, tam bene ut esse quandoque possit exemplar. Nescio an noris hominem, quamquam nosse debes; est enim probitate morum, ingenii elegantia, operum varietate monstrabilis. Scripsit mimiambos tenuiter argute venuste, atque in hoc genere eloquentissime; nullum est enim genus quod absolutum non possit eloquentissimum dici. Scripsit comoedias Menandrum aliosque aetatis eiusdem aemulatus; licet has inter Plautinas Terentianasque numeres) and RE .A. – s.v. It may have been even earlier, if we accept the suggestion that the mimaulos Kleon performed in the fourth century BC, and if we interpret the adjective
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period of the Athenian terracotta lamp mentioned above. This inference is based both on the episode that is connected to the origins of the proverb ‘all’s well: the old man is dancing’ (salva res: saltat senex) – referring to C. Pomponius, an aged mime who performed at the ludi Apollinares of – and on the epitaph of the mime-actor Protogenes, found on a stele in Samnium and dated to the period from to . The episode of Pomponius is related by the grammarian Festus ( L, L), who claims to have as his source the Augustan writer Verrius Flaccus, by Servius (ad Aen. . and .), and by Macrobius (Sat. ..). It appears that, during a festival in honour of Apollo at Rome, the attack of an unspecified enemy (was it Hannibal? See Livy .–) interrupted the games, because the spectators had to leave the theatre, and hastened to defend the city. Having defeated the enemy, they returned to the theatre, concerned that they needed to repeat the whole ritual. But their fears proved to be unjustified because they found the aged mime Pomponius still dancing to the accompaniment of the pipe. This is a far-fetched account, which aims at extolling the heroism of early Romans and their exemplary respect for ìItalikän as a reference to mime-plays which were Italian in source and content, and were originally performed on Italian soil. See RE . s.v. Kleon , and Athen. F–A: täi d Qeodkthi paraplhs©wv paize gr©jouv kaª Dromav ¾ Käiov, ãv jhsi Klarcov, kaª %ristÛnumov ¾ yilokiqaristv, ti d Klwn ¾ m©maulov pikaloÅmenov, Âsper kaª tän ìItalikän m©mwn ristov ggonen aÉtopr»swpov Ëpokritv. kaª gr NumjodÛrou perin n täi mnhmoneuomnwi m©mwi. This is the reading suggested by E. J. Jory Hermes () . Taylor suggests salva res senex, and Lindsay prints salva res senex. For the date see Bonaria (who suggests ); Beare Stage ; Cicu Problemi –; Reynolds Verrius (who favours an even later date). CIL . = CIL . = CIL . = ILS = Buecheler Carmina = ILLRP : PROTOGENES · CLOVL | SVAVEI · HEICEI – SITVST | MIMVS · PLOVRVMA · QVE | FECIT POPVLO SOVEIS · | GAVDIA · NUGES. For the date see Buecheler Carmina : ‘carmen Enniana aetate non multo posterius’; Cicu Problemi –; Garton Aspects ; Leppin Histrionen ; Maxwell Mime no. ; W¨ust Mimos . The case for was originally put forward by Reich Mimus (see, also, Bonaria ).
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religious customs; on the other hand, it contains some interesting details: Pomponius is described by Festus (.– L) as libertinus and magnus natu, and, during the fight, is reported to have been dancing to the music of the tibicen. Unless Pomponius took up acting late in life, his age and his freedman status imply that he must have been performing for at least or years before the date of the event with which he is associated, while his dancing does not exclude enacting roles in plays as part of his career. The charming (suaueis = suavis) Protogenes may also have been a freed slave, while the reference in the stele to the populus whom he greatly delighted (plouruma gaudia) suggests that he performed in front of large audiences. He is termed mimus, which indicates that the readers of the inscription understood that there was a difference between mime-players and actors of plays not termed mimes (for example, histriones). This distinction demonstrates that mime had probably been integrated in Roman theatrical culture by the second half of the third century BC. Nothing in the inscription shows that Protogenes held a specialised role in a troupe (for instance, he is not called archimimus, or actor secundarum); in fact, it is not clear that he performed in a grex or a caterva at all. He entertained his audience with nuges (= nugis), a difficult word which has been interpreted as ‘merry trifles’ (Beare Stage ) and ‘bagatelles’ (Maxwell Mime ). But Cicu (Problemi –) discusses the term nugae in detail, and is right to point out that it should not have its usual disparaging meaning in this context; he argues that nugae is the Latin equivalent of the Greek singular noun pa©gnion, a piece of theatrical entertainment with music, dance, and jokes, and that it represents the comic activities of travelling entertainers The genitive Cloul(i) in the stele, which has been identified as a reference to P. Cloelius Siculus, rex sacrorum in (see RE s.v. Cloelius, and Maxwell Mime ), has been taken by some scholars as an indication that Protogenes was still a slave when he died (Buecheler Carmina ; Maxwell Mime ), while others believe that he may have been manumitted before his death (Bonaria ; Cicu Problemi , who refers to Cytheris and Publilius as mimes who gained their freedom during their life-time).
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such as the comic riddle-solving Ischomachus (mentioned by Ath. F–A), who in the first century AD would be called circulatores, ‘mountebanks’. This is an attractive suggestion but it is weakened by the unknown etymology of the plural noun nugae (see EM s.v.), which could refer to people as well as to jests (see OLD s.v.), and by the mime-association of the term pa©gnion only in sources much later than Protogenes’ period (Plut. Mor. E; Hesych. s.v. kordakismo©). The second half of the third century BC (, according to Vell. Paterc. .., or , in line with Pliny NH .) is also the period in which the festival in honour of Flora, goddess of vegetation, fertility, and sensualism (a transition that took place through Flora’s connection with Venus: see Lucr. .– ), was established and run by the plebeian aediles M. and L. Publicius. Originally a movable festival, whose days were appointed by magistrates or priests, it became annual in , allegedly because of the need to ensure the prosperity of Roman agriculture, which had received a serious blow at the time from a disastrous famine. The ludi circenses were joined by ludi scaenici, comprising only mime-shows, and lasting from April to May. It may well be that the decision to devote the theatrical programme exclusively to mimes was simply dictated by the desire to formalise the types of shows which were taking place at this festival before . If this is correct, it would appear that the Romans of the late third and early second centuries BC had more opportunities to watch mimes than our current evidence suggests. Wiseman (Flora –) also argued that the Floralia enabled the public to watch ‘indelicate’ plays, whose plot was taken from Rome’s mythical or historical past, thus reinforcing the concept of ‘Roman-ness’ in the audience. Was it perhaps plays of this kind that Cato’s presence in the auditorium On this festival see Ovid Fasti .–; Val. Max. ..; Sen. Ep. .; Mart. Epigr. praef., ..–; HA, Heliog. .; schol. Iuv. . = . Wessner (cf. CGL .); Arnob. Adv. nat. .; Lactant. Div. inst. ..; Aug. Epist. ., De civ. dei .; Cicu Problemi –; Wiseman Flora –; and T. P. Wiseman, The Myths of Rome (Exeter ) , –.
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obstructed during the games in , when the audience is said to have been too ashamed to shout for the striptease of (probably) mime-actresses? After the report of that incident by Valerius Maximus (..), there are a host of passages connecting the ludi Florales (and the mimes) with obscenity, but the repetitiveness of this feature in our sources makes it difficult to distinguish reality and actual theatrical practice from the intellectual snobbery of the senatorial classes and the biased moralism of Christian authors, who castigate mime in all its manifestations. The explicit presence of mimes in our literary and documentary sources pertaining to the second century BC is rare. Apart from the establishment of mimes at the Floralia and the prominence of mime-actors at the abovementioned Hellenistic courts, we hear of mimes aiding, by means of their shows, a slave-revolt in Sicily in the s (Diod. Sic. /.. m©mouv d x postsewv to±v ndon [¾ EÎnouv] pede©knuto, di ì æn o¬ doÓloi tv p¼ tän «d©wn kur©wn postas©av xeqetrizon), and of a mime-actor who insulted from the stage the playwright Accius, and was condemned for it (Rhet. Her. .; .). However, there is a lot to be learnt about mime from the other theatrical genres predominant in Rome at the time. One generation before Terence, Caecilius Statius, the famous composer of fabulae palliatae, is said to have ‘inculcated’ into his plays comic elements that one would expect to see in mimes (Gellius .. Caecilius . . . et alia nescio qua mimica inculcavit, a reproachful statement made with Menander’s theatrical simplicity in mind), while in the first century BC Volcacius Sedigitus would attribute to the same Caecilius the adjective mimicus (Gellius . Caecilio palmam Statio do mimico). This cross-pollination between Do mimico is Gronovius’ ingenious emendation of the reading do comico in Fg (cominico X ). Bothe’s mimicam, agreeing with palmam, misses the point: the issue is not who the best mime-playwright is, but who the best playwright is. The reading comico is printed by Marshall in the OCT of Gellius, and defended by R. Rocca Maia – (–) –. But the adjective comicus does not add anything to the identity of Caecilius as a playwright. We know that the list of contenders comprises comic playwrights because Volcacius says so in line
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theatrical genres is perhaps best seen in the plays of Plautus, who is clearly influenced by forms of Roman popular drama which were alien to Terence’s aesthetic sensitivity. For instance, the dialogue between Labrax and Charmides in Rudens (– ) is made precisely of the material which a Roman would associate with mime: the conversation is fast-paced, witty, and filled with puns; it does very little to advance the plot, and it gives the impression that the audience is watching two jesters on stage exchanging jokes which could have been made outside the context of the play. Some of the characters and the types of verbal humour that occur in the fragments of Laberius have already appeared in the farcical plays of Plautus, and although I am not inclined to say that Laberius was always influenced directly by Plautus, it nonetheless seems logical to conclude that both playwrights were working along the same comic lines, and that the boundaries between their respective theatrical genres were much less clearly defined than the grammarians of late antiquity thought and would like us to think. Our sources on mime for the first century BC offer an entirely different picture. Playwrights such as Laberius and Publilius – (palmam poetae comico cui deferant). Is comico of line an error by dittography based on comico of line , and caused by the word palmam, which appears in both lines and ? For Gellius’ views on Caecilius see Holford-Strevens Gellius –. On Plautus and popular drama see A. M. G. Little HSCPh () –. Our testimonia on Publilius are as follows: Pliny NH ., .; Cic. Ad fam. ..; Ad Att. ..; Suet. De poetis Rostagni; Gellius ..–; Sen. De tranq. an. .; Sen. Contr. .., .., ..; Sen. Epist. ., ., ., .–, .–, Consol. ad Marc. .; Macr. Sat. ..–; Jer. Epist. .–, .; Salv. De gub. dei ..–. However, what we really know about him does not amount to much (see p. ). A new study of the sententiae circulating under his name and of his contribution to the development of Roman drama is required. In addition to the sententiae we have fragments from only two of his mimes: Putatores and Murmurco. On the former mime-play see Nonius . M = . L: ‘latibulet’ et ‘latibuletur’ pro ‘lateat’ . . . Publilius Putatoribus (ed. : liputatoribus codd.: potatoribus Hauler): ‘progredere et nequis latibuletur perspice’ (codd. praeter P : prospice P ); and Isid. ..: sarabarae sunt fluxa ac sinuosa vestimenta, de quibus legitur in Danielo: ‘Et sarabarae eorum non sunt
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and perhaps other mimographers of the same period from whose plays nothing survives – give mime literary qualities, which it did not seem to have until then. Cicero, in the mid-s BC, is able to claim that an early mime (mimus vetus) entitled Tutor was witty and full of tasteful puns (De orat. .). Cicero also quotes jokes from mimes without specifying their author or title: There are also remarks that are rather absurd, but often humorous for that very reason. They are not only quite appropriate for actors in mimes, but also to some extent for us orators. For example: Such a silly man: just when he comes into some money, he dies! or, A: What’s your relation to this woman? B: She’s my wife. A: Yes of course, she looks just like you! or, As long as he was at the waters, he never once died. This kind of witticism is a bit trivial and, as I said, suitable for actors in mimes, but sometimes it is not completely out of place for us orators either. In that case, someone who is really no fool says something as if he were, in a humorous way. inmutatae’. Et Publilius: ‘ut quid ergo in ventre tuo Parthi sarabaras | suspenderunt?’ (Lindsay: in ventre tuo parti sarabaras vel sarabara vel serrabasras vel saraberas vel saraba codd.: in ventre Parthi sarabaras tuo Buecheler: in ventre parti sarabaras tuo Ribbeck : parti in ventre sarabaras tuas Ribbeck suspenderunt codd. praeter DE : suspenderint DE : suspenderit Ribbeck : suspenderat Ribbeck : suspenderant Buecheler). On Murmurco see Priscian . = GL .. Hertz: ‘verro’ enim secundum Servium ‘versi’ facit, secundum Charisium autem ‘verri’, quod et usus comprobat . . . Publius in Murmurcone (Ribbeck: murmurithone R: muromonthones B : mauromonthones B : muro. muinthone D: Muromunthone H: moro munthone L: muromuntone K: Moro mentone vel Murrhinone vel Mormom»qwni Ritschl: Muto Mutuno vel Muro Mutuni vel Murco Mutone Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit.: Murmidone Hertz: murmillone Woelfflin: muto mutone Bothe): ‘cellas (codd.: cellas Bothe) servorum converri’. For example, Nucula: Cic. Phil. . (primum duos conlegas Antoniorum et Dolabellae, Nuculam et Lentonem, Italiae divisores lege ea quam senatus per vim latam iudicavit, quorum alter commentatus est mimos, alter egit tragoediam) and RE . – s.v. Nucula . De orat. .: sunt etiam illa subabsurda, sed eo ipso nomine saepe ridicula, non solum mimis perapposita, sed etiam quodam modo nobis: ‘homo fatuus (codd.: fatuus homo
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Cicero is not the only one to do this. Varro cites a fragment from an unspecified mime-play, which contains someone’s absurd request for water from Bacchus and for wine from the water-nymphs; this may be evidence for mythological parody in mime. Elsewhere (LL .) Varro quotes neologisms associated with the mime-stage: dictum ‘bon mot’ and dictiosus ‘witty man’. The first century BC also sees the appearance of many named actresses (for instance, Eucharis, Tertia, Cytheris, and Arbuscula) in addition to anonymous mimi and mimae, many of whom were favoured by important political figures such as Sulla and Mark Antony. The genre mimus acquires its literary identity Ribbeck), | postquam rem habere coepit, est emortuus (Lambinus: mortuus codd.).’ Et ‘quid est tibi ista mulier? Uxor. Similis me dius fidius.’ Et ‘ (add. Ribbeck) quamdiu ad aquas fuit, numquam est emortuus (codd.: mortuus Bergk)’. Genus hoc levius et, ut dixi, mimicum, sed habet non numquam aliquid etiam apud nos loci, ut vel non stultus quasi stulte cum sale dicat aliquid. The translation is taken from J. M. May and J. Wisse, Cicero on the ideal orator (Oxford/New York ). Varro apud Aug. De civ. dei .: An vero peritissimi illi et acutissimi viri, qui se pro magno beneficio conscripta docuisse gloriantur, ut sciretur quare cuique deo supplicandum esset, quid a quoque esset petendum, ne absurditate turpissima, qualis ioculariter in mimo fieri solet, peteretur ‘a Libero aqua, a Lymphis vinum’, auctores erunt cuipiam hominum diis inmortalibus supplicanti, ut, cum a Lymphis petierit vinum eique responderint: ‘Nos aquam habemus, hoc a Libero pete’, possit recte dicere: ‘Si vinum non habetis, saltem date mihi vitam aeternam’? quid hac absurditate monstrosius? Cf. Aug. De civ. dei .: ex eo enim poterimus, inquit, scire quem cuiusque causa deum advocare atque invocare debeamus, ne faciamus, ut mimi solent, et optemus a Libero aquam, a Lymphis vinum. Individual words apparently used in an unusual sense by the mimes are also identified by Festus (. L: ‘strutheum’ in mimis praecipue vocant obscenam partem virilem, salacitate videlicet passeris, qui Graece strouq¼v dicitur; . L: ‘strutheum’ membrum virile a salacitate passeris, qui Graece strouq¼v dicitur, a mimis praecipue appellatur). See also schol. Iuv. . = . Wessner ([Longum] penem, ut habent in mimo) and Seneca the Younger (Ep. .: dominum patrem familiae appellaverunt [scil. maiores nostri], servos, quod etiam in mimis adhuc durat, ‘familiares’). Eucharis: CIL . = ILS = ILLRP = Buecheler Carmina (fl. c. /; see RE s.v. Licinia ; RE s.v. mimos; RE Suppl. s.v. Eucharis; C. Garton Phoenix () ; Garton Aspects ; Leppin Histrionen ; Maxwell Mime no. ; Wiseman Catullus ). Tertia: Cic. Verr. ., ., ., . (fl. –; see Garton Aspects ; Leppin Histrionen ). Cytheris: Cic. Ad Att. .., .., .; Ad fam. ..–; Phil. ., ., .–, ., .; Pliny NH .; Plut. Ant. .; Sen. Suas. .; Serv. on
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in the eyes of intellectuals such as Cicero (Phil. . persona de mimo), Horace (S. .. et Laberi mimos ut pulchra poemata mirer), and Ovid (Tr. . si scripsissem mimos), who may not like it but can no longer ignore it. The epitaph for Ecloga, who lived for years during the period from BC to AD (CIL .), a bank receipt for the mime Herneimias (dated to ; SB ), and the work of the Augustan mimographer Philistion, none of whose mimes survives in spite of his fame in late antiquity, foreshadow only to a small extent the explosion of the popularity of the mime-genre that was to happen from the first to the third centuries AD. We have numerous inscriptions for mime-actors from this period, as well as an instruction by the citizens to the Laconian ephors to install doors specifically for mimes (c. AD ) at a theatre in Gytheion (Maxwell Mime –). The formative influence of the mime on authors such as Ovid and Petronius Verg. Ecl. ., .; Inc. Auct. De viris illustr. .; Ovid Am. ..– (cf. Ovid AA .; Tr. .; Mart. ..); Verg. Ecl. .–; Serv. on Verg. Ecl. . (fl. c. – c. ; see RE .A. – s.v. Volumnius ; A. B. Baca CW () –; S. Treggiari CW () –; Garton Aspects ; Leppin Histrionen ). Arbuscula: Cic. Ad Att. ..; Hor. S. ..–; Pseudacro on Hor. S. ..; Porph. on Hor. S. ..; Serv. on Ecl. . (fl. ; see RE ; RE Suppl. ; Garton Aspects ; Leppin Histrionen ). I discuss their portrayal in Ordia prima: Revista de estudios cl´asicos () –. The testimonia on this mimographer are numerous: Jer. ad Euseb. Chron. II = PL .; Suda . s.v. Filist©wn; AP .; Mart. ..–; Alciphron ..; M. Aurel. ..; Sext. Iul. Afric. De hist. Susannae epist. ad Origenem = PG .; Origen Epist. ad Africanum de hist. Susannae = PG .–; Epiphanius Adv. haeres. I (Haeres. .) = PG .; Epiphanius Adv. haeres. I (Haeres. .) = PG .–; Epiphanius Adv. haeres. I (Haeres. .) = PG .; Epiphanius Adv. haeres. II (Haeres. .) = PG .; Amm. Marc. ..; Nilus Epist. .; Marcus Diaconus vita Porphyrii episc. Gazensis ; Jer. Adv. Rufin. .; Marius Mercator Liber subnot. in verba Iuliani . = PL .–; Sidon. Apoll. Epist. ..; Cassiod. Var. ..–; Chor. Apol. mim. ; Georgios Monachos Chron. = PG .; Apopthegmaton collectio Vindobonensis (= Wachsmuth Festschrift zur Begruessung der Philologenversammlung [Freiburg ]) p. nn. –; Anecdota Graeca . Boissonade; Tzetzae prolegom. ad Lycophr. I p. = CGF .. Kaibel.
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testifies to the growing literary prestige of the genre, while the first appearance of the term archimimus in our extant literary and documentary sources for this era suggests that mime-plays and the mime-profession in general are now becoming more hierarchical and formalised than they used to be. This impression of the formalisation of the genre as a type of theatrical entertainment is reinforced by the frequency, in documents of the same period, of the terms biologi, Homeristae, and stupidi, all of which have been viewed as specialisations within the mime-profession (see Maxwell Mime –, –, and –). The appearance of new mimographers from the period of the Antonines onwards (such as Aemilius Severianus, Hostilius, Lentulus with his play Catinenses, and Marullus) surely points to the performance of new mimes and to the revitalisation of this genre. In the fourth Fantham Mime rightly argues for the influence mime-subjects exerted on Rome’s formal literature (elegy, lyric, the novel, Ovid’s poetry); this is a topic that still generates scholarly contributions: McKeown Elegy; Panayotakis Theatrum; Wiemken Mimus; Wiseman Ovid; M. Andreassi Groningen Colloquia on the Novel () –; R. May, Apuleius and drama: The ass on stage (Oxford ); E. Mignona, ‘Narrativa greca e mimo: il romanzo di Achille Tazio’, SIFC () –; E. Stemplinger, ‘Der Mimus in der horazischen Lyrik’, Philologus () –; and the contributions of S. J. Harrison and of W. Keulen in the volume edited by R. R. Nauta, Desultoria scientia: Genre in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and related texts (Leuven ) – and –, respectively. A list of male archmimes whose activities can be approximately dated would include Sorix (Plut. Sulla .–; fl. c. ; see RE . s.v. Norbanus ; Garton Aspects –, , ; Leppin Histrionen ), Lepos (Porph. on Hor. S. ..; fl. /; see RE . ; Leppin Histrionen –), Favor (Suet. Vesp. ; fl. c. AD ; see RE . ; Leppin Histrionen ), L. Acilius Eutyches (CIL . = ILS ; fl. c. AD ; see Leppin Histrionen –; Maxwell Mime no. ), and Cluvius Glaber (CIL . = ILS ; fl. c. AD ; see Maxwell Mime nos. –). Aemilius Severianus (second/third cent. AD): RE s.v. Aemilius ; Maxwell Mime no. ; and CIL . = ILS . Hostilius: RE . s.v. Hostilius ; Tert. Ad nationes .; and Tert. Apol. .. Lentulus: RE . s.v. Lentulus ; Leppin Histrionen ; V. Hunink, Tertullian de pallio (Amsterdam ) ; Tert. De pallio ., Ad nationes ., Apol. .; Jer. Contra Rufinum .; and Marius Mercator Liber subnot. in verba Iuliani . = PL .–.
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and fifth centuries our documentary evidence on mime is sparse (many of the mostly unreliable testimonies of the grammarians belong to this period), but mime-plays are mentioned by Ausonius as works of a distinctly literary status that are meant to be appreciated at the office rather than in the theatre (Ep. . historiam mimos carmina linque domi; Ep. a.; see Green ad loc. and Maxwell Mime ). The sixth-century rhetorical treatise of the sophist Choricius in defence of the mimes seems to react to dismissive statements of authors such as Cassiodorus (Var. ..– ) and John the Lydian (De Magistr. . = .– Bandy), both of whom allege that the sole merit of mime is its ability to make people laugh. Our latest documentary evidence on the genre is an account of wine issued as payment to mimes, dated probably to AD / (P.Oxy. .– and Maxwell Mime –).
Marullus: RE . s.v. Marullus ; Serv. on Verg. Aen. .; on Verg. Ecl. .; SHA, M. Anton. phil. .; Galen Perª natomikän gceirsewn . = . Kuehn; Jer. Contra Rufinum .; Marius Mercator Liber subnot. in verba Iuliani . = PL .–; S. Paulinus Epigr. = CSEL .. As an example I offer Diomedes’ poorly composed account, based on a no longer extant source by Suetonius, of how mime originated in Rome because of the rivalry between professional comic actors (De arte gramm. = GL ..–. K): primis autem temporibus, sic uti adserit Tranquillus, omnia quae in scena versantur in comoedia agebantur. nam et pantomimus et pythaules et choraules in comoedia canebant. sed quia non poterant omnia simul apud omnes artifices pariter excellere, siqui erant inter actores comoediarum pro facultate et arte potiores, principatum sibi artificii vindicabant. sic factum est ut nolentibus cedere mimis in artificio suo ceteris separatio fieret reliquorum. nam dum potiores inferioribus, qui in communi ergasterio erant, servire dedignantur, se ipsos a comoedia separaverunt, ac sic factum est ut exemplo semel sumpto unus quisque artis suae rem exequi coeperit neque in comoediam venire.
See also Cicu Problemi –. Likewise, Cassiodorus’ view that Philistion is the ‘inventor’ of the literary Roman mime is puzzlingly inadequate (Var. ..: mimus etiam, qui nunc tantummodo derisui habetur, tanta Philistionis cautela repertus est, ut eius actus poneretur in litteris, quatinus mundum curis edacibus aestuantem laetissimis sententiis temperaret). It may be argued that Philistion ‘re-invented’ the genre, and that his fame in late antiquity eclipsed the reputation of Laberius and Publilius, but it is still difficult to gauge from Cassiodorus’ account in what way Philistion was better than his mime-predecessors.
TESTIMONIA ON L A B ERI US
III TESTIMONIA ON LABERIUS The date of Laberius’ death () Suetonius De poetis, p. Rostagni [referring to Dec. / Jan. ]: Laberius mimorum scriptor decimo mense post C. Caesaris interitum Puteolis moritur.
Laberius’ outspokenness () Cicero Ad fam. .. [written in Jan. ]: Denique, si cito te rettuleris, sermo nullus erit; si diutius frustra afueris, non modo Laberium sed etiam sodalem nostrum Valerium pertimesco; mira enim persona induci potest Britannici iureconsulti. () Macrobius Sat. .. Willis [possibly referring to ]: Cum iratus esse P. Clodius D. Laberio [Fmg : valerio cett. codd.] diceretur, quod ei mimum [codd. praeter AC: minimum AC] petenti non dedisset, ‘quid amplius’, inquit, ‘mihi facturus es nisi ut Dyrrhachium eam et redeam?’ ludens ad Ciceronis exilium.
Laberius’ appearance on stage as an actor in one of his own mimes () Seneca Rhetor Contr. .. Winterbottom: Laberium divus Iulius ludis suis mimum produxit, deinde equestri illum ordini reddidit. () (?) Seneca De ira ..: see fr. (a). () Suetonius Divus Iulius .: Ludis Decimus Laberius eques Romanus mimum suum egit donatusque quingentis sestertiis et anulo aureo sessum in quattuordecim e scaena per orchestram transiit. () (?) Gellius .: Quibus modis ignominiatus [v: om. cett. codd.: ignominatus de Quaietis: an ignominia notatus?] tractatusque sit a C. Caesare Laberius poeta; atque inibi appositi versus super eadem re eiusdem Laberii. () Macrobius Sat. ..–: see frs. , , (b).
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Witticisms between Laberius and Cicero () Seneca Rhetor Contr. ..– Winterbottom: Iussit [scil. Caesar Laberium] ire sessum in equestria; omnes ita se coartaverunt ut venientem non reciperent. Cicero male audiebat tamquam nec Pompeio certus amicus nec Caesari, sed utriusque adulator. Multos tunc in senatum legerat Caesar, et ut repleret exhaustum bello civili ordinem et ut eis qui bene de partibus meruerant gratiam referret. Cicero in utramque rem iocatus [suppl. Schultingh]; misit enim ad Laberium transeuntem: recepissem te nisi anguste sederem. Laberius ad Ciceronem remisit: atqui soles duabus sellis sedere. Uterque elegantissime, sed neuter in hoc genere servat modum. Ab his huius studii diffusa est in plures imitatio. () Macrobius Sat. .. Willis: Deinde cum Laberius in fine ludorum anulo aureo honoratus a Caesare e vestigio in quattuordecim ad spectaculum transiit violato ordine, et cum detrectatus est eques Romanus et comminus [codd. praeter RFC: cum mimus RFC] remissus, ait Cicero praetereunti Laberio et sedile quaerenti: recepissem te nisi anguste sederem: simul et illum respuens et in novum senatum iocatus, cuius numerum Caesar supra fas auxerat. nec impune. respondit enim Laberius: mirum si anguste sedes qui soles duabus sellis sedere, exprobrata levitate Ciceroni, qua inmerito optimus civis male audiebat. () Macrobius Sat. .. Willis: In eundem Ciceronem Laberius cum ab eo ad consessum non reciperetur, dicentem, reciperem te nisi anguste sederemus, ait mimus ille [codd. praeter J H : nimium ille J : ille mimus H ] mordaciter, atqui solebas duabus sellis sedere, obiciens tanto viro lubricum fidei. The contest between Laberius and Publilius () (?) Cicero Ad fam. .. [written in Oct. ]: Equidem sic iam obdurui ut ludis Caesaris nostri animo aequissimo viderem T. Plancum, audirem Laberi et Publili [Manutius: publii codd.] poemata. () (?) Gellius ..–: Publilius mimos scriptitavit, dignusque habitus est qui subpar Laberio iudicaretur. C. autem Caesarem
TESTIMONIA ON L A B ERI US
ita Laberii maledicentia et adrogantia offendebat, ut acceptiores et probatiores sibi esse Publilii quam Laberii mimos praedicaret. () Macrobius Sat. ..–: see fr. . Ancient views on Laberius’ work () Horace S. ..– Shackleton Bailey: Nempe incomposito dixi pede currere versus Lucili. quis tam Lucili fautor inepte est ut non hoc fateatur? at idem, quod sale multo urbem defricuit, charta laudatur eadem. nec tamen hoc tribuens dederim quoque cetera; nam sic et Laberi mimos ut pulchra poemata mirer. ergo non satis est risu diducere rictum auditoris (et est quaedam tamen hic quoque virtus)
() Porphyrionis comm. in Q. Hor. Flacci Serm. .. Meyer: Laberi mimos negat magnopere mirandos esse, quamvis iocis et amaritudine abundantes sint, re vera humiles et in verbis et in conceptionibus et in materia. () Pseudacronis schol. in Hor. Serm. ..– Keller: Idest si dico Lucilium ideo bonum poetam esse quod habet facetias, idem mihi dicendum est de Laberio mimographo; nam et is habet facetias; sed multis caret quae poeta debet habere. Nam et mimorum ioca sic laudo ut non cetera illis adsignem quae perfecti sunt operis. Per hoc Lucilii opus mimis comparat. () Seneca Rhetor Contr. .. Winterbottom: Deinde auctorem huius viti, quod ex captione unius verbi plura significantis nascitur, aiebat Pomponium Atellanarum scriptorem fuisse, a quo primum ad Laberium transisse hoc studium imitando, deinde ad Ciceronem, qui illud ad virtutem transtulisset. Nam ut transeam innumerabilia quae Cicero in orationibus aut in sermone dixit ex [suppl. Haase] nota, ut non referam a Laberio dicta, cum mimi eius, quidquid modo tolerabile habent, tale habeant . . .
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() Fronto Ad M. Caes. et invicem .. = .–. van den Hout : Quamobrem rari admodum veterum scriptorum in eum laborem studiumque et periculum verba industriosius quaerendi sese commisere, oratorum post homines natos unus omnium M. Porcius eiusque frequens sectator C. Sallustius, poetarum maxime Plautus, multo maxime Q. Ennius eumque studiose aemulatus L. Coelius nec non Naevius, Lucretius, Accius etiam, Caecilius, Laberius quoque. Nam praeter hos partim scriptorum animadvertas particulatim elegantis Novium et Pomponium et id genus in verbis rusticanis et iocularibus ac ridiculariis, Attam in muliebribus, Sisennam in lasciviis, Lucilium in cuiusque artis ac negotii propriis. () Gellius ..: see fr. (a). () Gellius ..: see fr. . () Gellius ..: Fuisset autem verbum hoc [scil. nnoi] a te civitate donatum aut in Latinam coloniam deductum, si tu eo uti dignatus fores, essetque id inpendio probabilius quam quae a Laberio ignobilia nimis et sordentia in usum linguae Latinae intromissa sunt. I V FAC T S A N D P RO B L E M S Various statements may be made about the dates of Laberius’ birth and death, his personality, and his reputation as a poet, but the only facts we may claim to know with certainty about him are that he composed mimes, and that he was a contemporary of Cicero and Caesar. St Jerome, in his expansion of the chronicle of world history composed by Eusebius of Caesarea, mentions that Laberius died at the Campanian city of Puteoli ten months after Caesar’s demise (i.e. at some point between the Ides of December and the Ides of January ). It seems that Jerome’s source for this precise dating is Suetonius, but there are problems with Jerome’s testimony because attention has been drawn to the odd coincidence that a man whose praenomen is reported as Decimus is said to have died on the tenth
FACTS AND P ROBLEMS
(decimo) month after someone else’s death. Laberius’ date of birth is also uncertain. Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, Suetonius, possibly Gellius, and Macrobius report that Caesar asked Laberius to perform in one of his own mimes, and this event, which, according to our sources, was far from pleasant for Laberius, has persuasively been placed in November . The script of this mime does not survive in its entirety in any of the above authors with the exception of Macrobius, who cites senarii which Laberius allegedly composed to express his anger and resentment at having been forced to humiliate himself by acquiring the status of a low actor performing in mime, the lowest genre of Roman theatrical entertainment. In line of this fragment, which is conventionally referred to in modern scholarship as Laberius’ ‘prologue’ (fr. ), the speaker, who may or may not have been Laberius himself, says that he spent twice On the passage of Suetonius see Testim. (above) and R. Helm, Hieronymus’ Zus¨atze in Eusebius’ Chronik und ihr Wert f¨ur die Literaturgeschichte (Leipzig ) . Schwartz Anecdotes n. finds it odd that Suetonius, as reported by Jerome, is very specific about the time of L.’s death, and speculates that the MSS reading decimo mense in Jerome’s text is a corrupt form of L.’s praenomen and cognomen (possibly, Decimus Menas). Till Caesar n. rightly dismisses Schwartz’s hypothesis, pointing out that it was a common device in ancient biographies to record people’s death in relation to important events. Moreover, the wordorder of the text attributed to Suetonius militates against Schwartz’s view: in the sentence Laberius mimorum scriptor decimo mense . . . moritur the phrase mimorum scriptor oddly separates Laberius, the nomen gentis, from what Schwartz wrongly interprets as corrupt versions of the praenomen and the cognomen of L. (decimo mense = Decimus Menas). On the sources for this event see Testim. – above. On the dating see Schwartz Anecdotes and n. (with further bibliography). Seneca the Younger and Macrobius cite also two lines which allegedly belong to this play; see frs. and . Probably on the basis of Macr. Sat. .. (unde se et Laberius a Caesare coactum in prologo testatur his versibus). The verb testatur ‘affirms’ in Macr. Sat. .. (see preceding note) does not necessarily mean, as all scholars (with the exception of E. J. Jory) think, that it was L. himself who spoke the verses which Macrobius attributes to him. It is possible that, although L. may have composed these lines and expressed in them his indignation for Caesar’s request, a professional actor (‘Prologus’)
I N T RO D U C T I O N
years without reproach (bis tricenis annis actis sine nota). If we are to accept Macrobius’ attribution of this fragment to Laberius, and if we are to take the statement in line as an authentic and seriously intended reference to the age of Laberius the person as opposed to the age of the fictional character of the play reciting these lines (n. bis tricenis annis), then the date of Laberius’ birth should be estimated as about . The place of Laberius’ birth and details about his family are unknown. But Wiseman has usefully observed that he may have originated from the town of Lanuvium in Latium, which was also the birthplace of the comic poet Luscius and of the actor Q. Roscius, and may have been related to the aristocratic family of the Laberii, a Lanuvine tribe, one of whose members is attested to have served as a senator in . The first extant author to attribute to Laberius the praenomen Decimus is Suetonius (Testim. ); Macrobius too uses the same praenomen (Testim. ), but Cicero and Horace refer to him simply as Laberius (Testim. , , and ), and so do almost all the authors who cite fragments from mimes attributed to him. That Laberius was a member of the equestrian class is first attested by Seneca the Elder (Testim. ). Given the high-ranking status and consequently the wealth of the family of the Laberii, it is unlikely that Seneca the Elder and/or his source are unreliable witnesses regarding this testimony, but it is also conceivable (although there is no evidence for it) that Laberius, like the famous Roscius, had servile ancestry and/or freedman status, and that he was promoted delivered them. In my opinion the only clear indication that L. acted on stage is in Macr. Sat. .. (discussed in § (iii) below). So E. Fantham is right to print in OCD s.v. Laberius ‘(c.–? BC)’ as the dates of L.’s birth and death. But L. R. Taylor TAPA () misinterprets line of fr. and wrongly concludes that L. ‘was evidently in the upper seventies since he had been an eques Romanus for sixty years’. See T. P. Wiseman CQ () and nn. and (reprinted in Roman Studies (Liverpool ) ), citing as evidence for L.’s origin IGRR ., ILLRP , CIL ., .–, Inschr. v. Priene , and Bulletin de Correspondance Hell´enique () .
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to equestrian rank on account of his theatrical popularity and his contribution to drama. Suetonius (Testim. ) and Macrobius (Sat. ..) confirm Seneca’s evidence, but it is unclear whether they do so because they draw directly from Seneca’s account or whether all three of these authors have used a source earlier than Seneca which said that Laberius was an eques Romanus. In any case, there is no extant precedent of a member of the equestrian class being the author of plays composed for the disreputable stage of mime-drama, and it is tempting to make the connection – not only on a linguistic but also on a stylistic level – between the eques Laberius, whose scanty fragments reveal a conscious attempt to compose obscene verses mocking politics and philosophy and to construct neologisms in an amusing and sophisticated fashion, and the eques C. Lucilius, who, more than half a century before Laberius, had revolutionised in subjectmatter, vocabulary, and prosody the genre of Roman verse satire, which was as marginalised in the literary canon as the Roman mime. This connection between Laberius and Lucilius can be traced back to Horace and the commentators on his Satires: see Testim. and . The earliest event known to us in Laberius’ life is related by Macrobius, who wrote nearly five centuries after Laberius; it concerns Laberius’ refusal to compose a mime commissioned by the infamous P. Clodius Pulcher, who, disguised as a woman, had intruded into the festival of the Bona Dea in December and was murdered by T. Annius Milo ten years later. The account of Macrobius regarding this event (Testim. ) is conveniently placed in a section of his Saturnalia which deals with the witty sayings of Cicero (..–) against eminent people such as Pompey (..–) and Caesar (..), and may be ultimately derived from a corpus of witty sayings of public figures compiled around Tiberius’ time. The account runs as follows:
For this view and the dating see Schwartz Anecdotes –.
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When Publius Clodius was said to be angry with Decimus Laberius, because the latter, when invited to write a mime for him, had refused to do so, Laberius remarked: ‘The worst punishment you can inflict on me is to send me all the way to Dyrrhachium, and then recall me to Rome.’ He was jokingly alluding to Cicero’s exile.
The starting point for the proper understanding of Laberius’ joke is one of the bills moved by Clodius as tribune in ; as a result of this bill Cicero fled from Rome in late March of that year. But the punch-line of Laberius’ forthright remark to Clodius is based on the fact that a law of the people had allowed Cicero to return unharmed to Rome at the beginning of September of the following year. What Laberius essentially is portrayed as saying then is that he can do as he pleases, and that Clodius cannot harm him. The dates of Cicero’s departure into exile and return mean that Laberius’ plain-spoken reply to Clodius’ request, if it ever happened, took place at some point between September and January (the date of Clodius’ death). But Clodius was an aedile in , and Cicero (De har. resp. ) records how Clodius had gathered innumerable bands of slaves and instructed them to burst onto the stage during the ludi Megalenses in early April of that year. It is possible therefore that Clodius, who would have sponsored the theatrical shows in , had asked Laberius to write a play for the ludi scaenici on that occasion. Our sources do not say why Laberius declined Clodius’ invitation, but it is unwise, I believe, to interpret Laberius’ behaviour as the reaction of a free-spirited and old-fashioned aristocrat opposing the oppressive authority of a morally unsound magistrate, or as a sign of sympathy towards Cicero, who had been exiled during Clodius’ magistracy, and This is the view of Till Caesar . But it is slightly odd to expect to have a mime performed in a festival other than the Floralia (on which see pp. – and n. ). Cicero’s testimony that mimes replaced Atellane farces which used to be performed as ‘after-pieces’ (exodia) following the performance of a tragedy in the schedule of ludi scaenici (Cic. Ad fam. ..: nunc venio ad iocationes tuas, quoniam tu secundum ‘Oenomaum’ Acci, non, ut olim solebat, Atellanam, sed, ut nunc fit, mimum introduxisti) is dated to .
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dislike towards Caesar, who may have favoured Clodius’ political actions. Like the formidable Lucilius, Laberius may have been outspoken because he counted on the power bestowed upon him by his social class and because he may have disliked Clodius as a person. He need not have worried what would happen to his career as a mimographus, because presumably he did not depend on it for a living. But Macrobius’ passage (Testim. ) reveals that Laberius had acquired a good name as a mimographer already in the mid-s (we do not know when he started composing mimes), and that it was possible to approach him directly to commission a new mime from him. Cicero mentions Laberius in two letters dated to and . In the first (Testim. ) he urges the eminent jurist and friend of his Trebatius to return from Britain (Ad fam. ..) sooner rather than later, otherwise there will be talk about his prolonged absence from Rome. Cicero is very concerned (Ad fam. .. pertimesco) in case Laberius and someone by the name of Valerius poke fun at Such views are frequently put forth in scholarly accounts of L.’s career: see, for example, M. V. Carassa Dioniso () ; Giancotti Mimo ; Marzullo Mimo . There is no consensus about the identity of this man. Giancotti Mimo n. (with earlier bibliography) and Till Caesar n. are inclined to identify him with the jurist L. Valerius who corresponded with Cicero in (Ad fam. .) and / (Ad fam. ..). This would explain why Cicero calls him sodalem nostrum ‘our companion’, and why he says that a persona iureconsulti was likely to be presented on the mime-stage. But there is no other concrete evidence confirming that this lawyer was an author of mimes. Priscian on two occasions cites fragments from a play (he does not specify that this was a mime) entitled Phormio, which most MSS of Priscian attribute to an author called Valerius. (Priscian . = GL .. H and Priscian . = GL .. H). Marius Mercator (Liber subnot. in verba Iuliani . = PL .– Migne) mentions Valerius next to Petronius, whose novel abounds in dramatic motifs of the low stage. But were Valerius the author of Phormio and L. Valerius the jurist the same man? Shackleton Bailey EF wonders whether the man called Valerius in the passage of Cicero was the mimographer whom Martial (..–), Juvenal (.–; .–), and Tertullian (Adv. Valentinianos .) call Catullus, who composed a mime entitled Phasma (Iuv. .; schol. Iuv. .– = . Wessner), and another mime entitled Laureolus which was
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Trebatius; the character of a British lawyer portrayed on stage in parody of Cicero’s correspondent would have amused the Roman audience (says Cicero), and possibly Trebatius himself, but for Cicero this is not a laughing matter (Ad fam. ..). In the second letter (Testim. ), which Cicero addresses to the orator and poet Q. Cornificius, Laberius is mentioned next to T. Plancus Bursa, whom Cicero had prosecuted for his participation in the rioting after Clodius’ death, and to the mimographer Publilius, who is reported to have competed with Laberius in the ludi Victoriae Caesaris in late September in front of Caesar. Cicero ironically remarks that he feels proud of being able to see disreputable people and to hear unworthy literary compositions without getting upset (Ad fam. .. animo aequissimo). But the resentment he claims to feel at having to listen to Laberius’ verses, in case he offended Caesar by walking out of the theatre, should not suggest that Laberius was unpopular with the Roman audience, which included members of the aristocracy. On the performed under Caligula (Suet. Calig. .; for evidence on this mime see Ioseph. Antiqu. ., Mart. Spect. .–, Iuv. .–, Tert. Adv. Valentinianos .; L. Herrmann in M. Renard and P. Laurens, eds., Hommages a` Henry Bardon, Collection Latomus (Bruxelles ) –; K. M. Coleman JRS () –; and K. M. Coleman, Martial: liber spectaculorum (Oxford ) – ). Wiseman Catullus – argues forcefully that Catullus the mimographer and C. Valerius Catullus the love-poet were the same person. Although his view has not been received favourably (see, for example, Shackleton Bailey EF : ‘the theory . . . can hardly be taken seriously’), many of the questions Wiseman raises (especially on p. ) can be satisfactorily answered only if that view is accepted. It is certainly possible that the man whom Cicero calls Valerius in his letter to Trebatius dated to is Catullus the poet (Wiseman Catullus : ‘accepting the age at death as accurate, we should be prepared to admit –, –, –, or even a later thirty-year span, as the dates of Catullus’ life’), but why would Cicero call Catullus the poet sodalem nostrum? And given the legal profession of the addressee of the letter, is it not more likely that this Valerius was the jurist L. Valerius? On the theatrical association of Cicero’s vocabulary (persona . . . iureconsulti) see Shackleton Bailey EF –, who refers to Cic. Phil. . (persona de mimo) and to the title Iurisperita, which Charisius and the scholia Veronensia on Verg. Aen. . attribute to the playwright of fabulae togatae Titinius (–). On Bursa see RE . –; Shackleton Bailey EF and .
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contrary, both of these letters demonstrate that Laberius enjoyed a good reputation as composer of mimes amongst the Romans at least throughout the s and until the mid-s; furthermore, Cicero himself elsewhere confesses that he is interested in the puns and he is attracted by the political dimension of the mimetheatre (see p. ). There is no evidence showing that, before , Laberius had performed as an actor in a mime composed by himself or anyone else. This is not surprising: Laberius was said to have belonged to the second highest Roman social class, and acting would have brought him only infamia and the loss of his equestrian status. So it is unclear why Caesar in invited Laberius to perform in one of his own mimes at the plebeian games. Were there no prominent or professional mime-actors available? Was Caesar’s invitation a tyrannical act of revenge on Caesar’s part for the anti-Caesarian jokes made in Laberian plays? This is what modern scholars believe, and their interpretation seems to be supported by the text of Macrobius himself, who appears to connect Caesar’s invitation to Laberius to act in a mime with the opinion that Laberius was a harsh and outspoken individual (see Sat. ..: Laberium asperae libertatis equitem Romanum Caesar quingentis milibus invitavit; and Giancotti Mimo ). But are we perhaps looking at this event from the wrong end? Should we not rather view it as Caesar’s flattering gesture to Laberius, with which Caesar acknowledged Laberius’ theatrical genius and rewarded it with the considerable sum of HS , (HS , more than the minimum census qualification in the imperial period for members of the equestrian class)? It may be that Laberius had such an excellent reputation as a mimographer On the infamia of the actors see the passages listed in Giancotti Mimo n. , and the bibliography mentioned in Jory Competition n. . There are excellent discussions of the reputation of actors in Leppin Histrionen –; C. Edwards, The politics of immorality in ancient Rome (Cambridge ) – and ‘Unspeakable professions: Public performances and prostitution in ancient Rome’, in J. P. Hallett and M. B. Skinner, eds., Roman sexualities (Princeton ) –.
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that Caesar thought that the Roman audience would be delighted to see the most celebrated comic author of his time performing in one of his own plays during games which Caesar himself would attend. But the iambic lines which Macrobius and Seneca the Younger say that Laberius composed on that occasion suggest that he interpreted Caesar’s act as an insult to his old age, his social status, his character, and the Roman people in general (–). The event of the public performance of Laberius in one of his own mimes was first discussed by Petrus Crinitus in , and since then it has been included in every anthology of Latin poetry or literary history which mentioned Laberius or the Roman mime. All of these scholarly accounts draw heavily from Macrobius’ text without challenging its reliability; this was to be expected, because, unlike our other sources on this matter, Macrobius’ account is lengthy and detailed. It was only in that, after careful examination of the way in which Macrobius structured the story relating Laberius, Caesar, Publilius, and Cicero (Testim. , , , and ), Macrobius’ text was correctly interpreted as a garbled and confused version conflating the following three events: (a) Laberius, invited by Caesar with the promise of a large fee, acts on stage in one of his own mimes; he does not compete against Publilius or anyone else on that occasion. (b) At the end of this performance and while he was on his way to the seating-area Laberius exchanges sharp witticisms with Cicero. (c) On a completely different occasion, Laberius competes with the Syrian mimographer Publilius in front of Caesar, and is defeated.
On the contribution of Petrus Crinitus to Laberian scholarship see p. . The most useful discussions of the passage of Macrobius about L., Caesar, and Publilius are Giancotti Mimo –; Jory Competition – and –, Schwartz Anecdotes; and Till Caesar –. My account is indebted to these studies. Of
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The confusion in the text of Macrobius (Sat. ..–; ..; ..) may be demonstrated if we consider exactly how Macrobius’ narrative in each section of his account relates to the narrative of the same events found in earlier authors. Event (a): the public performance by Laberius in (i) Macr. Sat. .. (Laberium . . . his versibus; for the full text see fr. ): this narrative is possibly derived from a vita Laberi composed by Suetonius as part of the now fragmentary De viris illustribus (so Schwartz Anecdotes ). The incident described by Macrobius took place in early November . Since Caesar is said to have invited Laberius to perform as a mime-actor, I assume that the so-called ‘prologue’ and the remaining parts of Laberius’ no longer extant mime were not improvised but had been carefully composed in advance of the performance. This hypothesis has implications for the recording and transmission of these lines, which eventually found their way into Macrobius’ text. The same event is reported (albeit in a condensed fashion) in Suetonius’ life of Caesar (Testim. ), which also contains the detail of the fee Laberius was to get for his performance (quingentis; do we need to supply milibus?), and of the gold ring (anulo aureo) which Caesar presented to Laberius in order that he might be restored as a member of the equestrian less value are E. Hoffmann RhM () –; W. A. Krenkel, Caesar und der Mimus des Laberius (Hamburg ); and A. L´opez and A. Pocin˜ a, ‘D´ecimo Laberio, el caballero mim´ografo’, in S. Harwardt and J. Schwind, eds., Corona Coronaria: Festschrift f¨ur Hans-Otto Kr¨oner zum . Geburtstag (Hildesheim ) –. The fact that L. appears to have performed in only one mime should not make us emend the plural mimos to mimum in Macrobius (ipse ageret mimos quos scriptitabat). The imperfect tense of the frequentative form scriptitabat suggests that Caesar did not have a specific mime of L. in mind, and that Macrobius used mimos in a general sense (‘and that he himself should perform in the mimes which he was in the habit of writing’).
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class (the same detail is mentioned again in Macr. Sat. .. and ..). Suetonius’ account goes back to an earlier, now unidentifiable source, a witness of which is a passage in Seneca the Elder (Testim. ). I cannot say whether or not this source had included the lines of Laberius’ ‘prologue’. But it is also possible that Macrobius borrowed this account not directly from Suetonius, but from another, perhaps intermediate source, for instance Gellius (Testim. ), who may have derived it from Suetonius. (ii) Macr. Sat. .. (Necessitas . . . retineo; for the full text see fr. ): this narrative is possibly derived, either directly or indirectly, from the vita Laberi mentioned above. If it has been derived indirectly, a candidate for the transmission of these lines to Macrobius may be Gellius (see .: atque inibi appositi versus super eadem re eiusdem Laberii). The dramatic date of this event is . (iii) Macr. Sat. .. (in ipsa . . . perdimus; for the full text see fr. ): the immediate source for this passage is unknown, but it is likely that the incident described here was originally included in the same source from which Macrobius drew the fragment necesse est multos timeat quem multi timent, which immediately follows this fragment in Macrobius’ account. This unknown source may have been the Suetonian vita Laberi, itself possibly indebted to a text written before the time of the Senecas [see below, § (iv)]. The dramatic date of this event is still . The implication of Macrobius’ comment that Laberius was taking revenge in any way he could in ipsa quoque actione ‘during the performance of the play itself’ suggests both that Laberius’ caustic remarks were not confined to the ‘prologue’, and that the script of this mime was only occasionally peppered with statements against Caesar’s autocratic behaviour (in other words, the main theme of the mime in question was not an attack on Caesar’s policy). This section of Macrobius’ account also contains the only explicit piece of evidence testifying that Laberius acted: his acting is
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made clear by the fact that he is reported to have assumed the appearance (inducto habitu) of a slave (Syri), perhaps a fugitive slave, whose body-language indicated that he had been flogged (velut flagris caesus praeripientique se similis), and to have exclaimed (exclamabat) in verse. Macrobius (and/or his source) identifies the character personified by Laberius as Syrus, and Schwartz Anecdotes – argued at length that this word should be interpreted primarily not as a proper name (‘Syrus’) indicating servile origin but as an ethnic name (‘a man from Syria’), and that the name Syrus along with the line porro Quirites libertatem perdimus, which this character is said to have uttered, constitutes Laberius’ implicit attack on Caesar’s favourable policy towards the Syrians in Palestine. But Giancotti Mimo – has usefully pointed out that a comment on Caesar’s foreign policy in Palestine bears little, if any, connection with the alleged loss of freedom amongst the citizens in Rome, and that it would be nonsensical to have a Syrian slave commenting on Roman freedom (a quality which he does not possess). I believe that the senarius which Macrobius attributes to Laberius and the Syrian identity of the character would have made more sense to us in their original context, which we do not have. I take habitus to mean ‘demeanour, manner, bearing’ (OLD s.v. a; TLL ..–), and induco to be used figuratively to indicate that someone assumes a likeness of someone else: OLD s.v. a; TLL ..–; Ovid employs inducere literally in a narrative of actual transformation (Met. . humanam membris inducere formam). L. therefore may be visualised as having appeared on stage maskless, shoeless (as mime-actors usually were), wearing the short garment of a slave, and assuming the overall posture associated with slaves in comedies (on this see C. Panayotakis, ‘Nonverbal behaviour on the Roman comic stage’, in D. Cairns, ed., Body language in the Greek and Roman worlds (Swansea ) and ). Till Caesar n. concludes that L. in this performance was an actor secundarum partium (see Hor. Epist. ..–), but Festus M = L says that this role was usually reserved for the character of the parasitus. On this policy see Flav. Joseph. Ant. Iud. ., ., and .. Giancotti’s view is favoured by Till Caesar n. .
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But I am also inclined to agree with Giancotti and take the name Syrus as simply indicating ‘a slave’, like Syrus in Ter. HT and Ad., and in Pl. Pseud. . Giancotti, however, goes even further and argues that with this name Laberius alludes to his rival Publilius and to the humiliation which he (Laberius), a Roman knight, suffered, because he was unwillingly degraded to the level of a mime-actor from Syria (Mimo ). The problem with this attractive interpretation is that there was no competition between Laberius and Publilius in the plebeian games of , and that Publilius appears not to have been present at these games since he is not mentioned by the other authors (Seneca the Elder, Seneca the Younger, Suetonius) who offer an account of this event. My view is that, as far as the extant evidence shows, Laberius seems to have played the role of a slave-character called Syrus; the incongruity created by the fact that ‘Syrus’, a slave, is alerting the free Roman citizens to the loss of their liberty may have been precisely what Laberius wanted to create in that part of the play; but since the audience was aware that Laberius was playing ‘Syrus’ against his will, it was unavoidable (as Macrobius himself confesses) that the words of the character ‘Syrus’ would have been taken out of their theatrical context and viewed as a direct accusation levelled against Caesar. As far as I know, no-one has drawn attention yet to the similarity between L.’s fr. (cited in Macr. Sat. ..) and Pl. Rud. –, in which the slave Trachalio rushes out of the temple of Venus and, in a comic reversal of social status and in a highly rhetorical style, employs the legal process of quiritatio, which enabled him to cry out publicly in protest and ask for help from the citizens of Cyrene, whom he calls populares (this may be rendered ‘fellow-citizens’); Trachalio wants to save the girls Palaestra and Ampelisca and the priestess Ptolemocratia from the clutches of the evil pimp Labrax, who attacked the women inside the temple. But is a slave entitled to make use of the procedure of quiritatio, and does Trachalio, whose master (Plesidippus) is Athenian, have a right to expect assistance from ‘fellow-Cyrenaeans’? This incongruity is surely part of the joke, and I believe that we should interpret L.’s fr. along similar lines.
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(iv) Macr. Sat. ..– (et paulo . . . lapidatam; for the full text see fr. (b)): the way in which Macrobius introduces this fragment (et paulo post adiecit) suggests that he may have taken it directly from the same source as passage (iii) above, namely the vita Laberi of Suetonius, but the ultimate origin of both this and the previous fragment is likely to have been a source composed before the time of Seneca the Younger, possibly a collection of sayings (dicta) of eminent public figures which included lines attributed to Laberius (so Schwartz Anecdotes and ). The verse necesse est multos timeat quem multi timent, which Macrobius attributes to Laberius, is also cited by Seneca the Younger (see fr. (a)), and resembles strikingly a senarius which appears amongst the sententiae of the mimographer Publilius (M multos timere debet quem multi timent).
Seneca is not as generous with information on the context of this fragment as Macrobius is, and he does not say explicitly (as Macrobius does) that L. spoke this line while he was acting; however, it is clear that, whatever its original context, Seneca situates the line in an intensely charged political climate (Laberianus ille versus qui medio civili bello in theatro dictus; the battle at Pharsalus and Pompey’s death in Egypt in were still fresh in the Roman audience’s mind), and this squares with the comment of Macrobius that L.’s dicacitas (OLD s.v.: ‘mordant or caustic raillery’) delivered a blow (the verb lapidare ‘to stone’ is attested in a figurative sense only in late Latin: TLL ..– ) to Caesar’s impotentia (OLD s.v. : ‘lack of self-restraint, immoderate behaviour’). P. Hamblenne, ‘L’opinion romaine en – et les sentences “politiques” de Publilius Syrus’, ANRW . (Berlin ) and , thinks that Publilius’ maxim was intentionally phrased as an almost exact copy of the statement of L. against Caesar, and that it was uttered during the games in honour of Caesar in . But Giancotti Mimo – and Till Caesar n. are rightly sceptical about this, since Macrobius (Sat. ..) says that L.’s caustic jibe against Caesar made him (Caesar) transfer his support from L. to Publilius (ob haec in Publilium vertit favorem); but why would Publilius in Caesar’s presence use a phrase which would not please the most important public figure in Rome at that time? Till (above) believes that Publilius’ line was heard in the theatre after Caesar’s death in during the Megalensian games, an event in which Cicero was greatly interested (see Ad Att. .., dated to April ).
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Event (c): the competition between Laberius and Publilius in Of Caesars loue to Poets The Romaine Publius and Laberius, (Two Poets whome great Caesar fauored) Their Skill that Caesar held most serious, Though by most Caesars now disfauoured: Why should not Poetry please those great Kesars? It is, because those Kesars, are not Caesars. John Davies (?–), from The Scourge of Folly ()
(v) Macr. Sat. .. (ob haec in Publilium vertit favorem). Influenced perhaps by the account of Gellius (Testim. ), who attributed to Laberius’ maledicentia and adrogantia the fact that Caesar favoured Publilius’ mimes over Laberius’, Macrobius continues his narrative by wrongly supposing that Laberius, while he assumed the role of Syrus, was competing against Publilius. But, as was mentioned above, there is no evidence in authors earlier than Macrobius that Laberius and Publilius competed in , and the confusion becomes clear if we conclude that Macrobius’ sentence ob . . . favorem refers to the famous contest between these two mimographers, which took place not in but in late September during the ludi Victoriae Caesaris; these games had been instituted to celebrate Caesar’s victory over his republican opponents at Thapsus. Macrobius may have been confused by the mention in his source of a Syrus, whom he may have taken to be Publilius from Syria; it is no coincidence that he starts the next sentence in his account with the words is Publilius natione Syrus (Sat. ..). (vi) Macr. Sat. ..– (is Publilius . . . subleva; for the full text see fr. ). Macrobius’ misconception gives him the opportunity to digress and insert into the narrative flow of what he
See Schwartz Anecdotes ; Shackleton Bailey EF –.
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thought was the competition between Laberius and Publilius an account of Publilius’ life and career until the games in Rome in . According to Pliny the Elder (NH .), Publilius was born probably at Antioch and came to Italy, together with the astronomer Manilius and the grammarian Staberius Eros, as a young slave. Macrobius (Sat. ..– ) says that Publilius gained his manumission by his wit (he cites two Publilian jokes as evidence for this) and beauty, and received a careful education. According to Suetonius (Vita Terenti ), Terence had exactly the same qualifications and, likewise, was educated with the support of a rich patron. The similarity of these romantic accounts undermines their reliability, and suggests that Pliny the Elder, Suetonius, and Macrobius, who do not specify their sources, were drawing from a stock tradition of biographies of poor and unknown foreigners turned famous and influential public figures once they arrived in Italy, and specifically in Rome, the cultural centre of the world. It is likely then, as Schwartz (Anecdotes ) persuasively argues, that Macrobius’ source for this section of his account is a now lost vita Publili, possibly of Suetonian authorship. What exactly do the extant sources say about the games of ? The audience’s attention was undoubtedly focussed on Publilius. Laberius may have had a reputation as an outspoken mimographer, but Macrobius mentions that Publilius, prior to his appearance at Rome, had already become a celebrity through the successful performances he had given, while touring the villages of Italy, as an actor in mimes which he himself had composed (mimos componeret ingentique adsensu in Italiae oppidis agere coepisset); the phrase productus Romae ‘presented on the stage The best scholarly account of Publilius is still O. Skutsch’s entry in RE . – s.v. Publilius . But Giancotti Mimo – ought also to be consulted. On the testimonia and the fragments of Publilius see pp. –, n. . On the early career of Publilius see O. Skutsch RE . ; Giancotti Mimo ; and Till Caesar and n. .
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at Rome’ suggests both that Publilius was the highlight of the show and that he had never appeared in Rome before . Caesar’s delight at having the new star of the mime-stage competing against the celebrated and elderly Laberius (in the ‘prologue’ delivered in it is claimed that he was years old) must have been immense. According to Macrobius, Publilius challenged everyone who, at the time of the games (tunc), had some kind of connection with the stage; the competitors could be mimographers or mime-actors or people who had somehow rendered service to the theatre (omnes qui tunc scripta et operas suas in scaenam locaverant). The rules of the competition were clear: if the opponent should be a playwright, then he and Publilius would need to produce ‘in turn’ (in vicem; OLD s.v. ) and off the cuff a composition on a given theme (posita . . . materia) as circumstances allowed (pro tempore); if the opponent should be an actor, then he and Publilius would compete on a On producere ‘to bring on to the stage’ see OLD s.v. c; TLL ..– .. E. Hauler (WS () ) misinterprets productus (‘emporgekommen, gross und ber¨uhmt geworden’) and is rightly criticised by Giancotti Mimo and Till Caesar n. . That there was a distinction between the different types of competitors is clearly shown by the juxtaposition between scripta and operas suas (see Giancotti Mimo –; Till Caesar n. ). The former refers to the playwrights who produced scripts intended to be publicly performed; the latter has a general sense and may have referred to those who either worked as actors or helped as stage-hands in putting on a play. For this meaning of opera in a theatrical context see Varro in Gellius .. (sed enim Saturionem et Addictum et tertiam quandam, cuius nunc mihi nomen non subpetit, in pistrino eum [scil. Plautum] scripsisse Varro et plerique alii memoriae tradiderunt, cum pecunia omni, quam in operis artificum scaenicorum pepererat, in mercatibus perdita inops Romam redisset); for the phrase operam or operas locare see TLL ..–. For materia designating the subject-matter of plays Till Caesar n. refers to Cic. Inv. . and Quint. ... For pro tempore = ‘according to the circumstances’ see OLD s.v. pro b and Till Caesar –. Giancotti Mimo wrongly speculates that this phrase referred to the limited period of time during which each of the competitors would need to demonstrate their skills.
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given theme in acting. Therefore, the criteria and rules of the contest depended upon the theatrical ‘specialisation’ of each of Publilius’ opponents. But, as Jory has eloquently demonstrated, Publilius was bound to be the winner in this type of competition, since he, like his compatriot Archias (Cic. Arch. ), had acquired his theatrical skills in a cultural tradition which favoured improvisation. So there is absolutely no evidence either in Macrobius’ account or elsewhere in our extant sources that Publilius was involved in an acting competition with Laberius; he and all the other playwrights who are said to have been defeated by Publilius were not asked to act but to compose drama on the spot. This interpretation is corroborated by (and squares with) the fact that Cicero (Testim. ) says that he heard (as opposed to saw) the compositions (poemata) of Laberius and Publilius, and by the statement Publilius is reported to have made to Laberius, saying that the latter competed with the former in his capacity as ‘author’: quicum contendisti scriptor, hunc spectator subleva ‘as a spectator encourage the man with whom you competed as an author’ (Macr. Sat. ..). Macrobius does not reveal either how many playwrights accepted Publilius’ invitation and competed with him, or who decided whether the winner was Publilius or one of his opponents. Caesar’s jovial senarius, saying that Laberius was defeated by Syrus
On the improvisational skill of Archias see Cic. Arch. (quotiens ego hunc Archiam vidi, iudices, . . . quotiens ego hunc vidi, cum litteram scripsisset nullam, magnum numerum optimorum versuum de eis ipsis rebus quae tum agerentur dicere ex tempore, quotiens revocatum eandem rem dicere commutatis verbis atque sententiis!) and Jory Competition . This is a very symmetrical trochaic septenarius (pronoun – verb – noun / pronoun – noun – verb) appropriately composed for the occasion; the caesura after the eighth element (scriptor) separates neatly the two clauses. The word scriptor (as opposed to actor) need not imply that the extempore verses of L. and Publilius had been partly prepared in advance of the competition in written form, as Giancotti Mimo thinks.
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despite his (i.e. Caesar’s) preference for Laberius, does not necessarily mean that the judge of the competition was only Caesar; he may have been guided in his verdict by the reaction (laughter or applause) of the audience. If it is right, then, to accept the view that the contest between Laberius and Publilius was not in the disreputable sphere of acting but in the highly regarded area of extempore poetic composition, there is no cogent reason to assume that Laberius in late September lost his equestrian status or suffered infamia (as he did in early November ) by participating in this event, which no-one, according to our sources, had forced him to do. Therefore, it becomes clear that Macrobius, in his sentence statimque Publilio palmam et Laberio anulum aureum cum quingentis sestertiis (scil. Caesar) dedit (Sat. ..), conflates events, whose dramatic dates are (the prize awarded to Publilius) and (the restoration of Laberius to the equestrian class by means of the gold ring and HS ,), respectively. But this is not the end of the story. (vii) Macr. Sat. .. (sed et Laberius . . . laus est lubrica; for the full text see fr. ). If we are to trust Macrobius’ account, the four lines which are attributed to Laberius in this section of the text seem to have formed part of a new mime (novo mimo) which was both different from the poetic compositions
Macr. Sat. .. favente tibi me victus es, Laberi, a Syro. Caesar plays with the meanings of the word Syrus: ‘Syrus, an ethnic name designating Publilius’ origin’ and ‘a Syrian’. So what he essentially says to L., as Till Caesar points out, is that he (L. the Roman) was defeated by a man from Syria (Publilius). The caesura after the fifth element (me) separates the two parts of the line in both syntax (ablative absolute / passive voice construction) and sense (‘I favoured you’ / ‘you have been defeated’). On faveo = ‘I admire (an actor vel sim.)’ see OLD s.v. b and Till Caesar n. . Giancotti Mimo is wrong to think that ‘il nec ullo recusante del § si pu`o e si deve intendere nel senso che anche Laberio, in forza dell’obbligante invito di Cesare, fin´ı con l’accettare la sfida. Sia al § , sia al § Laberio subisce la costrizione dell’invito cesariano: unica costrizione, in un’unica circostanza’. But the events in § and in § of Macrobius’ narrative did not take place on the same occasion.
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previously improvised by Laberius in his contest with Publilius, and said to have been performed sequenti statim commissione. TLL .– includes this passage in the list of extracts in which commissio almost = ludus; OLD s.v. translates commissio as ‘the commencement, or holding, of games’. Sequenti statim commissione would then mean ‘without delay at the beginning of the following games’. But does Macrobius have in mind games other than the ludi Victoriae Caesaris or does he refer to a new stage (i.e. not the competition of Publilius and his rivals) in these games? J. Stroux (Philologus () ), Giancotti (Mimo –) and Till (Caesar and n. ) believe that commissio here = ‘performance’; this makes sense, because the lines which Macrobius says that Laberius composed (= ), and which stress the slippery nature of praise and the temporariness of achieving glory, would have little point if Publilius, at whom the lines were aimed, were not in the audience to hear them. But it would be wrong to believe, as Till (Caesar ) confidently asserts, that these lines were uttered by Laberius while he was on stage competing with Publilius. I am inclined to think that, before the competition with Publilius, Laberius had composed a mime destined for public performance at the games in honour of Caesar; that this mime was performed during these games in but this happened shortly after the event of Laberius’ competition with Publilius in improvised poetic composition; that it was professional mime-actors, not Laberius, who acted in this mime; and that, after his defeat by Publilius, Laberius had the time to insert (interiecit, as Macrobius says at ..) into the script the four senarii cited in Sat. ... This would explain why these lines survived: Giancotti (Mimo –) interprets Macrobius’ text along similar lines, and believes that Macrobius’ silence regarding the outcome of the mime performed at the sequens commissio reinforces the impression that these four senarii formed the only link between the result of the competition of L. and Publilius and the novus mimus.
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they were part of a written script; if they had been uttered on the spur of the moment by Laberius in his capacity as actor (as Till (Caesar ) suggests), who recorded them and how did they find their way into Macrobius’ source? Nothing else is known about Laberius’ participation in the games of . Event (b): L. exchanges sarcastic jokes with Cicero in (viii) Seneca the Elder (Testim. ), Suetonius (Testim. ), and Macrobius (Testim. and ) report that, after Caesar restored Laberius to the equestrian class at the end of the plebeian games in , Laberius went to sit at the front of the theatre in the first rows, which were reserved for the knights. However, according to Seneca the Elder and Macrobius, Cicero teased Laberius by saying that he (Cicero) would have made room for him (Laberius) if he (Cicero) had not already been cramped in his seat. Laberius is said to have retorted that it was unusual for Cicero to be cramped in his seat because he normally sat on two seats. The sarcastic subtext of these witticisms was Cicero’s political fickleness and Caesar’s decision to increase the number of senators (in the Senate had members) by rewarding people who had supported his party. Macrobius reports this event, whose reliability is dubious to say the least, in two versions which have slightly different wording, and he places them in two separate parts of his work, neither of which is located either near Macrobius’ citation of the ‘prologue’ of Laberius or near his account of the contest between Laberius and Publilius. The position of these passages amongst a host of dicta attributed to Roman male and female public figures suggests that Macrobius’ source was a collection of witty sayings, possibly compiled originally by Tiro, augmented by Asinius Pollio, and circulating in published form after the banishment of Augustus’ daughter Julia and before the appearance of Seneca’s Controversiae (he seems to draw
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material from this source for his text). Even if the meeting of Cicero and Laberius is entirely fictional, it builds on and corroborates the impression that Laberius was quick-witted and topical in his comments, and it is not surprising that he chose the sub-literary genre of the mimus as a vehicle for his literary experimentations with comic drama.
V L A B E R I U S ’ L A N G UAG E A N D T H E M E S If we are to believe Macrobius’ account (.., .., ..–, .., ..) of how Laberius behaved towards three powerful individuals of his time (Clodius Pulcher, Cicero, and Julius Caesar; see pp. –), it appears that Laberius was regarded, at least in the later part of his life, as a successful mimographer, whose social status and witty dicacitas made him formidable and enabled him to decline commissions and insult leading public figures. It is this wit (sal) that Horace, when relating Lucilius to Laberius (S. ..–), singles out as the most distinctive feature of the mimographer’s style, only to conclude that Laberius’ mimi are ultimately not pulchra poemata, because making the listener grin is not enough to make a composition qualify as beautiful poetry. Horace’s aesthetic criteria include polish, brevity, and stylistic alternation from the playful to the stern and from the moderately comic to the solemn, but it is unclear whether these criteria apply only to Horace’s criticism of Lucilius’ poetry or are valid by implication also for Horace’s disapproval of Laberius This reconstruction is based on the analysis of Schwartz Anecdotes . In his article he points out all the inconsistencies in (and the problems raised by) the different narratives of the jokes between L. and Cicero, and correctly doubts the authenticity of the event. Perhaps it was this reputation of L. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that inspired Samuel Coleridge to add the name ‘Laberius’ as a form of signature at the end of three satirical poems of his (‘Parliamentary Oscillators’; ‘On Deputy’; and ‘To a Well-Known Musical Critic, Remarkable for His Ears Sticking Through His Hair’).
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as a stylistically defective poet. Likewise, Laberius’ reception in the archaising culture of the second century AD is somewhat mixed. Whereas Fronto, M. Aurelius’ eloquent teacher and a formative figure in the shaping of Gellius’ views on elegant style, commends Laberius for his choice of unusual words and for his inimitable expressions (Testim. and frs. –), Sulpicius Apollinaris, Gellius’ distinguished tutor, is reported to have criticised Laberius for the base and undistinguished elements he introduced into the Latin language (Gell. .. and Holford-Strevens Gellius ), an opinion which may or may not have contributed to Gellius’ almost complete dislike of Laberius’ vocabulary. According to Gellius’ detailed and critical discussion of Laberius’ language and style (.), Laberius’ characteristics as a writer were two: his excessive freedom in coining neologisms and his exploitation of obsolete and uncouth words apparently derived from the language of the lower classes. The latter feature may be partly justified by reasons associated with mime as a literary (or ‘sub-literary’) genre. Like the Atellane farces, mime normally presented on stage trivial and low situations pertaining to ordinary people; therefore, it was reasonable to expect that the vocabulary used in mimes would reflect the mundane atmosphere of the subject-matter. The former characteristic of Laberius as writer, according to Gellius, is more complicated to explain. Witticisms and wordplays were one of the stock ingredients of mime-humour long before the time of Laberius and Cicero, the latter of whom not See E. Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford ) –; N. Rudd, The Satires of Horace (Cambridge ) –; P. M. Brown, Horace Satires I (Warminster ) –; K. Freudenburg, Satires of Rome: Threatening poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge ) . On Fronto’s stylistic theory and his influence on Gellius see HolfordStrevens Gellius –; the best (and most recent) discussion on the different attitude of Fronto and Gellius towards L. is Garcea and Lomanto. Gellius praises L.’s language and style only on four occasions (he cites him times): , , , and .
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only discusses mime-wit in relation to oratory (De orat. ., .–, .) but also quotes from it (De orat. .–). With his ungrammatical and often extravagant neologisms, therefore, Laberius is clearly continuing the long-established tradition of puns in comedy, but also acknowledges his debt to a literary predecessor who had excelled in this type of humour: Plautus. Analysis of the remains of Laberius’ mimes demonstrates that the thematic and linguistic boundaries between the Greco-Roman fabula palliata and the Roman mimus were much more blurred than our sources (mainly, grammarians of late antiquity) would like us to believe, and it seems to me that it was inevitable for Laberius to have been influenced by Plautus’ verbal jokes and method of composing neologisms, since he (Laberius) was living in an era when Plautus’ plays were both studied by learned men such as Varro (in his now lost De poetis and De comoediis Plautinis) and produced on stage with renowned actors (such as Roscius) playing famous roles (such as Ballio) to great popular acclaim. On the other hand, a closer look at the idiosyncratic and artificial manner in which Laberius employed the Latin language reveals both that he may have deliberately wanted to surpass Plautus in coining entertaining new words or in amusingly altering old ones, and that Gellius’ assessment of Laberius was somewhat simplistic in its approach. For, in addition to the terminology coined by Laberius, it appears that he often liked to employ the rules of Latin morphology in order to play with existing words which were either favoured by or unattested before Cicero, and to engage in grammatical debates, which formed the topic of heated discussion in the intellectual circles of the Roman upper classes of the mid-first century. In addition to the neologisms and vulgarisms which Laberius appears to No scholar has contributed to our understanding of the Plautine comic spirit at work more than Fraenkel in EP. On Plautine language specifically see L. Palmer, The Latin language (London ) –; Barsby Bacchides –, –; Duckworth Comedy – and . See Gratwick Menaechmi , –; Garton Aspects chapter .
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have favoured, there are in his extant corpus many instances of proverbial expressions, technical terms, rare and archaic words, and phrases whose formation is clearly influenced by Greek syntax and grammar. The imagery he employs to create comic effect comes from the spheres of agriculture, medicine, philosophy, cooking, chariot-racing, and the kingdom of animals and birds (see, for instance, n. inplastrum; ; ; .n. eugium; .n. coctus; n. ex Cynica; .n. gruem Baliaricum; n. blatta; nn. porrus and palma; .n. cursus transversi; .n. florens cacumen . . . frangere; .n. vigebam; .n. hedera serpens). This multi-layered and wide-ranging style of Laberius has been compared to the style of the erudite Herodas, the compositions of the novi poetae, and the Menippean Satires of Varro, and has been interpreted as Laberius’ artistic response to the growing intellectual demands and sophistication of the Roman theatrical audience of the mid-first century BC in linguistic innovation and playwriting skills (see Carilli Hapax –). While there is no doubt that Laberius’ language is complex, it is important to note that the verbal humour of his mimes would also have been recognised and enjoyed by spectators whose erudition was not as impressive as that of the members of the Roman upper class. His neologisms are not aimed exclusively at the entertainment of a small group of educated people, because many of the suffixes, prefixes, and verbal stems which Laberius employs in a witty fashion would have been known to the average Roman spectator, who would have been amused at the realisation that parts of ordinary speech have been used in an original way. What follows is an overview of the linguistic peculiarities of the extant fragments of Laberius: detailed comments on each of the following forms are found in the commentary. My categorisation and linguistic discussion both here and in the commentary are indebted to the following studies: Bacherler W¨orter; Bonfante Lingua; B. Boyce, The language of the freedmen in Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis (Leiden ) –, –; Carilli Hapax; Fischer Observations; Giancotti Mimo –; Marzullo Mimo –; and Traglia Lingua.
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Phonology memordi (instead of momordi) (.) memordit (instead of momordit) (.)
Morphology Change of grammatical gender and/or declension: alvus (masculine second declension instead of feminine first declension, ) adulterio (masculine or feminine third declension instead of neuter second declension adulterium, (c), (a)) adulteritas (feminine third declension instead of neuter second declension adulterium, (a)) ardor (feminine instead of masculine, .) clipeum (neuter instead of masculine, .) clunes (plural, feminine instead of masculine, ) dogma (feminine first declension instead of neuter third declension, ) grus (masculine instead of feminine, .) inplastrum (neuter second declension instead of feminine first declension, ) lanitia (feminine first declension instead of neuter second declension, .) latrinum (neuter second declension instead of feminine first declension, ) licentiatus (masculine fourth declension instead of feminine first declension licentia, ) miserimonium (neuter second declension instead of feminine first declension miseria, ) pluor (masculine third declension instead of feminine first declension pluvia, ) pugillar (neuter singular instead of masculine plural pugillares, )
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simius (masculine second declension instead of feminine first declension, .) versus (second instead of fourth declension, ) Irregular perfect stem: (or ) (.) praevulserat () Deponent verbal forms instead of active voice verbal forms: hietor () ignescor (.) Deponent verbal forms having a passive meaning: consector (.) frustror () Use of suffixes: –atus (licentiatus, ) –arius (manuarius, ; aulularius, title of fr. ; catularius, title of frs. –; centonarius, title of fr. ) –bundus (amorabunda, ) –enna (levenna, ) –itas (lubidinitas, ; luculentitas, .; deliritas, .) –monium (miserimonium, ; patrimonium, .; mendicimonium, (a); moechimonium, (a)) –olus (foriolus, .) –osus (annosa, ; bibosa, ; mammosa, ; somniculosus, ) Syntax The future infinitive form does not agree with the gender of its subject: . The genitive plural form nostri of the first person
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personal pronoun is used instead of the more apposite form nostrum: . Lexicon In the fragments of unequal length attributed to Laberius there are hapax legomena, of which are nouns, are adjectives, are verbs, and one is an adverb. These may be divided into three main sub-categories: () compound words (for example, lanicutis, reciprocicornis, testitrahus); () words composed by a preposition and a verbal form derived from a noun (for instance, conlabellare, depudicare); and () words composed with the aid of suffixes: these are nouns or adjectives (for example, adulterio, adulteritas, deliritas, lubidinitas, miserimonium, moechimonium, licentiatus, pluor, lanitia, suppolitor, manuarius, foriolus, appeto, amorabundus, bibosus) or verbs (for instance, adulescenturire, puellitari). Given the incomplete state of Laberius’ corpus, the predilection of grammarians to cite only fragments with linguistic peculiarities, and the loss of a great amount of Latin literature composed prior to Laberius or during his lifetime, the significance of these statistics should not be unduly emphasised. The hapax legomena are as follows, in alphabetical order (the asterisk ∗ indicates that Gellius considers this word vulgar): () nouns: abluvium (instead of diluvium, (a))∗ , adulterio (instead of adulterium, (c), (a))∗ , adulteritas (instead of adulterium, (a))∗ , appeto (.), ardor (feminine, .), belonistria (title of fr. ), cacomnemon (title of fr. ), deliritas (.), dictabolaria (), dogma (feminine, ), foriolus (.), hilaria (), lanitia (.), licentiatus (), lubidinitas (), manuarius ()∗ , mendicimonium ((a))∗ , miserimonium (), moechimonium ((a))∗ , pluor (), suppolitor (.), talabarriunculus (instead of talabarrio, )∗ .
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() adjectives: amorabunda (), bibosa (), blandiloquens (.), lanicutis (), levenna (instead of levis, )∗ , populacia (.), praeviridans (.), reciprocicornis (), sobrior (comparative, ), testitrahus (). () verbs: adulescenturire (.), conlabellare (), depudicare (instead of stuprare, (a))∗ , ebriulare (), elucificare (.), hietari (deponent, ), ignesci (deponent, .), iniquare (), manuari ( (a))∗ , puellitari (.). () adverb: mauricatim (.). As well as the asterisked words cited above, Gellius considers vulgar the following words: botulus (instead of farcimen, ), caldonia (), camella (), capitium (.), catomum (), cippus (), cocio (instead of arillator, .), elutriare (), fullonica (), gubernius (instead of gubernator, ), gurdus (.), lavandaria (), malaxo (), nanus (instead of pumilio, and Gell. ..), obba (), pittacium (.), and planus (instead of sycophanta, ). But his motives for thinking this are not always clear. Garcea and Lomanto () provide the following useful overview of Gellius’ opinion on Laberius’ vocabulary: His [Gellius’] disapproval [of L.] is limited to the lexicon, which, on the other hand, is the aspect of the mimographer’s language that Fronto appreciates. In addition to some terms that are not attested in texts predating the mid-second century or are not attested elsewhere (mendicimonium, moechimonium, adulterio, adulteritas, depudicare, manuari, manuarius with the euphemistic meaning of ‘thief’, lavandaria meaning ‘laundry, washing’, talabarriunculus, gubernius, levenna), Gellius censures other words, whose vulgar character is evident either from other sources (gurdus) or from the structure of the word itself (catomum and perhaps malaxare). The vulgar connotation of a number of terms apparently depends, above all, on the character of their referent (garments: capitium; cooking utensils: obba, camella; simple food: botulus; people living on the fringe of society: planus, nanus, cocio), or on their use in the technical jargons of arts and crafts (abluvium, elutriare, fullonica meaning ‘laundry’, cippus, emplastrum), or on their generic meaning (pittacium). These words, however, occur either in technical texts (of land-surveyors, medical doctors, veterinary surgeons), or in literary, even poetic, works, whose language
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deliberately draws on folk idioms (Lucilius, Varro the satirist, Horace’s Sermones and Epistulae, Persius, Petronius, Martial).
Words with special meaning: blitea (= inutilis, ), maesto (= maestifico, ), miseriter (= misere, ). Ten out of the titles which grammarians attribute to Laberius (Alexandrea, Belonistria, Cacomnemon, Colax, Cophinus, Cytherea, Ephebus, Necyomantia, Scylax, and Taurus) are Latin transliterated forms of Greek words (some of them formed according to Latin morphology), and this feature squares well with Laberius’ predilection for unusual and uncommon words of Greek derivation: for instance, we find in fragments attributed to him the forms catomum ‘onto the shoulder’ (), dogma ‘doctrine’ (), eugium ‘pussy’ (.; .), gubernius ‘steersman’ (), inplastrum ‘plaster’ (), malaxare ‘to mash’ (), and pharmacopoles ‘apothecary’ (.). This proportion of Greek words in Laberius’ extant vocabulary surely points to a high degree of Hellenic influence in the drama and the culture of Rome in the mid-first century BC, but does it indicate anything more than that? For example, are we to assume that some of these titles would have been incomprehensible to a part of the audience? This is certainly conceivable, but it should not mean that Laberius was composing his plays for a select circle of educated Romans who would only read his mimes or listen to them in a recital, or see a performance of them only in a private venue. Evidence from two Ciceronian letters (composed in and ) and two passages in Macrobius (reporting events dated possibly to and ), all of which I discussed above (pp. –), strongly suggests that at least some of Laberius’ mimes were performed in the theatre in front of an audience that would presumably have been mixed in terms of social class, intellect, and erudition. It is also historically implausible to argue for recitation in front of a small audience
The best discussion of this issue in relation to titles of comedies and tragedies of the republican period is Jocelyn Ennius –.
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as the means of dissemination of Laberius’ plays only because of some Greek titles in Latinised form and a handful of rare Latin words of Greek origin. My view is that Laberius composed his mimes with public performance in mind, and that the Greek words attested as titles of some plays and found in the text of fragments attributed to him reflect both the ever-growing presence of Greek in the Latin language of the intellectual e´ lite and the lower social classes and Laberius’ fondness for playing with language in a way that would amuse all of his spectators. This conscious decision forms part, I suggest, of Laberius’ literary experimentation with mime as a genre, which in his hands acquires the elevated status that the improvised and unscripted fabulae Atellanae had acquired in the s and s BC in the hands of Pomponius and Novius. Could it also be that some of Laberius’ mimes (not necessarily those which have a Greek word as their title) are direct translations or adaptations of now lost Greek plays (perhaps Hellenistic mimes) along the lines of Plautus’ and Terence’s Latin reworkings of Hellenistic comedies? This is possible but unlikely. There is no extract that I know of in a surviving Greek comedy or mime that looks remotely similar to a fragment of Laberius, and many of the titles attributed to plays by Laberius (for example, Augur, Gemelli, Sorores) point to stock themes and motifs of comic drama rather than to Laberius’ direct debt to specific Greek originals. A possible exception to this is the title Belonistria (on which see the commentary), but on the whole there is not enough evidence to argue persuasively that Laberius based his mimes specifically on the works of Sophron or Herodas or a Hellenistic New Comedy playwright. Taken as a group, then, the titles of mimes attributed to Laberius suggest that his plays dealt with popular religious festivals (Compitalia, Parilicii, Saturnalia), low professions (Belonistria, Centonarius, Colorator, Fullo, Fullonicae, Piscator, Restio, Salinator, Staminariae, Stricturae), people associated with place-names (Alexandrea, Cretensis, Cytherea, Galli, Tusca), mythology (Anna Peranna, Caeculi, Lacus Avernus, Necyomantia), the signs of the zodiac
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(Aries, Cancer, Taurus, Virgo), comic confusion (Aulularius, Gemelli, Imago, Sorores), character-types (Cacomnemon, Colax, Late Loquens, Sedigitus), and everyday aspects of Roman life (Aquae Caldae, Augur, Carcer, Catularius, Cophinus, Ephebus, Natalis, Nuptiae, Paupertas, Scylax). I refer the reader to the relevant sections in the commentary for an explanation of the meaning of each of these words and of their significance as titles of mime-plays. The above categorisation of the extant titles is not meant to be an accurate guide to Laberius’ repertory, but aims at showing the wide variety of the themes Laberius may have tackled in his plays. Some scholars have suggested that a few of Laberius’ mimes had two titles (Lacus Avernus or Necyomantia, Catularius or Scylax, and Fullo or Fullonicae). I am not in favour of this view, and I consider its strong and its weak points in the relevant sections of the commentary. It is impossible to reconstruct with certainty the plot of Laberius’ mimes, and in the commentary I have made only tentative suggestions about the interpretation of the above words as titles. VI LABERIUS’ P ROSODY Although the scanty remains of the plays of Laberius and Publilius do not give a clear indication regarding the modes of delivery employed in the Roman mime, I do not see why authors of Roman literary mimes should have differed in their approach to metrical schemes from their predecessors, Plautus and Terence, in whose scripts there is evidence of spoken verse, recitative, and song. The collection of sententiae traditionally attributed to Publilius consists mainly of senarii (spoken verse) and of a few trochaic septenarii (recitative); but in Petronius’ novel the narrator Encolpius says that during Trimalchio’s dinner the host himself delivered a tortured version of a song from a mime entitled Laserpiciarius (Sat. . atque ipse etiam taeterrima voce de Laserpiciario mimo canticum extorsit). It is possible then that at least some mimes contained all three modes of delivery as exemplified in the authors of the fabula palliata. Nevertheless, it is not certain
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that Laberius himself used lyric metres for ‘arias’ or ‘chorussongs’ in his plays, but it is at least clear that he employed the other two modes of delivery, spoken verse and recitative. So far as it is possible to give an overall picture of the metrical schemes used in the extant corpus of Laberius, I compiled the following list on the basis of my own metrical arrangement of complete and incomplete lines in the fragments attributed to Laberius. Complete senarii: (; .; .–; .–; .; .; .; ; ; .; .–; ; .–; ; ; .–). One of these fragments (), conventionally known as Laberius’ ‘prologue’, is lines long. Complete iambic septenarii: (.; .; .; ). Complete trochaic septenarii: (.; ; ; .; ; .; ; ; ; ; .). Complete iambic octonarii: (; .). Complete trochaic octonarii: (). Incomplete senarii: (or possibly ) (.–; .–; ; .; .–; .; .; .; .–; .; .–; ; (?) ; .–). Incomplete iambic septenarii: (.–; .; .; .; .; ; ; ). Incomplete trochaic septenarii: (; ; ; .; .; .–; .; ; .–; ; .–; .; ; .–; ; ; .–; .–; ; .–; ; .). Incomplete iambic octonarii: (.). Fragments whose metre cannot be decided mainly because they contain very few words: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . It would be unwise to conclude from this list that Laberius preferred senarii over other metres. In scanning the iambic and trochaic lines attributed to Laberius, I adopt the alphabetic notation used by Gratwick in his edition of Terence’s Adelphoe and Plautus’ Menaechmi, and
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taken over by Christenson in his edition of Plautus’ Amphitruo. This notation makes it easy to tackle the problems generated by the traditional podic analysis, and to see the similarity in the structure of iambic and trochaic metres. According to it the metres used by Laberius may be represented as follows: Senarius Iambic septenarius Iambic octonarius Trochaic septenarius Trochaic octonarius
ABCD A/BCD ABcD ABCD ABCD A/BCD ABˆD ABCD ABCD A/BCD ABcD BCD ABCD A/BCD ABcD BCD ABCD A/BCD ABCD A
ABCD constitutes a metron, with the A’s and C’s representing the ancipitia, and the B’s and D’s the longa. The anceps may be realised as a long (A, C), the two resolved shorts of a long (aa, cc), or a single short (a, c; c always in the final metron). The longa appear as either B, D, or their resolved equivalents (bb, dd); . . . the final D always scans long and therefore will be marked D regardless of the actual quantity of the syllable.
I use the symbol / to indicate significant word-end (caesura) after the fifth element in the senarius, the ninth element in the iambic septenarius and octonarius, and the eighth element in the trochaic septenarius. The alphabetic notation makes it easy to notice when Laberius violates the so-called Meyer’s and Luchs’ laws, both of which stress the importance of the ‘cretic’ unit not only in the line-cadence but also in the other metra of the line (except the line-opening). ‘According to Luchs’ law an iambic word ending an iambic line (or half-line) or a trochaic septenarius should not be immediately preceded by another iambic word or a word of three or more syllables ending in an iamb.’ Gratwick Terence –, Terence –, Menaechmi –, –; Christenson Amphitruo –. Christenson Amphitruo . For the symbol ˆ (catalexis) see Gratwick Terence : ‘pause may be formally marked by CATALEXIS, the omission in iambic or trochaic lines of the eighth expected weak place’. Christenson Amphitruo ; see also Soubiran Essai –; Questa Metrica –.
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¯ See, for example, (a). v˘ol(o) ¯el¯ucµfµc¯ar(e) ¯exµt(um) ae ¯¯ tat´s m˘eae ¯¯ . Meyer’s law ‘establishes that a word whose ending corresponds with the end of a foot must be a pure iamb at the following places: the second and fourth feet of the iambic senarius and the corresponding places of the trochaic septenarius, and (usually) the second and sixth foot of the iambic octonarius.’ ˘ a¯ vµd˘e(am) ¯ess˘e n¯equ¯am See, for instance, (a). n(e) ´n r¯e bon f´lµ˘um. The alphabetic notation enables us to re-write these laws in the following fashion: Meyer’s law: ‘if unaccented word end falls in D/, then it should be approached . . . BcD/ not BCD/’ Luchs’ law: ‘if unaccented word end falls in B/, then it should be approached . . . DAB/ not DaB/’. Working with this scheme, it is instructive to count the rate of recurrence of long, short, and resolved elements in all places of the complete senarii of Laberius, and compare the results to the data produced by a corresponding analysis of a sample of lines from Plautus and Terence. Tables A, B, and C demonstrate that there is a noticeable difference in the frequency of long, short, and resolved time-units as used by Laberius in his complete senarii and as used in a sample of , senarii from Plautus and Terence. I have indicated with figures in bold in Tables B and C the metrical places in which Plautus and Terence appear to differ from Laberius by about per cent or more. Christenson Amphitruo –; see also Soubiran Essai –; Questa Metrica –. Gratwick Menaechmi . I am grateful to Adrian Gratwick for providing me with the figures for Plautus and Terence reproduced here. Although there are tables for the distribution of iambic and non-iambic time-units in a part of Pl.’s Men. (see Gratwick Menaechmi –) and in Ter.’s Ad. (see Gratwick Terence –), I have taken the figures in these tables from two research seminars Gratwick gave at Glasgow in February and at St Andrews in October .
L A B E R I U S ’ P RO S O DY
Table A Complete senarii attributed to Laberius Sample size lines; numbers indicate percentages. place A B C D A caesura B C D A B C D
long
short
resolved
. . . . .
. . .
. . . . .
. . . .
. .
. . . .
Table B Plautus’ senarii. Sample size , lines; numbers indicate percentages. place A B C D A caesura B C D A B C D
long
short
resolved
. . . . .
. .
. . . . .
. . . .
. .
. . . .
.
I N T RO D U C T I O N
Table C Terence’s senarii Sample size , lines; numbers indicate percentages. place A B C D A caesura B C D A B C D
long
short
resolved
. . . . .
. . .
. . . . .
. . .
.
. . .
.
Table A, however, is potentially misleading because it includes metrical data pertaining to Laberius’ ‘prologue’, and it is instructive to separate the statistics given in Table A into two categories: one giving this information for the senarii which Laberius is reported to have composed in response to an invitation he received from Caesar to act in one of his own mimes, and the other providing the same information for the remaining complete senarii which belong to various mimes attributed by different authors to Laberius. The reason for this separation is twofold: firstly, the length of fr. invites independent scrutiny; more importantly, the verses which Macrobius attributes to Laberius in Sat. .. are markedly different in style and subjectmatter from the other fragments attributed to Laberius (see ); is Laberius’ employment of the senarius in these lines equally different? The picture which emerges in Table D is somewhat startling, because the statistics of the so-called ‘prologue’ differ more than about per cent in almost all metrical places not only from the figures given above for Plautus (these differences
L A B E R I U S ’ P RO S O DY
Table D The ‘prologue’ attributed to Laberius Sample size lines; numbers indicate percentages. place A B C D A caesura B C D A B C D
long
short
resolved
. . . . .
. . .
. . .
. . . . .
.
. . . . .
.
are indicated by figures in bold) but also from the figures which emerge (Table E) from the metrical analysis of the remaining senarii of Laberius (these differences are indicated by figures in italics; a figure in Table D that is both in bold and in italics indicates a difference by about per cent or more from both the statistics of Plautus and the statistics of the remaining senarii attributed to Laberius). In Table E figures in bold indicate differences by about per cent or more between these statistics and the data given about Plautus (Table B), and figures in italics indicate differences by about per cent or more between these statistics and data given above about Terence (Table C). As far as these statistics go, they demonstrate that in the first five feet Laberius differed greatly from both Plautus and Terence in his treatment of the anceps position A (unlike Plautus and Terence, Laberius seems to favour the sequence aBCD or aBcD over ABcD), that he was closer to Terence than to Plautus in his treatment of the anceps position C, that he was closer to
I N T RO D U C T I O N
Table E The remaining senarii attributed to Laberius Sample size ; numbers indicate percentages. place A B C D A caesura B C D A B C D
long
short
resolved
. . . . .
. . .
. . . . .
. . . . .
. .
. . . .
.
Plautus than to Terence in his treatment of the longum position B, and that he faithfully followed Plautus and Terence in their treatment of the longum position D before the word-break but differed greatly from them in his treatment of the longum position D after the caesura (unlike Plautus and Terence, Laberius appears to have avoided ‘dd’ resolutions). What do these figures mean about Laberius in relation to other writers of senarii of Republican and Augustan date? Table F shows the percentage of pure iambs (both ∪ – ‘an iamb’ and ∪ ∪∪ ‘a tribrach’) in each of the first five feet of a senarius in various writers. In his complete senarii (i.e. not in the ‘prologue’) Laberius seems to differ markedly from the comic and the tragic playwrights of the republic as far as the employment of three-time units (i.e. ∪ – and ∪ ∪∪) in the first and the fourth feet is I provide the statistics for L. (having divided them into three categories) and Publilius, and I take the figures for the other writers from Soubiran Essai –; Gratwick Menaechmi ; and Gratwick Terence .
L A B E R I U S ’ P RO S O DY
Table F Numbers in cols. I–V indicate approximate percentages. foot
I
II
Plautus Men. Terence Ad. Pacuvius Accius Cicero L.’s complete senarii L.’ ‘prologue’ L.’s other complete senarii sententiae of Publilius Hor. Epod. Phaedrus Seneca Phaedra
. . . . . . . . . .
III
IV
. . . . . . . . . .
V
Sample size
. . . . .
lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines
concerned, while some aspects in the versification of the ‘prologue’ (especially the part of the senarius after the caesura) appear to resemble the practice of Phaedrus and Seneca, who composed senarii almost a century after Laberius. The above statistics perhaps create a misleading picture of Laberius’ prosody, a picture complicated by the small number of complete Laberian senarii available for analysis. However, even the fundamental rule of iambo-trochaic versification (as formulated by Gratwick) regarding the cretic sequence BcD does not seem to be faithfully applied by Laberius, in whose extant corpus I counted at least instances of the cretic sequence DaB (in place of the favoured sequence DAB); four of these cases are in the ‘prologue’. Should the figures in Tables D and F cause
Gratwick Menaechmi : ‘Cretic sequences should generally be set as . . . BcD . . . rather than as . . . DaB . . . passim, regardless of word-end.’ See section on metre in ; .; ; .; .; .; .; .; . (twice); .; .; .; .; ; .; ; .; ; (twice); .; ; .; .; .; (twice); ; (twice); ; .; .; ; .; ; .; .; .; .; . (twice). I may not be correct in all of these cases, and
I N T RO D U C T I O N
concern about the authorship of fr. ? In the absence of more concrete evidence from Laberius, I am reluctant to conclude that the ‘prologue’ which Macrobius attributes to Laberius was composed by someone else at a later date (perhaps in the first century AD), and that this composition was copied by Suetonius in his vita Laberi, and found its way into the texts of Gellius and Macrobius. However, it is disconcerting to see a difference in the metrical patterns observed in the ‘prologue’ and in the other complete senarii of Laberius; although I understand why Laberius may have wished to alter his style to suit the unpleasantness of the occasion in which this piece was delivered, I fail to see why he would also want to change the way in which he composed senarii on that occasion. I would therefore recommend caution in using the ‘prologue’ on its own as a basis on which generalisations may be made concerning Laberius as a mime-playwright. It is also worth pointing out that in the ‘prologue’ alone ( lines) there are elisions, and line of this fragment has as many as five elisions in it. But this large number of elisions is perhaps less surprising when compared to the number of elisions found in the passage Gellius attributes to Laberius’ Restio ((a)): there are ten elisions in the eight lines of that fragment, which means that proportionately the passage of Restio has more elisions than fr. . Furthermore, there are other fragments attributed to Laberius that have a large number of elisions: see frs. (a) and (b) (four elisions in one senarius). Meyer’s law too seems to be violated twice (perhaps three times; see section on metre in ; .; and .), and it may well be the case that such facts reflect not negligence or poor poetic skills but a conscious decision on Laberius’ part to break free from the rules of iambo-trochaic verse composition as exemplified by his comic predecessors.
some of these passages certainly involve emendations. But my general point, I believe, is still valid.
TH E HISTO RY O F TH E TEXT OF L A B ERI U S’ MIMES
VII THE HISTORY OF THE TE XT OF LABERIUS’ MIMES None of Laberius’ mimes has survived complete. Only fragments whose length varies from one word to lines, have come down to us as citations in the works of Pliny the Elder, Fronto, Gellius, Macrobius, Bede, Charisius, Diomedes, Priscian, and Nonius, while the publication in of a Pompeian inscription added one more line to our meagre corpus. The distribution of the citations is as follows. Nonius includes in his dictionary quotations from Laberius; of those one is cited in two entries (. M = L and . M = L), while six appear also in Gellius (Non. . M = L ∼ Gell. ..; Non. . M = L ∼ Gell. ..; Non. . M = L ∼ Gell. ..; Non. . M = L ∼ Gell. ..; Non. . M = L ∼ Gell. ..; Non. . M = L ∼ Gell. ..) and part of one in an inscription (Non. . M = L ∼ ILS . no. ). Laberius is cited by Gellius times (six of his citations appear also in Nonius); by Charisius ten times (one of his citations also appears in Bede: Char. . K = . B ∼ Bede . K = J); by Macrobius six times (one of his citations also appears in Seneca: Macr. ..– ∼ Sen. De Ira ..); by Priscian and Fronto four times each; by Diomedes and Tertullian twice each; by Seneca and Bede once each (Seneca’s citation also appears in Macrobius and Bede’s in Charisius). Pliny the Elder refers to types of fish mentioned by Laberius, and a slightly different version of Pliny’s reference appears in John the Lydian (De Magistr. . = . Bandy); finally, one of the two verses cited in ILS . no. under no specific author’s name also appears in Nonius and is attributed to Laberius. The reason why the scripts of Laberius’ mimes, or, in fact, of any Roman mimes, have not survived in their entirety is far from clear. Although any view on this issue must ultimately remain speculative, it seems improbable that the quality of Laberius’
See C. Garton Gnomon () .
I N T RO D U C T I O N
skills as a playwright was considered so poor, or that the content of his plays was deemed so obscene, that it condemned his scripts to literary oblivion. Much more likely reasons for the almost complete disappearance of mime-scripts are the improvisational character of the mime as a theatrical genre, its non-educational character for pupils in schools and posterity in general, and the low reputation mime had acquired already in antiquity both in literary and in social terms: the fact that maskless men and women enacted low-life situations and used uncouth vocabulary in their performances could hardly have elevated mime in the hierarchy of Roman literary culture and in the society which generated and supported this culture. Although it stands to reason that literary plays written in verse would comprise lines which scanned and could not easily have been altered by actors during a performance, we do not know whether or not all the plays of Laberius – and those of the other Roman mimographers – had a carefully written script in verse, which the actors would need to memorize, and to which they were supposed to adhere closely. Fantham (Mime ) suggests that these performances were largely improvisational with a plot outline devised by the Archimimus, who would roughly assign dialogue sequences (scenes) for the other players to ad lib . . . When mime was admitted to the official programme of the Floralia in or after and had to be financed by the aediles . . . , the scenarios of the Archimimus must have begun a process of formalisation. From that time the sponsored plays must have been subject to rehearsal for approval before purchase; thus . . . their dialogue will have abandoned improvisation for a formal script . . . by the time of Sulla these [scil. the mimes] were composed by men of one class – like Laberius – and performed by those of another.
Fantham’s linear reconstruction of the development of mimescenarios should not be taken to imply that ‘literary’ and ‘nonliterary’ mimes could not have been written by the same author and could not have co-existed in the same period, while the
TH E HISTO RY O F TH E TEXT OF L A B ERI U S’ MIMES
existence of the freedman Publilius, who both wrote and enacted his mimes, refutes the view that two different social classes were involved in composing and performing mimes. It is possible that some of Laberius’ mimes resembled in their scripts the extant type of Roman popular theatre which was indebted to Greek New Comedy (the extract from Laberius’ Restio ((a)) is a good example in support of this view), whereas others may have had only a loosely constructed script, based on a general theme (for example, the unexpected return of the husband while his wife is committing adultery), and may even have contained prose passages. The effective stage presentation of the mimepieces of the latter category would have depended largely on the improvisational acting skills of the mime-troupe, and less on the literary qualities of the actual script and the coherence of the plot. Although there is evidence for constant production of mimeplays long after Laberius’ time (e.g. Ovid Tr. .; Sen. De ira .., Ep. .; Iuv. .–; HA, De vita M. Antonini .; Maximini duo .), none of the performances of mimes of the imperial period mentioned in our sources is attributed to or associated with Laberius. We do not know how long his plays went on being given full-scale productions, although the evidence of Cicero (Ad fam. ..) suggests that in October it was still possible for the Romans to watch a Laberian mime. But it would be unwise to claim that, when Horace (S. ..–) compared Lucilius with Laberius, or when the Elder Seneca (Contr. .. Winterbottom) discussed Cicero’s and Laberius’ witticisms, they had actually seen (as opposed to read) the plays of the mimographer. Although the Younger Seneca (Ep. .) and Jerome (Ep. .) seem to testify to the exploitation of maxims (in mime?), probably associated with the mimographer Publilius, for teaching purposes, it is far from clear that Laberius’ text was studied at schools. We also do not know when these mimes were no longer available in their entirety, and at what point grammarians and lexicographers started exploiting them in their treatises as sources of information for linguistic peculiarities in early
I N T RO D U C T I O N
Latin (did Horace, Seneca the Elder, and Pliny the Elder have the complete corpus of Laberius at their disposal when they were commenting on Laberius’ literary qualities?). Certainly some mime-scripts (not attributed to Laberius) must have been circulating amongst educated men in the mid-s BC, otherwise Cicero, when discussing jokes and word-plays in De Oratore . and .–, would not have been able to quote from the Tutor (a mimus vetus, oppido ridiculus) and from other unspecified mime-plays. However, there is no mention in our sources of an ancient scholar who produced a collection of Laberius’ works, and the temptation of reconstructing an editorial history of Laberius similar to that of Plautus or Ennius should be resisted. On the other hand, the second century AD was characterised by a keen interest shown by members of the educated upper classes in the poets of the republic, whom they admired for their archaic language, idiosyncratic style, and unusual vocabulary. It is not unlikely, therefore, that M. Valerius Probus, who is said to have started this revival of interest in early writers (Suet. De gramm. et rhet. . Kaster), had access to a larger corpus of Laberius’ scripts than Gellius and Nonius had. Moreover, when Nonius (. M = . L) cites the words mendicimonium and moechimonium (both of them attributed to Laberius’ Cophinus) and invites his readers to check the accuracy not only of these citations but also of the coined verbal form manuatus, which, Nonius says, will be found in the same ‘book’ (in eo quoque libro), it is reasonable to assume that Nonius’ intended readers would have had access to the script of this mime. Likewise, Fronto’s correspondence, in which Laberius is mentioned – along with Plautus, Ennius, Accius, Caecilius, Naevius, and Lucretius – as a poet worthy of study (Ad M. Caes. et invicem . = . van den Hout ), suggests that at least some mimes attributed to Laberius were circulating in some form in the second century AD. This
See Gratwick Menaechmi –; Jocelyn Ennius –. See Jocelyn Ennius ; Holford-Strevens Gellius –.
TH E HISTO RY O F TH E TEXT OF L A B ERI U S’ MIMES
raises the fundamental point of the accuracy with which educated Romans such as Gellius were recording quotations from Laberius; Gellius was Fronto’s contemporary, and the evidence in Fronto’s letters suggests that it was still possible for Gellius to cite a passage from Laberius checked against the original script. Even though such a reconstruction is not impossible, it would be unwise to assume this to have always been the case. Some of Gellius’ examples may have been taken from intermediate sources, particularly an anthology of extracts or grammatical writings, although it would again be unwise to assume a priori that everything Gellius cites comes from Probus or whomever he consulted at the time of writing a chapter of his treatise (see Holford-Strevens Gellius –). Even if erudite scholars such as Gellius were diligently and accurately, as seems to have been the case, copying verse authors, we can never be sure that their sources were accurate and reliable, or that inessential words which were originally contained in short quotations from Laberius were not omitted when they were integrated into the sentences of Gellius’ text. We should therefore approach the manuscript tradition of each of the authors who cited Laberius in full awareness of the likelihood that any of the surviving extracts attributed to Laberius may not have been exactly what he had originally written, or that they may not have been composed by him at all (it is instructive to note, in this respect, the confusion that exists in some manuscripts between the readings laverius and valerius: see Testim. and the apparatus criticus in ). The plays which were circulating in antiquity under Plautus’ name, but were not written by him, and the Plautine scripts themselves containing interpolations made by post-Plautine theatrical directors and professional actors, should function as salutary reminders of the alterations which may have taken place
The interchange between b and v in the MSS readings Laberius/Laverius as transmitted in Nonius is discussed by M. Carilli, ‘Nonio e il betacismo’, in F. Bertini, ed., Prolegomena Noniana III (Genova ) –.
I N T RO D U C T I O N
during the transmission of a mime-play from Laberius’ pen to a lexicographer’s collection of Laberius’ fragments. Of the works in which Laberius is cited I will discuss briefly here only the manuscript tradition of Nonius’ De compendiosa doctrina, since this work contains the largest percentage of Laberius’ corpus, is badly corrupt, and has perhaps the most complicated manuscript tradition of all the authors who quote the mimographer. Quicherat, Mueller, Onions, Meylan, Bertini, Mazzacane, Gatti, and Milanese (among others) have discussed in detail individual manuscripts of Nonius, but the complete picture of the relationship of all the extant manuscripts was originally drawn up by Lindsay, who, aided by J. H. Onions’ comprehensive edition of the first three books of Nonius (Nonius Marcellus, De compendiosa doctrina I–III (Oxford )), revealed the fundamentally tripartite character of this text. It seems that in Carolingian times Nonius’ dictionary, which was originally arranged in books of unequal size, was divided into three parts: Books –, Book (by far the longest of the treatise), and Books –; each of these parts has its own manuscript tradition and contains quotations attributed to Laberius ( in the first part, one in the second, and seven or possibly eight in the third). A further tripartite distinction can be observed See Quicherat ix–xiii; Mueller –; Nonius Marcellus, De compendiosa doctrina Harleian MS collated by J. H. Onions [= Anecdota Oxoniensia. Texts, documents, and extracts, chiefly from manuscripts in the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries. Classical Series, vol. , part ] (Oxford ); Nonius Marcellus: Collation de plusieurs manuscrits de Paris, de Gen`eve & de Berne par H. Meylan suivie d’une notice sur les principaux manuscrits de Nonius pour les livres I, II et III par Louis Havet [= Biblioth`eque de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes ] (Paris ); F. Bertini, ‘Errori nella tradizione manoscritta della Compendiosa doctrina’, Studi Noniani () –; R. Mazzacane, ‘Il codice Gudianus di Nonio Marcello (libb. I–III)’, Studi Noniani () –; P. Gatti, ‘Note sulla tradizione medievale di Nonio Marcello (libri I–III): il MS Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, ’, in Scire litteras: Forschungen zum mittelalterlichen Geistesleben (Munich ) –; and G. Milanese, Censimento dei manoscritti noniani (Genoa ). See Lindsay’s edn of Nonius xxi–xxix and L. D. Reynolds in Reynolds Texts –.
TH E HISTO RY O F TH E TEXT OF L A B ERI U S’ MIMES
within each of the three parts of the manuscript tradition: the extant manuscripts fall into three families, which are defined not by the quantity of text they contain, but by the quality and format in which the entries of the dictionary are preserved. The first family consists of manuscripts whose ‘pure’ text may be assumed, because of the relative rarity of errors, to have followed closely the lost archetype. The second family presents, it has been argued, a ‘doctored’ version of the text, which contains the emendations and spelling adjustments of a half-educated scribe. The third family offers an ‘extract’ version of the dictionary, in which the entries are preserved, but the citations are mostly omitted. Further complications arise from the fact that different sections in the same manuscript are derived from sources in different families (this, for example, is the case with MS E and its position in Books –), and from the fact that scribes often emended the text of a family after they consulted manuscripts that belonged to a different family. The scribe whose emendations are indicated in the apparatus criticus with the letter F , and belong to the ‘pure’ family of manuscripts for Books –, occupies a special place amongst the copyists of the De compendiosa doctrina, and played an important role in the textual transmission of Laberius, because he seems to have
However, this view was rightly challenged recently by G. Milanese, who examined the instances in which the MSS of the second family preserve readings that are identical with the readings of F , perhaps the most important witness in Nonius’ textual tradition. Le lezioni che F presenta in unione con la seconda famiglia sono, per dir cos`ı, omogenee a quelle che esso presenta da solo. Da ci`o derivano conclusioni assai rilevanti: . va completamente rivisto il quadro proposto da Lindsay che vede la seconda famiglia come frutto del lavoro congetturale di un ‘learned abbot’ . . . . E` assolutamente impossibile che il misterioso ‘learned abbot’ abbia congetturato in pi`u di casi in modo identico a un altro MS (F ), e per di pi`u integrando anche numerosissimi luoghi (circa ) omessi dalla I e dalla III famiglia.
See G. Milanese, ‘Il codex optimus di Nonio e alcuni dati per la riconsiderazione della “seconda famiglia” noniana’, in F. Bertini, ed., Prolegomena Noniana (Genoa ) – (the extract comes from p. ).
I N T RO D U C T I O N
consulted a manuscript which is now lost and seems to have contained correct variant readings and supplements not found elsewhere in the extant tradition. Though not always correct, these variants are of great value in emending Laberius’ text (see apparatus criticus in frs. , , , , , , , , , , , , and ). In Figures – I reproduce, with minor alterations, the full stemmata for each part of the De compendiosa doctrina, as constructed by Lindsay (xxx–xxxii), who regarded very highly the readings of L , F , and H (in Books –), L and Gen. (in Book ), and L and H (in Books –). I have seen MS H (Harleianus , Brit. Mus.) and MS O (Bodleian, Canon. Class. Lat. ), and photographic reproductions of the following manuscripts of Nonius: Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek M.V. (Class. ); Bern, B¨urgerbibliothek , , and ; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College ; Cambridge, University Library Mm. .; El Escorial, Real biblioteca Del Escorial M.III.; Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Pl. XLVIII I; Gen`eve, Biblioth`eque Publique et Universitaire, Lat. ; Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Voss. Lat. F and Voss. Lat. Q ; Montpellier, Biblioth`eque Interuniversitaire, Section de Medecine ; Paris, Biblioth`eque Nationale de France, Lat. , Lat. , and Lat. ; Wolfenb¨uttel, Herzog-AugustBibliothek, Gud. Lat. ; and fragmentum Turicense Cb. I am most grateful to Professor F. Bertini for allowing me to see these photographs, and to Rosanna Mazzacane, Maria Rosaria See J. Wood Brown CR () – and –; W. M. Lindsay CR () –; Lindsay’s edn of Nonius xxiv–xxv; G. Milanese, Censimento dei manoscritti noniani (Genoa ) – (no. ). I use Onions’ sigla, because they are more concise than Lindsay’s, and I avoid the potentially misleading terms CA and DA , which Lindsay used to define the source of some MSS in the third family, and AA , with which he indicated the source of some MSS in the first family. Instead of these I use the letters g or d, which are meant to indicate simply the consensus of the relevant MSS; this gives, I believe, a more accurate picture of the evidence offered by the MSS. I have also rendered in English Lindsay’s Latin terminology (archetypus, secundae familiae parens, and so on).
TH E HISTO RY O F TH E TEXT OF L A B ERI U S’ MIMES
Pugliarello, and Maria Carilli for turning my brief stay in Genoa in into a wonderfully productive research period. I have taken the sigla and the manuscript readings of the texts of the remaining authors who cite Laberius from the apparatus criticus of the most recent editions of these authors; although each of these manuscripts is usually assessed in the introduction to each of these editions, there has been no attempt, as far as I know, to draw up a stemma for the manuscript tradition of any of these works. Bede is cited from the edition by C. W. Jones (Liber de orthographia, CCSL A, ), whose list of sigla is corrected by C. Dionisotti Revue Benedictine () –; I consulted MS H (Harleianus , saec. IX?) and MS B (Bodley , saec. XIII), which is not recorded by Jones. Charisius is cited from C. Barwick’s edition, revised by F. Kuehnert (Flavii Sosipatri Charisii Artis Grammaticae Libri V (Leipzig )); I checked the accuracy of Barwick’s readings (and made the necessary corrections) by consulting all the manuscripts of Charisius, photographs of which were made available to me by Professor I. G. Taifacos, to whom I am greatly obliged. Diomedes is cited from H. Keil’s edition (Grammatici Latini (Leipzig )); Professor Mario De Nonno very kindly confirmed the accuracy of Keil’s recording of the readings in the three Carolingian manuscripts of Diomedes. I also saw MS Harl. Mus. Brit. (saec. XII) (this is the only other complete MS of Diomedes dated before the humanistic era, not recorded by Keil, and, according to De Nonno (per litteras), possibly the source of the humanistic manuscript tradition of Diomedes). Fronto is cited from M. P. J. van den Hout’s revised edition (M. Cornelii Frontonis epistulae (Leipzig )); John the Lydian (Perª xousiän = De magistratibus) from A. C. Bandy’s edition (Joannes Lydus: On powers or the magistrates of the Roman state (Philadelphia )); Macrobius (Sat.) from J. Willis’ edition (Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii Saturnalia (Leipzig )), whose apparatus criticus I have augmented and corrected on the basis of the collations of the
I N T RO D U C T I O N
MSS by Kaster (see p. xxviii); Seneca (De ira) from L. Reynolds’ edition (Seneca, Dialogi (Oxford )); and Tertullian from the editions of Dekkers (Apologeticus, CCSL , ) and of Gerlo (De pallio, CCSL , ). Gellius’ text is cited from M. Hertz’s editio maior (A. Gellii Noctium Atticarum Libri XX (Berlin –)) and P. K. Marshall’s revised edition (A. Gellii Noctes Atticae (Oxford )). For the dating of MS B I have adopted the suggestion of L. HolfordStrevens (CQ () –); I have seen MSS C (Cambridge, Clare College ), S (Cambridge, Trinity College (R..)), K (Oxford, Bodleian, Rawl. G. ), and L (Oxford, Bodleian, Lat. class. d. ), which were not recorded by either Hertz or Marshall (see P. K. Marshall in Reynolds Texts –); S, K, and L are anthologies that do not preserve passages from Gellius citing Laberius, but C has been useful in that it contains readings which are not recorded by the other manuscripts of the same family (VPR), and are clearly correct (for example, .. notari iussimus C: & notarius simus VPR: om. A). A new edition of Priscian is urgently needed to replace M. Hertz (Grammatici Latini – (Leipzig )); Professor De Nonno, who is currently preparing one, has confirmed the accuracy of Hertz’s recording of Priscian’s four citations attributed to Laberius, as transmitted in the antiquiores MSS (saec. IX), On the MSS of Macrobius’ Saturnalia see Marshall in Reynolds Texts – , Willis XIII–XIX, and (most importantly) the working papers of Kaster (see p. xxviii). Willis attaches great importance to the readings of N, D, and P, and considers the remaining MSS of the Sat. of comparatively less value. However, he is unwilling to accept in Sat. .. the reading licentium (of N, G, and P), and prefers the reading licentiam (of R, H, F, A, and C), without considering the possibility that L. may have intentionally changed the grammatical gender of the feminine noun licentia (as he does in Nonius . M = . L). For Gellius’ MSS see Marshall’s preface in the revised OCT of the Noctes Atticae; Marshall in Reynolds Texts – (especially : ‘The precise interrelationship of the three families, F g d, has yet to be worked out, although it seems safe to say that the esteem formerly given to d is largely unjustified’); B. Munk Olsen, L’´etude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe si`ecles (Paris ) (vol. ) – and (Paris ) (vol. .) –; and Holford-Strevens Gellius –.
TH E HISTO RY O F TH E TEXT OF L A B ERI U S’ MIMES Archetype
ancestor of second family
L1
ancestor of third family
F1 lost MS V
P
H1 E (from middle of Bk II to end of Bk III) E (from Bk I to middle of BK II) lost MS
A
C
X T D
lost MS
M
O
Figure Nonius’ De compendiosa doctrina Books – (= pp. . M – . M)
and has kindly sent me the readings of Z (Vat. Lat. , saec. IX ), which, although it occupies a special place in the recensio of Priscian (see M. De Nonno RFIC () –), is not recorded by Hertz. I consulted the following manuscripts (all of them in the Bodleian Library), not mentioned by Hertz: Auct. T.. (= T, saec. IX), Canon. Class. Lat. (saec. XI), D’Orville (= Auct. X...) (saec. XII), Canon. Class. Lat. (saec. XII), Add. C. (a. ), Rawl. G (saec. XIII), and Barlow (saec. XIV). Of these I record in the apparatus criticus only the readings from T; the other, later manuscripts shed no new light on Priscian’s citations of Laberius. The following sigla are not mentioned in the stemma (Figure ), but appear in the apparatus criticus: L = L , F = F , H = H . E = Ea.c. , E = Ep.c. , P = Pa.c. , P = Pp.c. , V = Va.c. , V = p.c. V , F = Fp.c. . L = corrections to L made by a scribe who consulted a MS of the third family (the ‘extract’ version). L = corrections to L made by a scribe who consulted a MS of the second family (the ‘doctored’ text). H = corrections to H made by a scribe who consulted the ancestor of the second family (the ‘doctored’ text).
I N T RO D U C T I O N Archetype
(?) lost MS L
lost MS
corrected lost MS ancestor of second family V
E
Gen.1 Cant.
H
Bern. ancestor of third family
P
lost MS Bern. 347 and 357 M O
Figure Book (= pp. . M – . M)
H = glosses inserted in the margin of H : see W. M. Lindsay Archiv f. lat. Lexik. () –. F = corrections to F made by a scribe who consulted a good MS which does not survive – perhaps the archetype itself. The following sigla are not mentioned in the stemma (Figure ), but appear in the apparatus criticus: Gen. = Gen. . E = Ea.c. , Cant. = Cant.a.c. , L = La.c. , H = Ha.c. , P = a.c. P . H , L , Cant. , P , E = corrections to H, L, Cant., P, and E, made by a scribe who consulted a MS of the second family (the ‘doctored’ version). The following sigla are not mentioned in the stemma (Figure ), but appear in the apparatus criticus: L = L , H = H , P = P , E = E , V = V . L = Lp.c. , H = Hp.c. , E = Ep.c. , V = Vp.c. . It may be helpful to explain briefly here the layout of the text of each fragment attributed to Laberius and the editorial principles on the basis of which I compiled the apparatus criticus. The manuscript readings and the conjectures which pertain to the text of an author who cites Laberius (for instance, Nonius or
TH E HISTO RY O F TH E TEXT OF L A B ERI U S’ MIMES Archetype
(?) lost MS L1
lost MS
ancestor of second family
ancestor of third family H1
lost MS
V
lost MS P1
lost MS
E1 A
C
X
D
M
O
Figure Books –, – (= pp. . M – . M)
Gellius) are indicated in square brackets placed within the text of this author. However, the manuscript readings and the emendations which relate to a fragment attributed to Laberius are indicated separately in an apparatus criticus positioned below the text which contains the Laberian fragment. If a family (or part of it) of manuscripts in Nonius omits a whole citation, I state at the beginning of the apparatus criticus which words are omitted by which manuscript(s), and I do not repeat or break down this piece of information into entries on each word. The capitals M and L in references to Nonius’ text refer to the editions of Nonius by Mercerus ( ; the pagination of Mercerus’ edn as reported by Lindsay is inaccurate) and Lindsay (), respectively. For example, the layout of fr. is as follows: Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Ebriulare [Mercerus : ebruilare F : ebrulare F HLPVEd: ebriolare Carrion], ebrium facere, et ebriacus [FH LPVEd: ebriatus H ], ebrius. Laberius . . . : homo ebriacus somno sanari solet verba Laberius . . . solet om. d homo g: homo Wagner ebriacus FHLPE: hebriacus V: ebriatus Bentinus: ebriolatus Carrion: ebriosus Fabricius somno g: somnum Wase sanari FHLPE: sonari V: obsonari Wase
I N T RO D U C T I O N
The presentation of the text and of the apparatus criticus in this way, which I adopted from other editions of fragmentary texts in the series Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries (for instance, R. L. Hunter, Eubulus: The Fragments (Cambridge )), clearly separates the readings pertaining to the words attributed to Laberius from the readings which concern the text of Nonius or Gellius or the author who happens to cite Laberius; so, for example, in the above fragment the reader can clearly see that FH LPVEd read ebriacus in Nonius’ text and that only FHLPE read ebriacus in the line which Nonius attributes to Laberius. In the apparatus criticus I have not reported any spelling variations relating to nouns or adjectives, when they do not signify an alteration in the meaning or the grammatical case of the nouns or adjectives in question (for example, in I print in the text of Laberius the accusative singular feminine adjective Pythagoream, which is the reading of MSS BZGT of Priscian ., without reporting in the apparatus criticus that MSS DH read pithagoream, MS R phythagoream, MSS AL phitagoream, and MS K pithagoriam). Likewise, I do not report emendations which do not scan or which do not alter the meaning of the transmitted text, when this both scans and makes sense (for example, in . I print the MS reading atque without reporting in the apparatus criticus Josephus Scaliger’s emendation ac for atque). VIII AN OVERVIEW OF ANT H OLOGIES C O N TA I N I N G L A B E R I U S ’ M I M E S The history of the editions of Laberius’ fragments, the earliest of which dates to , is a fascinating topic, and the contribution of each editor to solving the textual problems and understanding the meaning of each fragment attributed to Laberius is a
Petri Criniti, Commentarii de honesta disciplina (Florence ); the section entitled De poetis latinis lib. II (no page nos) contains frs –. I am grateful to Dr A. Mastrogianni for providing me with information concerning this anthology.
OV E RV IE W OF A N TH OLOGI ES OF THE MIMES
complicated issue. This is so for three reasons. Firstly, we do not have enough material from other Roman mimographers against which we could compare Laberius’ vocabulary or prosodic peculiarities. Secondly, the editions in which Laberius’ mimes appear can be divided into two groups: on the one hand there are the individual editions of the polymaths, grammarians, and lexicographers who quote Laberius, and on the other, the anthologies of Latin drama or Latin verse, which include the mimographer’s literary output; such collections of fragments have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve. These editorial strands, though distinct, sometimes converged and led not only editors of Latin poetry to include in their anthologies fragments of Laberius which were not widely known before the publication of grammarians’ texts, but also editors of grammarians’ texts to adopt emendations suggested in Latin anthologies. Thirdly, early editors of Latin anthologies included in their compilations of poetry or drama only a selection of Laberius’ mimes, and so the impression that readers and scholars formed of Laberius, at least in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was incomplete and misleading. The factors that seem to have dictated which fragments of Laberius should be included in an anthology were the length of each fragment, its inclusion in a previous collection of Laberius’ mimes, its literary merits, the challenging textual problems it posed, and the popularity of the ancient author who cited the fragment. The obscene subject-matter seems less likely to have prevented the inclusion of a fragment of Laberius in an anthology. It was perhaps predictable, though highly ironical, that the first fragments of Laberius to appear in a collection of Latin poetry were the lines that he is reported by Macrobius to have uttered at his verbal conflict with Caesar and Publilius (– ): predictable, because these are the longest extant and most moving fragments of Laberius that are also purported to have a political dimension and a historical context; and highly ironical, because these lines with their subdued and tragic imagery are the least representative extracts of Laberius as a mimographer.
I N T RO D U C T I O N
The editor of the first anthology that includes these lines, Petrus Crinitus, sketches briefly the portrait of the Roman knight Decius (sic) Laberius as depicted in literary sources, lists some of the titles of his mimes, and paraphrases the events which Macrobius relates concerning the mime-contest, sponsored by Caesar, between Laberius and Publilius, without challenging the accuracy of this account. Crinitus was interested in providing only a biographical sketch of Laberius, not an accurate text of his work. The text of Laberius printed by Crinitus differs in very few places from the text of the fragments of Laberius that appear in the ed. princ. of Macrobius (), while, in the five revised editions of Crinitus’ highly influential collection (, , , , ), someone rightly adopts readings found in the manuscripts and the ed. princ. of Macrobius, and improves considerably the punctuation in the text that Macrobius attributes to Laberius. Regarding the place of Laberius in anthologies, Crinitus set a pattern which would be maintained for four centuries. For, even after the publication of collections of fragmentary Latin poets that included a substantial number of Laberius’ fragments, editors of Latin florilegia which appeared as late as ignored the imaginative one-liners of the mimographer, as attested by lexicographers, and opted for the more sombre pieces cited in Macrobius because these sombre extracts, though allegedly belonging to separate mimes, could be seen to possess a strong thematic connection. Crinitus’ example was followed, amongst others, by P. Pithoeus (Paris , Lyon ), L. Fruterius in his Epistle to M. A. Muretus (Leipzig , ), M. Rollin in his account on education (Paris , ), L. Becker (Leipzig ) in his monograph on Laberius’ ‘prologue’ (), J. Elphinston (London ), and the anonymous editor of the Florilegium
On his work see A. Mastrogianni, Die Poemata des Petrus Crinitus und ihre ¨ Horazimitation: Einleitung, Text, Ubersetzung und Kommentar (M¨unster ); M. Heath, ‘Gellius in the French Renaissance’, in L. Holford-Strevens and A. Vardi, eds., The worlds of Aulus Gellius (Oxford ) –.
OV E RV IE W OF A N TH OLOGI ES OF THE MIMES
Latinum (Leipzig and Berlin ). Slight variations on the pattern set by Crinitus can be seen in the anthologies of P. Burmannus (Amsterdam ), P. Napoli-Signorelli (Naples ), H. Meyerus (Leipzig ), A. Egger (Paris ), J. Wordsworth (Oxford ), and A. Ernout (Paris , , , ). All these scholars print, apart from the verses Macrobius attributes to Laberius, a few more fragments of Laberius’ mimes, one of which is the second longest extant fragment of Laberius, attributed to his Restio (= (a)). These editions, whose readings are selectively recorded in the apparatus criticus, have very little to offer to Laberian scholarship. In most cases the text of Laberius, which is accompanied by a brief apparatus criticus only in Ernout’s edition, is reproduced almost word for word from earlier anthologies, and there are hardly any interesting emendations that both make sense and resemble the manuscript readings. Footnotes (only by Burmannus, Meyerus, and Wordsworth) are almost exclusively confined to reporting and evaluating conjectures by other scholars, while Burmannus and Elphinston misattribute to Laberius apophthegms which appear in the manuscript collections of sententiae attributed to Publilius and to Seneca the Younger. In Henricus Stephanus, continuing his father’s work on fragmentary Latin poets, published a substantial number of Laberius’ fragments ( out of ), along with a selection from the works of Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, Afranius, Lucilius, Naevius, and Caecilius. By the time of Stephanus’ collection, editions of Gellius, of Nonius, of Macrobius, and of Charisius had already appeared, all of which contained citations attributed to Laberius; years later, Stephanus himself would publish his own edition of Gellius with Carrion’s erudite notes. Although Stephanus’ anthology appeared before, and
For a list of editions of Gellius’ text and an authoritative account of their value see Holford-Strevens Gellius – and –; M. Heath in L. Holford-Strevens and A. Vardi, eds., The worlds of Aulus Gellius (Oxford ) –. The figures pertaining to the early editions of Nonius, Macrobius,
I N T RO D U C T I O N
consequently could not take advantage of, the ground-breaking editions of Nonius by Iunius (with Scaliger’s marginalia) () and by Mercerus (, ), it can be regarded as the first serious attempt to provide a complete picture of Laberius’ work, often making plausible emendations and sometimes even taking into account the context in which a citation was preserved. A major flaw of Stephanus in his edition of Laberius is his indifference to the importance of prosody: fragments consisting of more than one line (for example, (a)) are divided into verses that do not scan; lacunae are not indicated, even when the text makes no sense. The next highlight in Laberius’ editorial history is Ziegler’s tripartite monograph (G¨ottingen ) on the Roman mime; it marks a new era in Laberian studies, and requires special attention. Although Ziegler cites fewer fragments of Laberius than Stephanus ( out of ), and quite often adopts readings of previous editors (mainly Stephanus) that are patently wrong, his contribution to the evaluation and understanding of the mimographer’s work is threefold: he places Laberius in the larger context of the development of Roman mime as a genre and in relation to other mimographers, such as Mat(t)ius, Philistion, Marullus, and Catullus; he consulted not only previous anthologies containing Laberius’ fragments but also recent editions of Gellius and Nonius, who cite Laberius (in this respect, Mercerus’ editions of Nonius (; ) were particularly helpful); he is concerned with both textual issues and the meaning of a title or a fragment, and does not hesitate to speculate on the plot of a mime, using as evidence its title or a revealing word in the fragment itself. Similar observations may be made about Orellius’ less ambitious edition of fragments of Laberius (Leipzig ); Orellius’ edition also contains notes (by himself and Bothe) on stylistic and textual matters, as well and Charisius are drawn from my own research on the editorial history of these authors.
OV E RV IE W OF A N TH OLOGI ES OF THE MIMES
as a translation (into Ancient Greek and German) of Laberius’ ‘prologue’. However, the first ground-breaking collection of Latin drama that included Laberius’ mimes appeared in . In the fifth volume of his impressive Poetae scenici Latinorum, F. H. Bothe, whose perceptive notes on Laberius had already enriched Orellius’ small-scale study of Publilius and Laberius, presents the extant mime-material by adopting the structure of Ziegler’s edition (Bothe’s edition, like Ziegler’s, is divided into three sections: Laberius and his mimes; Publilius and his sententiae; other Roman mimographers and their works). Unlike the overwhelming majority of his predecessors, Bothe publishes the fragments after consulting a few manuscripts (mentioned in the title of his work), major Latin dictionaries (J. M. Gesner, Novus Linguae The translation of this fr. () was not a novelty in anthologies of this type. It first appeared in Ios. Scaligeri poemata Graeca versa ex Lat. Hal. & Gall. (Leiden ) – (reissued in I. C. Orellius, ed., Publii Syri mimi et aliorum sententiae cum D. Laberii prologo et fragmentis moralibus (Leipzig ) ; and in Iosephi Scaligeri poemata omnia ex museio Petri Scriverii (Berlin ) –). Translations of this fr. also appear in the following works: M. Rollin, De la mani`ere d’enseigner et d’´etudier les belles lettres, par raport a` l’esprit et au cœur (Paris ) –; H. Stadelmann, ‘Antikes in moderner Form: Prolog des Laberius (necessitas)’, Jahrb¨ucher f¨ur Philol. und P¨adag. () –; G. Malagoli, ‘Cavaliere e mimo’, Atene e Roma () ; and W. Krenkel, Caesar und der Mimus des Laberius (Hamburg ) . A paraphrase of in lines of verse was composed by Oliver Goldsmith in the late eighteenth century (see ‘Prologue of Laberius’ in R. Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith (London )); unlike Goldsmith’s version, J. V. Cunningham’s translation of L.’s lines into English iambic hexameters is faithful to the Latin text (see ‘An Old Actor Addresses Julius Caesar’ in The Poems of J. V. Cunningham (Athens, Ohio )). J. Elphinston translated into English maxims, wrongly attributed to L.: Dhe sentencious Poets: Pubblius, dhe Syrrian; C. D. Laberius, dhe Roman knight; L. A. Senneca, dhe Philosopher; D. Cato, dhe Morralist: Also, from Ausonius, Dhe Sayings ov dhe Sevven Greek Sages (London ) –. For translations of Gellius see HolfordStrevens Gellius –. Carilli Note translates (into Italian) all (= ) the frs. attributed to L. by Nonius. The only complete translation (but into Italian) of the extant L., previous to mine, is by Bonaria (Rome ) –. I am not aware of the existence of a previous English translation of all the extant frs. of L.
I N T RO D U C T I O N
Latinae Thesaurus (Leipzig )), and important editions of his time (for example, Gronovius’ edn of Gellius). Bothe’s edition, which was completed long before the publication of Hertz’s monumental editio maior of Gellius (–) and the authoritative editions of Nonius by Mueller () and Lindsay (), contains (out of the extant ) fragments of Laberius, and is the first sensible and scholarly attempt to correct obvious errors in the manuscripts that previous editors of Laberius were unwilling to put right. Bothe prints fragments that scan (when possible, the metre is indicated in parenthesis next to each fragment), and emends the text in an imaginative way which, though sometimes unconvincing, throws new light on the meaning of a fragment (see, for example, the emendation of the title Bellonistria () to Balaneutria). In view of the significance of Bothe’s edition, Ribbeck’s contribution to Laberian textual criticism may seem relatively unimportant. His section on the fragments of the Roman mime appears after the sections on the fragments of the palliata, the togata, and the Atellana, at the end of the second volume of his Scaenicae Romanorum poesis fragmenta, which appeared in and was revised in and in . Yet Ribbeck was the first to systematically mention (and even emend) the context in which a citation from Laberius was preserved, and to record in an apparatus criticus, which was feeble and carelessly compiled in the first edition, fuller and more adventurous in the second, and cautiously concise in the third, a good selection of manuscript variants (unfortunately, there is no list of sigla) and a substantial number of important emendations (in this respect, his views on Laberius’ text were greatly influenced – rightly so – by Buecheler’s emendations). Ribbeck may not have consulted all the manuscripts of the grammarians and lexicographers who quote Laberius, and may often have suggested emendations that, although they made sense, bore no resemblance to the readings of the manuscripts; but his overall knowledge of the vocabulary and the prosodic peculiarities of the comic and
OV E RV IE W OF A N TH OLOGI ES OF THE MIMES
the tragic Roman playwrights was an invaluable scholarly tool in editing the fragments of the Roman mime. The significance of this background knowledge cannot be overestimated, because it enabled Ribbeck to avoid the mistake of many recent editors of individual authors who cite Laberius: most of them (with the notable exceptions of Mueller, in his edition of Nonius, and Hertz, in his editio maior of Gellius) tend to emend the text in a way that reflects the Latin style cultivated not by Laberius, but by the author who cites Laberius. The absence of such pitfalls in Ribbeck’s methodology has made his edition a standard source of reference in the TLL and in twentieth-century editions of authors who quote the mimographers (for example, Marshall’s OCT of Gellius (; rev. with corrections ) justly uses in its citations of Laberius’ mimes Ribbeck’s – not Bonaria’s – edition). In spite of its virtues, Ribbeck’s edition did not provide Laberius’ fragments with a comprehensive examination of the manuscripts that preserved them, an account of the Roman mime that would place Laberius’ fragments in their appropriate theatrical and historical context, a translation, and a literary or linguistic commentary on them. This was the scholarly gap that Bonaria set out to fill with his remarkable Romani Mimi, a work which, although originally published in – in two volumes written in Latin (under the title Mimorum Romanorum Fragmenta), reached the wider public in in its revised form, which featured, apart from the text of all the extant mime-fragments and a dauntingly full apparatus criticus, an introduction to the history of the genre, a translation into Italian of the whole mime-corpus, and a commentary (in Italian) that focussed on linguistic issues; regrettably, the longawaited analysis of the fragments from a theatrical point of view was not realised. Bonaria’s achievement, to which I am greatly indebted, was made even more impressive by what purported to be a full list of testimonia on mime and pantomime, drawn from literary and archaeological sources and arranged in chronological order from BC to the seventh century
I N T RO D U C T I O N
AD – this is perhaps the most valuable section in the book. But, in spite of the wealth of information gathered in his volume, Bonaria is not critical enough of the transmitted text and accepts too easily the emendations of earlier editors; his text contains few new insights ((a)), his apparatus criticus is heavily burdened with unnecessary information (long lists of editors’ names follow each of the manuscript readings), his introduction and commentary contain several inaccuracies or statements that betray a misinterpretation of the sources, and his long list of testimonia, which might have been even more useful if they had been classified into thematic categories, is littered with misprints. Most of these errors were put right by Maria Carilli in a fresh study of Nonius’ manuscripts, which also recorded (not always trustworthily) the readings in some early editions of the De compendiosa doctrina. Carilli’s contribution appeared in in a long article published in Studi Noniani (Carilli Note –), and was accompanied by a philological analysis of a selection of passages from the lexicographer’s quotations of Laberius. Her article deserves to be more widely known for four reasons: Carilli is the first scholar to discuss in detail the grammatical context in which a quotation from Laberius is embedded, and to appreciate fully the importance of this context for the proper understanding of the meaning of a fragment and its textual problems; she rightly defends the reading of Nonius’ manuscripts in eight citations of Laberius, and vigorously challenges the rash emendations in these passages proposed by Ribbeck and passively adopted by
Reviews of Bonaria’s volume have on the whole been favourable: see, for example, Latomus () Herrmann; LEC () Degueldre; Emerita () de As´ıs; LEC () Delande; Emerita () Rubio; RSC () – Verdi`ere; GIF () Jannaccone. Corrections were suggested in the following critical reviews: Gymnasium () – Morel; RBPh () St´egen; Gnomon () – Garton; Mnemosyne () – Vrugt-Lentz; Latomus () – Pr´eaux; AJPh () – Putnam; AAHG () – Weissengruber.
OV E RV IE W OF A N TH OLOGI ES OF THE MIMES
Bonaria ; she re-examines the evidence for two problematic titles (Hetaera and Fullo) and two badly corrupt passages ( and ) of plays attributed to Laberius; and she questions the validity of Lindsay’s editorial decisions in citations which Nonius attributes to Laberius. My debt to her views, as well as to the views of most of the previous editors of Laberius, is clearly seen in the commentary.
SIGLA CODICUM
SIGLA CODICUM Beda, liber de orthographia C D H L M P B
codex Cantabrigiensis Corp. Chr. , saec. IX codex Monacensis , saec. IX codex Harleianus , saec. IX? codex Leidensis, B. P. L. , saec. X codex Montepessulanus , saec. IX codex Parisinus lat. , saec. VIII (–) codex Bodleianus , saec. XIII Charisius
N p n n C
codex Neapolitanus, olim Bobiensis, IV. A. , saec. VIII excerpta codicis Parisini lat. , saec. VIII codex Neapolitanus IV. A. , saec. XV codex Neapolitanus IV. A. , saec. XVI Cauchii ex deperdito codice excerpta Diomedes
A B M H p
codex Parisinus , saec. IX codex Parisinus , saec. IX–X codex Monacensis, olim S. Emmerami Ratisbonensis , saec. IX codex Harleianus , saec. XII excerpta codicis Parisini , saec. VIII Fronto
A
codex Ambrosianus E. inf./sup. (= S.P. /,,), saec. V Aulus Gellius
Per libros – A β
codex rescriptus Vaticanus Palatinus lat. , saec. IV codex Buslidianus nunc deperditus, saec. fortasse XII
SIGLA CODICUM
V P R C
pars prior codicis Vaticani lat. , saec. XII codex Parisinus Bibl. Nat. lat. , saec. XII codex Leidensis Gronovianus , saec. XII codex Cantabrigiensis Clare Coll. , saec. XIII/
Per libros – F O X N Q Z B
codex Leouardiensis Prov. Bibl. van Friesland/Ljouwert , saec. IX () codex Vaticanus Reginensis lat. , saec. IX codex Leidensis Vossianus lat. F , saec. IX codex Vaticanus Reginensis lat. , saec. XII () codex Florentinus Bibl. Naz., Conv. Soppr. J. IV. , saec. XV (c. ) codex Parisinus Bibl. Nat. lat. , saec. XIII codex Leidensis Vossianus lat. F , saec. XII ex. codex Bernensis una cum codice Leidensi B. P. L. , saec. XII ex.
Per omnes libros T Y S K L V
florilegium Gellianum in cod. Parisino Bibl. Nat. lat. , saec. XII florilegium Gellianum in cod. Vaticano lat. , saec. XII florilegium Gellianum in cod. Cantabr. Trin. Coll. (R. . ), saec. XII (c. ) florilegium Gellianum in cod. Bodleiano Rawl. G. , saec. XII florilegium Gellianum in cod. Bodleiano Lat. class. d. , saec. XII/ codices recentiores saec. plerumque XV Joannes Lydus, Perª xousiän (De Magistratibus)
P
codex Caseolinus Parisinus Supplementi Graeci , saec. IX–X
SIGLA CODICUM
Macrobius, Saturnalia N G D P M B V O L K R J H F A C
codex Neapolitanus V. B. , saec. IX med.– / codex Strasburg. , saec. XI codex Bodleianus Auct. T. II. , saec. XI in. codex Parisinus lat. , saec. XI codex Montepessulanus , saec. IX/ codex Bambergensis Class. (M. V. ), saec. IX/ codex Vaticanus Reginensis lat. , saec. IX/ codex Londiniensis, Bibl. Brit., Cotton Vit. C. III, saec. IX/ codex Vaticanus lat. , saec. X/ codex Vaticanus Palat. lat. , saec. IX in. codex Vaticanus Reginensis lat. , saec. X ex./XI in. codex Vaticanus lat. , saec. XII codex Harleianus , saec. XII codex Florentinus Laurentianus, sup. , saec. XII codex Cantabrigiensis, bibl. univ. Ff. . , saec. XII codex Cantabrigiensis, Corpus Christi College , saec. XII
Nonius Marcellus Per libros – (= pp. . M – . M) L F H E V P A C X T D
codex Leidensis Vossianus lat. F. , saec. IX in. (c. ) codex Florentinus Laurent. XLVIII. I, saec. IX/ codex Harleianus , saec. IXc./ codex Escorialensis M. III. , saec. IX()/ codex Wolfenbuettel. Gudianus lat. (◦ ), saec. IX–/ codex Parisinus Bibl. Nat. lat. , saec. IX/ codex Bambergensis M. V. (Class. ), saec. IX/ codex Parisinus Bibl. Nat. lat. , saec. IX ex. – X/ codex Leidensis Vossianus latinus Q. , saec. IX–/ fragmentum Turicense C b, saec. X/XI codex Parisinus Bibl. Nat. lat. , saec. IX/
SIGLA CODICUM
M O
codex Montepessulanus , saec. X/ codex Bodleianus, Canon. Class. Lat. (SC ), saec. X (c. )
Per librum (= pp. . M – . M) HLPVEMOT vide supra Gen. codex Genevensis , saec. IXc./ Bern. codex Bernensis , saec. IX–X Cant. codex Cantabrigiensis, bibl. univ. Mm. V. , saec. IX–/ Bern. codex Bernensis , saec. IX/ Bern. codex Bernensis , saec. IX/ Per libros –, – (= pp. . M – . M) HLPVEACXDMO vide supra Priscianus Per primos sedecim libros R B Z D H A G L K T
codex Parisinus lat. , saec. IX codex Bambergensis, class. , saec. IX codex Vaticanus lat. , saec. IX codex Bernensis , olim Bongarsianus, saec. IX codex Halberstadiensis, M. , saec. IX vel X codex Amienensis, Bibl. Municipale, , saec. IX codex Sangallensis , saec. IX codex Leidensis, B. P. L. , saec. IX () codex Caroliruhensis , saec. IX codex Bodleianus Auct. T. . , saec. IX Tertullianus Apologeticus
Recensio Vulgata S
codex Petropolitanus lat. I Q. v. , olim Sangermanensis, antea Corbeiensis, saec. IX
SIGLA CODICUM
P λ Q T W Ob U y y N
codex Parisinus lat. , saec. X codex Luganensis, saec. XI codex Parisinus lat. A, saec. XII codex Leidensis, Vossianus lat. F , saec. XII codex Admontensis , saec. XII codex Oxoniensis Add. C , saec. XII codex Parisinus lat. , saec. XIII codex Ambrosianus, S inf./sup., saec. XIV codex Gothanus I , saec. XIV–XV codex Florentinus Magliabechianus I VI , saec. XV
Recensio Fuldensis F
codex Fuldensis deperditus, cuius varias lectiones Franciscus Modius Aldenburgensis ad exemplar editionis Renati Laurentii Barraei (Parisiis, ) collegerat anno . Indiculum hunc, item deperditum, Francisci Modii excudit Franciscus Iunius Leidensis anno . Tertullianus De Pallio
F N S V
codex Florentinus Magliabechianus I. VI. , saec. XV codex Florentinus Magliabechianus I. VI. , saec. XV codex ‘satis vetustus’ quo usus est Salmasius in edit. a. codex Neapolitanus lat. , olim Vindobonensis , saec. XV Notae adscriptae
ac cp mg pc ,
ante correctionem per compendium in margine post correctionem ipsius scribae manus manus recentiores
T H E FR AG M E N T S : T E X T, T R A N SLATI ON, COMME NTARY ALEXANDR EA Gellius .. [Fg(=OXPN)d(=QZ)]: Sed enim in mimo quem [scil. Laberius] inscripsit [Fg: scripsit d] Alexandream [codd.: Alexandra in titulo mimi scripsit Orelli] eodem quidem quo vulgus sed probe Latineque usus est Graeco vocabulo: ‘inplastrum’ [ON: inplaustrum FXP: emplaustrum Q: emplastrum Z] enim dixit oÉqetrwv, non genere feminino, ut isti novicii semidocti. Verba ex eo mimo adposui: quid est ius iurandum? inplastrum aeris alieni inplastrum OXQ: inplaustrum FP: implastrum NZ
THE ALEXANDRIAN WOM AN Gellius ..: On the other hand, in the mime which he [L.] entitled The Alexandrian Woman, he certainly did use a Greek word that is commonly used, but he used it correctly and in the proper Latin form; for, unlike those half-educated fashionable people of our times, he said inplastrum in the neuter, not in the feminine gender. I quote the following words from this mime: what is an oath? The plaster (inplastrum) for debt . . .
C O M M E N TA RY Our only source for this fr. is Gellius, who attributes it to a mime by L. which, according to Gellius’ MSS, is entitled Alexandrea.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
There are two variants in the spelling of this word: Alexandrea and Alexandria (adopted by Wase and by Napoli-Signorelli ). On the basis of inscriptional evidence, the spelling Alexandrea is older (see TLL .–). Since both spellings occur in writings of L.’s time (e.g. Cic. Verr. . and Phil. .), and since it is impossible to know what spelling L. himself preferred, I print Alexandrea, which is the reading of all of Gellius’ MSS at this point. Orelli’s emendation of Alexandrea to Alexandra (i.e. urbs), adopted by Bothe, is not supported by parallels in writings of L.’s time (see TLL .–), and seems unjustified, even if we assume that Alexandra may have referred to a woman’s name (see TLL .–). The title Alexandrea does not occur elsewhere in the surviving frs. of Roman comedy and mime. It is the name of ancient towns (the most distinguished is the Egyptian royal capital; the areas in which the remaining towns are situated are listed in TLL .–) or of a person who may originate from Alexandria (Suet. Nero ; for the inscriptional evidence see TLL .–.). In Cicero’s and L.’s time an inhabitant of Alexandria would have been called Alexandrinus (Cael. ), but there is also the less common ethnic adjective Alexandr¯eus (= %lexandre±ov) which is attested only in inscriptions (TLL .–). It is possible, therefore, that the title Alexandr¯ea is the feminine form of Alexandr¯eus, and that it means ‘The Alexandrian woman’. There are several examples of titles of Roman plays denoting persons, mostly women, associated with an island (Terence’s Andria and Turpilius’ Leucadia; see Arnott Alexis –) and – less often – a town (Afranius’ Brundisina). The name Boiwt©a, which features in the list of comedies by Menander (–) and, in its Latinised form, appears as a title of a fabula palliata by Aquilius or perhaps Plautus (Gellius ..), may mean either the region of Boeotia or a Boeotian woman. Since titles of plays are more likely to refer to people associated with a place rather than to cities or regions, I find it more plausible that L.’s mime was entitled ‘The Alexandrian woman’ (rather than ‘Alexandria’); for other mimes of L. entitled after names of ethnic origin see Cretensis, Galli, and Tusca.
ALEXANDREA
It does not follow from the title Alexandrea that the plot of L.’s mime is set in the Egyptian capital. However, since Alexandria had specific political and moral connotations for the Romans of L.’s time, I regard it as unlikely (though not impossible) that L. named one of his mimes Alexandrea merely to provide his play with an exotic atmosphere. Notions of luxury, lack of discipline, decline of morals, and deceit were associated in Roman mentality with the fascinating capital of Egypt: see Caes. B.C. . (haec constabant ex Gabinianis militibus, qui iam in consuetudinem Alexandrinae vitae ac licentiae venerant et nomen disciplinamque populi Romani dedidicerant), Quint. .., and Frontin. Strat. .. (C. Caesar, quod suspectam habebat Aegyptiorum fidem, per speciem securitatis inspectioni urbis atque operum ac simul licentioribus conviviis deditus, videri voluit captum se gratia locorum ad mores Alexandrinos vitamque deficere). Frontinus’ testimony is important because of the phrase per speciem securitatis inspectioni urbis atque operum, which suggests that there was a feeling of public disapproval in Rome towards the dictator, shared by people who were unwilling to accept the view that, when Caesar was participating in licentious Egyptian banquets, he was actually spying on the city of Alexandria and its fortifications. Moreover, Cicero’s anxiety, reflected in his correspondence in through his repeated references to Caesar’s prolonged stay in Alexandria (Ad Att. .a., .., ..), may be seen as representing the feelings of the general public about an issue which may have given rise to some topical jokes concerning Caesar and Egypt. Alexandria was considered a training centre for professional mimes (see pp. –, n. ), and Cicero, writing in , refers to it as a byword of trickery and deception (stock themes in GrecoRoman comedy and mime), explicitly relating it to a long theatrical tradition of disreputable mime-plays, which goes back to Theocritus (Rab. Post. : Audiebamus Alexandream, nunc cognoscimus. Illinc omnes praestigiae, illinc, inquam, omnes fallaciae, omnia denique ab eis mimorum argumenta nata sunt); see C. Klodt, Ciceros Rede Pro Rabirio Postumo (Stuttgart ) –, T. P. Wiseman, ‘“Mime” and “pantomime”: some problematic texts’, in E. Hall and R. Wyles, eds., New directions in ancient pantomime (Oxford ) .
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
This mime cannot be dated. It is tempting to relate the title to Julius Caesar’s visit and prolonged stay in Alexandria, and perhaps his liaison with Cleopatra VII in / after the defeat of Pompey (Suet. Iul. .), or even the rumours that he (i.e. Caesar) was intending to transfer the capital from Rome to Alexandria (Suet. Iul. .), but there is no corroborating evidence for this view; Alexandria’s presence in Caesar’s political agenda was strong even after his departure from Egypt to Rome and until his assassination in (Suet. Iul. .). This fr. survives because Gellius wished to comment on the formation of the word inplastrum (or, according to some MSS, emplastrum). The adversative particle sed at the beginning of .. contrasts Gellius’ remarks in this section with his disapproving statement at .. that L. uses words which were both obsolete and vulgar, and which he derived from the rather uncouth speech of the common people (obsoleta quoque et maculantia ex sordidiore vulgi usu ponit); in order to support his view, Gellius had proceeded to give a long list of examples, which covered part of section .. and sections ..–. At .. he qualifies his opinion and grants that L.’s skill in Latin word-formation should not be totally discredited, because he, unlike some unreliable persons of Gellius’ time, at least used correctly the neuter (not the feminine) gender when transferring into Latin the Greek word for ‘salve’ or ‘plaster’ (¡ mplastrov). It is not clear whether the neuter form t¼ mplastron, used often by Galen, existed at the same time as the feminine form ¡ mplastrov, used by Dioscurides (. = . Kuehn), or appeared later; Galen (. Kuehn) says that the form ¡ mplastrov is a later form of ¡ mplastov, used in Hippocrates (see TGL s.v.; LSJ s.v.; Langslow Medical , ). Gellius does not explain why the neuter should be regarded as the appropriate Latin gender for rendering the Greek feminine noun mplastrov into Latin. The
ALEXANDREA
situation might have been clearer if we knew the identity, or had the works, of the individuals whose trendy grammatical habits Gellius attacks. His contempt for these persons is clearly shown not only by his decision not to name them, but also by his deliberate choice of the adjectives novicii (already used by Gellius in a disparaging sense at .. turba grammaticorum novicia) and semidocti, and the use and emphatic position of the pronoun isti (see Holford-Strevens Gellius n. , n. ; Garcea and Lomanto –; F. Cavazza, ‘Gellius the Etymologist’, in L. Holford-Strevens and A. Vardi, eds., The worlds of Aulus Gellius (Oxford ) –). But the only surviving passage in which emplastrum appears, according to a small number of MSS, in the feminine gender comes from the treatise De arboribus pomiferis (emplastro nominata) of Gargilius Martialis, a medical author of the third century AD (TLL ..–). Scribonius Largus, a medical writer of the time of Tiberius, uses the term in the neuter gender almost exclusively, but there are two instances in his work in which emplastrum may be feminine: p. . Sconocchia (†compositio emplastri† emplastrus antidota [T: emplastrum antidotum R]) and p. . Sconocchia (in quibusdam haec emplastrus efficacior [Sconocchia: haec emplastris efficatior cod.]); see S. Sconocchia, Per una nuova edizione di Scribonio Largo: I nuovi apporti del codice Toletano (Brescia ) –; and Langslow Medical , . L.’s fr. reads like a witty cre©a or a rhetorical sententia, a simple and memorable apophthegm, which conveys a moral message but does not do so in an austere tone (for the genre of cre±ai and the popularity of sententiae on the stage see A. S. F. Gow, Machon (Cambridge ) –, and E. Rawson, ‘Speciosa locis morataque recte’, in M. Whitby, P. Hardie, and M. Whitby, eds., Homo Viator (Bristol ) –). Its neat structure, exemplified in the bipartite division of the maxim (innocently phrased question – unexpectedly witty answer), the homoeoteleuton and the juxtaposition of the two important words ius iurandum and inplastrum, located at the heart of the fr., and the almost equal number of syllables involved in each section of the line, are
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
closely paralleled in other forms of native Italian entertainment (cf. Pl. Cist. –; Rud. –; Novius Maccus –), and are reminiscent of the carefully constructed one-liners of Publilius, in some of which the motif of the oath is similarly exploited (Amantis ius iurandum poenam non habet, A; cf. Q). E. Woelfflin, in a section of his edn of Publilius’ apophthegms (Publilii Syri sententiae (Leipzig ) ) entitled sententiae falso inter Publilianas receptae, included a slightly different version of this fr.: iusiurandum alieni infido emplastrum aeris est (). The mime-context of the technical term inplastrum firmly places this fr. in the long tradition of comic passages in which imagery of cure and sickness is employed for comic effect on the stage (see, for instance, Pl. Mil. ; Fantham Imagery – ; D. Langslow, ‘The language of poetry and the language of science: The Latin poets and “Medical Latin”’, in J. N. Adams and R. G. Mayer, eds., Aspects of the language of Latin poetry (Oxford ) – and especially –); the vocabulary of medical imagery also has a prominent place (and a different function) in the political speeches, the rhetorical works, and the letters of Cicero (see Fantham Imagery – nn. and , , –), for whom L. did not seem to have a high opinion; but since there are no close linguistic parallels between L.’s fr. and the extant Ciceronian corpus, it would be unwise to claim that L. was targeting with the technical term inplastrum a specific Ciceronian passage or the orator’s predilection for the language of medicine. On the other hand, it could reasonably be argued that L. was experimenting with this common medical and agricultural term in an original way, not only because this fr. seems to be the first instance in extant Latin literature in which inplastrum is used figuratively, but also because L. seems to be subverting the therapeutic function of the term by associating it with a somewhat illegal service: whereas in reality a poultice would be beneficial to a suffering patient, because it would absorb, say, the poison from a bite, an inplastrum, presented in the form of a false oath in this fr., would be beneficial to a debtor, because it would enable
ALEXANDREA
him to delay the payment of his legal debt, or even to provide him with a reason for not making a payment at all. The witty comparison in the fr. of an oath with a poultice whose function is to absorb and, consequently, eliminate a debt, suggests three possible story-lines. (i) Someone wishes to borrow money and swears that he intends to pay back his debt, but his prospective money-lender refuses to give any credit to the debtor’s oath and asks himself the rhetorical question ‘What is an oath?’, to which he dismissively replies ‘An absorbent of debts’, or in other words ‘It’s just a way of not paying back a debt’ (cf. Pl. Cist. –). (ii) A debtor has already borrowed money and would like to postpone the date of the payment of the loan; this he does by reassuring his money-lender with a formal oath that he would keep his promise and that he would meet the deadline of paying back his debt. However, the money-lender is unwilling to indulge his debtor’s wishes, because an oath, according to him, is what medicine is for wounds: once you apply the cure (i.e. the oath), the debt disappears. (iii) A perjurer, a debtor who had already borrowed money, is refusing to pay back his debt by boldly stating that the oath he had originally sworn was a cunning way to trick his money-lender into giving him the amount he required (cf. Pl. Bacch. ; on the motif of young men not keeping their word, and the legal procedures involved in making these oaths, see Barsby Bacchides on lines – and ). It is also possible to interpret the mention of a debt in this fr. as a cryptic reference to an historical event that was in some way connected to Egypt, for example, the enormous sum of money which Ptolemy XII Auletes borrowed and used as a bribe to secure the title ‘friend and ally of Rome’ (see R. J. Evans Acta Classica () and n. ). Metre: uncertain. Like Ribbeck , I scan the line as an incomplete trochaic septenarius with iambic shortening at quµd ˘est (scan bbCD ABCD a/bbCD ). This scansion appears to violate Meyer’s law at the end of the third metron (ali¯en´ produces bbCD instead of the desired BcD), but if the missing end of the
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
line were a single word or a single metrical unit or a ‘quasiviersilbiges Wort’, then L.’s line would form an exception to Meyer’s law (see, e.g., Pl. As. ego pol istum portitorem / priv¯ab¯o portorium, and Questa Metrica ). Ribbeck scanned the line as an incomplete iambic septenarius, Bothe as a choliambus, while Fleckeisen vacillated between an iambic line and a bacchiac tetrameter (see Ribbeck ad loc. and Lindsay Verse –). inplastrum: the technical term inplastrum or emplastrum meant either a ‘plaster’ or a ‘poultice’ (see TLL s.v. and OLD s.v.), and is used in agricultural treatises from at least the second century BC (Cato Agr. .) and in medical ones from at least the reign of Tiberius (Cels. De med. ..). Its comic exploitation in this fr. indicates that L. may have intended to make a joke on the connection between Alexandria and a specific type of inplastrum which was called viride Alexandrinum (‘Alexandrian green’; Langslow Medical ), and was used, according to Celsus (De med. .., ..B), as an absorbent and an alternative remedy for bites. The spelling in- of the first syllable of this word appears in all the older MSS and in one later MS of Gellius’ text, and it is rarer than the generally used spelling emplastrum (see EM s.v.; CGL .; Adams Pelagonius ; cf. J. Svennung Eranos () ), with which it may have co-existed. In fact, if L. wrote inplastrum, rather than emplastrum, in the script of his mime, he was the first to use such a spelling in extant Latin literature, for the first other surviving instance of the spelling inplastrum is found after L.’s time, in two of the older MSS of Pliny’s NH (. inplastrisque VR: emplastrisque cett. codd.); inplastrum also occurs in Fulgentius (Myth. .), Jerome (Tract. in psalm. ), Anthimus (De observ. cib. ), and Isidore (Orig. ..), and is used constantly in the medical works of the fifth-century authors Palladius and Ps.Dioscurides. It has been suggested (TLL ..–) that L. may have opted for the spelling inplastrum because he wished to use a word that belonged to the vocabulary of the common people (‘vulgari ratione’); but there is nothing in the surviving evidence
A N NA P E R A N NA
to suggest that the spelling inplastrum was exclusively colloquial or that the term emplastrum was an elevated word. It seems to me, then, both on the authority of the earlier MSS of Gellius and on the analogy of other compound Greek words which included the prefix n (implico ∼ mplkw, implicatrix ∼ mplktria, insuo ∼ nrptw, incido ∼ np©ptw; see CGL .), that we should not exclude the possibility that L. originally wrote inplastrum, using a spelling that was neither particularly vulgar nor particularly colloquial: the prefix in- simply meant that the original Greek word mplastrov or mplastron was morphologically integrated into Latin (cf. the forms exintero and exentero [< xenter©zw] in Pl. Epid. , ; Petr. .). ANNA PERANNA Gellius .. [Fg(=OXPN)d(=QZ)]: Praeterea in Anna Peranna ‘gubernium’ [codd. praeter F : gubernum F ] pro ‘gubernatore’ [codd.: gubernatione Falsterus] et ‘planum’ pro ‘sycophanta’ et ‘nanum’ pro ‘pumilione’ [FO PZ: ponilioneOmg : pomilione Q: pumilionem X : milionem X ] [scil. Laberius] dicit; quamquam ‘planum’ pro ‘sycophanta’ M. quoque Cicero in oratione scriptum reliquit quam pro Cluentio dixit. Nonius . M = . L [FHLPVEd(=ACXDMO)]: Conlabella [L d: Collabella FHL PVE: Collabella adiunge labra Fmg Hmg Pmg Hmg : Collabella adiungere labra Emg ]. Laberius Anna [Iunius: annalium codd.] Peranna [codd.: Perenna Iunius]: conlabella osculum conlabella L d: collabella FHL PVE
osculum codd.: oscula! L. Mueller
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( –)
ANNA PERANNA Gellius ..: Furthermore, in Anna Peranna [L. uses] gubernius, rather than gubernator, for ‘a steersman’ and planus, rather than sycophanta, for ‘an impostor’ and nanus, rather than pumilio, for ‘a dwarf’. I should add, however, that Marcus Cicero, in the speech that he delivered in defence of Cluentius, also used planus, rather than sycophanta, in the sense of ‘an impostor’. Nonius . M = . L: Conlabella (‘Purse your lips’). L. in Anna Peranna: purse your lips for a kiss
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime presents problems. In his discussion of the uncouth and vulgar vocabulary used in L.’s mimes (see Garcea and Lomanto ), Gellius (..) cites three words (gubernius, planus, and nanus) which he attributes to a mime by L. entitled, according to the MSS of Gellius, Anna Peranna. However, in his list of neologisms coined by early Latin authors, Nonius (. M = . L) includes a fr. which he attributes to a mime by L. entitled, according to all the MSS of Nonius, Annalium Peranna; this is followed by the entry Collabela (or Conlabella) osculum. It seems reasonable to suggest that Peranna, which the texts of Gellius and Nonius have in common, indicates that Gellius and Nonius were citing different extracts from the same mime, and that the correct title of this mime, Anna Peranna, had become (through an error in Nonius’ MSS) Annalium Peranna. Alternatively, it could be argued that there were two mimes by L., one entitled Anna Peranna, and the other Annales; if the latter
A N NA P E R A N NA
interpretation were correct, Peranna in Nonius’ text would form part of the lexicographer’s entry (Peranna, conlabella osculum), while the genitive plural Annalium, which occurs in the MSS of Nonius, would need to depend on a missing noun in the ablative case (e.g. libro or mimo): this view was, in fact, adopted in an early edn of L. (), which printed the title of the mime in the ablative plural (ANNALIBUS). Perottus eliminated Peranna from the text of Nonius by replacing it with the imperative perge iam. I find it more sensible to assume that Nonius and Gellius were referring to the same mime, whose title – the name of the mythological character of Anna Peranna or Anna Perenna – had become through an error in Nonius’ MSS Annalium Peranna. This error may have originated from the fact that, in the entry preceding Conlabella, Nonius (. M = . L) cited a fr. from Q. Quadrigarius’ Annales, and it is possible that the similarity of the words Annalium and Anna confused a careless scribe, who was perhaps looking at the wrong line of the text he was copying when he was recording the title of L.’s mime. The person referred to in the title of L.’s mime is most likely the same person whom Ovid (F. .–), Martial (..), Macrobius (..), and archaeological evidence (CIL .; .; Notizie degli scavi , and , ) call Anna Perenna, the protecting goddess of the new year (see A. Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (California ) –; F. B¨omer, P. Ovidius Naso: Die Fasten (Heidelberg ) –; R. J. Littlewood in C. Deroux, ed., Studies in Latin literature and Roman history (Brussels ) –; J. F. Miller, Ovid’s elegiac festivals (Frankfurt am Main ) –; T. P. Wiseman, The myths of Rome (Exeter ) , ). Bonaria suggests that L. opted for the form Peranna (rather than Perenna) because the homoeoteleuton between Peranna and Anna would amuse the Roman audience. But L. may not have had a choice in the matter, because it is far from clear that the spelling Perenna existed in L.’s time along with the spelling Peranna, which is attested also in Varro (Men. Sat. ; see J.-P. C`ebe, Varron, Satires M´enipp´ees (Rome ) –). Moreover, it is possible that
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( –)
Ovid changed the spelling Peranna to Perenna to justify the aetiological scenarios he puts forth in relation to the identity of this individual. Her festival was celebrated on the Ides of March at the first milestone on the Via Flaminia (Roscher . –; RE –; H. Usener RhM () –). Ovid gives four possible explanations for her name, only to conclude that all of them are wrong, and that a fifth is correct. Wiseman Drama offers a helpful overview of the five aetiological scenarios: (i) She was Dido’s sister Anna, shipwrecked in Latium, sheltered by Aeneas and Lavinia, warned by Dido in a dream of Lavinia’s jealousy, concealed by the river-god Numicius and turned into a water-nymph. Because she hides in a perennial river (amne perenne), she is called Anna Perenna. [.–] (ii) She is Luna, the moon, whose months fill the year (annus). [.] (iii) She is Themis or Io. [.] (iv) She is an Arcadian nymph, who fed the infant Jupiter. [.–] (v) But the truth is that she was an old woman from Bovillae, who provided hot cakes for the plebeians when they seceded to the Mons Sacer, and was honoured by them with a statue. [–] . . . When old Anna had just been made a goddess, Mars asked her to procure Minerva for him as a bride. She promised, but kept putting him off. Eventually she told him it was all arranged, but when Mars came to the bridal chamber and lifted the bride’s veil, he found it was Anna herself.
The surviving frs. neither make clear which of these versions (if any) L. favoured, nor throw any light on the plot of L.’s mime. But the farcical nature of the trick the old hag Anna played on the god Mars, and the mention of a kiss both in L. () and in Ovid (. oscula sumpturus subito Mars aspicit Annam), induced, among others, O. Ribbeck (Geschichte der r¨omischen Dichtung (Stuttgart ) ), Giancotti (Mimo –) and Wiseman (Drama –) to speculate that Ovid’s aetiological story about Anna Perenna, Mars, and Minerva is a (perhaps direct) descendant of L.’s mime, whose plot would involve Anna in the role of the mime-bawd, and would be divided into two acts: ‘first the secession, the cakes and the deification of Anna, then the Mars and Minerva comedy – with the archimima in the role of a landlady plying the different parts of her trade for men and gods respectively’
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(Wiseman Drama ). The reconstruction of the plot in this way, which is reminiscent of the plot of Plautus’ Casina and may have been similar to the story in Pomponius’ Maccus Virgo, is plausible because it is compatible both with Ovid’s familiarity with mime as a literary genre (see Wiseman Ovid) and with the importance of the disguise-motif in Roman comedy (see Pl. Mil. – ; Trin. –; Per. –; Poen. , ; K. Preston CPh () ). Giancotti (Mimo –) suggests a love-triangle between Anna, Aeneas, and the jealous wife Lavinia. But the plot of L.’s mime may not have involved mythological parody at all; Mommsen thought that it may have dealt with characters and comic events related to (or happening on) the day of the festival of Anna Perenna. In this respect, L.’s mime could be seen as one in a series of mimes inspired by religious festivals (cf. Compitalia, Parilicii, and Saturnalia). On the context in which these words survive see Anna Peranna. Metre: uncertain. gubernium: the noun gubernius (= gubernator) is not attested before L.; Gellius considers it both rare and vulgar. On the basis of the noun guberna, which has the same meaning as the noun gubernacula, Ribbeck, emends gubernium to gubernum (see Ribbeck Corollarium ), but G. Gundermann (Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () –) observes that gubernius also occurs in the Acta Petri cum Simone p. . Lipsius (gubernius autem nomine Theon) and . Lipsius (surrexit gubernius ora prandi sui). Cf. also Hist. Apol. rec. A Schmeling introivit gubernius (guvernius P; guvernio F; guvernator LGAtr; gubernus Ring). The spelling gubernus (= gubernator) occurs only in the Hist. Apol. rec. A (Athenagora dixit ad gubernum P, Kortekaas: gubernium Tsitsikli, Schmeling). Isidore (..) uses gubernio (= gubernius). Dalmasso concludes that the form gubernius, like gubernus, ‘rappresenterebbe la voce
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
popolare marinaresca greca e latina (kubrniov gubernius, kÅbernov gubernus) accanto alla forma letteraria kubernthv gubernator’, but the form kubrniov is not attested in LSJ, and the glossae render kÅbernov as gubernita (see LSJ s.v.). Although there are several neuter nouns in -ium formed from first-conjugation verbs (e.g. desiderium < desiderare; LHS –), I have been unable to find (in LHS or in Olcott Formation) any parallels (that is, other masculine nouns in -ius based on -¯a-stem verbal root) for the formation of the masculine gubernius. Giancotti Mimo speculates that gubernium could have occurred in an account of the journey of Anna, Dido’s sister, from Carthage to Latium. Littlewood (see above, Anna Peranna) suggests that ‘if gubernius, like its cognate form gubernator, can be extended to mean ruler or dictator, then this might conceivably be applied to Mars the war god’ (). planum: Dalmasso argues that, although pl˘anus and ˘ sycophanta, both words of Greek origin, have essentially the same meaning (‘an impostor’), the latter is a favourite word of the Roman comic playwrights (see W. Ramsay, The Mostellaria of Plautus (London ) –; OLD s.v. ; LSJ s.v. sukojnthv ), whereas the former means ‘impostor’ only in non-dramatic Latin texts (Cic. Clu. ; Hor. Ep. ..; Petr. ., .; Pliny NH .; see R. Mayer, Horace, Epistles I (Cambridge ) ; Garcea and Lomanto –). Dalmasso’s distinction is inaccurate both because sycophanta is also used in non-dramatic texts (Gellius .. uses it to refer to unreliable astrologers), and because the context of (at least) the Ciceronian passage, cited by Dalmasso, has a strong theatrical flavour. If we could be certain that Cicero borrowed from L. the use of the noun pl˘anus = ‘an impostor’ (and there is no way to prove or reject this view, or the view that it was L. who borrowed this word from Cicero), it would be reasonable to suggest that L.’s mime was performed not long before or not long after , the date of Cicero’s Pro Cluentio. But this is no more than a hypothesis, since both L. and Cicero may have have borrowed the term pl˘anus
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from another Latin source now lost; there is no evidence that the word was in circulation before its appearance in Pro Cluentio. On the other hand, the word plnov meaning ‘a vagabond’ or ‘an impostor’ is found in the vocabulary of Greek comic playwrights already in the fourth century BC (see LSJ s.v. III), and in the first century BC it was used in historiography (Diod. Sic. /..); it is possible, therefore, that Cicero, who seems to use both current Greek from the koin¯e and literary Greek drawn from his own experience, borrowed the word directly from a Greek author (on Cicero’s use of Greek, with contempt, in his speeches, ´ see L. Laurand, Etude sur le style des discours de Cic´eron (Paris – ; repr. and rev. Amsterdam ) –). If we assume that Gellius’ evidence is reliable, could it be that L. makes a point by not following Plautus and Terence in using the word sycophanta? Does his use of pl˘anus indicate a wish to dissociate his writings from the adaptations of his comic predecessors? nanum: derived from the Greek nnov or nnnov (EM s.v.); see Dalmasso –. Gellius (.) reports a discussion between Fronto, Sulpicius Apollinaris, Festus Postumius, and an unnamed Latin grammarian on the Latinity and the apparently vulgar character of this word; see Holford-Strevens Gellius – , ; Garcea and Lomanto –, –. The term nanus as a noun = ‘a dwarf’ seems to be an innovation of L.; Varro uses it to define a type of shallow water-vessel (LL .; cf. Paul.-Fest. M = L), Helvius Cinna (quoted by Gellius .. = fr. Traglia = Courtney = Hollis; see T. P. Wiseman, Cinna the poet and other Roman essays (Leicester ) , Courtney Poets , and Hollis FRP ) employed it as an adjective to qualify diminutive ponies, and Propertius may have used it (after L.) as a noun (meaning ‘a dwarf’) in the context of a wanton feast described with Latin words of Greek origin (..– Magnus [O: nanus mmg , Beroaldus] et ipse suos breviter concretus in artus | iactabat truncas ad cava buxa manus). It may be that L. and, indeed, the love-elegists preferred this word to pumilio because of its Greek origin and its rare employment by other Latin authors of their
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era. By late antiquity, nanus appears to have settled well in the Latin vocabulary (Iuv. .; Suet. Tib. .; HA, Al. Sev. .). Garcea and Lomanto, in the most recent and detailed discussion of the word, conclude: ‘nanus is not a uerbum barbarum but a Graecism, it occurs in Aristophanes and Cinna and therefore has the status of a literary word. These remarks, however, do not prevent Gellius from negatively assessing the extension of the use of nanus from small animals to people of short stature’ (– ). The Latin term pumilio (= ‘dwarf’; of doubtful etymology: see LHS ) seems to have been older than nanus: Lucretius (.) uses it to describe a female beloved of small stature who appears graceful and witty in the eyes of her lover; it is interesting that Pliny the Elder, unlike Helvius Cinna (cited above), opts for pumilio (rather than nanus) as the technical term to use in order to describe dwarf varieties of animals and birds (., ., .). On the fascination with dwarfs in Roman society see the commentaries of Mayor and of Courtney on Iuv. ., and of Howell on Martial ... Giancotti Mimo suggests that this word may have been targeted at Aeneas as a sarcastic comment of L. on Caesar’s ancestors, whereas Littlewood (see above, Anna Peranna) finds it ‘quite feasible that Anna, an old woman, deceptively veiled and small compared with the statuesque Minerva, should be described both as planus, an imposter, and nanus, a dwarf’ (). On the context in which this fr. survives see Anna Peranna. Metre: uncertain. Ribbeck scans the line as an incomplete trochaic septenarius (but he does not say where in the line these words were originally placed; they could have been at the beginning of the line: BcD Abb), and Bothe as an incomplete cretic. conlabella < con- + ∗ labello (< labellum, dimin. of labrum); it is attested only in this fr. attributed to L. However, a similarly
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formed denominative verb which has the word labrum as its base occurs in Novius (Decuma ), as attested by Nonius . M = . L (Sublabrare, cibum intra labra mittere. Novius Decuma: ‘iam ego illi subiens sublabrabo esui illud sinciput’): see Fischer Observations ; Carilli Hapax . For the meaning of conlabellare see the marginal glosses reported in the apparatus criticus and one of the so-called Glossae Nonii recorded in MS Leiden, Rijksuniversiteit B. P. L. F (= CGL .) Conlabella adiungere labra. The importance of these glosses has been recently discussed in detail by G. Milanese, ‘Una glossa noniana, Laberio e Plauto’, in L. Castagna and C. Riboldi, eds., Amicitiae templa serena: Studi in onore di G. Aric`o (Milan ). He relates the phrase adiungere labra to Plautine expressions such as ad labra labella adiungit (Pseud. ), labra ab labellis (Miles ), and labella cum labellis (Asin. ), and concludes that the author of the Nonian gloss had Plautus in mind when explaining L.’s coined verb. Apart from the participle conquieta ((a).), there do not seem to be in L. other examples of denominative verbs based on expressions which involve the preposition cum, or of denominatives with the prefix con- implying reciprocity. For other examples in L. of verbal forms coined from a preposition and an otherwise unattested verbal form, see depudicavit ((a)), praeviridantibus (.), and (possibly) iniquat (). For a similar invitation to a kiss see Pl. Asin. compara labella cum labellis (with Nonius . M = . L: Conparare est sociare, coniungere). Giancotti (Mimo ) and Wiseman (Drama ) speculate that this fr. refers to a detail from the unveiling of Anna Peranna, disguised as a bride, who with these words invites her spouse Mars to kiss her.
AQUAE CALDAE Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Glis nominativus ab eo quod sunt [codd.: est L. Mueller] glires. Laberius in Aquis Caldis [g: Aquis Calidis Laetus]:
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et iam hic me optimus somnus premit, ut premitur glis verba Laberius . . . glis om. d et iam L. Mueller: etiam g optimus g: opimus Passeratius [premit] opprimit L. Mueller ut premitur F : opprimitur F HLPVE (silente F ): praemittitur ed. princ.: quo premitur Passeratius: eo premitur Bothe: ut opprimitur Quicherat: ut glis ∗ ∗ ∗ L. Mueller
Charisius . K = . B [Npnn C]: Podagrosus a podagra bene dicitur, sed et podagricus a pedum aegritudine, cuius exemplum apud Laberium [npc mg : liberium n: liberum nac ] est in Aquis [n : in aqui n: in Aquis suppl. ex C Putschius]. verba sed et podagricus . . . Aquis in N fuisse non videntur gra, podagricus a pedum aegritudine appellatur p
podagrosus a poda-
HOT SPRINGS Nonius . M = . L: Glis (‘dormouse’); nominative case, from plural glires. L. in Hot Springs: . . . and already the most beneficial sleep overcomes me here, as it does a dormouse . . .
Charisius . K = . B: Podagrosus (‘gouty’) is rightly used of a person afflicted with podagra (‘gout’); however, this person is also called podagricus (‘gouty’) because of the illness (aegritudo) of his feet (pedes). An example of this is in L.’s Springs.
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C O M M E N TA RY The title Aquae Caldae is attributed by Nonius and (probably) by Charisius (for the textual problems in Charisius’ passage see below) to a mime of L.; the same title is also attributed twice by Nonius (.– M = . L and . M = . L) to a fabula togata by Atta (see A. Daviault, Comoedia Togata (Paris ) ). There is not enough evidence to say with certainty whether or not L.’s mime and Atta’s comedy had the same plot and characters, and there is no reason to assume that either (or both) of these titles referred to a specific city in North Africa which had hot springs (see Livy .. aliae adversus urbem ipsam [scil. Carthaginem] ad Calidas Aquas delatae sunt; Ptol. ..; CIL .– and .–); the title Aquae Caldae may also have referred to different locations of hot springs, which would have provided the background for the events of the plot (see RE –, especially –, and DS . –). T. Bergk (Neue Jahr. f. Phil. () –) attributes to this mime the fr. quamdiu ad aquas fuit, numquam est mortuus (Ribbeck prints quam diu ad aquas fuit, numquam est mortuus), quoted by Cicero (De orat. .) as an example of a silly joke appropriate not only to mime-actors but also to orators. However, Cicero mentions neither L.’s name nor a title in relation to this fr., and it is hazardous to conclude from the mention of the word aquas, and its seemingly therapeutic sense in the context, that Cicero, whose knowledge of the mime-repertoire was not confined to the mimes of L., was drawing material from L.’s Aquae Caldae in this section of his treatise. This fr. survives because Nonius wished to cite a passage which contained the form glis as the nominative singular of the Latin noun for ‘dormouse’, whose nominative plural form is glires (LHS ). The form glis for the nominative singular is also attested in Cato (Orig. fr. Peter), Varro (as cited by Charisius .– B
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( –)
and .– B), Probus (GL .. K), Priscian (. = GL ..– H), Ausonius (Techn. .), and the CGL (.; .; .; .). Other nominative singular forms of this noun, all of them found in authors of late antiquity, are glir, gliris, and glirus; see TLL ..– and W. Heraeus Archiv f. lat. Lexik. () . Ribbeck (ad loc.) suggests that in this fr. ‘laudat aliquis salutarem aquarum effectum’. His view is supported by the widely held belief of the Romans in the therapeutic function of hot springs: see Vitr. .. omnis autem aqua calida ideo [quod] est medicamentosa; Vell. Paterc. .. aquas salubritate medendisque corporibus nobiles (cf. Tac. Ann. .); Pliny NH . nec vero omnes quae sint calidae medicatas esse credendum (cf. NH ., .); Mart. .. salutiferis . . . Anxur aquis; Amm. .. aquis . . . sospitalibus; cf. TLL .–; .–; and .–. However, if we concluded that the speaker of this fr. used hot springs to cure his illness, we should assume, from the speaker’s statement, that s/he was suffering from lack of sleep – but the water of hot springs is not cited anywhere as a cure for insomnia; somniferous effects on the Roman stage are usually attributed to wine (cf. ecastor mustum somniculosum). Whatever the remedy for the speaker’s illness in the fr., the proverbial style (see Otto Sprichw¨orter ) of the comparison L. makes between a human and a dormouse conveys effectively how quickly and deeply the mime-character is falling asleep (L. Mueller’s et iam makes much more sense than the feeble etiam of the MSS). Servius (on Aen. .) and Isidore (..) say that dormice (glires) derived their name from the fact that sleep made them plumper (gliscere = crescere). On the image of the sleeping (i.e. hibernating) dormouse see Pliny NH .; Mart. . tota mihi dormitur hiems et pinguior illo | tempore sum quo me nil nisi somnus alit; .. somniculosos ille porrigit glires; Ausonius Eph. .– and Techn. . dic, cessante cibo somno quis opimior est? glis; Jerome c. Ioh. . L.’s joke echoes the imaginative comparisons between humans and animals in Semonides (IEG fr. West) and Plautus, who, in order to amuse his audience, attributes to some of his characters features or habits of a wide range of animals (polypus, ox, ass, earthworm, leech,
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sheep, lambs, shrewmouse, caterpillar, nightingale, dove, hawk, thrush, housefly, snake, hound, wolf, vulture, and sheepdogs; less frequent are such comparisons in Terence and in Cicero; see Fantham Imagery –, , , –). Metre: incomplete senarii; scan line D A/BcD ABcD; line AbbCD . Meyer’s (n. optimus) and Luchs’ laws (optim¯us s¯omn¯us premit, DAB cD) are not violated. optimus: Passeratius’ emendation of optimus ‘most beneficial’ to opimus ‘plump’ is attractive both because it is easy to explain palaeographically and because the adjective opimus is attested in relation to glis: see Ausonius Techn. . (cited above); the joke, then, would be that the result of the action of sleeping, i.e. swelling, would be projected onto not only the person (or animal) sleeping but also sleep itself. Writing optimus instead of opimus seems to have been a common scribal error: see Col. .. tenerrima pullities saepe quadraginta diebus opima (optima codd.) redditur. However, opimus is not an adjective normally attributed to sleep; moreover, opimus (bCD) violates Meyer’s law at the fourth foot of the senarius, whereas optimus (BcD) does not. somnus premit: a common expression; see TLL ..–. This fr. is preserved because Charisius wished to cite it as an example of a passage that contains the word podagricus. Unlike Charisius, who seems to accept both podagrosus and podagricus as correct Latin forms denoting a person suffering from gout, Probus challenges the Latinity of the form podagricus, and favours the term podagrosus: see De nomine excerpta in GL .. K (Podagrosus, an podagricus? Podagrosus a podagra, sicut rugosus a ruga; cf. Beda GL .. K and CGL .). In fact, the form podagricus, derived from the Greek podagrik»v (not from pes and aegritudo, as Charisius claims; see EM s.v., WH s.v., and LHS –),
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is much more frequently attested than podagrosus: L. may have been the first to use it, although a papyrus containing frs. of an epitome of a history of Rome, attributed to Livy, seems to include this word (P.Oxy. .: [ . . . poda]gricus A. Hostilius Mancinus); Petronius associates it with the language of the freedmen (.), but also uses it in relation to other characters in the Satyricon who are not freedmen (., .; cf. Sen. Apocol. .; De ira ..; Ep. ., .). Unlike podagrosus, podagricus is copiously attested in medical writings (Celsus Med. .. (twice); Pliny NH ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., .; Vitr. .., ..; the Greek suffixation of medical adjectives such as this is superbly discussed by Langslow Medical –). The form podagrosus, formed from the noun podagra and the ending -osus (for its formation and its meaning see LHS – and Langslow Medical –), is attested already in Plautus (Merc. ; Poen. ) and Lucilius (– M = – W), but seems to disappear until the time of the HA (Heliog. .; Vop. .). Adjectives in -osus are favoured by L. (annosus (), bibosus (), mammosus (), somniculosus (); see Ernout Adjectifs , , , ), but it is interesting that in this mime L. opts for the form podagricus (rather than podagrosus). This may have been due to the Greek ending of the word, which by L.’s time may have been the established medical term for a gouty person. For other Greek -ik»v → Latin -icus adjectives in L. see Attica (.), Baliaricum (.), Cynica (), and physicus (.). Neither the authorship nor the title of the mime to which the word podagricus belongs is extant in N, the oldest MS of Charisius; this raises some interesting problems, especially regarding the title of the play in question, which, according to the later MSS of Charisius, is not Aquae Caldae, but simply Aquae (the title Calidae – reported in the ablative plural Calidis so as to agree with Aquis – apparently occurred in the (now lost) MS C, which H. Putschen is supposed to have consulted when compiling his edn of Grammaticae Latinae auctores antiqui (Hanoviae ); on the importance of C in the MS tradition of Charisius see the Preface of Barwick in his edn of the Ars Grammatica, pp. –). Assuming that
ARIES
the attribution of the passage to L., found in the later MSS, is correct, it is reasonable to conclude tentatively that the adjective Caldae was dropped either through a scribal error or because it was often omitted next to the noun Aquae, and that Charisius and Nonius were citing extracts from the same mime of L., which was entitled Aquae Caldae. The mention of a gouty person in a play whose title points to the therapeutic function of hot springs is not odd or unexpected (see Pliny NH .). Gout seems to have been associated with wealth in the Roman mind (see Smith on Petr. Sat. .), but I cannot say whether or not this notion applies to L.’s fr. Metre: uncertain. According to Putschen’s edn of Charisius (mentioned above), the (now lost) MS C reported that L.’s fr. consisted of the words podagricus non recessit. Bothe and Ribbeck retained these words and scanned them as parts of two incomplete trochaic septenarii (podagricus | non recessit). But since these words are not found in any of the extant MSS, it seems more sensible not to include them in the text.
AR IES Charisius . K = . B [Nnn p]: Clunes feminino genere dixit Melissus et habet auctorem Laberium, qui in Ariete sic ait, vix sustineo clunes
et Horatius [suppl. Haupt] et [suppl. Haupt] ‘lassas clunes’. vix sustineo clunes scaevola et horatius et lassas clunes Nnn : corr. Haupt: vix sustineo clunes scaevolas Bothe in notis: vix sustineo lassas clunes, Scaevola Ribbeck clunes melissus femi dixit oratius et lassos culunes et melius mas dicitur p
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THE RAM Charisius . K = . B: Melissus put clunes (‘buttocks’) in the feminine; his source for this is L., who has, in The Ram, the following: I can hardly support the < . . . > buttocks.
Horace also writes , and ‘exhausted buttocks’.
C O M M E N TA RY Charisius is our only source for attributing to L. a mime entitled Aries. No other extant mime or Roman comedy bears this title (cf. the titles of L.’s mimes Catularius and Scylax, both of which refer to animals; for titles of Roman comedies referring to animals see Giancotti Mimo –). The word aries was used to signify a male sheep (TLL .–.), the legendary ram that carried Phrixus to Colchis (TLL .–.), a mechanical device whose function was to break down walls (TLL .–.), a type of fish (TLL .–), and the constellation Aries (TLL .–). Although the three extant words of this mime do not allow us to identify which of the above meanings is indicated by a mime-play entitled Aries, O. Ribbeck (Geschichte der r¨omischen Dichtung (Stuttgart ) ) was the first to argue that the title of L.’s mime did not allude to an animal but to the constellation Aries, and that this mime dealt with astrology. It is undoubtedly striking that there are four titles of mimes, all attributed to L., which may be interpreted as indicating signs of the zodiac (is it a coincidence that the titles Aries, Taurus, Cancer, and Virgo refer to spring and summer star-signs?), and on the basis of these titles it is easy to construct a theory arguing that the mimographer was presenting on the farcical stage a series of
ARIES
skits that ridiculed, in the manner of Petronius’ Trimalchio (Sat. .–; .–; see Smith ad loc.), popular beliefs about starsigns, and the way in which stars were thought to influence and fashion people’s characters (e.g. Sat. . [Trimalchio speaking] itaque quisquis nascitur illo signo, multa pecora habet, multum lanae, caput praeterea durum, frontem expudoratam, cornum acutum. plurimi hoc signo scholastici nascuntur et arietilli). Educated Romans, such as Cicero, knew and appreciated the astronomical works of erudite Hellenistic poets such as Aratus (for the Roman reception of the Phaenomena see Kidd Aratus –, and for Cicero’s translation of Aratus W. W. Ewbank, The poems of Cicero (London ) –; Courtney Poets –), and it may be that L. with this and other mimes based on signs of the zodiac was responding in a low and perhaps derisive fashion to the popularity of such literary trends in intellectual circles of his era. But this astrological interpretation is not supported by evidence other than the titles of plays attributed to L. by grammarians, and it may ultimately be due to mere coincidence (see O. Crusius’ criticism of Ribbeck’s view in Neue Jahrb. f. kl. Alt. () ). There is only one fr. that is explicitly said (by the scribe who copied Charisius) to belong to the mime Aries, which is attributed to L. Apart from this fr., Tertullian quotes some words which refer to a ram, and which he attributes to L. (); some scholars, therefore, assumed that Tertullian, when making the distinction between a male sheep and a battering ram, was quoting from L.’s Aries; however, Tertullian does not name which Laberian mime he has in mind in his description of the military engine, and for this reason I discuss his citation of L. in the section of frs. that belong to unspecified mimes. Charisius’ motive for citing L. is entirely different from Tertullian’s. In his discussion of the gender of various nouns, Charisius deals with the word clunis, which is found mostly in the plural (for instances
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of this word in the singular see LS s.v.), and could be either masculine or feminine (LHS ). Charisius cites instances in which this noun (in the plural) is treated as feminine; L.’s fr. is one such example (was L. the first to use clunis as a feminine noun?), and is quoted on the authority of the Augustan grammarian C. Maecenas Melissus (GRF Funaioli), while Charisius himself cites two more instances of clunis as feminine noun: Horace’s pulchrae clunes (S. ..; cf. Nonius . M = . L) and Q. Scaevola’s lassas clunes ( Courtney = Hollis). In fact, clunis is feminine also in Celsus (De med. ..), Pliny (NH ., .), Ausonius (Epist. .), Caelius Aurelianus (Acut. morb. ..) and Isidore (..). Clunis as a masculine noun occurs more rarely, and seems to predate clunis as feminine: Nonius’ scribes (. M = . L) cite a passage in which clunes appears to be masculine, which is supposed to belong to a play entitled Agroicus, attributed to Plautus (clunes desertos codd.: infractos Paulus-Festus: distortos Ritschl: diffractos Onions: dissertos Lindsay; cf. Paulus-Festus M = L). Juvenal (. tremulo . . . clune) and Martial (.. clune nudo) employ clunis in the same fashion. Some grammarians seem to favour the masculine gender for clunis on the analogy of the masculine nouns panis, cinis, and crinis: see Verrius Flaccus GRF Funaioli; Beda De orth. in GL ..–; Serv. on Aen. .; cf., however, Prisc. . = GL .. H ‘finis’ quoque et ‘clunis’ tam masculini quam feminini generis usurpavit auctoritas in una eademque significatione. Metre: uncertain. Ribbeck scanned the line as an incomplete senarius (which I do not favour because it violates Meyer’s law at the fourth foot), but Ribbeck as an incomplete trochaic septenarius (which I prefer). In both cases he inserted lassas before clunes (n. < ∗∗∗ >); the words vix sustineo lassas clunes could then be the beginning of a trochaic septenarius (scan BCdd ABCD A/). But the insertion of lassas is metrically unnecessary; the words vix sustineo clunes could form by themselves the beginning of a trochaic septenarius (BCdd ABC).
ARIES
vix sustineo: on sustineo associated with the weight of the body, see Ovid Met. . (addit et infirmos baculo quos sustinet artus), Petr. Sat. . (succisi poplites membra non sustinent). Cf. Cic. Ad Att. .. (iam enim corpore vix sustineo gravitatem huius caeli quae mihi laborem adfert in dolore), Ad fam. .. (Brutus enim Mutinae vix iam sustinebat). clunes: it is unclear who the speaker of this line is, for clunis could refer to the buttocks of either people (TLL .–; it is frequently used in association with the effeminate behaviour of cinaedi) or animals (TLL .–); interestingly enough, it is used both of rams (Varro RR .. si arietes sint . . . scapulis et clunibus latis) and of constellations (Manil. .– aspice Taurum | clunibus; Germ. ab adversis omnem secat ille Leonem clunibus). On its euphemistic sense as anus see J. N. Adams Glotta () – and Vocabulary , , and . < ∗∗∗ >: Charisius’ entry is so poorly transmitted that no adjective seems to have survived in the grammarian’s quotation of L.’s fr. which would indicate that clunes is a feminine noun: the word-order in MSS Nnn (see apparatus criticus) indicates that L. may originally have written a word which looked like Scaevola’s name and which, because of an error of haplography, was omitted by Charisius’ scribe; this view was adopted by Bothe, who pointed out L.’s fondness for diminutives and inserted the feminine adjective scaevolas (diminutive of scaevus = ‘left’, ‘inauspicious’, ‘unlucky’) after clunes. But this adjective is not attested elsewhere, and does not make sense when applied to clunes. Alternatively, it is possible that L. originally wrote clunes lassas ‘exhausted buttocks’ (see Adams Vocabulary and ), which would make good sense as object of the verb sustineo (in fact, the adverb vix would clarify the meaning of the fr. even more), but would also create problems concerning Scaevola’s quotation. Had Scaevola too written lassas clunes? If so, the omission of one of the two examples (lassas clunes) may have been due
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( –)
to haplography. Or had L. written another feminine adjective accompanying the noun clunes, which was omitted by the scribe for the same reason that Horace’s phrase (pulchrae clunes) was not recorded? We read in the treatise De dubiis nominibus (GL .. K) that on Scaevola’s authority clunes is feminine (ut Scaevola ‘lassas clunes’), but it is unclear to me how careful the author of this treatise was in checking the accuracy of the passages he was copying from other handbooks. It is also possible to argue, as Ribbeck did, that the mimographer had originally written clunes lassas and that the name Scaevola (if this is the correct MSS reading) should be viewed not as a nominative case, referring to the poet Q. Scaevola, but as the vocative case of a proper name which may have formed part of L.’s original quotation. Ribbeck does not say whether or not this person called Scaevola is supposed to be a fictional character or a historical personality, whose nomen gentis was Scaevola. If the latter were the case, I fail to see what, for example, Mucius Scaevola (see OCD s.v. Mucius) would be doing in the plot of a Laberian mime entitled The ram. Was he represented as a kinaidos, as Ziegler () argues? Because of the problems raised by the poorly transmitted state of Charisius’ text, it seems to me more sensible to conclude that for some unknown reason the feminine adjective which L. wrote to accompany the noun clunes was omitted by the scribe. AU G U R Charisius . K = . B [Nnn ]: Large: Iulius Modestus ait qualitatis hoc esse; largiter idem Modestus ait quantitatis. denique Laberius in Augure largiter (inquit) feci lucri feci lucri Buecheler: lucri feci vel luti feci npc : luti feci Nn: lucri feri vel luti feri nac : lucrifeci Bothe
AU G U R
T H E AU G U R Charisius . K = . B: Large (‘abundantly’): Iulius Modestus says that this refers to quality; he also says that largiter (‘abundantly’) refers to quantity. Lastly, L. has in The Augur: . . . I made a large amount of profit
C O M M E N TA RY The figure of the seer seems to have been a standard source of entertainment in Greek New Comedy and mime, in the fabula togata, and in the fabula Atellana: cf. Mnteiv of Alexis (; see Arnott Alexis –), O«wnistv of Antiphanes, %gÅrthv of Philemon (), MhnagÅrthv or MhtragÅrthv of Antiphanes (–) and MhnagÅrthv of Menander, Rhinthon com. Olivieri, Ariolus of Naevius (–), Augur of Afranius (–) and of Pomponius (–), and Omen of Afranius (–). Charisius’ MSS provide the only extant piece of evidence for the treatment of this character in Roman mime. Although the augures held a specific Roman office with clearly defined tasks and functions (see RE –; ANRW ., –), there is no reason to assume that L. was comically portraying in his play a specific augur who was holding the office in the year of the performance of this mime (see TLL .–). The central character of this piece may have been a fictional money-grabbing impostor who did not belong to the college of the augures, and was making a living by pretending to be an augur (see J.-P. C`ebe, La caricature et la parodie dans le monde romain antique des origines a` Juv´enal (Paris ) ; Jocelyn Ennius ). On the notion that the augures were avaricious (this would square with the mention of lucrum in L.’s fr.), untrustworthy, and histrionic, see Accius Astyanax – = – W (nil credo auguribus, qui auris verbis divitant | alienas, suas ut auro locupletent domos); Ennius Telamo – Jocelyn; inc. fab.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
Jocelyn; Afran. Augur – (modo postquam adripuit rabies hunc nostrum augurem, | mare caelum terram ruere ac tremere diceres); cf. Pl. Mil. – ; Rhet. Her. .; Cic. Div. .–; Prop. ..–; Livy ... If the augur of L.’s play were also a foreigner (cf. Iuv. ., .), the opportunities for comic scenes would be even greater. Jokes at the expense of auguria, portents, appear already in Plautus: Asin. – (sed quid hoc quod picus ulmum tundit? hau temerariumst. | certe hercle ego quantum ex augurio eiius pici intellego, | aut mihi in mundo sunt virgae aut atriensi Saureae); Stich. – (auspicio hodie optumo exivi foras: | mustela murem apstulit praeter pedes; | . . . nam ut illa vitam repperit hodie sibi, | item me spero facturum: augurium hac facit). Bonaria refers to Cic. Div. ., and speculates that the plot of this mime ‘presente la presa in giro degli auguri e dell’aruspicina’; although Bonaria’s view is not unfounded, Cicero speaks of the unreliability not of the augures but of the haruspices, who – strictly speaking – were a different category of seers: see Cato Agr. . (haruspicem, augurem, hariolum, Chaldaeum nequem consuluisse velit); Cic. Div. . (Artificiosae divinationis illa fere genera ponebas: extispicum eorumque qui ex fulguribus ostentisque praedicerent, tum augurum eorumque qui signis aut ominibus uterentur, omneque genus coniecturale in hoc fere genere ponebas), . (non intellegis eadem [scil. conclusione] uti posse et haruspices et fulguratores et interpretes ostentorum et augures et sortilegos et Chaldaeos); TLL .–.; for the meaning of haruspex see the passages cited in TLL ..–. L.’s fr. survives because it contains the adverb largiter (see LHS ), which (according to the grammarian Iulius Modestus, as cited by Charisius) is supposed to signify quantity, in contrast to the adverb large, which (again according to Modestus) signifies quality (cf. Char. . B = Beda De orth. in GL .. K: Large et largiter. Iulius Modestus utrumque recte dici ait, sed ‘large’ esse qualitatis, ‘largiter’ quantitatis). Modestus does not say what he means by ‘quality’, and his definition does not seem to be
AU G U R
followed by Charisius . B, who makes the following distinction between these terms: ‘large’ . . . significat effuse et abundanter, ut dicimus ‘large et liberaliter patrimonio usus est’, et ‘largiter’ multum, ut ‘largiter pecuniae habuit’. The distinction between large and largiter was not discussed only by Modestus: see Dositheus GL ..– (illud vero est vitiosum, quod multi dicunt, ‘largiter, duriter’, ignorantes rationem et nitentes auctoritate, cum et illi auctores qui semel ‘largiter’ ac ‘duriter’ dixerunt saepius ‘large’ et ‘dure’ dixerint; Priscian . = GL .. H; cf. Charis. . B: naviter, humaniter, largiter, duriter: quae quamvis antiquitati adsignent grammatici, tamen dicunt etiam secundum suam rectam analogiam proferri posse, ut nave et ignave humane large dure) and Differentiae p. . Beck (citing the example frumentum large praebitum est, largiter consumptum est). Diomedes (GL .. K) wrongly believes that the form largiter was earlier than large. Plautus uses largiter five times (referring to fault, profit, and wine: Epid. ; Most. ; Rud. , ; Truc. ) and large once (referring to polite behaviour: Aul. ). Latin authors using both of these forms include Lucretius, Horace, Suetonius, Lactantius, and Augustine (see TLL ..–), but the relevant passages from their writings do not prove that the boundaries in the meaning of these two adverbs were clearly defined or generally accepted. Metre: uncertain (n. feci lucri). largiter: unlike large, largiter may govern a genitive of person or thing or abstract noun: see TLL ..–. and LHS . In conjunction with a noun denoting ‘money’ or ‘profit’, it occurs in Pl. Rud. (credo . . . illic inesse argenti et auri largiter) and (magna . . . praedast, largiter mercedis indipiscar). feci lucri: Buecheler suggested that the fr. be divided into two lines, that the order of the words lucri feci be inverted, and that they be scanned as the beginning of a senarius ( . . . largiter | feci lucri . . . ). I agree with the suggestion of inverting the order of the transmitted text (lucri f¯ec´ at the beginning of a senarius
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( –)
violates Meyer’s law at the second foot), but I do not see why largiter feci lucri should be in two lines. These words could form the beginning of a trochaic septenarius (BcD ABcD ) observing Meyer’s law (l¯arg˘ıt¯er f¯ec´ l˘ucr´); but they could also be the ending of either a senarius (/BcD ABcD) or a trochaic septenarius (/BcD ABcD; this is the scansion Bothe opted for). In either of the latter cases (i.e. if this fr. were originally at the end of a line) both Meyer’s and Luchs’ laws would be observed (l¯argµt¯er f¯ec´ l˘ucr´). The expression facio lucri occurs frequently in Plautus (six times), Nepos, Phaedrus, and Seneca (see TLL ..–), whereas the combination lucri facio is found once in Plautus (Bacch. ) and several times in Cicero (Verr. ., . (lucri fio); Brutus’ letter to Cicero in Ad fam. ..; cf. also Petr. .; Mart. .., ..; TLL ..–). There is a striking effect of assonance, conveyed by the proximity of the liquids l and r, in the expression largiter feci lucri. Bothe’s reading lucrifeci is not attested in writings earlier than, or contemporary to, L.’s mimes (see TLL ..–, to which add CGL .). AULULARIUS Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Ebriulare [Mercerus : ebruilare F : ebrulare F HLPVEd: ebriolare Carrion], ebrium facere, et ebriacus [FH LPVEd: ebriatus H ], ebrius. Laberius . . . idem [g: Plautus Laetus] in Aululario [scripsi: aulularia FHLVE: aularia P: Augure Stephanus in notis: maldaria Scaliger]: homo ebriacus somno sanari solet verba Laberius . . . solet om. d homo g: homo Wagner ebriacus FHLPE: hebriacus V: ebriatus Bentinus: ebriolatus Carrion: ebriosus Fabricius somno g: somnum Wase sanari FHLPE: sonari V: obsonari Wase
AULULARIUS
THE MIME OF THE POT Nonius . M = . L: Ebriulare, ‘to make someone drunk’; ebriacus, ‘a drunkard’. L. . . . the same author in The Mime of the Pot: a drunkard’s usual remedy is sleep
C O M M E N TA RY Nonius, our only source for this fr., attributes it to a mime by L. which, according to Nonius’ MSS, is entitled Aulularia. The ending -aria suggests that this word is a feminine adjective, of the sermo plebeius, accompanied by the noun fabula, which, though missing in Nonius’ text, can easily be understood on the basis of the Plautine titles Aulularia, Cistellaria, Mostellaria, and Vidularia (see LHS ; it is not discussed by Cooper Formation in his section on adjectives in -arius, –). Consequently, Ritschl (Parerga ) and Woelfflin (Titel ) suggested that the name ‘Laberius’ in connection with the title Aulularia was a scribal error, and that it should be emended to ‘Plautus’; in fact, this emendation had been proposed as early as by Pomponius Laetus, a learned Professor of Latin and enthusiastic supporter of revivals of Roman dramas in the fifteenth century. However, C. Wagner (De Plauti Aulularia (Bonn ) ) rightly expressed the view that the surviving evidence does not allow us to decide whether or not Nonius’ MSS were wrong in attributing the title Aulularia to L.; on the other hand, if L.’s mimus bore exactly the same title as Plautus’ fabula palliata, it is difficult to explain the feminine gender of the adjective Aulularia, and it would be unconvincing to argue that the term fabula could also be applied to mimes, because the theatrical genres of comedy and mime seem (at least to Cicero, L.’s contemporary) to have been distinct from each other (Cael. mimi ergo iam exitus, non fabulae). The most recent editor of L., Carilli (Note ), seems reluctant to emend the
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
ending -aria to -ario in Nonius’ text, and concludes that Plautus’ Aulularia was so popular in antiquity that it probably inspired L. to write a mime which not only was named after Plautus’ comedy, but also borrowed from it its characters and plot. But I fail to see why L. could not have written a mime entitled Aulularius; this would not have been the sole instance in which L. would use as the title of a mime a masculine adjective in -arius, with the missing noun mimus to be understood by his audience (cf. Catularius; Petr. Sat. . de Laserpiciario mimo canticum), and it would not be unreasonable to argue that a careless scribe either misread or emended the adjective ending -ario to -aria, because he knew that the word Aulularia was a title of a play, or because he was familiar with the ending of plays in -aria. I do not know what Scaliger meant when he wrote in the margin of Iunius’ edn of Nonius () the word maldaria as an emendation for the title Aulularia. Moreover, Stephanus () wrongly thought that the title of this mime, which appears in early editions of Nonius as Aulular . . . () or Aulu . . . (, ) or Aulula . . . (, ), should be identified with the title of the previous mime, namely Augur, on the grounds that the above abridged forms originated from the abbreviation Aug . . . for Augur. Stephanus’ view is not correct, because the error he points to could have occurred only in printed editions of L. that list the titles of his plays in alphabetical order, and does not arise in Nonius’ MSS, which, immediately before the quotation from the Aulularius, contain a fr. not from L.’s Augur, but from his Cytherea. It is unclear whether or not the plot of this mime presented any similarities to Plautus’ Aulularia, as Ziegler () tentatively suggests. This fr. survives because it contains the adjective ebri¯acus, which Nonius glosses as ebrius. Ebri¯acus occurs only in L. (did he introduce it into the Latin language?), the Vulgate, the glossae (TLL ..–), and a writing-tablet from Vindolanda (see J. N. Adams CQ () ). It was looked down upon by
AULULARIUS
Charisius (. B eber et ebriacus ne dixeris), and seems to have been formed from ebrius on the analogy of mer¯acus < merus (EM s.v. ebrius; LHS , ); Carrion’s ebriolatus is an unnecessary emendation prompted by the infinitive ebriulare at the beginning of Nonius’ lemma (cf. ), while Fabricius’ ebriosus lacks the support of Nonius’ MSS. Bentinus’ emendation of ebriacus to ebriatus, making this word the perfect participle of the rare and late verb ebriare, deserves serious consideration because it also occurs in Nonius’ text immediately before the citation of L. (in MS H ); it was adopted by Ribbeck, but, as Adams notes, the colloquial and sub-literary character of ebriacus is so well supported by the evidence of Charisius, the late Peregrinatio Aetheriae (.), and the Romance languages that Bentinus’ emendation is unnecessary. Metre: a senarius (aBcD A/BCD ABcD); Luchs’ law is not violated (s¯an¯ar´ solet). ebriacus: since words associated with drunkenness occur at least five times in L.’s frs. (, , , , ), it is not unreasonable to conclude that the sight of a drunkard was a regular source of laughter in the plot of his plays; cf. Pl. Most. , Pseud. –. The drunkenness-motif is a continuous source of laughter also in the comic novel of Petronius, which shares many elements with mime (see Sat. ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., ., .; Panayotakis Theatrum Index s.v. ‘drunkenness’). somno sanari solet: on sleep as the cure for drunkenness (its salubrious effect is stressed by the assonance of s), see Pl. Most. (ubi somno sepelivi omnem atque obdormivi crapulam), Rud. – (quin abeo huc in Veneris fanum, ut edormiscam hanc crapulam, | quam potavi praeter animi quam lubuit sententiam?), Ter. Ad. – (interea in angulum | aliquo abeam atque edormiscam hoc villi), Cic. Phil. . (edormi crapulam), Sen. NQ .. (quemadmodum ebrietas, donec exiccetur, dementia est et nimia gravitate defertur in somnum), and cf. TLL ..–.. It may be argued, on the basis of the
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Plautine and Terentian passages cited above, that the speaker of this line, which is expressed comically in the form of a moral maxim, is a drunkard, who refers to his own drunkenness, and announces (either to the audience or to another character) that he is going to sleep; however, it is equally possible that this line was the beginning of a joke par prosdok©an, in which a drunkard would firstly mention sleep as the conventional cure of a hangover, and then proceed to reject this view and to suggest a better alternative for himself: ‘the usual remedy for drunkenness is sleep; however, the cure for my drunkenness is . . . ’. B E LO N I S T R I A Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Efflictim [gACDMO: efflictum X], vehementer. [efflictim nimie Hmg Vmg : efflictim nimis Emg ] . . . Laberius Belonistria [Iunius: Bellonistria g: Bello Istrio Bentinus: Balaneutria Bothe : Belonistria seu Frugio Bothe in notis: Bello Histrice Fruterius: an Balanistria?]: domina nostra privignum suum am¯at efflictim verba Laberius . . . efflictim om. d domina Brakman amat efflictim g: efflictim amat Laetus
THE SEAMSTRESS Nonius . M = . L: Efflictim, ‘excessively’ . . . . L. in The Seamstress: . . . our mistress is passionately in love with her stepson . . .
BELONISTRIA
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, attributed to L., presents problems. Nonius’ MSS give the unintelligible reading Bellonistria, which was emended by Iunius to Belonistria; this noun, not attested elsewhere in extant Latin literature but accepted by the majority of L.’s editors, would be a Latin transliteration of the (likewise unattested) Greek feminine noun belon©stria, formed from the noun bel»nh (‘needle’) and the feminine ending -©stria (see C. D. Buck and W. Petersen, A Reverse Index of Greek Nouns and Adjectives (Chicago ) ; Henriksson B¨uchertitel : ‘so wie die Worte basan©zw und basan©stria von bsaniv’; Carilli Hapax –: ‘l’intervento di suffisso -tria, afciancato [sic] a belon©v, diminutivo di bel»nh, d`a luogo ad una formazione analoga a quella di vocaboli concernenti attivit`a femminili, quali, fra gli altri, postria e kstria, attestati come titoli di lavori teatrali greci’). The word belonistria would then indicate ‘a seamstress’ (for L.’s fondness for entitling his mimes after low professions see Catularius). Although Iunius’ emendation is attractive in its simplicity, neither the masculine form belonistv nor the verb belon©zw is attested, and it is difficult to explain why L. did not transliterate into Latin the well-attested feminine form kstria (cf. %kstria of Antiphanes (–) and %kstriai of Sophron (see Henriksson B¨uchertitel , Hordern Sophron , and Olivieri Frammenti )), but preferred to coin the noun belonistria (= ‘a needle-woman’). Is this in accordance with his tendency to form neologisms? If so, how comic would this word have sounded in the ears of a Roman audience, whose vocabulary included Greek loan-words such as crotalistria and citharistria? Slightly less plausible than Iunius’ emendation is Bothe’s Balaneutria, a transliterated form of the Greek balaneÅtria (see TGL and LSJ s.v.), ‘a bath-woman’; this emendation would square with other references to baths in L. (, , ), and may have denoted a woman of low morals; but it is difficult to see how the word Balaneutria was corrupted to Bellonistria. In the apparatus criticus I suggest emending the transmitted text to Balanistria, a
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Latin transliteration of the noun balan©stria, ‘a female acorngatherer’. Although this word is not attested elsewhere in Greek, it can easily be understood as the feminine form of the attested noun balanistv, derived from the verb balan©zw, ‘to shake the acorn-tree’ (see TGL s.v.), and its ending -©stria has the advantage of being the same as the ending -istria of Nonius’ MSS. Scribal confusion over the nouns bel»nh and blanov is not unknown (see Archippus and LSJ s.v. bel»nh), and it is easy to see how a scribe who was unfamiliar with the compound belonistria (itself a corrupt form of balanistria), would change it to bellonistria, a nonsensical word, which the scribe wrongly thought derived from bellum + -istria. The title Balanistria would also have given L. the opportunity to play with the sexual meaning of the word blanov or balanus (see Adams Vocabulary ), but the surviving evidence shows no trace of such puns. Other emendations that refer to a historical military event are less plausible; a minor expedition of the Romans against the Istrians in (see Livy ..) may have formed the plot for this mime of L. (entitled, according to Bentinus, Bellum Istrium or, according to Fruterius, Bellum Histricum), but, in addition to the palaeographical difficulties which this hypothesis raises, I wonder how effective the humour would have been if a mime on this topic was performed so many decades after the event Livy was describing. L.’s fr. is cited by Nonius, along with Pl. Poen. and Pompon. , not because it contains the word efflictim as an adverb that qualifies verbs denoting passionate love (Nonius’ quotations of Plautus and Pomponius would have sufficed to illustrate this point), but because it contains the word efflictim as an adverb that indicates a woman’s excessive passion for a man (in the other two citations of Nonius efflictim is used of a man’s excessive love for a woman). Metre: like Ribbeck , I scan the fr. as two incomplete senarii: scan line dd a/BcD ABcD; line aBCD A/. Luchs’ law is not violated (pr´v´gn¯um suum). For the scansion of the first foot of the second line as an iamb (˘am¯at), cf. Pl. Cas. a˘ m¯at efflictim and see LHS ; Ribbeck Corollarium ; Lindsay Verse –; M¨uller Prosodie –; Questa Metrica . Pomponius Laetus did not opt for this scansion but inverted the order of the words amat efflictim (so he scanned ¯effl´ct[im] a˘ m¯at, ABcD, which observes Meyer’s law). Bothe scanned the lines as two incomplete trochaic septenarii (line dd a/BcD ABcD; line bbCD A), but in this case we would need to scan am˘at, which Plautus would not have preferred. domina . . . privignum: cf. Sen. Contr. ..: omnia inter privignum et novercam conposita; simulatum morbum et derisum mimo (codd.: animo Winterbottom) turpissimo patrem. The stepmother as a disreputable figure occurs again in a fr. from an unspecified mime attributed by Priscian to L. (). It is tempting to consider those lines as part of Belonistria, but, apart from the character of the noverca, there is no other evidence to support this hypothesis. Whether or not the stepmother was always presented unfavourably in mimes cannot be ascertained, but she seems to have been a regular character in them: see Sophron’s Penqer (and Hordern Sophron ); the mime-title EIKURA attested on an Athenian terracotta lamp of the late third century BC (see pp. – n. ); Jerome Ep. ..; D. Noy, ‘Wicked stepmothers in Roman society and imagination’, Journal of Family History () –; and P. A. Watson, Ancient stepmothers: Myth, misogyny and reality (Leiden ) – (L.’s fr. is discussed briefly on pp. and ). The words domina nostra indicate that the speaker of this fr. was possibly a (female?) slave (TLL ..– .), who is telling the audience or another character about the mistress’s improper feelings towards her stepson; however, it is unclear how important or integral to the plot of this play the ‘Phaedra-motif’ was, and – in spite of the exploitation of Attic tragedy on the Roman stage (see Fraenkel EP –) – we should not jump to the conclusion that L. wrote a parody of Sophocles’
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Phaedra or Euripides’ Hippolytus. Cicu Problemi – offers a detailed reconstruction of the plot of L.’s mime, based on the story of the wicked stepmother in Apul. Met. .–, but his views are ultimately groundless; the most detailed interpretations of Apuleius’ tale as a prose narration of an adultery mime are in Wiemken Mimus – and in R. May, Apuleius and drama: The ass on stage (Oxford ) –. efflictim: on this adverb see G. Maurach, Plauti Poenulus (Heidelberg ) . On the formation of adverbs in -im generally see Lindsay Language and LHS . In Roman comedy this adverb is applied only to humans in conjunction with the verbs amare, perire, and deperire (see Pl. Amph. ; Cas. ; Merc. ; Poen. and ; Pseud. arg. .; Naev. Coroll. ; Pompon. Dotata ; CGL ., .). L. seems to be the first to have used it in relation to a woman’s love for a man (see A. Funck, Archiv f. lat. Lexik. () –); Apuleius is the only other extant author using efflictim in such an amatory context (Apol. ; Met. ., .). C AC O M N E M O N Gellius .. [Fg(=OXPN)d(=QZ)]: Item in Cacomnemone [Fd: cacomemmone g: Cacomemnone Stephanus: an Cacon Mnemone?]: hµc est
inquit [scil. Laberius] ille gurdus quem ego me abhinc menses duos ex Africa venientem excepisse tibi narravi menses duos Bothe: duos menses codd. vel huc venientem Ribbeck in app. crit.
venientem codd.: advenientem
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T H E F O RG E T F U L Gellius ..: Likewise, in The forgetful, he [L.] has: . . . he is that blockhead, whom, as I told you, I met two months ago, when I was coming back from Africa . . .
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime seems to be a Latin transliteration of the Greek adjective kakomnmwn (TLL .–), whose spelling and meaning puzzled scribes and early editors of L.; it is not found in extant Greek literature, and has been taken to mean infelix (this is the view of Mosellanus as recorded in Gellius’ edn) or stupidus (Ziegler ). Henriksson B¨uchertitel rightly compares and constrasts it with the adjective eÉmnmwn, also not attested in extant Greek literature; its form may be surmised through the comparative adverb eÉmnhmonestrwv in Xen. Agesil. . (Þv n ¾ painov eÉmnhmonestrwv c, and see LSJ s.v.). The adverb in Xenophon’s passage is passive in meaning (‘easier to remember’), but it is likely that the adjectives eÉmnmwn and kakomnmwn, if they existed and if they referred to a person, would be active (‘remembering easily’ and ‘forgetting easily’) rather than passive (‘remembered easily’ and ‘forgotten easily’) in meaning. Moreover, the adjective mnmwn does not appear to have a passive meaning (see LSJ s.v.), while the reference to a ‘blockhead’ (gurdus) would square better with a play entitled ‘The person with a bad memory’ than with a play entitled ‘The person that is not memorable’. It is also possible that L. entitled his mime Cacon Mnemon, ‘The person who remembers bad things’, rendering the Greek words Kakän Mnmwn, a phrase which goes back to Aeschylus (Eum. kakän te mnmonev), and could easily be corrupted palaeographically. But I find it
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more likely that L. would coin an adjective for comic purposes, and would expect his audience to be amused by the originality of the title. I am inclined to conclude that the title of this mime refers to a person with bad memory, possibly the gurdus mentioned in the fr., and that the comic situations in the plot would arise from this person’s habit of forgetting easily. Bonaria is reluctant to follow this interpretation and suggests that the adjective cacomnemon may also indicate ‘un uomo di rancori tenaci’. But if L. wished to denote a person bearing malice, he could have entitled his mime Mnesikakos (see LSJ s.v.). Why did L. not opt for the adjective mnmwn, ‘forgetful’ or ‘forgotten’ (see LSJ s.v.)? Compound adjectives beginning with caco- tend to be technical terms, associated with astronomy (cacodaemon), metre (cacometer), rhetoric (cacosystatus, cacozelus), or medicine (cacochymus, cacoethes) (see TLL .–. and Langslow Medical ); as such they can be attested as early as Lucilius (cacosyntheton, M = W) and Cicero (kakost»macov, Ad fam. ..). Is L. poking fun at medical terminology and Cicero’s fondness for it ()? If Cacomnemon is the correct reading, L. should be credited not only with coining a new compound adjective which echoes medical technical terms but also with introducing to the comic stage a new illness: bad memory. This fr. survives because Gellius cites it as an example of the uncouth and common words of questionable Latinity L. used (and perhaps introduced) in his plays (Neque non obsoleta quoque et maculantia ex sordidiore vulgi usu ponit, ..; cf. . tit. et quod multis item verbis utitur, de quibus, an sint Latina, quaeri solet, and HolfordStrevens Gellius ; Garcea and Lomanto ). Although Gellius does not explicitly identify what irritated him in this fr., it is likely that the offensive word was gurdus (on which see below). Gellius is our only source for attributing this fr. to L.’s Cacomnemon; for no apparent reason Ziegler () assigns to this mime also a fr. attributed by Nonius to L.’s Compitalia ().
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Metre: the arrangement and scansion of these lines (trochaic septenarii) go back to an anthology of Latin poetry published at Leiden in , and were adopted by Bothe (the first editor of Roman drama to take scansion into consideration when constituting the text), Maittaire, and Marshall: scan line cD; line BcD AbbcD ABcD ABcD; line bbCD ABcdd ABC. I have adopted Bothe’s transposition of the words duos menses, because the transmitted text violates Meyer’s law (it creates an undesirable aBCD sequence at unaccented word-end; menses duos, ABcD, solves this problem). Ribbeck emended L.’s fr. (see apparatus criticus) and scanned the extant lines as two iambic septenarii (hic est ille gurdus, quem ego me abhinc menses duos ex Africa | advenientem excepisse narravi . . . = aaBcD AbbcD ABcD AbbˆD | AbbCD ABcD AB . . . ). W. Studemund (Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () ) and M¨uller (Prosodie ) leave the question open. But it is not uncommon for two monosyllables following a polysyllable to occur at the end of iambo-trochaic lines (Soubiran Essai ), and the words hic est are found after punctuation and change of speaker at the end of a trochaic septenarius in Pl. Persa . – hic est | ille: in Ter. Andr. these words involve three speaking characters on stage: the speaker of the line (Davos), the addressee (Mysis), and the man about whom the speaker and the addressee were talking earlier (Chremes). It is not clear to me whether we need to envisage a similar set-up for L.’s fr., but the demonstrative pronoun hic and the personal pronoun tibi indicate that the speaker is engaged in conversation, not soliloquising, when he points to the gurdus on stage. Has the gurdus just appeared on stage or is this an eavesdropping scene which presents the speaker talking to another character about the gurdus, who was already on stage when the speaker appeared? gurdus: a low and perhaps imported word, according to Quintilian .. Et ‘mappam’ circo quoque usitatum nomen Poeni sibi vindicant, et ‘gurdos’, quos pro stolidis accipit vulgus, ex Hispania duxisse
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originem audivi. His evasive statement (note the non-committal audivi) on the Spanish origin of this colloquialism (OLD s.v.: ‘blockhead’, ‘dolt’) has not found favour amongst modern philologists, who suggest that there may have been a common root in the formation of this adjective and of the Greek bradÅv, namely ∗ gw rd-: Sommer Handbuch , ; J. Cousin REL () –; WH s.v.; ML , no. (attesting the widespread occurrence of gurdus in the Romance languages). But the possibility that the consonants br- may also have been derived from the root mr- (not gw rd-; see EM s.v. gurdus) leaves the question of the etymology of gurdus open. The word is not attested before L. (has he invented it?), was rarely used by literary authors after him (Quintilian and Cassiodorus are the notable exceptions: see TLL ..–), and is frequently found in the CGL: . agurthv gurdus; .; .; . gurdus ineptus vel inutilis; .; .; .; .; .; .; .). The form gurdonicus in Sulpicius Severus Dialog. .. (audietis me tamen ut gurdonicum hominem, nihil cum fuco aut cothurno loquentem) does not seem to be derived from gurdus: see TLL .–; EM s.v. gurdus; and P. Antin REL () –; Garcea and Lomanto and n. . abhinc menses duos: on abhinc + cardinal numeral + accusative of time to indicate ‘how long ago’, reckoning from the present time (i.e. the time when the speaker uses this expression), see KS ; LHS , ; and TLL .–.. ex Africa: the administration of Africa and Caesar appear often in Cicero’s correspondence (Ad Att. ., dated to May ; .a, dated to June ; Ad fam. ., probably dated to September ; cf. the speech Pro Ligario, dated to ), and this may be an indication that a political/satirical joke concerning Africa in a mime composed in the mid-s would have been topical. Had the speaker gone to Africa perhaps as a magistrate (cf. Cic. Pro Planc. ) or as a soldier? It is tempting to situate this reference in the context of Caesar’s military campaign in Africa
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(winter – spring ) and his victorious campaign at Thapsus (in April ), but I found no corroborating evidence for this. excepisse: perhaps, as in the Loeb translation, ‘met’ or ‘greeted’ (OLD s.v. excipio and ), but the lack of context makes it impossible to say with certainty why this sense should be preferred to meanings such as ‘to give shelter to’ (TLL ..–; OLD s.v. ) or ‘to capture by ambush’ (TLL ..–.; OLD s.v. ): ‘this is the dolt to whom I gave shelter on my way back from Africa two months ago, as I told you’ or ‘this is the dolt I captured on my way back from Africa two months ago, as I told you’ (the reference to the province of Africa may have a military context). CAECULI Charisius . K = . B [Nnn C]: Mauricatim. Laberius in Caeculis [codd.: Gaetulis Bergk: Saeculis Ribbeck in app. crit.]: non int te Mauricatim scire suppl. ex C Putschius: n˜ int . . . . . . N: om. nn – verba inter duas personas distribuit et sic disposuit Bergk non intellexi. :: te Mauricatim scire
THE BLINDLINGS Charisius . K = . B: Mauricatim (‘in the style of a Moor’). L. in The Blindlings: . . . I didn’t realise that you could talk in Moorish . . .
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C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, attributed to L. by Charisius, seems to be a diminutive of the adjective caecus (so TLL .; ML no. ; EM s.v. caecus; Ziegler ; OLD does not list this word with a small c; for the formation in -ulus see LHS ) or the plural of a proper name (Caeculus) probably derived also from caecus (so OLD s.v. Caeculus; but M¨uller Mnemosyne () – derives Caeculus from the proper name C¯acus; cf. LHS ). Its precise meaning in either case as a title for L.’s mime is unclear. Charisius attributes ten frs. of a fabula palliata entitled Caecus vel Praedones to Plautus (see Leo’s edn –), and one fr. of a fabula togata entitled Caecus to Titinius (). A. Daviaux, Comoedia Togata (Paris ) ad speculates that Caecus refers to the victim of a hoax and that the plot of Titinius’ play involved deception, but I found no evidence to support this interpretation (caecus tends to be applied to the passion which blinds a person’s judgement, not to the person himself/herself: see OLD s.v. c). Only the feminine form of the adjective caeculus is attested (see TLL s.v. caeca and caecilia), and it is used as a substantive indicating a small, blind snake (CGL . ¾ tujle©av caecula; Isid. .. caecula dicta eo, propter parva sit et non habeat oculos), but this use occurs later than L., who would be unlikely to have entitled his mime ‘The little blind snakes’. If ∗ caeculus existed and were applied to a person, the diminutive ending -ulus (Lindsay Language ; LHS ) might have referred not only to the age or size of the person (‘a little blind boy’), but also to the quality of his vision (‘somewhat blind’: so ML s.v. ∗ caeculus). Therefore, it seems likely that the title of this mime, as Buecheler had suggested (see Ribbeck ad loc.), may be an allusion to Caeculus, allegedly the son of Vulcan and the founder of both Praeneste and the gens Caecilia (see Cato fr. Peter Caeculum . . . in foco invenisse . . . et quod oculos exiguos haberet, Caeculum appellatum; Verg. Aen. .– with Fordyce ad loc. and, especially, N. Horsfall, Virgil, Aeneid : A Commentary (Brill ) –; Servius on Aen. . Caeculus autem ideo, quia oculis minoribus fuit: quam rem
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frequenter efficit fumus). Our sources regarding the birth and career of Caeculus are wide-ranging and tell a story which resembles the story of the miraculous birth of king Servius Tullius (Cato fr. Peter; Dion. Hall. Ant Rom. ..–; Livy .; Ovid F. .–; Pliny NH .; Servius and the scholia Veronensia on Verg. Aen. .; Solinus p. . Mommsen; Plut. Rom. , citing Promathion; see H. J. Rose Mnemosyne () – and JRS () ). The information these sources provide would make fascinating material for mythological parody on stage: a girl, impregnated by a spark from a fire, gives birth to an extraordinary boy who, after some ordeals, becomes king. The episodic nature of this tale (impregnation of a maiden by fire or the god of fire; portent of fire; humble upbringing of the boy; foundation of Praeneste) renders it easily adaptable for the stage, but if Charisius’ MSS are correct, L. seems to have written a mime about more than one Caeculus. Should we interpret the plural number as referring to Caeculus’ followers or to a fictional tribe of small blinking people? If this was the case, however, the text of Charisius ought to say Laberius in Caeculiis. Does the plural Caeculi refer to more than one little blind boy descended from Vulcan (The Brothers Caeculus, on the analogy of Plautus’ The Brothers Menaechmus)? Is this a case where a Roman playwright comically dramatises his nation’s mythological past to amuse and edify the audience? A sensationalised version of a popular tale about a mythical ancestor of divine parentage would fit well in the mimic repertoire, which embraced mythological parody. Therefore, the conjectures of T. Bergk (Gaetuli, proposed in Philologus () ) and Ribbeck (Saecula, a view abandoned by Ribbeck ) are unnecessary. This fr. survives because it contains the unusual adverb Mauricatim (see below). Charisius, our only source for this fr., quotes it in the larger context of his discussion on the significance and use of adverbs (. K = . B – . K = . B),
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and may have derived it from Iulius Romanus’ treatise entitled jormän. The fr. is cited, without any linguistic comment on the peculiarly formed word Mauricatim, as part of a long series of quotations from literary texts containing noteworthy adverbs. Metre: I follow Bothe in not emending the transmitted text and in scanning the fr. as the remains of two iambic septenarii, spoken by one person: scan line CD ABˆD; line ABcD ABc. The fact that the seventh foot of the first line is a spondee (not an iamb) is not unparalleled in Plautus: see Persa nam ego me confido liberum fore, tu te numqu¯am sp¯eras, and Lindsay Verse –. T. Bergk (Philologus () ) preferred to identify two speakers in the conversation, to add credidi as the verb on which the infinitive scire depended, and to scan the emended fr. as the remains of two iambic septenarii: A. non intellexi. B. credidi | te Mauricatim scire. In this he was followed by Ribbeck and Bonaria (the latter of whom scanned the emended fr. as a complete iambic octonarius), and was cited in the OLD s.v. Mauricatim (the entry for this word has not yet appeared in the printed version of the TLL). In spite of the lacunose state of the MSS of Charisius (see apparatus criticus), Bergk’s emendation seems to me unjustified (I would consider more favourably the suggestion of Ribbeck , who transposes te after scire and scans the fr. as a complete senarius), because I see no compelling reason why the scenario suggested by the MSS’ readings should be rejected: one speaker (the subject of the verb non intellexi) is expressing his surprise at the fact that his/her addressee (te) was able to talk in the language of the Moors (for scio + adverb indicating the ability to talk in a given language see Cic. De orat. . Graece sciret; Ad fam. .. Graece scio; and OLD s.v. ). Mauricatim: ‘in the Moorish language’ (OLD s.v.; ‘Maurisch’: A. Funck Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () –; K. Bergsland Symbolae Osloenses () ). On the morphology of adverbs in -¯atim see Lindsay Language :
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Parallel with the adjectives in -¯ato– derived from Nouns, e.g. togatus from t˘oga, and, like them, not postulating the existence of a verb in -are (e.g. ∗ togare) . . . , are Adverbs in -¯atim like assulatim, from ass˘ula, a splinter . . . guttatim from gutta, ostiatim from ostium, vicatim from v´cus, gradatim from gr˘adus, &c., also paulatim, pauxillatim, nostratim, from noster . . . and from proper names tongiliatim.
(Cf. LHS –.) But the formation of this adverb concerned grammarians interested in issues of grammatical analogy and anomaly from at least the mid-first century BC: Item cum dicamus ab ‘Osco’, ‘Tusco’, ‘Graeco’, ‘Osce’, ‘Tusce’, ‘Graece’, a ‘Gallo’ tamen et ‘Mauro’ ‘Gallice’ et ‘Maurice’ dicimus (Varro LL fr. ., cited by Gellius ..; see Holford-Strevens Gellius ). If Varro’s treatise on the Latin language was published around the mid-s (OCD s.v. Varro), it would be tempting to view the unusual Laberian morphology of the grammatically anomalous Mauricatim as L.’s comic contribution to a grammatical issue with which at least some members of his audience would have been familiar. To signify that someone can speak Moorish, L. does not use the contemporary phrase Maurice scire, does not opt for the expression scio + ∗ Maure, and does not construct his comic adverb from the root of the adjective Maurus (e.g. ∗ Mauratim). What he does is to use the root of the adverb Maurice in order to construct an entirely new adverb, applied to a proper name, with an ending (-atim) which is normally employed to signify that something is happening either ‘gradually, one at a time’ (for instance, guttatim ‘drop by drop’, ostiatim ‘door by door’, paul(l)atim ‘bit by bit’, pauxillatim ‘little by little’; see OLD s.v.) or ‘in the manner of’ (for example, muricatim ‘in the manner of shellfish’; see OLD s.v.). Therefore, translating the Laberian adverb ‘in the manner of the Moors’ (so Judith Schaffner-Rimann, Die lateinischen Adverbien auf -tim (Z¨urich )) misses the comic point of the unusual morphology of Mauricatim and ignores the well-attested construction scio + adverb (e.g. Graece/Latine) = ‘I am able to talk (in Greek/Latin)’. Furthermore, foreign speech, because of its exotic sound, has great comic potential on the stage, and is
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attested as a source of comic effect in both the fabula palliata (the speeches of Hanno in Pl. Poen. –: see A. S. Gratwick Hermes () – and M. Leigh, Comedy and the rise of Rome (Oxford ) ) and the Greek mime (the language of the ‘Indians’ in P.Oxy. ; see Andreassi Mimi , , and, especially, S. Santelia, Charition Liberata (P.Oxy. ) (Bari ) –, who reviews also instances of foreign speech in Aristophanic comedy). But what is the connection between ‘small blind people’ and ‘Moorish’? Barbarians occur as characters on the comic stage (T. Long, Barbarians in Greek Comedy (Illinois )), so are we to imagine an exotic setting in which at least two characters (the speaker of the fr. and his/her addressee) would have had dealings and a conversation with actors playing Moors, whose made-up Moorish would have amused the audience? Is the legendary founder of Praeneste comically portrayed as having travelled to the barbaric Mauretania in North Africa to conquer a bellicose and savage nation (on the Roman perception of Moors see NH on Hor. Carm. .., .., and ..)? In either scenario, the addressee is likely to have spoken to the Moor(s), and surprised the speaker, who then exclaimed: ‘I didn’t realise you could talk in Moorish’. CANCER Priscianus . = GL .. H [RBZDHAGLKT]: Neutra eiusdem terminationis Graeca sunt et addita ‘tis’ faciunt genetivum, ut ‘hoc peripetasma huius peripetasmatis’, ‘hoc poema huius poematis’. haec tamen antiquissimi secundum primam declinationem saepe protulerunt et generis feminini, ut . . . [GL .. H] Laberius in Cancro [RBDHKT: crancro A: cacro Z : om. Z : cancrone GL]: nec Pythagor¯eam dogmam doctus doctus est Anon. Bern.: doctus denegat Brakman
CANCER
THE CRAB Priscian . = GL .. H: Neuter nouns with that ending are Greek words and form their genitive case by adding the ending tis, for example, peripetasma peripetasmatis, poema poematis. However, our forefathers often preferred to decline these words according to the first declension, and to make them feminine; for example, . . . [GL .. H] L. in The Crab: he had no knowledge of the Pythagorean doctrine . . .
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Priscian attributes to L., may have referred to the constellation Cancer, in which the sun was found at the time of the summer solstice (TLL .–.; OLD s.v. ; Kidd Aratus –), and which signified an especially hot time of the year (TLL .–.), or to the amphibian crab (TLL .–; OLD s.v. ), whose habits were sometimes comically applied to human beings: Pl. Pseud. (Pseudolus talking about the pimp Ballio) ut transvorsus, non provorsus cedit, quasi cancer solet; Cas. (the slave Chalinus speaking) recessim cedam ad parietem; imitabor nepam (with MacCary and Willcock ad loc.; for the motif of ‘transformation’ in Plautine comedy see Fraenkel EP –); Petr. Sat. . (Trimalchio speaking) in cancro ego natus sum. ideo multis pedibus sto, et in mari et in terra multa possideo; nam cancer et hoc et illoc quadrat (Smith ad loc.: ‘under Trimalchio’s own sign, the Crab, astrologers usually put merchants and others engaged in making profits’; see Manil. .; Firm. Matern. Math. ..–). I find it less likely that, as a title of a mime, cancer signified a form of disease (see TLL .–, and Langslow Medical , Adams Pelagonius –; but see TLL .– : ‘titulus mimi . . . cuius generis cancrorum sit incertum est’). If this play had anything to do with the constellation Cancer,
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it would be tempting to view it as one instalment in a series of ‘astrological’ mimes composed by L. as a comic response to the contemporary preoccupation of Roman erudite circles with Hellenistic astronomy (cf. Aries, Taurus, Virgo). According to Germanicus and Hyginus the transformation of the crab (animal) into The Crab (constellation) was due to vengeful Juno, who rewarded the crab for its courageous attack on Hercules while he was fighting the Hydra: see Germ. Aratea – te quoque, fecundam meteret cum comminus Hydram | Alcides, ausum morsu contingere uelle, | sidere donauit, Cancer, Saturnia Iuno, | nunquam oblita sui, nunquam secura nouerca (cf. Schol. Basileensia .– Breysig and Schol. Strozziana .–. Breysig); Hyg. Astr. .: Cancer. Hic dicitur Iunonis beneficio inter astra collocatus, quod, cum Hercules contra Hydram Lernaeam constitisset, ex palude pedem eius mordicus arripuisset; quare Herculem permotum eum interfecisse, Iunonem autem inter sidera constituisse, ut esset cum duodecim signis quae maxime solis cursu continentur; and TLL .–. But the astrological connections of the constellation Cancer with the other signs of the zodiac and the moon are so widespread (see TLL .–.) that it is impossible to reconstruct the plot of L.’s play with certainty. This fr. survives because it contains the word dogma as a feminine noun of the first declension. Priscian (. = GL .. H) distinguishes between () Latin nouns of Greek origin ending in -ma, which as Greek words were neuter non-parisyllabics of the third declension (e.g. t¼ po©hma toÓ poimatov) and retained these grammatical features when imported into Latin (poema poematis, and OLD s.v.; Priscian’s other example, ∗ peripetasma ∗ peripetasmatis, seems to occur only in the plural, OLD s.v.), and () Latin nouns of Greek origin ending in -ma, which as Greek words were neuter non-parisyllabics of the third declension (e.g. t¼ d»gma toÓ d»gmatov) but in the writings of some Latin authors became feminine nouns of the first declension (e.g. dogma dogmae in L., but dogma dogmatis in other authors; see TLL ..–;
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OLD s.v.). Cf. Ars Anonyma Bernensis in GL ..– Hagen Invenimus, enim, antiquos dativum et ablativum pluralem in is productam proferre in his neutris Graecis a finitis, ut poema poematis et cetera. Laberius vero dixit: Pythagoream dogmam doctus est, quod exemplum ostendit, haec nomina etiam primae declinationis fuisse, sed tamen secundum usum et rationem tertiae declinationis sunt; .–; CGL .; and Auctor De dubiis nominibus in GL .. K. The only statement Priscian makes to explain this differentiation is that the first declension feminine forms occur in the writings of very early Latin authors (haec tamen antiquissimi secundum primam declinationem saepe protulerunt). Although neither Priscian nor the modern philologists who discuss such nouns (see NW –; Carilli Hapax n. ) connect this matter with the issue of literary genre, an examination of the passages in which similarly formed Latin nouns of Greek origin occur suggests that such variations in case-ending were popular amongst early comic playwrights of the palliata, the Atellana, and the mimus, and amongst later authors who wished to acknowledge their debt to these comic genres: so diadema, -ae is found in Pompon. Satura and in Apul. Met. . (see M. Zimmerman, Apuleius, Metamorphoses X (Groningen ) ); schema, -ae in Pl. Amph. , Caec. Stat. Hypobolimaeus sive subditivos , and Petr. Sat. . (see Smith ad loc.), Apul. Met. . (see Groningen Commentaries on Apuleius , ); stigma, -ae in Petr. Sat. . and .; syrma, -ae in Afran. Divortium and in L. Valerius Phormio Bonaria. L.’s innovation therefore is not that he changed the gender and declension of a Latin noun of Greek origin ending in -ma (in this respect he was quite faithfully following in the footsteps of his comic predecessors) but that he seems to be the first author who changed the gender and the declension of the noun dogma (on which see below). Metre: like Ribbeck , I take this line to be an incomplete senarius (scan ABccD A/BCD A; if est were to be supplied after doctus, the line could be scanned as a senarius whose first foot is missing ( CD aaBC/D A/BcD; so Ribbeck in his apparatus criticus ad loc.; this would be a rare example of an accented
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monosyllable at line-end); Ribbeck scanned the line as an incomplete iambic septenarius. nec: I take nec (OLD s.v. neque ) to refer to doctus (hyperbaton). Pythagoream: for adjectives in -¯eus denoting ‘belonging or related to a person’s name’ and formed on the analogy of Greek adjectives ending in -eov or -eiov, see LHS –. Cicero prefers the form Pythagoreus (he employs it times), which is already attested in Cato Agr. ., as opposed to Pythagorius (see OLD s.v. and LHS –), which he uses only twice (De orat. ., Tusc. .), and to Pythagoricus (see OLD s.v. and LHS –), which occurs only once in his works (De div. .). The ideas of Pythagoras, the celebrated Samian philosopher of the midsixth century BC who emigrated and taught in S. Italy in about (see RE –), were well known in L.’s time, when Pythagoras’ philosophical tradition is said to have been revived by the learned scholar and friend of Cicero P. Nigidius Figulus (consul ): see RE . – s.v. ‘Nigidius’; RE . () – s.v. ‘Pythagoras’ (Pythagoreanism, –; its revival in Hellenistic and Roman times, –); Rawson Life (see Index s.v. ‘Nigidius Figulus’ and ‘Pythagoras’, and especially –); A. Gianola, La fortuna di Pitagora presso i Romani dalle origini fino al tempo di Augusto (Catania ; L. is discussed on pp. –). In addition to his discoveries in mathematics, music, and astronomy, and to his views on beans and vegetarianism, Pythagoras was known for his theory of metempsychosis, according to which the soul, after death, transmigrates from one earthly body to another (human or animal or plant). Its most celebrated example is perhaps Ennius, who elevates his literary status when he is implicitly portrayed as Homerus alter on the basis of the alleged transmigration of Homer’s soul into Ennius’ body via the body of a peacock (Ann. – Skutsch, and Skutsch Ennius –; Lucr. DRN .–; Porph. on Hor. Ep. .. quod secundum Pythagorae dogma anima Homeri in suum (scil. Ennii) corpus venisset, and Rudd’s
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note on Hor. Ep. .. somnia Pythagorea). If this mime portrayed the attack of the crab on Hercules and its subsequent defeat by him (see Cancer), the point of the allusion to the ‘Pythagorean doctrine’ may have been the comic transmigration of the crab’s soul from its dead body as an animal to its new form as a constellation. It so happens that Tertullian cites a fr. of a mime which he attributes to L. but to which he does not give a title: . This fr. contains a misogynistic witticism based on the doctrine (sententia) of the transmigration of the soul, and it complements nicely the fr. Priscian cites and attributes to L.’s Cancer (Bonaria assumes that both of these frs. belonged to Cancer). But since Tertullian does not name the mime’s title, I prefer to follow Ribbeck and consider the fr. reported by Tertullian separately from this one without excluding the possibility that both of these frs. were part of L.’s Cancer. Was L. breaking new ground with this fr.? Although there are some instances of philosophers and philosophising as comic targets in early Roman playwrights (e.g. Pl. Capt. , Merc. with Enk ad loc., Pseud. ; Ter. Andr. ; Turpil. ), philosophy and specific philosophical schools are ridiculed more frequently in the mimes (; ; (a).–; ) and the Atellane farces (Pompon. Philosophia, and Frassinetti ad loc.) of the first century BC than in the fabula palliata, and this probably testifies to the familiarity of at least part of L.’s audience with philosophical ideas, either imported from Greece or bred in Italy. When Cicero snobbishly remarks that Euripides and Menander, and Socrates and Epicurus, are nonsensically and to great popular acclaim made to converse with each other in the theatre during the plot of a play which represented a banquet of playwrights and philosophers (convivia poetarum ac philosophorum, referred to in the fr. of his Pro Q. Gallo, fully discussed in Giancotti Mimo –), the point of the joke is surely that a large part of the audience would be able to spot the temporal illogicality of the scene and be amused by it. Even Malvolio is presented as familiar with ‘the opinion of Pythagoras’ (Twelfth Night IV.), although this does not prove to be of any avail to him.
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dogmam: on the unusual gender of this noun see . Cicero seems to be the first extant author to have employed and explained this Greek term (rather than the existing Latin word ´ decretum) in philosophical discourse (see L. Laurant, Etude sur le style des discours de Cic´eron (Amsterdam ) n. ); he also uses it consistently in accordance with its Greek gender and declension (LSJ s.v.): Acad. . quae [scil. Sapientia] neque de se ipsa dubitare debet neque de suis decretis quae philosophi vocant d»gmata, quorum nullum sine scelere prodi poterit; . quoniam enim id haberent Academici decretum (sentitis enim iam hoc me d»gma dicere); . et omnia meminit Siron Epicuri dogmata; . scelus enim dicebas esse, Luculle, dogma prodere; . . . quod mihi tecum est dogma commune; De fin. . ut proverbia nonnulla veriora sint quam vestra [scil. Epicureorum] dogmata. The term dogma re-appears in the philosophical writings of, amongst others, Seneca, Fronto, Apuleius, Tertullian, and Lactantius, mainly in connection with Platonism, Stoicism, Pythagoreanism, and Epicureanism (see TLL ..–), but also in the satirical poetry of Martial and Juvenal in a mockphilosophical context (Mart. ..– magni Thraseae consummatique Catonis | dogmata; Iuv. . nec Cynicos nec Stoica dogmata legit). For its use in medical language and in religious matters see TLL ..– and .–.. L. is the only extant author of the pre-Christian era to use this word as a feminine of the first declension. Fronto uses the peculiar ablative plural form dogmatis (de eloquentia = p. .– van den Hout [scil. sapientes viros] interdum nonnulla in usu habere debere, quae dogmatis improbent; and NW –), while M. Aurelius, who had been advised by his teacher to read and enjoy L. for his style (Testim. ), may have used the accusative dogmam as a token of appreciation of the mimographer’s linguistic idiosyncrasy: p. .– van den Hout quod de Lysia orator saeculi huius dogmam [m : dogma m , Hauler, van den Hout] tulerit. If the form dogmam in M. Aurelius’ passage is due to a scribal error, L. is the only extant author to use dogma as a feminine noun of the first declension. Cicero’s abovementioned philosophical works are dated to , and since the term dogma (as a noun of either the first or the third declension)
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does not appear at all in any other literary or archaeological sources of this era, I wonder whether L.’s grammatical twist of this newly introduced technical term was meant as a direct jibe against Cicero, who was careful enough to maintain the gender and declension of the original word so as to emphasise its Greek origin and establish it as an official technical term. This hypothesis may be corroborated by the Greek ending -eam (rather than -iam or -icam; see above), which L. chooses to give to the adjective accompanying the word dogmam. If this view is correct, this play may be dated to the mid-s, when the term had just been brought into the Latin philosophical vocabulary. doctus: ‘learned’ rather than ‘expert’. The masculine noun it qualifies does not survive. This participle, which creates alliteration and assonance with dogmam and has the same number of syllables, is sometimes used to refer to a group of philosophers (TLL ..–.), or to individuals skilled in philosophy (e.g. Cic. Tusc. disp. . sic viguit Pythagoreorum nomen, ut nulli alii docti viderentur, and TLL ..–.); therefore, its employment here alongside two other philosophically charged words is apposite and surely deliberate: those in the audience familiar with the contemporary philosophical terminology would have appreciated L.’s careful choice of vocabulary. For doctus + accusative see Hor. Carm. .. docte sermones utriusque linguae, .. dulcis docta modos, and TLL ..–. : Brakman supplies denegat to stress even more the effect of the alliteration, and for his choice of verb he refers his readers to .. I fail to see the connection between these lines. CARC ER Nonius . M = . L [FHLVE]: Miseria, ut saepe, generis feminini. Neutri Laberius Carcere:
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
hom˘o frugi, quod tibµ relictumst, retines miserimonium frugi codd.: frugi Ribbeck relictumst scripsi: relictum est codd. retines m. Bothe : m. retines codd.: retine m. Bothe : m. obtines Quicherat miserimonium Aldina: miseri munium F L : miserii munium H : miserie munium F H E: miseriae munium L : miseriae mumium V
THE DUNGEON Nonius . M = . L: Miseria (‘wretchedness’), as usual, of feminine gender. It is neuter in L.’s The Dungeon: thrifty fellow, you retain the wretchedness that was left to you
C O M M E N TA RY The meaning of the title of this mime, which Nonius’ MSS attribute to L., and the mime’s plot are impossible to determine with certainty. Carcer signified the barriers which functioned as the starting-point of a race-course (see, for example, Enn. Ann. and Skutsch, with Skutsch Ennius, ad loc. (‘the normal word for barriers is carceres, the singular carcer . . . meaning the space fenced off by them’); TLL .–; and OLD s.v. ), a prison (e.g. Pl. Rud. ; TLL .–.; OLD s.v. ), prisoners or people worthy of the prison (e.g. Ter. Ph. , Cic. Pis. ; TLL .–; OLD s.v. b), and various enclosed spaces (e.g. the Underworld) which were regarded as resembling a prison (TLL .–.; OLD s.v. ). The TLL cites L.’s title at the end of the section of passages on ‘locus custodiae hominum’ ( .–), and it is this sense that I have rendered in my translation with ‘dungeon’, which may also refer to a cave or place of punishment. The etymology of carcer, a word widely spread in Indo-European languages (ML – no. ), is unknown (see LHS , WH s.v., and EM s.v.: ‘Mot a` redoublement, d’origine ind´etermin´ee . . . Vocalisme “populaire”’). It may be
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significant that the mimographer Sophron ( Hordern) used the word krkaron in one of his plays (Phot. k krkaron. t¼ desmwtrion. oÌtwv SÛjrwn), but it is not clear whether the word was also the title of his play. Bothe thought that the title of this mime was perhaps Cancer. It is true that cancer may have been a dissimilated form of carcer (see Paul.-Fest. p. M = L cancri dicebantur ab antiquis qui nunc per diminutionem cancelli (= ‘latticed barriers’); OLD s.v. cancer ; EM s.v. cancri, -orum; and M. Zimmerman, S. Panayotakis, et al., Apuleius Madaurensis: Metamorphoses –, V and VI – (Groningen ) ). However, the syntactical context in which the titles Cancer and Carcer survive in Priscian and Nonius, respectively, requires the scribe to have used the ablative singular form of these nouns, and this makes it less likely that a careless scribe would have confused the forms Cancro and Carcere; it is more likely that he would have confused the forms cancro and ∗ carcro. Moreover, the abovementioned entry of Paul.-Fest. does not actually connect carcer and cancer, but carcer and a diminutive of cancer, cancelli (usually attested in the plural; see NW –). I am therefore inclined to take Cancer and Carcer as titles of two different mimes, both attributed to L.; Ziegler (), for no obvious reason, attributes to this mime one more fr., which Nonius attributes to an unspecified mime of L. (). This fr. survives as part of Nonius’ long list of passages containing substantives of more than one grammatical gender (. M = . L). Nonius’ practice in this section (‘De indiscretis generibus’) of his treatise is to record the commonly used form of a substantive and then the deviation from this norm. I am inclined to think that Nonius and/or his source read miserii munium, which is also the reading in H , and wrongly thought that miserii is the genitive singular of the neuter noun ∗ miserium. But Nonius did not then proceed to consider either what munium could mean (if this is what L. had originally written) or the possibility that
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L. employed the ending -monium to create a new neuter substantive (see also ). No other examples survive of miseria used in the masculine or neuter (but cf. Serv. on Verg. Aen. . ad captandam . . . miseriam). Metre: I follow Bothe in transposing the words miserimonium retines and in scanning the line as a trochaic septenarius with iambic shortening at h˘om˘o: scan bbCD AbbCD A/bbCdd aBcD. Carilli Note retains the order of the words as transmitted in the MSS and scans the fr. as two incomplete iambic octonarii ( homo frugi, quod tibi relictum est miserimonium, | retines). frugi ‘frugal, thrifty’ (TLL .; OLD s.v. ) rather than ‘virtuous’; for its use in Plautine comedy see W. Ramsay, The Mostellaria of Plautus (London ) –. relictumst: I take this to mean ‘which has been left as an inheritance’ (OLD s.v. relinquo b, and Cic. Off. . quas enim copias iis [scil. proximis] et suppeditari aequius est et relinqui; Petr. Sat. . hereditatem accepit, ex qua plus involavit quam illi relictum est; and Ter. Eun. qui mihi reliquit haec quae habeo omnia. retines: see OLD s.v. b (immaterial possessions) and (an attribute or quality). miserimonium: found only in L.; Ribbeck and Bonaria adopt the reading miserimunium found in L , P, and F (the most reliable scribe of Nonius’ text, according to Lindsay), but the reading miserimonium, first suggested not by Bothe (as Ribbeck and Bonaria claim) but in the Aldina of Nonius, is much more probable. If miserimunium were to be accepted, it would need to be viewed, according to Fischer Observations n. , as a compound substantive like the Varronian armilustrium (< arma + lustro + -ium, LL .) and the Plautine lumbifragium (< lumbus + frango + -ium, Amph. , Cas. ); so, Fischer argues, L.’s coinage may be regarded as consisting of the substantives miseria and munus, and its formation may have corresponded to the
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formation of the word domicenium (< domus + ceno + -ium, Mart. .., ..). But none of the words adduced by Fischer is an exact parallel to L.’s neologism, because all of them involve a substantive and a verb, not two substantives, preceding the suffix -ium. Furthermore, Fischer’s interpretation does not fit the grammatical context in which L.’s passage has been transmitted (what Nonius says is that L. changed the gender of the noun miseria, not that he invented a compound substantive with the noun miseria as one of its elements). It is simpler to suppose that L. had originally written the form miserimonium, which was then copied wrongly by Nonius’ scribes, if not by Nonius himself or by his source, as miserii munium or miserimunium. Substantives in -monium and -monia are fairly rare, unclassical in character, abstract, and mostly associated with the sermo quotidianus: ‘they form but a small class, less than three dozen in all, about / in -monia, / in -monium (literature, glosses, inscrr. inclusive)’ (Olcott Formation ). Some of these in -ium (matrimonium, patrimonium, testimonium, vadimonium, the only substantives in -ium found in Cicero: Cooper Formation ) are juristic or social terms, formed from personal substantives, others are formed from adjectives (L.’s miserimonium , mendicimonium and moechimonium (a); tristimonium Petr. Sat. .) or verbs (alimonium Varro RR ..; gaudimonium Petr. Sat. .), while of them occur in inscriptions (amongst them the ‘hapax’ parsimonium and parcimonium, ‘savings’). On these see LHS , Olcott Formation –, Lindsay Language , and Cooper Formation –: ‘the words in -monia are too sparingly used to be regarded as classic; they belong rather to the colloquial language, while those in -monium are to be consigned unhesitatingly to the sermo vulgaris’. So L.’s miserimonium would not only belong to the tradition of the comic sermo vulgaris exemplified in, for example, the witty Plautine substantives mercimonium and falsimonium (Amph. , Bacch. , Curc. , Merc. , Most. , , Pers. , Stich. ), but may also have had a mock-legal or technical flavour. We may then envisage a juristic background to this fr. in which the speaker, punning on (and exploiting the homoeoteleuton of) the words patrimonium and miserimonium, may
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have said ‘thrifty fellow, [your father’s property (patrimonium) is lost (squandered?) but] you keep possession of the wretchedness (miserimonium) which was left to you as an inheritance’. The verbs ‘bequeathed’ (relictumst, see above) and ‘retain possession’ (retines, see above) suggest that something was said in the missing context which would have provided a contrast with the kind of ‘inheritance’ (emphatically placed at the end of the line) that is ‘retained’ by the addressee: the missing word may have been patrimonium, and the implication of the speaker’s remark may then have been that the dead person who bequeathed miserimonium to the heres was himself ‘wretched’ (so all he left was ‘wretchedness’); this is also the view of Carilli Hapax –. The order of the words mis. retines in Nonius’ MSS was (rightly) reversed by Bothe, not only, as Carilli Note notes, because this creates a complete trochaic septenarius which also happens to conform stylistically with other lines of L. (alliteration in, and juxtaposition of, the active retines and the passive relictum est; on this stylistic device in L. see Giancotti Mimo ), but also because Nonius often reversed the original order of the words in passages that he was citing (see F. Bertini Studi Noniani () – and –). CATULAR IUS Gellius .. [VPCv]: Valerius Antias in libro historiarum LXXV. verba haec scripsit: ‘Deinde funere locato ad forum descendidit’ [VPC: descescendit Bentley]. Laberius [v: Valerius C: Valerius Nauerius V: Valerius auerius P ] quoque in Catulario [codd.: Catullario Ziegler] ita scripsit: ergo mirabar, quo modo mammae mihi ergo Palmerius: ego codd.: vel ego Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit. mirabar codd.: demirabar Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit. lacunam
CATUL A RI US indicavit Marshall: descendiderant v: om. VPC: sic descendiderant Ribbeck : tam descendiderant Ribbeck : descescenderant Bentley: an descendidissent?
Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Hillas [FH LPVEd: Hilla H ] intestina veteres esse dixerunt: unde Bohillae [Quicherat: Bohilla F HLPmg VE ACX DMO: Boilla F P E X : Bochilla ed. princ.], oppidum in Italia, quod eo bos intestina vulnere trahens advenerit. Laberius . . . [. M = . L] Idem Catulario [g: Catullario Ziegler] neque aliter hunc pedicabis. quo modo video, adulescenti nostro caedes hillam verba Laberius . . . hillam om. d neque Lipsius: neve FHLPV E: ueue V : nonne Quicherat dubit. in app. crit.: Naevi Leo: numne Ribbeck – aliter hunc g: hunc aliter Bothe: genialiter hunc Buecheler: aliter hunce Ribbeck pedicabis g: praedicabis Perottus: pedica, si vis Leo quomodo g: quo modo? Onions adulescenti FH : aduliscenti H LPVE quomodo? et video duabus personis tribuit Bothe caedes Carilli: cedis g: caedis ed. : caedit ed. : caeditur ed. : caedi Ribbeck hillam F: hilla HL: illa PVE: hillas Iunius: ilia Buecheler: hirulam Ribbeck : hirulas L. Mueller
THE MIME OF THE PUPPY Gellius ..: Valerius Antias in the seventy-fifth book of his Histories wrote the following: ‘Then, having made arrangements for the funeral, he went down (descendidit) to the forum.’ L. also, in The mime of the puppy, has the following: . . . so that’s why I was wondering how my breasts
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Nonius . M = . L: Men of old called intestines hillae; hence Bohillae, the name of an Italian village, because it was there that an ox (bos) arrived with its intestines hanging out of an open wound. L . . . . [. M = . L] The same author in The Mime of the Puppy has: . . . and you will bugger him in the same way. As far as I see, you will bang our young man’s small gut . . .
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this play, which has been attributed to L. by the later MSS of Gellius .. and all the MSS of Nonius . L, indicates someone or something associated with the young offspring of a land mammal, most likely a young dog; on the derivation, meaning, and form of the diminutive cat˘ulus see TLL .– .; OLD s.v.; WH s.v.; EM s.v.; ML no. ; NW . It is difficult, however, to be certain about the exact sense of the title. Ritschl Parerga (unnumbered footnote), Woelfflin Titel , and Ribbeck took catularius to be an adjective formed from the diminutive catulus (< canis) + the suffix -arius, and governing the missing noun mimus (cf. Aulularius: aulula (< aula or aulla) + -arius): it would then mean ‘The mime about a catulus (or catuli)’. But if the reading of the MSS is correct, the form catulario in Gellius and Nonius may also be the ablative singular of a neuter adjective in -arium belonging to the sermo rusticus, used substantively, and denoting ‘locality for animals’ like columbarium (Varro RR ..) and apiarium (Colum. ..) (see LHS , Cooper Formation –, ): the title, in this case, would mean ‘The house of the catulus (or catuli)’. Moreover, masculine adjectives in -arius are associated with the sermo plebeius and may be used substantively to indicate a nomen agentis, whose action or job is connected, perhaps in a professional manner, to an animal (for instance, asinarius, Cato Agr. ., Varro RR ..; porcinarius, Pl. Capt. ;
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see Cooper Formation –; LHS ). In this respect, the title may have referred to a person who was ‘keeper of dogs’ (cf. the occupations indicated in the titles Belonistria, Centonarius, Colorator, Fullo, Restio, Salinator, and Staminariae). The uncertainty about the meaning of Catularius is complicated further by the fact that another mime attributed by Nonius to L. is entitled Scylax = SkÅlax ‘The puppy’ (LSJ s.v.). Consequently, Josephus Scaliger (in the marginalia found in Nonius’ edn), Wase (), Bothe (who attributes to this mime the fr. appearing under the title Scylax), and (ex silentio) Ritschl Parerga , identify Catularius with Scylax. But if L. were rendering into Latin the Greek diminutive skÅlax, which may also be employed in Latin transliterated form to indicate a dog’s name (Colum. ..; Petr. Sat. .), he would have entitled his mime Catulus, not Catularius. I am therefore inclined to agree with O. Ribbeck (Geschichte der r¨omischen Dichtung (Stuttgart ) ) that Catularius and Scylax are the titles of two different mimes, both attributed to L.; Ziegler prints Catullarius and speculates () that this mime had something to do either with the cognomen of Quintus Lutatius Catulus (he does not specify whether he is talking about the father or the son: see ‘Lutatius’ and in RE . –) or with the custom mentioned in Pl.’s Saturio that the Romans ate young dogs’ flesh (see Paul.-Fest. M = L and Leo’s edn of Pl. ). The grammatical context in which this fr. survives is a discussion by Gellius of the archaic forms of some perfect active verbs: ‘Peposci’ et ‘memordi’, ‘pepugi’ et ‘spepondi’ et ‘cecurri’ plerosque veterum dixisse, non, uti postea receptum est dicere, per ‘o’ aut per ‘u’ litteram in prima syllaba positam, atque id eos Graecae rationis exemplo dixisse; praeterea notatum, quod viri non indocti neque ignobiles a verbo ‘descendo’ non ‘descendi’, sed ‘descendidi’ dixerunt (. tit.). Although Gellius distinguishes, by means of the adverb praeterea, the two morphological issues he discusses, the grouping of these perfect
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tenses in one section is misleading because the unassimilated spelling peposci, memordi, and the like (on these see LHS ; NW –; Sommer Handbuch –) has nothing to do with the formation of descendidi. Perfect forms in -endidi, belonging to verbs whose present ends in -endo, -endere, are colloquial forms and were composed on the analogy of vendo, vendidi, itself a composite of venum + d˘are (see LHS ; NW –; Sommer Handbuch ). The perfect active forms descidi and descindi are attested in inscriptions (see OLD s.v.), but the only examples from literary authors known to Gellius to have used the perfect active form descendidi in the third person singular and the third person plural are also the only examples known to us: L. and the Roman historian Valerius Antias (fr. Peter). Valerius wrote in the first century BC but it is not clear exactly when (see T. P. Wiseman, Clio’s Cosmetics (Leicester ) –; and T. Cornell’s sceptical entry in the OCD ), so it is impossible to ascertain whether he and L. used these verbal forms independently (for L.’s fondness for archaic perfect forms see ) or whether L. is poking fun specifically at Valerius’ use of this form (I find it less likely that Valerius would have copied this form from L. either to mock him or because he liked the archaic tone of descendidi). Valerius and L. are also said to have had the same taste in future infinitive forms ending in -urum regardless of the gender and number of the infinitive’s subject (see Gellius .. and ), but it may well be that L. is deliberately evoking and reviving the ‘archaic’ language of Plautus, whose plays contain similar examples of grammatical and syntactical irregularities ( and ). It may also be inferred from Gellius’ statement cited above (. tit.) that L. and Valerius were, in Gellius’ view, both docti and nobiles; however, Gellius did not think highly of either of them (see Holford-Strevens Gellius and ), and may have copied the passages of Valerius and L. in question from an intermediate source (perhaps Probus? Cf. .. Idem Probus Valerium Antiatem libro historiarum XXII. ‘speponderant’ scripsisse annotauit uerbaque eius haec posuit).
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Metre: Bergk (see Ribbeck apparatus criticus ad loc.) retains the MS reading ego and scans the first line of the fr. as an incomplete trochaic septenarius: bbCD A/BcD ABcD. But I adopt Palmer’s emendation ergo (see below), and scan the line as a complete senarius (ABCD A/BcD ABcD) which does not violate either Meyer’s (qu¯o m˘od¯o, BcD) or Luchs’ (mod¯o m¯ammae mihi, DAB cD) laws. Ribbeck supplies and to make the lines scan as senarii ( ego mirabar quo modo mammae mihi | descendiderant; .n. ). Buecheler puts the linedivision before mammae ( . . . ego mirabar quo modo | mammae mihi descendiderant . . . ) and scans the lines as incomplete iambic senarii. ergo: I prefer Palmer’s emendation to the MS reading (ego), which adds little to the line. The particle ergo may here be seen to introduce a jocular statement following from an earlier remark of an interlocutor (OLD s.v. ergo a; KS ): ‘so that’s why I was wondering how my breasts had been hanging down’; cf. Pl. Asin. ergo mirabar quod dudum scapulae gestibant mihi, ‘so that’s why I was wondering why my shoulders were itching me earlier’, says the slave Libanus to his fellow-slave Leonida, when the latter is about to propose a plan which will bring trouble to both of them. Ribbeck’s emendations (sed, et, demirabar) are based on his assumption that this line must be a senarius, while Buecheler’s line-division after mammae spoils the acoustic effect created by the assonance of m. mirabar: for miror + indirect question see TLL .– .; OLD s.v. c. mammae ‘breasts’ or ‘udders’? Since this word is used in the plural for women (Pl. Men. ; TLL .–.; OLD s.v. ; Langslow Medical ), men (Cic. Fin. .; TLL ., , , , ; OLD s.v. ), and animals (Varro RR ..; TLL .– , .–; OLD s.v. ), it is difficult to say anything conclusive about the identity of the speaker. Is this an actor playing an old
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hag with sagging breasts? The imagery of sagging breasts was not uncommon in misogynistic invective: Lucil. – M = – W ullam | non licitum esse uterum atque etiam inguina tangere mammis; Hor. Epod. .– sed incitat me pectus et mammae putres, | equina quales ubera; Prop. .. necdum inclinatae prohibent te ludere mammae; Mart. Ep. .. aut tibi pannosae dependent pectore mammae; TLL .–; Richlin Priapus –. The amazement of the speaker at the sagging breasts is emphasised by the alliteration and assonance of m (mirabar quo modo mammae mihi) and by the employment of anatomical terminology: for descendo = ‘I hang downwards’ used absolutely in relation to (internal and external) parts of the body see TLL ..–, OLD s.v. . < ∗∗∗ >: a form related to the perfect descendidi is needed here, otherwise Gellius’ words Laberius quoque (..) do not make sense (this view does not favour Bentley’s descescenderant). Unfortunately, it is only the later MSS of Gellius .. that have the reading descendiderant, which could scan as the beginning of both an iambic and a trochaic line (for the use of the indicative in indirect questions in comedy see W. M. Lindsay, Syntax of Plautus (Oxford ) ; J. T. Allardice, Syntax of Terence (Oxford ) –). But descendiderant may not have been the first word in the line (Ribbeck, who wants this to be an iambic line, supplies sic or tam before the pluperfect), and it is uncertain whether L. used an indicative in the indirect question (might he not have used the subjunctive descendidissent?). This fr. and fr. form part of Nonius’ long list of new words found in the writings of early Latin authors (. M = . L), and are cited because they contain a form of the rare and seemingly archaic substantive hilla, which is a diminutive of the equally rare word h´ra ‘an intestine’ (see OLD and WH s.v.): Paul.Fest. M = L hira, quae deminutive dicitur hilla, quam Graeci nstin, intestinum est, quod ieiunum vocant; Char. . K = .
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B hillum Varro rerum humanarum intestinum dicit tenuissimum, quod alii hillam appellaverunt, ut intellegeretur intestinum propter similitudinem generis; Varro LL . in eo quod tenuissimum intestinum fartum, hila ab hilo dicta (on the neuter noun hilum ‘a trifle’, see Skutsch on Ennius Ann. vii); Gloss. Lat. . Lindsay iras, intima intestina quorum nunc diminutio hillae dicuntur. The word hira is apparently found already in Pl. Curc. omnes hirae (a conjecture for the MSS’ chirae) dolent, but it is not used again until Apuleius’ time (Plat. .). The generic term hilla denotes either the human intestinum ieiunum, so called because it is always found empty (Varro in Char. . K = . B; Paul.-Fest. M = L; Adams Pelagonius –), or the entrails of (most) animals (Plin. NH . ab hoc ventriculo lactes in ove et homine, per quas labitur cibus, in ceteris hillae, a quibus capaciora intestina ad alvum; Arnob. Nat. . fendicas, quae et ipsae sunt hirae, quas plebis oratio hillas [Stewechius: illa cod.] solet cum eloquitur nuncupare; CGL .; . hiliis intestinis), or (figuratively) a small ‘stuffed intestine’, a small sausage (Varro LL .; Hor. S. ..– perna magis et magis hillis | flagitat immorsus [scil. stomachus] refici; Ps.-Acro on Hor. S. .. hillae et hilli dicuntur salsa intestina. hirri positivus est, diminutive hilli dicuntur. haec hilla quidam in diminutione neutri generis esse dicunt alii: hilli sive hilla fartata salsicia). I cannot say whether it was L. or Varro (or someone else) who used this diminutive first in the feminine gender and in the singular to indicate a section of the bowels which does not form part of the large intestine. But if hi(l)la appeared in the first century BC only in the works of Varro and L., and if Varro’s treatise on the Latin language was circulating a little before Cicero’s death, it is tempting to date this mime to the mid-s and to argue that L.’s choice of this word was deliberate and gave this fr. a colloquial and perhaps mock-medical flavour. Metre: Bothe scans the fr. as two incomplete trochaic septenarii with line-division after modo: .n. quo modo video. But this involves transposition of aliter hunc and hiatus between video and adulescenti. Ribbeck scans the lines as two complete senarii, but this involves three conjectures (numne . . . hunce . . . modo?
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video . . . hirulam) that seem to me unjustified. Ribbeck scans the fr. as three iambic septenarii ( . . . aliter | hunc . . . | caedi . . . ), and emends caedis to caedi to avoid a trochaic foot at the beginning of the third line; Carilli agrees with Ribbeck in metre and line-division ( . . . aliter | hunc . . . | caedes . . . ), and emends caedis to caedes for the same reason (.n. caedis). I agree with Ribbeck but adopt Carilli’s emendation: scan line abbˆD; line ABCD ABcD/ aabbCD ABˆD; line ABCD . This scansion makes the seventh foot of the first line a tribrach (n˘equ[e] a˘ lµter), and the seventh foot of the second line a spondee (adulescent´ n¯ostro); both of these can be paralleled in Plautus (see Lindsay Verse –). |
– neque aliter | hunc pedicabis: the fr. as transmitted by Nonius’ scribes presents various grammatical and metrical problems. I have not managed to find any instance in which neue, the reading of most MSS, takes an indicative (for its use with subjunctive in indirect prohibitions and negative final clauses, and with negative imperatives, see KS –, , – ; LHS , , –; Lindsay Language ). Quicherat and Ribbeck emend neue to nonne and numne, respectively, but neither suggestion is close to the original reading, while both require a question mark after the verb pedicabis. Leo’s emendation (the vocative of the proper name Naevius) is far-fetched and involves a further emendation to make sense (pedica, si vis for pedicabis). In order to make the line scan as a complete senarius Ribbeck also emends hunc to hunce on the testimony of Priscian GL ..–.. H, but his emendation cannot be adequately supported by examples from extant Latin literature (this issue is discussed in NW –). I prefer to retain hunc and to adopt Lipsius’ neque, which is palaeographically similar to neue and is often constructed with an indicative. I take neque to mean et non (LHS , ; OLD s.v. a), and to negate not the verb pedicabis but the adverb aliter (so neque aliter = item: see, for example, Cic. Mil. , TLL .–, and cf. the words neque . . . ullo alio genere in the passage of Petronius cited below; this
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meaning would be somewhat obscured if Bothe’s transposition hunc aliter were adopted). The use of neque with the second person singular future tense seems to point to a formally expressed negative command addressed to or employed by a person asked to promise not to do something in future: see Livy .. ‘ex mei animi sententia,’ inquit, ‘ut ego rem publicam populi Romani non deseram neque alium civem Romanum deserere patiar’; Petr. Sat. .– ‘ex tui animi sententia, ut tu, Tryphaena, neque iniuriam tibi factam a Gitone quereris, neque si quid ante hunc diem factum est obicies vindicabisve aut ullo alio genere persequendum curabis; ut tu nihil imperabis puero repugnanti . . . item, Licha, ex tui animi sententia, ut tu Encolpion nec verbo contumelioso insequeris nec vultu, neque quaeres ubi nocte dormiat’ (cf. P. G. Walsh, The Roman novel (Cambridge ) –). It is tempting, therefore, to speculate that the words neque aliter . . . pedicabis were preceded by (at least) one other negative command and that the whole passage was expressed in an archaic and formal tone which was meant to evoke and subvert the solemn vocabulary of oaths and treaties. The speaker may have been asking an addressee to swear to continue to commit sodomy (on pedicabis see OLD s.v. paedico ; Adams Vocabulary – ) with a young man in the same rough manner as before (L. Mueller interprets aliter as mollius). The language employed here and the verb caedis in the following line suggest that the young man’s buggery was a form of sexual humiliation and punishment (on the aggressive and threatening character of pedicare see Adams Vocabulary and C. Williams, Roman homosexuality (Oxford ) –). quo modo video: Bothe was the first editor of L. to attribute quo modo and video to two characters in the play, making quo modo a question and video, as well as the following words of the fr., the response to this question: A. Neve hunc aliter paedicabis. B. Quomodo? | A. Video; adolescenti nostro caedis hillas. This punctuation was adopted by all subsequent editors of L. and Nonius and by the major dictionaries (s.v. paedico). But I fail to see why the transmitted text is unsatisfactory. The speaker has just urged
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someone to keep on buggering a young man as roughly as before. As far as the speaker sees (quo modo | video), this will have a very forceful result (hence the future expression caedes hillam). For quo modo = ‘as far as’ see OLD s.v. c; for the parenthetical use of quo modo video cf. Cic. Ad fam. .. sed, quo modo video, si aestimationes tuas vendere non potes neque ollam denariorum implere, Romam tibi remigrandum est. caedes: Carilli Note emends the trochaic present tense form caedµs to the spondaic future tense form caed¯es to get the necessary iambic rhythm at the beginning of the line; she also notes that the speaker used a future tense (pedicabis) in the previous line, and that the ending -is is frequently mis-spelled as -es in Nonius’ MSS (see F. Bertini Studi Noniani () –). On caedo = ‘I beat’ as a substitute to pedico see OLD s.v. ; TLL .–; and Adams Vocabulary – (‘Caedo sometimes implies a sexual act seen as a punishment. In its literal sense “beat” the verb indicated a form of punishment’, ). Josephus Scaliger (In appendicem P. Vergilii Maronis commentarii et castigationes (Leiden ) ) compares this passage to Pl. Cas. †ecfodere hercle hic volt, credo, vesicam vilico. hillam: on the meaning and the occurrences of this substantive see . It is used in the feminine singular (by L., Varro (spelling hila), Paul.-Fest., the glossae, and unidentified authors (alii) referred to by Charisius), the feminine plural (by Pliny, Arnobius, Ps.-Acro), the masculine plural (by Ps.-Acro) and the neuter plural (by Ps.-Acro); its gender in Horace’s passage is unclear. In order to make the line scan as a senarius Ribbeck and L. Mueller emended hillam to hirulam and hirulas, respectively. But hirulam (or -as) is problematic because it does not square with any of the MS readings of the lemma commented on by Nonius. I favour F’s hillam because it occurs also in all the MSS of Nonius regarding fr. of L. (I assume that the word following hillam in L.’s text would have started with a consonant; this
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would ensure that Meyer’s law was not violated.) Furthermore, it makes better sense to argue that the mentula would be ‘beating’ ‘an intestine’ rather than ‘the intestines’ in general. The testimony of Varro and Ps.-Acro points to the use of these entrails in the making of sausages, but the context of the word hillam in suggests that these entrails may also have been cooked and eaten without any stuffing. CENTONAR IUS Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Eugium, media pars inter naturalia muliebria [codd.: mulieris Quicherat] . . . . [. M = . L] Laberius in Centonario [FHLPE: Centenario V]: quare tam arduum ascendas. an concupisti eug´um scindere? verba Laberius . . . scindere om. d arduum FH LPVE: ardium H ascendas FHLVE: ascen P: ascendis Bentinus: ascendisti Bothe: conscendis Iuniusmg an concupisti eug. scind. FHLVE: om. P: an concupisti eug. scindere Brock: scind. an concupiisti eug. Ribbeck: an concupivisti eug. scind. vel scind. Onions: an concupivisti eug. scind. Bothe: an concupiscis eug. scind. Perottus
THE FIR EMAN Nonius . M = . L: Eugium, the middle part of the female genitalia . . . . [. M = . L] L. in The fireman: . . . why you are so high in the saddle. Did you want to rip my pussy apart? . . .
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C O M M E N TA RY The correct spelling of the title of this play, which has been attributed to L. by Nonius, is almost certainly Centonarius: the reading centenarius (found only in MS V) was probably due to a scribe who, unaware of the word centonarius, took this to be a mis-spelling of the more common word centenarius (OLD s.v.: ‘that is or contains a hundred’). Like L.’s Catularius (cf. also his Aulularius), the form Centonario has been interpreted as the masculine ablative singular of the rarely attested adjective centonarius -a -um (cf. Tert. Praescr. more centonario), formed from cento + -arius (EM s.v. cento) and qualifying the missing noun mimus: according to this view the title should be translated ‘The mime about a cento’ (‘a curtain made of old garments stitched together’ (OLD s.v.)); see Bonaria (‘Il mimo del centone’), Woelfflin Titel , and W. Heraeus, Die Sprache des Petronius und die Glossen (Leipzig ) = Kleine Schriften (Heidelberg ) , who believes that the title is derived from the fact that ‘ein cento eine Hauptrolle spielte’. This view may be supported by the important function of the pot, the casket, and the rope in Plautus’ Aulularia, Cistellaria, and Rudens, respectively; Donatus (GL ..) attributes a fabula palliata entitled Chlamydaria to Naevius, while one of the farcical episodes in Petronius’ novel, which shares many of its features with low drama, involves a stolen tunic containing treasure (Panayotakis Theatrum –). But the masculine adjective centonarius, whose ending is associated with the sermo plebeius, may also be used substantively to indicate a man whose job was somehow related to a cento (see Cooper Formation –; LHS ). Accordingly, the word centonarius has been taken to mean ‘a fire-man who used mats for extinguishing fires’ (OLD s.v.; Caes. B.C. ..; Vitr. ..) or ‘is qui centones consuit, vendit, ad incendia extinguenda et ad usus militares suppeditat’ (TLL s.v.) or ‘merely a clothes dealer (cf. Cato RR [= Agr.] . Romae tunicas, togas, saga, centones, sculponeas)’ (Smith on Petr. Sat. .). In this respect L.’s mime
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should be translated not ‘The mime about a quilt’ but ‘The fireman’ or ‘The rag-man’: it may have had as its main character a Centonarius and it would have been one in a series of mimes, attributed to L., whose title signified a low profession (see Catularius). This seems to be the view taken by Ritschl Parerga (in an unnumbered footnote) and Ribbeck. L. is the first extant literary author to employ the word centonarius; it appears again (as a substantive indicating someone’s profession) in Petr. Sat. .. One of Trimalchio’s illiterate friends is the centonarius Echion, who delivers the longest (and most ungrammatical) speech of all the contributions of the guests (Sat. –; see Smith ad loc.). His fondness for gory gladiatorial spectacles, his keenness on proverbial expressions, and his materialistic attitude towards education, which always ought to lead to a profitable profession, make for lively reading but were not meant to impress Petronius’ audience (P. G. Walsh, The Roman novel (Cambridge ) –; N. W. Slater, Reading Petronius (Baltimore ) –; E. Courtney, A Companion to Petronius (Oxford ) –). It is possible then that a man like Echion, whose profession was not highly regarded amongst the Roman upper classes (cf. Cic. Off. .), was depicted or involved somehow in the plot of L.’s mime. The profession of the centonarii was well attested in Italy (there are about inscriptions pertaining to them: TLL .–.), and their guild (called collegium, corpus, or centuria) is mentioned either on its own (TLL .–.) or with the associations of fabri, dendrophori, nautae, and navicularii (TLL .–). On the centonarii see RE –; H. C. Mau´e, Die Vereine der fabri, centonarii und dendrophori im r¨omischen Reich (Frankfurt ); E. de Ruggiero, Dizionario epigrafico di antichit`a romane (Roma ) ; J. Marquardt and A. Mau, Das Privatleben der R¨omer (Leipzig ) , ; and H. Bl¨umner, Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und K¨unste bei Griechen und R¨omern (Leipzig ) . In his review of Bonaria , L. Herrmann (Latomus () ), presumably because of the occurrence of the word eugium, assigns to this mime fr. , which Nonius attributes to an unspecified
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mime of L. But it is possible that L. used the word eugium in two different plays. This fr. survives because it forms part of Nonius’ list of new words found in the writings of early Latin authors (. M = . L), and it is cited because it contains a form of the rare substantive eugium (see below), which appears only in Lucilius and in L. (twice). The fr. abounds in sexual imagery, and seems to refer to a comic incident of (simulated?) sexual intercourse between a man (the addressee) and a woman (the speaker). It is conceivable that this fr. describes an event which took place before the dramatic time of the delivery of these lines, and now forms part of either a soliloquy conveyed directly to the audience or a dialogue between two characters on stage. Metre: I scan the fr. as two incomplete trochaic septenarii (scan line D ABcD; line BcD ABcD ABCD aa); so do Brock (see the apparatus criticus of Ribbeck ad loc.), who suggests scindere, Bothe, who suggests a different line-division ( . . . eugium | scindere), and Onions, who prints concupivisti and scindere or scindere. Ribbeck scans the lines as senarii (quare . . . arduum | ascendas . . . eugium?) but transposes scindere before an and prints concupiisti (.n. an concupisti). quare: I take this particle (found only in Terence and Lucilius before Cicero: see LHS –) to introduce an indirect question (hence the subjunctive ascendas) which probably depended on either a missing verb of asking (‘tell me why . . . ’) or the (omitted) expression quae causa est (‘what is the reason why . . . ?’): see OLD s.v. Aa. arduum: L. appears to be the first extant author to use the neuter gender of the adjective arduus substantively, in the
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singular, and without a preposition (in other authors it is usually constructed with in or per, both in the singular and in the plural) to indicate a steep place: see TLL .–. The climbing on an arduous location acquires a sexual meaning here (. n. ascendas), and presumably the point of the joke is that the addressee of these lines assumed an inconvenient or impractical (‘too high’) position for sexual intercourse. ascendas: on ascendo used of male animals ‘mounting’ the female to copulate see Col. .., TLL .–, OLD s.v. . On the imagery of verbs of ‘climbing’ and ‘mounting’ taken from the animal world and applied to human sexual intercourse see Adams Vocabulary –. If the speaker of this fr. is playing the role of a human being, not of an animal, L. is the first extant author to use ascendo as part of the human sexual vocabulary. I fail to understand why TLL ( .–) groups this passage together with the passages indicating ‘homines ascendunt . . . in montes, muros, tecta, loca superiora’. On ascendo + accusative without preposition see Liv. Andr. trag. = W, and the other examples cited in TLL .–. an concupisti: on an (= ‘is it that . . . ?’) introducing a direct question which amplifies, or forms a suggested answer to, a previous question (very commonly found in Plautus and Terence), see KS ; OLD s.v. an ; and TLL .– .. Bothe’s concupivisti and Ribbeck’s concupiisti are unnecessary emendations: they involve a different word-order from that transmitted by the MSS, and result from the decision of Bothe and Ribbeck to divide and scan the lines of this fr. differently. Concupisti is used by Cic. Verr. .., .., Catil. .; Phaedr. ..; Sen. Contr. .., ..; and Sen. De Clem. ... eugium: a Greek loan-word for female (and male, according to Adams Vocabulary ) genitalia; the imagery has a distinctly
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agricultural flavour: cf. eÎgeiov, -on ‘of fertile land’ (Theophr. Hist. pl. .. eÎgeion . . . cwr©on, and LSJ s.v.). TLL .., WH s.v., EM s.v., and Adams Vocabulary say that it is a transliterated form of the unattested substantive eÉge±on, but I do not see why it cannot be regarded as a transliterated form of the attested neuter adjective eÎgeion (as W. Goldberger Glotta () – argues). If so, it would accompany a missing neuter substantive (e.g. cwr©on or mlov or mrov). It occurs again in L. () and in a corrupt passage of Lucilius (– M = W = – K) in relation to (probably) a prostitute called Hymnis: Hymnis, [add. Marx] sine eugio †ac destina† [Warmington: ac destina codd.: ac destinas Marx: ac intestino Krenkel]. Hymnis is clearly a woman’s name and Nonius in his lemma (. M = . L; cf. CGL .) talks about naturalia muliebria (TLL s.v. ‘de membro muliebri, vagina’; OLD s.v. ‘the region of the female pudenda’), but the verb which governs eugium in this fr. is elsewhere connected with male intercourse (.n. scindere). Satire and mime were marginalised literary genres, and the context in which eugium is attested suggests that it was a low word, perhaps also exotic-sounding and funny, but not necessarily offensive. The agricultural imagery (employed already by Plautus) for the male and female sexual organs and for sexual intercourse with both sexes is discussed very well by Adams (Vocabulary , –, –, –, –, and –). Adams speculates that, since the form eÉge±on is unattested, the word eugium ‘must have entered Latin as a vulgar borrowing. Its generic restriction, and the fact that the passage of Lucilius manifestly has to do with prostitution, suggest that it would first have been heard in brothels in the mouths of Greek prostitutes’ (Vocabulary ). scindere: on scindo, ‘I split’, in sexual imagery see Priap. . and . (both passages referring to violent male anal intercourse), and Adams Vocabulary –. L. uses it again at in relation to a lupa (presumably, a prostitute).
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COLAX (a) Lapis Ghislanzoni: Notizie degli scavi , p. n. (= ILS . no. Dessau): · · · · · · · ·
·
(b) Nonius . M = . L [HLPVEACX]: Ignescitur pro ignescit. Laberius Colace [HLPVEAX: Scolace C]: figura humana inimica ardore ignescitur figura humana HLPVEACX: figura immane L. Mueller dubit. in adnot.: figurae humanae Bothe inimica Lapis: inimici HLPVEACX: inimico Leo: inimici† L. Mueller: vini L. Mueller dubit. in adnot.: animi Ribbeck in app. crit.: nimio Bothe ardore HLPVEACX: candore Ribbeck in app. crit. cinerescunt Valmaggi: cinerescut Lapis
THE FLATTERER (a) Lapis Ghislanzoni: Notizie degli scavi , p. n. (= ILS . no. Dessau): the hostile flame sets the human body on fire; the limbs of the living, now peaceful, turn into ashes.
(b) Nonius . M = . L: Ignescitur instead of ignescit. L. in The Flatterer: the hostile flame sets the human body on fire
Alas!
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C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which all the important MSS of Nonius attribute to L., shows that the boundaries between the repertoire of the Roman literary mime and the realm of GrecoRoman New Comedy were by no means sharply delineated. The figure of the colax – the word itself is a transliterated form of the Greek word k»lax, which has been rendered by commentators as ‘flatterer’, ‘fawner’, ‘toady’, or ‘sponger’ – seems to have existed on the stage of Greek Old Comedy at least from the s, but E. Tylawsky (Saturio’s Inheritance (New York ) –) has clearly demonstrated that his ancestry can be traced back to Homer (Odysseus disguised as a beggar; Irus, who was both a beggar and an entertainer; Medon the herald and flattering hanger-on; Phemius the bard), to the uninvited and unnamed knisokolax mentioned in a poem by the elegist Asius in the seventh or sixth century (Athen. .B–D = West IEG no. ), and to the ‘cheap everpresent guest’ portrayed in Epicharmus’ ìElpªv £ PloÓtov (– Kaibel = Olivieri). The most distinctive features of the colax, given different prominence in different authors, include a remarkable skill in using verbal expertise to influence for his own benefit the political judgement of the populace or to befriend and exploit worthy or stupid individuals, and an extraordinary fondness for (perhaps even obsession with) food. The latter feature led to the confusion and sometimes identification of the kolax with the comic ‘parasite’, whose presence as a type in the extant plays of Aristophanes is somewhat blurred: traits of his character have been seen, for instance, in Dicaeopolis (who, in Acharnians, models his disguise as stereotypical beggar on Euripides’ representation on stage of Telephus), Cleon (parodied in Knights and Wasps), and the intellectuals and philosophers, including Socrates, targeted in Clouds. But it is only through the chorus of k»lakev in Eupolis’ Spongers (K»lakev –), performed in , that a character labelled kolax steps out onto the comic stage: see Tylawski Saturio’s Inheritance –, and I. C. Storey, Eupolis (Oxford )
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–. The nomenclature of the ‘hanger-on’ was expanded probably with Alexis, who seems to have cleverly invented and applied to the type previously called k»lax the term parsitov as a nickname (Parsitov –, PÅraunov –), a character appearing also in other playwrights of Middle Comedy: Timocles (Drak»ntion ), Antiphanes (D©dumoi –, Pr»gonoi ), Aristophon (ìIatr»v –, Puqagoristv –), and Axionicus (Calkidik»v –); see Arnott Alexis –, –, and ; Tylawski Saturio’s Inheritance –; A. Duncan, Performance and Identity in the Classical World (Cambridge ) –. The scholarly discussion of the extent to which the traits of the ‘fawner’ (satisfaction of desire for power and wealth, self-gratification) and those of the ‘parasite’ (satisfaction of physical greed) were conflated in an integrated way or were viewed as distinctly separate has rightly been reviewed by P. G. McC. Brown (ZPE () –), who argues that both during Menander’s lifetime and later there was a lot of common ground between these two types. The popularity of this figure, whatever character-traits it possessed, is clearly attested in the fact that Menander (not long after ) and possibly Philemon (see A. Koerte, Menander: Reliquiae (Leipzig ) , ad K»l. fr. ∗ ; PCG ) entitled one of their plays K»lax, thus inviting their audiences to view the parasitic flatterer as the main attraction of the play: see A. W. Gomme and F. H. Sandbach, Menander: A Commentary (Oxford ) –. Before Terence in transferred two characters (the parasitus and the miles gloriosus) from Menander’s K»lax to his play Eunuchus (see Ter. Eun. –, and Barsby Eunuchus – with earlier bibliography), Naevius and Plautus had already written fabulae palliatae entitled – at least according to Ter. Eun. , Nonius, and Priscian – Colax (see Naev. –; Pl. frs. – Lindsay = Leo ), but the fragmentary nature of these plays and the problematic nature of Terence’s adaptation of material from the Menandrean original do not allow any conclusions to be drawn as to the way in which Roman playwrights developed (if at all) the character of the parasitic flatterer. When L., therefore, composed a mime which he entitled Colax, he was
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consciously engaging himself with a complex theatrical figure, whose comic potential had already been successfully tested, but perhaps not exhausted, on the Roman stage. The word colax occurs rarely in Latin literature and is always associated with the theatre (it denotes either the title of, or a character in, a comedy; TLL .–); consequently, the fact that L. does not entitle his play after a Latin word for ‘fawner’ (for instance, Adulans (Cic. Pis. ) or Adulator (apparently unattested before the late first century AD: TLL .–; OLD s.v.; CGL .)) suggests that he consciously wanted the audience to view his play in the tradition of the plays of Greco-Roman New Comedy in which such a character appeared, and to have certain expectations about the story-line and the humour in it. There is no strong evidence that the plays of L. or of any other Latin mimographer were adaptations from existing Greek comedies, and I find it implausible that the Greek form of the title of L.’s play indicates that he ‘translated’ the subject-matter and the characters of a specific Greek play entitled K»lax (on L.’s fondness for Greek words as titles of mimes see Henriksson B¨uchertitel –). For Iunius’ misattribution to this mime of another fr. of L. (), which Nonius relates to a mime entitled Scylax, see Scylax. (a) This couplet was written in a marble inscription, about half a metre in width, and is our most recent and perhaps most exciting acquisition of yet another Laberian fr. The inscription was found in a columbarium located before the Porta Praenestina in the via Casilina in Rome, and was published in (and included in the ILS in ). It contains the name of the freedman M. Albius Philer, who is mentioned probably because he is buried in the burial chamber, and two unattributed iambic lines, the first of which is also found in the section ‘De contrariis generibus verborum’ in the work of Nonius, who attributes the line to L.; the second line is not attested elsewhere. M. Albius Phileros
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is not otherwise connected with the theatre or with mime in particular, and I am inclined to think that the couplet from L.’s mime follows his name in the inscription not because he was an actor or an avid fan of L. but because the elegant funeral imagery of the couplet was deemed appropriate for commemorating Phileros’ death. The two lines make sense as a whole, and there is no challenging reason to doubt either that the author of the first senarius had also composed the second, or that the authorship of both lines belongs to L. Given the prominence of columbaria in the first and second centuries AD, it is likely that this inscription antedates Nonius, and its contribution to the study of L. is threefold: it offers the alternative reading inimica for the difficult reading inimici of Nonius’ MSS, it confirms the accuracy of the remaining words in L.’s fr. as transmitted by Nonius’ MSS, and it offers a metrically correct version of a line that most likely followed L.’s senarius as quoted by Nonius. Looking at the broader picture, it also illuminates in an extraordinary fashion how excerpts even from low literary genres such as the mime were extracted from their context and were attached to a cultural environment which had little to do with their original framework. The match between the sombre atmosphere of the subterranean sepulchre and L.’s extract, which talks about the flames of the funeral pyre overwhelming the human body, which then turns into ashes and rests in peace, demonstrates a perfect synergy between literature and material culture (at least in the world of ex-slaves). It should also be noted that this harmony may not have existed in the original theatrical context from which the extract was taken, and it is now impossible to demonstrate whether or not these lines were meant to be taken seriously when they were first performed. (b) Bonaria () wrongly claims that Nonius cited the first line of this fr. because he wished to preserve an example of the otherwise attested masculine noun ardor in the feminine gender. Elsewhere
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in the same section entitled ‘De contrariis generibus verborum’ (. M = . L – . M = . L) Nonius cites passages containing verbs that are used as deponents, although they have an active form (e.g. punitur for punit, certatur for certat). Therefore, the correct reason for the citation of this fr. of L. is that Nonius wanted to quote an instance (in fact, the only surviving instance) of the verb ignesco as deponent (see below). Verbal forms attested both as deponents and in the active voice are listed and discussed in NW –. Metre: senarii (scan line aBCD aaBCD ABcD; line aaBCD aBcD aaBcD). Meyer’s law is not violated in the second and fourth feet of the first line because of the ensuing elisions (h¯um¯an(a) inimica and a¯ rd¯or(e) ignescitur; see Questa Metrica ). figura humana inimica ardore: the conjectures of Bothe and Ribbeck, recorded in the apparatus criticus, regarding the words humana and ardore in L.’s fr. as transmitted by Nonius’ scribes, are due to the MSS reading inimici, which makes little sense in this context (‘the human body is set on fire by the flame of the enemy’), and both of them antedate the publication of the inscription which contains the reading inimica. But even inimica was far from unanimously accepted. F. Leo (Hermes () ), E. Lommatzch (Carmina Latina Epigraphica (Leipzig (= Amsterdam )) n. ), C. Brakman (Mnemosyne () ), and Traglia (Lingua –) reject both the MSS’ inimici and the inscription’s inimica in favour of the grammatically correct and sensible reading inimico. It is easy to see the reasoning behind this view: the ending -o could easily have been corrupted into an -a, given the ending -a of the preceding words figura and humana, and the fact that the word immediately after inimico begins with an a. One may also argue that, even if the person who carved the inscription on the stone was a careful slave, he may have been illiterate or given the wrong instructions. However, the pseudo-philosophical tone of the fr. and the lack of any errors in the remaining inscription (on cinerescut see below) militate against emending inimica to inimico, which,
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in any case, does not account for the existence of the genitive singular inimici in Nonius’ MSS. If we were to accept inimica as the more plausible reading (as I am suggesting), we should interpret it as an ablative singular qualifying the noun ardore, not as a nominative singular accompanying the subject figura humana (so M.-V. Carassa Dioniso () ). This interpretation is corroborated by several instances of the adjective inimicus in conjunction with substantives denoting ‘flame’ (see TLL ..–), such as fax (Prop. ..– cum subdita nostrum | detraheret lecto fax inimica caput; for the funeral imagery see Camps ad loc.), ignis (Verg. G. . fer stabulis inimicum ignem atque interfice messis; Ovid Met. . et positis inimicos admovet ignes, referring to Meleager’s impending death; Apul. Apol. cum caro in humorem crassum et spumidum inimico igni conliquescit), and incendium (Sil. Ital. . addunt frugiferis inimica incendia ramis), and by the fact that ardor is used in L.’s fr. literally = ignis (cf. Cic. Planc. cum mea domus ardore suo deflagrationem urbi atque Italiae toti minaretur; Lucr. ., ., ., ., .; Prop. .. ubi suppositus cinerem me fecerit ardor, referring to funeral pyre; TLL .–). Ardor inimica, then, would contrast with figura humana in chiastic order (noun – adjective – adjective – noun), and would refer not to flames of passion but to flames of fire by means of which the human body (for figura humana = human body, see Cic. Nat. Deor. ., .; cf. . hominis figura; TLL ..–) turns into ashes. The funeral imagery continues in the following line with the verb cinerescunt (note the deliberate juxtaposition of the verbs ignescitur and cinerescunt for maximum acoustic effect) and the compound participle conquieta describing the peacefulness of the human body after death. The main problem with ardor inimica is of course the (elsewhere unattested) feminine gender of the (otherwise masculine) noun ardor. L. Valmaggi (BFC (–) –) and V. Pisani (Joanni Dominico Serra ex munere laeto infertae (Napoli ) –) explain the unusual gender of ardor by comparing ardor to other masculine nouns in -or -¯oris which appear to be feminine in authors of late antiquity, who often followed the grammatical peculiarities of archaic Latin literature (Buecheler
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Carmina . dolorem effugisse nefandam; Iuvencus . mox liuor daemonis atra). Carilli (Note –) supports this view (i) by drawing attention to other instances in L. of words found only in authors of late antiquity, (ii) by suggesting that L. may have been influenced by the neoteric poets in changing the commonly used gender of some substantives (cf., for example, alvus as masculine in Calvus Morel = Traglia = Courtney = Hollis, Helv. Cinna Morel = Traglia = Courtney = Hollis, and L. ; clunes as feminine in Q. Scaevola Morel = Traglia = Courtney = Hollis, Hor. S. .., and L. ), and (iii) by citing a passage of De dubiis nominibus, in which ardor is included in the list of nouns used in both genders (GL .. K). But if we were to take ardore as feminine in L.’s fr., it is odd that Nonius did not form a separate entry for ardor as a feminine substantive either at this point or elsewhere in his treatise. Carilli Note believes that the erroneous form inimici ardore existed in Nonius’ source, and was then copied by Nonius himself; therefore, Nonius had no opportunity to notice the unusual gender of the noun ardor in L. ignescitur: L. is the only extant author to use the intransitive verb ignesco as a deponent (cf. the form hietantur from the verb hietor in ). Formed from the stem igni- and the suffix -esco, which conveyed a notion of ‘becoming (something; in this case, fire)’ or ‘passing into a state (of something; in this case, fire)’ (Lindsay Language ; LHS , ), ignesco = ‘I catch fire’ is found only in the philosophical/didactic works of Lucretius (.) and Cicero (Nat. deor. .) before it is taken up by Virgil (Aen. .) and Ovid (Met. .), and retains the character of a specialised word throughout its existence (TLL ..–). It is clear that L. uses the verb almost as an elevated technical term, adding to the solemnity of the funeral imagery: the human bodies are consumed by the flames of the funeral pyre just as the natural world is destroyed by fire. The language is elaborate and the tone is high, but L. is neither writing a philosophical treatise nor contemplating the vanity of human life, so the fr.
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should not necessarily be taken seriously. It is likely, though by no means certain, that the context would have ironised the serious feeling expressed here (see note on hem below). Nonius’ entry is not mentioned by K. Sittl (Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () ), or P. Berretoni (Studi e Saggi Linguistici () ), who interpret the form ignescitur as passive. On the other hand, according to P. Flobert (Recherches sur les verbes d´eponents latins (Lille ) ), the form ignescor is formed on the analogy of the passive verbal forms accendi, comburi, and cremari. But Carilli (Note n. ) remarks that verbs in -sco functioned as Greek ‘middle’ verbs ‘con funzione trasformativa’ (cf. CGL . and . igniscit puroÓtai), so the deponent form ignescor renders exactly this ‘middle’ quality of ignesco (cf. J. B. Hofmann, De verbis quae in prisca latinitate extant deponentibus (Munich ) ). cinerescunt: yet another denominative verb formed with the suffix -sco, signifying the notion of ‘becoming (ash)’ (Lindsay Language ; LHS ); after L. it is not found again before Tertull. Apol. . arborum poma . . . contacta cinerescunt, but it appears frequently in authors of late antiquity (TLL .–). The proximity of the forms ignescitur and cinerescunt is neither coincidental nor a mark of seriousness; the bubble is pricked by means of the mock-didactic flavour of the substantives and the pomposity of the rarely used verbs. F. Leo (Hermes () ) and Carilli (Note – n. ) rightly compare the form cinerescut with the reading emerut (for emerunt) in CIL ., and regard both endings in -ut not as errors but as abbreviations of the spelling -unt. conquieta: to exaggerate the tone created by ignescor and cineresco, L. now adds the past participle conquietus (apparently found only here) of the compound denominative verb conquiesco (LHS and ), which is sometimes used to denote the peace and rest of the dead (CIL . Claudius Polydeuce hic conquiescit; Cic. Sest. Rosc. ut ne ad saxa quidem mortui conquiescant; OLD s.v. c).
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( –)
animantium: the present participle of animo, used substantively for animate beings in general, humans in particular, and specific types of animals of either sex, is clearly associated with Lucretius (e.g. ., .; TLL .–, .–; .–), and is frequently employed by Cicero both in his philosophical and in his rhetorical works (TLL .–, .–, .–; .– ). The sentiment of the fr. is deliberately enhanced by the appropriate philosophical vocabulary. hem: very common exclamation in Plautus and Terence, in whom it occurs about and times, respectively; Cicero uses it only four times: Cluent. , Rab. Post. , Ad fam. .., ... In the comic playwrights it is used to express surprise, terror, and disbelief at the sound of either good or bad news, but also to indicate anger, grief, caution, and to introduce a reply to someone’s question: see TLL ..–.; OLD s.v.; E. Karakasis, Terence and the language of Roman comedy (Cambridge ) – ¨ einige Interjektionen der lateinischen Umgangssprache ; G. Luck, Uber (Heidelberg ) ; P. McGlynn, Lexicon Terentianum (London/Glasgow ) –; P. Richter, ‘De usu particularum exclamativarum’, in G. Studemund, ed., Studia in priscos scriptores Latinos collata (Berlin –) ; Hofmann Umgangssprache –; Lindsay Language . F. Leo (Hermes () ) was the first to suggest that the exclamation hem in L.’s fr. was uttered not by the person who spoke the words cited in the inscription before hem but by another character, who is reacting to what s/he has just heard. Bonaria () refers to J. Marouzeau (REL () –), who pointed out that Terence frequently joined two lines with a monosyllabic word (a preposition, a conjunction, or an exclamation), which, though placed at the end of the first line, and sometimes introducing a change of speaker, really belonged to the following line (e.g. Eun. , , , , , ; cf. Soubiran Essai –; J. Descroix REL () –). Hem is found at the end of a line only once in Plautus (Aul. , a trochaic septenarius; at hem there is a new speaker, whose words continue into the next line) and times in Terence: of these
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hem is at the end of iambic (Andr. , , , , ; HT , , , ; Eun. ; Ph. , , , ; Hec. ; Ad. , , , , ) and trochaic (Andr. , , , , ; HT , ; Eun. , ; Ph. , , ; Ad. ) lines; it introduces a change of speaker times (Andr. , , , , , ; HT , , , , , ; Eun. , , ; Ph. , , , , ; Hec. ; Ad. , , , , ), but the words of the new speaker continue into the next line only times (Andr. , ; HT , , ; Eun. , , ; Ph. , , , ; Hec. ; Ad. , , ). In the light of these statistics, it seems sensible to agree with Leo and postulate a change of speaker before hem, but I cannot say with certainty that this character continued speaking in the next line. Is this character the colax of the title, reacting in a mocktragic fashion (‘Alas!’ ‘Really!’) to the pompous statement made by the person whom he wants to flatter? (Cf. Gnatho’s comments to Thraso’s silly, boastful remarks in Ter. Eun. –.) Whatever the context of this fr., it is interesting that whoever carved the extract of L. onto the inscription was unlikely to have taken it from a grammatical anthology of literary passages indicating linguistic peculiarities in early Latin authors, because a lexicographer primarily interested in the rare forms ignescitur, cinerescut or conquieta would probably have deemed the exclamation hem inessential, and would have omitted it from his entry. It is possible, therefore, that either the scribe of the inscription himself or the person who commissioned him to inscribe this couplet consulted the script of the mime itself, perhaps not long after L.’s time (this is the view of F. Leo in Hermes () ). COLORATOR Gellius ..– [VPRCv]: ‘Poposci’, ‘momordi’, ‘pupugi’, ‘cucurri’ probabiliter dici videtur [VP: videntur RC], atque ita nunc omnes ferme doctiores
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
hisce [v: huiusce VPRC: huiusce modi ed. princ.] verbis utuntur. Sed Q. Ennius in saturis ‘memorderit’ dixit per ‘e’ litteram, non ‘momorderit’: . . . [..] Item idem Laberius in Coloratore: itaque leni pruna coctus simul sub dentes mulieris veni, bis, ter memordit leni pruna coctus Ribbeck : leni pruna percoctus codd.: leni percoctus pruna Hertz: percoctus leni pruna Fleckeisen: leni pruna percoctus Buecheler: levique pruna percoctus Beroaldus
THE C OLOUR ER Gellius ..–: The forms poposci, momordi, pupugi, and cucurri seem to be the generally approved ones, and so almost all better-educated men nowadays use these forms. However, Quintus Ennius, in his Satires, wrote memorderit (with an e), not momorderit . . . [..] So did L. in The Colourer: . . . and so, having roasted me over a slow fire, when I was put on the plate in front of her, she took a few good bites out of me
C O M M E N TA RY The morphology of the title of this mime, which Gellius attributes to L., indicates a person professionally associated with colours (OLD s.v.: ‘colourer [?house-painter]’; Olcott Formation : ‘dyer’; for other substantives in -¯a-tor formed from the present stem of first-conjugation verbs see LHS ). Concrete substantives in -tor had the place of explanatory relative clauses (colorator = is qui colorat); they indicated (at least in classical Latin) a permanent condition or quality associated with the person or object referred to by the substantive, and were common already in early Latin authors (Cooper Formation , –): we find of
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these in Plautus. Fewer are found in Terence () and Cicero (), and their occurrence decreases further in the Augustan writers, before it increases again in the writings of Seneca, Pliny, Martial, Apuleius, and the ecclesiastical authors (Cooper Formation , –), in whom substantives in -ator regularly signified a single action or a temporary state as well as a permanent condition. Nomina agentis of this type, many designating professions (e.g. calator: Pl. Merc. and OLD s.v.; glutinator: Lucil. M = W and OLD s.v.; LHS –), are, according to Cooper Formation , of popular origin but also ‘more in accordance with the spirit of the classic language than the corresponding formations in -arius’. The popularity of the suffix -tor in the sermo vulgaris is well documented by Olcott (Formation –), who lists substantives in -tor found in inscriptions, about one third of which are also in Cicero. ‘As regards meaning, the greater number of inscriptional words in -tor . . . denote[s] trades, or occupations (especially in the public service). In the language of commerce they strove for popular favor with the similar substt. in -arius . . . but the latter, as the longer form, prevailed’ (Olcott Formation ). Five inscriptions attest the existence of the occupation of coloratores, four found at columbaria in Rome (CIL . Anteros Liviae colorator, . Amaranthus colorat, . Amarantus colorat, . Licini coloratoris), and one in Interamna Sucasina in Latium (CIL . C. l. Philogenes colorator). The Edict. Dioclet. . mentions a colorator, while in CGL . colorator is glossed as stilbwtv (cf. LSJ s.v. st©lbw ‘glitter, gleam, of polished or bright surfaces’) or «ndikoplsthv, «ndikopleÅsthv (LSJ s.v.: ‘dyer’). Although colorare may be used of humans being coloured by, for instance, the light of the sun (Cic. De orat. . and TLL .–), it is more likely that the colorator referred to in the title of this mime would have dealt with the application of colour to objects, not people. What these objects are is less clear. Colorare is applied, amongst others, to food (Cato Agr. ; Colum. .., ..; TLL .–), the human body (Cic. De nat. deor. .), clouds (Cic. De nat. deor. .), water (Cat. .), stars (Vitr. ..), hair (Ovid Am. ..),
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and medicine (Scrib. Larg. ), and it is only in Seneca that it is found applied to wool (Ep. .) or stones (Ep. .). Is L.’s colorator a man who paints wall-surfaces, a decorator? Is he a dyer? If so, what does he dye? The inscriptional evidence suggests that the job of the colorator was a profession associated with freedmen, but there is no literary or other evidence that I know of to suggest in what way this profession would have been exploited in a comic play. Several of the mimes of L. are entitled after professions which may not have been highly regarded by the Roman upper classes (e.g. Centonarius, Fullo, Piscator, Salinator, Staminariae; see Cic. Off. .), and it may be that L. was interested in devising comic plots which were somehow related to the life and occupation of specific low-class characters: their language, habits, and actions would have been familiar to the audience watching these mimes, and may have formed the basis on which the comic incidents were constructed. This fr. survives because it contains an example of a perfect stem whose reduplication-vowel has not been assimilated to the vowel of the perfect stem (so, memordi, not momordi): see Garcea and Lomanto and n. . The wider context of this morphological issue is Gellius’ discussion of the difference in practice between the majority of the better-educated people of his time (nunc omnes ferme doctiores, ..), who assimilated the reduplication-vowel of the perfect tense to the stem-vowel and wrote poposci momordi pupugi cucurri, and the majority of earlier authors (plerosque veterum, . tit.), who did not do this but instead employed an ˘e in the reduplication-syllable of the perfect stem, and wrote peposci memordi pepugi cecurri on the basis of Greek (actually, Indo-European) reduplicated perfect forms with an ˘e (e.g. ggraja). These forms have been fully discussed in LHS ; NW –; Lindsay Language , , ; Sommer Handbuch –; and G. Meiser, Veni Vidi Vici: Die Vorgeschichte
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des lateinischen Perfektsystems (Munich ). The process of nonassimilation seems to have lasted at least until the end of the republic, if we are to believe Gellius’ testimony that even Cicero and Caesar employed the forms memordi, pepugi, and spepondi (..; see Cic. Sex. Rosc. pepugisset found in some MSS; such forms may have been discussed in Caesar’s De analogia); nor does this process appear to have confined itself to specific literary genres: amongst the writers who did not assimilate the reduplication-vowel to the stem-vowel Gellius (..–) includes Ennius in his saturae, the comic playwrights Plautus, Atta, and L., the historiographers Valerius Antias and Quintus Aelius Tubero, and Publius Nigidius Figulus, who wrote on natural science. L., therefore, is far from being original in using both here and in . the ‘archaic’ form memordit. It is also found in Plautus (Poen. , only in MSS C and D; B has momordit), Nigidius Figulus (Gellius .. = fr. Swoboda), and Virgil (Aen. ., only in MS P; the OCT prints momordit). Memorderit occurs in Ennius (Gellius .. = Sat. Vahlen ), admemordit in Plautus (Gellius .. = Aul. fr. II Leo = fr. II Lindsay), and memordisse in Atta (Gellius .. = Concil. ). Nonius . M = . L, commenting on the forms memordi peposci pepugi spepondi (cf. CGL .), lists only the passages from Atta, L., and Ennius referred to above, containing instances of the form memordi, but at the end of the section he adds cetera in obscurioribus invenimus (. M = . L). If Nonius’ source for this section was Gellius ., the only passages Nonius did not copy from Gellius are attributed to Plautus and to Nigidius Figulus. Metre: I scan the fr. as two iambic septenarii (the second of them complete) with line-division after coctus: scan line dd aBCD ABˆD; line aBCD AbbcD ABCD aBˆD. Bothe divides the lines differently (itaque . . . mulieris | veni . . . ) and scans them as iambic octonarii; I cannot see how this can be correct. Ascensius in his edn of Gellius divides the fr. into three lines (itaque levi | pruna . . . mulieris | veni . . . ), but they do not scan either.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
leni pruna: before L. pruna (‘a living coal’, OLD s.v.) occurs only in Cato (Agr. . eo prunam lenem indito), while the adjective lenis (‘moderate’) used of fires for cooking (OLD s.v. d) seems to have qualified pruna often (Cato Agr. .; Philumenus Medicus De medicina , p. . ad lenes prunas coques). But whereas a ‘gentle fire’ (lenis pruna) is associated in our other extant sources with the cooking process, the ‘moderate fire’ in L.’s fr. is used, I argue below, for the first time figuratively, and it contributes to the slow mental pain inflicted upon the man to whom the participle coctus refers. coctus: L. uses the passive participle of coquo not to refer to actual cooking but to emotional agitation as punishment (.n. sub dentes). Imagery associated with cooking and the kitchen was employed to indicate mental affliction already in Ennius (Ann. Skutsch quae nunc te coquit et versat in pectore fixa; and Skutsch Ennius, ad loc.) and Plautus (Trin. egomet me coquo et macero et defetigo), and was taken up perhaps by Catullus (. irata est. hoc est, uritur et coquitur (Dousa, Lipsius: loquitur codd.); Fordyce ad loc. rejects the emendation) and certainly by Virgil (Aen. . (of Allecto) femineae ardentem curaeque iraeque coquebant; and Fordyce ad loc.); cf. Sen. Ep. ., Quint. .., TLL .–). Ribbeck’s emendation coctus of the MSS’ percoctus restores the metre and relates the fr. of L. clearly with the passages from Ennius and Plautus cited above. sub dentes: sub + the accusative of dens + a form of venio occurs also in Petronius in the long passage of verbal abuse levelled against Ascyltus by the illiterate freedman Hermeros: recte, venies sub dentem (Sat. .). The passages of L. and Petronius are the only instances of dens depending on sub cited in the TLL ..–. The expression sub dentem (or dentes vel sim.) venire appears to have been proverbial (cf. also Suet. Tiber. . (Augustus talking about Tiberius) miserum populum Romanum, qui sub tam lentis maxillis erit; and Otto Sprichw¨orter s.v. dens ), and it was in a
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proverbial sense that Hermeros was threatening to ‘get his teeth into’ Ascyltus. In their editions of the Cena Trimalchionis Marmorale (, ) and Smith (, ) compare this passage of Petronius to that of L., and the modern translators of the Sat. render Hermeros’ words figuratively: e.g. ‘I’ll get my teeth into you’ (Dinnage, Sullivan), ‘you will feel my teeth’ (Walsh). But whereas the consensus is that the expression sub dentem venire is used figuratively in Petronius, TLL .– suggests that the biting was real in the fr. of L., and that the speaker who came under the teeth of the woman was perhaps a fish (presumably, they mean an actor dressed as a fish). This does not make any sense to me. What would have been the context of the fr. envisaged by this scenario? A fish or an animal narrating how it had been cooked and bitten twice and thrice by a woman? It is much more likely that the imagery of cooking, which was introduced in this fr. with the words leni pruna and was intensified with the participle coctus, continues in a metaphorical sense with the proverbial expression sub dentes venire, and indicates the fulfilment of someone’s wish to punish someone else. According to this view, L.’s fr. would mean that, as soon as (simul) the mulier in question (a sexually experienced woman: OLD s.v. mulier ) found the opportunity to punish the man, who was agitated (coctus) (perhaps by her) over a long period of time (leni pruna), she grasped the opportunity to punish him and ‘got her teeth into him’ (i.e. punished him somehow) repeatedly (bis ter). This man is now narrating his experience. bis ter: the asyndeton reinforces the vigour of the imagery of ‘biting’, and is found only here and in Seneca (Thy. bis ter regestus; Herc. Fur. bis ter rotatum; Hor. Epod. . cum bis ter ulnarum toga is probably corrupt). TLL .–. says that bis is often found with other adverbial numerals ‘ita ut in eadem re simplex series intellegenda sit’ (.–). Other, more frequently occurring expressions combining bis and ter are bis terque (Cic. Quint. F. ..; Hor. Epod. ., Ars Poet. ; Ovid
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
Met. .; Pers. Sat. .; Luc. B.C. .; Sen. Thy. , N.Q. ..; Sil. Ital. ., ., ., .; Mart. Ep. .., .., ..), bis aut ter (Cato Agr. ., .; Rhet. Her. .; Varro RR ..; Colum. RR .., ..; Celsus De medic. .., ..; Pliny NH .), and bis terve (Cic. Ad fam. .., Ad Att. ..; Hor. Ars Poet. ; Varro Men. fr. C`ebe; Scrib. Larg. , , ; Pliny NH .). memordit: for the ‘archaic’ spelling memordit as opposed to momordit, see and .. The woman’s ‘biting’ forms the climax of the imagery of cooking and of biting as punishment (this aspect is emphasised by the asyndeton bis ter and the assonance mulieris . . . memordit). L. uses memordi(t) again figuratively (‘to nibble away the family fortune’) in .; mordeo + an accusative of person = ‘I cause distress to someone’ was used frequently of inanimate objects (a letter; Cic. Ad Att. ..) or of words and behaviour (Ter. Eun. ; Ad. ) which worried someone (OLD s.v. ), but it can also be used of people vexing other people, perhaps out of envy (Lucil. M = W quanto blandior haec, tanto vehementius mordet; Ter. Eun. invidere omnes mihi, mordere clanculum; cf. Hor. Carm. .. et iam dente minus mordeor invido; TLL .–). COMP ITALIA Gellius .. [Fg(=OXPN)d(=QZ)]: Neque non obsoleta quoque et maculantia ex sordidiore vulgi usu [scil. Laberius] ponit, . . . [..] item in Compitalibus [FO XPNd: Capitalibus O ]: m¯alas malaxavi malaxavi FOPN: mala.laxavi X : mala.l.axavi X : malaxavit d: malacissavi Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit.
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Gellius ..– [Fg(=OXPN)d(=QZ)T]: ‘Susque deque fero’ [suppl. Hertz: suppl. F. Skutsch] aut ‘susque deque habeo’ – his enim omnibus modis dicitur – verbum est ex hominum doctorum sermonibus. In poematis quoque et in epistulis veterum scriptum est plurifariam; sed facilius reperias [FOXNQZT: repperies P: reperies ed. princ.] qui id verbum ostentent quam qui intellegant. Ita plerique nostrum, quae remotiora verba invenimus, dicere ea properamus, non discere. Significat autem ‘susque deque ferre’ animo aequo esse et quod accidit non magni pendere atque interdum neglegere et contemnere, et propemodum id valet quod dicitur Graece diajore±n. Laberius in Compitalibus: nunc lentu’s, nunc tu susque deque fers; mater familias tua µn lecto adverso sedet, servos sextantis utitur nefariis verbis supplevi: vel Ribbeck nunc FPdT: nun O: nun.. N: .non X lentu’s Fleckeisen: lentus es Fgd: lentus est T: lentus es Lipsius: lentus es Scaliger: lentescis Bothe mater familias tua FgZT: sanatur familias tua Q: Caia cur familia Gronovius tua codd.: tuo Ribbeck – sedet servos FOZT: sed et servos XNQ: et servos P: sedet servis Scaliger sextantis FXPNQ: sex tantis OZ: sex tant¯u T: sescentis Lipsius: sex ante Gronovius – utitur nefariis | verbis Bothe: verbis nefariis utitur FOXNdT: verbis nefarius utitur P: verpis nefariis utitur Scioppius: vernulis nefariis. Utitur Scaliger: nefarius fututor utitur Gronovius in app. crit.
Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=CXDMO)]: Prolubium est [lacunam statuit Onions]: ‘ petere amicitiam et fidem’ [Onions: Proluvium est patere amicitiam et fidem codd.: Prolubium est petere amicitiam Scaliger: Prolubium est , , ‘prolubium est petere amicitiam et fidem’ Lipsius: Prolubium Mercerus
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
in textu: Prolubium , , ‘prolubium est petere amicitiam et fidem’ Mercerus in notis] . . . [. M = . L] Laberius Compitalibus [FHLpc PVE: comnpitalibus Lac ]: quo quidem me a matronali pudore prolubium meretricis progredi coegit! verba Laberius . . . coegit om. d quo quidem g: quod quidem ed. : quom quidem L. Mueller in app. crit. prolubium Lipsius: proluvium g: prolubium Guietus meretricis g: meretricie Lindsay: meretricium Ribbeck coegit! L. Mueller: coegit g: coegit? Iunius
Nonius . M = . L [FHLVE]: Latrina [Aldina: latrinas FHLVE] genere feminino; et est lavatrina [F H LV: et est latrina F H E: et est lavatrina Quicherat], quod nunc balneum dicitur . . . . [. M = . L] Neutro Laberius Compitalibus [FHVE: comnpitalibus L]: sequere in latrinum, ut aliquid gustes ex Cynica haeresi
Hic latrinum ventris fimi [Carilli: ventri fine F E: ventri finem FHLV: ventri †finem Lindsay: ventris fine Lindsay dubit. in app. crit.: ventri faciendo Onions: neutri finem Mercerus : neutri fine Gothofredus] locum dixit. sequere in Bothe: sequere in F HLVE: seque in F : sequere | in C. F. W. M¨uller gustes H : gustus FH L: gustis VE Cynica Iunius: cineca FH E: cinica H : cinyca V: cyneca L haeresi Iunius: heresi codd.
THE F ESTI VAL AT TH E C ROS S -ROADS Gellius ..: Besides, he [L.] used words which were both obsolete and vulgar from the rather uncouth speech of the common people . . . ;
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[..] for example, in The festival at the cross-roads, he [L.] has: I mashed the jaws . . .
Gellius ..–: The expression susque deque fero (‘I bear both up and down’) or susque deque habeo (‘I have both up and down’), all of which mean the same thing, is derived from the everyday language of learned men. It also occurs extensively in the poems and in the letters of the early writers; but you will probably more readily find people who use this phrase ostentatiously than who understand it. So it is that most of us rush to use the rather recondite words which we have come across, but not to learn their meanings. Now the expression ‘to bear both up and down’ means to be of a tranquil mind and not to attach great importance to what has happened, and occasionally to be indifferent and to disregard things, signifying virtually the same thing as the Greek word diajore±n. L. in The festival at the cross-roads has: now are tranquil, now you are even-tempered (susque deque fers); the mistress of your household is sitting on the marriage-bed, a worthless slave uses foul words . . .
Nonius . M = . L: Prolubium (‘desire’) means ∗ ∗ ∗ : ‘ to seek your friendship and loyalty’ . . . [. M = . L] L. in The festival at the cross-roads: . . . how far a courtesan’s desire has forced me to go, away from my matronly decency!
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Nonius . M = . L: The noun latrina (‘lavatory’) is feminine; there is also the form lavatrina, nowadays called ‘a bathroom’ (balneum) . . . . [. M = . L] In L.’s festival at the cross-roads it [i.e. latrina] is neuter: follow to the loo to get a taste of the Cynic school
Here he [L.] calls latrinum the place for the excrement of the stomach. C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, attributed by both Gellius and Nonius to L., is also the title of a fabula togata attributed to Afranius (– ), and suggests that events associated with religious festivals enriched the repertory of Roman popular theatre as a whole (cf. Anna Peranna, Parilicii, and Saturnalia). The festival in honour of the Lares Compitales, the guardian spirits of the crossroads in farm-lands and cities alike, took place in the compita (Isid. Orig. ..; Paul.-Fest. M = L; Schol. Pers. . (cited below); TLL .–.; .–), and its features have been thoroughly discussed: RE –; Fowler Festivals –; Scullard Festivals –; G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der R¨omer (Munich ) . The Romans traced its origins to Servius Tullius (Dion. Halic. ..; Pliny NH .), and its development is related to Tarquinius Superbus (Macr. Sat. ..). The formulaic expression which was apparently used by the praetor to announce the beginning of the festival is reported by Gellius (.. Dienoni populo Romano Quiritibus Compitalia erunt, quando concepta fuerint, nefas = Macr. Sat. ..), but the precise date of the festival itself, at least in Cicero’s and L.’s time, seems not to have been fixed (Varro LL .; Macr. Sat. ..; Auson. Eclog. .–). It took place at some point between the end of
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the Saturnalia ( to (sometimes) December; see Dion. Halic. ..; Cato Agr. ; but Pliny NH . puts the Compitalia before the Saturnalia) and January. In it was celebrated on December (Ascon. –), in and in on January (Cic. Ad Att. ..; Pis. ), and in on January (Cic. Ad Att. ..). It is only in the calendars of Philocalus and Polemius Silvius, compiled in the fourth and fifth centuries AD respectively, that we find the ludi Compitales occupying the period – January (Fowler Festivals ). The scholiast on Pers. . assigns the origins of the festival to an agricultural custom which involved sacrifices made in shrines located at the place where the paths of farms crossed each other (compita sunt loca in quadriviis, quasi turres, ubi sacrificia, finita agricultura, rustici celebrabant). In an urban context the crossroads of neighbouring farms would have corresponded to the meeting-place of streets with houses (vici), and the festival would have given the opportunity to people of all social classes residing in the same vicus to mingle and celebrate. The atmosphere must have been quite festive, since this period was regarded as a public holiday (Gell. ..) with ludi in its programme of events. Propertius (..) mentions the sacrifice of fattened pigs, Festus ( M = L; M = L; cf. Macrob. Sat. ..–) talks about hanging woollen effigies and woollen balls, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (..) specifies the culinary contribution of each family to the festival (a honey-cake), and testifies to the participation of slaves in the proceedings (to±v d t perª tän geit»nwn ¬er sunteloÓsin n to±v pronwp©oiv oÉ toÆv leuqrouv, ll toÆv doÅlouv taxe (scil. ¾ TÅlliov) pare±na© te kaª sunierourge±n, Þv kecarismnhv to±v ¤rwsi tv tän qerap»ntwn Ëphres©av), while Cato (Agr. ) is happy to allow his household to have a bit more wine on this occasion, and to permit the bailiff to perform the religious rites (Agr. .). This celebration was very much a family affair (see Cic. Ad Att. ..; .. Ego, quoniam IIII Non. Ian. compitalicius dies est, nolo eo die in Albanum venire, ne molestus sim familiae; veniam III Non. Ian. igitur), and
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its festive spirit has rightly been compared to the gaiety which characterises our New Year celebrations (Scullard Festivals ). So, this social gathering surely provided an excellent opportunity for L. to employ colloquialisms and expressions used by the lower classes. But, like other mimes of L. possibly targeting people in possession of political power (Alexandrea, Necyomantia), Compitalia may have had a political character. Hugely popular and potentially subversive, the collegia compitalicia were abolished by the Senate in , restored by P. Clodius in , banned (together with their ludi) by Caesar in , and eventually revived by Augustus, who integrated them into the religious re-organisation of the state (Ascon. –; Suet. Caes. .; Aug. ., .). L. may have exploited the political nature of the meetings at the cross-roads, and drawn on their bad reputation (A. W. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome (Oxford ) –). Bonaria argues that, since Caesar discontinued these games by (see T. Birt RhM () –), the mime was staged before this date. But it is not clear that the celebrations at the Compitalia included ludi scaenici, and even if they did I do not see why L.’s Compitalia should necessarily have been performed at the ludi Compitalicii. Could it not have been performed on another occasion? All that the title reveals is that the play was named after a festival which may or may not have been banned by the authorities at the time of the performance of L.’s mime. Therefore, this play cannot be securely dated. This fr. survives because it contains an instance of what Gellius (..) regarded as yet another vulgarism attributed to L. and apparently derived from the uncouth speech of the common people (Dalmasso ; Holford-Strevens Gellius ; Garcea and Lomanto ). I argued above that a mime-play whose dramatic time may have been the festival of the Compitalia would have given the perfect opportunity to L. to include in the script lowclass words and vulgar expressions, because slaves were allowed
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to participate in the proceedings of this festival. But what is uncouth in this fr.? The verbal form malaxavi, the expression malas malaxare, or both the verb and the expression? Metre: uncertain. The two words may have formed part of a senarius (scan ABcD AB ) or a trochaic septenarius (scan ABcD AB ); Ribbeck appears to scan them as the beginning of an iambic line in the text, but in the apparatus criticus he prints malacissavi and scans the fr. as the beginning of a trochaic septenarius. malas malaxavi: the verb malaxare is formed from the stem of the aorist infinitive of the Greek malssw (malxai) ‘I make soft’ (Charis. . B malaxo malssw; EM s.v.; LHS , ), like campsare (< kmptw, kmyai; Enn. Ann. Skutsch with comm. ad loc.), taxare (< tttw, txai; Sen. Ep. .), charaxare (< carssw, carxai; Apic. .), and pausare (< paÅw, paÓsai; Cael. Aurel. ..); it is not formed from malak©zein, as W. Goldberger Glotta () n. claims. Varro LL . discusses correctly the etymology of the verb malaxo (ab eo quod illi [scil. Graeci] malssein nos malaxare) without saying whether or not he regards it a low word, and uses the compound form commalaxarem in Men. Sat. C`ebe, which may well antedate the performance of L.’s mime (see OCD s.v. Varro). If L.’s Compitalia was written before the dissemination of Varro’s LL (?; see OCD s.v.), then L. is the first extant Latin author to use this verb without a prefix, and the only one to employ it in conjunction with the substantive mala. Seneca (Ep. .) uses it once to indicate an action of which he does not approve (an potius optem ut malaxandos articulos exoletis meis porrigam?), but malaxo occurs frequently in the writings of medical authors, from the first century AD onwards, and is used either absolutely or with an accusative indicating a bodily part that is made soft (TLL .–; Langslow Medical , ); Cassiodorus (De orthographia I = GL .. K) uses malacizo malacisso (hence, Ribbeck’s tentative and unnecessary emendation malacissavi), and Isidore (..) malaxatus. The speaker of this fr., then, is figuratively and humorously
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
using medical imagery to say that he or she softened someone’s jaws (I take malas to be the accusative plural of m¯ala, not of m˘ala (scil. femina); both would fit the metre), presumably by hitting them (see TLL . ‘feriendo’); so, it is the expression malas malaxare as a whole, rather than the verbal form malaxavi, that Gellius found uncouth. Ascensius’ interpretation of malaxavi as ‘I softened by repeated kissing’ (‘deosculatus sum’) seems to me less plausible than the explanation I offered above, because it weakens the comic point generated through the imagery of violence, a literary device frequently employed for humorous effect in Plautus: see Epid. ; Capt. –; Rud. –, ; and Fantham Imagery –. Hitting someone’s jaws is a distinctive feature of these comic scenes: Bacch. – (the parasite speaking) mihi cautiost | ne nucifrangibula excussit ex malis meis; Rud. – (the slave Trachalio is talking about the pimp Labrax) opinor, leno pugnis pectitur. | nimi’ velim inprobissumo homini malas edentaverint. The comedy in L.’s fr. is emphasised by alliteration, assonance, and figura etymologica, and harks back to Plautine puns such as Venerem hanc veneremur (Rud. ) and Venus, | veneror te (Rud. –). This fr. survives in Gellius, who cites it with approval (see Garcea and Lomanto ), because it contains an example of the archaic expression susque deque ferre ‘to regard as a matter of indifference’ (OLD s.v.; Paul.-Fest. M = L Susque deque significat plus minusve; TLL ..–; LHS ; NW –). Gellius wishes to clarify the meaning of the expression susque deque ferre (or esse or habere), which is used by many cultivated men of his time (.. ex hominum doctorum sermonibus; .. plerique nostrum), but not all of them understand it or use it properly. The implication seems to be that Gellius’ educated contemporaries were keen to use the ‘archaic’ Latin they found while reading poemata and epistulae of early Latin authors (..), but in Gellius’ view these people paid more attention to showing off their erudition than to using Latin accurately. The expression susque deque esse, lit.
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‘to be both up and down’, is found first in Pl. Amph. , and is employed to describe Amphitruo’s erroneous perception of Alcmena’s feelings concerning her alleged adultery (atque id me susque deque esse habituram putat ‘and he thinks that I will consider this of no account’; see Christenson ad loc.). Lucilius ( M = W) uses the phrase to indicate events of little weight, Varro (cited by Gellius ..) to describe things which are essentially similar, while Cicero, in a letter written in (Ad Att. .. nam de Octavio susque deque), makes it clear with this expression (without attaching a verbal form to it) that he does not care about the news concerning Octavius. The surviving evidence therefore points to the popular nature and origins of this proverbial colloquialism (cf. Otto Sprichw¨orter ; TLL ..–), does not support Gellius’ claim that susque deque was combined with habere, and shows that L. is the only extant author to have used susque deque with ferre. It is also worth noting that Gellius’ interpretation of the expression covers far too wide a range of emotional reactions, from calmness (.. animo aequo esse; OLD s.v. aequus ) and little regard for something (quod accidit, non magni pendere; OLD s.v. pendo b), to neglect and complete disregard (.. neglegere et contemnere; OLD s.v. contemno ; cf. LSJ s.v. diajorä). Metre: senarii: scan line ABCD A/BCD aBcD; line ABcdd A/bbCD ABcD (Luchs’ law is not violated: a¯ dv¯ers¯o sedet); line ABCD a/BcD aBcD (Meyer’s law is not violated: u¯ tµt¯ur nefariis); line AB. On the metrically incomplete first line, see below. I do not understand how the scansion of line in Ribbeck can be correct: mat´er famili¯as t˘ua ´ın lecto advers´o sedet. I prefer to scan famili¯as t˘ua µn with iambic shortening (see M¨uller Prosodie ); cf. Ennius Hecuba Jocelyn tibi µn concubio; Pl. Mil. tibi µn senecta; Stich. lupum µn sermone; M¨uller Prosodie –; Lindsay Verse . nunc lentu’s: the beginning of the line as transmitted in the MSS is one element short and does not scan ( n¯unc l¯ent˘us es, nunc tu susque deque fers), if we assume that this line is a senarius. Lipsius inserted tu after lentus es and scanned
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the line as a senarius without having to add anything before the first nunc (ABcD BCD aBcD); this is perhaps the most economical solution to the problem, but it upsets the symmetry of nunc lentu’s, nunc tu susque deque fers. Scaliger’s lentus es requires a monosyllable at the beginning of the senarius but no other alterations to the rest of the transmitted text. It also makes the omission of tu easy to explain palaeographically (lentus es). However, it violates Meyer’s law in the second foot (l¯ent¯us ). I adopt Fleckeisen’s lentu’s, adopted also by Ribbeck, which involves two additions ( and ), one deletion (es), and a slight emendation regarding a weak final s (lentu’s). In his apparatus criticus Ribbeck notes that he does not want to print nunc (presumably, to avoid having three instances of nunc in the same line?), and that he prefers an exclamation such as or . It is true that in the extant plays of Plautus and Terence the combination nunc nunc occurs only once (at the beginning of a senarius: Pl. Rud. ), whereas em nunc occurs seven times in senarii and trochaic septenarii (Pl. Cas. ; Epid. –; Merc. ; Poen. , ; Trin. ; Ter. Ph. ); but only one of these instances has em nunc at the beginning of a line (a senarius: Poen. ), Ussing’s emendation for the reading et nunc, while the combination a nunc is not attested at all in Plautus and Terence. Ribbeck does not seem to appreciate the tension created by the dramatic repetition of nunc: like Trachalio’s dramatic and suspenseful description of the shipwreck of Palaestra and Ampelisca (Rud. ), so here the speaker’s rebuke to the addressee would become more serious by means of the anaphora in the triple nunc. Moreover, the first nunc could easily have been omitted through haplography. But if having three instances of nunc in the same line is considered a stylistic flaw, I do not see why Ribbeck did not consider the combination nunc, which is found times in Plautus and Terence, in ten of them at the beginning of the line (a senarius: Pl. Aul. ; Pseud. ; Ter. Eun. ; a trochaic septenarius: Pl. Amph. ; Asin. ; Bacch. ; Capt. ; Cist. ; Ter. Andr. ; Ph. ). At would make perfectly good sense (‘but now you are calm . . . ’), would not spoil
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the anaphora nunc . . . nunc, and would create an effective contrast between the statement of the speaker and what had been said before. The omission of at from the quotation does not alter the meaning of the fr., so it is easy to imagine Gellius or his source or the scribes copying Gellius’ MSS carelessly omitting this adversative particle because they regarded it as inessential. On lentus = ‘unconcerned’, see OLD s.v. , TLL ..; Cicero uses it frequently to denote an unresponsive person (sometimes applied to himself; OLD s.v. ). Ovid (Tr. .) claimed that Augustus was ‘untroubled’ while watching the adulterous affairs of the mime-stage (scaenica vidisti lentus adulteria). Did Ovid have in mind L.’s fr. when he wrote these words? susque deque fers: . mater familias tua: these words suggest that the speaker is addressing a married man and is talking to him about his wife (or that the speaker, a married man, is soliloquising about his own wife): cf. Livy .. matrem familiae tuam purpureum amiculum habere non sines; .. si in sua quisque nostrum matre familiae, Quirites. The formal title mater familias (-ae) occurs already in Ennius (Androm. Jocelyn liberum quaesendum causa familiae matrem tuae; see Jocelyn ad loc.), Plautus (Amph. , applied by Alcmena to Juno in an oath; Merc. , , used of Demipho’s respectable wife, who should not be accompanied in public by a beautiful maid; Stich. , applied by Panegyris to herself and her sister to describe what a wife should ideally be to her husband), and Terence (Ad. , used as the opposite of meretrix). Gellius (..–) offers an unconvincingly subtle explanation of the difference between a mater familias and a matrona: matronam dictam esse proprie quae in matrimonium cum viro convenisset, quoad in eo matrimonio maneret, etiamsi liberi nondum nati forent, dictamque ita esse a matris nomine, non adepto iam, sed cum spe et omine mox adipiscendi . . . matrem autem familias appellatam esse eam solam quae in mariti manu mancipioque aut in eius in cuius maritus manu mancipioque esset, quoniam non in matrimonium tantum, sed in familiam quoque mariti et in sui heredis locum venisset; cf.
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Cic. Topica genus enim est uxor: eius duae formae: una matrumfamilias, [eae sunt quae in manum convenerunt;] altera earum, quae tantum modo uxores habentur. Whatever the distinction, a mater familias was expected to behave in a respectable, honourable, and dignified fashion to her husband and to her household, and the moral boundaries between her and a disreputable woman were often exploited in political invective (see Cic. Cael. in eius modi domo in qua mater familias meretricio more vivat; and Austin on Cic. Cael. si matrem familiam secus quam matronarum sanctitas postulat nominamus; Phil. . ingenui pueri cum meritoriis, scorta inter matres familias versabantur; TLL .–, .–); it is this dignity that later jurists single out in order to describe a mater familias irrespective of her social class or her status as a mother (S. Treggiari, Roman Marriage (Oxford ) –, –). The wife in L.’s fr., therefore, ought to have been behaving in a dignified manner, but the attitude of the worthless slave mentioned in the next line and what is said in cloud her reputation. The first to notice this were Thysius and Oiselius in their edn of Gellius; Ziegler () added that the speaker of these lines was implying that the married woman had committed adultery and was carrying an illegitimate child. These three scholars are indebted to Josephus Scaliger for their interpretation (see below). In his edn of Gellius (, on ..–), Gronovius boasts that little attention has been paid to Q’s reading sanatur familias tua, which, Gronovius thought, holds the key to what L. had originally written. But his emendation C¯aµ˘a c¯ur, though suitable in the marriage context of the fr. (see OLD s.v. Caia), neither makes sense (is there an expression Caia familias?) nor fits the metre (it adds unnecessary syllables to the senarius). µn lecto adverso: the lavishly decorated marriage-bed (lectus genialis) was located symbolically in the atrium and was named after its position opposite the entrance door of the house (TLL ..–; OLD s.v. lectus ); see Prop. .. seu tamen adversum mutarit ianua lectum (and Camps ad loc.); Ascon. Milon. Deinde omni vi ianua expugnata et imagines maiorum deiecerunt et lectulum
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adversum uxoris eius Corneliae, cuius castitas pro exemplo habita est, fregerunt, itemque telas quae ex vetere more in atrio texebantur diruerunt; and S. Treggiari, Roman Marriage (Oxford ) , , . Mosellanus did not know the meaning of lectus adversus and interpreted the fr. of L. as follows: ‘dupliciter accipi potest, primo ut intelligas matremfamilias adulteram, quae in lecto adverso, id est adversi adulteri cubet. Deinde sensus valebit quoque, si intelligis matremfamilias in lecto adverso, quae aegrotet.’ According to Scaliger, as cited in Thysius’ and Oiselius’ edn of Gellius, the mater familias is lying on the lectus adversus because she is pregnant, but the child she carries is illegitimate (‘Uxor tua foeta de more in adverso lecto sedet, adstantibus improbissimis servulis, neque suspicaris de stupro’). In order to support this view Scaliger emends servos to servis, verbis nefariis to vernulis nefariis, and takes utitur out of the fr. of L. and into the following clause as the verb governing the subject M. Varro (..), who is the next author cited by Gellius in this section. The fr. which results from these emendations does not make sense, and I prefer to retain utitur in this passage and accept Bothe’s metrically necessary transposition of nefariis verbis. The people living in this house are well off (this is a grand house with an atrium), and the impression we get is of a house-mistress dealing with household matters from the public area of the courtyard, which is sanctified by the presence of her marriage-bed. The solemnity established with the formula mater familias reaches its climax here and will be duly destroyed in the following line. servos sextantis: on the spelling -vos see Lindsay Language . Whereas the noun sextans (for its formation see LHS , ; Lindsay Language ; NW ) occurs frequently to denote ‘one sixth of any unit’ (OLD s.v.), the form sextantis ‘one sixth of an as’ as a genitive of value qualifying a worthless person is found only in L. and in Cicero’s De orat. . (dated to ), not surprisingly in the context of Cicero’s discussion of puns: ut tuus amicus, Crasse, Granius, ‘non esse sextantis’. The joke is attributed to Crassus’ friend Granius, but given Cicero’s
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knowledge of and attraction to the word-plays of the mime-stage (De orat. .), it may well be that the performance of L.’s Compitalia came before (but not long before) the composition of De oratore. Similar expressions are used by the freedmen in Petr. Sat. . (aedilem trium cauniarum), . (nemo dupondii evadit), and . (assem habeas, assem valeas); see Smith ad loc. and cf. the passages containing the phrase unius assis cited in OLD s.v. as b. The construction involving a substantive indicating a person + a genitive of value (especially sextantis) is Greek: Nicophon . oÉk xiov triwb»lou; Paroem. Gr. II Leutsch tettrwn ½bolän xiov (cf. Cels. .. ut idem in sextante denarii habeam quod Graeci habent in eo, quem obolon appellant). nefariis: frequently found in oratory and historiography in association with scelus, facinus, libido, res, and homo, this adjective qualifies the substantive verba only here (cf. Suet. Prata fr. nefarius in verbis intellegitur, nefandus in opere; the enjambment in the fr. of L. makes the combination of nefarium and verbum even more surprising), and seems too strong to be used in a farcical play (it does not occur in the extant scripts of the other comic playwrights). But it effectively destroys the image of purity suggested in the previous line by the phrases mater familias and lecto adverso, and intensifies the worthlessness of the slave (cf. the alliteration and assonance in servos sextantis), who is said to use these ‘atrocious’ words. The speaker of this fr. in a comically exaggerated fashion portrays the conduct of the household-slave as a serious event, equal to parricide, treason, and murder. This fr. survives because it contains the word prolubium (‘inclination, desire’, OLD s.v.; TLL ..–), which ought not to be confused either with proluvies (‘an overflow’, ‘a discharge’, OLD s.v.; TLL ..–.) or with proluvium (which means the same as proluvies; TLL ..–). The confusion in the recording of these words in the MSS of, among others,
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Nonius and Terence is discussed superbly by M. Carilli Studi Noniani () –. She concludes that the spelling proluvium originated from a false variant reading of prolubium but became an independent word belonging to a different declension from proluvies though being essentially synonymous with it (proluvium = proluvies = profusio, effusio). The etymology of prolubium is uncertain. WH and EM do not have a separate entry for it, but relate proluvium and proluvies to lavo (see relevant entries). LHS group it along with adagium, ingenium, praemetium, pr¯opudium, and supercilium, and suggest that it was formed on the pattern of compound abstract nouns in -ium ultimately derived from verbs via a personal substantive (e.g. refugere → ∗ refugus → refugium). This would mean that ∗ pr¯o-lubere → ∗ prolubus → prolubium. TLL ..– comments on its derivation: ‘nomen actionis a pro(incertae significationis) et lub-/lib- “diligere” compositum, non necessario a verbo ∗ pro-lubeo sim. derivandum’. Nonius’ definition of this term is now lost because it was replaced, through haplography, by the passage which Nonius cited first (trag. inc. = Klotz prolubium [proluvium codd.] est petere [Scaliger: patere codd.] amicitiam et fidem) to exemplify the meaning of this word (for this reason Lipsius inserted and Mercerus : see apparatus criticus). Apart from Nonius’ passage and the fr. of L., prolubium also occurs in Accius Androm. = Klotz muliebre ingenium, prolubium, occasio [proluvium codd.]; Caecil. Stat. Hypobolimaeus Rastraria quod prolubium, quae voluptas, quae te lactat largitas?; Ter. (imitating Caecilius) Ad. (Micio is asking Demea the reason for his sudden change of behaviour) quod prolubium? [proluvium var. l.] quae istaec subitast largitas?; Donat. ad loc.: prolubium [proluvium codd.] Latine, quod Graeci proqum©an, id est promptus animus ad largiendum; Naevius Colax ); Varro LL IV fr. ; Gell. ..; .. sed maius mihi in ista victoria prolubium est, cum te non in causa tantum, sed in argumento quoque isto vinco (see TLL ..–.); .. feros et inmanes navitas [scil. the crew of Arion’s ship] prolubium tamen audiendi [scil. Arionem] subit (see R. Marache, Mots nouveaux et mots archa¨ıques chez Fronton et Aulu-Gelle (Paris ) ); Apul. Met. . (Lucius the ass
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is talking about his appetite for lust) nam et vino pulcherrimo . . . et ungento flagrantissimo prolubium libidinis suscitaram (see Zimmerman ad loc.); and CGL .. The above list shows that prolubium was a popular word amongst the comic playwrights and that it was sometimes associated with (reproachable) feminine behaviour. L.’s fr. corroborates this impression. Metre: iambic septenarii (scan line D aBCD ABˆD; line aBcD aaBccD ABcD aBˆD). See .n. meretricis. quo: I take this to mean ‘to what a state!’ (OLD s.v. quo b), and to accompany the infinitive progredi ‘to proceed (to a given point or stage) in one’s actions’ (OLD s.v. a). – a matronali | pudore ‘away from matronly decency’. These words suggest that the speaker of the fr. is a married woman, who may or may not be the spouse referred to in .. ‘Where materfamilias denotes a respectable married woman in relation to husband or household status, matrona denotes the married woman in a less private context. She was recognisable by her dress, the long robe worn out of doors, called the stola’ (S. Treggiari, The Roman marriage (Oxford ) , and passim; TLL .–.). A matrona was regarded as the opposite of a meretrix in character and morals both on- and off-stage: Pl. Cas. – (Cleustrata matrona speaking) non matronarum officiumst, sed meretricium, | viris alienis, mi vir, subblandirier; Cist. – (the lena speaking) matronae magi’ conducibilest istuc, mea Selenium, | unum amare et cum eo aetatem exigere quoi nuptast semel. | verum enim meretrix fortunati est oppidi simillima: | non potest suam rem optinere sola sine multis viris; Most. – (Scapha ancilla talking to Philematium meretrix) tu ecastor erras quae quidem illum exspectes unum atque illi | morem praecipue sic geras atque alios asperneris. | matronae, non meretricium est unum inservire amantem; Ter. Eun. bonas matronas facere, meretrices malas; Cic. Fin. . quid enim necesse est, tamquam meretricem in matronarum coetum, sic voluptatem in virtutum concilium adducere?; Hor. Epist. ..– ut matrona meretrici dispar erit atque | discolor. The denominative adjective matron¯alis is first attested here (for its formation
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see LHS ). In terms of the moral qualities a married woman should possess, matronalis is joined with the substantives decus, gravitas, dignitas, modestia, honestas, pudicitia, and verecundia (TLL .–). The combination matronalis pudor appears again in Ps.-Quint. Decl. Min. . and Decl. Mai. .; cf. also Mart. ..– quis Floralia vestit et stolatum | permittit meretricibus pudorem? and Howell ad loc. The concept of pudor, applicable to both men and women, is very difficult to render into English with just one word, because translations such as ‘modesty’ or ‘decency’ do not demonstrate that the person who possesses pudor both shows restraint and is aware of the social boundaries between what are commonly thought of as decent and as indecent behaviour (OLD s.v. ). prolubium: . meretricis: Ribbeck and Lindsay wanted this fr. to consist of trochaic septenarii, and they arranged the lines as follows: quo quidem | me a matronali pudore prolubium meretricis | progredi coegit. This arrangement creates problems because the second line is one element short at the end; for this reason Lindsay emended meretricis to meretricie, whereas Ribbeck emended it to meretricium. The MS reading meretricis may have been a gloss for the adverb meretricie, which is attested in the fabula palliata (Pl. Mil. , used as the opposite of digne) and perhaps in the fabula togata (Atta Aquae Caldae quam meretricie em [Ribbeck: meretrice e vel meretricae e vel meretricae vel metrice codd.] lupantur nostro ornatu per vias; TLL .–). Ribbeck’s (not Bothe’s, as Bonaria claims) meretricium (on its formation see LHS ) is frequently found in Plautine comedy (Bacch. ; Cist. ; Men. ; Poen. , ; Truc. ; cf. TLL .–), and has the advantage of creating a neat chiastic arrangement of adjectives and nouns with alliteration and assonance (me matronali pudore prolubium meretricium; matronalis pudor = prolubium meretricium). TLL . and . is sceptical about Lindsay’s meretricie and prefers Ribbeck’s meretricium; so does OLD. My objection is
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that the arrangement of the words according to both Ribbeck and Lindsay results in an unaccented word-end approached not by BcD (the desirable cretic) but by BccD (pr¯ol˘ubµ¯um). The extant fr. could be arranged without any emendations so as to produce two iambic septenarii (the second of them complete; see above for detailed scansion). The speaker of this line would be a married woman (matronali pudore), and she would say: ‘a courtesan’s whim forced me to march forth away from my matronly decency’. Most meretrices in Roman comedy were portrayed as cunning, greedy, mercenary, unfaithful, and unreliable (Duckworth Comedy –), so what the woman of this fr. implies is that, in order to achieve her goal (whatever that was), she used means associated with and appropriate to a meretrix, not a matrona. But this does not necessarily mean that she went so far as to commit adultery; she may have used guile to deceive someone, which a decent matrona would not have done. This fr. appears in Nonius’ section on substantives attested to have more than one gender (‘De indiscretis generibus’): it contains the form latrinum, found only in Lucilius ( M = W) and in L. as a neuter noun (Carilli Note n. speculates that ‘forse il genere neutro di latrinum e` dovuto proprio all’influsso del sinonimo balneum’, but the point is that they are not synonyms; see below). The forms latrina and latrinum occur already in Plautus (Curc. – ut ego tua magnufica verba neque istas tuas magnas minas | non pluris facio quam ancillam meam quae latrinam lavat), in Lucilius ( M = W hic tu apte credis quemquam latrina petisse? with Marx ad loc.: ‘carpebat convivarum sordidorum hoc versu imbalnitiem’; M = W qui in latrina languet) and in the MSS of Nonius citing a fr. attributed to Pomponius’ Heres Petitor ( = Frassinetti; but the line does not scan and editors have emended latrinam to lavatrinam). The original meaning of latrina seems to have been ‘a place to wash oneself and perhaps to wash one’s clothes’, ‘a lavatory’ (Varro LL . domi suae
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quisque ubi lavatur balneum dixerunt et, quod non erant duo, balnea dicere non consuerunt, cum hoc antiqui non balneum, sed lavatrinam appellare consuessent; CGL . latrina loutrÛn; Gloss.L IV Ps.-Plac. L latrinis: locis quibus lavari solebant sordida), and all the passages I have cited so far (with the possible exception of Lucil. M = W) seem to have this meaning. But the scatological humour in L.’s fr. (n. gustes) seems to me to indicate that, in addition to changing the gender of latrina, L. has also modified its meaning: the word has now acquired the sense of ‘toilet’ or secessus (TLL ..– rightly thinks that L.’s fr. should be classified in the section on lavatrina = ‘locus, ubi ventrem exonerare licet’; cf. CGL .; .; .). The word latrina in this sense is not used again until the s AD (Colum. RR .. sed in ea parte quae tetris latrinae sterquiliniique et a balinei libera est odoribus); later authors employ it much more frequently (TLL ..–), but I have not found any instance, after L.’s time, in which latrina or lavatrina is used = balneum ‘a room for bathing’. In the words which follow the citation of L.’s fr. Nonius feels the need to explain this novelty, and I believe that TLL ..– is unjustly wondering whether, because these words present textual problems, they form part of yet another fr. cited by Nonius. I adopt Carilli’s emendation, ventris fimi, on the basis of CGL . fimus stercus quod a ventre [Carilli: benire cod.] purgatur, rather than Lindsay’s proposal to read ventris fine, where fine or fini = usque + genitive of space (see E. Woelfflin Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () –). Metre: trochaic septenarius (scan bbcD ABcdd A/BCD aaBcD). sequere in: M¨uller Prosodie suggests reading sequere in and adduces many examples of hiatus in trochaic septenarii. But I follow Bothe and I agree with Carilli in inserting me after sequere because sequere me is frequently found at the beginning of a line in comedy (Pl. Capt. ; Merc. ; Per. ; Poen. ; Ter. Hec. ; Caec. Stat. ). latrinum: and .
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gustes ‘to have some knowledge or experience of’ (OLD s.v. ; TLL ..–); cf. Pl. Most. gustare ego eius sermonem volo; Cic. Pis. non gustarat istam tuam philosophiam; Tusc. disp. . ‘nondum gustaverat’ inquiunt ‘vitae suavitatem’; Lucr. . qui numquam vero vitae gustavit amorem; TLL ..–. Although gusto appears here to be used metaphorically, it seems to me that, since the primary meaning of gustare is to experience the taste of food and drink through the mouth (TLL ..), an invitation to someone to go to a latrinum and get a ‘taste’ of the Cynic doctrine means that the latrinum was a place where people were relieving, not bathing, themselves: the speaker is clearly inviting the addressee to follow him or her to the loo to witness nature at its best. But what does the production of excrement have to do with the Cynics? ex Cynica: on adjectives of Greek origin in -icus in L. see . The contrast between the low subject-matter of sequere in latrinum and the lofty tone generated by the coined adjective Cynicus, which denoted a connection with a specific philosophical sect, and the technical flavour of the Greek term haeresis, deliberately reserved for the end of the line, makes this an excellent par prosdok©an type of joke, which defies all expectations created by the first part of the line. One of the features for which the ‘dog-like’ philosophy of Diogenes was renowned amongst L.’s contemporaries was its principle of leading a way of life which, in its most extreme form, did not care for the commodities of a luxurious or even a comfortable living but preferred the bare simplicity of nature (not to be confused with the simplicity of the mos maiorum or the ‘good old days’ in which the ancestors of the Romans were leading allegedly pure and innocent lives; on Cynicism in Rome see Rawson Life , , and –; and the excellent entry on Cynics by J. L. Moles in OCD with up-to-date bibliography). The few belongings of a Cynic philosopher are comically set up as a model for the equipment of an impoverished parasite in Pl. Persa – (cynicum esse egentem
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oportet parasitum probe: | ampullam, strigilem, scaphium, soccos, pallium, | marsuppium habeat, inibi paullum praesidi | qui familiarem suam vitam oblectet modo; cf. Stich. and Fraenkel EP n. ), while Quintus Tubero’s choice of goat-skins (instead of rugs), wooden Punic stools (instead of couches), and cheap Samian crockery (instead of expensive plates) on the occasion of the funeral banquet in honour of Publius Africanus is said to have been more appropriate to the death of the Cynic Diogenes than to the death of divinus homo Africanus (Cic. Mur. ). This list of amusing remarks at the expense of the Cynics could go on, but the point I am making is that Cynicism with its extreme position on material possessions and human ethics was making itself an easy target for supporters of other philosophical schools and for comic playwrights such as L., in whose plays there is also evidence for parody of Pythagoreans and Stoics (; (a).–; ). But none of these frs. should be taken as evidence that L. supported one philosophical school and opposed another. In this fr. therefore the speaker interprets the Cynic principle e natura vivere (see Cic. Fin. .) in its most extreme sense: could there be a better way of understanding the doctrine of the Cynics and of living in accordance with nature than the experience of the most primitive function of the human body? haeresi: L. is fond of choosing the right substantive to accompany adjectives with a philosophical connection (n. dogma). The word a¯resiv (= ‘the followers of a system of philosophical principles’ or ‘the system of philosophical principles itself’ (LSJ s.v. B.II.)) goes back to the second century BC (Polyb. ..), and is mentioned for the first time in extant Latin literature in the Menippean Satires of Varro in conjunction with the doctrines of Zeno ( C`ebe Zenon novam haeresim) and Menippus ( C`ebe Menippe haeresis). Nonius (. M = . L, . M = . L, and . M = . L) cites three frs. attributed to Varro’s perª a¬rsewn. Cicero uses the term in his philosophical works, in connection with Cato (Parad. Stoic.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
Cato autem, perfectus mea sententia Stoicus, . . . in ea est haeresi quae nullum sequitur florem orationis), and in two letters (Ad fam. .. (twice) ex qua a¬rsei [scil. Stoicorum] ‘vi hominibus armatis’ deiectus sis . . . in ista ipsa a¬rsei [scil. Epicureorum] metuo ne plus nervorum sit quam ego putarim; Ad Att. .. itaque ioca tua plena facetiarum de haeresi Vestorina). TLL ..– divides into two groups the instances in which haeresis occurs referring to philosophy: the former contains examples of haeresis in which the ‘notio doctrinae’ is predominant, whereas the latter has examples of haeresis in which the ‘notio sectae’ is prevalent. I am far from convinced that the distinction they draw is as clear-cut as they make it out to be, and I do not see why L.’s fr. is placed under the former group. NW – list Latin substantives of Greek origin with an accusative in -im and an ablative in -i (haeresi is listed on p. ). COP H INUS (a) Gellius ..– [FOXPNQZ]: Laberius in mimis quos scriptitavit oppido quam verba finxit praelicenter. Nam . . . et, quod in mimo ponit, quem Cophinum inscripsit [codd. Nonii . M = . L: scripsit codd. Gellii], ‘manuatus [codd.: maustus codd. Nonii . M = . L] est’ pro ‘furatus est’ . . . (b) Nonius . M = . L [FHLVEd(=ACXDMO)]: ‘Mendicimonium’ [FHLVE: Medimonium d] et ‘moechimonium’ [Bentinus ex codd. Gellii ..–: moccimonium FHLVEAXDMO: moncimonium C: moecimonium Onions] Laberius in libro [FHLVEd: mimo Quicherat] quem Cophinum [Iunius ex codd. Gellii ..–: gropium L : cropium FHL VEACX DMO: propium X : Cecropium Laetus: Crupium
COPHINUS
ed. : †Cropium Onions] inscripsit. In eo verba haec inveniet [V: inveniat H : inveniret FLEd: invenerit H ] qui doctrinae studium putaverit adhibendum. In eo quoque libro [Iunius: in eo libro quoque FHLVEd] ‘manuatus’ [Bentinus ex codd. Gellii ..–: maustus FHLVEd: manuatus Bonaria dubit. in notis], quod est furatus, invenire [add. Carilli: inveniet ed. princ.: invenire L. Mueller]. (c) Nonius . M = . L [FHLPVEd(=ACXDMO)T]: ‘Adulterionem’ pro ‘adulterio’ [codd. Gellii ..– et P: adultero FHLVEdT]. Laberius Cophino [Iuniusmg ex codd. Gellii ..–: coprino H ACDMOT: coprimo X: quoprino H LP VE: quod primo P : quiprino F: Caprino Mercerus : Quoprino Gerlach]. Quem si quis legere voluerit, ibi inveniet, et fidem nostram sua diligentia adiuvabit. Nonius . M = . L [HLPVEACX]: Lenis [Iunius: lineas HLPEACX: ineas V: lenas Aldina: lines Heraeus], vasi genus. Afranius Fratriis: ‘labella, lenis’ [HLPVEACX: labella, lines Lindsay]. Laberius in [om. ACX] Cophino [Iunius: cofino LPVEAX: confino HC]: cum provincias dispoliavit, columnas monolithas, [labella] lenis cum codd.: quoniam Bothe in notis dispoliavit codd.: despoliavit Bothe: dispoliatur Wase: dispoliavit < . . . > L. Mueller monolithas Aldina: monolitas HLPVE: molitas ACX: monolithas† L. Mueller labella codd.: secl. L. Mueller lenis codd.: lenas Aldina: lenias Ribbeck : e balineis Ribbeck : lines Lindsay: secl. L. Mueller: lenis Bonaria : lenis Bonaria dubit. in notis
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
T H E BA S K E T (a) Gellius ..–: L., in the mimes which he was always writing, coined words with excessive freedom. For . . . in the mime which he entitled The basket he uses ‘he palmed it’ instead of ‘he stole it’ . . .
(b) Nonius . M = . L: Mendicimonium (‘beggary’) and moechimonium (‘adultery’): L. uses these words in the script entitled The basket. If anyone thinks it is necessary to conduct research into this, he will find these words there. He can also find, in that script, the word ‘palmed’, which means ‘stole’.
(c) Nonius . M = . L: L. uses the word adulterio for ‘adultery’ (adulterium) in The basket. If anyone cares to read this, he will find that word there, and will confirm our reliability with his diligence.
Nonius . M = . L: Lenis (‘trough’), a kind of container. Afranius, in The sisters-in-law, has: ‘bowls, troughs’. L., in The basket: when he plundered the provinces, the monolithic pillars, [the bowls] the troughs . . .
COPHINUS
C O M M E N TA RY Both Gellius (..) and Nonius (. M = . L; . M = . L; . M = . L) quote from this mime, which they attribute to L.; but, although the title of the mime, according to the MSS of Gellius, is Cophinus, the text of Nonius . M = . L and . M = . L is so heavily corrupt that the title is unintelligible (cropius, gropius, propius, coprinus). Iunius emended these meaningless readings to Cophinus, thus suggesting that Nonius was copying Gellius .. when citing the Laberian words mendicimonium, moechimonium, manuatus, and adulterionem. However, Iunius did not observe that Gellius attributed only one of these four words to L.’s Cophinus, namely manuatus (.. nam et ‘mendicimonium’ dicit et ‘moechimonium’ et ‘adulterionem’ ‘adulteritatemque’ pro ‘adulterio’ . . . et, quod in mimo ponit, quem Cophinum inscripsit, ‘manuatus est’ pro ‘furatus est’). Therefore, Nonius, who may have been carelessly copying Gellius’ text and probably had no access to a volume of L.’s mimes, attributed erroneously to L.’s Cophinus the words adulterio, mendicimonium and moechimonium, all three of which should properly be regarded as frs. of an unspecified mime or mimes composed by L. (see M. Hertz Jhrb. f. klass. Phil. () ; Carilli Note ). The title Cophinus is formed on the Greek word k»jinov (EM s.v.; CGL .), which indicates ‘a basket’ (LSJ s.v.), and has passed through Latin (L. seems to be the first extant Roman author to have used this word) into the Romance languages (ML no. ). K»jinov occurs already in Aristoph. Av. – as a receptacle for feathers (tv rr©couv | kaª toÆv koj©nouv pantav mp©plh pterän), but the difference between a k»jinov and an rricov (LSJ s.v. ‘wicker-basket’) is not clear; see Dunbar ad loc.: ‘Translate the “hampers and baskets”, but ancient commentators clearly did not know how these differed.’ For Isidore (.. ‘De vasis repositoriis’) a cophinus is a receptacle made of little twigs and associated in agriculture with cleansing dung and transporting soil (cophinus est vas ex virgulis, aptum mundare stercora et terram portare; cf. Colum. .. stercoratam
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
terram inditam cophinis offerat, and TLL .–). But was this the use of a cophinus in L.’s as well as in Isidore’s time? If it was, the plot of this play, like other Laberian mimes featuring undignified professions, may have involved a person with the low task of transporting manure. Although we do not know of a Greek play entitled K»jinov, it may not be coincidental that some Plautine comedies are named after receptacles (Aulularia, Cistellaria, Vidularia) which contain treasure or trinkets; the latter are essential for the recognition of a long-lost daughter and for her happy reunion with her parents. If the title of this play was The Basket, and if such a prop appeared on stage during the performance, L. would surely have wished his audience to focus their attention on this object, just as Plautus, by naming one of his comedies Rudens, singled out as the highlight of his play the scene involving a rope (rudens), a small box with trinkets, and a tug-of-war between two slaves (–). Could it then be that the wicker-basket in L.’s mime was a receptacle for something much more important than excrement and soil? Ziegler () speculates that the plot of L.’s Cophinus resembled that of Turpilius’ Canephorus (–), in which there is a mention of hiding a will (Nonius .– M = . L). Juvenal associates a cophinus with Jews and food (see . with Mayor’s and Duff’s comm. ad loc.; .–; Sidon. Ep. .; Matthew .; TLL .–), and Schwartz (Anecdotes ) believed that the province referred to in . is Syria; but he does not notice that L. wrote provincias, not provinciam. (a) This fr. survives as one of the examples Gellius uses to demonstrate L.’s excessive freedom in coining words. Gellius’ disapproval of L.’s use of the Latin language is clear (oppido quam . . . praelicenter ..); see –, and Holford-Strevens Gellius ; Garcea and Lomanto –. Metre: uncertain.
COPHINUS
manuatus est: found only here, according to TLL .–, but in fact the participial adjective manuatus also occurs in Martianus Capella IV (De arte dialectica) § = p. Willis, meaning ‘endowed with hands’, just as ungulatum is formed by Mart. Cap. IV § to denote something ‘endowed with nails’ (sed manus specialiter alicuius hominis manus est, et ut mutua conversione respondeat, alicuius manuati manus, ut possimus ita convertere, quia et manuatum aliquid manu manuatum est; I am grateful to Dr I. Ramelli for this reference). L. has constructed the deponent verb manuor manuari manuatus sum (= ‘to steal’) from the noun manus (see EM s.v. manus) on the analogy of the deponent verb furor furari furatus sum (= ‘to steal’; NW ) and the denominative verbs tumultuor and arcuor (see P. Flobert, Recherches sur les verbes d´eponents latins (Lille ) and X. Mignot, Les verbes d´enominatifs latins (Paris ) ). F. Della Corte would like the pretentious Mamurra to be the subject of this verb (), and compares L.’s neologism with Cat. .– Porci et Socration, duae sinistrae | Pisonis (on thieving as the work of the left hand see Fordyce on Cat. .), but the parallelism is not exact. Nonius’ MSS at . M = . L omit the est after manuatus and read maustus, but the correct reading is surely manuatus both because a thief’s success depends on how skilful and swift he is with his hands, and because L. used elsewhere the noun manus to coin the substantive manuarius = ‘thief’ (). Bonaria believes that manuatus est may originally have formed part of , governing the accusatives labella, lenis (‘s/he stole the bowls, the troughs’). This is possible, although it is far from certain that labella belongs to , that manuatus est followed the accusative lenis in ., or that manuatus est could also govern the accusatives columnas monolithas in .. (b) and (c) Since the Laberian words cited by Nonius in these frs. have been wrongly attributed to Cophinus (Cophinus), I discuss the
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
formation and meaning of adulterio, mendicimonium, and moechimonium under . Nonius’ mistake indicates that at least some, if not all, of his citations of L. have been copied not directly from the scripts of L. but from anthologies of the mimographer’s output. The fact that he invites his reader twice to look at the actual liber of L. to confirm that his (Nonius’) citations are accurate (. M = . L quem si quis legere voluerit, ibi inveniet, et fidem nostram sua diligentia adiuvabit; . M = . L in eo verba haec inveniet, qui doctrinae studium putaverit adhibendum) is a smoke-screen covering his dependence on Gellius, who does not mention either the title or the actual lines containing these words (see Lindsay’s edn of Nonius vol. I, p. : ‘necnon ex grammaticis vel lexicographis aliquot, inter quos erat Aulus Gellius, a quibus sumpsit citationes et supra dictorum scriptorum et aliorum, ut Caecilii, Laberii, Titinii’; and p. n. : ‘nam coram filio aut discipulo quis fatetur se nescire?’). But Nonius’ exhortation to his reader to consult the text of L. suggests that libri containing at least some of L.’s mimes were accessible and circulating during Nonius’ time. This fr. survives as part of the section of Nonius’ treatise entitled ‘De genere vasorum vel poculorum’. Nonius’ entry at this point is a type of vessel (vasi genus) probably spelled lenis (for the confusion in the spelling of this word see .n. lenis). One would expect, therefore, that L.’s fr., which, according to the MSS, includes the diminutive labella ‘bowls’, ought also to contain some form of the noun lenis. This is important in view of L. M¨uller’s suggestion to delete both labella and lenis from L.’s fr. (.n. [labella] lenis). The lines in question read like an extract from a list of objects that were plundered during a military campaign, and the reference to ‘monolithic pillars’ (columnas monolithas) induced F. Della Corte (Maia () –) to argue that the subject of the verbs manuatus est and dispoliavit was
COPHINUS
Caesar’s pretentious and extravagant officer of engineers (praefectus fabrum) Mamurra, who belonged to the equestrian class, was a frequent target of Catullus’ invective (, , , ; see Fordyce on Cat. ; Wiseman Catullus , , ), and scandalised Cicero with his wealth (Ad Att. ..). Nepos, cited by the Elder Pliny (.), reports that Mamurra was the first man in Rome to cover whole walls in his house with marble, and that he was also the first to have solid marble columns in his whole house (namque adicit idem Nepos primum totis aedibus nullam nisi e marmore columnam [scil. Mamurram] habuisse et omnes solidas e Carystio aut Luniensi). The ostentatious display of luxury exemplified through Mamurra’s preference for solid columns was deemed sufficient evidence by Della Corte that L.’s Cophinus contained an indirect attack on Caesar. The same view is held by W. C. McDermott (Maia () –), who summarises the meaning of the fr. of L. as follows: ‘Mamurra stole (manuatus est) from the provincials of the East, as did so many Roman equites, by an exercise of Roman arrogance in buying at ridiculously low prices objects of art (vases: labella and lenis) and monolithic columns from the quarries at Carystus on the southern tip of Euboea’ (p. ). The implications of this identification for L.’s mime are less clearly outlined; Della Corte and McDermott do not attempt to situate the allusion (assuming it is correct) in the play’s plot. Did it form part of an expository prologue in which the speaker narrated past events which have a bearing on the lives of the people involved in the play? Is Mamurra a character in this mime? Does the fr. contain an allusion to a fictional character whose unlawful accumulation of wealth is compared to that of Mamurra in Hispania and Gallia? These are questions that have not been considered by Della Corte and McDermott, and since they cannot be answered with any certainty, it is hazardous to claim that this is yet another anti-Caesarian comment by the mimographer L., in which he characterises Mamurra as a thief, a plunderer of provinces, and a decadent upstart with a fondness for monolithic pillars.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
Metre: Carilli (Note and ) scanned the fr. as two incomplete iambic septenarii (x – x cum provincias x – x dispoliavit | columnas monolithas labella lenis), and explained the lacunose state of the text by arguing that originally this fr. included a longer list of stolen goods, and that Nonius cited only the words which made it easier for him to exemplify the entry of his treatise, lenis. But if we took the view that the transmitted text was lacunose, and that labella should be deleted (for this view see below), we could also scan the fr. as three senarii: cum provincias | dispoliavit, columnas monolithas | [labella] lenis . Lindsay’s scansion of this fr. as a couplet of bacchiac tetrameters puzzled W. Kroll (Laberius ), while Bonaria unconvincingly scanned the fr. as two iambic lines, the former of which is an octonarius and the latter a septenarius. I take the view that labella should be deleted and I scan the fr. as two trochaic septenarii (the first of them complete): scan line BCD aBCdd ABcD AbbcD; line BC . dispoliavit: on dis-/despolio with inanimate objects see TLL ..–. I follow Ribbeck and Bonaria in printing dispoliavit (Bothe and Lindsay print despoliavit), because all the MSS read dispoliavit at this point. The noun provincia is governed by dispoliare only here, but it is found with spoliare in Cic. Verr. . (provinciam spoliaret) and .. (ne provincia spoliaretur). Occasionally (Afran. Crimen , Prisc. GL .. H) dispolio is used as a deponent, hence Wase’s emendation dispoliatur. monolithas: a rare, three-termination adjective formed from the Greek two-termination adjective mon»liqov, attested already in Hdt. .. (stgh); it was also applied to ½bel©skoi (Diod. Sic. ..) and k©onev (Str. ..; see LSJ s.v.). L. seems to be the first extant author to use it in Latin; after L. it is attested again in the historian (?) L. Ampelius (.), whose work is dated probably to the second century AD. The Greek origin of this adjective and of the substantive lenis (see below)
COPHINUS
gives an appropriately foreign flavour to the loot stolen from the provinces. [labella] lenis: these words occur in exactly the same form and order in a passage of Afranius (Fratriae ) cited by Nonius immediately before the citation of L.’s fr. (. M = . L). Ribbeck , however, emends lenis to balineis in the passages of both Afranius and L., and L. Mueller deleted both labella and lenis from L.’s fr. because he thought they somehow intruded from Afranius’ line into L.’s fr. But the noun lenis must have occurred in some form in L.’s fr., otherwise Nonius would not have cited L. at all in his entry on lenis. Carilli (Note –) draws attention to the fact that the word lenis (spelled lenes or lines) appears twice in the Digest (... silvam, . . . in qua labra et lenes [tenes codd.] . . . positas haberet; .. lenes et labra . . . aedium sunt; see W. Heraeus, Kleine Schriften (Heidelberg ) ) in conjunction with the noun labrum (‘a bowl’, OLD s.v. ), from which the diminutive labellum stems (see A. Sparti Studi Noniani () ), and argues that the nouns labrum and lenis should be seen as a pair forming a stereotypical phrase cited either by Afranius or by L. in Nonius’ entry. My reservation with this view is that, if either (or, in fact, both) of these playwrights adopted the formula, it is odd that they changed part of it (labra → labella). I am inclined to think that only labella should be deleted in L.’s fr. as an intrusive gloss carelessly copied by Nonius’ source or by Nonius himself from Afranius’ Fratriae . lenis: the spelling of the feminine third declension noun l¯enis (TLL ..– ‘genus vasis quod in hortis colendis adhibebatur’; OLD s.v. ?linis ‘a vessel for liquids, perh. a trough’) is uncertain and depends heavily on scholarly emendations. In addition to the passages of Afranius and L. cited above, it apparently occurs also in Varro LL . hac lance . . . hac leni, but this reading (reported in TLL) is Heraeus’ emendation for the MSS’ levi, and is not recorded by OLD (the Loeb edition of Varro
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
prints Groth’s emendation clavi). It is not surprising, therefore, that Ribbeck and Lindsay wanted to emend the spelling lenis in L.’s fr. (see apparatus criticus). The noun is spelled lines in the margin of P a in Digest .., lineas in the majority of the MSS of Nonius (E. Fraenkel Hermes () – believed that the reading lineas was a corruption of the form lines), and linis in CGL .. WH and EM derive it from the feminine Greek substantive lhn»v (EM mis-spells it lnov), which applies to ‘anything shaped like a tub’ (LSJ s.v.), while TLL .. and LHS relate it to the substantive ¡ lhn©v, -©dov = ¡ lhn»v ‘trough’. In either case, I take lenis in L.’s fr. to be the accusative plural of this noun, which, along with the preceding accusative columnas, was probably the object of a verb (such as affero) that was not transmitted by Nonius’ source or Nonius himself or Nonius’ scribes. However, I take lenis in Nonius’ entry as nominative singular, because the explanation Nonius gives of the meaning of this word (vasi genus) is also in the singular; this view squares with Nonius’ practice elsewhere in the same book of his work (. M = . L Obba poculi genus; . M = . L Armillum, urceoli genus vinarii). CR ETENSIS Charisius . K = . B [Nnn C]: Simiam auctores dixerunt etiam in masculino, ut Afranius in Temerario . . . Laberius tamen in Cretensi [nn C pc : cretens. N extrita ultima littera: ceteris Cac ] ait: pharmacopoles simium deamare coepit pharmacopoles Buecheler: pharmacopolis ed. princ.: farmacopoles Nnn C simium Nnnpc C: simiam nac deamare coepit Barwick: te amare coepit Nnn Cac : tunc amare coepit C pc : deamare occipit Putschius
CRETEN S I S
THE CRETAN Charisius . K = . B: Some authors, such as Afranius in The reckless man, have also used the word ‘ape’ (simiam) as a masculine . . . However, L., in The Cretan, has: . . . the apothecary began to fall passionately in love with that ape (simium) . . .
C O M M E N TA RY The ending -ensi found in the later MSS of Charisius . K = . B suggests that the title of this mime, which Charisius attributes to L., is a denominative adjective of origin indicating a man or a woman from the island of Crete (LHS ). The earliest MS of Charisius at this point has the reading Cretens, which is very similar to that of the later MSS, and does not give me any reason either to doubt that the title of L.’s mime was Cretensis or to follow Bothe in reading Creusi = Krousi, the plural of Krwn; what would be the plot of a mime entitled Creontes? Other adjectives pertaining to Crete are Cresius, Cretaeus, Creticus, and the feminine form Cressa (see OLD s.v.), all of which seem to be in use by at least the second half of the first century BC; the adjective Cretensis is attested as a substantive adjective in the masculine plural (‘the Cretans’) already in Ennius Euhemerus – W (venisse cum magna Cretensium multitudine), but the title of L.’s mime is one of only three instances I have found of Cretensis used in the singular to signify ‘a Cretan (wo)man’; cf. Livy .. velox Cretensis; Perioch. traditum educandum Cretensi cuidam esse. Was ‘The Cretan’ of L.’s mime a person associated in Roman historical discourse with Crete, or was he a fictional character who displayed features which some Romans attributed generally to all Cretans? In view of the fact that Plautus in his Poenulus exploits the prejudices of the Romans towards Hannibal and
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
the Carthaginians (see M. Leigh, Comedy and the Rise of Rome (Oxford ) –), it seems to me more likely that L., who is also credited with the authorship of mimes entitled Tusca and Galli, would have exploited Roman beliefs about the behaviour and character of Cretans to construct a theatrical stereotype which would amuse his audience. What could this stereotype be like? Nepos describes how Hannibal outwitted the greedy Gortynians in Crete and retained his large fortune by means of a clever trick (vidit autem vir omnium callidissimus magno se fore periculo, nisi quid providisset, propter avaritiam Cretensium, Hann. .). Cicero makes disparaging remarks about the untrustworthiness of the Cretan Cydas, who was appointed by Antony as juryman (Phil. . Cydam Cretensem, portentum insulae, hominem audacissimum et perditissimum; cf. . Cretensis iudex isque nequissimus); his abuse may have little to do with Cretans in general and Cydas’ reliability in particular, and it aimed at establishing Antony as a devious political leader, but it would still have been based on Roman popular views on what Cretans were supposed to be like. The stereotype of the cunning Cretan is also employed by Ovid, who twice evokes the belief that Cretans are renowned liars (Ars .– nota cano; non hoc, centum quae sustinet urbes, | quamvis sit mendax, Creta negare potest; Am. .. Cretes erunt testes; nec fingunt omnia Cretes). Regardless of the truthfulness of these allegations, the point is that L. already had at his disposal some popular preconceptions about Cretans which he may have adopted as his working model, or which he may have modified in a way that is now irretrievable to us. In this section of his work, Charisius is talking about the morphology of the noun simia, and the important word in the passage in which L.’s fr. is cited is the adverb etiam (governing in masculino). The substantive simia ‘(fe)male monkey’, which may have
CRETEN S I S
originated from a personal adjective in -ius (simius; LHS –) and is perhaps related to the Greek adjective sim»v ‘flat-nosed’ (EM s.v. simia and simus; WH s.v.: ‘von s´mus (aus gr. sim»v . . . ) auf dem Umwege eines gr. Sim©av’; OLD s.v. has ‘prob. SIMVS’), is commonly used in the feminine gender (LHS ; EM s.v. simia ‘une fois s´mius cr´ee´ , s´mia a tendu a` devenir uniquement f´eminin’), and belongs to the group of Latin words for animals known as epicoena (like araneus and aranea, coluber and colubra, luscinius and luscinia; see NW –). Charisius points out that some authors also use the form simia in the masculine gender (etiam in masculino; see LHS , ), and he cites Afran. Temer. – (quis hic est simia, | qui me hodie ludificatus est?) to support this statement; cf. Beda De orthogr. in GL .. K simiam auctores dixerunt etiam in masculino genere, and [Serg.] Explan. in Artem Donati I = GL .. K alii dicunt hic et haec simia, alii hic simius. In addition to the passage of Afranius, Charisius cites L., who uses the accusative form simium. Although Charisius does not explicitly say that simium is the accusative of the masculine simius, as opposed to the accusative of the neuter ∗ simium, it seems more likely that L. used the masculine form in -ius rather than the neuter form in -ium, because at the beginning of his entry Charisius talks about the masculine gender (. K = . B simiam auctores dixerunt etiam in masculino). What Charisius does not observe is whether the form simius in L.’s passage refers to a male monkey (cf. Phaedr. . lupus et vulpis iudice simio; .. pendere ad lanium quidam vidit simium) or to a man (cf. Vatinius’ letter to Cicero Ad fam. .a. Simius, non semissis homo, contra me arma tulit; Hor. S. ..– neque simius iste | nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum; Sen. Contr. .. Cesti simius est); cf. .n. simium, and Cicero’s letter to Marius, Ad fam. .. hic simiolus (applied to Clodius). On the employment of names of animals in satirical and political invective see Richlin Priapus , , , , –. Metre: senarii (scan line /BccD ABcD; line aaBcD A/). Buecheler changed the order of the words
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
(deamare coepit pharmacopoles simium) and scanned the fr. as a complete senarius. pharmacopoles: the Greek word jarmakopÛlhv goes back to Aristoph. Nub. (see Dover ad loc.), and it usually denotes a ‘druggist, apothecary’ (LSJ), whose remedies and prescriptions do not find favour among practising doctors. In Latin it is first attested in a speech of Cato (Orat. = Gell. ..), who portrays an apothecary as the type of person one would listen to but not trust (itaque auditis, non auscultatis, tamquam pharmacopolam. nam eius verba audiuntur; verum se nemo committit si aeger est). In his speech On behalf of Cluentius () Cicero calls one L. Clodius, who, Cicero says, was hired by Oppianicus’ father to poison Oppianicus’ grandmother, pharmacopola circumforaneus ‘a travelling dealer in jrmaka’. The death of the singer Tigellius saddened buffoons, mime-actresses, beggars, whole associations of flute-girls, and pharmacopolae (Hor. S. ..–), because in life he was generous to them. Clearly Horace does not wish to portray the mourners in Tigellius’ funeral procession as reputable. A collegium of sellers of potions (coll[egio] farmac[opolarum] publicor[um]) is referred to in an inscription in Brixia (CIL .). But the line between a conscientious medicus and an ignorant pharmacopola is most clearly drawn by the medical writer Scribonius Largus, Compos. : Medicamentorum malorum non nocet nominum aut figurarum notitia, sed ponderis scientia. hanc porro medicus nec quaerere nec nosse debet, nisi diis hominibusque merito vult invisus esse et contra ius fasque professionis egredi. illas autem, figuras dico et nomina, necesse est ei scire, ut et ipse devitet, ne per ignorantiam aliquam sumat et aliis idem praecipere possit: hoc enim proprium est medicinae, et illud execratissimi pharmacopolae contrario oppositi virtuti eius, ut et in ceteris artibus animadvertitur: nulla enim est, quae non habeat adversantem sibi sub specie similitudinis professionem.
This term, then, implies that at least some of the characters in the plot of Cretensis were people of low social background, and it is conceivable that the fr. refers to a love-potion which the
CRETEN S I S
quack-doctor drank so that he began to fall passionately in love (.n. deamare) with another person who is described as ‘monkey’ (see below). The exotic sound of the Greek loan-word pharmacopoles, combined with the insulting tone of simia and the assonance of m (pharmacopoles simium deamare), would have added to the overall effect of surprise. simium: the use of the feminine substantive simia to mock people whose behaviour resembles somehow that of monkeys features in comedy (Pl. Most. vide ut fastidit simia, applied to the slave Phaniscus; Afran. Temer. – cited above), but it also occurs effectively in letters (Caelius’ letter to Cicero Ad fam. .. malui conlegae eius, homini alienissimo mihi et propter amicitiam tuam non aequissimo, me obligare quam illius simiae (applied to Appius) vultum subire). For simius as a term of abuse see the passages cited in . The relative frequency of this insult in literary genres such as comedy, satire, oratory, and epistolography suggests that the ‘monkey’ with whom the ‘apothecary’ fell in love in L.’s fr. was not an animal but a person, and that the speaker of this fr. does not share the feelings of the ‘apothecary’ towards the ‘monkey’. deamare coepit: I take this phrase to mean that in the speaker’s narrative, which referred to past events, the ‘apothecary’ had just begun to acquire strong feelings for the ‘monkey’; this usage of coepi + infinitive to indicate ‘die ingressive Aktion des Perf.’ belongs to the Umgangssprache and occurs as early as Plautus (e.g. Cas. exordiri coepit; see LHS ; KS –; and G. Reichenkron, ‘Die Umschreibung mit occipere, incipere und coepisse als analytische Ausdrucksweise eines ingressiven Aorists’, in Syntactica und Stilistica: Festschrift f¨ur Ernst Gamillscheg (T¨ubingen ) –). deamare: the force of the prefix de- is to increase the intensity of the feelings felt by the subject of the compound infinitive (Isid. . Dehiscens, valde hiscens. Hic enim ‘de’ augentis est; Nonius . M = . L Deamare, vehementius amare; Serv. on Aen. .;
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
Paul.-Fest. M = L; CGL .; . deamare nimis amare), but it also suggests that the passion in question is not good for the person who feels it. Deamare is often attested in comedy, and is directed towards both persons (Pl. Epid. ; Poen. ; Ter. HT (jokingly, applied to a man); Afran. Vopisc. ) and objects (Pl. Poen. ; Truc. ). After L. it is not found again until Apul. De Plat. ., .. CYTH ER EA v el CYTH ER IA Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE) d(=ACXDMO)]: Ebriulare [Mercerus : ebriulare F : ebrulare F HLPVEd: ebriolare Carrion], ebrium facere, et ebriacus [FH LPVEd: ebriatus H ], ebrius. Laberius in Cytherea [hoc vel Cytheria scripsi: there FHLP VE: thore P : Cithera Iunius: Chare Maittaire: Hetaera Carrion: Here Martea Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit.: Cythera Carilli]: ebriulati mentem hilaria arripuit verba Laberius . . . arripuit om. d ebriulati Aldina: ebruilati g: ebriolati Carrion: ebrulati L. Mueller mentem g: mente Scaliger hilaria F : hilariam F HLPVE: hilarem Iunius: hilari Scaliger arripuit g: arripiunt ed. princ.: arripiant Iuniusmg : arripuit Scaliger: accipiunt Carrion
Nonius . M = . L [FHLVEd(=ACXDMO)]: Portisculus [FHLVE: postisculus d] proprie est hortator [F HLVEDM: ortator F : hostator ACXO] remigum, idem [FHLVECDO: id est AXM] qui eam [Iuniusmg : eandem FHL VEd: eadem L ] perticam tenet quae portisculus [F HLVEAXDO: pertisculus F : porticulus C: posticulus M] dicitur, qua [H VACXD: quae L: que FH E: qui MO] [add. Quicherat] cursum [Quicherat: excursum FHLVEd: excussum Gronovius] et [om. E] exhortamenta moderatur . . . . [. M = . L] Laberius
CYTHEREA
Cytherea [hoc vel Cytheria scripsi: cythera FHLVE: cithera ed. princ.: cithara ed. : Hetaera Carrion]: nec palmarum pulsus nec portisculi verba Laberius . . . portisculi om. d palmarum FHLVE: palmularum Carrion portisculi FHL VE: porticuli L
THE C YTH ER EAN Nonius . M = . L: Ebriulare, ‘to make someone drunk’; ebriacus, ‘a drunkard’. L., in The Cytherean, has: . . . gaiety took hold of the drunkard’s mind
Nonius . M = . L: Portisculus, strictly speaking, is the encourager of the oarsmen, the same person who holds the rod which is called portisculus, with which he regulates both the speed of the oarsmen and his words of encouragement to them . . . . [. M = . L] L., in The Cytherean, has: . . . neither the beat of the oar-blades nor the beat of the rod
COMMENTARY The title of this mime, which Nonius attributes to L., presents problems. All the MSS in Nonius . M = . L () read cythera, while the majority of the MSS in Nonius . M = . L () read there. It is not unreasonable to conclude, given that there is some similarity between these words, that cythera and there were variant readings of the title of the same mime, which may or may not have been entitled Cythera (the Aegean
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
island, sacred to Venus; OLD s.v.). But in the second half of the sixteenth century L. Carrion (Emendationum et observationum liber primus (Paris ) , ) claimed to have found the reading Hetaera in some otherwise unidentified ‘sanctioribus libris’ (he wrote this in regard to fr. ) and/or in an ‘optimus et vetustissimus codex Parisiensis’, which does not survive today (he wrote this in regard to fr. ). Carrion’s reading, paralleled in the titles of a fabula palliata by Turpilius (–) and of an Atellane comedy by Novius () but not in the title of any extant Greek comedy, was almost unanimously adopted by Nonius’ editors and the majority of L.’s editors; Lindsay, however, printed †there and Cythera, and Ribbeck Hetaera?. But the title Hetaera is not attested even in Nonius’ codices recentiores (see Carilli Note n. ), and I wonder whether the ‘sanctiores libri’ to which Carrion refers were a figment of his imagination in support of his own emendation of the MS readings cythera and there. On the other hand, it seems more likely that Carrion did actually read in some MS (presumably of Nonius) the word Hetaera, which could be defended as the lectio difficilior, but misinterpreted a gloss on the title of the mime as the title itself. If we were to emend the unintelligible reading there into Cyth¯era, we would have a Latin transliteration of either the Greek word for the island t KÅqhra or the Greek form Kuqrh, which was a surname of the goddess Aphrodite in Greek love-poetry (LSJ s.v.). Carilli’s view (Note ) that Cythera is most likely a reference to a courtesan is attractive because of the multitude of plays in Greek New Comedy and in Roman comedy whose title refers to the name of a courtesan (see Carilli Note – n. ), but is not supported by strong evidence (Cythera as a courtesan’s name appears only in the late antique comedy Querolus). It is more plausible, I believe, to read in both passages of Nonius the substantive Cyther¯ea (Hor. Carm. ..; the spelling Cythereia (= Cytherea) appears slightly later than Cytherea (in Ovid)), and to interpret it as a Latin transliteration of the Greek Kuqreia, referring either to Venus (OLD s.v. Cytherea; LSJ s.v. Kuqreia), or to a prostitute bearing a name associated with Venus. It is equally possible that the title of this
CYTHEREA
mime was Cytherµa = Kuqhr©a ‘A woman from the island of Cythera’. The association of this island with Venus would indicate to the audience of the mime the disreputable profession or the low morals of the woman in question, and would account for the palaeographically difficult Hetaera. A title such as ‘The woman from Cythera’ would square not only with similar titles such as Menander’s Sam©a and Terence’s Andria, but also with L.’s practice of entitling his mimes with meaningful adjectives denoting origin (Alexandrea, Cretensis, Galli, Tusca). It is also tempting to associate, as Iunius did, the title of this mime with the famous actress Cytheris (on whom see n. on pp. –), and with the nickname Cytherius, which Cicero (Ad Att. ..) gave to Antony in because of his scandalous affair with this mima. Although amongst the surviving titles of mimes attributed to L. we find the location of Lacus Avernus, I find it less likely that the title Cyther¯a (assuming that this is the correct MS reading) refers to the island of Cythera, because this was written usually in the plural (e.g. Verg. Aen. .); in other words, if L.’s title referred to the Aegean island, the MSS of Nonius ought to read Laberius in Cytheris; but the earliest reference to Cythera in the singular is found in Pliny the Elder NH ., .. This fr. survives because it contains a form related to the verb ‘intoxicate’ (ebrium facere), which is written as ebrulare in all the MSS of Nonius with the exception of F , whose readings were highly regarded by Lindsay; it has ebruilare. Mercerus’ emendation ebriulare was both justified and close to the MS readings, but was challenged by Carrion, who saw the connection between the form ebriulare and ebriolus, the diminutive of ebrius, and proposed ebriolare. Carrion’s emendation was adopted by TLL .., which prints ebriolor ebriolatus sum ebriolari only in the passive voice. The etymology of verbs in -˘ul¯are (-µl¯are) has been discussed in detail by J. Samuelsson in Glotta () –:
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
one of the morphological groups out of which verbs in -˘ul¯are are formed consists of diminutives in -ulus -ula -ulum. Samuelsson suggests that, since anulus produces the form anulatus, and crustulum the form crustulatus, it is odd that ebriolus should give the form ebriulatus; ‘man sollte jedoch ebriolare erwarten’ (). In order to support his view Samuelsson cites the forms commalliolo (< cum + malleolus), debrac(c)hiolo (< de + brac(c)hiolum), and fasciolo (< fasciola). The objections of Carrion and Samuelsson are certainly sensible, but perhaps do not do justice to L.’s witty but unorthodox morphology, according to which the stem of the infinitive ebriulare, which Carilli (Hapax ) compares to the infinitive gratulare (→ gratulatus), may be seen as a combination of the base of both the diminutive ebriolus and the plain adjective ebrius (note that Nonius’ gloss on ebriulare is not ebriolum facere, but ebrium facere). L. is equally unconventional in the formation of another word associated with inebriation, namely ebriacus (). Metre: uncertain. The fr. could be scanned as an incomplete trochaic septenarius (so Ribbeck : BccD ABcdd Abbc) or an incomplete iambic septenarius. Carilli (Note ) and I favour the latter option and scan the fr. as follows: BccD ABcdd AbbˆD. For the seventh foot of the iambic septenarius as a dactyl see Lindsay Verse ; the tribrach created by the resolved long of the sixth foot and the elision (hµl˘arµ[a] arripuit: cdd AbbˆD) draws attention to the unusual word hilaria. ebriulati: J. Healey, The Discovery of a New World (?) : One, in his song commended his mistresse, another, the goodnesse of the wine, a third related all the passages betwixt him and his wife at home, so that it made mee remember that old saying of Laberius: Ebriulati mentem hilarem accipiunt ‘When wines effect the braine doth binde, | Then mirth doth caper in the minde’.
On drunkenness in L. see n. ebriacus. I take ebriulati to be the genitive singular of the perfect passive participle (here used substantively, ‘drunkard’) of the verb ebriulare (Nonius’ entry); TLL
CYTHEREA
.. prints ebriolari (); OLD does not have an entry for ebriolare or ebriulare or ebriolari but lists ebriulatus as an adjective (‘intoxicated, tipsy’), formed apparently from ebriolus. The early editors of Nonius, who thought that the word was in the nominative plural, did not understand the word hilaria and had to emend the verb arripuit in order to adjust the syntax of the fr. to their views. hilaria: found only here in extant Latin literature. Bothe was the first to argue that the reading in F should be preferred to the reading hilariam of all the other MSS, because it could be understood as a hapax which rendered into Latin the Greek word ¬lar©a = ¬lar»thv ‘cheerfulness, gaiety’ (LSJ s.v.). But there do not seem to be any instances of ¬lar©a before Herodotus Medicus’ time (first century AD), so it is possible that L. was not influenced by any Greek text containing the noun ¬lar©a, which would have been formed from ¬lar»v on the analogy of soj©a and ponhr©a. L. must have derived hilaria from the adjective hilaris or hilarus (EM do not include hilaria in their list of derivatives of hilarus; hilaris), and formed it on the analogy of similar abstract nouns in -ia such as astutia (< astutus) and ignavia (< ignavus): see LHS . This, then, would be the subject of the verb arripuit, which would appear not to have a subject if we printed hilariam and took it as an accusative agreeing with mentem. The word hilaria, a comic or colloquial variation on the archaic hilaritudo and the classical hilaritas, would suit L.’s predilection for changing the endings of commonly used words (cf. e.g. (a) adulterio and adulteritas = adulterium; . deliritas = deliratio; licentiatus = licentia, lubidinitas = lubido), and would fit in a comic fr. dealing with drunkenness (for hilaritas in the context of drunkenness at a banquet see Varro Men. C`ebe; Pliny NH .; Petr. Sat. .; Pomp. Mela .; TLL ..–). mentem . . . arripuit: TLL .– lists other passages in which arripio is governed by an abstract noun (for instance, dolor, rabies, and furor), but in all these cases the action of the verb
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
is directed towards a human being or a bodily part, whereas in L.’s passage the object of arripere cannot really be described as a ‘res corporealis’. This fr. is preserved because Nonius wished to comment on the double meaning of the noun portisculus (< ?portus: EM s.v.; cf. TLL ..–), which was used to refer either to the instrument by which the man who encouraged the oarsmen to row faster regulated the speed, or to this man himself (TLL ..–): cf. Paul.-Fest. M = L portisculus est, ut scribit Aelius Stilo, qui in portu modum dat classi; id [?idem Lindsay Glos. Lat. (Paris ) ] autem est malleus, cuius meminit Cato in dissuasione de rege Attalo et vectigalibus Asiae: ‘C. Licinio praetore remiges scribti cives Romani[s] sub portisculum, sub flagrum conscribti veniere passim’. Nonius (. M = . L) describes this instrument as a pertica ‘rod’ (OLD s.v.), but Festus, citing Cato orat. Malcovati (see above), says it was a hammer (malleus). Skutsch on Enn. Ann. argues forcefully on morphological (the formation of portisculus resembles that of acisculus, another kind of hammer) and on inscriptional (see CIL .) grounds that the original meaning of this word was ‘hammer’, and that at a later stage (certainly by Aelius Stilo’s time) the same word that was used to designate the instrument was also used to describe the instrument’s wielder. Metre: I scan the transmitted text as an incomplete trochaic septenarius: BCD A/BCD ABcD. Ribbeck prints Carrion’s conjecture palmularum for palmarum (see below), and scans the line as a complete senarius. nec . . . palmarum . . . portisculi: anaphora, alliteration of p, and assonance of l and m. Although Carrion’s emendation palmularum adds to the assonance, there is no need to adopt it in order to have a complete senarius; Nonius is not concerned with the preservation of metrically complete frs. The connecting particles nec . . . nec and the mention of the blades of the oars (palmarum) suggest that portisculus here refers to the instrument,
E P H E BU S
rather than to the person who moderates the oarsmen’s speed. For other instances of portisculus referring to the instrument see Cato orat. Malcovati (cited above); Pl. Asin. (ad loquendum atque ad tacendum tute habeas portisculum); Isid. Orig. .. (porticulus [sic] malleus in manu portatus, quo modo signum datur remigantibus); CGL . (portisculo malleo). Portisculus refers to the hortator remigum in Fronto p. .– van den Hout (vel, si videretur, aliquam navem conscenderes, ut aethere tranquillo in alto portisculorum et remigum visu audituque oblectares); and in CGL . and .. This person is also called pausarius in Sen. Ep. ., and keleustv in CGL . (celeusta is found in CIL .). Although the OLD cites Enn. Ann. – Vahlen (= – Skutsch) portisculus signum | quom dare coepisset as an instance of portisculus = ‘one who beats time to rowers’, Skutsch Ennius, ad loc. rightly points out that portisculus in Ennius’ passage is ambiguous. Palmae = ‘oarblades’ appears also in Cat. . and, possibly, Vitruv. .. (Rose’s emendation for the MSS’s parmis; TLL ..–). The diminutive palmula, which apparently has the same meaning as palma above, is attested also in Cat. ., ., and Verg. Aen. .; see TLL ..–, which accepts Carrion’s emendation (palmularum) in L.’s fr. EP H EBUS Macrobius Sat. .. Willis [NGPRHFAC]: Decenter et his epithetis Vergilius usus est: pro ‘sagitta’ ‘volatile ferrum’, et pro ‘Romanis’ ‘gentemque togatam’, quorum altero Sueius, altero Laberius usus erat . . . . ac Laberius in Ephebo [codd.: Epheso Camerarius]: licentium ac libidinem ut tollam petis togatae stirpis licentium NGP: licentiam RHFAC petis om. P lubidinem Bothe – versus sic ordinavit Ianus
libidinem codd.:
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
Macrobius Sat. .. Willis [NGPRHFAC]: Idem [scil. Laberius] infra: idcirco ope nostra dilatatum est dominium togatae gentis – versus sic ordinavit Ianus
ope nostra codd. praeter R: opera R
TH E EP HEBE Macrobius Sat. .. Willis: Virgil also aptly employed the following periphrases: ‘winged steel’ for ‘arrow’, and ‘the toga-clad nation’ for ‘the Romans’; Sueius used the former phrase, L. the latter . . . . and L., in The Ephebe, has: you are asking me to eliminate the wantonness and the debauchery of the toga-clad race . . .
Macrobius Sat. .. Willis: The same author [scil. L.] later in the same mime: therefore, with our aid the dominion of the toga-clad nation has been extended . . .
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which the MSS of Macrobius attribute to L., is a Latin transliteration of the word jhbov, which, by the fourth century BC (if not earlier), had acquired a technical sense, denoting youths between and years old who were
E P H E BU S
undergoing military training (see OCD s.v. eph¯eboi for recent bibliography). The portrayal of men of this age-group appears to have been popular in Middle and New Comedy, if the titles of several fragmentary plays attributed to playwrights of these periods are anything to go by: an ï Ejhbov was written by Philemon (–), an ï Ejhboi by Ephippus (–), a Sunjhbov by Philemon (), and a Sunjhboi by Apollodorus (), Euphron (), and Menander (). The military sense of the word was retained when the term was transferred into Latin through the Roman adaptations of Greek New Comedy, in which an ephebus was usually also the impulsive and sometimes penniless young man (adulescens amans), whose tricks and amorous affairs constituted the kernel of the play’s plot: e.g. Charinus in Pl. Merc. – (principio ephebis aetate exii | atque animus studio amotus puerilist meus, | amare valide coepi hic meretricem), the unnamed young man in Caecilius’ Synepheboi – = Cic. De nat. deor. .– (cf. Cic. Fin. ., De opt. gen. orat. ), Pamphilus in Ter. Andr. , Chaerea in Eun. ; cf. Hor. Epist. ..– aspice, Plautus | quo pacto partes tutetur amantis ephebi. The ephebus seems to have occurred also in native Italian drama (Pompon. Synephebi ) and in the title of a satire attributed to Varro (Sunjhbov –); cf. Lucil. M = W ephebum quendam quem pareutacton vocant. It is not possible to decide to what extent L.’s mime is indebted to one or more of the above Greek plays, but the lack of firm external evidence demonstrating that L.’s literary mimes were adaptations of Greek comedies suggests not direct influence from a single source but comic exploitation of a familiar stage-character. Moreover, the word ephebus appears already in non-dramatic works of the early first century BC in the sense of a youth who is the object of (usually male) sexual desire: see Varro Men. C`ebe hic ephebum mulieravit, hic ad moechada adulescentem | cubiculum pudoris primus polluit; Cic. Flacc. venio ad Lysaniam eiusdem civitatis, peculiarem tuum, Deciane, testem; quem tu cum ephebum Temni cognosses, quia tum te nudus delectarat, semper nudum esse voluisti; and cf. Petr. Sat. ., ., ., ., ., .; Mart. .. quod . . . suo Caesar permisit ephebo; TLL ..–. This was sometimes the case
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
also with the Greek term jhbov: K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London ) , . TLL ..– quotes instances in which the term ephebus refers to mythological youths, such as Ganymede, Bacchus, and Mars; although it would be possible to argue that there is a mythological background to the existing frs. of Ephebus (.n. idcirco ope nostra), all the instances of ephebus referring to mythological youths cited in TLL come from late antique authors, and it would be hazardous to give more weight to the hypothesis that this mime dealt with, say, Ganymede than to the view that it featured the amorous adventures of an ordinary youth. In spite of the uncertainty of the plot of this mime, it seems to me unjustified to emend the title Ephebus to Ephesus, as two early editors ( and ) of Macrobius have done. In this section of his work Macrobius (Sat. ..) talks about words which Virgil uses as attributes (epitheta). Macrobius divides these words into two groups: simplicia and conposita. His aim is to demonstrate that, although it is generally believed that such words are Virgil’s creations, Virgil has derived them from earlier authors (sed et haec a veteribus tracta monstrabo). So, at Sat. .. he approves of Virgil’s becoming use (decenter) of the expression volatile ferrum = sagitta (Aen. .; see Pease ad loc.), but also cites Cicero’s contemporary Sueius for the expression volatile telum (see Courtney Poets and –). Likewise, he commends Jupiter’s phrase gens togata = Romani (Aen. . with Servius and Pease ad loc.), but he also points out that the phrases gens togata and stirps togata occurred before Virgil in L.’s Ephebus. Macrobius’ words et haec a veteribus tracta monstrabo suggest that he is arguing for Virgil’s conscious and direct borrowing from earlier authors, but how likely is it that Virgil would have known L.’s mimes? Theatre seems to have been in Virgil’s mind when he composed the dramatic tale of Dido (see Virgil’s explicit
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comparison of Dido, in Aen. .–, to Orestes and Pentheus as characters on the tragic stage), and P. Hardie, ‘Virgil and tragedy’, in C. Martindale, ed., The Cambridge companion to Virgil (Cambridge ) –, has offered a comprehensive account of the presence of Greek and Roman tragedy and the tragic in the Aeneid. But some of Virgil’s bucolic poems/performances, published about –, can also be seen to echo drama either in its format (for example, the arrangement of the dialogue in the ‘amoebaean’ poems , , and ) or in its content (for instance, the bucolic farcical scene involving Chromis, Mnasyllos, Aegle, and Silenus in Ecl. .–, and the song of Alphesiboeus in Ecl. .–, whose family-tree goes back, via Theocritus’ second Idyll, to the mimographer Sophron’s plays): see C. Panayotakis, ‘Virgil on the popular stage’, in E. Hall and R. Wyles, eds., New directions in ancient pantomime (Oxford ) –. Given that only L. is said to have used the expression gens togata before Virgil, that L.’s mimes were known to some of Virgil’s contemporaries (Hor. S. ..), and that there is some evidence for the influence of theatre in parts of Virgil’s poetic output, it is reasonable to argue that Virgil may have taken the phrase ‘toga-clad nation’ directly from L. and included it in Jupiter’s memorable speech to Venus; it is also tempting to visualise a divinity delivering these lines, but this cannot be proved. Metre: senarii (scan line aBcD aBcD ABcD; line aBCD A/). licentium: as far as I am aware, none of the editors of Macrobius or L. has accepted the reading licentium, which appears in the oldest MS of Macrobius; TLL .., when citing this fr., prints licentiam. But the form licentium as lectio difficilior should not be dismissed so easily. Nonius says that L. uses the feminine licentia in the masculine and cites the words eo licentiatu () to prove it. Admittedly, the forms licentiatus and licentius or licentium are not the same, but it would not have been uncharacteristic of L. to introduce yet another morphological change to the noun
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
licentia (). The irregular form licentium (acc. sing. of the unattested forms licentius or licentium) would have been regarded as a scribal error, and would have been corrected by later copyists to the common form licentiam (note, also, that the next word, ac, may have contributed to the confusion between licentium and licentiam because it contains the vowel a). The fact that Macrobius does not comment on this form does not prove anything, because he was interested only in the phrases stirps togata and gens togata found in L.’s Ephebus; therefore, there was no reason or need for him to say anything about the words surrounding these phrases. ut tollam petis: the verb petis raises interesting questions. Is this an extract from a dialogue? Are these the words of a god or a goddess who, having been summoned by the addressee, has been asked to exercise his or her power to eliminate or cleanse the low morals of the Romans? Is the speaker talking in a formal and elevated style (.n. togatae stirpis), because he or she is a character usually appearing in elevated literary genres? On tollo + abstract nouns ‘to put an end to an attitude’ see OLD s.v. d. togatae stirpis: a solemn expression, not found elsewhere in extant Latin literature. In its literal meaning as an agricultural technical term (‘stem’) stirps was apparently used as a masculine noun (see OLD s.v. for a list of examples). However, there are also some instances of stirps as a masculine noun used metaphorically to denote ‘the ancestral race from which one springs’ (OLD s.v. ; Enn. Ann. Skutsch; Pacuv. and ). L. uses stirps in its metaphorical sense and as a feminine substantive; this use was not uncommon (cf. Cic. Leg. . orti stirpe antiquissima sumus; Skutsch on Enn. Ann. suggests that this happened ‘apparently under the influence of gens and origo’). But L. opts to use in low drama a word traditionally associated with high and serious literature (see the passages from tragedy, epic, oratory,
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and historiography listed in OLD s.v. stirps ); it appears only twice in comedy: Pl. Trin. (see OLD s.v. b) and Inc. Fab. Pall. . Coupling this word with the formal adjective togatus, L. gives this line a sombre tone, and creates a sharp contrast between ‘the toga-clad stock’ and the ‘wantonness’ (licentium ac libidinem) mentioned in the previous line. The position of these words in separate lines would have surprised the audience, who would not have expected the words ‘wanton behaviour’ to be associated with the high phrase stirps togata. For the context in which this fr. survives see . Metre: senarii (scan line ABccD A/BCD AbbcD; line aBCD A/). idcirco ope nostra: with whose help did the dominion of the toga-clad race expand? Are these the words of a divinity, who in the following lines would have introduced a causal or final clause explaining the reason (idcirco; see OLD s.v. b and d) for their action? dilatatum est dominium: an original expression. Dilato (‘I roll out’) was first used by Varro (LL .) in a culinary context (a globo farinae dilatato), and was very popular with Cicero, who uses it with both physical and non-physical things in the sense of ‘expand’ (OLD s.v. a, b, a, b, ). Although there are instances of abstract nouns such as gloria, animus, and imperium governed figuratively by a form of dilato (TLL ..–), this is the only instance in which the noun dominium is paired with the verb dilatare, and L. seems to be the first Roman verse-author to use dilato at all. The only other poetic works in which the verb occurs are Moret. (levat opus palmisque suum dilatat in orbem) and Ovid’s Met. . (ipsaque dilatant patulos convicia rictus). Dominium occurs already in the second century BC apparently in the sense of a
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‘banquet’ (Turpil. ; Lucil. – M = W), but after the poet Laevius, whose floruit Courtney puts about (see Poets ), it comes to mean the power of the dominus towards his slaves (fr. Courtney; see Courtney Poets –). It is in this sense that L. employs dominium, creating alliteration and homoeoteleuton with dilatatum. togatae gentis: although the word toga appears already in Plautus (Am. ) and Cato (Agr. .), the first extant example of the derivative adjective togatus as a substantive denoting a Roman citizen is in Cicero, who used the word togatus in contrast to the adjective Siculus (Verr. ..): for subsequent examples of togatus = ‘a person of Roman status’ see OLD s.v. a. The history of the phrase gens togata after its occurrence in Virgil’s splendid line Romanos, rerum dominos gentemque togatam (Aen. .) is impressive: Suet. (Aug. .) says that Augustus quoted Virgil’s line in an assembly when he saw a crowd of men in dark cloaks, and Martial (Ep. ..) incorporates it into a couplet which aimed at flattering Domitian. Gellius (..) uses gentemque omnem togatam in juxtaposition to ceteros omnes linguae Atticae principes, and Statius (Silv. ..) employs it in the plural (et gentes alis insemel togatas). For the possibility that L. was Virgil’s direct source for this phrase see . FULLO Gellius ..– [Fg(=OXPN)d(=QZ)]: Laberius in mimis quos scriptitavit oppido quam verba finxit praelicenter. Nam . . . (..) et item in Fullone furem ‘manuarium’ [scil. Laberius] appellat: manuari, (inquit) pudorem perdidisti,
multaque alia huiusce modi [Fd: huiusmodi g] novat.
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THE LAUNDER ER Gellius ..–: L., in the mimes which he was always writing, coined words with excessive freedom. For . . . (..) also in The Launderer, he calls a thief ‘a palmer’: . . . you palmer, (he writes) you’ve lost your decency
and he uses many other neologisms of that sort.
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Gellius attributes to L., indicates another important, yet low profession of Roman everyday life, the launderer or fuller, whose job it was to wash or scour cloth and linen. The mechanics of this trade have been discussed in detail in H. Bl¨umner, Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und K¨unste bei Griechen und R¨omern (Leipzig ) , , and DS ..–, where drawings based on paintings found on the walls of the largest Pompeian fuller’s shop are reproduced and give a clear idea of the tasks which fullones needed to perform at the various stages of cleaning a garment (on these see R. J. Forbes, Studies in Ancient Technology (Leiden ) ; J. Overbeck, Pompeji in seinen Geb¨auden, Alterth¨umern und Kunstwerken (Rome ) ). There are several inscriptions referring to individual fullers and a collegium or a sodalicium fullonum (TLL ..–), and Pliny the Elder (NH .) mentions that in the republic the censors C. Flaminius and L. Aemilius gave specific instructions on how garments ought to be washed; all this testifies to the significance of the fuller and his profession in Rome. But, like other principal Roman trades, a fuller’s job would not have been considered dignified, and Cicero would not have approved of it (cf. Off. .), although he and other members of the upper classes depended on fullers for the cleaning
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of their garments. A fullo is one of the many tradesmen who are portrayed as standing outside houses asking greedily for money (Pl. Aul. stat fullo, phrygio, aurufex, lanarius; petunt fullones, sarcinatores petunt; cf. Titin. ni nos texamus, nil siet, fullones, vobis quaesti), and his job does not gain in reputation with the passing of time: Firmicus Maternus (Math. ..), writing in the fourth century AD, includes the fullones amongst the artes aut sordidae aut squalidae. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the indecorous nature of his job, the fullo appears to have become a stock character on the comic stage long before L.’s time. In Middle Comedy Antiphanes wrote a KnajeÅv (), while there are five titles of Atellane comedies and one of a fabula togata related to this character (Pompon. Fullones, Decuma Fullonis; Novius, Fullones, Fullones Feriati, Fullonicum; Titin. Fullonia or Fullones; see T. Guardi Pan () – and C. Squintu, ed., Le Atellane di Pomponio (Cagliari ) ). Perhaps the most famous fictional fuller is the cuckold husband in the baker’s story of the adultery of the fuller’s wife in Apul. Met. .–: the baker and the fuller return unexpectedly to the fuller’s home, and the unfaithful spouse has to hide the adulterer in the bottom of a wicker cage (viminea cavea). But the smell of sulphur which was placed there to whiten the cloth makes the adulterer sneeze loudly and repeatedly, and the paramour is discovered by the fuller, who would have harmed both his wife and her unnamed lover had the baker not intervened to calm him down. The story is brief and amusing, and it is likely that Apuleius composed it, along with the other adultery tales of Book , under the influence of farcical adultery mimes: see B. L. Hijmans, Jr. et al., Apuleius: Metamorphoses IX (Groningen ) ; S. J. Harrison, ‘Literary texture in the adultery-tales of Apuleius, Metamorphoses Book ’, in R. R. Nauta, ed., Desultoria Scientia: Genre in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and related texts (Leuven ) –; R. May, Apuleius and drama: The ass on stage (Oxford ) . Whether the plot of L.’s Fullo was similar to the baker’s tale is impossible to ascertain. But the fact remains that for some of his mimes L. seems to have been interested in low professions (Belonistria, Centonarius,
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Colorator, Salinator, Staminariae) around which he devised a story. For the context in which this fr. survives see (a). Having mentioned a form of L.’s coined verb manuor = ‘I steal’ (on which see (a)n. manuatus est), Gellius cites a fr. which contains a form of the rare substantive adjective manuarius, which Gellius glosses with the noun fur (see Garcea and Lomanto ; for neologisms in mime see LHS ). Metre: uncertain. If the transmitted text (without the parenthetical inquit) were at the end of a line, it would form part of an iambic septenarius: scan bbCD aBCD aBˆD. Ribbeck and Bonaria scan the fr. as an incomplete trochaic septenarius: manuari, pudorem perdidisti . manuari: masculine adjectives in -arius belong to the sermo plebeius and may be used substantively to indicate a person who works professionally with his hands: e.g. aerarius, ampullarius, lapidarius, marmorarius (see Cooper Formation –; LHS ). Therefore, the morphology of the substantive manuarius is particularly effective, since it denotes a person who uses his hands (to steal) in order to earn a living. L. is the only extant author who uses the masculine form of the adjective manuarius as a substantive. The neuter form is used to designate ‘a manual’ in Act. lud. saec. Sept. Sev. . Calpurnius . . . ex manuario legit. As an adjective, manuarius -a -um qualifies the nouns mola and vas (Sueton. fr. p. . ad molas manuarias; Charis. .– B manuarium vas). Gellius .. talks of an aere conlecto quasi manuario, implying that the sum of money collected had been, as it were, won at a game which involved the use of hands, e.g. dice (see Garcea and Lomanto n. ). pudorem perdidisti: L. is playing with the opposite notions of ‘shame’ and ‘theft’ (the audience would not have
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associated pudor with professional thieves), and with the acoustic effect created by the alliteration of p and the assonance of d and r. Since there is no context, it is impossible to define the precise meaning of the complex concept pudor. Is the speaker telling the addressee (the manuarius) that the addressee has lost his self-respect as a thief? (see OLD s.v. pudor ) FULLO NICAE v el FULLONICA Nonius . M = . L [FHLVE]: Grues genere feminino . . . . [. M = . L] Masculino Laberius in Fullonicis [FHLVE: Filonico Iunius: Fullonibus Zell: Fullonica L. Mueller: Fullonia L. Mueller dubit. in notis: Fullone Bothe]: utrum tu hunc gruem Baliaricum an hominem putas esse? utrum tu hunc Scaliger: virum tu hunc FHLVE: ..verum tu hunc L. Mueller: utrum tu hunc L. Mueller dubit. in notis: virum tune hunc Quicherat: virumne hunc Bothe Baliaricum L : Balearicum FHL VE: Balearium Orelli an FHLVE: anne Bothe esse codd.: secl. Quicherat – virum | tu esse h. gr. Bal. anne hominem putas? Bothe : esse h. gr. Bal. an putas esse hominem? Bothe : tu gruem Bal. hunc esse anne hom. putas? L. Mueller: verum tu h. gr. Baliar. an esse hominem putas? Lindsay
THE LAUNDR IES Nonius . M = . L: Grues (‘cranes’), feminine . . . [. M = . L] It is masculine in L.’s The Laundries: . . . which do you think he is? A Balearic crane or a human being? . . .
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C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime attributed to L. has raised some concern among editors of Nonius (Quicherat) and of the Roman mimes (Bothe, Ribbeck, Bonaria). The MSS of Nonius unanimously give the reading fullonicis, but Bothe emended the text to fullone on the basis of the mime-title Fullo, which Gellius (..) attributes to L. But I fail to see why an emendation is needed, or why it should be assumed that L. wrote only one mime whose title was related to the fuller’s trade. It is possible that he composed two mimes with similar content along the lines of different Atellane comedies, whose titles indicate that the common element in their plot may have been various incidents from the life of launderers (Fullo). The word fullonicis would be the ablative plural of either the feminine substantive adjective fullonica (i.e. officina; see OLD s.v., to which add CGL .; TLL ..–) or of the neuter substantive fullonicum, attested probably in the title of an Atellane comedy by Titinius (the MSS have filonico) and in Ulpian (Dig. .. meritoria . . . quae volgo deversoria vel fullonica appellant); both fullonica and fullonicum indicate ‘a laundry’. The fact that L. elsewhere () uses this adjective as a feminine substantive does not mean that he necessarily entitled the mime in question Fullonicae; the colloquial character of the neuter fullonicum as attested by Ulpian (cited above) may have induced L. to prefer Fullonica (neuter plural) to Fullonicae (feminine plural) as the title of his mime. L.’s Laundries would then belong to the tradition of comic plays portraying fictional incidents associated with fullers. This fr. survives because Nonius wanted to point out that, unlike Virgil (Georg. .) and Lucilius ( M = W), L. uses the noun grus (‘a crane’) in the masculine gender (). Horace (S. ..) and Cassiodorus (Var. ..) may be added to Nonius’ list; see TLL ..– and cf. Serv. on Verg. Aen. .; Priscian . = GL .. H; NW . In his description of the
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triangular formation of cranes migrating to warmer climates, Cicero (De nat. deor. .) employs the word grus in the feminine gender (he refers to them with the pronouns eae and quae), but the leader of the flock is referred to as ipse dux. It is not clear why L. changed the gender of grus; was it because the character in the fr. was comparing a man to a crane, and thought it appropriate that the word for ‘crane’ should be a masculine noun? L. preferred simius to simia in another mime (.n. simium), but this is not an exact parallel to the use of grus here because there is no morphological change involved in the case of grus. Metre: like Ribbeck , I scan the fr. as two incomplete trochaic septenarii: scan line D ABcD abbcdd aBcD; line Bc. Meyer’s law (h¯unc gr˘u¯em, BcD) is not violated in the first line. In his apparatus criticus Ribbeck wonders whether utrum tu hunc might be scanned as an anapaest (˘utr˘um t(u) h¯unc) on the basis of the reading of MS P for Pl. Persa (utrum tu pro ancilla me habes an pro filia?; see Muller Prosodie ). However, Lindsay in the apparatus criticus of the OCT for Pl. Persa notes: ‘sed utr˘um tu vix ferendum’. utrum: jokes introduced by utrum normally contain one sensible and one absurd part, and the addressee of the joke is invited to choose between these two parts; for instance, in Pl. Rud. – the disrespectful slave Sceparnio asks the young Plesidippus: sed utrum tu masne an femina es, qui illum patrem | voces? (Sceparnio and everyone in the audience can clearly see that Plesidippus is not a woman); cf. also Rud. – (the old Daemones asking the pimp Labrax) utrum tu, leno, cum malo lubentius | quiescis an sic sine malo, si copiast? Likewise, in L.’s fr. it is clear that the person pointed at (hunc) is not a Balearic crane, so the addressee of this line (putas) cannot possibly say that he is looking at a bird from the Balearic Islands. gruem Baliaricum: on adjectives of Greek origin in -icus in L. see . Cranes in Greco-Roman life and art are discussed
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in D’Arcy W. Thompson, A Glossary of Greek Birds (Oxford ) –; J. M. C. Toynbee, Animals in Roman Life and Art (London ) –; and Dunbar on Arist. Av. . Jokes relying on the similarity of the appearance or behaviour of a character on stage to an animal or a bird are common in comedy (see, for example, MacDowell on Arist. Vesp. ; Fraenkel EP –; Fantham Imagery , , ; TLL ..–); the comic parasites Tithymallos and Philippides, strolling shoeless at dawn, were compared to a crane (Aristophon Puqagoristv , lines –). But what is the point of the comparison between a man, referred to here with the pronoun hunc, and a Balearic crane? Pliny the Elder, in his account of birds’ crests (NH .), mentions that the distinctive feature of a Balearic crane is a cirrus ‘a kind of tuft’ (OLD s.v.), and in his list of birds imported from the Balearic Islands for the dinner-table (NH .) he includes the vipio, a smaller species of crane (sic enim vocant minorem gruem). It is possible, therefore, that the speaker of this fr. is jokingly inviting his or her addressee (putas) to compare the hair or the head-gear or the small stature of a third person on stage (hunc) with the tuft on the head or with the small body of a grus Baliaricus. But how many people in the audience would have seen a Balearic crane or read a description of this bird? Is L. perhaps inviting his audience to compare only in general terms an odd-looking individual to an exotic bird? Surely the joke would have worked even for someone not fully acquainted with the exact features of a Balearic crane. Cranes are also said to produce a distinctive sound (Lucr. .–, Verg. Aen. .; TLL ..–; OLD s.v. gruo), and to have long necks and legs (Lucil. M = W longior hic quam grus, grue tota, cum volat olim), so it is reasonable to assume that the voice of the character compared to a Balearic crane may have been made to echo that of cranes, or that the actor would have a long neck or long legs which would have made the visual joke clear to the audience. In his edn of L. Orelli thought that the comparison was intended as a rebuke against a homo superbus et fastuosus.
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GALLI (a) Gellius ..– [VPRCv]: ‘Poposci’, ‘momordi’, ‘pupugi’, ‘cucurri’ probabiliter dici videtur [VP: videntur RC], atque ita nunc omnes ferme doctiores hisce [ς : huiusce VPRC: huiusce modi ed. princ.] verbis utuntur. Sed Q. Ennius in saturis ‘memorderit’ dixit per ‘e’ litteram, non ‘momorderit . . . Item Laberius in Gallis [VPR C: Galis R : Callis codd. Nonii . M = . L: caldis (scil. aquis) Bothe in notis]: de integro patrimonio meo memordi nummˆum centum milia
(b) Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: ‘Memordi’ [FHLP VEd: momordi P ], ‘peposci’ [FHL PVEd: posci L ], ‘pepugi’ [F HL PVEd: pugis L : pupugi F ], ‘spepondi’ [PV: pondi F : pondii L : spopondi F HL Ed] in veteribus lecta sunt . . . . [. M = . L] Laberius in Gallis [Bentinus ex VPR C Gellii ..–: Callis g: Caldis (scil. aquis) Bothe in notis]: de integro patrimonio meo memordi nummˆum centum milia verba Laberius . . . milia om. d meo g: mea Iunius: om. Buecheler verba sic ordinavit Bothe: meo centum milia nummum memordi codd. Gellii ..– et Nonii . M = L (sed P Nonii nummum om.)
THE EUNUCH PRIESTS (a) Gellius ..–: The forms poposci, momordi, pupugi, and cucurri seem to be the generally approved ones, and so almost all better-educated men nowadays use these forms. However, Quintus Ennius, in his
GALLI
Satires, wrote memorderit (with an e), not momorderit . . . Likewise, L., in The Eunuch Priests, has: . . . from my entire estate I nibbled away a hundred thousand sesterces
(b) Nonius . M = . L: The forms memordi, peposci, pepugi, and spepondi are found in early writers . . . . [. M = . L] L., in The Eunuch Priests, has: . . . from my entire estate I nibbled away a hundred thousand sesterces
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which both Gellius and Nonius attribute to L., appears to be the plural form of the word Gallus. But to what exactly L. referred with this word is uncertain. Quint. .. mentions the words Aiax and gallus as instances of ¾mwnum©a, a figure of speech according to which the same term indicates different things or persons: it is ambiguous whether Aiax refers to the son of Telamon or the son of O¨ıleus, and unclear whether ‘gallus’ avem an gentem an nomen an fortunam corporis significet. All four meanings (‘the cockerel’, ‘the Gaul’, ‘the priest of Cybele’, and ‘an emasculated man’) were current in L.’s time (see OLD s.v. Gallus , Gallus a, Gallus , and TLL ..–), but it is more likely that the title of this mime referred to Gauls or the priests of Cybele than to cockerels. The inhabitants of Gaul seem to have appeared as characters on the comic stage by the Hellenistic period in the phlyaces of the parodist Sopater of Paphos (Galtai = fr. Olivieri = CGF p. Kaibel) and in the New Comedy of Posidippus (Galthv –) and Apollodorus (Galtai ). An Atellane comedy entitled Galli Transalpini and attributed to Pomponius may have presented on stage an historical event involving the Senate and an embassy
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from Transalpine Gaul in (see P. Frassinetti, Atellanae Fabulae (Rome ) ). Caesar’s long-lasting campaigns (–), which resulted in the conquest of Gaul, would have made any subject related to the habits and life of Gauls topical for the comic stage not only during the campaigns but also long after the defeat and capture of Vercingetorix in , and the Roman perception of the inhabitants of Gaul as long-haired barbarians wearing thick cloaks and gold ornaments would have enabled playwrights such as L. to exploit these cultural stereotypes for the audience’s amusement (on the Roman view of Gauls see J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Romans and Aliens (London ) Index s.v. Gaul, especially –). Likewise, a comic theatrical portrayal of the eunuch priests of Cybele (I take Gallis to be the ablative plural of the masculine Gallus; for the rare feminine Galla see Fordyce on Cat. .) may have drawn upon the emasculated appearance of these oriental-looking persons with their long hair arranged in a rounded mass (Varr. Men. C`ebe), their drums (Varr. Men. C`ebe), and their religious cries and gold ornaments (Rhet. Her. .); see Scullard Festivals ; and TLL ..–.. On the portrayal of non-Romans in L. see also Cretensis and Tusca. (a) and (b) For the linguistic context in which this fr. survives in Gellius see Garcea and Lomanto , and . Nonius cites the same fr. in his section ‘De honestis et nove veterum dictis’, but he omits four passages quoted by Gellius (L. , Nigidius fr. Swoboda, Pl. Aul. fr. Lindsay; and Pl. incert. Lindsay), and alters the order in which the remaining passages appeared in Gellius. Metre: I follow Ribbeck in scanning the fr. as two senarii: scan line BcD aaBcD; line aBcD A/BCD ABcD. So do Ribbeck, , Buecheler, and Onions, but they change linedivision(s) and word-order: Ribbeck de integro patrimonio | meo memordi centum nummum milia; Ribbeck in the apparatus criticus
GALLI
prints de integro patrimonio | meo centum nummum milia memordi ; Buecheler de integro patrimonio | meo memordi centum milia nummum; and Onions de integro | patrimonio meo centum milia nummum | memordi. Marshall prints the fr. as cited in Ribbeck (de integro patrimonio meo centum milia | nummum memordi). Meyer’s law is not violated in the fourth foot of the first line (´nt˘egr¯o, BcD). patrimonio: on this juristic term see n. miserimonium. memordi: on mordeo (‘I take a bite out of’) governing edible objects see OLD s.v. a. But L. appears to be the first extant author to have used this verb = ‘I nibble away part of’ an abstract object (here, the inheritance). TLL .– includes this fr. in the list of passages which contain forms of mordeo metaphorically describing the action of ‘biting’ performed by people (e.g. Sen. Ep. . hoc tene, hoc morde; Petr. Sat. . homines non caperentur, nisi spei aliquid morderent), but none of the examples cited is an exact parallel to the use of mordeo here; see also .n. memordit. Are these the words of an adulescens amans who, after the death of the pater familias, has inherited the property but has been squandering it on women, banquets, and gifts? On the character of the spendthrift young man always in need of money see Duckworth Comedy –. nummum ˆ centum milia: the heavy assonance of m in this line (meo memordi nummˆum centum milia), the juxtaposition between the legal term patrimonium and the metaphorical (perhaps colloquial) use of mordeo, and the contrast of the enormous sum of money squandered by the speaker and the slow pace at which the squandering took place (‘I nibbled away’) make the imagery of the fr. vivid and suggest that the speaker’s profligacy has been a long-standing habit of his. On the frequent genitive plural form nummˆum + mille or milia see Quint. .. idem ‘centum milia nummum’ et ‘fidem deum’ ostendant duplices quoque soloecismos esse, quando et casum mutant et numerum; OLD s.v.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
nummus a; and the very long list of passages cited in NW –. GEMELLI Gellius ..–, ..– [A(..–; .. (mul)ta – .. oc(cupatas))bVPRCv]: In oratione Ciceronis quinta in Verrem, in [b: om. AVPRC] libro spectatae [AC: specte VPR] fidei Tironiana cura atque disciplina facto, scriptum fuit: [..] ‘ . . . sed quocumque venerint, hanc sibi rem praesidio sperant futurum’. [..] Videbatur compluribus in extremo verbo mendam [Beroaldus: menda VPRC: mendum Ascensius] esse. Debuisse enim scribi putabant non ‘futurum’ sed ‘futuram’, neque dubitabant quin liber emendandus [Beroaldus: emendatus VPRC] esset, ne, ut in Plauti comoedia moechus, sic enim mendae suae [v: menda est suae VPRC: mendam scite Baehrens] inludiabant, ita in Ciceronis oratione soloecismus esset ‘manifestarius’ [C: est et manifestarius VPR]. [..] Aderat forte ibi amicus noster, homo lectione multa exercitus, cui pleraque omnia veterum litterarum quaesita, meditata evigilataque erant. [..] Is libro inspecto ait nullum esse in eo verbo neque mendum neque vitium et [A: om. VPRC] Ciceronem probe ac vetuste locutum. [..] ‘Nam futurum’ inquit ‘non refertur ad rem, sicut legentibus temere et incuriose videtur, neque pro participio positum est, set verbum est indefinitum, quod Graeci appellant parmjaton, neque numeris neque generibus praeserviens, set liberum undique et inpromiscum, . . . ’ [..] ‘Plautus etiam in Casina, cum de puella loqueretur, occisurum dixit, non occisuram, . . . ’ [..] ‘Item Laberius in Gemellis non putavi (inquit) hoc eam facturum
Non ergo isti omnes, soloecismus quid esset, ignorarunt, sed . . . Plautus occisurum et Laberius facturum indefinito modo
GEMELLI
dixerunt, qui modus neque in numeros neque in personas [neque in tempora] [secl. Mosellanus] neque in genera distrahitur, sed omnia istaec una eademque declinatione complectitur . . . ’ eam VRC: eum P
TH E TWINS Gellius ..–, ..–: In a remarkably accurate copy of the fifth speech of Cicero Against Verres, which was carefully and methodically prepared by Tiro, there is the passage: ‘ . . . but wherever they go, they hope that this privilege will protect them (hanc sibi rem praesidio sperant futurum)’. Many have held that the final word was wrong, thinking that the correct form ought to have been not futurum, but futuram, and not doubting that the passage ought to be emended, in order that the solecism in Cicero’s text might not appear in flagrante, like the adulterer in Plautus’ comedy (for that is how they have mocked the error). By a stroke of luck a good friend of mine happened to be present; he was widely read and skilled in these matters, and had spent many a night carefully studying and constantly thinking about almost all the works of earlier authors. When he examined the passage, he said that there was no error or solecism in the form of the word, and that Cicero had used it correctly and in accordance with earlier practice. ‘For the word futurum’, he said, ‘should not be taken with the word rem, as it may seem to hasty and careless readers, nor does it function as a participle; it belongs to the infinitive mood, which in Greek is called parmjatov, and does not obey any rules about number or gender, but is free in every respect and bound by nothing; . . . Plautus also, in Casina, although he was talking about a girl, used the form occisurum, not occisuram;’ . . . ‘Likewise, L., in The Twins, has:
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
I didn’t believe that she would do (facturum) this . . .
And so it is not the case that all these authors were ignorant of what a solecism was, but . . . Plautus used occisurum and L. facturum in the infinitive mood, a mood which is not split up into numbers or persons [or tenses] or genders, but embraces all these things in one and the same form . . . ’
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Gellius attributes to L., is the diminutive form of geminus (see EM s.v. geminus: ‘le diminutif est plus tendre et plus expressif ’; LHS ). Apparently introduced by Catullus, who uses it to refer both to a twin (.; OLD s.v. ) and to a person who is not a twin but merely similar to another person (.; OLD s.v. b), this word was employed less frequently than geminus and seems to have been predominantly poetic (see the passages listed in TLL ..– and – ); in technical prose writings gemellus tends to be applied to objects or abstract nouns which form a pair (OLD s.v. and TLL ..–). Since the word in the title of L.’s mime is in the plural, it is very likely that it refers to a set of twins, not to a person whose cognomen is Gemellus. A comedy involving twins and presumably confusion caused by mistaken identity is hardly an original scenario, but the numerous occurrences of titles of plays indicating twin brothers or sisters suggest that the ‘twin’ theme was in demand. Plays entitled D©dumoi are attributed to the Hellenistic playwrights Antiphanes the younger (–), Anaxandrides (), Xenarchus (–), and Euphron (–), while Aristophon (D©dumai (vel -oi) £ PÅraunov –), Alexis (D©dumoi vel -ai –), Antiphanes the elder (AÉlhtrªv £ D©dumai) and Menander (D©dumai) appear to have composed plays which may have involved twin sisters (see Arnott Alexis ). The popularity of this topic is demonstrated by similar titles in the fabula togata (Titin. Gemina –) and the native Atellane comedy (Novius Gemini ; Pompon. Macci Gemini Priores –), and by the
GEMELLI
multiple sets of twins in the fabulae palliatae Trigemini and Quadrigemini, attributed to Plautus (fr. Lindsay) and Naevius (), respectively. Pairs of male and female twins have also caused amusement and confusion in Pl.’s Menaechmi and Bacchides, respectively; so, even if L.’s Gemelli is not an adaptation of one of the Greek comedies mentioned above (and there is no evidence for this hypothesis), L.’s decision to write a mimus entitled ‘Twins’ was probably based on the successful reception this subject-matter had in all the categories of comic drama (palliata, togata, Atellana). Whether L.’s mime involved mythological (e.g. Romulus and Remus: Ovid F. . expositos . . . gemellos; Castor and Pollux: Cat. . gemelle Castor et gemelle Castoris) or non-mythological twins is impossible to ascertain. This fr. survives because it contains the archaic future active infinitive facturum (the ending -urum is of uncertain derivation: LHS –; Lindsay Language ; Sommer Handbuch ); see Garcea and Lomanto and n. . The starting point for the discussion in this section of Gellius’ work is the apparently incorrect infinitive futurum which qualified a feminine subject (eam) and was allegedly found in ‘a remarkably accurate copy’ (libro spectatae fidei) of Cicero’s Verrines (..). An unnamed amicus noster, homo lectione multa exercitus (..), explains that futurum should not be emended to futuram but should be understood on the analogy of Greek future active infinitives (.. re±n, poisein, sesqai, et similia) which do not change number or case or gender according to the number, case, and gender of their subject. Gellius cites in support of this view C. Gracchus fr. Malcovati , Claud. Quadrig. fr. Peter and fr. Peter, Val. Antias fr. Peter, Pl. Cas. –, and this fr. of L.; HolfordStrevens (Gellius ; and Eikasmos () –) has shown the unreliability of ‘manuscripts of allegedly superior authority’ adduced by Gellius; still, it cannot be denied that L., who was keen on archaic words and endings, did write facturum, even
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
though the subject of the future infinitive in his fr. was eam. This he did in accordance with the practice of some early Latin authors, not all of them comic dramatists. In their commentary on Pl.’s Cas. (cited below) MacCary and Willcock say that the earliest form of the future active infinitive ended in -urum, and was both indeclinable and not accompanied by esse. ‘Later, because this looked like an accusative masculine, it came to be declined as the future participle, and esse was added to make the infinitive’; see e.g. Pl. Cas. – [scil. Casina] deieravit | occisurum eum; – [scil. Casina] altero te | occisurum ait (see W. M. Lindsay, Syntax of Plautus (Oxford ) ); Cato Orig. fr. Peter illi polliciti sese facturum omnia; Lucil. M = W nupturum te nupta negas; C. Gracchus fr. Malcovati credo ego inimicos meos hoc dicturum; Sulla fr. Peter ad summam perniciem rem publicam perventurum esse. But the form -urum (both with and without esse) of the future active infinitive with concord appears also in early Latin: for instance, Pl. Asin. mihi tibique interminatust nos futuros ulmeos; Ter. Andr. – ubi nuptias | futuras esse audivit; HolfordStrevens Gellius n. . Therefore, the construction -urum esse with concord did not succeed -urum esse without concord; both constructions could have been used in the same period and by the same author, and gradually -urum without concord became obsolete, and was resuscitated by authors like L. who favoured an archaic style (cf. Varro RR ., Gell. ..). Metre: uncertain. The extant text perhaps forms part of a trochaic septenarius: scan BcD ABcD ABc. Meyer’s law is not violated (h¯oc ˘ea¯ m, BcD).
I M AG O Nonius . M = . L [FHLPVEd(=ACXDMO)]: Genius [FHL PVEd: Genus L ] generis [codd.: suppl. ed. princ.: suppl. Onions]. Laberius [om. A] in [om. FH V ] Imagine:
IMAGO
genius generis nostri parens genius FHLPVEd: genius Bothe : genuis L. Mueller: genius Brakman generis codd.: secl. L. Mueller generis ed. princ.: generis Ribbeck nostri codd.: noster Laetus parens codd.: secl. Onions
T H E D E C E I T F U L I M AG E Nonius . M = . L: Genius generis (‘the guardian-spirit of a clan’). L., in The Deceitful Image, writes: the guardian spirit, parent of our clan . . .
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which almost all the MSS of Nonius . M = . L attribute to L. (MS A omits the author’s name), is the Latin equivalent of the Greek noun edwlon (see LSJ s.v.), and could have several meanings, all of which indicate a representation of a person or thing (see OLD s.v. –). Since the four words attributed to this mime do not give an indication of what exactly Imago referred to, I wish to draw attention to two meanings for which a strong theatrical connection has already been established. In Plautine comedy imago frequently denotes the image of character A which character B has assumed in order to deceive character C (and sometimes character A); see OLD s.v. ; TLL ..–. In this sense, imago occurs as a kind of technical term in prologues or in scenes which function as prologues, and it always refers to trickery and deception; e.g. imago is employed in the episode when the adulterer Jupiter pretends to be the innocent Amphitryon, and Mercury assumes the likeness of Sosia (Amph. in Amphitruonis vortit sese imaginem;
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
ego servi sumpsi Sosiae mi imaginem; et servos, quoiius ego fero imaginem), or when the slave Tyndarus and the master Philocrates pretend to be master and slave, respectively (Capt. huius illic, hic illius hodie fert imaginem), or when the courtesan Philocomasium pretends to be her imaginary twin sister in order to fool her custodian (Miles et hinc et illinc mulier feret imaginem). L.’s Imago may therefore have presented a trick played upon one of the characters whose image was copied, just as Chaerea, in Terence’s Eunuchus, copied the image of the eunuch Dorus in order to gain access to his beloved Pamphila by deceiving Thais and Pythias. But imago, like the Greek edwlon, could also refer to an apparition or ghost (see OLD s.v. ; TLL ..–). The popularity of the supernatural topic of the phantom and the haunted house in New Comedy and the mime is demonstrated by the Plautine Mostellaria and the Menandrean Fsma, the latter of which was ‘translated’ into Latin by Luscius from Lanuvium (Ter. Eun. ); Donatus conveniently summarised the plot of the play: the female ‘ghost’ with whom the young man of the play falls in love turns out to be the secret daughter of his stepmother, who kept her in the house next door, having disguised the house as a shrine. Donatus tells us that the young man of the play was terrified (exhorruit) when he set eyes upon what he believed to be a ghost, and his fear may be paralleled to the ‘noisy’ mime entitled Phasma and attributed to the playwright Valerius Catullus: consumptis opibus vocem, Damasippe, locasti | sipario, clamosum ageres ut Phasma Catulli (Iuv. .–; W. S. Watt Hermes () –). Did Damasippus play the role of the character who saw the phantom (and screamed), or of the phantom himself ? This fr. is preserved in the second book of Nonius’ treatise, entitled ‘De honestis et nove veterum dictis’ (‘Apt words used by early authors in an unfamiliar way’). Its position in this section (as opposed to the section on ‘De proprietate
IMAGO
sermonum’ (‘Appropriateness in the use of words’)) is of the utmost importance for the understanding and solution of the problem posed by the MS readings genius and genus at . M = . L, because it indicates that the reading genus in L (Nonius’ oldest extant MS), adopted only by L. Mueller, cannot be defended since, had Nonius wished to comment on the formation of genus generis, he would have chosen another section of his work to do this. However, if the entry of Nonius at this point is simply genius (OLD s.v. : ‘the male spirit of a gens existing during his lifetime in the head of the family, and subsequently in the divine or spiritual part of each individual’), it is equally unclear why Nonius chose L.’s passage to illustrate this word; genius is attested long before L. (e.g. Pl. Capt. Genio suo ubi quando sacruficat, per tuom te genium opsecro), and L.’s fr. does not seem to provide either an instance of an unusual meaning of this word, or an explanation for its formation or its etymology. These issues have been discussed at length by Carilli (Note –), who draws attention to Aufustius’ definition of genius as cited by Paul.-Fest. M = L genius est deorum filius et parens hominum, ex quo homines gignuntur; this definition may have been known to Nonius, and bears some similarity to L.’s fr. (genius . . . parens . . . ). Carilli (Note ) rightly, I believe, argues that what attracted Nonius in L.’s fr. was not the word genius on its own, but what Nonius wrongly took to be a iunctura or formulaic phrase, namely genius generis. This phrase is not attested elsewhere in extant Latin literature and was arguably formed on the analogy of such phrases as genius loci, rei, hominis, populi, plebis, coloniae, municipi, oppidi, patriae, provinciae, terrae, vici (Serv. on Verg. G. . genium dicebant antiqui naturalem deum uniuscuiusque loci vel rei vel hominis [add. MS R]; OLD s.v. ; for the inscriptional evidence see TLL ..–.). Nonius cannot be right in his interpretation of the syntax in L.’s fr., because if we assume that genius forms an unparalleled expression when coupled with generis, and if we take nostri to be the genitive singular of the adjective noster qualifying generis, then parens is left in a very odd position in the line (?‘the parental guardian spirit of our clan’?).
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
Metre: uncertain. Unlike Bothe, who scanned the fr. as an anapaestic dimeter, I follow Carilli and scan it as part of an iambic line, probably an iambic septenarius: aaBccD ABcD . Meyer’s law is not violated (nostr´ p˘ar¯ens, BcD). Ribbeck inserted est between generis and nostri, and scanned the fr. as a senarius whose beginning is missing. genius generis nostri parens: on the genius in Roman religion see Roscher . –; RE –. Generis should not be taken with genius (on Nonius’ error see above), but as an objective genitive governed by parens (if I am correct in this, the expression parens generis would appear only here; for parens patriae or urbis see OLD s.v. parens ). Parens should not be deleted from L.’s fr. or transferred to the text of Nonius’ entry, as Onions suggests, because parens occurs again in relation to genius in the passage of Aufustius cited above, and because its position in L.’s fr. creates a neat chiastic arrangement of cases (nominative– genitive–genitive–nominative), which adds to the acoustic effect of alliteration (genius generis nostri parens) and figura etymologica (genius and genus < geno or gigno).
LAC US AV ER NUS Gellius ..– [Fg(=OXPN)QZB]: Laberius in Lacu Averno mulierem amantem verbo inusitatius ficto ‘amorabundam’ dixit. Id verbum Caesellius Vindex in commentario lectionum antiquarum ea figura [Q ZB: ex figura Fg: ex ea figura Q ] dictum scripsit [Gronovius: scriptum dixit codd.] qua ‘ludibunda’ et ‘ridibunda’ et ‘errabunda’ dicitur ‘ludens’ et ‘ridens’ et ‘errans’. Terentius autem Scaurus, divi Hadriani temporibus grammaticus vel nobilissimus, inter alia quae de Caeselli erroribus composuit in hoc quoque verbo errasse eum scripsit, quod idem esse putaverit ‘ludens’ et ‘ludibunda’, ‘ridens’ et ‘ridibunda’, ‘errans’ et ‘errabunda’. ‘Nam ludibunda’ inquit ‘et
L ACUS AVERN US
ridibunda et errabunda ea dicitur quae ludentem vel ridentem vel errantem agit aut simulat.’ Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Catulire [P : catullire FHLP VEd], surire [L. Mueller: esurire FHLPV Ed: usurire V : e surire Gesner] vel libidinari [F HPVEd: libidenari F L] [catullire libidinari Hmgpc Pmg Vmg Emg : caltullire libidinari Hmgac ]. Laberius in [om. F L: secl. Onions] Lacu Averno [Bentinus ex codd. Gellii ..: lacu balerna FHLP VE : lacu lalerna E : lacuba∗∗ lerna P : Lacubalerna Mercerus ]: scinde una exoleto patienti catulientem lupam verba Laberius . . . lupam om. d scinde g: scando Ribbeck una Quicherat: una FHLPE: una una V: unam Aldina: inam Palmerius: cum Onions exoleto Aldina: exculeto F H : excoleto F H LP VE: excolecto P : exoletum Buecheler: exolete Bothe : exsoleto Carilli patienti Ribbeck : inpatienti g: in patiente ed. princ.: impatienter ed. : impatientem L. Mueller in notis: inpatientem Buecheler: patienti Ribbeck catulientem F HPVE: catulentem F L: catullientem ed. princ.: catulientem Ribbeck : catulientem Ribbeck : catulientem L. Mueller lupam g: pugulam Guietus
Priscianus . = GL .. H [RBZDHGLKT]: ‘Versi’ quoque pro ‘versus’. Laberius [R Z: Lauerius R BDHGLKT] in Lacu [RBZ DHGT: Lacum LK: om. Z ] Averno [RBZ DGLKT: arverno H: om. Z ]: versorum non numerorum numero studuimus versorum codd.: versorum Ribbeck in app. crit. non numerorum Buecheler: non numerum codd.: non nummorum Dziatzko: nunc numerˆum Bothe dubit. in notis
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
LAKE AVER NUS Gellius ..–: L., in Lake Avernus, called a woman in love ‘loveful’ (amorabunda), a rather unusual word, which he himself coined. Caesellius Vindex, in his Commentary on Archaic Words, wrote that this word was used idiomatically, just as ludibunda and ridibunda and errabunda are used for ludens (‘playing’) and ridens (‘laughing’) and errans (‘erring’). However, Terentius Scaurus, a very distinguished grammarian of the time of the deified Hadrian, mentioned, among other things which he wrote in his work On the Errors of Caesellius, that in the case of this word too Caesellius had made a mistake in arguing that ludens and ludibunda, ridens and ridibunda, errans and errabunda had the same meaning. ‘For ludibunda’ he said ‘and ridibunda and errabunda refer to a woman who plays the part of, or pretends to be, one who plays or laughs or errs.’
Nonius . M = . L: Catulire (‘to be on heat’), to be sexually excited or to gratify one’s lust. L., in Lake Avernus, has: fuck the shit out of the bitch on heat along with the shagged-out old queen
Priscian . = GL .. H: L. too, in Lake Avernus, uses the form versi instead of versus: we paid attention to the number of lines, not of metres
L ACUS AVERN US
C O M M E N TA RY Gellius ..–, Nonius . M = . L, and Priscian . = GL .. H cite extracts from this mime, whose title presents serious textual problems in Nonius’ text (see apparatus criticus). But given that at least the word lacu appears in all the MSS of Nonius as part of the title of the mime attributed to L., it is reasonable to conclude that the unintelligible readings lacu balerna, lacu lalerna, and lacuba e lerna in Nonius are corrupt versions of the title Lacus Avernus, which Gellius and Priscian report in relation to L. There were two variants in the name of this lake in L.’s time: the less common lacus Avernus (with Avernus as a masculine adjective qualifying lacus) and the more frequent lacus Averni (with Averni in the genitive, signifying perhaps the genius of this location): see TLL .–. What L. himself had originally written is impossible to ascertain, but since none of the MSS of Gellius, Nonius, and Priscian give any reading resembling a genitive I print Lacus Avernus as the title of the mime. The location referred to by the title is a volcanic crater filled with water and situated in Campania, north of Cape Misenum, near Baiae, Cumae, the Acherusian Lake, and the Lucrine Lake (see RE ; D. Ogden, Greek and Roman Necromancy (Princeton ) –; D. Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford ) –; there is an excellent map of the location in Austin’s edn of Verg. Aen. , p. xi, and an air photograph of the Lake in Ogden, Greek and Roman Necromancy ). The Romans called Lucrinus and Avernus lakes (lacus) not gulfs (sinus), but Strabo (..) reserved the term lake (l©mnh) for the Acherusian Lake and called Lucrinus and Avernus gulfs (k»lpoi), presumably because the latter were inner gulfs, not directly connected with the sea. Strabo, whose work was at least partly composed under Tiberius, also reports (..) that ‘the people before his time’ (o¬ pr¼ ¡män) ‘used to relate fabulously’ (mÅqeuon) that Homer’s account of Odysseus’ descent into Hades was set at the ‘Birdless Lake’ (for the etymology of *ornov = Avernus see Strabo ..; Dio Cassius .; Lucr. .–; Verg. Aen.
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.–; and Austin on Aen. .; TLL .–), and that near the lake was an oracle of the dead which Odysseus visited (.. nekuomante±on . . . ìOdussa e«v toÓt ì jiksqai). Cicero corroborates this account in Tusc. disp. . (dated to ), in which he cites five lines from an unknown Latin tragedy referring to Acheron and Lake Avernus (Trag. Fab. Inc. –; cf. also –), and disparagingly connects the oracles of the dead with the former consul and augur Appius Claudius Pulcher (cos. ; died ): inde Homeri tota nkuia, inde ea quae meus amicus Appius nekuomante±a faciebat, inde in vicinia nostra Averni lacus (see Necyomantia). Livy (..) reports that Hannibal visited that area under the pretext of performing a sacrifice. Therefore, long before Virgil exploited in the Aeneid the infernal associations of Lake Avernus (., ., ., ., ., ., .), there was a strong belief, exploited in tragedy at least once, that this lake represented an entry point to the Underworld. So when L. came to compose a mime entitled Lake Avernus, he had the opportunity to exploit in a comic fashion not only old tales, popular superstitions and actual religious practices connected with the lake but also literary works which had used Lake Avernus as the background to their story-lines. The two extant lines from this play make it impossible to reconstruct the plot. E. Hauler (WS () n. ) speculates that fr. may originally have belonged to a Prologue. He does not explain why. This fr. consists of one word (amorabundam) which Gellius says that he found in L.’s Lacus Avernus (see Garcea and Lomanto and n. ). The word does not occur elsewhere in extant Latin literature. The reason for Gellius’ citation is the interpretation of the word by Caesellius Vindex, a grammarian of the early second century AD, whose grammatical observations and Virgilian interpretations were criticised by Gellius (.) and Gellius’ teacher Sulpicius Apollinaris (.; see Holford-Strevens Gellius –); the text (Laberius in Lacu Averno . . . dixit) does not make
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it clear whether Gellius found the word amorabundam in Caesellius or in a source other than Caesellius’ Commentarium lectionum antiquarum. Caesellius equated adjectives in -bundus with present participles (if this were correct, amorabunda would mean amans; OLD s.v. translates: ‘loving, amorous’); however, Terentius Scaurus objected to this view and suggested that adjectives in -bundus denote imitation of the action of the verb from which the adjective was created (if this were correct, amorabunda would mean quae amantem agit aut simulat; see Gell. .. and Holford-Strevens Gellius n. ). Gellius disagrees with Scaurus (..) and suggests a different line of enquiry: the suffix -bundus, he says, may have its own nuance (.. an extrema illa particula habeat aliquid suae propriae significationis). This suggestion is elaborated upon by Apollinaris, who relates the suffix -bundus to intensity, large quantity, and abundance (.. vim et copiam et quasi abundantiam rei; if this were correct, amorabunda would mean quae valde amat ‘she who loves intensely’). But this interpretation is not entirely persuasive either, because adjectives such as moribundus (OLD s.v.: ‘on the point of death’) are not easily explained by it. Even more puzzling than the meaning of amorabunda is its formation. Adjectives in -bundus clearly belong to the sermo plebeius, especially in its earlier period: Cooper (Formation –) found of those (he lists most of them), out of which are attested in early authors (including historiographers favouring archaic words) and only seven in Cicero. At least three (furibundus, moribundus, and ruibundus) are attested in inscriptions (Olcott Formation –). Although their suffix seems to be connected with the gerundive suffix (Lindsay Language ), these adjectives appear to be active in meaning, and may take a direct object in the accusative (Sisenna fr. Peter populabundus agros ad oppidum pervenit, cited by Gellius ..). They may be formed from verbs of all conjugations, including deponents, but most of them seem to be derived from verbs of the first conjugation (see LHS – with earlier bibliography). But if L. wanted to create an amusing neologism (see LHS ) observing the same pattern as errabunda, ludibunda, and ridibunda, he would have written
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amabunda, not amorabunda. Amorabunda therefore both belongs to the language of the lower classes and is unusually formed, since it ought to be viewed either as a kind of denominative formation ending in -¯a-bundus (so LHS ‘quasi-denominativ’; OLD s.v. has ‘[amor + -bundus]’; EM list it among the words derived from amo; Fischer Observations : ‘il s’agit d’un suffixe d´everbatif attach´e a` un substantif ’), or as a verbal adjective derived from the unattested verb ∗ amoro or ∗ amoror = amo (so A. Thysius and J. Oiselius in their edn of Gellius (Leiden ) on ..; and ´ () , who compares amorabunda to the P. Langlois REL verbal form amoratus (CIL .)). The latter explanation seems to me difficult to support in view of Gellius’ testimony that the form amorabunda was a verbum inusitatius fictum (..). In one of his letters Cicero uses a similar neologism (Ad Att. .. cum complicarem hanc epistulam, noctuabundus ad me venit cum epistula tua tabellarius); see OLD s.v.: ‘[if genuine, ∗ noctuor (NOCTV + O ) + -BVNDVS]’. This fr. is included in the section of Nonius’ treatise which deals with rare words coined by early Latin authors, and is cited because it contains a form of the verb catulire (catulientem; cf. also the entry from Nonius’ glosses in CGL . catullire libidinari). A denominative verb of the fourth conjugation (< catulus + -io), catulio seems to have indicated the sexual craving of bitches; its formation and meaning are paralleled in the rare verb equio, used of mares on heat (Col. ..; Pliny NH .; both catulio and equio may have been formed on the analogy of verbs such as prurio ‘I itch’, ‘I have a sexual craving’; LHS ). It seemed appropriate therefore that L. should use the participle catulientem with reference to a female, not a male, but unusually he uses the term to characterise a person (n. lupam), not an animal. In addition to L., the only other extant author who uses catulio (= ‘I am on heat’) is Varro (RR .. feturae principium admittendi [scil. canes] faciunt veris principio: tum enim dicuntur catulire, id est ostendere
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velle maritari). OCD s.v. Varro dates RR to ; if L. was dead by then, he would be the first literary author (as far as we know) to use catulio, but it is odd that the first instance of this word should refer to people, not animals. I am inclined to think that, even if L.’s Lacus Avernus predated Varro’s RR, L. was not responsible for coining the verb catulire but was familiar with it through a source now lost. That this source was not cited by Nonius means nothing: he did not cite Varro either. Metre: I adopt the conjectures of Quicherat (una ; see below) and Ribbeck (patienti; see below), and scan the fr. as an iambic octonarius: ABCD aBCdd ABcdd ABcD. Luchs’ law is not violated (cat˘ulµ¯ent¯em lupam). Ribbeck unnecessarily inserts two pronouns ( patienti catulientem) and scans the line as a trochaic septenarius. Bonaria follows Ribbeck . Lindsay in his edn of Nonius and Carilli Note scan the line as a trochaic septenarius without emending the text: scinde una exoleto inpatienti catulientem lupam (BCD aBCdd ABcdd ABcD). But there are problems with the syntax and the sense in this version. scinde: sexual word-play based on agricultural terminology relating to ‘cutting’ or ‘splitting’ goes back to Plautus and is discussed very well by Adams Vocabulary –; see also : ‘Scindo was not a technical term for the breaking of the hymen, but a metaphorical substitute for futuo or pedico.’ However, in his discussion of this fr. of L. from the point of view of animal sexual imagery (catulientem), Adams Vocabulary prints the conjecture of Ribbeck scando (‘I mount’; see OLD s.v. c), instead of the reading scinde. This is unjustified for three reasons: scinde makes perfectly good sense and fits the metre, Ribbeck adopted scinde in his third edn, and L. uses scindo (= futuo, pedico) elsewhere in relation to the forceful penetration of a woman (.n. scindere). una : there is no parallel in early Latin or among the authors of L.’s era for the adverb un¯a with the ablative case
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
without a preposition (for examples of un¯a + cum with ablative or un¯a + inter with accusative or un¯a combined with simul see OLD s.v. una a); for this reason Quicherat inserted cum after una, and Onions replaced una with cum; Buecheler retained una but emended exoleto inpatienti to exoletum inpatientem and added ac; this would make exoletum inpatientem and catulientem lupam the direct objects of scinde. Un¯a + ablative without preposition occurs, according to LHS , only from the time of Iulius Valerius (an author of the early fourth century AD). exoleto: this is the emendation printed in the Aldine edn of Nonius for the nonsensical readings exculeto, excoleto, and excolecto. Carilli (Note ) wonders whether the spelling exc-, which occurs in all the MSS (including the precious F ), suggests that Nonius had originally written exsoleto, but I am not convinced that L. would have done the same; besides, the spelling exsolesco is not attested before Seneca the Younger (see TLL ..–). Originally exoletus was the perfect participle of exolesco (‘I grow up’; Paul.-Fest. M = L: exoletus, qui excessit olescendi, id est crescendi, modum; Paul.-Fest. M = L exoletus, qui adolescere, id est crescere desiit), and could be used simply to denote a person who was no longer an adulescens (Pl. fr. L exoletam virginem; the same sense occurs in Suet. Galba ). However, already in Plautus’ time the word had become almost a technical term for denoting male prostitutes who had passed their prime (Pl. Curc. ibidem [scil. sub basilica] erunt scorta exoleta quique stipulari solent; Poen. – scortum exoletum ne quis in proscaenio | sedeat). The disreputable sexual practices of these persons made this participle almost synonymous with the adjective libidinosus (Firmic. Matern. Math. .. ille [sc. Sulla], qui numquam fuit memor sexus sui . . . senex exoletus in aliena aetate flagitia corporis detinebat; Arnob. Adv. nat. . illa mimorum atque exoleti generis multitudo). In all these instances exoletus is used as an adjective, but in Cicero it becomes a substantive (Mil. ille [scil. Clodius] qui semper secum scorta, semper exoletos, semper lupas duceret) (dated to ). L.’s fr. is the only other extant example of this use of exoletus before Seneca the Elder (see TLL ..–).
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I cannot say whether L.’s mime antedated Cicero’s Mil., but I find it unlikely that there was an intertextual connection between these passages, although they share the words exoletus and lupa. The exoleti are discussed in detail by C. A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality (New York/Oxford ) –: the term exoletus denoted a male prostitute past the age of adolescence, who might well be called upon to play the insertive role in penetrative acts with his male clients, but who might just as well also play the receptive role. His distinctive feature was not his sexual specialty, but rather his age, although sometimes even that was not a definitive characteristic, as the word seems in some contexts to refer to a male prostitute of any age. ()
But exoletus in the sense of a young male prostitute is found only after Seneca the Younger (Ep. .), and I do not see any cogent reason why the exoletus of L.’s fr. should not be regarded as a person advanced in years. What is not clear to me because of the lack of context is whether the word exoletus in this fr. refers to someone who actually practised prostitution or whether it should be interpreted as a term of abuse directed against an elderly man who was not a male prostitute but, at least from the speaker’s point of view, behaved in a lascivious and effeminate fashion (this sense is also attested in Firmic. Matern. Math. ..). He would have played the passive role in the penetrative act (at least this is what the imperative scinde and the participle patienti (see below) suggest). patienti: this is Ribbeck’s emendation for the reading inpatienti, which has strong MS support (it has been recorded even by F ), and is retained by both Lindsay and Carilli. The reading inpatienti would fit the metre if we were to scan the line as an iambic octonarius (sc´nd(e) u¯ n¯a c(um) ¯ex˘ol¯et(o) ´np˘atµ¯ent´ c˘at˘ulµ¯ent¯em l˘up˘am) or as a trochaic septenarius (sc´nd(e) u¯ n(a) ¯ex˘ol¯et(o) ´np˘atµ¯ent´ c˘at˘ulµ¯ent¯em l˘up˘am). But why call an exoletus inpatiens? Carilli (Note ) suggests that inpatiens may playfully indicate a reversal of sexual roles on the part of the exoletus, although, as she herself suggests,
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‘impatiens, come contrario di pathicus, non sia attestato altrove’. Given the literary portrayal of exoleti (discussed above) and the perception of their services in Roman sexuality, it seems more likely that the speaker of this fr. utters an insult against a man whom he calls exoletus, and implies that this man has regularly ‘suffered’ or ‘submitted to’ the sexual desires of other men in penetrative acts. Patior as the technical term for assuming the passive role in sexual intercourse, and patientia as the concept of the submission to the active partner’s desire, are discussed by Adams (Vocabulary –) and Williams (Roman Homosexuality –); the earliest extant instance of patior in this sense is in the literary fabula Atellana (Novius pati dum poterunt, antequam pugae pilant; see OLD s.v. c). Seneca uses it of a pathicus in NQ ..; in Petronius (Sat. .) patiens is used as a substantive referring to a puer who assumes the receptive role in sexual intercourse with an older man. If Ribbeck’s conjecture is correct, L. would be the first extant author to use the participle of patior referring to a male passive sexual partner. catulientem: and n. scinde. Sexual terminology appropriate to animals but metaphorically applied to humans is discussed by Adams (Vocabulary –). lupam: I take this to refer not to an actual ‘she-wolf’ but to a woman who either practises prostitution or does not do so but is nonetheless insultingly called lupa by the speaker (for various explanations of lupa = ‘she-wolf’ and ‘whore’ see the passages cited in TLL ..–). The earliest attestation of lupa = meretrix or scortum is Pl. Epid. divortunt mores virgini longe ac lupae; see also Lucil. M = W si nihil ad faciem et si olim lupa prostibulumque. L.’s fr. therefore is not breaking any new ground as far as the term lupa is concerned, but L. is cleverly exploiting the animal imagery of the word lupa further by presenting the ‘whore’ of the fr. as a person exhibiting the behaviour of an animal (catulientem). He was not original in this. Novius, who composed fabulae Atellanae in the early first century BC, comically
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calls he-wolves those who go constantly to the she-wolf ( = Frassinetti: cum ad lupam nostram tam multi crebro conmetant lupi); see also Serv. on Aen. .; Isid. .. Cicero (Mil. , cited above) says that Clodius’ retinue comprised scorta, exoleti, and lupae. I wonder whether the combination of exoletus and lupa in Cicero and L. is merely an abusive formula not reflecting reality: Cicero and the speaker of L.’s fr. may be talking about people whom they deem disreputable rather than people who were professional prostitutes. This fr. survives in Priscian because it contains an instance of the fourth declension noun versus forming its genitive plural according to the second declension. L.’s fr. is the only extant example of this formation found in a literary author; but the form versorum is also attested in an undated inscription from Calabria (CIL .), which includes an acrostic poem of lines forming the name L. Nerusius Mithres, presumably the person who paid for the inscription to be made so that he would be remembered by his contemporaries and by posterity (is cuius per capita versorum nomen declaratur | fecit se vibus [sic] sibi et suis omnibus | libertis libertasque posterisque eorum). A poorly preserved funerary inscription found in Verona (CIL .) records clearly the accusative plural form versos (uisquis iter carpis versos hoc respice q), while the poet Laevius, whose floruit Courtney (Poets ) dates to about , uses the nominative plural form versi (Prisc. GL .. = fr. Courtney omnes sunt denis syllabis versi; but in the passage cited by Terent. Maur. = fr. a Courtney, Laevius uses the form versus). The ablative plural versis is attested in the mimographer Valerius, Cicero’s contemporary, as cited by Priscian . = GL .. H: ‘versi’ quoque pro ‘versus’ . . . . (GL .. H) Valerius in Phormione: ‘quid hic cum tragicis versis et syrma facis?’; see Sommer Handbuch ; NW ; Courtney Poets . It would appear then that the second-declension plural forms of versus were confined to low drama and light poetry,
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and may have originated from the language of uneducated people. Metre: I follow Ribbeck and Bonaria in adopting Buecheler’s emendation numerorum for numerum, and I scan the line as a complete senarius: ABCD aaBCdd AbbcD. In the apparatus criticus of his second edn Ribbeck retained the reading numerum and supplied tot before versorum; this would make the line a complete senarius. versorum: ‘lines of verse’ (OLD s.v. a; Cic. Ad fam. .. scripsi etiam versibus; Phaedr. pr. versibus senariis). On the formation of this word see . Would L.’s original audience have known that versorum = versuum? In any case, I find it unlikely that they would have translated this word as ‘of the men who had been turned’. The juxtaposition between versus (‘a line of verse’) and numerus (‘a poetic metre’), the homoeoteleuton versorum – numerorum, and the words of the missing context would have clarified the meaning. numerorum: ‘a poetic measure, metre’ (OLD s.v. a; Cic. Acad. . varium et elegans omni fere numero poema fecisti). The MS reading numerum is attractive because it can be interpreted as the contracted form of the genitive plural of numerus, a form also used by the uneducated Trimalchio (Petr. Sat. . ipsimi nostri delicatus decessit, mehercules margaritum, catamitus et omnium numerum); but, if retained, it produces an incomplete trochaic septenarius, which violates Meyer’s law ( BCD A/bbCdd ABBcD); this is why I adopt Buecheler’s conjecture. Dziatzko’s nummorum would fit the metre (it produces a complete senarius) but would create a less effective contrast with the surrounding words versorum and numero (see below). The witty combination of numerus and versus occurs also in Lucilius, who plays with the substantive numerus in the plural, referring to a particular metre (the hexameter), and the word Numeri, the genitive or vocative singular of the Roman cognomen Numerius, whose forms Numerii and Numerie cannot fit into a hexameter: – M = – W
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servandi numeri et versus faciendi | nos Caeli Numeri numerum ut servemus modumque. numero: it is possible to take numero as an adverb, ‘quickly’ (OLD s.v. ), in which case the fr. would mean ‘we quickly paid attention to the lines of verse, not to the metres’, and the genitives versorum and numerorum would be governed by studuimus (studeo + genitive occurs in Caecil. Synephebi qui te nec amet nec studeat tui). However, since studeo (‘I devote myself to the study of’) commonly governs a dative (OLD s.v. a), I take numero to be the dative singular of the noun numerus (‘number’): L. is playing with two of the meanings of numerus as Lucilius had done with the form N/numeri (see above), the anonymous composer of the epitaph of Plautus with the pun on numeri innumeri (Gellius .. = Courtney Poets et Numeri innumeri simul omnes conlacrimarunt; see Courtney Poets ), and Lucretius with innumero numero (.). LATE LOQUENS Nonius . M = . L [FHLVEd(=ACXDMO)]: Populacia [H M: popularia Gesner: populatia FH LVEACXDO], ut nugalia [FH LVd: aut nugalia H E : aut gugalia E : ut nugaria Scaliger] vel [om. L ] puerilia [F HL VEd: om. L : pue∗∗∗ F ]. Laberius [F HL VE: ∗∗ berius F : liberius L d] Late Loquente [L. Mueller: late loquentibus FHLVEd: Latiloquentibus Quicherat: Lare loquenti (sic) Wase: Latine loquentibus Ritschl: Late coquentibus Iunius]: [e] dum populacia agimus per ludum [e] dum Iuniusmg : e dum FH LVEd: et dum H : haedum Aldina: dum Scaliger: dum Wase: dum Onions: dum Lindsay in app. crit.: dum Ribbeck, populacia Aldina: puerilia FHLVEd: populatia ed. : popularia Gesner
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Nonius . M = . L [FHLVE]: Pluvia, ut saepe, generis feminini . . . . Masculino [FHLVE: Masculini Mercerus : masculini Quicherat] Laberius Late loquente [FHLVE: Lateloquentibus Passeratius: Lare loquente (sic) Wase: Late loquentes Bothe : Latine loquentes Ritschl]: qui pedem ex taberna tulimus, tantus cum instaret pluor instaret Haupt: staret FHLVE
THE BLETH ER ER Nonius . M = . L: Populacia, i.e. trifles or puerile things. L. in The Bletherer: . . . while we were playing these silly tricks for fun
Nonius . M = . L: Pluvia (‘rain’), as usual, feminine. It is masculine in L.’s The Bletherer: when we stepped out of the inn, although so much rain (pluor) was looming
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Nonius attributes on two separate occasions to L., presents problems. All eleven MSS at . M = . L (fr. ) read late loquentibus, whereas the five MSS that preserve passage . M = . L (fr. ) unanimously have late loquente. This baffling inconsistency attracted various
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equally baffling interpretations: Bothe thought that these two frs. belonged to the same mime, which, however, had a double title, Late loquentes and Late loquens. Ribbeck believed that only one of the titles was correct, namely Late loquentes. In the apparatus criticus of his edn of Nonius, Lindsay sensibly argued that the reading Late loquentibus, corrected into Late loquente, may have existed already in the archetypus codex written as follows: e loquenti bus. This co-existence of variant readings probably confused the copyist of the archetypus, who may have thought it best to record both the form loquentibus and the correction e, which was meant to be written in place of the ending -ibus. This would explain the creation, in subsequent MSS, of the readings loquentibus edum and loquentibus et dum (dum is the first word of the fr. attributed to L.). In the light of Lindsay’s hypothesis, the editors’ emendations of the odd reading edum (see apparatus criticus) are unnecessary. Another reason why I prefer Late loquens to Late loquentes is that L. likes to entitle some of his mimes after character-types, whom he mentions in the singular (Cacomnemon, Colax). The phrase Late loquens would thus refer to an individual who, like a rhetorician trained in public speaking, can speak at great length and over a wide range of topics (OLD s.v. late b): see Cic. Fin. . quod latius loquerentur rhetores, dialectici autem compressius; Quint. .. de quo nos latius ibi loquemur ubi de figuris orationis tractandum erit (for the adverb late + verbs of speaking other than loquor see TLL ..–.). Rhetor often had the disparaging meaning of someone who skilfully manipulates language to make an argument attractive (Cic. Tusc. disp. . at quam rhetorice, quam copiose, quas sententias colligit, quae verba contorquet! ut licere quidvis rhetori intelligas; and OLD s.v. rhetor b), and I believe that Late loquens too was meant to be perceived in an unfavourable light, and to characterise someone who spoke continuously without getting to the point. One of the glossaries (CGL .) includes the compound latiloquens as an explanatory term for the Greek platul»gov, which LSJ translate ‘babbling’ (cf. platulschv used of an incompetent doctor in AP ..; LSJ s.v. translate ‘diffuse babbler’; and
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
platurhmosÅnh ‘breadth in speaking, prolixity’ in Timon ). Quicherat had even made the interesting suggestion of reading Latiloquentes as the title of this mime, but late is well attested as an adverb qualifying loquor without being joined to it (see above). Kroll (Laberius ) believed that with this mime L. poked fun at the accent or elocution of an Italian tribe. The MSS at the beginning of this entry give two otherwise unattested words as Nonius’ entry: populacia and populatia (Carilli (Note ) wrongly records that all the MSS have populatia; H , which I saw in the British Library, and M, a photographic copy of which I examined carefully, have populacia), both of them meaning (according to Nonius) ‘childish’ (puerilia). OLD does not have an entry for either ∗ populacius or ∗ populatius, while TLL .. (s.v. ludus) prints Gesner’s emendation popularia. The problem is complicated further by the fact that in the MSS the gloss puerilia crept from Nonius’ entry into L.’s line. It is difficult therefore to decide whether the imaginative word coined by the mimographer and preserved by the grammarian was populatia or populacia or something else (for example, popularia). I am inclined to agree with Carilli (Note –) that we should read, both in Nonius’ text and in L.’s fr., the otherwise unattested substantive adjective populacia, because () it occurs in H and in M; () the confusion between t and c is more frequent in Nonius’ MSS than the confusion between t and r (see F. Bertini Studi Noniani () ); () the ending -acius seems to be a common suffix of the sermo vulgaris, which L. is said to record in his plays (see LHS ‘vulg¨ar -¯acius f¨ur Suffix -¯aceus’; Cooper Formation – – on he prints L.’s ∗ populacius; Olcott Formation – records six adjectives in -acius from inscriptions: gallinacius, hederacius, rosacius, solacius, testacius, vernacius); and () Nonius preserved this fr. in his section ‘De honestis et nove veterum dictis’ as an example of a line containing an entirely new word, not a common one with an unusual meaning (as would have been the case with e.g. popularia
LATE LOQUENS
= puerilia). It is also possible, though less likely (as Carilli (Note n. ) points out), that L. wrote populacia as the accusative neuter plural of the unattested adjective populax, -acis. But on what grounds did Nonius render ∗ populacius (if this is the correct reading) as ‘childish things’, ‘things of no importance’ (see OLD s.v. puerilis and nugalis)? Was it the expression per ludum ‘in jest’ that induced him to do so? Was it the (now lost) context of this fr.? And what made L. choose the noun populus as the base on which he coined a denominative adjective of apparently pejorative meaning (‘trifling’)? I do not have an answer to these questions. Metre: I scan the fr. as two incomplete senarii (scan line D aaBcD; line aaBCD A/). [e]: for a plausible explanation of the origin of the reading e see Late Loquens. populacia: . per ludum ‘in jest, in a spirit of levity’; OLD s.v. ludus b. L. appears to be the first extant author to have used the phrase per ludum (after L. it is attested again in Curtius Rufus). TLL ..– include this fr. in the list of passages in which ‘luditur dicendo, scribendo’, but they have reservations about this (‘si recte hic inseruimus’). It is far from clear that the ‘trifles’ to which the speaker refers involve speaking or writing; if Nonius interprets populacia as nugalia, it is possible that the expression populacia agere denotes something similar to nugas agere (‘to waste one’s efforts’, OLD s.v. nugae a) or nihil agere (‘to play the fool, jest’, OLD s.v. ago b). Nonius includes this fr. in the section of his treatise entitled ‘De indiscretis generibus’, because it contains the only known instance of the substantive pluvia as a masculine noun. Nonius does not comment on the fact that L. has not only changed the
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
gender of pluvia but also refrained from writing ∗ pluvius as a noun (I suppose L. did not do this because pluvius would have added an unwanted syllable at the end of the trochaic line); instead, L. coined a new word, pluor (see also ), which he presumably formed from the stem of the verb pluo + the ending -or (so OLD s.v. tremo < tremor). I cannot say whether this formation reflected everyday language, or whether pluor was coined by L. as an amusing linguistic innovation. Carilli (Hapax ) observes that the alliteration in the words taberna tulimus tantus and the suffix -or in pluor, which is attested in vocabulary of high register (see Cooper Formation ), gives this line an epic flavour. The speaker seems to be describing a dramatic event; the neologism pluor may have added to the tone of the line. Metre: like Ribbeck, Lindsay, and Carilli, I scan the line as a trochaic septenarius: BcD aBCdd A/BCD ABcD. Luchs’ law is not violated (´nst¯ar¯et pluor, DAB cD). pedem ex taberna tulimus: both the expression pedem ferre and the noun taberna are common before L. in plays and in non-dramatic poetry (see OLD s.v. fero b; taberna ). instaret: Haupt’s conjecture is metrically unnecessary, but it is preferable to the MSS’ staret, because insto is often constructed with words indicating threatening natural forces or looming natural phenomena, a sense not found with sto: see TLL ..–. and OLD s.v. insto b, a. pluor: . NATA L I S Gellius .. [FOXPNQZ]: Neque non obsoleta quoque et maculantia ex sordidiore vulgi usu [scil. Laberius] ponit, . . . [..] Item in mimo qui inscribitur Natalis [Bothe: natal FONQZ : nata Z : nata.l. X:
NATA LI S
Nata.L. P: Nacca Beroaldus: Natale Ziegler: Natal Ribbeck, : Natalicium Hertz: Natalicius Fleckeisen] ‘cippum’ dicit et ‘obbam’ et ‘camellam’ . . . Pergit Gellius .. [FOXPNQZ]: . . . et ‘pittacium’ [FON: pictacium XP: capitatium Q: om. Z] et ‘capitium’: induis (inquit) capitium tunicae pittacium capitium PQ : captivum FOX NQ Z: captium X pittacium FPO: pittaciu N: pictatium Z: pittatium X : pitatium X : epittatium Q: pictacium Cratander
THE BIRTHDAY Gellius ..: Besides, he [L.] used words which were both obsolete and vulgar from the rather uncouth speech of the common people . . . [..]. Likewise, in the mime entitled The Birthday, he [L.] uses the words cippum (‘pillar’) and obbam (‘beaker’) and camellam (‘goblet’) . . . Gellius ..: . . . and pittacium (‘flap of cloth’) and capitium (‘woman’s garment’); he has: . . . you put on the blouse, the flap of the tunic . . .
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime is very difficult to establish with certainty. Most editors have taken the MS readings nata.l. or natal to be abbreviated forms of adjectives which indicate or are related to a birthday celebration: so Bothe and Ribbeck print Natalis (‘The birthday’; OLD s.v. a and s.v. a), whereas Marshall in the OCT of Gellius adopts Fleckeisen’s conjecture Natalicius (should we understand the masculine noun dies? See Mart. ..). This view is supported by a passage in Cicero (Phil. .) about a ‘birthday-party’, which Mark Antony gave in his gardens (dat nataliciam (v.l. natalicia) in hortis; hence, Hertz’s conjecture Natalicium as the title of L.’s mime). If the title referred to someone’s birthday, it is possible that the plot would have dealt with comic events taking place on that day (the plot of Plautus’ Pseudolus takes place on the birthday of the pimp Ballio). Ribbeck prints Natal as a neuter noun of the third declension (natal, -alis); OLD adopts this reading and glosses it ‘The name of a mime by Laberius’. But what does Natal mean? An early emendation that has not found favour with later editors of L. is Beroaldus’ Nacca; this emendation deserves consideration both because nacca, according to Paul.-Fest. M = L, is a word of the lower classes meaning ‘a fuller’, and because there is evidence that L., who liked to use low words, exploited the character of the fuller in at least two of his mimes ( and ). I also wonder whether the title of this mime was Nata ‘The daughter’ (OLD s.v. testifies to the existence of this noun in both early comedy and tragedy); this reading occurs in two later MSS of Gellius (see apparatus criticus), and its corruption into natal or nata.l. may have been due to the confusion caused when a scribe abbreviated L.’s name with the letter l; so Gellius’ text would have run as follows: Item in mimo qui inscribitur nata l ‘cippum’ dicit. On the context in which this fr. survives see . Metre: uncertain.
NATA LI S
cippum: of uncertain etymology (see OLD s.v.; TLL .–; WH s.v.; EM guess: ‘D´eriv´e: incippat: includit [Gl.]?’; Sommer Handbuch ); this word, well attested in the Romance languages (see ML no. ), is discussed in detail by Garcea and Lomanto, who conclude that it ‘appears to be a technical term rather than a vulgarism’ (); but their arrangement of the evidence is misleading. The first extant literary author to use cippus is Lucilius, and although his passage ( M = W) contains textual problems, it seems likely that he uses the word to indicate ‘a gravestone’ (see OLD s.v. ; TLL .–). In Varro’s LL . (published about ?) cippus denotes simply a boundary-stone (there is abundant inscriptional evidence for this meaning in TLL .–), while Horace (S. ..) appears to combine both of these senses and to use cippus as a pillar indicating the dimensions of a graveyard. But Caesar (B.G. ..) says that his soldiers facetiously called cippos the intertwined and sharp branches projecting from the tree-trunks which were sunk and fastened into the trenches of a camp so as to function as its defence-mechanism. It is possible therefore that in the lost context of L.’s play, which Gellius possibly knew but did not cite, the mimographer, like Caesar’s soldiers, used cippus in an unconventional sense which Gellius regarded as vulgar. obbam: Nonius, on two occasions (. M = . L and . M = . L), glosses this word as poculi genus, and he cites two frs. from Varro’s Menippean Satires in support (see also CGL .; .); an etymological connection has often been made between the word for this kind of vessel and the African town of Obba, mentioned by Livy .. (see WH s.v.; EM s.v.; TLL ..–; OLD s.v.; Garcea and Lomanto n. ). But it seems odd then that Varro Men. C`ebe (cited by Nonius) associates obbas with the Campanian town of Cales (Calenas obbas); was it the case that obbae originated in Africa, then spread out, and different varieties of them were made in various Italian towns? It is also unclear why Gellius regarded
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
the word as vulgar. Persius (.) uses it to describe a squat mug (sessilis obba), and Tertullian (Apol. .) contrasts it to a simpulum, a very small vessel from which wine was poured in religious ceremonies (see Paul.-Fest. M = L). In all these passages the technical character of the word does not change, and there does not seem to be an indication that obba was an uncouth term. In his edn of Gellius (), Petrus Mosellanus puts forth the unlikely view that obba does not mean a bowl but a rope made from the hide of camels. camellam: transmitted into Italian and French (ML no. ), this word makes its first appearance (as far as we know) in L., and re-appears once in Ovid (Fasti .), denoting a bowl a shepherd is meant to use in honouring the tutelary deity of the flock, and three times in Petronius: Trimalchio possesses a large camella (.), Oenothea an antiquated and wooden one (.–, .). Both Trimalchio and Oenothea use this bowl to serve wine. It is also attested in Ars Anon. Bern. = GL .. Hagen; Terent. Scaurus De orthogr. = GL ..– K; and CIL .. It is not clear why Gellius considers camella a vulgar term. Its etymology is uncertain: the assumption is that cam˘ella is a diminutive of the noun cam˘era, which is a Grecism originating from camara = kamra (see OLD s.v.; Sommer Handbuch ; Dalmasso ). However, camella is rendered in Greek in the Edictum Imp. Dioclet. . (= CIL p. ) as kmhla (kbaqa ¢toi kmhla shmodia©a gegenhmnh tetorneumnh), which suggests that the penultimate of camella, unlike that of camera, was an ¯e (not an ˘e): see EM s.v. and W. Heraeus, ‘Die Sprache des Petronius und die Glossen’ in J. B. Hofmann, ed., Kleine Schriften von Wilhelm Heraeus (Heidelberg ) . Garcea and Lomanto say that ‘[w]hile obba designates a vessel of above-average quality, camella . . . indicates a rather rough vessel’ (). But does the context in the passage of Persius not suggest that an obba is of below-average quality? And would Trimalchio have allowed rough vessels in his household?
NATA LI S
This fr. survives because it contains the words capitium and pittacium, both of which Gellius regards as vulgarisms (). It is certain from the passages mentioned in .n. capitium that this word may be regarded as a technical term related to garments; it is not clear why Gellius thought it was a vulgarism. The only extant author who talks about a tunica . . . aperta, quod vulgo capitium nominant is Jerome (Ep. .), but he wrote later than Gellius. Could L. not have taken capitium from the usual terminology associated with (women’s) garments (see below, n. capitium)? Metre: uncertain. Bonaria says that Ribbeck scans the line as a senarius. This is wrong. Ribbeck , like Ribbeck, , scans it as a cretic tetrameter catalectic (this scansion is adopted by Bonaria and Marshall in the OCT of Gellius). It is certainly possible that L. and other Roman mimographers composed parts of their mimes in cretics, but there is no evidence from L.’s other frs. or from the frs. of the other mimographers corroborating this view. The fr. starts as a trochaic septenarius, and has a significant wordend after the eighth element (tunicae/), but the word p´tt˘acµ¯um creates an unwanted BccD sequence which would violate Meyer’s law. For this reason, I adopt Fleckeisen’s arrangement of the words so as to produce two incomplete trochaic septenarii: scan line BcD; line bbcD aaBCdd A/. induis: the speaker is addressing someone and says that the addressee is putting a capitium on. But it is not clear whether the addressee puts the capitium on himself/herself (in this case, induo would govern only the accusative capitium; see Ter. Eun. meam [scil. vestem] ipse induit; OLD s.v. a), or whether the addressee puts the capitium on somebody else (in that case, induo would be constructed with the accusative capitium and with a dative of person; see Cic. Tusc. disp. . cui cum Deianira sanguine
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
Centauri tinctam tunicam induisset; OLD s.v. ). If the latter possibility were the case, the dative is missing, and the translation would need to be slightly modified. I also wonder whether the line refers to a man’s dressing up as a woman as part of a deceitful trick. capitium: there is detailed discussion of this obscure word, which has passed into the Romance languages (ML no. ), in Dalmasso – and in Garcea and Lomanto – (TLL .– confusingly put this fr. of L. under ‘foramen tunicae capiti aptum’; it should have been put under ‘tunica mulierum . . . lato foramine circa collum insignis’): ‘in Republican Rome, capitium designated a jacket or shawl that adhered to the tunic so as to become an appendix to the tunic itself. Eventually, in late and especially in ecclesiastical Latin, it came to mean the neck-opening of the tunic or a hood’ (Garcea and Lomanto n. ; for the sense of capitium in late Latin see TLL .–; .–.). The only extant early authors, apart from L., in whom this word is attested, are Aelius Stilo and Varro. Festus M = L says that the grammarian Stilo explains the neuter plural pescia as capitia ex pellibus agninis facta, quod Graeci pelles vocent pskh neutro genere pluraliter. Varro uses capitium in the sense of ‘a vest’ or ‘a bra’: LL . capitium ab eo quod capit pectus, id est, ut antiqui dicebant, comprehendit; De vita populi Romani frs. – Riposati (cited in Nonius . M = . L) make it clear that capitium was a woman’s garment (cf. Dig. ... muliebria sunt . . . stolae, pallia, tunicae, capitia, zonae); Nonius, unaware of Varro LL ., wrongly interpreted capitium = capitis tegmen in the Varronian passages he cites. Garcea and Lomanto say that Stilo assigns a different meaning to capitium than Varro. But he does not; Stilo only says that scipia were capitia made of lamb-skin (therefore, his comment is on the material from which capitia are made, not on the meaning of capitia itself). tunicae pittacium: the word pittacium is discussed by Dalmasso (); A. D’Ors (‘pittkion–pittaciarium’, Aegyptus ()
N ECYOM A N TI A
–); Garcea and Lomanto (). I take tunicae pittacium to be in apposition to capitium, and pittacium to designate a (small) piece of cloth attached to the tunic. The Greek word pittkion means ‘a tablet for writing on, label, ticket’ (attested in the comic playwright Dinolochus, in Diogenes Laertius, in Polybius, in papyri, and in inscriptions; see LSJ s.v.), and two of these meanings (‘label’ and ‘ticket’) are carried over in the Latinised form pittacium (see EM s.v.) and found in Petronius (Sat. ., .; see Smith ad .). In Celsus (..) the word means ‘a strip of leather’. L. is the first extant author to use this Grecism (did he introduce it into the Latin language?). It is not clear from the surviving instances of pittacium why Gellius regarded it as a vulgarism. N E C YO M A N T I A Gellius .. [Fg(=OXPN)d(=QZ)]: Item in Necyomantia [Gronovius: neciomantia FOPZ: ne cyonantia X: necromantia N: neciom˜acia Q] ‘cocionem’ [FOPNd: cotionem X] pervulgate [scil. Laberius] dicit, quem veteres ‘arillatorem’ [FXN: aryllatorem OPd: arulatorem ed. princ.: arylatorem Scioppius] dixerunt. Verba Laberi haec sunt: duas uxores? hercle hoc plus negoti est, inquit cocio: sex aediles viderat uxores? FOX: uxores PNd hercle hoc Bothe: hoc hercle X: hoc hercule FOPNd negoti FNZ: negotii PQ: negotio OX est inquit Fg: essen quid Z: esset quid Q: est, ecquid Gronovius: est, quam qui Ribbeck : est quam quod Fleckeisen: est: set quid Hertz cocio Fg: cocios d: coctio Ribbeck sex aediles Fg: ex ediles Z: exiles Q: sed aedilis Ziegler: vel sex aediles Bergk: seniles Gronovius: si exlex et mox victitat Bothe
Gellius ..– [Fg(=OXPN)d(=QZ)]:
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Percontabar Apollinarem Sulpicium, cum eum Romae adulescentulus sectarer, qua ratione diceretur ‘habeo curam vestri’ aut ‘misereor vestri’ et iste casus ‘vestri’ eo in loco quem videretur habere casum rectum. Is hic mihi ita respondit: ‘Quaeris’ inquit ‘ex me, quod mihi quoque est iamdiu in perpetua quaestione. Videtur enim non vestri oportere dici, sed vestrum, sicuti Graeci locuntur: pimeloÓmai Ëmän, kdomai Ëmän, in quo loco Ëmän aptius vestrum dicitur quam vestri et habet casum nominandi, quem tu rectum appellasti, [add. Hertz]. Invenio tamen’ inquit ‘non paucis in locis nostri atque vestri dictum, non nostrum aut vestrum’ . . . . [..] ‘Et Laberius in Necyomantia [FOXPd: necromantia N]: dum dµ˘utµus detinetur, nostri oblitus est verba et habet casum nominandi . . . nostri oblitus est om. d retinetur XP
detinetur FON:
NECROMANCY Gellius ..: Likewise, in Necromancy, [L.] uses the word cocio (‘dealer’) colloquially to signify what earlier writers called arillator (‘scavenger’). L.’s words are as follows: two wives? By god, this is more trouble, as the scavenger (cocio) said; he had seen six aediles . . .
Gellius ..–: I would often ask Sulpicius Apollinaris, when in my youth I was his pupil at Rome, for what reason people would say habeo curam vestri (‘I care for you’) or misereor vestri (‘I pity you’), and what he thought was the ‘direct’ case of vestri in each phrase. He gave me the following answer: ‘You are asking me’, he said,
N ECYOM A N TI A
‘something that I have been trying to answer for a long time. For it seems to me that one should not say vestri but vestrum, just as the Greeks say pimeloÓmai Ëmän and kdomai Ëmän; in this expression Ëmän corresponds more aptly to vestrum, rather than to vestri, and has the form vos as its nominative case, which you called “direct” case. However,’ he said, ‘I find in many places the forms nostri and vestri, not nostrum or vestrum.’ . . . [..] ‘L. too, in Necromancy, has: while detained for a longer time, he forgot us (nostri) . . .
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Gellius attributes to L., appears to be a Latinised form of the Greek feminine noun nekuomante©a (‘prophecy of the dead’), which in the second century AD was given as a subtitle to the eleventh book of the Odyssey (Hermog. Progymn. ), and is attested as an alternative title to Lucian’s Menippus (see LSJ s.v.; it does not appear in our extant sources before the second century AD). The Greek neuter noun nekuomante±on (‘prophecy-place of the dead’) is attested in extant literary texts more frequently than the feminine nekuomante©a, and occurs by the late fifth century BC (Hdt. ..h.; see LSJ s.v.). Cicero retained its Greek spelling and used it disparagingly in connection with the rites performed by Appius Claudius Pulcher (passage cited in Lacus Avernus). Like L., Pliny the Elder Latinised the feminine noun nekuomante©a, but he designated with it a painting of Nicias the Younger which, he says, existed at Athens (NH . Athenis necyomantea Homeri). The extant evidence then suggests that L. was the first to create out of the Greek concrete neuter noun nekuomante±on, known to at least the readers of Cicero’s Tusculans, the Latinised abstract feminine noun necyomant´a. Pliny the Elder will form in a similar fashion the rare compounds axinomantia ‘divination by means of axes’ (NH .) and hydromantia ‘water-divination’ (NH .). I have considered the possibility that L.’s Necyomant´a = Nekuomante±a,
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
‘The oracles of the dead’, but this does not seem likely because, if it were the case, Gellius would have written in Necyomantiis when citing L.’s fr. (there is no trace of an ablative plural in any of the MSS at ..). Sopater, the composer of phlyax drama, wrote a Nkuia Ghosts Called Up, but the exploitation of Homeric material is much clearer there than in L. ( = fr. Olivieri ï Iqakov ìOdusseÅv, toÉpª ti jaki mÅron, | presti. qrsei, qum). Although there is no extant Greek play entitled Nekuomante©a, Kock CAF and Olivieri Frammenti suggest that there was a Greek original, whose example L. followed. (Do they mean that he ‘translated’ this lost play into Latin in the same way that Plautus and others created fabulae palliatae out of Greek originals?) There is no evidence to support this view; in fact, what we may glean from L.’s frs. about L. as a playwright suggests that he composed plays which were not based on Greek originals. Henriksson (B¨uchertitel ) argues that there was a connection between this mime and the eleventh book of the Odyssey. But the plot of L.’s play need not have been a literary parody of Odysseus’ descent into Hades; L. may have parodied the religious practices and beliefs of his contemporaries without alluding to Homer: the evidence of Cicero Tusc. disp. . (dated to ) and his abusive remarks (dated to ) against the tribune P. Vatinius (Vat. quae te tanta pravitas mentis tenuerit, qui tantus furor ut, cum inaudita ac nefaria sacra susceperis, cum inferorum animas elicere, cum puerorum extis deos manis mactare soleas) show that necromantic practices were not unknown in the Roman republic, were met with disapproval, and offered an excellent opportunity for rhetorical exaggeration and parody (see D. Ogden, Greek and Roman Necromancy (Princeton ) –). The four famous nekuomante±a referred to by literary sources were located at Heraclea on the south coast of the Propontis, at Acheron at Ephyra in Thesprotia, in the promontory of Taenarum in the south of Peloponnese, and at Lake Avernus in Campania (these are discussed in detail by Ogden Greek and Roman Necromancy –); there may well have been more sites dedicated to necromancy about which we do not know. It is tempting to relate the plot of
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this mime to the mime entitled Lacus Avernus, especially because of the ‘prophecy place of the dead’ located at Lake Avernus, but I would not go so far as to argue that the mimes Lacus Avernus and Necyomantia are identical, or that their titles refer to the same play; it is possible that L. composed more than one play on a topic which, because of its comic potential, was popular with the Roman public (the same may have been the case with Fullo and Fullonicae). It is impossible to ascertain the outline of the story of this mime; Kehoe (Studies –) rightly demolishes the reconstruction of the plot offered by Mommsen and Crusius, the latter of whom wishes to relate the character referred to as cocio in Necyomantia to the character referred to as amorabunda in Lacus Avernus in order to create a story that involved an oracle which made a reference to the ‘two wives’ mentioned in .. However, Kehoe proceeds to offer his own speculative view, according to which L. in this mime mocked Julius Caesar by placing him in hell just as Seneca had done with Claudius in the Apocolocyntosis (Studies –). Kehoe’s view takes it for granted that L.’s mime was performed after Caesar’s death. This theory was originally suggested by T. Bergk N. Jhb. f. Phil. () , who saw in the words sex aediles (.) a reference to Caesar’s action in early of raising the number of aediles from four to six. Bergk, Kehoe, and Bonaria argue that, since Caesar was likely to have disliked parody of his political actions on the mime-stage, and since the joke about the ‘six aediles’ ought to be topical in order to be fully appreciated by the spectators, Necyomantia was performed shortly after March . Although I agree with these scholars that the humour of this line would have been weakened or lost if it had been delivered long after the event to which it refers, I very much doubt whether a performance of this mime in Caesar’s lifetime in early would have harmed L.’s status as a citizen, his career as a playwright, or the popularity of mime as a form of stage-entertainment in the late first century BC. This mime may have had nothing to do with Caesar, and the fr. may have been uttered as an aside joke which did not contribute to the play’s main plot (see below). The ritual of the re-animation
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
of the dead has many comic possibilities and may have involved sorcerers, ventriloquists, and other low-life characters (Ogden Greek and Roman Necromancy –; M. W. Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (London ) –); therefore it is unwise to view this mime as a satire on exclusively political themes. This fr. survives because it contains the rare word cocio (spelled in our extant sources also as coctio or coccio; ‘[app.] A dealer’ (OLD s.v.); see CGL . cocio metab»lov; . metaprthv cocio; . ariolator cocio ¾ metaboleÅv), which Gellius says that L. used colloquially (pervulgate dicit, ..) to designate what was meant by the term arillator (it should be stressed then that Gellius does not single out cocio because of its formation but because of its unusual meaning). The ancient view about the etymology of the noun cocio, which has passed into the Romance languages (see ML no. ), is imaginative and amusing: Paul.-Fest. M = L Coctiones dicti videntur a cunctatione, quod in emendis vendendisque mercibus tarde perveniant ad iusti pretii finem. EM (s.v.) and OLD (s.v.) speculate that it may be of Etruscan origin; LHS (I ) comment on its vulgar formation (‘Assibilierung des t vor vulglat. i’; see also G. Gr¨ober Archiv f. lat. Lexik. () ; and especially W. Heraeus, ‘Die Sprache des Petronius und die Glossen’, in J. B. Hofmann, ed., Kleine Schriften von Wilhelm Heraeus (Heidelberg ) –). L. appears to be the first extant literary author to have used the word, which occurs again in Petronius in an episode constructed so as to resemble a scene from low drama (Sat. . et cociones qui ad clamorem confluxerant, nostram scilicet de more ridebant invidiam; see Panayotakis Theatrum ). Camerarius emended the MS reading coaetio in Pl. Asin. to coctio or cocio, but this has found favour with neither Leo nor Lindsay. Cocio is also attested in CIL . (Miccio cocio) and .. (Pacatianus cocio). Apparently cociones were known for their greed (Porph. on Hor. S. .. Mercurialem quasi lucrosum, quia Coctio appellabatur.
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omnes enim coctiones lucro student). Gellius (..) says that in ‘early writers’ (veteres) a cocio was called arillator (see Paul.-Fest. M = L Arillator, qui etiam coccio appellatur, dictus videtur a voce Graeca, quae est a²re, id est tolle, quia sequitur merces, ex quibus quid cadens lucelli possit tollere). But the term arillator (OLD s.v.: ‘A broker, huckster’) is not attested in our extant literary sources or in inscriptions (for its occurrences in the glossaries see TLL .–). Metre: I scan the fr. as two trochaic septenarii (the second of them incomplete) with synizesis in duas at the beginning of the first line (see Lindsay Verse and ). If the word which followed viderat in the missing context started with a consonant, Meyer’s law would not be violated (v´d˘er¯at, BcD): scan line BCD ABCD aBCD ABcD; line BCD ABcD . Bergk inserts qui at the beginning of the second line and scans the fr. as two iambic octonarii (the second of them incomplete); this would not involve synizesis in duas: line aBCD ABCD/ aBCD ABcD; line BCD ABcD . But the addition of qui or of ubi both spoils the symmetry of having two cardinal numerals (duas – sex) at the beginning of these lines, and is unnecessary given the proverbial nature of the phrase hercle . . . cocio (see the apparatus criticus of Ribbeck ad loc. and Otto Sprichw¨orter ). duas uxores: this phrase has been taken to be an allusion to the rumour, (according to Suetonius) spread by Helvius Cinna, that Caesar was thinking of legalising polygamy: Iul. . Helvius Cinna tr. pl. plerisque confessus est habuisse se scriptam paratamque legem, quam Caesar ferre iussisset cum ipse abesset, uti uxores liberorum quaerendorum causa quas et quot vellet ducere liceret. Roman matrons would not have been amused if this had happened (see Cato fr. Malcovati = Gell. ..; Holford-Strevens Gellius –). Cinna was tribunus plebis in ; if then we were to interpret duas uxores as a satirical comment on the ‘forthcoming’ law about polygamy, this would tie in nicely with Cicero’s evidence regarding necromancy (passage cited in Lacus Avernus and dated to ) and with the increase of aediles from four to six (see below, n. sex aediles) in early . Although Suetonius is not the
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most reliable source one could wish for, and despite the fact that the number two (i.e. wives) does not appear in his passage (he talks of ‘as many wives as Caesar wishes’), it is difficult to resist the temptation of interpreting this fr. as one which abounds in topical references to events happening in /. Dio (..–) mentions the possibility of the legalisation of polygamy in connection with persons whom he does not name, and refers to it as an example of extreme proposals made by flatterers or by people who wished to make Caesar appear ridiculous to the Roman public: ¢rxanto mn gr timn aÉt¼n Þv kaª metrisantaá procwroÓntev d, peid ca©ronta to±v yhjizomnoiv Ûrwn (pln gr ½l©gwn tinän pnta aÉt dxato), e© ti me±zon llov llo kaq ì Ëperboln sjeron, o¬ mn ËperkolakeÅontev aÉt¼n o¬ d kaª diaskÛptontev. mlei kaª gunaixªn Âsaiv n qels sune±na© o¬ t»lmhsn tinev pitryai. plus negoti est, inquit cocio: on the rare noun cocio see . It seems unlikely that the cocio mentioned here is a character in this play (as I wrongly argued in Theatrum ). The way in which the line is phrased (there is no ut ‘as’ preceding inquit) suggests both that the scavenger’s words hercle hoc plus negoti est are reported by someone else, and that they have a proverbial flavour (‘“By god, this is more trouble”, as the scavenger said’; cf. Otto Sprichw¨orter ). See Lucil. M = W (‘hoc aliud longe est’, inquit qui cepe serebat) and Petr. Sat. .– (the uneducated freedman Echion is speaking) ‘oro te’ inquit Echion centonarius ‘melius loquere. “modo sic, modo sic” inquit rusticus; varium porcum perdiderat’, with Smith ad loc.: ‘an unusual form of expression in which a general remark becomes amusing when put into some particular setting. . . . In the equivalent type of expression in English parataxis is not used: “ . . . , as the bishop said to the actress.”.’ D. MacDowell draws my attention to the structure of a similar type of joke in Arist. Vesp. – (with MacDowell ad loc.). In other words, the speaker of L.’s fr. has just seen or heard something about two wives. He exclaims: ‘two wives?’, and then he proceeds to cite the humorous phrase which a cocio allegedly used when he (i.e.
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the cocio) saw six aediles, namely that two wives (like six aediles) are even more (plus) trouble than one wife (and four aediles). The speaker seems then to give a misogynistic twist to a proverbial phrase. If so, the cocio may have nothing to do with the plot. On the significance of the number of aediles see below. On negotium = ‘trouble, annoyance’ see OLD s.v. . sex aediles: according to our sources, there were two plebeian aediles elected every year until . But in that year it was decreed that two more aediles be elected (later named curule aediles), this time from the patricians, not the plebeians: see Livy .. quibus [scil. patriciis] cum ab universis gratiae actae essent, factum senatus consultum ut duumviros aediles ex patribus dictator populum rogaret, patres auctores omnibus eius anni comitiis fierent (and Oakley ad loc.); I. Lydus De Mag. . = . Bandy goran»moi tssarev; Dig. ... deinde cum placuisset creari etiam ex plebe consules, coeperunt ex utroque corpore constitui. tunc, ut aliquo pluris patres haberent, placuit duos ex numero patrum constitui: ita facti sunt aediles curules. But in early Caesar nominated, apart from the above four aediles, two more plebeian aediles: Dio .. kaª v mn t¼ präton tov tam©ai tessarkonta proeceir©sqhsan ãsper kaª pr»teron, kaª goran»moi t»te präton dÅo mn kaª x eÉpatridän, tssarev d k toÓ plqouv; Suet. Iul. . senatum supplevit, patricios adlegit, praetorum aedilium quaestorum, minorum etiam magistratuum numerum ampliavit; Dig. ... deinde Caius Iulius Caesar duos praetores et duos aediles qui frumento praeessent et a Cerere cereales constituit. Ita duodecim praetores, sex aediles creati sunt. The point of the joke then is that, just as the scavenger was distressed by the sight of two more aediles in addition to the existing four, so the speaker feels alarmed at the prospect of having more than one wife. This fr. survives as part of a list of passages which Gellius’ teacher Sulpicius Apollinaris allegedly communicated to Gellius himself
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
when he taught him in Rome (.. cum eum Romae adulescentulus sectarer). Apollinaris’ aim was to answer Gellius’ query regarding the correct use of the genitive plural form of the first person personal pronoun nostri as opposed to nostrum. Gellius insists that the impromptu tutorial he got on the genitives mei, tui, nostri, and vestri is reported exactly as it was delivered to him many years ago (.. haec memini mihi Apollinarem dicere, eaque tunc ipsa, ita ut dicta fuerant, notavi), but it is doubtful that he would remember passages (two of them lengthy) from prose and verse authors and his exact conversation with his teacher; it is more likely that he reconstructed the episode having looked in his sources at the passages he cites. It is possible then that the views expressed here are an elaborated version of what may have been said to Gellius in Rome. The issue in question is conveniently reported to have been in Apollinaris’ mind for a long time (.. quod mihi quoque est iamdiu in perpetua quaestione); his initial reaction to his pupil’s question is to consider the form vestrum preferable to vestri as a genitive governed by the expression habeo curam, because vestrum seemed more akin than vestri to the Greek genitive Ëmän as used in the expressions pimeloÓmai Ëmän (‘I take care of you’) and kdomai Ëmän (‘I care for you’). But Apollinaris then quotes Sulla (Res Gestae fr. Peter), Terence (Ph. ), Afranius () and L. as authors who use nostri rather than nostrum as genitive of person concerned or genitive objective governed by the verbal forms in mentem veniat, paenitet, miseritust, and oblitus est. The plural genitives nostri and vestri are not attested in Plautus, who used nostrum and nostrorum; the form nostri appears with Terence (Ph. ; the case in Andr. is doubtful; P. McGlynn, Lexicon Terentianum (London/Glasgow ) ), who also uses the plural genitive forms nostrum (Andr. ), nostrarum (Eun. ), and vostrarum (HT ; Hec. ): for the formation and the meaning of these genitives see LHS –; Sommer Handbuch –. Apollinaris does not attempt to distinguish between nostrum as a partitive genitive and nostri as an objective genitive, nor does he suggest that nostrum may have been applied to a group of people viewed collectively as one body, whereas nostri may have been used
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when the context required these people to be viewed as single individuals (see Sommer Handbuch ). His conclusion (..– ) is that, just as vestrorum is often used for no reason instead of vestrum, so nostri is often used for nostrum for the sole reason that an archaic author who was not careful enough with his use of the Latin language sanctioned the form nostri, which was subsequently adopted by literary authors, including L., who revered the authority antiquity bestowed upon this form. But L. is unlikely to have used this genitive only on the grounds that he regarded it as an archaism or a colloquialism; by L.’s time nostri was used in literary compositions and by educated people (for its occurrence in Catullus and Cicero see n. nostri oblitus est). Metre: Bonaria, like Ribbeck , prints r˘etµn¯etur rather than d¯etµn¯etur and scans the fr. as a complete senarius (for the monosyllabic ending est see Soubiran Essai –); but Bonaria disagrees with Ribbeck as far as the scansion of diutius is concerned: Ribbeck scans d˘um dµ¯utµus retinetur, aaBcD aaBC, whereas Bonaria scans d¯um dµ˘utµus retinetur, AbbcD aaBC (which is preferable). The discussion about the quantity of the second syllable of diutius starts with L. Mueller (De re metrica (Leipzig ) ), who argues for a proceleusmatic rhythm of the word in Lucilius; O. Ribbeck (RhM () ) concurs. C. Dziatzko (RhM () –) argues the same for diutius as attested in passages of Plautus, Terence, Turpilius, Afranius, Pomponius, and Pacuvius. However, on the basis of Pl. Rud. (eo vos, amici, detinui dµ¯utµus), Sommer (Handbuch ) argued that the older scansion of this word was dµ¯utius; in this he was corrected by J. P. Postgate (CQ () –), who re-examined the evidence for diutius, including this passage of L. and Phaedr. Epilogus fruar dµ˘utµus si celerius coepero. Although I agree with Postgate that the second syllable of dµ˘utµus should be short in the fr. of L., none of the above scholars considered the possibility that the reading retinetur is not right. Like Marshall in the OCT of Gellius, I print detinetur (see below), and scan the fr. as an incomplete trochaic septenarius: Bcdd ABcD A/BCD aB. I assume that the missing word at the end of the line was a pure iamb. Luchs’ law is not violated
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
by obl´t˘us ¯est (DaB rather than the desired DAB), because est is not an unaccented word. detinetur: the reading of MSS FON is to be preferred to retinetur in MSS XP, although it makes it impossible to scan the line as a complete senarius; detineo ‘I detain’ seems to have a slightly less forceful sense than retineo ‘I hold back, I prevent from escaping’, but this distinction is not always observed, even in Plautus; I print detinetur because it creates a good alliterative effect before the significant word-end of the line (dum diutius detinetur), and its combination with diutius can be paralleled in drama: see Pl. Rud. (cited above). nostri oblitus est: on the distinction between nostri and nostrum see . Forms of obliviscor + the genitive plural nostri referring to one person are found in Cat. . si nostri oblita taceret and Cic. Ad fam. .. si nostri oblitus es (but cf. Ad fam. .. non te oblitum mei). Since the context of L.’s fr. is missing, I have tentatively translated the word nostri as ‘us’, but it may well be that the speaker is talking only about himself/herself (see also the passage of Sulla cited in Gell. ..). It is impossible to say anything with certainty about the context of this fr. NUP TIAE Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)T]: Iniquat [gd: Inquit T: Iniquat iniquus fit Fmg , Pmg , Vmg , Emg ]. Laberius Nuptiis: aequum animum indigna iniquat contumelia verba animum . . . contumelia om. T aequum E: equum FHLPVdT indigna iniquat Passeratius: indignati niquat L : indignat iniquat F L AXDMO: indignati iniquat H : indignanti iniquat H PVE: indignant iniquat F C: indignatione iniquat Onions
NUPTIAE
THE WEDDING C ER EMONY Nonius . M = . L: Iniquat. L., in The wedding ceremony: an undeserved insult ruffles (iniquat) the unruffled mind
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Nonius attributes to L., suggests a conventional theme in Greco-Roman drama. Plays entitled ‘Wedding’ are attested from the fourth century BC onwards: Sophilus Gmov ; Antiphanes Gmov vel Gmoi –; Araros ëUmnaiov –; Philemon Gmov –; Diphilus Gmov . The popularity of the topic is evidenced also by its exploitation in fabula palliata (Caec. Stat. Gamos ; see also, in Pl. Cas. –, the mock-marriage of Chalinus, pretending to be Casina, and Olympio) and in the native fabula Atellana (Pompon. Nuptiae = Frassinetti). Its comic potential ensured its growth beyond dramatic genres. Seneca the Elder (Contr. ..) refers to the relationship of a man with a prostitute as vere mimicae nuptiae, in quibus ante in cubiculum rivalis venit quam maritus. Ps.-Quintilian (Decl. . Winterbottom) talks of an invalid marriage in theatrical terms: ecquid semoto illo nuptiarum mimo atque inani tantummodo nomine. In an episode strongly coloured by references to low drama, Petronius constructs a mock-wedding between sevenyear-old Pannychis and sixteen-year-old Giton (see Sat. –.; and Panayotakis Theatrum –). It is impossible to reconstruct the treatment of this theme in L. Nonius cites this fr. because it contains the unusual verbal form iniquat, which (as far we know) occurs only in L., and is wrongly
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
glossed by F as iniquus fit (CGL .); its use in this fr. makes it clear that it is construed as an active verb (TLL ..– ‘iniquum (sc. non tranquillum) reddere’). The extant evidence suggests that L. coined a denominative verb which he appears to have derived from the adjective iniquus (in- ‘privativum’ + aequus; see OLD s.v. iniquo, LHS , on iniquus, Fischer Observations , and Carilli Hapax ). For similar formations in L. see n. conlabella and cf. depudicavit ((a)) and praeviridantibus (.). Metre: a senarius; scan AbbCD aBCD aBcD. Meyer’s law is not violated at the second foot (´nd´gn(a), CD rather than the desirable cD) because of the ensuing elision. The three elisions aequ(um) anim(um) indign(a) lead the audience quickly to the unusual and important word in the line, iniquat, after which there is significant word-end. aequum animum: the exploitation of the concept of ‘mental calmness’ in moral maxims heard in the theatre seems to have been hackneyed; see Pl. Rud. (spoken by Trachalio to Ampelisca to console her for her own and Palaestra’s misfortunes) animus aequos optumum est aerumnae condimentum; Aul. pol si est animus aequos tibi, sat[is] habes qui bene vitam colas; Publ. sent. M Medicina calamitatis est aequanimitas. indigna . . . contumelia: I wonder whether this line was in any way directed against Mark Antony’s silly sententia as reported by Cicero: Phil. .– Sententiolas edicti cuiusdam memoriae mandavi quas videtur ille [scil. Antonius] peracutas putare: ego autem qui intellegeret quid dicere vellet adhuc neminem inveni. ‘Nulla contumelia est quam facit dignus.’ Primum quid est dignus? nam etiam malo multi digni, sicut ipse. An quam facit is qui cum dignitate est? Quae autem potest esse maior? Quid est porro facere contumeliam? quis sic loquitur? But any such interpretation should also take into account that the phrase indigna contumelia is attested elsewhere: Ter. Ph. – absenti tibi | te indignas seque dignas contumelias | numquam cessavit dicere hodie.
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indigna iniquat: on the formation of iniquat see . The clever etymological game that L. plays with the neologism iniquat and the adjective aequum, itself in homoeoteleuton with animum, baffled many scribes (see the incorrect readings in the apparatus criticus), and becomes even more complicated through the alliterative juxtaposition of indigna (in- ‘privativum’ + dignus) and iniquat, and by the hyperbaton iniqua . . . contumelia. The acoustic effect is impressive. The line seems to have been constructed so as to put in direct confrontation the aequus animus at the beginning of the line and the contumelia at its end. The fr. clearly reads like a sententia (cf. ), and it is unsurprising, though not entirely justifiable, that Z. K. Vysoky (Listy Filologick´e () ) compares this line to the apophthegm of Publilius B bonus animus laesus gravius multo irascitur; Giancotti (Mimo ) and Carilli (Hapax ) see a conceptual similarity between this fr. and the following bipartite maxims of Publilius: G gravissima est probi hominis iracundia; F furor fit laesa saepius sapientia; and M mutat se bonitas irritata iniuria. Cf. also the pithy sayings involving the phrase aequus animus (cited above), and the obscurely phrased maxim of Mark Antony which Cicero dissects and ridicules in both language and subject-matter (quoted fully in the previous entry). It would be unwise to speculate on the speaker of and the circumstances surrounding this fr., but it is possible that the missing context deflated any high or sombre sentiments evoked by this line. PARILICII Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Foria [FHL PVEd: feria L ], stercora [F H L PVEd: stercore F : astercora L : tercora H ] liquidiora . . . . Laberius [ed. princ.: lauerius g] in Pariliciis [Ribbeck, : panilicis FHLVE: panicilicis P: Pannilicis Ziegler: Pariliis Ribbeck : Paliliis L. Mueller dubit. in app. crit.: Panilicis Bothe dubit.: Paliliciis Bothe ]:
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
foriolus esse videre: in coleos cacas
Foriolus, qui foria [FH LPVE: feria H ] facile emittat, soluti scilicet [F PVE: lutis licet F L: solutis scilicet H: saluti scilicet Mercerus ] ventris. verba Laberius . . . ventris om. d verba foriolus esse . . . cacas om. P foriolus FHLE: feriolus V esse FHLVE: es Perottus: ut C. F. W. M¨uller: em L. Mueller videre Ribbeck : videres FHLV E: videris V esse vid. FHLVE: videris esse Lindsay dubit. in app. crit. coleos FH LVE: culeos H : coles (scil. caules) Buecheler: vel coleos Ribbeck in app. crit.: coleis L. Mueller cacas FHLVE: cacas Ribbeck in app. crit.: cacas Luchs
T H E F E S T I VA L O F PA L E S Nonius . M = . L: Foria, liquid excrement . . . . L., in The Festival of Pales, has: . . . you seem to have the runs (foriolus); you’re shitting on your bollocks . . .
Foriolus is used of a person who has diarrhoea, obviously a person with loose bowels. C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime attributed to L. presents problems. It is reasonable to conclude that the unintelligible MS readings Panilicis (which Lindsay prints in his edn of Nonius at .) and Panicilicis are not neologisms designating the title of an otherwise unattested festival, but corrupt versions of the adjective Pariliciis: palaeographically the corruption is easy to explain because of the similarity between ri and ni and the common error of omitting one i in the suffix -iciis. The fact that all the extant MSS
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of Nonius report the ending -icis suggests that the consonant c was part of the correct reading: this rules out the emendation of Ribbeck Pariliis, which however was on the right track, unlike Ziegler’s nonsensical Pannilicis. L. Mueller’s Paliliis and Bothe’s Paliliciis are conjectures worth considering but ultimately not to be preferred to Ribbeck’s Pariliciis, because it is easier to mistake -ri- for -ni- than -li- for -ni-. The adjective Pariliciis, which in L.’s title should be understood as an ablative plural masculine adjective qualifying the missing noun ludis, is also attested in Pliny the Elder designating the star-group Hyades (see NH . hoc est vulgo appellatum sidus Parilicium, quoniam XI kal. Mai. urbis Romae natalis, quo fere serenitas redditur, claritatem observationi dedit; Kidd Aratus ), and seems to have been formed with the suffix -µcius on the analogy of adjectives associated with festivals, such as Compitalicius (Compitalia), natalicius (Natalis), Floralicius, Saturnalicius, Cerealicius (see E. Woelfflin Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () –; M. Leumann Glotta () = Kleine Schriften (Zurich und Stuttgart ) ; LHS ). The festival of Parilia was an agricultural celebration in honour of Pales, the (male or female) tutelary deity of shepherds and flocks (Varro LL . Palilia dicta a Pale; but cf. Paul.-Fest. M = L Pales dicebatur dea pastorum, cuius festa Palilia dicebantur; vel, ut alii volunt, dicta Parilia, quod pro partu pecoris eidem sacra fiebant; Charis. . K = . B Palilia dicuntur. Pales enim dea pastoralis est, cuius dies festus; nisi quod quidam a partu Iliae Parilia dicere maluerunt; Roscher –; Fowler Festivals –; Scullard Festivals –). It was celebrated on April, which, incidentally, was regarded as Rome’s birthday (Paul.-Fest. M = L Parilibus Romulus Urbem condidit, quem diem festum praecipue habebant iuniores), and at least in Propertius’ time it involved drunken crowds jumping over bonfires of straw (.. annuaque accenso celebrata Parilia faeno; see Camps ad loc.). Ovid (F. .–; with B¨omer ad loc.) describes fully how farmers celebrated the day, and how he participated in the ritual. In it was decreed that horse-races be included in the urban celebrations of the Parilia, and Dio says that the ulterior motive behind this innovation was not the desire to celebrate
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
the anniversary of the foundation of Rome but Caesar’s wish to celebrate his victory over Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, the elder son of Pompey the Great, whom Caesar defeated at the battle of Munda in that year (.. t te Par©lia ¬ppodrom© qant, oÎti ge kaª di tn p»lin, Âti n aÉto±v ktisto, ll di tn toÓ Ka©sarov n©khn, Âti ¡ ggel©a aÉtv t protera© pr¼v spran j©keto, timqh; cf. ..). In Cicero (Ad Att. ..) writes to Atticus that, in the Parilia of that year (i.e. after Caesar’s death), his nephew Quintus was wearing a garland (coronatus) honouring Caesar, and a year later he mentions a slanderous rumour that he will succeed Caesar as a dictator on the day of the Parilia (Phil. .). Therefore, because of its alleged connection with Rome’s birthday and with Caesar’s victory over Gn. Pompeius, the festival of the Parilia is an event of special significance. It is tempting then to date L.’s mime at the time of the revival of interest in the festival of Parilia, and to visualise (as Carilli Note – does) an attack against Caesar as the hidden link connecting the plot of this mime with the plots of other Laberian mimes, whose titles indicate festivals directly affected by an action of the dictator (Compitalia, Saturnalia). But there is no evidence corroborating this view, which is also weakened by the fact that L. composed mimes whose titles point to festivals that appear to have nothing to do with Caesar (Anna Peranna). It may well be that in L.’s Parilicii the festival of the Parilia functioned only as the background against which the events of the story unfolded, and that these events were not connected with the contemporary political scene. This fr. survives because it contains the word foriolus (nowhere else attested in extant Latin literature), which Nonius relates to the noun foria (‘liquid excrement’), the entry at this point in his treatise. Nonius appears to treat foria as a neuter plural noun (so does TLL ..), although foria is unmistakably
PA R I LI C I I
feminine singular in Varro (RR .. quidam adiciunt perfunctas esse [scil. sues] a febri et a foria). Although the gender of the noun may have changed, its meaning appears to be the same. Its etymology is uncertain (OLD s.v.), but the scholiast on Iuv. . Wessner relates the noun forica to the verb forire, which he glosses as follows: forire est pro deonerare ventrem, forire est nam foras eicere (see the extracts from the glossaries cited in TLL ..– ; .–); EM (s.v. foria) note: ‘Mot vulgaire, rapproch´e de foris par e´ tymologie populaire’. Foria, foriolus, and the compound verb conforire (Pompon. Maccus = Frassinetti conforisti me, Diomedes) are sub-literary vulgarisms (see Adams Vocabulary – ) which have passed into the Romance languages (ML no. , nos. and ). It seems then that L. coined the denominative adjective foriolus from the low word foria and the suffix -lo-, which occurs in nouns such as hariolus (see EM s.v. haruspex and Fischer Observations ), and in the diminutive ending -olus (cf. filiolus; LHS , ). It is possible that the diminutive force of the suffix -olus suggests that foriolus be rendered ‘someone who suffers a little from diarrhoea’, but it is more likely that, as Carilli (Hapax n. ) notes with a reference to B. Zucchelli, Sulle formazioni latine in -lo non diminutive (Parma ) and , ‘in foriolus il suffisso -lo non ha valore diminutivo, ma, come in hariolus, indica una qualit`a permanente’. Metre: the fr. as transmitted by the MSS has metrical problems caused by the final syllable of videres. Ribbeck’s emendation of videres to videre restores the iambic rhythm by eliding the e in vider(e), makes the error of the scribe easy to explain (the ending -es in videres may have been due to the first two letters of the following word esse), and can be justified linguistically (on the second person singular ending of the present indicative -re, which Plautus and Terence used but Cicero avoided, see Lindsay Language –). But I do not follow Ribbeck and Bonaria in scanning the fr. as one complete senarius (f˘orµ˘ol˘us ¯ess˘e vµd¯er(e): ´n c¯ol˘eo¯s c˘ac¯as), because Luchs’ law is violated with the sequence c¯ol˘eo¯s c˘ac¯as (DaB cD). I prefer the arrangement of the words in Lindsay’s edn of Nonius, adopted also by Carilli, which makes
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
the fr. two incomplete trochaic septenarii: scan line bbcD; line BccD ABcD aB. Meyer’s law is not violated in the sequence c¯ol˘eo¯s (BcD). Lindsay tentatively suggests reversing the order of esse videris (the reading of V ) to videris esse; this means that the fr. would scan as two incomplete iambic octonarii, which is perfectly possible. Luchs suggests scanning the fr. as a complete trochaic septenarius (foriolus videris esse quia cacas in coleos, bbcD aBcD abbcD ABcD) but this involves both the reversal of esse videris and the addition of quia. foriolus: . videre: see n. above on the metre of the fr. in coleos cacas: the etymology, the literary and inscriptional occurrences, and the register of both coleus, the obscene word for ‘testicle’ (see TLL .–), and caco, the reduplicated verbal form designating defecation (attested first in Pomponius), are fully discussed in Adams Vocabulary (see Index s.v. caco and coleus; particularly, , –); L.’s fr. is the sole instance of the combination of cacare and coleus, and may be explained if one compares it to the literary passages and the graffiti, cited by Adams Vocabulary –, indicating that a man or a woman who suffered pedicatio (i.e. was sodomised) often defecated on the penis (mentula) of the man who sodomised him/her (the usual expression for this act appears to have been mentulam cacare). Adams does not cite L.’s fr. in the list of passages which have a similar meaning to (or the same point as) CIL . (hanc [scil. mentulam supra pictam] ego cacavi: the sodomised speaker says that he defecated on a penis, presumably on one which sodomised him), but he (i.e. Adams) does admit that the alliterative expression in coleos cacare ‘must have savoured of gross indecency’ (; Adams’ interpretation of Pomponius’ fr. cited above seems to me entirely in the spirit of the low Atellane farces). My view is that in L.’s mime this fr. was addressed to someone who had sodomised a man or a woman; the speaker is being sarcastic (hence the
PAU P E RTA S
verb videre or videris ‘you appear’) when he or she says that the addressee suffers from diarrhoea (foriolus). What he or she refers to as ‘shitting on the bollocks’ (in coleos cacas) is actually a reference to the pedicatio practised by the addressee with the result that there are traces of the excrement of the pedicatus or the pedicata on the testicles of the pedicator. I wonder whether this passage may be considered as implicit evidence for the hypothesis that a phallus was worn by mimes and was visible on the stage. (The evidence for stage phalluses in Old Comedy, the mime-plays of the time of Choricius, and the popular Turkish Shadow Theatre, itself possibly derived from mime-performances, is gathered by J. Nimmo Smith in FILELLHN: Studies in Honour of Robert Browning (Venice ) and n. .) PAUPERTAS Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)CXDMO]: Bidentes qui [FHL PVEXDMO: quia L C] aestimant ob eam causam oves a Vergilio dictas quod duos dentes habeant, pessime ac vitiose [FH LPVEXDMO: a vitiose H C: a vitio L. Mueller] intellegunt [F HLPVECXDMO: intellegant F ] [bidentes quasi biennes quod bimae immolentur Pmg Vmg Emg ]. nam nec duos dentes habent, et hoc quidem ut [scripsi: et codd.] genus monstri est [om. F ]. at [scripsi: et codd.] melius intellegi potest, si biennes [Quicherat: biennis gCXDMO: biennis L. Mueller] dixerit [gCXDMO: dixerint Quicherat: dixeris L. Mueller] auctoritate [H L PVE: auctoritatem FH L CDMO: actoritatem X] < . . . > [lacunam statuit Ribbeck : Onions]. Pomponius in Atellana . . . Laberius in Paupertate: visus hac noctu bidentis facere propter viam verba Pomponius . . . viam om. CXDMO visus g: visus Carilli hac noctu Quicherat: ac nocte g: hac nocte Laetus: hac nocte Bothe bidentis facere propter viam L. Mueller: bidentis propter
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – ) viam facere FHLPVE: bidenti propter viam | facere Ribbeck : bidenti propter viam | facere Onions: bidentes . . . propter viam | facere Quicherat: propter viam bidentis facere Carilli
Nonius . M = . L [FHLVE]: Licentiam [FHLVE: Licentia Mercerus ] feminino [FHLVE: feminini L. Mueller in notis]. Masculino Laberius in Paupertate [Stephanus: paupertatem FHLVE]: meo licentiatu meo Mercerus : eo FHLVE: ea Iuniusmg : om. Aldina tatus FHLVE: licentiatus Aldina
licentiatu Guietus: licen-
Nonius . M = . L [FHLVE]: Lanitium [H : Lanicium F LV: Lacinium F E: Laum H ] genere neutro [FH LVE: masculino H ] . . . . Feminino. Laberius [Iunius: laverius codd.] Paupertate: nihilne refert mollem e lanitia Attica an pecore ex hirto vestitum geras? nihilne Ribbeck, : nihil codd.: nil Bothe: nil Bergk refert L. Mueller mollem FHLVE: mollemne Quicherat: molem Gothofredus e lanitia FHLVE: ex lanitia Bergk: ex lanicia Bothe: e lanicia Mercerus : de lanitia Stephanus Attica FHLVE: Arctica Bothe in notis hirto Marquardt and Mau: hircorum FLVE: hyrcorum H: hircino Quicherat Buecheler: Marquardt and Mau: Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit. vestitum Scaliger: vestium FHLE: vestigium V: vestitium Salmasius: vestim Ziegler
POVERTY Nonius . M = . L:
PAU P E RTA S
Those who reckon that Virgil called sacrificial sheep bidentes because they were supposed to have only two teeth (duos dentes) show a most deplorable and faulty understanding of the meaning of the word. For these animals do not have two teeth: a monstrous idea! But the sense can be understood better, if Virgil had said biennes (‘two years old’) on the authority of < . . . >. Pomponius in the Atellane farce . . . L. in Poverty: last night I dreamt I sacrificed two-year-old sheep on account of the journey
Nonius . M = . L: Licentia (‘permission’), feminine. Masculine in L.’s Poverty: . . . with my permission
Nonius . M = . L: Lanitium (‘wool’), neuter . . . . It is feminine in L.’s Poverty: does it not matter at all whether you wear a soft garment of Attic wool or a one of shaggy rawhide?
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Nonius attributes on three occasions to L., may refer to ‘Poverty’ as the main character; Aristophanes personified in his PloÓtov both ‘Wealth’ (ploÓtov) and ‘Poverty’ (pen©a), the latter of whom is personified also in Alcaeus and Plato (see LSJ s.v. II). ‘Inopia’ appears briefly as the daughter of ‘Luxuria’ instigating the plot at the beginning of Plautus’ Trinummus. Wase () suggests that L.’s play showed a
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
debate between ‘Opulentia’ and ‘Paupertas’. But this view cannot be strongly supported (fr. , which could be interpreted as a statement uttered by ‘Opulentia’, is too general to corroborate Wase’s assertion). It is very unlikely that paupertas is here used metonymically = pauper (this use is attested later than L.; see TLL ..). Nonius cites this fr., which he attributes to L.’s Paupertas, as evidence against the silly view of some unnamed interpreters of Virgil who argue that the plural noun bidentes, which Virgil uses of sheep, designates sheep with two teeth (see Aen. . centum lanigeras mactabat rite bidentis; and Fordyce ad loc.: ‘bidens is the ritual term for a two-year-old sheep, not because it has only two teeth . . . but because ruminants at that age acquire their first two permanent teeth, which stand out prominently among the surviving milk-teeth’). The reason for the appellation bidentes was extensively discussed by Gellius (.; see HolfordStrevens Gellius – and n. , which is slightly inaccurate), but Nonius’ account bears little similarity to Gellius’ exposition (compare Gell. .. ostentum enim est et piaculis factis procurandum with Nonius . M = . L et hoc quidem ut [scripsi: et codd.] genus monstri est). Nonius dismisses the view of Virgil’s interpreters (Nonius uses a plural verb, but Gellius mentions only one person reading Virgil, and characterises him as quispiam linguae Latinae litterator (..; see also .. legebat barbare insciteque, .. indocti hominis)), and implicitly adopts the view of Publius Nigidius (De extis fr. Swoboda), stated by Gellius (..–), namely that the term bidentes signifies not only young sheep but all two-yearold sacrificial animals. Nonius does not acknowledge his debt to Nigidius or to Gellius, and does not continue the discussion of this issue, citing Gellius’ more detailed account of how he (i.e. Gellius) is supposed to have found in some notes on the pontifical law (.. invenimus in commentariis quibusdam ad ius pontificum pertinentibus) that through corruption biennes → bidennes
PAU P E RTA S
(allegedly meaning the same as biennes ‘two-year-old’) → bidentes. Nonius omits the view of I. Hyginus (De Verg. fr. Funaioli), stated but implicitly rejected by Gellius (..–), namely that the term bidentes designates sacrificial animals with two prominent teeth as a sign of their less tender age. Nonius also fails to mention another ancient theory, according to which bidentes were sheep with teeth in both jaws (for the evidence on these derivations, which prove that the grammarians did not really know the etymology of the word bidentes, see Carilli Note – n. ). Nonius compresses Nigidius’ view into a textually problematic conditional clause: Nonius says that Virgil could have avoided confusion, if he (i.e. Virgil; the participle dictas near the beginning of Nonius’ entry makes it clear that the subject of the verb dixerit in the clause si biennes dixerit is Vergilius) had used the word biennes (this should be in the plural, corresponding with the plural bidentes at the beginning of the entry, so Quicherat’s emendation is correct). The problems created by the nonsensical auctoritatem (why does Lindsay print auctoritatem Pomponius?) and by the difficult auctoritate of the MSS are resolved, if we print after the ablative auctoritate a lacuna, in which Nonius would presumably have mentioned the author or authors on whose authority it would have been easier to understand (melius intellegi) the word biennes than the word bidentes (would these authors be Nigidius Figulus and the unnamed author of the commentarii ad ius pontificum?). It is clear that we should not print the reading Pomponii of the ed. princ., both because the ensuing citations from Pomponius (Galli Transalpini – = – Frassinetti) and L. are not examples of the point Nonius was making in the previous sentence, and because Nonius gives the names of the authors he is citing in the nominative, not in the genitive (see Carilli Note –). We may conclude: Nonius, drawing heavily probably from Gellius, intends to explain that bidens = biennis (that is why he includes this discussion in the section of his treatise entitled ‘De proprietate sermonum’). However, he conflates a compressed account of the origin of the word bidentes with one passage from
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
Pomponius and one from L., both of which are irrelevant to the main point he is trying to make; the inclusion of the extract from Pomponius in Gellius’ account, on the other hand, makes perfect sense because it is used as evidence that the term bidentes can also refer to sacrificial animals other than sheep. Metre: uncertain. The fr. as transmitted by the MSS presents several problems, and all the scholarly attempts at scanning it involve emendations and alteration of the word-order as reported by Nonius. In his edn of Nonius, Lindsay scans the fr. as two incomplete iambic septenarii, but Meyer’s law is violated at the sixth foot of the first line: visus hac noctu bidenti | propter viam facere (h¯ac n¯oct¯u gives BCD rather than the desirable BcD). Carilli (Note ) too scans the fr. as an iambic septenarius but prints visus (so the speaker is referring to someone else’s dream) and changes the word-order: visus hac nocte | propter viam bidentis facere . Bothe adopts Leopardus’ conjecture bidente, inserts , and scans the fr. as cretic tetrameters: v´s˘us h¯ac n¯oct(e) bµd¯ent˘e pr¯opt¯er vµ¯am | f˘ac˘er˘e. Ribbeck , followed by Bonaria, adopts Quicherat’s emendation hac noctu, changes bidentis to bidenti, adds , and scans the fr. (which may by now be a far cry from what L. originally wrote) as two trochaic septenarii: visus hac noctu bidenti propter viam | facere (line BcD ABcD ABcD ABcD; line bbc). I adopt Quicherat’s emendation hac noctu and follow L. Mueller’s suggested word-order, which involves the addition of sum in order to complete the third metron with a long syllable: BcD ABcD A/bbcD ABcD. Luchs’ law is not violated. The addition of sum means that the speaker is talking about a dream that he himself had. In addition to the version printed in this edn, the only other scansion of the fr. I am inclined to favour is that of Carilli (cited above). hac noctu: on the frequent omission of h in Nonius’ MSS see F. Bertini Studi Noniani () , . On the form noctu (Quicherat’s emendation, which solves metrical problems) see
PAU P E RTA S
NW ; Lindsay Language ; Skutsch on Enn. Ann. ; Skutsch Glotta (–) –; LHS . The ablative hac nocte is frequently attested in Plautus as a phrase introducing a dream that a character saw on the night previous to his narration of the dream: see Curc. hac nocte quod ego somniavi dormiens; Curc. hac nocte in somnis visus sum viderier; Mil. – hac nocte in somnis mea soror geminast germana visa | venisse; Rud. – velut ego hac nocte quae processit proxuma | mirum atque inscitum somniavi somnium. The spelling noctu in the context of the narration of a dream occurs only once in Plautus: Mil. mi hau falsum evenit somnium quod noctu hac somniavi. For the sequence of the narration of dreams in Plautine comedy see J. Collart, Hommages a` J. Bayet (Brussels ) –. bidentis: Ribbeck emends the reading bidentis, which is attested in almost all the MSS, to bidenti; his emendation can be supported by the fact that facio in the sense of ‘I sacrifice’ or ‘I dedicate’ (TLL ..– and n. facere) could take a dative or an ablative case (hence Leopardus’ bidente). However, I find it unnecessary to repeat here the singular number bidenti recorded by Nonius in his citation of the fr. of Pomponius (bidenti verre) which preceded the extract of L., because facio = sacrifico can also be construed with an accusative (n. facere), and bidentis can be taken as an accusative plural (Stephanus was hinting at this with his emendation bidentes). Bidens = ‘a two-pronged hoe’ (OLD s.v.) is first attested in Lucretius (see TLL .–); as an insulting term used of a person with few teeth, it is very rare (Priap. ‘Quid hoc novi est?’ ( Buecheler) bidens amica Romuli senis; TLL .–). facere: on facio = sacrifico, governing an ablative, see Pl. St. ; Cato de Agr. , ; Pompon. – = – Frassinetti; Varro LL .; Tib. ..; Livy ..; Paul.-Fest. M = L, M = L; Serv. on Verg. Ecl. .. For passages with facio = sacrifico + dative see TLL ..–. On facio (‘I sacrifice’, ‘I dedicate’) governing an accusative, see Pl. Aul. ; Men. ;
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
Cato Agr. .; Varro Men. C`ebe; LL .; Ovid F. .–; Livy ..; OLD s.v. ; TLL ..–. : see n. on metre. propter viam: the phrase propter viam is well attested, both in inscriptions and in literature, in the sense ‘by the roadside’, ‘on the road’ (see CIL and ; Lucr. ., Cic. Verr. .., and TLL ..–). However, propter is also used with viam meaning ‘for the purpose of (a journey)’, with reference to ‘a sacrifice or meal celebrated before setting out on a journey’ (OLD s.v. propter B..d; TLL ..–: ‘ad petendum, perficiendum sim. vel iuvandum, favendum sim.’). See the inadequate information about this custom provided by Paul.-Fest. M = L: propter viam fit sacrificium, quod est proficiscendi gratia, Herculi aut Sanco, qui scilicet idem est deus; and Macr. Sat. ..: sacrificium apud veteres fuit quod vocabatur propter viam; in eo mos erat ut, siquid ex epulis superfuisset, igne consumeretur. Cf. the obscure joke of Sceparnio directed against the shipwrecked household of Labrax in Pl. Rud. propter viam illi sunt vocati ad prandium (and see Marx ad loc.). O. Crusius (Neue Jahrb. f¨ur d. class. Alt. () ), on the basis of the passage in Festus, unconvincingly argued that L.’s fr. refers to a vision Hercules had, when he reached a crossroad, about Poverty (obviously the Paupertas of the title) and Luxury. But the speaker of these lines is perhaps soliloquising or simply saying to an addressee that he (i.e. the speaker) dreamt last night that he sacrificed a young sheep to propitiate the gods before a journey; there is nothing in the fr. of L. or in the context of Nonius’ passage to make us think that the vision was Hercules’; Hercules was only the deity to whom such sacrifices were apparently made. This fr. is cited by Nonius in the section of his treatise entitled ‘De indiscretis generibus’, because it contains an instance of the
PAU P E RTA S
feminine noun licentia used by L. as a masculine noun. L. is fond of changing the grammatical gender of some of the substantives he uses in his mimes, and this he does either to reflect colloquial speech or to amuse the audience with linguistic innovations (see latrina – latrinum in , lanitium – lanitia in , grus (fem.) – grus (masc.) in ; possibly licentia – licentium in ). But Nonius does not comment on the fact that in this case (i.e. in ) L. not only changes the gender of licentia but also alters radically its ending and seems to write licentiatus (this word is a conjecture for the MSS’ licentatus and appeared for the first time in the Aldine edn of Nonius, but it was Guietus who put the form correctly in the ablative case in L.’s fr.). If licentiatus is the correct reading, it should be noted that L. experiments also with the endings of miseria – miserimonium in and pluvia – pluor in . TLL and OLD s.v. say that licentiatus is derived from licentia (OLD adds ‘+ -ATVS ’). However, if licentiatus and licentia mean exactly the same thing (and, since licentiatus does not occur elsewhere in extant Latin literature, we have only Nonius’ word for it that this is the case) it appears that L. formed the word not directly from licentia but with a double suffix (-a- and -to-) on the analogy of abstract nouns derived from verbs of the first conjugation, such as apparo → apparatus, balo → balatus, orno → ornatus (see LHS ; Fischer Observations ; Carilli Hapax ). If this is correct, it would presuppose the existence of the verb ∗ licentio, ∗ licentiare (∗ ‘I permit’), from which the abstract noun licentiatus (‘permission’) would be derived. On the other hand, if the MS reading licentatus were to be retained, I would likewise envisage its derivation from the unattested verb ∗ licento, ∗ licentare (∗ ‘I permit’) (but I do not know any parallels for this). Both licentiatus and licentatus would fit the metre but I am inclined to prefer licentiatus because it allows greater flexibility in scansion (see n. on metre). Metre: uncertain. Ribbeck takes these words to be the end of an iambic septenarius: aBcD aBˆD. I adopt Ribbeck’s view, but it is perfectly possible to place the words in a different metrical position. Lindsay too, in his edn of Nonius, gives the fr. an iambic rhythm but does not say what the original
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
position of these words was in the line. Bonaria suggests that they formed the beginning of an incomplete senarius: aBcD aBC. No-one (as far as I know) has considered the possibility that the words meo licentiatu were in the middle of a senarius (cD aBcD A) or of a trochaic septenarius (cD aBcD A). Such an arrangement would not violate Meyer’s or Luchs’ law. If we were to retain the MS reading licentatus, emended to licentatu, the fr. could be scanned as the beginning (though not the ending) of a senarius or an iambic septenarius, but Meyer’s law would be violated if we were to scan the words as the middle of a trochaic septenarius (cD aBCD ). meo licentiatu: the ablative meo is Mercerus’ conjecture for the MSS’ eo; the letter m was wrongly copied as the final letter of the title Paupertate; but Nonius does not use in + accusative to indicate the titles of the works from which he cites extracts. Iunius’ emendation ea is wrong because it does not take into account the context in which this fr. survives. On the formation of licentiatus see . Carilli (Hapax ) argues that the phrase meo licentiatu has a mock-legal character and was coined in order that it might echo the juristic expression meo arbitratu (see OLD s.v. arbitratus c and ). On the context in which this fr. survives see . Lanitium is a denominative neuter noun meaning ‘sheep’s wool’ (as a product); it is formed from lana + suffix -itium (see LHS ), and is first attested in Virgil Georg. .– si tibi lanitium curae, primum aspera silva | lappaeque tribolique absint. It then seems to disappear and re-appears in Pliny the Elder (NH ., ., .). If it is likely that ‘the Georgics occupied Virgil for seven years and was completed in ’ (R. F. Thomas, ed., Virgil: Georgics (Cambridge ) ), and if it is true that L. died shortly after Caesar, then the formation lanitia, which is attested only in L., seems
PAU P E RTA S
to have appeared before lanitium; yet the way in which Nonius structures the entries at this point in his treatise suggests that lanitia was an unusual variation on lanitium. The extant evidence shows that both of these words, unlike lana, which is attested as early as Plautus and Cato, were rare. Was Virgil aware of L.’s lanitia, and did he coin the form lanitium deliberately in order to differ from the mimographer? Was Pliny the Elder aware of both lanitia and lanitium, and if so, did he choose the form lanitium because it was sanctioned by an author who did not compose disreputable mimes? There is no easy answer to these questions. In L.’s fr. lanitia appears to refer to sheep as a group (i.e. not to individual animals), and to designate ‘sheep’s wool used to produce woollen garments’. It is formed from lana + suffix -itia, apparently on the analogy of mollitia (see LHS and Fischer Observations ; cf. Pliny NH . mollitiem lanae), and it may have undertones of softness of wool associated with the tenderness of lambs (compare lanitia with pueritia; LHS cites pullities ‘a set of young birds’). If lanitia is formed on the pattern of mollitia, L. wittily exploits the linguistic link between these words by putting mollem and lanitia close to each other, although they do not qualify one another (mollem qualifies vestitum, lanitia is qualified by Attica). Lanities, yet another denominative substantive derived from lana, appears later than both L. and Virgil (see TLL ..–; lanities is not recorded by OLD). Carilli (Hapax ) compares the substantives lanitium / lanitia / lanities with the nouns calvitium / calvitia / calvities, and concludes that ‘`e probabile che lanitia sia, come calvitia, una forma popolare, preferita da Laberio per ragioni stilistiche’. Metre: it is impossible to scan the fr. without any emendations. In his edn of Nonius, Lindsay retains as closely as possible the transmitted text, and scans the fr. as two iambic octonarii with synizesis at nihil and transposition of vestitum geras: nihil refert moll(em) e laniti(a) Attic(a) an pecor(e) ex hirto geras | vestitum (line ABCD ABccD a/BccD ABcD; line ABc). Carilli (Note ) adopts Buecheler’s supplement durum and scans the fr. as two senarii with synizesis at nihil: nihil refert moll(em) e laniti(a) Attica
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
an pecor(e) ex hirto vestitum geras. Quicherat’s sugges¯ a violates Meyer’s law in tion nµh´l r¯ef¯ert m¯oll¯emn(e) ¯e l¯anµtµ(a) Attµc¯ the second foot (r¯ef¯ert, CD) and should not be accepted. I adopt Iunius’ arrangement of the lines and Ribbeck’s scansion of the fr. as two senarii (this was also followed by Bonaria): scan line aBcD A/BCD aaBcD; line AbbCD A/D ABcD. Luchs’ law is not violated in the second line (v¯est´t¯um geras, DAB cD). |
lanitia Attica: on the form lanitia see . On adjectives of Greek origin in -icus in L. see . On the fine quality of Attic wool see Pliny NH . laudatissima [scil. lana] omnis e collo, natione vero Galatica, Tarentina, Attica, Milesia (see also . quin ipsae sordes pecudum sudorque feminum et alarum adhaerentes lanis – oesypum vocant – innumeros prope usus habent. in Atticis ovibus genito palma); Varro RR .. pleraque similiter faciendum in ovibus pellitis, quae propter lanae bonitatem, ut sunt Tarentinae et Atticae, pellibus integuntur, ne lana inquinetur, quominus vel infici recte possit vel lavari ac putari. pecore: on pecus used specifically of sheep (the first extant attestation of this use is in Accius) see OLD s.v. b; TLL ..–. ex hirto : the MSS readings hircorum and hyrcorum create both stylistic and metrical problems, and have won little favour amongst Nonius’ editors. The emendations of Marquardt and Mau and of Buecheler restore the meaning and the metre of the line, and arrange the words mollem . . . durum in an impressively chiastic order: the accusatives mollem and durum are not only semantically contrasted, but also placed in strategic places in the fr. so as to give the impression that they embrace the significant juxtaposition between the three-word prepositional phrases e lanitia Attica and pecore ex hirto; the arrangement of the words in the first part of the indirect question (noun lanitia – adjective Attica) corresponds with the arrangement of the words in the second part (noun pecore – adjective hirto); the arrangement of cases in the first part (accusative–ablative–ablative)
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corresponds in reverse order with the arrangement of cases in the second part (ablative–ablative–accusative). The common error in Nonius’ MSS regarding the confusion between c and t may also be invoked here in order to explain how the reading hircorum may have originated from an unintelligible reading hircodurum < hirto durum (Carilli Note ). Marquardt and Mau’s hirto and Buecheler’s durum may also be supported by passages in which hirtus is associated with the roughness of woolly animals, including sheep (Lucil. M = W pascali pecore ac montano, hirto atque soloce; Varro RR ..–; Colum. RR praef. ; ..; ..; see TLL ..–), and by instances of durus used as an adjective qualifying a noun designating a garment (Sen. Ep. . dura atque horrida veste; Iuv. .; see TLL ..–). P ISCATOR (a) Beda Liber de orthographia in GL .. K = Jones [CDHLMPB]: ‘Pugillares’ et masculino genere et semper pluraliter dicas, quia pugillus est qui plures tabulas contineat. item [an item vel autem?] Laberius in Piscatore singulariter ‘hoc pugillar’ [codd.: ‘pugillar’ verbo ‘hoc’ omisso Ribbeck ] dixit. (b) Charisius . K = . B [Nnn C]: Hos pugillares et masculino genere et semper pluraliter dicas, sicut Asinius in Valerium [ex C Putschius: N: inve nn : Valeriam C], quia pugillus est qui plures tabellas continet in seriem sutas. at tamen haec pugillaria [Putschius: sutas ac pugillaria codd.: sutas. at pugillaria Fabricius] saepius neutraliter [Putschius: neutrum codd.] dicit idem Catullus in hendecasyllabis. item [suppl. ex C Putschius: om. Nnn ] singulariter ‘hoc pugillar’ dicit.
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THE FISHER MAN (a) Beda On Orthography in GL .. K = Jones: One should use the word pugillares (‘wax tablets’) as a masculine noun, which should always be in the plural, because pugillus denotes the whole set which would contain many individual wax tablets. Likewise, L., in The Fisherman, used the word in the singular: this set of writing tablets (hoc pugillar). (b) Charisius . K = . B: One should say hi pugillares (‘these wax tablets’), that is, like Asinius in Against Valerius, treat the word as a masculine noun which should always be in the plural, because pugillus denotes the whole set which contains more than one wax tablet stitched together in series. But, in spite of all this, the same Catullus, in hendecasyllabic poetry, quite often uses the word in the neuter gender, and writes haec pugillaria. Likewise, uses the word in the singular: this set of writing tablets (hoc pugillar).
C O M M E N TA RY The fisherman seems to have been a popular character in Greek mime, Greco-Roman New Comedy, and Atellane farce before L.’s time: see Sophron ëWlieÆv t¼n groiÛtan ‘The fisherman against the countryman’ – = – Olivieri; Sophron, Qunnoqrav ‘The tuna-fisher’ – = – Olivieri (and Hordern Sophron –); Men. &lieÆv vel &lie±v –; Pompon. Piscatores – = – Frassinetti. A southern Italian vase found in Lipari and showing a maskless white-haired man halving a tuna with a big knife in front of a bald, maskless, and middle-aged man with a big head (a potential customer?) is taken to be a
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scene from a mime (perhaps Sophron’s ‘The tuna-fisher’; see Olivieri Frammenti –, Bieber History ). The starving fishermen provide with their cheerful song an entertaining interlude in the midst of the misfortunes of Palaestra and Ampelisca in Pl.’s Rudens (–), which may have been based on a Greek original by Diphilus (Rud. ). Quintilian (..) mentions that the gait of fishermen in comedy was quicker than that of young men, old men, soldiers, and married women. It is impossible to see how L. exploited the character of the fisherman, and in what way his treatment of him is indebted (if at all) to the earlier stage-representation of fishermen. (a) and (b) This fr. survives because it contains an example of the plural masculine noun pugillares written as a singular neuter noun (pugillar). The word pugillares is derived from the masculine pugillus (< pugnus + suffix -illus ‘what can be held in the fist, a handful’, OLD; see LHS , ; NW ), and refers to ‘wax-coated wooden tablets, with a rim to prevent rubbing, hinged together in pairs or sets by straps at the side, and used for writing which was not meant to be permanent’ (Fordyce on Cat. .). As an adjective, pugillaris -is -e indicates that the object designated by the noun which pugillaris qualifies is small enough to hold in one’s hand (P.Mich. . pugillaribus codic). The form pugillares (masculine or feminine plural) as a substantive is first attested in the Digest ..., citing an extract from P. Alfenus Varus (cos. ): sed nec pugillares nec codices in supellectili sunt. Charisius . K = . B cites an Asinius (does he mean the associate of Catullus and friend of Virgil and Horace, Asinius Pollio? See ORF fr. , p. Malcovati ) as an author who uses the form pugillares, a form which appears also in Seneca the Younger and is commonly found subsequently (OLD s.v.). However, Catullus used the same word, but as a neuter plural noun (.– et negat mihi nostra reddituram | pugillaria, si pati potestis). Gellius used pugillaria at ..– to denote a set of writing tablets not yet
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
smeared with wax (legebamus id quoque in vetere historia rerum Poenicarum virum indidem quempiam inlustrem . . . epistulam scriptam super rebus arcanis hoc modo abscondisse: pugillaria nova nondum etiam cera inlita accepisse . . . ). L.’s pugillar therefore is a rare variation on Catullus’ poetic form, and it may be argued that L.’s reason for changing the grammatical number of pugillaria is that it referred to only one set of writing tablets (so the singular pugillar ought to be the appropriate form for designating such an object). It is not clear whether L. wrote pugillar as a reaction to Catullus’ pugillaria or independently of it. Neither Bede nor Charisius says that the form pugillar is a vulgarism. As far as I know, pugillar is attested only here in L. and in Ausonius Eph. .– (the poet addresses a slave: Puer notarum praepetum | sollers minister, advola. | bipatens pugillar expedi). L. may have used the word more than once in different mimes: note that only Bede explicitly attributes hoc pugillar to L.’s Piscator; the extant MSS of Charisius mention neither the author nor the title of the work, which is supposed to contain the words under discussion. Charisius also asserts that Catullus uses pugillaria quite often (saepius), but the form is found only once in Catullus’ corpus. The ending of pugillar suggests that L. formed the noun on the pattern of neuter nouns of the third declension ending in -ar (e.g. exemplar; NW ); Ribbeck therefore thought that the neuter demonstrative pronoun hoc was superfluous (since the gender of the noun was indicated by its ending), and deleted it. I retain hoc because it is attested in the passages of both Bede and Charisius, and because L. may have used a neuter pronoun to emphasize the unusual grammatical gender of the word he created. Metre: uncertain. RESTIO (a) Gellius ..– [Fg(=OXPN)d(=QZB)TYv]: Democritum philosophum in monumentis historiae Graecae scriptum est, virum praeter alios venerandum auctoritateque
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antiqua praeditum, luminibus oculorum sua sponte se privasse, quia [F O XPN : qua F O N Q : que Q ZB] existimaret cogitationes commentationesque animi sui in contemplandis naturae rationibus vegetiores et exactiores fore si eas videndi inlecebris et oculorum impedimentis liberasset. Id factum eius modumque ipsum quo caecitatem facile sollertia subtilissima conscivit Laberius poeta in mimo quem inscripsit [ed. princ.: scripsit codd.] Restionem [FNd: restitionem O: rettiorem X: rectiorem P: rectionem Y] versibus quidem satis munde atque graphice [FN: grafice OX PZBTY: grafice˛ X : gratifice Q] factis descripsit, sed causam voluntariae caecitatis finxit aliam vertitque in eam rem quam tum [F O ZB: quantum cett. codd.] agebat, non inconcinniter. Est enim persona quae hoc aput Laberium dicit divitis avari et parci sumptum plurimum asotiamque [Fg: asoticonque d: asoliamque TY: swt©an te ed. princ.] adulescentis vivide plorantis [Bothe: viri deplorantis codd.: filii deplorantis v: [viri] deplorantis Jordan: vivide deplorantis Hertz in app. crit.: severe deplorantis Ribbeck: videre plorantis Damst´e]. Versus Laberiani sunt: Democritus Abderites physicus philosophus clipeum constituit contra exortum Hyperionis, oculos effodere ut posset splendore aereo. Ita radiis solis aciem effodit luminis, malis bene esse ne videret civibus. sic ego fulgentis splendorem pecuniae volo elucificare exitum aetatis meae, ne in re bona videam esse nequam filium.
ut add. N s.l. esse gQ: esset FBZ civibus g: civilibus FdTY fulgentis X : flulgentis X : fulgenti FOPNdTY splendorem Carrion: splendore in FgQZTY: spendore in B: splendore Stephanus volo elucificare H PVEd Nonii M = . L: velo lucificare codd. Gellii: velo ludificare TY: volo lucificare ed. princ.: volo elucifacere Corpus– : volo luscificare Turnebus: volo eludificare Lambinus exitum codd.: exitium Beroaldus aetatis codd. Nonii M = . L: aetati codd. Gellii videam esse FOPNdTY: esse videam X nequam filium Fg: quam filium dT: nequam filii Bothe
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(b) Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Elucificare [FHLPVEd: elucificare lucidare Hmg , Pmg , Vmg , Emg : elucifacere Iunius], dictum a luce. Laberius: sic ego fulgentis splendorem pecuniae volo elucificare exitum aetatis meae sic ego codd. Gellii ..: sicito gACXDO: scito M: si cito Aldina: sic cito Iunius fulgentis X Gellii .. et PVE Nonii: fulgenti FHLd splendorem Carrion: splendore codd. Nonii: splendorei Lindsay dubit. in app. crit. pecuniae FHLP VEAXDMO: pecunae P : poecuniae C: pecuniam Mercerus : pecuniam Fruterius: pecuniae Bothe elucificare H PVEd: elucifecare FH L: elucifacere Iunius: elucificari Bothe: elucificarei L. Mueller in app. crit. aetatis codd. Nonii: aetati codd. Gellii ..
Gellius .. [Fg(=OXPN)QZ]: Laberius in mimis quos scriptitavit oppido quam verba finxit praelicenter. . . . [..] Item in [F : om. F gQZ] Restione ‘talabarriunculos’ [Fg: tallabarriunculos QZ: tabellariunculos vel caballariunculos Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit.] dicit, quos vulgus ‘talabarriones’.
TH E ROP E-DEALER (a) Gellius ..–: According to the records of Greek history, the philosopher Democritus, a man worthy of respect above all others and endowed with the authority of the Ancients, voluntarily deprived himself of his sight, because he believed that the thoughts and musings of his mind in contemplating the laws of nature would be more vivid and precise if he freed them from the enticements of vision
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and the impediments of eyesight. It is that deed and the very manner in which he readily inflicted blindness on himself by the cleverest of tricks that the playwright L., in a mime entitled The rope-dealer, described in very elegant and vivid verses; however, L. came up with a different reason for the self-blinding and transferred it, quite neatly, to the story which he was then presenting on stage. For the character who speaks the following lines in L.’s mime is a greedy and stingy millionaire, who vehemently bewails the exorbitant expenditure and profligacy of a young man. These are L.’s verses: Democritus, the natural scientist of Abdera, positioned a shield to face the rising of Hyperion, so that, by the splendid sheen of brass, he could poke his eyes out. Thus by the sun’s rays he destroyed his vision, not wishing to see the good fortune of bad citizens. Likewise, I want the sheen of my gleaming gold to deprive of light my last days, so that I may not see my worthless son’s good fortune.
(b) Nonius . M = . L: Elucificare (‘to deprive of light’), derived from lux (‘light’). L.: Likewise, I want the sheen of my gleaming gold to deprive of light my last days
Gellius ..: L., in the mimes which he was always writing, coined words with excessive freedom. . . . [..] Likewise, in The rope-dealer, he uses the word talabarriunculos to refer to what is commonly called talabarriones.
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C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Gellius attributes on two occasions to L., seems to indicate a person whose profession was associated with ropes, but the exact details of this person’s job are far from clear. The concrete substantive restio, like other substantives in -o -onis, belongs to the sermo plebeius and is formed from the noun restis and the ending -o (not -io, as stated in OLD s.v.): cf. linteo, -onis ‘a dealer in, or weaver of, linen’, Pl. Aul. (LHS ). The vulgar character of words in -o -onis is discussed in detail by Cooper (Formation –), who mentions also L.’s cotio [sic; .], talabarriunculus (a variation on talabarrio; ), adulterio ((a)), and appeto (.). The suffix -o in restio, as in the words caupo and mulio, designates, according to Olcott (Formation ) and LHS , a person working in a trade of humble status. There is inscriptional evidence from Rome about a conlegiu(m) restionu(m) (CIL .; Olcott Formation ). The first extant instance of restio in Latin literature is in Pl. Most. –, and it occurs as part of a joke made by the slaveboy Phaniscus, who comically interprets the word bucaeda ‘an ox-slaughterer’ as ‘a person who is beaten with ox-hide whips’, and restio as ‘a person who is flogged with a rope’: postremo minoris pendo tergum illorum quam meum: | illi erunt bucaedae multo potius quam ego sim restio. On the basis of Plautus’ passage, Burmannus, in his anthology of Latin verse (, p. ), interpreted the title of L.’s mime not as ‘a rope-dealer’ but as ‘a person who deserves to be flogged with ropes’ (on the abusive character of words ending in -o, e.g. ganeo, buco, agaso, see Cooper Formation –). The subversive imagery in Phaniscus’ lines squares with the topsyturvy world of Plautine humour but tells us little about what a restio actually did. Mark Antony allegedly taunted Octavian by saying that his great-grandfather was a restio (Suet. Aug. . M. Antonius libertinum ei proavum exprobrat, restionem e pago Thurino). Charisius (. B) distinguishes between the terms restiarius (not attested elsewhere) and restio as follows: restiarius qui facit, restio qui vendit. But this distinction seems improbable (see Cooper
RESTIO
Formation ). In the glossaries restio is explained as funium factor (CGL .; the same gloss is given for the terms restor and resticularius) or as skoinopl»kov (CGL .), (presumably) = scoinopl»kov ‘maker of rush-ropes or mats’ (LSJ). In spite of the uncertainty surrounding the exact meaning of this word, it is clear that L. has once again entitled one of his mimes after a low profession (Catularius). (a) This is the second longest extant fr. of L., and perhaps our clearest piece of evidence that the literary motifs which L. employed in some of his mimes also occurred in Greco-Roman New Comedy; consequently, the boundaries between L.’s literary mimes and the fabulae palliatae of his theatrical predecessors are not as sharply drawn as some scholars have suggested. Gellius (..) cites L.’s fr. not because it contains the unusual verbal form elucificare ((b)) but because it refers to the motive of Democritus for blinding himself. The reason for this action differs in the various accounts of the philosopher’s alleged selfblinding: Lucretius (.–) attributes Democritus’ decision to the onset of old age, which weakened his (i.e. Democritus’) mental powers. Cicero (Tusc. disp. . and Fin. .) states that Democritus’ eyesight was a distraction and an obstacle to the piercing vision of his soul (aciem animi). Gellius’ account (..) is similar to Cicero’s: eyesight obstructs Democritus’ thoughts, therefore the philosopher deprived himself of his sight to contemplate the laws of nature more vividly. Tertullian (Apol. .) conveys with this story a message of Christian morality: Democritus blinded himself because he could not endure looking at women without feeling desire for them, and found it painful not to be sexually satisfied. As presented by the speaker in L.’s fr., Democritus blinds himself malis bene esse ne videret civibus ‘not wishing to see the good fortune of bad citizens’. Gellius approves of the elegance of L.’s writing, his power of description (versibus quidem satis munde atque graphice factis descripsit
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..), and his inventiveness (non inconcinniter ..); this is high praise indeed, especially since it comes from Gellius, who elsewhere (.) censures L. for the uncouth words he employs in his mimes. The speaker, a dives avarus et parcus, a rich and stingy miser (according to Gellius ..), presents the blinding process in a mock-epic style, emphasised by the reference to Hyperion, and the humour of the passage is derived from bathos: the elevated tone established by the reference to the Abderite philosopher (a senarius of only four words) is contrasted with the reason for the miser’s introduction of it – namely, his exaggerated desire not to see the good fortune of his worthless son; the monetary concerns of a senex durus and the character of the apparently spendthrift young man are commonplaces in New Comedy (see, for instance, the altercation between Demea and Micio in Ter. Ad. –; and Duckworth Comedy –). L.’s joke can thus be summarised as follows: ‘A did x; his intention was y; I want to be like A in order to do x, because my intention is z.’ The logic of this joke is not uncommon in earlier comedy, both Menandrean (e.g. Dysk. –) and Plautine (e.g. Men. –); it demonstrates that L. was working along the lines of a well-established comic tradition. The wrath of the speaker is meant to give the impression that there is a lack of coherence in his speech; nevertheless, the symmetrical arrangement of the two parts of the comparison shows clearly that L. took great care in composing his plays, and that his audience was expected to appreciate this: splendore aereo in line corresponds to fulgentis splendorem pecuniae in line , bene esse in line to in re bona . . . esse in line , and malis . . . civibus in line to nequam filium in line . The humour of this passage, which may have been the point at which this unnamed stingy miser appeared on stage for the first time (cf. Knemon’s entrance in Men. Dysc. –), was surely emphasised by the actor’s gestures, tone of voice, or other comic business, which are now irretrievably lost to us; it is no accident that Gellius uses the adverb graphice (..), normally employed in descriptions of painting (see OLD s.v.), to commend the visual dimension of L.’s lines.
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Metre: senarii. The problem of the unsatisfactory metrical arrangement of this fr. in early editions of Gellius and in anthologies of Latin verse was first raised by Burmannus (, p. ; even Stephanus had arranged the words in an unmetrical fashion), but it was Lucas Fruterius (‘Verisimilia et epistolae philologicae’, in J. Gruterus, Lampas sive Fax artium liberalium (Frankfurt ) ) who suggested the arrangement of the lines adopted here. Scan: line AbbcD ABCdd AbbcD line aaBCdd A/BCD aaBcD line aaBCdd A/BCD ABcD line aabbCD a/bbCD ABcD line aBcD a/BcD ABcD line AbbCD A/BCD aBcD line aBCdd A/BcD ABcD line ABcD aa/BcD ABcD.
Luchs’ law is observed at the end of line (aetatis meae, DAB cD), and Meyer’s law in the second foot of line (re bona, B cD). Meyer’s law is not violated at the fourth foot of the second line because of the elision (contr(a) exort(um) Hyperionis, BCD (instead of the preferred BcD at word-end) aaBcD). But Carrion’s emendation splendorem – adopted by Ribbeck, Bonaria, and Marshall in the OCT of Gellius – violates Meyer’s law at the fourth foot of line because it creates a BCD (rather than the preferred BcD) sequence at word-end. The problem arises from the unsatisfactory readings of Nonius’ MSS splendore, which gives an unmetrical BCd, and of Gellius’ MSS sp(l)endore in, which is nonsensical but may be easily explained as a corrupt version of splendorem given that m may have been copied by a careless scribe as in. A reversal of the word-order (splendorem fulgentis pecuniae) will violate Meyer’s law, because fulgentis would create the undesirable sequence BCD at word-end. Moreover, it is very likely that fulgentis preceded splendorem in L.’s script because the majority of the MSS of Gellius and some MSS of Nonius read fulgenti, which may be explained as a corrupt version of the correct
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
reading fulgentis, whose s was carelessly omitted in front of the word splendorem. Carrion’s emendation splendorem is essential also because it restores the sense of lines and (splendorem would be the subject of the infinitive elucificare), and it does so better than other conjectures do. Democritus Abderites: on Gellius’ interest in the philosopher whose name was associated in Greco-Roman thought with the atomic theory of the universe see HolfordStrevens Gellius –. The adjective Abderites (OLD s.v. seems to treat it as a noun, but see TLL .) is a Latin transliteration of the Greek word %bdhr©thv and was employed by Cicero already in the mid-s (De orat. . de Protagora Abderita; see also Brut. Protagoras Abderites, dated to ; for other occurrences of this word later than L. see TLL .–); it is unclear whether L.’s Restio antedates these works. The natives or inhabitants of the town of Abdera on the coast of Thrace had a reputation for being stupid (Cic. Ad Att. .. hic (i.e. Rome) Abdera non tacente me; .. id est %bdhritik»n. nec enim senatus decrevit nec populus iussit me imperium in Sicilia habere; Mart. .. Abderitanae pectora plebis habes), and it is possible that the pointed use of the ethnic adjective Abderites here suggests that Democritus was portrayed as stupid for blinding himself. physicus philosophus: on Latinised forms of Greek adjectives in -icus in L. see ; Democritus was Greek, so it is appropriate that all three Latin words qualifying him in this line should be of Greek origin. The adjective physicus as a substantive designating people who dealt with nature in scientific terms is first attested in Lucilius (– M = – W principio physici omnes constare hominem ex anima et corpore | dicunt), and re-appears in Varro and in Cicero, who uses it about times (see TLL ..– .). L. appears to be the next poet after Lucilius to have used it in relation to natural science. But physicus as a term qualifying Democritus seems to have been common: see Cic. De orat. .; Varro RR ..; Vitr. ... On the noun philosophus
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accompanied by adjectives which indicate either a period of time or the school of thought to which a philosopher belonged see TLL ..–. On L.’s exploitation of philosophy for comic effect see n. Pythagoream. The assonance of ph in this line (physicus philosophus) and of c and t in the next line (clipeum constituit contra exortum) is particularly striking. clipeum constituit contra exortum: I. Lana (RFIC N.S. () ) interprets seriously the description of the way in which Democritus allegedly blinded himself. But this misses the point that the reconstruction of the event is deliberately set up by the speaker (i.e. the stingy miser) to pave the way for the comparison of Democritus with the speaker, who no longer wishes to see his son squandering the family property. That the details presented here are nothing but a clever and imaginative re-fashioning of popular beliefs concerning the loss of Democritus’ eyesight is confirmed by the hyperbolic oculos effodere (see below). Hyperionis: a very grand Greek name (instead of the Latin Sol), which fittingly elevates the tone of the self-blinding of the Greek philosopher who studied the universe. The only extant Latin poet who uses Hyperion = ‘the sun’ before L. is Ennius (Ann. Skutsch Interea fugit albus iubar Hyperionis cursum; see Skutsch’s comm. ad loc. and OLD s.v. b). Cicero uses the name to indicate both the Sun (Arat. Progn. ), and the Titan who was thought to have fathered the Sun (De nat. deor. .). oculos effodere: a comic hyperbole. If Democritus were to put a brass shield facing the sun, and stare at it constantly, the sheen of the shield would make his eyesight blunt, not gouge his eyes out. Instead of obtundere ‘to make blunt’ (cf. Pliny NH . aciem . . . oculorum obtundit), the miser uses the more violent verb effodere ‘to gouge out’, which occurs in the comic threats of characters in Plautus and Terence (see TLL ..– and Barsby on Ter. Eun. and ). It is comically appropriate
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that Democritus, a natural scientist, should seek the cure for his problem in nature. splendore aereo: on the symmetrical fashion in which L. has arranged these lines see (a). On the shining quality of weapons such as the shield and the sword see Verg. Aen. . aerataeque micant peltae, micat aereus ensis. The exaggerated imagery and the vocabulary in L.’s fr. recalls strikingly Pyrgopolynices’ order to his servants to polish his shield and make it more radiant than the sun so that it may dazzle the vision of his enemies: curate ut splendor meo sit clupeo clarior | quam solis radii esse olim quom sudumst solent, | ut, ubi usus veniat, contra conserta manu | praestringat oculorum aciem in acie hostibus (Pl. Mil. –). Could it be that L. was aware of Plautus’ passage, borrowed from it the imagery of the dazzling shield, and adjusted it to the context of a joke about the self-blinding of Democritus? aciem effodit luminis: a deliberately odd choice of verb, since effodio is normally used for eyes, not for vision ((a). oculos effodere); how can you gouge out someone’s eyesight? On lumen (in the singular) = ‘vision’ see OLD s.v. c. splendorem: on the prosodic implications of Carrion’s emendation see n. on metre. elucificare: on verbs in -ficare, which belong to the sermo plebeius, see Cooper Formation –. The reading elucificare, which occurs in the majority of Nonius’ MSS, is preferable to the reading lucificare of Gellius’ MSS partly because of the prefix e(x)-, which creates alliteration between the infinitive elucificare and its object, the noun exitum. Gellius does not comment on the meaning of this word, which is attested only here, and Nonius says only that it is derived from lux. Already in , in his edn of Gellius, Aegidius Maserius took it to mean ‘expertem lucis facere’, and this meaning is recorded in both the OLD (s.v.: ‘[EX+ LVX + -FICVS + O ]’ ‘to deprive of light’) and the TLL
RESTIO
( ..–: ‘ab ex et lucificus . . . fere i.q. luce privare’; see also Fischer Observations ). According to this view, e(x)- would have a privative force and would negate the sense of lucificus or lucifico (< lux + facere; see TLL ..–; LHS ); cf. ex-pectorare ‘to banish from the mind’, ex-animare ‘to deprive of life’, ex-sanguis ‘bloodless’. However, the glosses of Nonius (CGL .) explain elucificare as lucidare ‘to make bright’; on the basis of this testimony and the fact that ex-, when prefixed to verbs ending in -fico, has intensifying (not privative) meaning (exaedifico, excarnifico, exsacrifico), P. Gatti in Studi Noniani () – argued that elucificare should mean ‘illuminare fino in fondo, completamente’. The first objection to this suggestion, which was originally proposed by Ziegler in his commentary on the Roman mimes (G¨ottingen , ; Gatti does not seem to be aware of this), is that a playwright who is as playful with the Latin language as L. was need not follow strictly the meaning of prefixes and the rules of word-formation. A good example of unusual meanings given to familiar words is Plautus, who uses exaedificare both = ‘to build something completely’ (OLD s.v. ) and = ‘to turn out of doors’ (exaedificavisset me ex his aedibus, Pl. Trin. ; surely here Plautus plays with the privative force of the prefix ex-). The second objection is that Gatti’s view does not square with what the text says and with what we know about the character of the miser in comedy: ‘Mentre il filosofo per raggiungere il proprio fine si sarebbe arrecato un danno, il nostro dives otterrebbe due vantaggi: dando fondo alle proprie ricchezze terminerebbe i suoi anni tra sfarzo e divertimenti, mentre il figlio, non potendo pi`u contare sulle sostanze del padre, non avrebbe pi`u la possibilit`a di ritrovarsi nequam in re bona’ (–). But the speaker says nothing about squandering his property to spite his son, nor does elucifico appear to have the meaning which Gatti would like it to have. The speaker clearly says ne . . . videam nequam filium, and this makes sense only if he were deprived of his sight by means of the ingenious plan he has concocted; note that sic at the beginning of line relates the two people compared in the passage, namely Democritus (line ) and ego (line ). If the miser were to do
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
something entirely different to what Democritus is supposed to have done, there would be no cogent reason why Democritus and the carefully constructed account of his alleged self-blinding should be mentioned in the first place. aetatis: the reading of Nonius’ MSS (aetatis) is preferable to that of Gellius’ (aetati), because exitus is always qualified by a genitive when it = ‘the final stage’ or ‘the final period’ (see TLL ..–). TLL .. is unwise to print aetati when citing this fr. of L. (b) This fr. survives because it contains the unusual word elucificare ((a).). If Nonius cited the fr. from Gellius .., it is interesting that he (i.e. Nonius) did not cite only the line in which elucificare appeared, but excerpted as much of the context as he deemed necessary for the scope of his work: so he omitted lines – (the account of the alleged self-blinding of Democritus) and line (the purpose clause explaining why the speaker wishes to blind himself). On the context in which this fr. survives see (a). The meaning of the word talabarrio (attested only in this passage of Gellius; on the vulgar formation of the word see Restio) and of the diminutive talabarriunculus (attested only here in Gellius, who attributes it to L. and disapproves of its formation) is unknown (see EM s.v., OLD s.v., and Garcea and Lomanto ). If talabarrio -onis refers to a person (not an object), then talabarriunculus (if this is the correct reading) seems to have been formed on the analogy of latrunculus (< latro -¯onis) and tirunculus (< tiro -¯onis); cf. also homunculus and virguncula. But LHS also list instances of -unculus as a suffix attached to nouns designating objects (e.g. pugiunculus, carbunculus, parunculus). Although it is impossible to
SALINATOR
say with certainty whether talabarrio refers to a person or to an object, J. Knobloch (RhM N.S. () –) advanced the view that the word talabarrio was formed from the verb barrio -ire (used of elephants, ‘to trumpet’; see OLD s.v.) and the component tara- of the neologism taratantara, coined to imitate sound (see Enn. Ann. Skutsch at tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dixit, with comm. ad loc.). According to Knobloch, tara- became tala- through dissimilation, and the coined noun talabarrio means ‘a cry-baby’; so the diminutive would mean ‘a little bawler’. Metre: uncertain. SALINATOR Gellius ..– [VPRCv]: Bibendi avidum P. Nigidius in commentariis grammaticis ‘bibacem’ et ‘bibosum’ dicit. ‘Bibacem’ ego ut ‘edacem’ a plerisque aliis dictum lego; ‘bibosum’ dictum nondum etiam usquam repperi nisi apud Laberium, neque aliud est quod simili inclinatu dicatur. Non enim simile est ut ‘vinosus’ aut ‘vitiosus’ ceteraque quae hoc modo dicuntur, quoniam a vocabulis, non a verbo, inclinata sunt. Laberius in mimo [codd.: in mimo vel primo vel in mimo libro primo v] qui Salinator inscriptus est verbo hoc ita utitur: non mammosa, non annosa, non bibosa, non procax annosa codd.: anosa Klotz: pannosa Studemund
non procax codd.: om. Ziegler
T HE SALT-DEALER Gellius ..–: Publius Nigidius, in his Commentaries on Grammar, calls a person who is eager for drinking bibax and bibosus. I find the word bibax,
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
like edax, in the writings of many others; but the only place in which I have as yet discovered the word bibosus is a passage in L., and there is no other word of a similar derivation. For the words vinosus or vitiosus and others which are formed in that manner are different, because they are derived from nouns, not from a verbal form. L., in his mime entitled The salt-dealer, uses this word as follows: she isn’t bosomy, wrinkly, boozy, or brash
C O M M E N TA RY The etymology of this substantive in -tor indicates that the title of the mime attributed to L. signifies a person professionally associated with salinae ‘salterns’ (on the meaning and popular origin of words in -tor see Colorator). But what exactly this person did is uncertain (OLD s.v. renders salinator as ‘[app.] The operator of a salt-works’). The only extant author in whom this word is found before L. is Cato, who talks of salinatores aerarios (ORF fr. Malcovati = Serv. on Aen. .), an expression which perhaps means that these persons somehow made money in salt-business (probably by getting contracts from the state for the sale of salt and the proper operation of salt-works). There is inscriptional evidence that salinator = ‘salt-miner’ (CIL .; .) and ‘salt-dealer’ (CIL .; see Olcott Formation ). It is impossible to say with certainty which of these meanings was indicated by the title of L.’s mime (my rendering ‘The saltdealer’ is only one possible interpretation); on the other hand, it is unlikely that L.’s Salinator has anything to do with the censor M. Livius, cos. and , who defeated Hasdrubal in Umbria at , and who was mentioned by Cicero (Brut. ; Sen. ); M. Livius was allegedly given the cognomen Salinator because of a heavy tax on salt, which he is said to have imposed on some tribes (Livy ..–). The fact that other Laberian mimes are entitled after low-life professions (Colorator) makes it much more likely that the plot of Salinator involved a worker or dealer in salt.
SALINATOR
This fr. survives in Gellius because it contains the adjective bibosa, which does not occur elsewhere in extant Latin literature. Gellius’ starting point for his discussion is the Commentaries on Grammar by Cicero’s erudite friend Publius Nigidius Figulus (on Nigidius and Gellius see Holford-Strevens Gellius ). Gellius finds fault with the fact that Nigidius has paired the adjectives bibax and bibosus as adjectives designating a person keen on drinking (bibendi avidus; see Gramm. Rom. Fr. fr. , p. Funaioli). This Gellius does on the grounds that, whereas the formation of bibax can be paralleled by that of edax (in both cases the base of the substantive is derived from the stem of a verb), the adjective bibosus, which even Gellius could find only in L., cannot be compared morphologically to other words in -osus, e.g. vinosus or vitiosus, because the latter are compounds of nominal stems joined with the suffix -osus; on the other hand, the ending -osus in bibosus is attached to a base derived from a verbal stem (see O. Schonweit and C. Weyman Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () ; Dalmasso ; Ernout Adjectifs ; Garcea and Lomanto –; LHS ). Gellius also discusses the meaning of the suffix -osus, and concludes that it does not always have to be pejorative (see ..–; F. Cavazza, ‘Gellius the etymologist’, in L. Holford-Strevens and A. Vardi, eds., The worlds of Aulus Gellius (Oxford ) –). But, whereas Gellius finds fault with Nigidius’ grammatical skills regarding bibosus, he makes no attempt to rebuke L. for employing this word, with which L. enhances the anaphora of the quadruple non and creates a fine effect of assonance and isosyllabism: mam-mo-sa, an-no-sa, bi-bo-sa, procax. Carilli (Hapax ) cleverly observes that L. avoids the use of the attribute vinosa, which is attested in Plautus (Curc. vinosissuma), in order to achieve with the adjective bibosa a complex acoustic effect: se ben si guarda alla struttura fonica del verso, si nota che il primo elemento della successione anaforica e` caratterizzato dalla geminatio della m e dall’alliterazione delle due sillabe contigue (ma-mmosa),
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
particolari che ritornano rispettivamente l’uno nel secondo elemento (annosa), l’altro nel terzo (bi-bosa), per non guastare il ritmo cantilenante creato dal giuoco simmetrico delle assonanze.
On other adjectives in -osus in L. see . In his edn of Gellius (), Aegidius Masserius (comm. on Gell. .) put forth the view that bibosus is not derived from the verb bibo but from a rare noun bibus, which (according to Masserius) also produces the diminutive bibulus; if this had been the case, the formation of bibosus would have been in line with that of annosus and mammosus. ∗ Bibus is not attested, and Masserius’ suggestion has rightly not been adopted by subsequent commentators. Metre: trochaic septenarius. Scan: BCD aBCD a/BcD aBcD. L. observes the same rhythmical pattern for the first four words (non mammosa, non annosa, B CDa, B CDa), and approximately the same for the remaining four (non bibosa, non procax, B cDa, B cD). mammosa: in this denominative adjective the suffix -osus clearly designates abundance (see LHS ), and not necessarily in a pejorative sense: see Varro LL .; Lucr. .; TLL .–; Ernout Adjectifs . The other adjectives in this fr., however, as well as the sarcastic context in the comic epigram of Martial .., suggest that both L. and Martial employed mammosa (‘having large breasts’) as part of a misogynistic joke. The denominative adjective mammeata, in Pl. Poen. , is said as a compliment by the slave Milphio to the courtesan Adelphasium. annosa: see Ernout Adjectifs . L. seems to be the first extant author to have used this denominative adjective, which is employed after L. by Virgil in relation to a sturdy oak-tree (Aen. .). It is used again of persons in Ovid AA . (annosum . . . senem) and F. . (anus . . . annosa). On invective against women who are portrayed as old see Richlin Priapus –. bibosa: on the unusual morphology of this adjective see . On the comic motif of drunkenness in L. see n. ebriacus.
S ATURNA L I A
procax: in early comedy this adjective almost always qualifies pimps and prostitutes: Pl. Persa procax, rapax, trahax (of a leno); Truc. procaciores esti’ vos (of meretrices); Ter. HT meast potens procax magnifica sumptuosa nobilis (of a meretrix); Hec. maligna multo et mage procax facta ilico est (of a meretrix); cf. Cic. Cael. si denique ita sese gerat non incessu solum sed ornatu atque comitatu, non flagrantia oculorum, non libertate sermonum, sed etiam complexu, osculatione, actis, navigatione, conviviis, ut non solum meretrix sed etiam proterva meretrix procaxque videatur (of Clodia); Lact. Inst. .. lenae procaces. The woman, therefore, referred to in L.’s fr. has none of the features typically associated with courtesans/bawds: she does not have large breasts, she is not aged, she is not fond of drinking, and she does not demand extravagant things. Who is she? I am inclined to think that the person referred to is not a puella or a virgo but, like Thais in Terence’s Eunuchus, a courtesan who does not seem to exhibit features traditionally linked with her kind; this surprises the speaker, who praises her by offering a list of attributes which one would have expected her to have but which she does not have. There may be more to the use of procax by L. here. A disyllabic adjective of iambic rhythm such as this is, of course, needed to complete the trochaic septenarius, but if L. knew of the passage of Nigidius in which the unusual adjective bibosus is coupled with the equally rare bibax (attested for the first time in Nigidius: TLL .–), he may have deliberately played with the grammatical formations suggested by Nigidius by coupling bibosus with an adjective ending in -ax (procax).
SATUR NALIA Gellius .. [Fg(=OXPN)QZ]: Neque non obsoleta quoque et maculantia ex sordidiore vulgi usu [scil. Laberius] ponit, . . . [..] Atque item in mimo qui Saturnalia inscriptus est ‘botulum’ [FgZ: bortulum Q] pro
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
‘farcimine’ appellat et ‘hominem levennam’ [FOXPQZ: lavennam N: leucunam ed. princ.: levennem Bothe] pro ‘levi’. T H E F E S T I VA L O F S AT U R N Gellius ..: Besides, he [L.] used words which were both obsolete and vulgar from the rather uncouth speech of the common people . . . [..] And, likewise, in his mime entitled The Festival of Saturn, he [L.] uses the word botulum for farcimen (‘sausage’) and hominem levennam for levem (‘unreliable fellow’).
C O M M E N TA RY This is the fourth title in the extant corpus of L. designating a religious festival (Anna Peranna, Compitalia, Parilicii), and it is conceivable that all four of these mimes were inspired by or depicted events associated with the religious festivals after which they were named. The Saturnalia, celebrated from to (sometimes) December (see the testimonies of the Atellane writers Novius and Mummius in Macr. Sat. ..) in honour of Saturn, was one of the oldest (Livy ..) and perhaps the most popular Roman festival, involving (among others) a dedication to the temple of Saturn, sacrifices, a lavish banquet apparently open to everyone, and the presentation of gifts to children and to friends: the sources are discussed in detail in RE .. –; Fowler Festivals –; Scullard Festivals – . This was a much anticipated and merry public holiday, the best known feature of which was the custom of having servants waited on by their masters at dinner; this custom, which created a topsy-turvy world for a few days and subverted the relationship between master and servant in a way paralleled only by the comic scenarios of Plautine drama, is attested already in
S ATURNA L I A
the mid-second century BC in the work of the poet Accius (as recorded by Macr. Sat. .. eumque diem celebrant: per agros urbesque fere omnes | exercent epulis laeti, famulosque procurant | quisque suos, nostrisque itidem est mos traditus illinc | iste, ut cum dominis famuli epulentur ibidem); see also Anth. Lat. vol. no. . Riese nunc tibi cum domino ludere, verna, licet. Whether or not L. exploited this custom for comic effect in his mime is now impossible to ascertain. On the context in which this fr. survives see . Metre: uncertain. botulum: Paul.-Fest. M = L say that a botulus, a word of perhaps Oscan origin (see OLD and EM s.v.), was a kind of sausage (genus farciminis). This is not exactly what Gellius says: he claims that it was ‘a vulgar word for farcimen’. Charisius . K = . B states that, when the adjective Lucanicus (‘Lucanian’) is used, we are to understand that it qualifies the noun botulus: ut puta Lucanicum, intellegitur pulmentum vel intestinum, et hic Lucanicus, subauditur botulus vel apparatus . . . sumptum est enim nomen ab inventoribus Lucanicis. This suggests a non-Roman origin of botulus as a word and type of food, but it does not clarify the exact meaning of a botulus. OLD s.v. renders botulus as ‘black pudding’. In the staged episode of the ‘Trojan’ (i.e. stuffed) pig, which a cook was ordered by Trimalchio to slice in front of the amazed guests, Encolpius says that botuli formed part of the stuffing (Petr. Sat. . nec mora, ex plagis ponderis inclinatione crescentibus thumatula cum botulis effusa sunt). Seneca (Ep. .) speaks of botularios (‘sellers of botuli’), and Martial writes an epigram (.) about a botulus which was given as a present to someone, who then passed it on, as a present at the festival of the Saturnalia, to another person. When talking about eating practices which he considers unnatural, Tertullian rebukes his pagan readers for the botuli filled
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
with blood (Apol. . denique inter temptamenta Christianorum botulos etiam cruore distensos admovetis). In the glosses (CGL .) botulus is rendered as jÅskov, which LSJ translate as botellus (OLD s.v. ‘a small sausage’). Gellius’ testimony therefore is problematic since it does not square with the evidence given by Festus (botulus and farcimen do not seem to be synonyms); furthermore, the low character of botulus as attested by Gellius is not corroborated by all the sources in which this word is found: see RE , Garcea and Lomanto . levennam: a hybrid word, not attested elsewhere in our extant sources and coined from the base of the Latin adjective l˘evis (OLD s.v. a) and the Etruscan suffix -enna (as a masculine suffix), a similar version of which is attested in the words Dosennus (Pompon. = Frassinetti) and sociennus (Pl. Aul. ): see TLL ..– (‘quasi nomen gentilicium in -enna cadens’), OLD s.v., EM s.v. l˘evis, Carilli Hapax , and Adams Bilingualism –, who speculates that words such as levenna ‘might go back to a time when there were Etruscan actors at Rome’ (p. ). This view would agree with the reason why Gellius cited levenna (.. neque non obsoleta quoque et maculantia ex sordidiore vulgi usu [scil. L.] ponit). SCYLAX Nonius . M = . L [HLPVEACX]: Lubidinitas [HPVE: libidinitas L ACX: lybidinitas L ], pro lubidine [HV: libidine L ACX: lybidine L : lubidinem P: lubidineni E]. Laberius in Scylace [HLPVEACX: Colace Iunius: Scriptura Corpus : Catulario sive Scylace Bothe]: lubidinitate labitur lubidinitate HPVE: lybidinitate L : libidinitate L ACX
S CY L A X
THE PUPPY Nonius . M = . L: Lubidinitas for lubido (‘lustfulness’). L. in The Puppy: s/he is wasting away from lustfulness . . .
C O M M E N TA RY On the meaning of this title and the unconvincing view that it was an alternative title for L.’s Catularius see Catularius. There is no extant Greek play entitled SkÅlax. This fr. is cited in the section of Nonius’ treatise entitled ‘De mutata declinatione’, which includes both nouns which are attested in more than one declension (for instance, exercitus -i and exercitus -us) and nouns which, although they do not change declension or meaning, have an alternative form (e.g. iter and itiner; apricitas and apricatio). The fr. which Nonius attributes to L.’s Scylax contains a word of the latter category: lubidinitas instead of lubido. L. is fond of this type of change: elsewhere he uses adulterio and adulteritas instead of adulterium ((a)), appeto instead of appetens (.), deliritas instead of deliratio (.), hilaria instead of hilaritas (), mendicimonium instead of mendicitas ((a)), miserimonium instead of miseria (), pluor instead of pluvia (), talabarriunculus instead of talabarrio (), levenna instead of levis (), blandiloquens instead of blandiloquus (.), and Mauricatim instead of Maurice (.). There is no suggestion from Nonius (or from anyone else, since lubidinitas is attested only here in L.) that lubidinitas and lubido are different in meaning, and the views that have been put forth to explain the unusual formation of lubidinitas relate it to the abstract nouns voluptas (so WH s.v. libido) or cupiditas (so EM s.v. lubet), both of which have a similar meaning
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
to that of L.’s neologism. Cupiditas seems better than voluptas as a word on the basis of which L. formed lubidinitas, especially since lubido and cupido are similar from a morphological perspective. But L.’s decision to coin lubidinitas from the base of the abstract noun lubido (lubidin-) and the suffix -i-tas (on such abstract nouns see LHS ; Carilli Hapax –) also enables him to create and play with alliteration and assonance to maximum acoustic effect: lubidinitate labitur. Metre: uncertain. The fr. could be scanned as the beginning of a senarius (aBccD a/BcD ), as the ending of a senarius ( aBccD aBcD), or as the ending of a trochaic septenarius ( aBccD aBcD). lubidinitate labitur: on the coined noun lubidinitas see . On labor (as a verb) designating a moral fall cf. Cic. Parad. Stoic. lapsa est lubido in muliere ignota; Sen. Contr. .. adulescens gloriae cupiditate lapsus est; and TLL ..–. Giancotti (Mimo ) and Carilli (Hapax ) believe that the unusual formation of the noun lubidinitas, whose ablative singular in this fr. has no fewer than six syllables, prolongs the stylistic effect of the moral decline which is designated by the verb labitur. It is impossible to decide whether the subject of labitur in L.’s fr. is a man or a woman. SEDIGITUS (a) Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Grunnire [H LVEA : Grunire H : Grumnire FPA XDMO: Gruminare C: Grundire Roth] dicuntur porci, quod eorum proprium vocis [om. A] est . . . . Laberius [FHLPE: Laberus V] in Sedigito [Bentinus: sedicito g: an Sue dicit?]: grundientem aspexi scrofam verba Laberius . . . scrofam om. d grundientem FHLVE: girundientem P: grunnientem Aldina scrofam FHLPVE : scofam E
S EDI GI TUS
(b) Nonius . M = . L [HLPVEd(=ACXDMO)]: Grundire cum sit proprie suum, ut Laberius [HLPV Ed: Siberius V ] in [om. DMO] Sedigito [Bentinus: sedicit HLPVEACX: dicit DMO: Sedicito Mercerus : Sedicit Gerlach: an Sue dicit?]: grundientem aspexi scrofam grundientem HLPVEACXDM: grundientem et O scrofum AX: scorfum C
scrofam HLPVEDMO:
SIX-FINGERED (a) Nonius . M = . L: Grunnire (‘to grunt’) is used in relation to pigs, because it is appropriate to the noise they make. L., in Six-fingered, has: I watched the sow as it was grunting . . .
(b) Nonius . M = . L: Grundire (‘to grunt’), since it is properly a characteristic of pigs, as L., in Six-fingered, has: I watched the sow as it was grunting . . .
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Nonius attributes on two occasions (. L and . L) to L., is Bentinus’ emendation for the MS readings sedicito, sedicit, and dicit. I am sceptical about this conjecture, and wonder whether Nonius originally wrote Laberius in Sue dicit ‘L. has in The pig’ (this title would be appropriate
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
to a fr. which talks about the sound sows make); however, this hypothesis would not account for the final -o (of sedicito), which is attested in all the MSS of the g family in Nonius . L, and is weakened by the fact that Nonius does not normally use the verb dicit when citing an extract from an author: he simply cites the author’s name and the title of the author’s work in the ablative case, often accompanied by the preposition in. I therefore print Sedigitus (Laberius in Sedigito), which I render as ‘The six-fingered man’ (see CGL . Sedigitus sex digitos habens; CGL . xadktulov sex digitus; CGL . xadktilov sexdigitos m. : sexdigitus m. ). But I cannot say with any certainty whether this title refers to a fictional man who was (comically?) portrayed as having six fingers (Pliny NH .), or to a real person whose cognomen was Sedigitus (the best known person of this name being the poet Volcacius of about : Gell. ..; .; Pliny NH .).
(a) and (b) This fr. survives in two different sections of Nonius’ treatise because the verb grundire or grunnire, which is the focus of Nonius’ entry on both occasions, is viewed from a different perspective in each section. As a rare verb, employed mostly by early writers, grundio occurs in the section ‘De honestis et nove veterum dictis’; as an onomatopoeic verb, representing the sound of pigs and so appropriately used of them, it appears in the section on ‘incorrectly used words’ (De inpropriis; Nonius cites this fr. of L. and a passage from Q. Claudius Quadrigarius (see below) as instances for the proper usage of grundio; the author who uses grundio incorrectly is Caecilius (see below)). The spelling of this verb with -nd- (grundio) appears to be older than that with nn- (grunnio), which is said to be a characteristic of Oscan or Umbrian dialect (see TLL ..–; EM s.v.; Sommer Handbuch ; LHS , ).
S EDI GI TUS
Metre: an incomplete trochaic septenarius. Scan: BcD ABCD A/. grundientem: formed on the analogy of grÅzw and grul©zw ‘to make the sound of a pig’ (< grÓ; see LSJ s.v., TLL ..–, and the detailed discussion of G. Barabino, ‘Le voces animalium in Nonio Marcello’, Studi Noniani () –), and widely attested in the Romance languages (see ML no. ), grundio first occurs in relation to the sound of pigs in the work of the Roman annalist Q. Claudius Quadrigarius (Hist. fr. Peter grundibat graviter pecus suillum) and in Varronian satire ( C`ebe grundit tepido lacte satur mola mactatus | porcus). But Nonius . M = . L states that the playwright Caecilius used the verb grundio of persons, a use which is not absolutely clear from the wording of the passage Nonius goes on to cite: cruento ita ore grundibat miser (Imbrii ). Since it is logical to assume that grundio (‘I grunt’) was originally employed in relation to pigs, and was subsequently used of persons in a metaphorical sense (rather than the other way round), it is highly likely that early attestations of grundire referring to the sound made by pigs have simply not survived. scrofam: Nonius makes it clear that the scrofa mentioned in this fr. is a real pig, and I have found no evidence, such as that scrofa might have been used in Latin (as in Modern Greek) as a term of abuse directed at a woman regarded as morally filthy, for questioning this assertion. (The evidence in Adams Vocabulary and on the sexual meaning of porcus would not support this interpretation; Juvenal compares the fertile Niobe to the famous white sow with her thirty piglets in the story of the foundation of Alba Longa (. atque eadem scrofa Niobe fecundior alba), but this does not clarify the meaning of L.’s fr.) The speaker uses a verb of past tense (aspexi), which suggests that he is narrating an event of the past. Whether this scrofa was an ordinary sow or a famous sow such as the white sow with her litter of thirty piglets in the
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Aeneid (see Williams on Aen. . and Fordyce on Aen. .) is now impossible to tell. SORORES (a) Gellius ..– [Fg(=XPN)d(=QZB)]: Item C. Calvus in poematis ‘laboriosus’ dicit, non, ut vulgo dicitur, qui laborat, sed in quo laboratur: ‘durum’ inquit ‘rus fugis et laboriosum’. Eadem ratione Laberius quoque in Sororibus [Fg: Soporibus d]: ecastor (inquit) mustum somniculosum mustum Mercerus in notis: multum codd. Gellii, codd. Nonii M = L: multum Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit. lacunam post mustum indicavit Ribbeck
(b) Nonius . M = . L [FHLVEd(=ACXDMO)]: Somniculosus, quod ad somnos vocet [Scaliger: quod ad somnos vacet FH L VEd: quod ad sumnos vacet L : quod a somno si iacet H : quod somnos advocet Muretus]. Laberius Sororibus [FHLVE: Soror. ibi Scaliger]: ecastor mustum somniculosum verba Laberius . . . somniculosum om. d mustum Mercerus in notis: multum FHLVE Nonii, codd. Gellii ..–: mustum Brakman somniculosum F HLVE: somniculo∗∗∗∗∗ F ecastor multum | somniculosum! Lindsay: somniculosum ecastor mustum Buecheler
Nonius . M = . L [FHLVE]:
S O RO R E S
Clipeus generis masculini . . . . Neutro [FHLVE: Neutri Quicherat] Vergilius . . . Laberius [Iunius: laverius codd.]Sororibus: hoc voluit clipeum contra pel˘uem proici clipeum Onions: clipeus codd. peluem FHLVE: puluem Aldina contra p. pr. codd.: proici c. p. L. Mueller
–
Nonius . M = . L [HLPVEGen.Bern.Cant.Bern.MO]: Alescere [L. Mueller: adolescere HLPVEGen.Bern.Cant.O: adholescere Bern.M: olescere L. Mueller: ab olescere Lindsay], crescere: unde adolescentem [E pc Bern.Cant.Bern.O: adulescentem HLPVEac Gen.: adholescentem M: olescere Quicherat] dicimus [Bern.MO: dicimi H : dici LGen.Bern.: dicit H PVECant.]. Lucretius lib. II . . . Laberius in Sororibus: laus nomine, gloria alescit verba Laberius . . . alescit om. Bern.Bern.MO nomine H LPVE Cant. : nomine agendi nomine H E Gen.Cant. : nomen Lachmann: nominatur Bothe : nomini Quicherat: nominis Gerlach gloria HLPVEGen.Cant.: secl. Quicherat: gloriae Laetus actione suppl. Carilli: ea agenti suppl. L. Mueller alescit H L Gen.Cant. : adolescit H L VECant. : dolescit P: adolescit Bothe : olescit Bergk
THE SISTER S (a) Gellius ..–: Likewise, Gaius Calvus, in his poems, uses the word laboriosus to denote not, as it is generally used, the worker, but the thing worked on: ‘you avoid’, says Calvus, ‘the hard and
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laborious countryside’. On the same principle, L. too, in The sisters, has: Goodness Gracious! A sleepy must . . .
(b) Nonius . M = . L: Somniculosus, because it would induce sleep. L. in The sisters: Goodness Gracious! A sleepy must . . .
Nonius . M = . L: Clipeus (‘shield’), masculine . . . . Neuter in Virgil . . . and in L.’s The sisters: . . . s/he wanted this shield to be thrust forward towards the bowl . . .
Nonius . M = . L: Alescere, ‘to grow up’: hence we speak of an adolescens (‘growing up person’). Lucretius Book II . . . L. in The sisters: . . . praise grows with good reputation, glory . . .
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime is attributed to L. by the majority of Gellius’ MSS (on one occasion) and by Nonius (on three occasions): the reading soporibus, which is found in a later family of Gellius’ MSS, and from which the title Sopores would be derived, makes little sense as a title of a mime. The playwrights of Middle Comedy Alcaeus and Antiphanes are said to have composed plays
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entitled %deljaª moiceu»menai () and %delja© (), respectively, while the plural Sorores is also attested as a title of a fabula togata by Afranius (–). It is possible that the plot of L.’s mime involved comic confusion caused by twin sisters (Gemelli) or misunderstandings similar to those portrayed in Terence’s Adelphoe. The meagre remains of the play do not allow a reconstruction of the story. (a) and (b) This fr. is preserved by Gellius and Nonius for slightly different reasons. Gellius (.) includes it in his discussion of adjectives in -osus which have an ambiguous meaning (for instance, formidulosus may designate both someone who fears and someone who is the object of fear); elsewhere, Gellius discusses the morphology of adjectives in -osus (denominative and deverbative; ), but here he focusses on the semantic ambivalence and the peculiar usage of these words (see Garcea and Lomanto ): so the poet Calvus (fr. Courtney = fr. Hollis durum rus fugit et laboriosum), according to Gellius, does not use the word laboriosus in its common meaning, ut vulgo dicitur (i.e. ‘someone who works’), but to indicate ‘something on which work is being done’ (Hollis FRP finds Gellius’ interpretation problematic). Gellius then goes on to say that L. and Cinna (fr. Courtney = fr. Hollis somniculosam ut Poenus aspidem Psyllus) employ somniculosus ‘according to the same principle’ (eadem ratione); this remark is neither accurate nor helpful, but I suppose that what Gellius means is that somniculosus in L. and in Cinna designates not ‘someone who sleeps or feels sleepy’ but ‘someone who brings sleep to others’, ‘a soporific person or thing’ (the analogy with laboriosus is not exact). Nonius, on the other hand, does not have an extensive discussion of the active or passive meaning of these adjectives; he cites the fr. because he is interested in the rare meaning of somniculosus (i.e. causing someone to do something), which he glosses with the clause ‘because it would induce sleep’. The complicated issue of whether Nonius copied Gellius or knew
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this fr. of L. independently of Gellius is thoroughly discussed by Carilli (Note –), who argues in favour of Hertz’s view that Nonius’ immediate source, at this point of his treatise, was Gellius, and explains the problems that arise from this conclusion, which relate to the arrangement of the citations Nonius seems to have derived from Gellius. Metre: uncertain (but of the possibilities outlined below I prefer to scan this fr. as an incomplete trochaic septenarius). Ribbeck puts a lacuna between mustum and somniculosum, and scans the fr. as a senarius (ABCD A/ AbbCD). I do not favour this scansion because it creates a spondee rather than an iamb as the final foot of the line, and it is based on the assumption that somniculosum has a short i. In his apparatus criticus Ribbeck proposes to print ecastor multum somniculosum, presumably an iambic septenarius (ABCD ABcD ABCD aBˆD, if we scan somn´culosum) or an incomplete iambic octonarius (ABCD ABcD ABCdd AB , if we scan somnµculosum). LS print somnµculosus, whereas OLD prints somn´culosus. But the extant evidence points to somn´culosus: the i is clearly long in Pl. Amph. (a trochaic septenarius), Capt. (a bacchiac tetrameter), and C. Helvius Cinna apud Gell. .. = fr. Courtney = fr. Hollis (a choliamb). Buecheler inverts the word-order and prints somniculosum ecastor mustum, which may be scanned as an incomplete senarius (ABcD ABCD A). Lindsay divides the extant fr. into two lines and prints ecastor m´ultum | somn´ıculosum, but can this be correct? If Lindsay intended to scan these words as two incomplete senarii, there is a problem in that the final foot of the first line is a spondee rather than an iamb. Brakman supplies deprendit plerosque after mustum, but his conjecture neither makes sense nor scans. If we were to assume that there were no words between mustum and somniculosum, the extant fr. may be scanned as the beginning of a trochaic septenarius (BCD ABCD aBC). ecastor: exclamation used exclusively by women, according to Gellius ., Charisius . K = .– B, and Donatus on Ter. Andr. . This is confirmed by the fact that all the instances
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in which ecastor is found in Plautus () and in Terence () have a female character as a speaker: see G. Lodge, Lexicon Plautinum (Leipzig –) –; P. McGlynn, Lexicon Terentianum (London and Glasgow ) ; F. W. Nicholson HSCP () ; and B. L. Ullman CW (–) –. This suggests that the speaker of the fr. is a woman (perhaps one of the sisters of the title?) who has just started to feel the effect of the must (that she herself has drunk?). mustum ‘unfermented or only partially fermented grapejuice, must’ (OLD s.v.). On ancient definitions of this word see TLL .–. It is widely attested in Romance (ML no. ). Mustum is Mercerus’ emendation in place of the reading multum, attested unanimously in both Gellius’ and Nonius’ MSS. The advantages of this conjecture are three: (i) it justifies the inclusion of the passage in Gellius’ argument by creating a noun that is qualified by the adjective somniculosus (so L.’s fr. corresponds in structure with Cinna’s fr. somniculosam aspidem (adjective + noun), also cited by Gellius; it is very likely therefore that Gellius read mustum in the text of L., which he consulted when writing his account on adjectives in -osus; mustum was then copied wrongly as multum); (ii) it is palaeographically justified on the basis of the scribal confusion between l and s (cf. Manil. Astr. . multa M: musta GL; Pliny NH . multi E: musti cett.; Iuv. . saufeia S: laufeia O); and (iii) mustum would make sense if we were to assume that the fr. was spoken by a bibulous woman (n. ecastor). If the MS reading multum were adopted, it could be regarded as an adverb (‘very’; OLD s.v. multum , ) or an adjective. If it were regarded as an adjective, it would qualify (along with the adjective somniculosum) a missing noun, for example vinum (Ribbeck tentatively suggested mustum!). On drunkenness in L. see n. ebriacus. somniculosum: on the rarely attested meaning of this adjective see (a) and (b), and CGL . somniculosus Ëpnwtik»v (with the discussion in O. Sch¨onwerth and
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C. Weyman Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () , Ernout Adjectifs – , and M. G. Carilli, ‘Gli aggettivi col suffisso -osus in Nonio’, Studi Noniani () –). This is not the only occasion on which L. and Cinna employ a word differently from their contemporaries (). The only other extant author to have used this adjective as L. and Cinna did is Fronto Ep. ad M. Caes. .. = .– van den Hout hoc unum ex Annalibus sumptum amoris mei argumentum poeticum et sane somniculosum. On the formation of denominative adjectives in -iculosus (e.g. febriculosus, siticulosus, lacticulosus) see LHS . Plautus takes somniculosus in its usual sense (‘lethargic’) and forms the adverb somniculose ‘lethargically’ (Amph. ; Capt. ). Cf. also Cic. Sen. somniculosae senectutis (see OLD s.v. a). This fr. survives in the section of Nonius’ treatise on substantives which are attested as having more than one grammatical gender (‘De indiscretis generibus’), because it contains the noun clipeus, which, although commonly used in the masculine gender (already in Ennius), is employed by L. as a neuter substantive (hoc . . . clipeum). L. was not the first author to do this: the earliest occurrence of clipeum (as a neuter noun) is in the Atellane playwright Pomponius ( = Frassinetti clipeum in medio fixum est), whose floruit is about . It is possible that L. picked up this grammatical feature from Pomponius as a linguistic trait shared by the low genres of the Atellane comedy and the mime (on the alleged influence of Pomponius on L. see Testim. ), but the alteration of clipeus to clipeum perhaps had nothing to do with cross-fertilisation between comic genres, since clipeum is also used by the Roman annalist C. Licinius Macer (died ; fr. Peter), Varro (LL .), Virgil (Aen. ., .), Livy (.., .., .., ..), and Vitruvius (..), and in inscriptions (CIL ., ., ., ..; for instances of clipeum in the glossae and in later authors see TLL .–; NW – ). Charisius . K = . B states that clipeus designated a
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shield, whereas clipeum was used to refer to any round object shaped like a shield, but the validity of this dubious distinction is undermined by the passages which Charisius himself cites as exceptions to this ‘rule’. Metre: the fr. could be scanned as a complete senarius (AbbCdd A/BCD ABcD) or an incomplete trochaic septenarius ( AbbCdd A/BCD ABcD), if, like Ribbeck and Bonaria, we scanned peluem as a disyllabic noun with u having consonantal value. But I prefer to follow Onions and Lindsay in scanning peluem as trisyllabic, especially since u after liquid consonants acquires the value of a vowel in early playwrights: Pl. Amph. lar˘uarum; Aul. mil˘uos; Capt. lar˘uae; Ter. Ph. mil˘uo (see Sommer Handbuch ; LHS , –); the same phenomenon occurs in Phaedrus (.. mil˘uum, .. mil˘uo) and in Ovid (Met. . mil˘uus); the accusative peluim in Caecilius (peluim sibi poposcit) could be either disyllabic or trisyllabic (see Ribbeck’s note in the apparatus criticus ad loc.). But other poets treat u following a liquid as a consonant: Hor. S. .. (larva), [Ovid] Halieut. (milvi), Iuv. (. pelvis; . milvos). I scan L.’s fr. as two incomplete trochaic septenarii: line Cdd A/bbCD ABcD; line BC . On proici scanned as a spondee (BC) see Lindsay Verse and cf. Metre (coicior) and Metre (deicis). The noun peluis also occurs in , but on that occasion L. appears (at least, according to the MSS) to prefer the accusative ending in -im (as in Caecilius Statius (cited above) and in Cato Agr. . (cited below)); nevertheless, even then L. scans it as a trisyllabic noun (pel˘uim). hoc . . . clipeum: on the gender of this noun see . | proici: on the trisyllabic scansion of peluem see – peluem ˘ section on metre. Its etymology is uncertain, although various suggestions (ancient and modern) have been put forth to relate this noun to a nominal stem designating a bowl, or to a verbal root indicating washing (see TLL ..–; EM s.v.; OLD s.v. translates it as ‘a shallow bowl or basin, usu. of metal’). Before
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L. it is attested in Cato (Agr. . pelvim I) and in Caecilius Statius (passage cited above), and it is clear from the extant literary sources (even the early ones) that a peluis did not function only as a receptacle for feet to be washed in (see the various uses listed in TLL ..–). L. mentions it twice in his extant mimes (here and in ), but on both occasions the notion of washing and the function of this bowl as a container for perfume, or as a votive gift, or as an instrument of the household are hardly present. The speaker of this fr. appears to say that someone (the gender of this person is not revealed through the verb voluit) wanted a buckler to be held out or thrust forward (on the meaning of proicio see OLD s.v. a) towards (contra: see OLD s.v. a) a bowl, and I wonder whether the context of this fr. was a mock-battle in which a small shield and a metallic bowl functioned as weapons; this hypothesis may be corroborated by the fact that proicio often accompanies words indicating weapons in descriptions of battles (for clipeum proicere see Livy .., Amm. Marc. ..; examples of proicio + scutum or hasta or tela are in OLD s.v. proicio a and in TLL ..– and .–). The problems in the transmission of this fr. and its context are discussed in detail by Carilli (Note –), who begins with the sound observation that the correct reading of the verb in the fr. of L. cited by Nonius is alescit (this form is attested in the first hand of all the extant MSS for this passage except V and E). Her view is reinforced by the fact that in the passage of Lucretius (.) cited before that of L. the MSS of Nonius report the reading adulescendi or adolescendi, whereas the direct tradition of Lucretius has alescendi. If, however, we accept that the passages of Lucretius and L. were cited by Nonius in his section entitled ‘the various meanings of words’ because they contained a form of the verb alesco, we need to face the problem of the apparent contradiction created by the fact that, whereas in the citations
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of Lucretius and L. we have the forms alescendi and alescit, in the lemma of Nonius which immediately precedes these passages the MSS report the reading adolescere. Various views have been put forth to explain the origin of, and solve, this problem; the most unconvincing of these is the view of Lindsay, who, in his edn of Nonius, prints ab olescere (a construction, ab + infinitive, not found elsewhere in Nonius), and thus makes it difficult for readers to see the connection between what Lindsay thinks should be the main lemma (olesco) and the passages of L. and Lucretius, which do not contain a form of olesco. (Lindsay emends adulescendi to olescendi in the passage of Lucretius, disregarding the evidence of the direct tradition; he then prints alescit in the fr. of L., which does not square with the verb Lindsay thought Nonius wanted to discuss.) Carilli is in a way more sensible than Lindsay in her approach to the text of Nonius, and defends the reading of the MSS adolescere. But to solve the discrepancy outlined above Carilli posits a lacuna after the word Lucretius and hypothesises that an error of haplography caused both a passage of Lucretius exemplifying the verb adolescere and the lemma alescere to have been omitted by a careless scribe, who was thus responsible for the conflation of these two entries (adolescere and alescere) in the copies of subsequent scribes. Carilli reconstructs Nonius’ text (. M = . L) as follows (Note ): ADOLESCERE crescere, unde adolescentem dicimus. Lucretius lib. II denique alescendi summum tetigere cacumen
This is a plausible suggestion because it manages to retain the unanimously transmitted adolescere and to harmonise it with the verbal forms of alescere which are clearly the correct readings in the passages of Lucretius and L. But it is also an unnecessary one, especially since there is evidence from Varro (cited in Censorinus .) that the word adulescens is derived from the verb alescere
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(adulescentes ab alescendo sic nominatos). So the reading adolescere may have been a corrupt version of the original alescere, which was miscopied to adolescere by a scribe who saw the word adolescentem in the explanatory clause unde adolescentem dicimus. Printing alescere as the lemma of Nonius was a possibility which L. Mueller, in his edn of Nonius, considered, but he also suggested as an alternative the conjecture olescere. Metre: uncertain. The possibilities are numerous and are complicated both by the fanciful conjectures of various editors and by the poor state in which the text was transmitted. I am sceptical about the views of Ribbeck (who follows Lachmann and scans the fr. as a paroemiacus: laus n´omine gloria al´escit) and of Lindsay (who, unlike most editors, retains all the six words transmitted in the MSS, and scans them as two incomplete dactylic hexameters: laus nomine agendi, / nomine gloria alescit < ∪ – ∪ ∪ – ∪ ∪ – – >); their scansion cannot be paralleled in our other extant frs. of literary mime (nor is there external evidence supporting the view that mimographers used hexameters). Bothe and Ribbeck scan the fr. as two incomplete iambic senarii, but they retain the reading adolescit, which is not correct: (Bothe) laus nomine | glori¯a adolescit ; (Ribbeck) laus nomine gloria | adolescit . I am inclined to favour Carilli’s suggestion (Note ) that perhaps the structure of this fr. was originally bipartite, with each part consisting of a nominative (laus and gloria) and an ablative (nomine); Carilli (Note n. ) supplies actione (perhaps echoed in the MS reading agendi?) as the missing ablative of the second part of this apophthegmatic line; the verb alescit governs both laus and gloria as subjects (cf. hominem fieri ex mulo, colubram ex muliere). It is possible that the speaker of this fr. wished to contrast the way in which praise and glory are nourished and grow in a person. Praise increases with a good reputation (nomen; see below); in other words, if you are well thought of, you receive high praise from people, and your good name ‘nourishes’ (as it were) the favourable opinion of the public towards you. But in order to ‘nourish’ glory, you have to achieve something: good
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reputation or people’s praise is not enough to make one’s glory grow; action () is necessary for this purpose (according to the speaker). I scan the fr. as two incomplete trochaic septenarii: line ABcD; line BcD aBcD a/. nomine ‘good name’, ‘reputation’; see OLD s.v. ; and Carilli Note n. , who cites, among others, Nonius . M = . L, Cic. Brut. , ; Verg. Aen. ., .; and Hor. Carm. ... : on this conjecture see section on metre. alescit ‘it is nourished, it grows up’ (OLD s.v. and TLL .–). On its etymology and formation (as an inchoative of al˘ere ‘to cause to grow’) see EM s.v. alo, LHS . On its relation to the context of Nonius’ treatise see . Alesco occurs four times in Varro’s RR (.., .., .., ..) and once in Lucretius (cited above), but in all of these instances it refers to either plants or animals. L. appears to be the first extant author to use it metaphorically with abstract concepts (laus and gloria); Venantius Fortunatus, who spells it alisco, does the same: .. unus amor vivo solidamine iunctus alescat. STAMINAR IAE Gellius .. [Fg(=OXPN)QZ]: Neque non obsoleta quoque et maculantia ex sordidiore vulgi usu [scil. Laberius] ponit, quale est in Staminariis: tollet bona fide vos Orcus nudas in catomum tollet FgQZ: tollat Ribbeck, nudas FgQZ: nudus Bergk catomum FOPNQZ: catonum X: Catonium ed. princ.: catomium Aldobrandus: Charonium Mosellanus
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T H E W E AV I N G - WO M E N Gellius ..: Besides, he [L.] used words which were both obsolete and vulgar from the rather uncouth speech of the common people, as in The weaving-women: to be sure, Death will lift you, women, naked onto his shoulder
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Gellius attributes to L., appears to have been transmitted to us as an ablative plural of a word ending in -arius, -aria, -arium, and governed by the preposition in. The transmitted form (staminariis) does not indicate clearly the grammatical gender of the word. However, Woelfflin (Titel ) suggested that staminariis be emended to the singular staminario and be regarded as an adjective qualifying the missing noun mimus on the analogy of L.’s Catularius (i.e. mimus); if this were correct, Staminarius would mean ‘The mime about a thread’. But an inscription found in a Roman columbarium (CIL . LAVDICA | STAMINARIA | COI. NANAEIS) and the glosses (CGL . nsthv ¾ t¼n stmona; see LSJ s.v. nsthv and nhstik»v ‘of or for spinning’) indicate that staminariis can also be a substantival adjective, and on the basis of this W. Heraeus (Die Sprache des Petronius und die Glossen (Leipzig ) n. = Kleine Schriften (Heidelberg ) ) argued that L.’s title is a feminine adjective meaning ‘The weaving-maids’. In this he followed F. Ritschl (Opuscula Philologica (Leipzig /) ) and O. Ribbeck (Geschichte der r¨omischen Dichtung (Stuttgart /) ), and his view has been adopted by all subsequent editors of L. (including myself) and by the OLD. In fact, this interpretation had originally been proposed by Mosellanus in the commentary accompanying Ascensius’ edn of Gellius (Paris , ad loc.): ‘In Staminariis: a mulieribus textricibus, quae sic forte a Laberio
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dicuntur, quod in stamine texendo occupentur.’ It is true that substantives ending in -arius designate a profession, and that several of L.’s mimes are entitled after professions (Catularius). But it is also possible that Staminariis is the ablative plural of a neuter noun (∗ staminarium) denoting the place where a stamen would be found (see Cooper Formation –; LHS ; and Catularius). The unique expression staminatas (probably < stmnov) duxi in Petr. Sat. . is etymologically unrelated to the title of L.’s mime (see Smith ad loc.; W. B. Sedgwick (Cena Trimalchionis (Oxford ) ) is wrong). On the context in which this fr. survives see and n. in catomum. Metre: Ribbeck prints catomium and, like Bergk and Bothe before him, scans the fr. as a complete iambic octonarius: ABcD aBCD A/BCD aBcD. His scansion is cited in OLD s.v. catomium with the gloss: ‘[conj. for next (i.e. catomum), to restore supposed metre]’. But the reading catomum, which is clearly correct (see below), ought to be retained, and the fr. can be scanned as an iambic septenarius (ending with the amphibrachys ∪ – ∪): ABcD aBCD ABCD aBˆD (this is the scansion adopted by Marshall in the OCT of Gellius). H. R¨onsch’s division of the fr. (N. Jhb. f. Phil. () ) into two incomplete senarii ( tollet bona fide | vos Orcus nudas in catomum ) is not to be followed because it violates both Meyer’s law (tollet gives CD, rather than cD, at the fourth foot) and Luchs’ law (bona fide gives aBcD, rather than the desirable ABcD, at the end of the line). bona fide kal p©stei (CGL .), ‘in good faith’, ‘honestly’ (OLD s.v. bonus c; TLL .–). Orcus: already in Ennius (Ann. Skutsch; see comm. ad loc.) this word signifies the god of the Underworld personifying death. However, its existence in jocular phrases both in comedy
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
(Pl. Pseud. Orcus recipere ad se hunc noluit) and in texts filled with colloquial expressions (Petr. Sat. .: (the uneducated freedman Echion speaking) Glyco, Glyco dedit suas; itaque quamdiu vixerit, habebit stigmam, nec illam nisi Orcus delebit) suggests that the word was not confined to the sombre vocabulary of epic or tragedy. In L.’s fr. Orcus is clearly neither the kingdom of the Underworld nor the abstract concept of death, but a personified figure of death who will lift the women addressed (vos) by the speaker (therefore, they must be on stage at the time of the delivery of the line) and place them on his shoulder (see n. in catomum) so that they may be flogged. The lack of clothes (nudas) will make the punishment more painful and humiliating, and I presume more amusing in the mind of the speaker. in catomum: in late August , in a letter to M. Fabius Gallus, Cicero uses the rare expression in catomum, in a context reminiscent of schoolroom discipline, to indicate that supporters of Cato (such as Cicero and Gallus) will be in trouble when Caesar, who is called, ironically, ‘teacher’, returns to Rome from the battle at Munda: sed heus tu, manum de tabula! magister adest citius quam putaramus; vereor ne in catomum Catonianos (Ad fam. . with Shackleton Bailey EF ad loc.). L. is the only other extant author to use in + catomum, and surely it is this phrase which annoyed Gellius and made him include this fr. in the list of passages exemplifying obsolete and uncouth words (..). Catomum appears to have adverbial force and to be derived from the Greek prepositional phrase kat ì åmon (see EM s.v. and TLL ., both of which, however, print Ým»n, presumably because they confuse åmov ‘shoulder’ and Ým»v ‘raw’). TLL . mentions that this phrase applies ‘de homine vapulante supra umerum elato’; I suppose this means that the person who is to be punished would be hoisted up on someone’s shoulder and then would be beaten with a stick or flogged. In catomum has thus been related to the verb catomidiari or catomizari, Salmasius’ conjecture for the reading catorogare in Petr. Sat. .: the narrator Encolpius says that, since he was unable to perform sexually with
S TA M I NA RI A E
Circe, manifestis matrona contumeliis verberata tandem ad ultionem decurrit vocatque cubicularios et me iubet catomizari (see LSJ s.v. katwm©zw; TLL .–; M.-G. Cavalca, I grecismi nel Satyricon di Petronio (Bologna ) and n. ; Garcea and Lomanto –). This passage may be compared with the incident in Apul. Met. ., in which slaves raise a boy high and thrash his buttocks with a rod (vocatis duobus e familia validissimis, quam altissime sublato puero, ferula nates eius obverberans). B. L. Hijmans Jr. et al., eds., Apuleius Madaurensis Metamorphoses IX (Groningen ) refer to an illustration on a Pompeian fresco which represents a scene such as this and is reproduced in O. Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (London ) , and C. L. Ragghianti, Pittori di Pompei (Milano ) illustr. . Hijmans et al. conclude: ‘From these illustrations it becomes clear how one might visualize this scene: one slave has pulled the boy over his shoulders, holding him by the arms, while the other holds the boy’s legs, keeping them off the ground. In those frescoes it is a naughty schoolboy who is being punished; here [i.e. in Apuleius’ text] it is an adulterer caught in the act’ (p. ). Furthermore, the speaker of Iuv. . says that effeminate men (sarcastically called ‘brides’, nubentibus .) cannot conceive a baby and thus keep their ‘husbands’, so they hope to find a cure for their infertility by ‘holding out their palms to the running Lupercus’ (agili palmas praebere luperco) at the fertility-festival of the Lupercalia; the scholiast (on Iuv. . Wessner) glosses palmas as follows: ‘palmas’ ideo dicit, quia aut catomus [= katì ßmouv] levabantur [R¨onsch: laetabantur codd.] aut quia a manibus vapulant, conciperent statim. For other words related to catomum and occurring in glosses or in texts of late antiquity see TLL .– and H. R¨onsch N. Jhb. f. Phil. () . (Jos. Scaliger, Epistolae (Frankfurt ) connects in catomium (sic) with the Greek verb trachl©zein ‘to bend or twist the neck’ (LSJ), but a neck is not the same as a shoulder.) It is therefore unnecessary to emend catomum in L.’s fr. to catomium (for metrical reasons: see section on metre) or catonium (interpreting it as the Underworld (this is the view of Ascensius) or as a prison for adulterers (so says Mosellanus)) or even to
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
Charonium (to make the connection with Orcus, the god of the Underworld). STRIC TUR AE Gellius ..– [VPRCv]: Versum quoque Laberii in quo id vocabulum positum est notari iussimus [C: & notarius simus VPR: enotari iussimus Gronovius], quem legimus in mimo qui Stricturae [Scioppius: qui stricture VPC: quis trie ture R: qui scripturae v: qui Scriptor ed. princ.: Scriptura Egnatius: Secturae vel Structurae Ribbeck ] inscriptus est: sine lingua caput pedarii sententia est
Hoc vocabulum a plerisque barbare dici animadvertimus; nam pro ‘pedariis’ ‘pedaneos’ appellant. sine lingua caput Fleckeisen: caput sine lingua codd.: caput sine lingua Bergk pedarii Fleckeisen: pedani VPRC: pedaria v: pedari Ribbeck caput sine lingua pedari sententiast Bergk: caput sine lingua sententiast pedari Buecheler: sine lingua aput pedarium sententia est Lachmann
THE IRON BARS Gellius ..–: I requested that a line of L. should also be recorded in which I found that word [pedarius], a line which occurs in a mime entitled The iron bars: . . . the vote of a second-class senator (pedarius) is like a head without a tongue
I have observed that this word is formed by many in an uncouth way; for some, instead of pedarii, say pedanei.
S TRI CTURA E
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Gellius attributes to L., presents both textual and interpretative problems. Stricturae is Scioppius’ sensible emendation for the reading stricture, attested in three of the four MSS of Gellius extant for this section of his work (it occurs even in the important MS C, which Marshall had not collated). Derived from stringo, stricturae may be viewed as the nominative plural of the feminine future participle, and may be rendered as ‘The women who will bind fast’. But what could this be a reference to? All the editors of Gellius or of L. who offered a view on the meaning of this title related it to the noun strictura (attested always in the plural, but I do not see why it could not also be used in the singular), which is found first in Lucilius – M = – W crebrae ut scintillae, in stricturis quod genus olim | ferventi ferro; after L. it was employed by Virgil in the description of Vulcan’s forge in Volcania (Aen. .– striduntque cavernis | stricturae Chalybum et fornacibus ignis anhelat). See Fordyce ad loc.: ‘stringere is technically to “smelt”, i.e. to run molten iron through moulds (hence the appropriateness of the verb) into ingots (cf. Cat. . ferri stringere duritiem; Pers. .– stringere venas | ferventis massae crudo de pulvere) and stricturae are the ingots or bars of pig-iron which hiss as they are cooled in the tank’. Nonius, however, when citing the passages of Lucilius and Virgil quoted above, misinterprets stricturae as ‘sparks’: stricturae dicuntur proprie scintillae quae de ferro ferventi eunt: quod aut stricte emittantur, id est celeriter, aut quod oculos sui fulgore perstringant (. M = . L; cf. . M = . L: Stricturae dictae sunt quae de ferro candenti micant, cum massa malleis cuditur . . . dictae autem quod aut strictius emittantur aut quod oculos fulgore perstringant). In his discussion of iron ores and smelting, Pliny the Elder (NH .) gives yet another interpretation: according to him, stricturae is a generic name covering specific varieties of iron ore (‘edging ores’ in the Loeb translation): stricturae vocantur hae omnes [i.e. differentiae ferri], quod non in aliis metallis, a stringenda acie vocabulo inposito (Isidore plagiarises this definition at ..). The glosses confuse the
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
issue further: CGL . Stricturae lelipammnon £ t¼ p¼ toÓ sidrou p±pton ãsper spinqrev; Stricturae mtallon. Despite these contradictory statements it is clear that the word stricturae is associated with iron-work. But what would be the point of having such a theme as the title of a mime? The rarity of the noun and the difficulty of explaining its significance as a mimetitle induced scholars to make various conjectures (see apparatus criticus), but these are misguided since it is possible for us to view Stricturae as a play whose plot was somehow related to the profession of an ironmonger or a forger. Certainty is impossible, but the fact that several of L.’s mimes are entitled after low professions (Catularius) lends some support to this hypothesis. This fr. survives in the larger context of Gellius’ discussion of the origin of the obscure phrase pedari(i) senatores (.), a phrase which has received detailed scholarly attention: see D. B. Monro Journal of Philology () –; RE Suppl. –; L. Ross Taylor and T. Scott TAPA () –; J.-P. C`ebe, Varron: Satires M´enipp´ees (Rome ) –. Derived from pes + the suffix -arius (see EM s.v. pes), the adjective pedarius seems to have been a term specifically for senators or officials of lower standing. But Gellius is not sure that they derived their name from the fact that, since they were low in the ranking order according to which senators were asked for their sententiae, they could express themselves only by using their feet to move place and go to the area where the proposer was seated (see Festus M = L pedarium senatorem . . . ; qui ita appellatur, quia tacitus transeundo ad eum cuius sententiam probat quid sentiat indicat). For this reason Gellius cites two more explanations. The grammarian Gavius Bassus (Gellius .. = fr. Funaioli) defines pedarii as the senators who had not yet acquired curule rights and as a consequence went to senate on foot, in contrast to those senators who had already been curule aediles and had the right to go to senate in a litter. The third explanation
S TRI CTURA E
is related to the traditional formula with which the general call to senate took place: senatores quibusque in senatu sententiam dicere licet ‘senators and those who have the right to express their opinion in senate’. Having as his starting-point a passage of Varro (Men. C`ebe equites ‘pedarios’ = Gell. ..), Gellius thinks that with the term pedarios Varro means those magistrates who held lower offices and had not yet been added by the censors to the list of senators (so they went on foot to stand by a senator with whose view they agreed). Gellius cites L.’s fr. in order to corroborate the view that a pedarius was an official of lower rank (unfortunately L.’s line does not solve the problem of the origin of this word), but also implicitly commends L. for employing the correct term pedarios instead of the vulgar (in Gellius’ view) variant pedaneus, which, in addition to Gellius’ passage, is found only in inscriptions and texts from the early third century AD, frequently in a legal context: see Garcea and Lomanto –; TLL ..–; OLD s.v. On the formation of pedaneus see LHS ; on adjectives which have the same stem but end with the suffixes -arius and -aneus (e.g. extrarius and extraneus, temporarius and temporaneus, proletarius and proletaneus) see W. A. Baehrens, Sprachlicher Kommentar zur vulg¨arlateinischen Appendix Probi (Groningen ) –. Metre: in his edn of Gellius Marshall prints the fr. as it appears in the MSS: caput sine lingua pedarii sententia est. But this arrangement does not fit the metre (unless we scan c˘aput ˘ sµn˘e with iambic shortening) and it violates Meyer’s law at the second foot: lingua gives CD rather than the desirable cD); it is problematic even if we assume that Marshall meant it to scan as an incomplete trochaic septenarius. Buecheler and Bergk assume that the fr. was transmitted in a lacunose form (see apparatus criticus) but their conjectures do not add anything to the line (on the contrary, they spoil its concision). Fleckeisen had seen the problem created by lingua in the second foot and rightly inverted the word-order to sine lingua c˘ap¯ut (which restores the cD sequence); Ribbeck and Bonaria adopted his conjecture, and I am inclined to do the same, assuming that this is an incomplete trochaic
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
septenarius with two elements missing at the beginning of the line: dd ABcD aBcD ABcD. The problem, however, even with this scansion is that the line does not have a caesura (but this is not unparalleled in L.: see, for instance, the section on metre for ). For another line of L. ending with the monosyllabic est see , Metre. sine lingua caput: the joke rests on knowledge of the fact that the pedarii (be they members of the senatorial or of the equestrian class) were not allowed to use their tongue to express their view (). pedarii: on the theories about the derivation of this term see . Festus ( M = L) reports that Lucilius’ fr. agipes [codd.: Gai pes Warmington] vocem mittere coepit ( M = W) refers to a pedarium senatorem; Cicero uses the term in two letters to Atticus written in (.., ..). See also Frontin. De Aq. .; Tac. Ann. ..; TLL ..–. TAU RU S Diomedes Art Gramm. I = GL ..– K [ABMH]: Hiare et hietare veteres dixerunt . . . [.– K] Laberius [H: lauerius ABM: liberius ed. princ.] etiam in Tauro passivo modo enuntiavit, ‘hietantur fores’ inquit, pro eo sane quod est ‘hietant’, id est patent.
TH E BULL Diomedes Art Gramm. I = GL ..– K: The forms hiare and hietare (‘to be wide open’) were used by our forefathers . . . [.– K] L., in The Bull, used this verb
TAU RU S
even in the passive voice: ‘the doors are wide open’ (hietantur) instead of correctly saying hietant, that is, they are wide open. C O M M E N TA RY The meaning of the title of this mime, which Diomedes attributes to L., is as ambiguous as the other titles of Laberian plays which may refer not only to an animal (Aries, Cancer) or a person (Virgo) but also to a constellation named after this animal or person (Aries). Since only two words survive from Taurus, and since there is no external evidence providing information about its subject-matter, it is impossible to say whether L. wrote a comic story about an actual bull (OLD s.v. a) or a parody of the myths (of Europa, Pasiphae, and Theseus) related to the constellation Taurus (see OLD s.v. and Kidd Aratus ). This fr. survives because it contains the form hietor used as a deponent verb instead of the usual active (but archaic and uncommon) form hieto (see NW ). Derived from hio -are ‘to be wide open’, the type hieto seems to have been composed on the analogy of verbs such as clam-o and clam-ito, and to have been produced through the dissimilation of the second i of the form ∗ hi-ito (see EM s.v. hio; OLD s.v.; TLL ..–). Hieto should thus be viewed as the frequentative form of hio (as clamito is of clamo), but the extant evidence suggests that it had the same meaning as hio (TLL .. has ‘[vehementer] hiare’). As a deponent and an intransitive verb it is found only in this fr. of L. (see Carilli Hapax n. and n. ignescitur), whereas as an active verb, used particularly of the gaping of the mouth, it is attested in Plautus (Men. ubi ego dum hieto, Menaechmus se supterduxit mihi), Caecilius Statius (– tu, quid enim oscitans | hietansque restas?), and Gnaeus Ma(t)tius, who composed, among
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
others, mimiambs in the style of Herodas (Ilias fr. Courtney ille hietans herbam moribundo †tenit† ore; see Courtney Poets –). So this fr. of L. is unique in two respects: it contains the deponent hietor and it relates it to the noun fores; one would have expected a combination of either os (‘mouth’) + hietor (‘I gape’; cf. os + hieto in the passage of Mat(t)ius) or fores (‘door’) + pateo (‘I am open’; see OLD s.v. pateo a), not fores + hietor. It is possible that L. coined the deponent form hietor on the analogy of the verbs oscito (attested from Ennius) and oscitor ‘I open the mouth’ (employed, among others, by Plautus, Turpilius, the author of the Rhet. Her., and the Younger Seneca): see TLL ..–.; OLD s.v. Metre: uncertain. The fr. can be scanned as the ending of a senarius (dd ABcD) or of a trochaic septenarius (dd ABcD), or as part of an iambic (dd ABcD ) or a trochaic (dd ABcD ) line. TUSCA Nonius . M = . L [FHLPVEd(=ACXDMO)T]: Blitea, inutilis, a blito, herba nullius [FHLPEdT: nullus V] usus . . . . Laberius in Tusca [Bothe in notis ex codd. Charisii . B: Tucca FHLP VE: Tuncca P : Tusco Iunius: Lucca Mercerus ]: bipedem bliteam beluam verba Laberius . . . beluam om. dT
bipedem FHL PVE: ui pedem L
Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Luculentitatem [gAX: Luculentatem CDMO], a luculento . . . . Laberius (Iunius: laverius g) Tusca [Bothe in notis ex codd. Charisii . B: Tucca H PV: Thucca FH LE: Tusco Iunius]:
TUSCA
dominus noster tua luculentitate captus verba Laberius . . . captus om. d noster FH: nst Lcp : nt Lcp : nrt Pcp Vcp : nr Ecp : noster Bergk: noster L. Mueller: noster Ribbeck captus g: captus L. Mueller dubit. in app. crit.: captus Bothe, qui verba sic transposuit dominus luculentitate captus noster tua
Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Maestas [Mercerus: mestas F HLPVEACDMO: estas F : mestis X] pro maestificas [Mercerus : mestifices FHL PVEd: mestitices L ]. Laberius Tusca [Bothe in notis ex codd. Charisii . B: Tusco g: Thusco vel Tucca Ziegler]: concitata mobilitatam mente maestas verba Laberius . . . maestas om. d concitata F L : concitatam F HPVE: concitataa L mobilitatam Bothe : mobilitata F HPVE: om. F L: mobilitata mota H mg P mg V mg E mg mente FHL PVE: mentem L maestas FL E: mestas HV: mesta P: aestas L : maestas L. Mueller dubit. in app. crit.: maestas vel Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit.
Charisius . K = . B [Nnn C]: Inridenter. Laberius in Tusca [Nnn : Tuscia C: Thusca Fabricius: Thusco vel Tucca Ziegler]: inridenter petit
T H E E T RU S C A N WO M A N Nonius . M = . L:
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
Blitea, useless; derived from the word blitum (‘blite’), a vegetable of no use . . . . L. in The Etruscan woman: . . . the two-legged good-for-nothing brute
Nonius . M = . L: Luculentitas (‘splendour’), derived from luculentus (‘splendid’) . . . . L. in The Etruscan woman: . . . our master, captivated by your splendour . . .
Nonius . M = . L: Maestas in the sense of maestificas (‘you make someone sad’). L. in The Etruscan woman: you make her sad, after she was stirred to action by an agitated mind . . .
Charisius . K = . B: Inridenter (‘mockingly’). L. in The Etruscan woman: . . . s/he mockingly asks
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime attributed to L. is cited three times by Nonius and once by Charisius. It appears to be a form of the
TUSCA
adjective Tuscus ‘Etruscan’, but the intended grammatical gender of the title is uncertain because there is evidence in the MSS both for Tuscus (attested in the g family of the MSS of Nonius . M = . L) and for Tusca (reported by Charisius . K = . B; the readings in Nonius . M = . L and . M = . L are probably corrupt versions of this adjective but at least they testify that the title ended with the feminine ablative singular ending -a). It is conceivable that L. composed two similarly entitled mimes, Tuscus and Tusca, but I am not inclined to adopt this view both because titles of Greco-Roman comedies usually refer to female ethnic names (Alexandrea; but there are exceptions to this norm, e.g. Pl.’s Poenulus), and because the reputation of Etruscan women for luxurious and uninhibited life-style would easily lend itself to the comic portrayal of such characters in mime (see L. Bonfante’s excursus on Etruscan women in E. Fantham et al., eds., Women in the classical world (Oxford ) – with further reading). L. is probably dealing here with stereotypical Roman perceptions of non-Romans, as he may have done in his mimes whose titles indicate a connection with inhabitants of Alexandria, Crete, and Gaul (Cretensis). If the correct reading of the title of this mime is Tusca, it is difficult to dissociate it from notions of prostitution practised by women (but not necessarily Etruscan women) who worked in the vicus Tuscus ‘the street of the Etruscans’, which was situated at the foot of the Palatine hill and ran from the Roman Forum, at the east end of the Basilica Julia, along the area known as Velabrum up to the Circus Maximus (see A. Claridge, Rome: An Oxford archaeological guide (Oxford ) fig. and fig. ). Originally populated by Etruscan settlers, the vicus Tuscus, in L.’s time, would have had wealthy houses and shops (see CIL . and Mart. ..), but it would also have been the meeting-place for prostitutes: see Pl. Curc. in Tusco vico, ibi sunt homines qui ipsi sese venditant; Cist. – non enim hic ubi ex Tusco modo | tute tibi indigne dotem quaeras corpore; Hor. S. .. Tusci turba impia vici; cf. also CGL . lena toscia.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
It is therefore possible that the title of this mime referred to a prostitute. Nonius cites this fr. because it contains a form of the unusual denominative adjective bliteus (on its formation see LHS ; EM s.v. blitum), which is frequently attested in the glosses (see TLL .–), but it is found only in Plautus and L. as far as literary authors are concerned: Truc. (the courtesan Phronesium speaking) blitea et luteast meretrix nisi quae sapit in vino ad rem suam; cf. also Cas. , where bliteum is used as a substantive adjective: nil moror barbarico bliteo. Derived from the noun blitum (OLD s.v.: ‘a kind of spinach, blite’; TLL .–; first attested in Pl. Pseud. ; see Paul.-Fest. M = L Blitum genus holeris a saporis stupore appellatum esse ex Graeco putatur, quod ab his blx dicatur stultus), bliteus is used metaphorically in Pl. Truc. and in L., and it indicates a person who is as insipid and worthless as grass (see LSJ s.v. bl©ton ‘blite’ and blitv ‘worthless woman’; Pliny NH . blitum iners videtur ac sine sapore aut acrimonia ulla, unde convicium feminis apud Menandrum faciunt mariti; Nonius . M = . L blitea, inutilis, a blito, herba nullius usus; Isid. .. blitum genus oleris, saporis evanidi, quasi vilis beta). Plautus may have coined the adjective bliteus to create homoeoteleuton with luteus (see Truc. cited above); L. certainly uses bliteus to create alliteration and isosyllabism with bipedem and beluam. The definitions of blitum as a tasteless plant and the use of blitum and bliteus in the glosses and in literary authors are thoroughly documented by M. Carilli (Studi e ricerche dell’Istituto di Latino () –) and G. Maggiulli (Studi Noniani () –). Carilli believes that L.’s passage is directly indebted to Plautus, and bases her view on the fact that both Plautus and L. combine bliteus with another adjective (luteus– bipes), and that both of these adjectives are employed as terms of abuse. But it is equally possible that L. either formed this adjective independently of Plautus, or borrowed it from the speech
TUSCA
of the lower classes, whose slang phrases he appears to have favoured. Metre: uncertain. The fr. can be scanned as the ending of either a senarius (/bbCdd ABcD) or a trochaic septenarius (/bbCdd ABcD) with a caesura just before the beginning of bipedem. But it is equally possible that the extant three words were originally placed in the middle of either a senarius (bbCdd A/BcD ) or a trochaic septenarius (bbCdd A/BcD ). bipedem: if Tusca was composed before , L. would be the first to use the adjective bipes disparagingly of a human being. Cicero employs it as a substantival adjective in this way in Dom. (dated to ): hoc tu scriptore, hoc consiliario, hoc ministro omnium non bipedum solum sed etiam quadrupedum impurissimo, rem publicam perdidisti; Pliny Ep. . ‘scripsit [scil. Modestus],’ inquit, ‘in epistula quadam quae apud Domitianum recitata est “Regulus omnium bipedum nequissimus”’; Apul. Met. . omnium bipedum nequissimus Chryseros; HA, Alex. Sev. . ille omnium non solum bipedum sed etiam quadrupedum spurcissimus. A lustful and well-endowed man in Juvenal (.) is called a ‘two-legged donkey’ (cf. also Jer. Ep. . revertimur ad nostros bipedes asellos). bliteam: . On other aspects of agricultural imagery used in an offensive manner against characters in comedy see Pl. Bacch. adeon me fuisse fungum ut qui illi crederem; tantist quantist fungus putidus; stulti, stolidi, fatui, fungi, bardi, blenni, ´ () –; S. Lilja, Terms of buccones; P. J. Miniconi REL abuse in Roman comedy (Helsinki ) –; Fantham Imagery . beluam: on this noun applied as a term of reproach to humans (common in the comic playwrights and in Cicero) see OLD s.v. a; TLL .–; S. Lilja Terms of abuse –; Fantham Imagery –. Since belua may refer to both men (Pl. Rud. ) and women (Ter. Eun. ), it is not clear whether the speaker of this fr. talks about a man or a woman.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
This fr. survives because it contains a form of the rare abstract substantive luculentitas (OLD s.v.: ‘splendour, gorgeousness’), which Nonius derives from the word luculentus, itself a denominative adjective related to the noun lux (on the etymology of luculentus see Ernout Adjectifs – and LHS ; for the formation of luculentitas on the analogy of abstract feminine nouns such as novitas or sanitas see LHS –). Luculentitas is first attested in Caecilius vide luculentitatem eius et magnificentiam, and does not appear to have been employed after L.: Arnobius, Cassiodorus, Orosius, and Martianus Capella use the nouns luculentia and luculentas (see TLL ..– and –). L. may have formed the noun according to the pattern set by Plautus and Caecilius, both of whom coined opulentitas ‘richness’ from opulentus (Pl. Mil. quasique eius opulentitatem reverearis; Caec. – opulentitate nostra sibi iniuriam | factam). Metre: like Lindsay, I scan the fr. as two incomplete trochaic septenarii: scan line ccD ABcD; line BcD aBcD A/. Bergk inserted est after noster, presumably in order to avoid the resolution of the tenth element (cc) and the sequence ccD (dominus), but this would violate Luchs’ law because it would create a DaB (rather than the desirable DAB) sequence before the final iamb tua (cD). Ribbeck’s suggestion (dominus noster), adopted by Bonaria, is better than Bergk’s because it does not violate Luchs’ law and creates a neat caesura just before dominus: line /bbcD ABcD; line BcD aBcD a/. But Ribbeck’s suggestion is unnecessary because such resolutions are not unknown in L. (see, for instance, Metre in ). Bothe both inserts an est and re-arranges the word-order so as to compose a single trochaic septenarius: see apparatus criticus (bbCD aBcD a/BcD ABcD). luculentitate: . Since luculentus may refer to the physical beauty of a person (see the passages in OLD s.v. d), it is likely that luculentitate in the fr. of L. refers to the fine appearance,
TUSCA
not the intellectual excellence, of a character (the gender is not specified, although it is mostly women that luculentus qualifies: see TLL ..–), whose beauty captivated the speaker’s master (dominus noster; cf. .n. domina . . . privignum). Was this fr. spoken by a slave acting as a go-between between his/her master and a courtesan? captus: on capio applied to women or to the beauty of women (especially courtesans) which captivates men see TLL .– . and .–; this use is first attested in Ter. Andr. (certe captus est, spoken about a filius captivated by a meretrix) and becomes very frequent in the elegiac poets. This fr. survives because it contains a form of the rare verb maestare, which Nonius glosses as maestificare (‘to make someone sad’), a verb attested only in post-classical authors (see TLL .–). Oddly enough, Nonius does not cite this fr. of L. along with a fr. of the tragedian Accius (–), whom he quotes elsewhere in the same section of his treatise (. M = . L) under the entry Maestaret pro maerentem [codd.: an maestum?] faceret. Accius Myrmidonibus: quodsi, ut decuit, stares mecum aut meus maestaret dolor, | iam diu inflammari Atridae navis vidissent suas. Maesto is not attested after L.; its antonym, laeto ‘I make someone cheerful’, is as rare as maesto, and is attested only in the tragic playwrights of the early republic (Liv. Andr. ; Acc. ), before it was employed by Apuleius (Met. ..; ..). Maesto then appears to have been a sombre and elevated neologism used instead of (aliquem) maestum or maerentem facio, and it is likely that L.’s fr. with the triple alliteration of m, the multiple assonance of t, and the use of the rare verbal form mobilitatam was meant to have a tragic feel to it. Metre: like Lindsay and Carilli, I scan the fr. as an incomplete trochaic septenarius, although I do not adopt the same reading as they do (see n. concitata): scan BcD ABccD A/BcD A.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
concitata: the variant readings in the transmission of this fr. create great confusion and various interpretations in the meaning of this line: () Lindsay, in his edn of Nonius, and Carilli (Note ) print concitatam as the object of maestas and take mobilitata as an ablative singular qualifying mente; the fr. would thus say concitatam mobilitata mente maestas and mean ‘you make her sad, after (or although) she was excited by a disturbed mind’. This view is supported by the fact that the glosses read mobilitata mota (see n. below), not mobilitatam motam, and by the fact that the words concitatam and mobilitata occur in F , whose readings are valued highly by Lindsay because they appear to be corrections to F made by a scribe who consulted a good MS now lost – perhaps the archetype itself. () TLL .– prints both concitata and mobilitata in asyndeton as feminine ablative singulars of participles qualifying mente; the fr. would thus say concitata, mobilitata mente maestas and mean ‘you make (someone) sad with an excited and disturbed mind’. () Bothe and Ribbeck print concitata as an ablative feminine singular of a participle qualifying mente (hyperbaton), and mobilitatam in the accusative, presumably as the object of the verb maestas; the fr. would thus say concitata mobilitatam mente maestas and mean ‘you make her sad, after (or although) she was stirred to action by an agitated mind’. I favour this view because the expression mentem concitare ‘to agitate the mind’ is attested in Cicero (Div. .; .; see OLD s.v. concito b and TLL .–). The playwright therefore constructs the line as follows: ablative–accusative–ablative –verb – (accusative, qualified by the participle mobilitatam, and omitted by Nonius or Nonius’ source). () It is also possible to print concitatam and mobilitatam in asyndeton as accusative singulars of participles of feminine gender qualifying a missing feminine noun and accompanied by mente as an ablative of respect: ‘you make sad the woman (?) who is excited and disturbed in mind’. mobilitatam: see CGL . mouilitata mota. Derived from mobilis + suffix -itare (cf. nobilitare and debilitare; LHS ), the
VIRGO
verb mobilito ‘I set in motion’ also occurs in Caecilius ( ita quod laetitia me mobilitat, maeror molitur metu) and Lucretius (. inde omnia mobilitantur). Carilli (Note and n. ) prints mobilitata mente and regards this a precursor to adverbs of the Romance languages ending in -mente. maestas: . Charisius cites this fr. in the section of his work on adverbs (. K = . B), because it contains the adverb inridenter, formed from the participle of inrideo ‘I mock’. L. is the earliest and, in fact, sole extant author of the classical period who employs this adverb, which re-appears only in the writings of Probus, Nepotianus, and Augustine (see TLL ..–). A full list of adverbs formed from participles or adjectives ending in -ns is in NW – (inridenter is cited on pp. –). Metre: uncertain. Ribbeck scans the fr. as the ending of a senarius (CD ABcD) or of a trochaic septenarius (CD ABcD), but it is also possible that the words inridenter petit were originally in the middle of a senarius (CD ABcD ) or of a trochaic septenarius (CD ABcD ). VIRGO Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Appetones [FV : Appectones H : Apetones H LPV E: Appeditones A: Apeditones Hmg CXDMO: Adpetones L. Mueller] [Apetones apetentes Hmg : Apetones adpetendes Pmg : Appetones appetentes Vmg Emg ] ab appetendo [FHL PVE: ab adpetendo d: ad adpetendo L ] dicti. Laberius [g: liberius d] in [HPVEd: sin FL] Virgine:
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
alienum appetonibus viae expeditae deverticula s alienum codd.: alieni Quicherat in app. crit. appetonibus Stephanus: apetonibus codd. expeditae Buecheler: perditae FHLED: perdite PVACXMO: praeditae Bothe: paratae L. Mueller: †perditae Lindsay deverticula s Quicherat: deverticulas gCXDMO: diverticulas A: diverticula sequi Iunius: deverticulis Bothe: deverticula Ribbeck in app. crit. s Buecheler: s vel s L. Mueller: sunt Lindsay
Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)T]: Colustra, lac concretum in mammis [Haupt: Columnum lacconeregium ere mammis F H : Columnam lacchonere iunmi mammis H L : Colustra lumnam lacchonere iunmi mammis H L PVE: Colu∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ lacconere ∗∗∗∗∗∗ mammis F : colustra dT: Colustra alumnans, lac novitium in mammis Bothe in notis] . . . . Laberius [Iunius: laverius F HLPVE: laverias F ] in Virgine: siquidem, mea colustra, fretus
terris [suppl. Onions] [studere fecisset codd.: secl. Lindsay] sumere aquam ex fonte’ [gCXDMOT: fontem A]. fretus gACXDO: fretrus M: frequen T siquidem mea colustra fretus fecisset Ribbeck : si quidem mea colustra fretus , sumere est ex fonte aquam Bothe in notis: siquidem mea colustra fructus fecisset Ribbeck : siquidem mea colustra fretus terris studere Quicherat: siquidem mea colustra fartus fecisset L. Mueller: siquidem mea colustra fretus tua e re fecisset Lindsay dubit. in app. crit.
Nonius . M = . L [HLPVEd(=ACXDMO)]:
VIRGO
Peluis, sinus aquarius in quo varia [HLPVEd: vasa L. Mueller] pelluuntur [C: perluuntur HLPVEAXDMO]: unde ei nomen est. Laberius [ACX: laverius HLPVE] Virgine: amore cecidi, tamquam blatta in pel˘uim verba Laberius . . . peluim om. DMO cecidi PVEAX: caecidi HL: ceci C blatta HLVE : blata E ACX: blacta P: blitus Perottus peluim HLPVEACX: pelluim Bergk
TH E MAIDEN Nonius . M = . L: Appetones (‘those who eagerly strive after something’) is derived from appetere (‘to strive eagerly after something’). L. in The maiden: . . . for those who are eager to get their hands on others’ property the side-ways of a road that is easy to traverse are . . .
Nonius . M = . L: Colustra, curdled milk in the breast. . . . L. in The maiden: if it is really possible, my sweet-heart, relying . . .
ters [s/he had done to pursue] to draw water from the spring’. Nonius . M = . L: Peluis, a basin for water, in which various things are thoroughly rinsed (pelluuntur): hence its name. L. in The maiden: because of love I fell like a beetle falling into a bowl
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
C O M M E N TA RY The title of this mime, which Nonius attributes on three occasions to L., may indicate that the plot involved a virgin girl of marriageable age. Araros in the fourth century BC composed a Parqen©v, while the existence of the title Virgo in the corpus of plays attributed to Afranius (–), and the oxymoronic title Virgo Praegnas, which Nonius attributed to Novius (– = – Frassinetti), composer of Atellane comedies, suggest that L. wished to exploit on the mime-stage a character popular in the fabula palliata, the togata, and the Atellana. However, given that three Laberian mimes are entitled after signs of the zodiac (Aries, Cancer, Taurus), it is also conceivable that ‘The maiden’ referred to the constellation Virgo, and that this mime formed part of a series of plays which portrayed (perhaps in a mocking fashion) mythological events related to specific constellations (on the various mythological traditions associated with Virgo see Kidd Aratus –). This fr. survives because it contains a form of the substantive appeto, which occurs only in L. and appears to be derived from the stem of the verb appetere + the suffix -o -onis (an ending found primarily in words associated with the sermo plebeius: see Restio and Fischer Observations ). R. Rocca (‘Il preverbio adin Nonio’, Studi Noniani () ) prints the unassimilated form Adpetones, because ‘Nonio, contro Diomede (GL , Keil: appete), preferisce la grafia disassimilata come Catullo , , Virgilio Aen. XI e le epigrafi CIL ’ (p. ). But it is not clear that L. himself preferred this form: all the MSS read apetonibus in the citation which Nonius attributes to L., and it makes sense to view this reading as a corrupt form of appetonibus, which was wrongly copied by a scribe who mistook two p’s for one. Since appetere may indicate both ‘to have a natural desire
VIRGO
for’ (OLD s.v. ) and ‘to attack’ (OLD s.v. ), L.’s neologism was very likely meant to designate a person who, desirous of the property of others, approached strangers in order to ‘go for’ them and steal their possessions. Metre: uncertain. I follow Buecheler, Ribbeck, and Carilli in scanning this fr. as two incomplete senarii with caesurae before alienum and deverticula and with line-division after appetonibus: scan line /bbCD aBcD; line aBcD A/BCdd aB. Although the missing final iambic word of the second line is preceded by ddaB (rather than the desirable DAB) sequence (devertµc˘ul˘a s¯unt ), Luchs’ law is not violated because the final long, which is preceded by a short anceps, is a monosyllable (see Pl. Pseud. ; Stich. ; Questa Metrica ). The extant words of this fr. may also be scanned as two incomplete trochaic septenarii with line-division after viae: scan line dd A/BcD aBcD; line BcD ABCdd a/B. But there seem to be problems with this arrangement, which violates Luchs’ law because of the sequence appet¯onµb¯us vµae (DaB cD, instead of DAB cD). Bothe emends the fr. substantially (deverticulis praeditae viae alienum adpetonibus) and scans the emended version as a trochaic septenarius. alienum appetonibus: on the noun appeto see . OLD s.v. appeto takes alien¯um to be an objective genitive (contracted form of alienorum) depending on appetonibus (‘desirous of others’ property’). However, TLL . rightly leaves the question of the form alienum open (is it the accusative singular alien˘um or the contracted genitive plural alien¯um?), especially since it is possible that L. may have intended the form appetones to function as a colloquial version of the participle of appeto; see CGL . adpetones adpetentes (TLL: adpetantes codd.), and Carilli Hapax , who argues that alienum in this fr. is probably an accusative singular form, because alienum as a contracted genitive plural form is unattested elsewhere, and because accusatives depending on nomina agentis or actionis were a common feature of Plautine and Christian Latin.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
viae expeditae: as Carilli (Note ) observes, Buecheler’s emendation seems to be the least problematic attempt to restore the text at this point. It can be palaeographically explained by the fact that e is both the final letter of viae and the first of expeditae, and one could see how, once this e was dropped, a scribe would be baffled by the word xpeditae or xpedite, which he would alter to perditae or perdite. The adjective expeditus (‘easy to traverse’) in association with the noun via is also attested in Cic. Pro Fl. , Livy .., Val. Max. . ex. b, Sen. De benef. .., Sen. De prov. ., Quint. proem. ; see OLD s.v. b and TLL ..–.. Carilli (Note ) seems to be taking viae expeditae as nominative plural forms (‘le vie agevoli sono le strade traverse’), but it makes much more sense, especially since the end of the line is missing, to take them as genitive singular forms dependent on deverticula, the subject of the verb sunt: ‘the side-ways of a street that is easy to traverse are . . . ’. If this interpretation is correct, the missing word at the end of the line would be the predicate qualifying deverticula. In that respect, I prefer the supplement of L. Mueller (bona or proba ‘convenient’, i.e. for thieves) to that of Buecheler (mala) because, if a street is easy to traverse and consequently can be frequented by many people, thieves would find it easy to assail potential victims in narrow side-ways and get their hands on others’ property. deverticula s: since Nonius’ sole interest in this fr. is the etymology of the noun appetones, not the grammatical gender of the noun deverticulum, it seems reasonable to explain, as Quicherat did, the MS reading deverticulas as the error of a scribe, who joined the neuter nominative plural noun form deverticula with the abbreviation s for sunt; the feminine form ∗ deverticula (= deverticulum) is not attested, and there is no cogent reason to believe that L. coined it here (so the reading deverticulas is unlikely to have been an accusative plural feminine). For definitions of deverticulum see Don. on Ter. Eun. diverticulum est ubi iter de via flectitur; Serv. on Verg. Aen. . diverticula autem sunt semitae
VIRGO
transversae, quae sunt a latere viae militaris; Isid. Orig. ..; TLL ..–. The textual problems in the transmission of this entry are evident even in the best MSS of Nonius (see apparatus criticus and Carilli Note ), who quotes Lucilius ( M = W †hiberam insulam† omento omnicolore colustra) and L. apparently in order to exemplify uses of the noun colustra (attested also as colostra, colostrum, and colustrum: ‘beestings’; see OLD s.v.; TLL .–; Sommer Handbuch –). It seems either that there was only one entry, colustra, which (perhaps because it was written in an abbreviated form) may have been misread by scribes as columnam (so says Lindsay in his apparatus criticus ad loc.), or that there were two entries, columnam ‘pillar’ and colustra, which were conflated into one lemma (this is the view of J. H. Onions JPh () ). Hauptius’ restoration of the explanatory gloss for colustra (‘lac concretum in mammis’) is palaeographically quite close to the unintelligible reading of the MSS, and can be supported by several entries in the glossaries (CGL . colustrum lac concretum in mammis; .; .). The lack of a theatrical context, the odd phrase in the MSS mea colustra fretus, the fact that the MSS also attribute to this fr. of L. the words terris studere fecisset sumere aquam ex fonte, and the difficulties that arise from the conflation of the Laberian fr. with a fr. of Naevius’ Lycurgus ( = fr. Marmorale aquam creterris sumere ex fonte), which Nonius cites at . M = . L in relation to the noun creterra (see W. Clausen CQ () –), make it very difficult to decide whether we are to take L.’s mea colustra as a literal example of Nonius’ entry (but what would then be the meaning of the fr.?) or as a term of endearment addressed to another person on stage (see Pl. Poen. – (the slave Milphio is talking to the girl Adelphasium) mea voluptas, mea delicia, mea vita, mea amoenitas, | meus ocellus, meum labellum, mea salus, meum savium, | meum mel, meum cor, mea colustra, meu’ molliculus caseus; huiiu’ colustra, huiius dulciculus caseus; and
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
A. Traill CQ () n. ). If the latter is the case, mea colustra would be in the vocative case and would not be governed by the verbal forms fretus or fecisset. This is how Carilli (Note ) appears to interpret L.’s fr., which she translates as follows: ‘se, dolcezza mia, confidando . . . ’. If we were to take mea colustra with fretus, then mea colustra would need to be in the ablative case (‘relying on my sweet-heart’; see OLD s.v. fretus a; but we would need to scan s´quµd¯em m˘ea¯ c˘ol¯ustr¯a fr¯et˘us . . . ), and it would account for the inclusion of fretus in the fr.; Nonius (and/or his source) must have realised that it was essential to cite fretus for the fr. to make sense. Ribbeck emends fretus to fructus and transposes the verb fecisset (which was originally next to studeret) into the conditional clause of L.’s fr. (= si quidem mea colustra fructus fecisset). This is metrically problematic and does not account for the infinitive studere, which is attested in all the MSS of Nonius at this point (is it an error of dittography based on sumere?) but in none of Nonius . M = . L (which contains the citation of Naevius’ fr.). I am inclined to take mea colustra as vocative, to interpret colustra metaphorically as a term of endearment, and (like Lindsay) to regard studere fecisset as an interpolation which has nothing to do either with L.’s or with Naevius’ frs. The hypothesis that Nonius cited the passage of Naevius’ Lycurgus twice can be easily supported by the view that at . M = . L Nonius was interested in creterra ‘crater’ as a rare word (hence its inclusion in the section ‘De honestis et nove veterum dictis’), whereas at . M = . L he listed creterra in the section ‘De genere vasorum vel poculorum’. Metre: uncertain. The extant fr. (as I print it) may be scanned as an incomplete trochaic septenarius (bbCdd aBcD a/). This fr. survives in the section of Nonius’ work entitled ‘De genere vasorum vel poculorum’, because it contains a form of the noun peluis, on which see n.– pel˘uem | proici. Metre: a senarius; scan aBcdd A/BCD ABcD.
VIRGO
amore: I take this to be an ablative of cause; so what the speaker says is not that he or she fell in love (this would need the construction in + accusative: Pl. Trin. – nam qui in amorem praecipitavit | peius perit quam saxo saliat; Cat. .– | inducens in amorem; Curio in Cic. De inv. . nemo potest uno aspectu neque praeteriens in amorem incidere; Sen. Contr. exc. . in amorem filiae istius incidi), but that, because of love, he or she fell from the high position in which he or she was. The speaker’s previous status is not specified, but the inferior status in which the speaker finds himself or herself because of love may be moral, social, or financial (see n. cecidi below). The extant fr. could then be the words of a woman who states that her moral standards have fallen because of love; or of a man who claims that love ruined him financially (through the expenses for his wife or his girlfriend). The imagery of the insect (cockroach? moth?) that has fallen into a bowl (see n. blatta below) underlines the helplessness of the speaker: just as an insect falls into a basin and then hopelessly struggles to get out of it, so the speaker feels that, because of love, he or she has fallen into disgrace and it is impossible to regain his or her previous status (the metaphor is expressed almost in proverbial terms: see Otto Sprichw¨orter ). On the idea that the person who has fallen in love also ‘falls’ metaphorically from a high point into an abyss see Pl. Trin. – (cited above) and Cat. .– tanto te absorbens vertice amoris | aestus in abruptum detulerat barathrum. However, the comparison in L.’s mime between a person and a bug surely undermines the seriousness of the situation in which the speaker is involved. cecidi: the speaker is here playing with the literal and metaphorical senses of the verb cado, which may be applied not only to people and things that fall on the ground but also to people who have been ruined or brought down from a high position (of power or social status or good fortune or eloquence): see also . and ; Cic. Ad fam. .a. (sed quoniam eodem tempore eademque de causa nostrum uterque cecidit); Part. orat. (nihil est enim tam miserabile quam ex beato miser. Et hoc totum est quod moveat, si
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
qua ex fortuna quis cadat); Caelius Ad fam. .. (illud video, bene sentientem, etsi nihil effecerit, cadere non posse); Orat. (minimeque in lubrico versabitur et, si semel constiterit, numquam cadet); Lucr. . (graviter magni magno cecidere ibi casu); OLD s.v. f and a; TLL .–.. blatta: apparently a vulgar, assimilated form of the unattested noun ∗ blacta, of unknown etymology (see EM s.v.; OLD s.v.; Sommer Handbuch ), blatta is not attested before L. and has been employed to designate various insects: (cockroaches?) Verg. Georg. . lucifugis congesta cubilia blattis (cf. Colum. RR .. lucifugaeque blattae, ut ait Maro; Mart. ..; Isid. .. hoc autem animal [i.e. blatta] lucem videre non patitur, contrarium muscae, nam musca lucipeta, et blatta lucifuga est; per noctem enim tantum ambulat); (clothes-moths) Hor. S. ..– cui stragula vestis, | blattarum ac tinearum epulae, putrescat in arca; (book-worms) Mart. . selectos nisi das mihi libellos, | admittam tineas trucesque blattas; TLL .– . It is not clear to me what kind of insect L. had in mind in this passage, but in view of Pliny NH . (e contrario tenebrarum alumna blattis vita, lucemque fugiunt, in balinearum [Mayhoff: balineis or balineas codd.] maxime umido vapore prognatae) he may have been referring to a cockroach. peluim: on the trisyllabic accusative of pel˘uis see Metre. ˘ On the form peluim (as opposed to peluem) see Velleius Longus in GL ..– K (sane basim et pelvim per i scribamus, quoniam et basicula et pelvicula scribitur, et ablativo casu i finiuntur, ab hac basi et ab hac pelvi); Lindsay Language §; and NW , –, .
E X I N C E RT I S FA BU L I S – F R AG M E N T S F RO M U N S P E C I F I E D M I M E S ( a ) Plinius Naturalis Historia .–:
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
Apud antiquos piscium nobilissimus habitus acipenser, unus omnium squamis ad os versis, contra quam in nando meat, nullo nunc in honore est, quod equidem miror, cum sit rarus inventu – quidam eum elopem vocant. Postea praecipuam auctoritatem fuisse lupo et asellis Nepos Cornelius et Laberius poeta mimorum tradidere. Pliny Natural History .–: In the times of our forefathers the sturgeon was considered to be the noblest of the fishes, being the only one with its scales towards its mouth, in the opposite direction to its movement when it swims; now, however, it is held in no esteem, which I personally find surprising, since it is a fish seldom to be found; some people call it elops. Cornelius Nepos and the mimographer L. have recounted that, at a later stage, the most highly esteemed fishes were the bass and the hake. (b) Ioannes Lydus Perª xousiän (De Magistratibus) . = . Bandy = . Wuensch [P]: kaª lopa mn aÉt¼n %ristotlhv kaª pntev o¬ jusikoª kaloÓsin kaª %ristojnhv d ¾ Buzntiov n ti ìEpitomi tän n «cqÅsi jusikän. o¬ d ëRwma±oi kuipnsera [Bekker: aku·phnsera R: ku·pnsera Fuss], di ì v aÉtoª gegrjasin a«t©av. Kornliov d pwv [Wuensch: d päv P: Npwv Fuss] kaª Labriov ¾ poihtv, mjw ëRwma±oi, jasªn ìOptt»n tina naÅklhron toÓ Karpaq©ou st»lou, o«ke±on Klaud©ou basilwv, negk»nta k tv ktw qalsshv lopav n mson tv ìOst©av [Wuensch: oste©av P: ìOsths©av Fuss] kaª Kampanv perispe±rai qalsshv. John the Lydian On Powers . = . Bandy = . Wuensch: Aristotle and all other natural scientists call this fish elops, as does Aristophanes of Byzantium in his Epitome of the physical properties of fishes; but the Romans call it accipenser, for reasons which they have explained in their writings; and Cornelius pos
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and the playwright L., both Romans, relate that a certain Optatus, shipowner of the Carpathian fleet, who was a freedman of king Claudius, brought fish of this type from the lower sea and scattered them between Ostia and the Campanian sea.
C O M M E N TA RY In his lengthy discussion of fish, and specifically of the various grades of fish for the table, Pliny the Elder (NH .) contrasts a rare type of fish called acipenser (OLD s.v. ‘prob. the sturgeon’), highly regarded ‘in the old days’ (apud antiquos; see Lucil. M = W; Cic. Tusc. disp. .; Fin. .; [Ovid] Halieut. ; D.’A. Thompson, A glossary of Greek fishes (London ) –, –), with two other varieties of fish which, according to Cornelius Nepos and to L. (so says Pliny), were the most highly esteemed fishes at a later period (no specific details are given as to which period Pliny refers to): these were the asellus (‘hake’) and the lupus (‘bass’). Varro (LL .) states that the name of the aselli was derived from their colour, and [Ovid] (Halieut. ) remarks that this name gives the wrong impression about the fish’s shape (see CGL . ½n©skov ¾ «cqÅv asellus; TLL .– ; Thompson Fishes –). OLD s.v. asellus wrongly groups the passage of Petr. Sat. ., in which the priestess Quartilla says that ‘after a little donkey’ (asellum) she does not care for daily rations, with other passages which cite asellus = ‘fish’: it should be listed under section , where asellus = ‘an ass’; see M. Habash Ancient Narrative () –. On the origin of the name lupus = ‘bass’ see Varro LL . and Isid. ..; this fish seems to have been a delicacy (see Tit. apud Macr. Sat. ..; Varro RR ..; Colum. ..; OLD s.v. a; TLL ..–; Thompson Fishes –). Pliny then goes on to say that in his day the place of honour, as far as fish-dishes are concerned, is given to the scarus (OLD s.v.: ‘the parrot-wrasse’), and that in the reign of Tiberius Claudius one of the Emperor’s freedmen called Optatus imported wrasse
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and scattered them about in the sea between Ostia and the coast of Campania (NH . inde advectos (scil. scaros) Tiberio Claudio principe Optatus e libertis eius praefectus classis inter Ostiensem et Campaniae oram sparsos disseminavit). It is the latter passage of Pliny concerning Optatus that John the Lydian (. Bandy) and/or his source, Petrus the Patrician writing in the mid-sixth century AD, wrongly connected with L. and Cornelius Nepos (both of whom Pliny mentioned only in connection with lupi and aselli), without even considering whether these authors (i.e. L. and Nepos) were alive during the reign of Claudius. Bandy, in his commentary on Lydus’ On Powers, fails to note this historical blunder on Lydus’ part and takes his evidence at face value; but it is worthless. The extant corpus of Nepos mentions neither a lupus nor an asellus, and although it is likely that Pliny’s statement is based on a citation which he saw in a work by Nepos no longer extant, the possibility that Pliny misattributed to L. and to Nepos the reference to the hake and the bass should always be kept in mind. Even if a character in a play of L. did say what Pliny claims, it is still unclear that he or she mentioned both types of fish, and that he or she used exactly the same words which Pliny employed in his passage (postea praecipuam auctoritatem fuisse lupo et asellis). The attempt therefore of Bonaria and other scholars to paraphrase Pliny’s words and turn them into a fr. that scans (l˘up(i) a¯ tqu(e) a˘ s¯ell´ pr´ncµp¯em l˘oc(um) o¯btµn¯ent: a complete senarius) is ultimately futile. M. Cornelius Fronto Epist. ad M. Caes. et invicem .. = . van den Hout [A]: Enimvero quibus ego gaudium meum verbis exprimere possim, quod orationem istam meam tua manu descriptam misisti mihi? Verum est profecto quod ait noster Laberius, ‘ad amorem iniciendum delenimenta [A: delinimenta Hildebrand] esse deliramenta [Buttmann: deliberamenta A: deleramenta Ribbeck], beneficia autem veneficia [Mai: beneficia A].’ quo poculo aut veneno
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quisquam tantum flammae ad amandum incussisset praeut tu me [et A: seclusi] facto hoc stupidum et attonitum ardente amore tuo reddidisti? M. Cornelius Fronto Letters to and from M. Caesar .. = . van den Hout : And indeed with what words could I express my joy at your having sent me that speech of mine transcribed by your own hand? The words of our L. are undoubtedly true, that ‘in inspiring love blandishments are delusions, but kind acts work the real magic’. With which cup or love-philtre could anyone so have stirred the flame of passion in loving as with this deed of yours, with which you have amazed and dazed me by the ardour of your love?
C O M M E N TA RY Unlike Gellius, Fronto expresses unqualified admiration for L.’s poetry (Holford-Strevens Gellius , ; Garcea and Lomanto ); he recommends L. as an author worthy of study by Marcus Aurelius (Fronto Ad M. Caes. et invicem .. = . van den Hout ; Testim. ), and does not hesitate to call him ‘our mutual friend L.’ (.. = .– van den Hout noster Laberius; on the meaning of noster in this passage see van den Hout Fronto , –; OLD s.v. b and c). Nevertheless, Fronto is not accurate when he cites L., because the words which he quotes to Marcus Aurelius at .., and which he attributes to L., do not scan. Bonaria () states that it is not necessary to emend L.’s text as cited by Fronto or to provide supplements to it so that it may scan, because L. may have also written in prose, since there is some evidence for the existence of mime-prose texts. However, the overwhelming majority of lines attributed to L. either scan or can be made to scan with slight emendations, and there is no external evidence to suggest that L. composed prose-mimes. On the other hand, the problematic scansion of the fr. raises the important issue of the accuracy with which Fronto cites L.: Fronto may have paraphrased the original fr. of L., retaining
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only the important words delenimenta, deliramenta, beneficia, and veneficia, and omitted other words of the original context, which he deemed superfluous for the purpose of praising Aurelius in his letter to him. It is because of this uncertainty in the transmission of the fr., not because I think that it was originally not written in verse, that I print L.’s text in continuous prose as part of Fronto’s letter. L.’s fr. is employed by Fronto as a moral maxim, praising in an authoritative and alliterative fashion Aurelius’ action of transcribing a speech of Fronto, which Fronto himself, with mock modesty, considers mediocre or even unworthy (.. = . van den Hout oratio mediocris, ne dicam ignobilis). Fronto’s point to Aurelius is that, when it comes to inspiring love, real kindnesses speak louder than simply ingratiating actions (so Aurelius’ effort in transcribing Fronto’s speech is profoundly appreciated by Fronto), and this is exactly the gist of L.’s fr. too (‘blandishments are delusions, but kind acts work the real magic’). It is impossible to know how L.’s witty saying functioned in its original context. Metre: uncertain. Ribbeck prints delenimenta | ad amorem d˘el˘eramenta, veneficia autem beneficia | (trochaic septenarii; but there are more syllables in the second line than those required by the metre; moreover, in order that the second line may scan, the first and second syllables of deleramenta need, contrary to norm, to be short. On the shortening of the first syllable of deleramenta see M¨uller Prosodie ). In his third edn Ribbeck re-arranges the words as follows: ad amorem delenimenta deleramenta | beneficia, veneficia . . . (trochaic septenarii; but this arrangement is unsatisfactory, because some of the words Ribbeck introduces into L.’s text change the meaning of the fr. contrary to Fronto’s intention). E. Hauler (WS () ) rightly incorporates into L.’s fr. the words ad amorem iniciendum and prints . . . ad amorem iniciendum delenimenta d˘eleramenta , | beneficia autem veneficia (iambic octonarii: line aaBCdd ABCD ABccD ABcdd; line aabbCD aBcdd). On the scansion of d˘eleramenta see above. The sequence beneficia autem (aabb CD) violates Meyer’s law in the second foot of the second line.
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delenimenta . . . deliramenta: L. plays with suffixes again. As elsewhere, the suffix -mentum has an instrumental force (Gratwick on Pl. Men. ; LHS –). So delenimentum (< delenire; see EM s.v. lenis; OLD s.v.; TLL ..) designates ‘something that soothes’ (but the ingratiating action itself has an ambiguous quality to it because it may lead to a good or a bad end: see TLL ..–), while deliramentum (< delirare; see Beda in GL .. deliramentum, non deleramentum, quia a verbo liro, id est sulco, originem trahit; EM s.v. lira; OLD s.v.; TLL ..) denotes ‘something that is off the furrow, i.e. off the rails’. Van den Hout (Fronto ) argues that we ‘should not alter deleramenta (Ribbeck’s conjecture for the MS’ deliberamenta) to deliramenta: it is a paronomasia (annominatio) with delenimenta, and the form deleramentum is also found in MSS of other authors’. But the forms deleramentum and delero are products of dubious etymological views (see EM s.v. lira: ‘Souvent e´ crit d¯el¯er¯o, qu’on explique par un faux rapprochement avec lhre±n [‘to be foolish’]; cf. Caper, GLK , , delirare et delerare p¼ toÓ lrou. Mais l’¯e de d¯el¯er¯o peut avoir une origine dialectale’), and the alteration of deleramenta to deliramenta does not impair significantly L.’s word-play. Before L. the nouns delenimentum and deliramentum are attested only in comic playwrights (Afran. and ; Pl. Amph. ; Capt. ; Men. –), and it is surely deliberate that L. opts to pun on words which are both rare and specifically associated with comedy (at . he even coins the unique word deliritas, which Nonius glosses with the common term deliratio). It is also worth considering whether the word deliberamenta, which the scribe of Fronto’s MS attributes to L., ought to be accepted as what L. originally wrote. Neither OLD nor TLL have an entry for it, while van den Hout (Fronto ) dismisses it as ‘a nonexistent word’. But this is not the first time that L. uses suffixes to coin unique neologisms: deliberamentum would thus be formed from the stem of the infinitive deliberare + the suffix -mentum, and would denote ‘something which produces a deliberation’. The problem with this view, however, is that the fr. would then mean ‘to inspire love blandishments cause deliberation, whereas kind
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acts are sorcery’; the meaning of this version is less clear than the earlier version, which expresses a clear contrast between what are mere delusions (deliramenta) and what is sorcery (veneficia). beneficia . . . veneficia: homoeoteleuton and isosyllabism in these four compound abstract substantives (-menta . . . -menta . . . -ficia . . . -ficia) create symmetry, but the striking aspect in the word-play regarding this pair is that beneficium ‘an action that does good’ (< bene + ficus + -ium) and veneficium ‘an action that employs magic’ (< vene- (see OLD s.v. venenum) + ficus + -ium) are acoustically almost identical (see H. Thielmann Archiv f. lat. Lexik. () ). The sense of veneficium = ‘a philtre’ (OLD s.v. b), though attested later than L., recalls the opening of the fr., where there is a mention of the action of inspiring love (ad amorem iniciendum). It comes as no surprise that Apuleius, the erudite sophist, exploited this pun (perhaps as a direct borrowing from L.) in an amatory context in his Apologia when refuting the accusation of Aemilianus that he (Apuleius) seduced Pudentilla by means of magic potions: cur ergo Pudentillae animum veneficiis flecterem? . . . o grave veneficium dicam an ingratum beneficium (). M. Aurelius Caesar Frontonis Epist. ad M. Caes. et invicem .. = . van den Hout [A]: Postquam ad te proxime scripsi, postea nihil operae pretium quod ad te scriberetur aut quod cognitum ad aliquem modum iuvaret. Nam di tän aÉtän fere dies tramisimus: idem theatrum, idem odium [van den Hout: idem odeum A : item odium A : i(n) a(lio) otium Amg ], idem desiderium tuum. Quid dico ‘idem’? Immo id cottidie novatur et gliscit et, quod ait Laberius de amore, suo modo kaª pª «d© moÅs, ‘amor tuus [A: tuus amor Ribbeck] tam cito crescit quam [A : tam A ] porrus, tam firme quam palma [A : quam firme quam palma A : tam quam palma firmiter Buecheler].’ Hoc igitur ego ad desiderium verto, quod ille de amore ait.
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M. Aurelius Caesar Fronto’s Letters to and from M. Caesar .. = . van den Hout : Since I wrote you my last letter, there has been nothing worthwhile to write to you about, and nothing that would have interested you in any way, had you known about it. For we let the days pass by, doing – more or less – the same things: the same theatre, the same boredom, the same longing to see you. But why do I say ‘the same’? Rather with every day my longing renews itself and grows in strength and, as L. in his own inimitable way and in his characteristic style comments on love, ‘your love grows as fast as a leek, as firm as a palm-tree’. What he says about love, then, I apply to my longing for you. C O M M E N TA RY On Fronto’s predilection for L.’s poetry see . This fr., however, survives in a letter from Marcus Aurelius to Fronto: he exploits the effective and original imagery of the fr. to convey to Fronto the ever-growing longing (desiderium) he feels for him. But care has been taken to distinguish this feeling from the feeling of love (amor) originally mentioned in L.’s fr.: as each day passes by, Marcus’ longing for his teacher ‘grows as quickly as a leek and as firmly as a palm-tree’. It is now impossible to recover the identity of the speaker, or of the addressee, and the context in which this striking declaration of love was originally uttered. But the unique comparison of amor with a leek and a palmtree, in order to convey the idea that the feelings of longing which the addressee (amor tuus) has towards someone develop quickly and have depth, suggests that this was a comic statement originally aimed at amusement through hyperbole rather than at the expression of genuinely serious emotions (could these have been the words of a slave who addresses his/her master and comments on his or her master’s love for another person?). The speaker constructs this witty and bipartite saying as if it were a common proverb, but the underlying assumption, shared by Aurelius himself, is that the imagery conveyed here is not found
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elsewhere (suo modo kaª pª «d© moÅs; see van den Hout Fronto ). Like Fronto in fr. , so Aurelius here cites L. loosely, because the transmitted text, which Aurelius attributes to L., does not scan. On the implications arising from the metrical difficulties see . Metre: the fr. has been reconstructed so as to scan as two senarii (Buecheler: a˘ m¯or tu u s t¯am cµt¯o | cr¯esc´t qu¯am p¯orr¯us, t¯am qu¯am p¯alm˘a f´rmµt˘er) or as two trochaic septenarii (Ribbeck: a˘ m¯or t˘uu˘ s | t¯am cµt¯o cr¯esc´t qu¯am p¯orr¯us, t¯am qu¯am p¯alm˘a f´rmµt˘er). Either of these reconstructions is possible, but it is far from certain that they bear a close similarity to what L. originally wrote. porrus: the speaker of L.’s fr. is not interested in the portrayal of the leek as a humble dish (see Hor. S. ..), or in the unpleasant breath it may produce in the mouth of the diner (see Morton Braund on Iuv. .–), or in the two varieties of porrus (sectivum and capitatum) which existed in antiquity (see OLD s.v. and Mayor on Iuv. .). It is the speed with which leeks grow that is stressed in the amatory context here. palma: cf. Varro RR .. palma . . . in crescendo tarda; Verg. G. . ardua palma; Val. Max. .. excelsae altitudinis; Pliny NH . in longitudinem excrescunt. The point of comparison here between the palm-tree and amor is the deep-rootedness of the feelings which the addressee of this fr. has for someone; likewise, Aurelius’ longing for his teacher grows deeper every day and will not easily be eradicated. M. Cornelius Fronto Ad M. Antoninum de Orationibus = . van den Hout [A]: Neque ignoro copiosum sententiis et redundantem hominem [scil. Senecam] esse; verum sententias eius tolutares video nusquam quadripedo concito [A: concitas Klussmann: secl. Cornelissen] cursu tenere [A: contendere Cornelissen: tendere Nov´ak],
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nusquam pugnare, nusquam iestatem [lac. suppl. Mai] studere [suppl. Mai], ut Laberius ait, ‘dictabolaria’ [A: dicabularia Heraeus: dictabolari Heindorf], immo dicteria, potius eum [scil. Senecam] quam dicta confingere [van den Hout: conpingere A: continuare Heindorf]. M. Cornelius Fronto To M. Antoninus on Speeches = . van den Hout : I am quite aware that Seneca is a man well supplied with thoughts, in fact overflowing with them; but I see that his thoughts amble along, never shaping their course at the headlong speed of a horse at the gallop, never engaging in combat, and never striving after grandeur in language, , as L. says, Seneca constructs ‘bits of word-lumps’, or rather ‘wordshowing-parades’, instead of pithy sayings.
C O M M E N TA RY In his discussion of the style which Seneca the Younger cultivates in his sententiae Quintilian notes the following: his [i.e. Seneca’s] works contain a number of striking general reflexions [multae in eo claraeque sententiae] and much that is worth reading for edification; but his style is for the most part corrupt and exceedingly dangerous, for the very reason that its vices are so many and attractive . . . For if he had only despised all unnatural expressions and had not been so passionately fond of all that was incorrect, if he had not felt such affection for all that was his own, and had not impaired the solidity of his matter by striving after epigrammatic brevity [si rerum pondera minutissimis sententiis non fregisset], he would have won the approval of the learned instead of the enthusiasm of boys. (..–; Loeb translation)
Fronto, like Quintilian, focusses on the slow pace of Seneca’s phrases, and he does this by exploiting the vocabulary of horseracing (on tolutares . . . quadripedo concito cursu tenere see van den
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Hout Fronto ). Fronto thinks that Seneca’s sayings are a far cry from galloping horses, and never strive after sublimity and grandeur (nusquam maiestatem studere). But E. Hauler (WS () ), Giancotti (Mimo ), and Bonaria (), among others, have interpreted Fronto’s words as a paraphrase of an original quotation from L., who with these phrases was allegedly targeting his rival Publilius (see van den Hout Fronto ). Attempts were also made to reconstruct Fronto’s text in such a way that it would scan as a series of senarii: tolutares ecce istius sententiae: nusquam quadripedo concito cursu tenent, nusquam pugnant, nusquam maiestatem student. dictabolaria , immo dicteria potius quam dicta confingit .
This is plainly wrong. For at this point in the letter Fronto borrows only one word from L., the neuter plural noun dictabolaria, which he then joins with a word he found perhaps in the early comic playwrights (dicteria; the particle immo clearly shows that L. was not the author of both dicteria and dictabolaria), in order to express in a witty fashion the inadequacy of Seneca as an author in his sententiae. The neuter plural noun dicteria, of unclear etymology and meaning (see OLD s.v.: ‘[perh. DICO + Gk. term. -rion]’; TLL ..–: ‘[a gr. deiktrion tractum esse videtur, quamvis differant significationes traditae; cf. deikthriv ‘mima’?]’; and the discussion of van den Hout Fronto –), is attested also in Varro (Men. C`ebe neque orthopsalticum attulit psalterium | quibus sonant in Graecia dicteria) and Martial (.. omnibus adrides, dicteria dicis in omnis), and appears to have been employed by the Atellane playwrights Pomponius and Novius (Macr. Sat. .. Novius vero Pomponiusque iocos non raro dicteria nominant). But the noun dictabolaria (if this is the correct reading) is not attested elsewhere, and L. seems to have coined it with the aid of the suffix -arius attached to the unattested noun ∗dictabulum < dictare (cf. vocabulum < vocare): see TLL ..–; E. Hauler WS
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() ; and Carilli Hapax and n. . But it is also possible that dictabolarium is a hybrid word consisting of the Latin neuter noun dictum and the Greek neuter noun bwlrion, which is the diminutive of bälov ‘lump’ and is attested in Strabo and Marcus Aurelius (see LSJ s.v.). Fronto does not say anything about the original context in which the word was employed; when applied to Seneca’s style of writing, it suggests that Seneca’s phrases do not flow freely but stick together like small clods of earth. ( a ) Gellius ..– [FOXPNQZ]: Quod Laberius verba pleraque licentius petulantiusque finxit; et quod multis item verbis utitur de quibus an sint Latina quaeri solet. Laberius in mimis quos scriptitavit oppido quam verba finxit praelicenter. Nam et ‘mendicimonium’ dicit [FXPQ: dixit ONZ: suppl. Hertz post dicit collato Nonio . M = . L] et ‘moechimonium’ et ‘adulterionem’ [FOX PNQZ: adultereonem X ] ‘adulteritatem’que pro ‘adulterio’ et ‘depudicavit’ pro ‘stupravit’ et ‘abluvium’ pro ‘diluvio’ . . . Gellius ..–: That L. coined many words rather freely and heedlessly; and that he also uses many words whose Latinity is often found questionable. L., in the mimes which he was always writing, coined words with excessive freedom. For he [L.] speaks of mendicimonium (‘beggary’), and uses the words moechimonium and adulterio and adulteritas for ‘adultery’, and depudicavit for stupravit (‘he violated someone’s sexual integrity’), and abluvium for diluvium (‘inundation’) . . . C O M M E N TA RY On the context in which these frs. survive see (a). Metre: uncertain.
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mendicimonium . . . moechimonium ‘the condition of a beggar’ (the common word for this would be mendicitas, attested already in Pl. Men. , Rud. ; see OLD s.v.) . . . ‘the act of adultery’ (moice©a; cf. in Late Latin moechatio: TLL .– .). These abstract nouns in -monium, attested only in L., are formed from the substantive adjectives mendicus (native Italian word) and moechus (form imported from Greek), respectively, and belong to the sermo vulgaris. On their mock-legal flavour see n. miserimonium, LHS , Olcott Formation –, Cooper Formation –, Fischer Observations , Carilli Hapax , and Garcea and Lomanto . adulterionem adulteritatemque: neither of these nouns is attested elsewhere, and both of them, according to Gellius, have the same meaning as the commonly attested noun adulterium (‘adultery’), which is found as early as Plautus and Cato (see OLD s.v.). Gellius must have been able to see at least part of the mime-script, which contained the word adulterio, otherwise I do not understand how he could have deduced simply from the formation of this noun that it was abstract feminine rather than, say, concrete masculine; for instance, adulterio might have designated an adulter, ‘a person committing adultery’, just as restio and cocio, both of which appear in L.’s frs., are masculine nouns belonging to the sermo vulgaris and indicating persons, not abstract concepts (Restio; W. Meyer Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () ; R. Fisch Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () ). Along these lines Dalmasso (–) argues that Gellius’ gloss pro adulterio should be taken to refer only to the unusual noun adulteritatem, while adulterionem should be taken to mean ‘an adulterer’. But Gellius’ testimony that adulterio = adulterium suggests that L. regarded his neologism as a feminine abstract substantive in -io -ion-is, which he formed from the stem of the verb adulterare ‘to commit adultery’ (cf. rebell-io, opin-io, and see LHS . OLD s.v. and Garcea and Lomanto say that adulterio is formed from the inflection -ion- added to the stem of adulter). Moreover, Carilli (Note ) draws attention both to the existence of several
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feminine abstract nouns of a legal character ending in -io -ionis (e.g. usucapio, pignoriscapio, internecio, deliquio, perduellio; LHS ; Fischer Observations ), and to the structure according to which these frs. are cited in Gellius’ passage: Gellius uses the particle et to connect the words mendicimonium, moechimonium, adulterionem, depudicavit, and abluvium, while the suffix -que is clearly used to relate the nouns adulterionem and adulteritatem to the explanatory phrase pro adulterio; therefore, both adulterio and adulteritas ought to be viewed as words coined by L. to refer to the act of adultery. On the formation of adulter-i-tas see LHS , and Garcea and Lomanto ; L. seems to be keen on forming (or to be fond of rarely attested) abstract feminine nouns in -itas: n. lubidinitas; .n. luculentitas; .n. deliritas. depudicavit: a compound, denominative verb (< de + pudicus + o: OLD s.v.; Garcea and Lomanto ), which Gellius glosses with the verb stuprare, ‘to violate the chastity of someone’, attested from Plautus (Aul. ; Truc. ; OLD s.v.). Depudico is found only in this passage of Gellius. The various uses of the prefix de- with verbs, substantives, and adjectives are discussed in LHS – and OLD s.v. L. seems to have employed de- as a prefix with privative force; however, whereas compound verbs such as deartuo (‘I dismember’; Pl. Capt. ), despolio (‘I plunder’; Pl. Men. ), and desquamo (‘I scale’; Pl. Aul. ) indicate actions (mainly a removal of some sort) directed towards tangible objects (the human limbs, loot, and the scales of a fish, respectively), depudico appears to mean ‘I remove someone’s pudicitia’ (an abstract concept). Cf. deformo ‘I disgrace’ in Cicero (see OLD s.v. ), dehonesto ‘I dishonour’ in Livy (see OLD s.v. and s.v. dehonestamentum ‘a source of disgrace’), devenusto ‘I disfigure’ in Gellius (see OLD s.v.), and devirgino ‘I deprive of virginity’ in Varro and Petronius (see OLD s.v.; Fischer Observations ; LHS ). Apuleius (Met. .) coins the form depudesco, but this means ‘I put off my own (not someone else’s) pudor, I become impudicus’; see also CGL . panaiscuntä depudo. On other instances in L. of compound forms consisting of a preposition and a
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denominative verb see n. conlabella; (b). praeviridantibus; and n. iniquat. abluvium: I do not see why Gellius disapproves of the formation of this word, which he glosses with the noun diluvium, ‘inundation, flood’, attested from Varro (according to Augustine Civ. dei ., .) and Virgil (Aen. .). After L. abluvium is found again only in the treatise of Agennius Urbicus Agrim. p. (fl. perhaps early second century AD). Garcea and Lomanto () say that abluvium ‘features a mismatched prefix’, and refer at length to a passage in Fronto in which the compounds of luere and of associated verbs are considered in detail: With his refined linguistic sensitivity, Fronto considers colluere to be fitting to mean the act of rinsing one’s mouth, pelluere that of washing the floor, lavere that of wetting one’s cheeks with tears, lavare that of washing clothes, abluere that of wiping off dust or one’s sweat, eluere and elavere that of washing away a stain whether slight or very stubborn, diluere that of diluting honeyed wine, proluere that of gargling, subluere that of scraping the hooves of a beast of burden. (Garcea and Lomanto ; see Fronto Ad M. Caes. .. = .– van den Hout ; and van den Hout Fronto –)
Diluvium is derived from diluo (< dis + luo) ‘I dissolve and carry away’ (OLD s.v.): the idea then is that the heavy rain during a storm dissolves by softening and washes away the soil along with other objects that happen to be in an area which is flooded (Verg. Georg. .; Prop. ..). But in this respect L.’s abluvium, derived from abluo, is equally adequate in conveying effectively the notion that the water of the rain in a flooded area violently washes away (ab-) everything that comes its way (Varro RR .. terra adruenda pulvinos fieri, quos inrigationes et pluviae tempestates abluunt; Sen. NQ .. devolutus torrens altissimis montibus . . . abluit villas; .. cum ceteri amnes abluant terras et eviscerent; Colum. .. etiam . . . terra . . . a pluviis non abluatur).
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(b) Nonius . M = . L: see (b) ( c ) Nonius . M = . L: see (c) C O M M E N TA RY Nonius’ entries manuatus, mendicimonium, moechimonium, and adulterionem are probably drawn from Gellius ..–. But Nonius misread Gellius’ passage, and attributed all of the abovementioned hapax legomena to L.’s Cophinus, whereas Gellius actually relates this title only to the fr. manuatus est: Cophinus and (a) and (b). The impression that Nonius’ source at this point in his treatise was Gellius is also reinforced by the absence in Nonius (and in Gellius) of any citation of lines of L. containing the words mendicimonium, moechimonium, and adulterionem. Nonius shares with Gellius seven quotations of L. in total. Since in these three instances (Nam et ‘mendicimonium’ dicit et ‘moechimonium’ et ‘adulterionem’) neither Gellius nor Nonius cites any lines from L., whereas in the other four cases Nonius cites lines of L. which have already been cited by Gellius, it is tempting to speculate that Nonius’ sole source for these seven Laberian frs. is Gellius; this hypothesis is corroborated by Nonius’ clever attempt to disguise his lack of scholarly diligence ((b) and (c)). It is impossible to draw any definite conclusions about Nonius’ source(s) for the other instances in which he quotes L. Gellius ..– [FOXPNQZ]: Neque non obsoleta quoque et maculantia ex sordidiore vulgi usu [scil. Laberius] ponit, . . . Et elutriare lintea elutriare FXPNQZ: el∗ utria O
lintea FXNQ: relintea O: linthea PZ
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Gellius ..–: Besides, he [L.] used words which were both obsolete and vulgar from the rather uncouth speech of the common people, . . . He [L.] also has . . . to bath (elutriare) the linen
C O M M E N TA RY On the context in which this fr. survives see . Metre: uncertain. The extant fr. may be scanned as the ending of a senarius ( ˘el¯utrµ¯ar˘e l´nt˘ea˘ ) or of a trochaic septenarius ( ˘el¯utrµ¯ar˘e l´nt˘ea˘ ), or as the beginning of a senarius (˘el¯utrµ¯ar˘e l´nt˘ea¯ ), or as the middle of a trochaic septenarius ( ˘el¯utrµ¯ar˘e l´nt˘ea¯ ). elutriare ‘to put into a vat or bath’ (OLD s.v. elutrio). It is not clear why Gellius regards elutriare as an uncouth word. In addition to this fr., elutrio appears twice in Pliny the Elder, who employs it as a technical term in his account of the preparation of purple dye (NH . vellus elutriatum mergitur in experimentum) and of the filtering of oxymel, a mixture of vinegar and honey (NH . mellis decem libris, aceti . . . aquae pluviae sextariis quinque suffervefactis deciens, mox elutriatis atque ita inveteratis; see Garcea and Lomanto , and Aegidius Maserius’ note (ed. Gellii ad .): ‘elutriare id signat quod graece metagg©zein, i. de vase in vas transferre: quod quidem et transvasare dicitur latine, sed rarius’). But it occurs also in medical texts as jargon designating ‘to purge something by washing it with something else’: Chiron elutrias usque aceto acro; see TLL ..–. Its derivation is uncertain: OLD s.v. takes it to be a denominative verb probably coined from the stem of the unattested noun ∗ elutrum, derived from the Greek lutron (‘reservoir for water’; attested from Herodotus, see LSJ s.v. ) + -o. It is possible that Gellius thought L. ought not to have used elutrio with the word lintea ‘pieces of linen cloth’ as its object, for which an appropriate verb may
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have been eluo (Pliny NH . elutis linteolis; Arnob. Nat. . sacras eluant vestes) or lavo (Titin. vestimenta qui laves; Hor. Epod. .; Petr. Sat. .; Pliny NH .; TLL ..–). lintea: it is unclear whether we are to take lintea as a substantive (‘a towel or napkin’, ‘a piece of linen cloth’; see OLD s.v. linteum , b) or as an adjective (‘made of linen’) qualifying a missing noun (e.g. vestimenta; see OLD s.v. linteus and TLL ..–). In their list of the neologisms which Gellius attributes to L., LHS separate the words elutriare and lintea with a comma, thus taking lintea to be not the accusative plural of linteum but the nominative singular of the unattested feminine ∗ lintea. It is certainly conceivable that L. may have altered the gender of linteum to ∗ lintea, just as he has often done with the grammatical genders of other substantives. However, it is preferable to take lintea in the accusative as the object of elutriare; Gellius includes this word in his citation of the fr. of L. in order to make clearer to his readers the meaning of the unusual form elutrio. Pergit Gellius ..– [FOXPNQZ]: . . . et ‘lavandaria’ dicit, quae ad lavandum sint data, et . . . lavandaria Hertz: labandaria FQZ: labandria OPN: labrandria X: lavandria Ziegler: LABANDRIA [scil. titulus fabulae] Corpus
Gellius ..–: . . . and he [L.] uses the word lavandaria for the items that were handed over for washing (lavandum) C O M M E N TA RY On the context in which this fr. survives see . Metre: uncertain.
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lavandaria: Gellius glosses this word with the relative clause quae ad lavandum sint data, which suggests that the stem of the gerundive of lavo is joined with the neuter suffix -arium to form a neuter plural substantive (would this word also have existed in the singular as lavandarium?) designating ‘things that are for washing’ (see LHS , ; Garcea and Lomanto ). This combination (indicating purpose) of the stem of the gerundive and a form of the suffix -arius may also be seen in the rare words kalendarium ‘book for the recording of monthly interests’ (Sen. Ben. ..; Ep. .), molendarius ‘animal or thing for the process of milling’ (Paul. Dig. ... and ), obrendarium ‘a vessel or a plot of ground for the burial of the dead’ (CIL ., .). Lavandaria is also employed as an adjective qualifying the feminine noun herba in the medical treatise of Chiron ( ad ventris dolorem herbae lavandariae sucum . . . dabis); TLL ..– is uncertain about its etymology, and sceptical whether this is the same word as that used by L.; but surely the point here is that the juice of the herb is given in order that it may wash away, i.e. purge, the stomach-ache; therefore, the concept of washing away (the dirt and the pain) is common to the passages of L. and Chiron. Gellius ..– [Fg(=OXPN)QZ]: . . . coicior (inquit) in fullonicam
(et) . . . coicior Fg: ciocior QZ: collicior Aldobrandus
Gellius ..–: he [L.] also has . . . I am thrown into the fullery
and . . .
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C O M M E N TA RY On the context in which this fr. survives see . Metre: uncertain. The extant fr. may be scanned as an incomplete senarius ( AbbcD ABcD or AbbcD ABcD ) or as an incomplete trochaic septenarius ( AbbcD ABcD). coicior in fullonicam: the word Gellius disapproves of in this fr. is surely fullonicam (on its derivation see LHS and cf. histrionicus, mulionicus, and murmillonicus) ‘laundry’. On the forms fullonica and fullonicum see Fullonicae vel Fullonica. The adjective fullonicus is first attested in Cato Agr. .; as a feminine substantive designating a fuller’s shop, fullonica occurs first in L. and is found again in Frontin. Aq. , Ulpian Dig. .., and in inscriptions (some of which may predate L.; see TLL ..–; Olcott Formation ). The use of coicior suggests that the speaker implies that he was put into a fuller’s shop as if he were forcefully thrown into prison (for this meaning of coicior see OLD s.v. conicio and TLL .–). Gellius ..– [FOXPNQZv]: quid properas? quid praecurris caldonia ? quid (primum) codd.: ecquid ed. princ.: et quid Egnatius quid (alterum) FOXNQZ: et quid P: ecquid v caldonia codd.: caldoniam Aldobrandus: Calidonia Stephanus: Calidoniam Ribbeck
Gellius ..–: what’s the rush? Why are you hurrying on past the hot-rooms?
C O M M E N TA RY On the context in which this fr. survives see . Metre: uncertain. If the reading caldonia is correct, the fr. may scan as an incomplete senarius (AbbCD ABC/D Abb)
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or an incomplete trochaic septenarius ( AbbCD ABC/D Abb). But this is far from certain. caldonia: Gellius included this fr. in his list of citations from L. which contain vulgar or uncouth words; therefore it is difficult to see the justification for Ribbeck’s conjecture ecquid praecurris Calidoniam?, which is adopted by Bonaria. ‘One wonders how vulgarism may apply to Calidoniam . . . It may be that Laberius alludes to the mythical Atalanta, excellent huntress and unequalled runner, who took part in the hunting of the Calydonian boar’ (Garcea and Lomanto ). This explanation is unconvincing, because Gellius criticises not the allusive character of L.’s comic style but his unusual word-formations. The MSS give the reading caldonia, which (as far as we can tell) depends on the verb praecurris, which takes an accusative case when it means ‘to precede’. But Propertius uses praecurro = ∗ praetercurro ‘I run past the front of’, ‘I go by’ (.. diversas praecurrens luna fenestras; see Camps ad loc. and OLD s.v. praecurro b), and it is possible that L. employs the verb in the same way. If this is correct, the speaker would be asking the addressee: ‘why are you hurrying? why are you running past the caldonia?’. Caldonia (if this is the correct reading) is the only word in the fr. which is likely to be the reason for the inclusion of the passage in Gellius’ discussion of vulgarisms in L.; in the Loeb edn of Gellius J. C. Rolfe (ad loc.) relates caldonia to the adjective cal(i)dus and takes it to be a vocative referring and addressed to a woman at the public baths. This suggestion was originally made by Petrus Mosellanus (): ‘caldonia: appellari hoc loco suspicor eam mulierculam in fullonica, quae calfaciendis aquis praesit in caldariis vasis, in quibus aliquid calefit’. This interpretation is possible, especially since Gellius had previously cited frs. containing neologisms which pertained to bathing and washing (, ). But it is also possible that L. intended caldonia to be the accusative plural of the neuter noun caldonium, which he coined as a synonym of caldarium (‘hot bath’, Vitr. .., ..; Sen. Ep. .; Cels. ..; or ‘a room
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( –)
containing warm water for bathing’, Vitr. ..). Caldonium may have been formed as a parallel to the denominative adjectives cauponius, lenonius, and fullonius (‘of, or relating to, inns, pimps, and fullery’, respectively), themselves coined from the nominal third declension stems caupon-, lenon-, and fullon- and the suffix -ius. Aldobrandus with his conjecture caldoniam may have interpreted the fr. as I do (did he want us to supply the noun cellam?). But the morphological analogy between caldonium (originating from a second declension adjective) and cauponium (‘an inn, a tavern’; see OLD s.v.) is far from perfect, and this may have been the reason for Gellius’ disapproval of the form caldonia. Regrettably the extant context does not allow any certain conclusions about the spelling and meaning of the word. Gellius .. [Fg(=OXPN)QZ]: ‘Cum tantus’ inquit [scil. Q. Claudius Quadrigarius] ‘arrabo penes Samnites populi Romani esset.’ ‘Arrabonem’ dixit sescentos obsides et id maluit quam pignus dicere, quoniam vis huius vocabuli in ea sententia gravior acriorque est; sed nunc ‘arrabo’ in sordidis verbis haberi coeptus ac multo videtur sordidius ‘arra’, quamquam ‘arra’ quoque veteres saepe dixerint et conpluriens Laberius. Gellius ..: ‘Since the Roman people gave such a great pledge (arrabo) to the Samnites’ says Q. Claudius Quadrigarius. He used the word arrabo to refer to the six hundred hostages, and he preferred that word to pignus (‘surety’), because it was weightier and more forceful in the above sentence; but nowadays arrabo has come to be numbered among vulgar words, and arra is considered even more vulgar, although it was often used by early writers and especially by L.
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C O M M E N TA RY In his discussion of a passage from Claudius Quadrigarius (fr. Peter), Gellius notes with approval that Quadrigarius employs the word arrabo instead of pignus. But then he goes on to say not only that in his own time the word arrabo had lost its prestige and was regarded as a low word, but also that the short form of arrabo, arra, was treated with even more contempt, despite the fact that it was frequently (saepe) employed by early writers (veteres) and especially (conpluriens) by L.; Gellius seems to mention L.’s name here as an exemplary case of an author whose vocabulary and phraseology tended to be imitated by the learned men of Gellius’ era. EM s.v. arra have a lengthy note in which they state that arrabo was formed (perhaps through Etruscan) from the Greek noun rrabÛn ‘pledge’ (see Varro LL .; Isid. .. has got it wrong), and that the abridged form arra came as a result of the frequent use of arrabo by merchants and pimps (see, for example, Pl. Rud. and ). The noun arrabo is attested in Plautus, Terence, Quadrigarius, and Varro, and is not found in the authors of the Augustan period. It re-appears in Gellius, Apuleius, the Church Fathers, and the grammarians (see TLL .–). Although Plautus makes a joke on arrabo by dropping its first syllable and thus creating the rustic form rabo (see Pl. Truc. – and LHS ), the shortened form arra is not attested before L.; did Gellius have access to more texts of veteres than we currently do or is he making things up? Gellius does not say whether L. changed the meaning and/or morphology of arra in his mimes. It is tempting to see L.’s employment of the word as implicit evidence for the existence of pimps, prostitutes, and young men in the plot of some plays. Arra occurs again in Pliny (NH . and .) and very often in the texts of the jurists and the Church Fathers (see TLL .–). If EM are right in identifying the use of arrabo in the speech of low tradesmen as the reason for the shortening of arrabo to arra, then arra entered into the prestigious sphere of legal and ecclesiastical terminology as an uncouth word. See E. P. Hamp Glotta ()
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; Garcea and Lomanto and n. . LHS give more examples of apocopated forms of Latin words imported from Greek. Tertullianus Apologeticus . Dekkers [FSPa(=lQTWOb UyyN)]: Age iam, si qui philosophus affirmet, ut ait Laberius de sententia Pythagorae, hominem fieri ex mulo, colubram ex muliere,
et in eam opinionem omnia argumenta eloquii sui distorserit, nonne consensum movebit et fidem infiget? colubram FSP: colubrum a
vel hominem Buecheler
Tertullian Apology . Dekkers: Come, tell me; if some philosopher should positively assert, as L. says talking about the Pythagorean doctrine, that . . . a mule becomes a man, and a woman a snake,
and if that man should twist all the arguments in his speech to support this view, wouldn’t he move everybody to agree with him, and wouldn’t he instil in everyone’s mind confidence in this notion? C O M M E N TA RY The contrast or staged debate which Tertullian sets up at this point in the Apology is between a philosopher, who by means of his eloquence aims at persuading an audience that a person before his or her birth (i.e. in his or her ‘previous life’) is an animal or an inanimate being (.; for the theory of the transfiguration of the soul see Plato Phaedo E, Tim. B, Phaedr. C, Rep. D), and a Christian, who will argue with confidence
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that man comes from man (at enim Christianus si de homine hominem ipsumque de Gaio Gaium reducem repromittat). The reaction of the audience to these two views, says Tertullian, could not be more different: the philosopher’s view would be accepted without a second thought, whereas the Christian would be hissed off the stage, as it were. In order to exemplify (and play down the seriousness of) the philosopher’s view, Tertullian cites a misogynistic joke of L. on Pythagoreanism without ascribing it to a specific mime. It is unclear to me how Tertullian had access to L.’s witticisms (did he read an anthology of mimes by L. or of comic playwrights including L.?), but both this fr. and the series of comically coined adjectives which Tertullian attributes to L. and cites in his De pallio () give the impression that he cites L. from memory. On the exploitation of Pythagoreanism and other philosophical schools for comic effect in L. see n. Pythagoream. L.’s joke squares with the general theatrical invective against women (see n. below), while his derisive presentation of Pythagoreanism seems to have been a stock mime-joke. From a letter of Cicero to Atticus (..), dated to , and from Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis, we know of a mime entitled Faba, ‘The bean’; it is very tempting to assume that the plot of this mime dealt with the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. Perhaps the story in Faba presented a change of someone or something, not related to the doctrine of Pythagoras, into a bean. But this is not very likely, because the bean played an important role in Pythagoreanism. It is worth noting that there are textual difficulties both in Cicero’s and in Seneca’s passage. See Cic. Ad Att. .. sed heus tu, videsne consulatum illum nostrum, quem Curio antea poqwsin vocabat, si hic [scil. L. Afranius] factus erit, fabam mimum (Lambinus: faba mimum codd.: fabae midam Brooks: fabae hilum Hofmann) futurum?; Sen. Apocol. . (with Eden ad loc.): ‘olim’ inquit ‘magna res erat deum fieri: iam Fabam mimum [Eden: famam mimum S: fama nimium VL: fabam mimum Buecheler: Fsma mimum Watt: fabulam mimorum Landsberg: fabam imam Constans: fabulam mimum Rossbach: fatuum mimum Schmidt: Fabarii mimum Krohn: qaÓma mimum Ussani: Laberi mimum Reid: Afranii mimum
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Passerat: jalarism¼n Herrmann] fecisti; see P. T. Eden, ‘Faba mimus’, Hermes () –. Metre: uncertain. Buecheler scanned L.’s fr. as an almost complete senarius: hominem fieri ex mulo, colubram ex muliere (bbCdd A/BCdd AbbcD). colubram ex muliere: L.’s twist of the Pythagorean doctrine is twofold: he relates both men (apparently homines here = viri) and women to unappealing animals (on the word mulus ‘mule’ used as a term of abuse against people see TLL .–), and inverts the process of transfiguration: in the joke, which could have been uttered either by a male character (e.g. an old man or a slave) or by a woman (e.g. a cunning courtesan), the point is not that the race of women comes from snakes but that snakes come from women. Woman therefore is presented as an animal producing cunning and vicious snakes. This unflattering association is not original: see Men. Monost. Liapis ìI¼v pjuken sp©dov kak gun, and V. Liapis, Menndrou Gnämai Mon»sticoi (Athens ) , who refers to the saying civ ponhr¼v ¡ gun qumoumnh (cited in MS Paris. Suppl. Graec. ). Tertullianus De pallio .. Gerlo [FNSV]: Equidem haud miror prae documento superiore. Nam et ‘arietem’ (non quem [NSV: quam F] Laberius ‘reciprocicornem’ et [Rhenanus : ut codd.] ‘lanicutem’ [codd.: lanientem Leopardus] et ‘testitrahum’ [Rhenanus : testitrabum codd.: vestitrahum Scaliger], sed trabem [scripsi: trabes codd.] machinalem [scripsi: machina est codd.], quae muros frangere militat) nemini unquam adhuc libratum illa dicitur Carthago, ‘studiis asperrima belli’, prima omnium armasse . . . Tertullian On the pallium .. Gerlo:
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Personally I am not surprised at this, in view of a previous case. For the famous Carthage, ‘the shrewdest city in the arts of war’, is said to have put in the field, before all other cities did so, a ram, which had never been previously launched by anyone, and I don’t mean the ram that L. describes as ‘curly-horned, woollypelted and bollock-dragging’, but a mechanical battering-ram, whose service in war is to break city-walls . . . C O M M E N TA RY This fr. survives in the larger context of the comparison Tertullian makes between the loss of the pallium as a type of garment that was gradually replaced by the longer tunic in the wardrobes of the Carthaginians (.. exinde tunicam longiorem cinctu arbitrante suspenditis, et pallii iam teretis redundantiam tabulata congregatione fulcitis, et si quid praeterea condicio vel dignitas vel temporalitas vestit, pallium tamen generaliter vestrum immemores etiam denotatis) and the gradual disappearance of the battering ram from the Carthaginian battlefields, in spite of the fact that Carthage itself was apparently the city which invented this mechanical device. L.’s citation comprises three coined adjectives, and does not seem to have any immediate relevance to or implications about the context of Tertullian’s discussion, but the complicated syntax and word-order (arietem – non quem . . . militat – nemini . . . libratum) of the speech gives Tertullian the opportunity to explain to his audience by means of a literary allusion that he is talking not about real rams but about mechanical weapons. Like the Virgilian quotation which Tertullian inserts next to the name Carthago (studiis asperrima belli; see Verg. Aen. .), so L.’s citation next to the noun arietem appears to be employed as a means for the erudite Tertullian to display his literary knowledge and to impress his contemporaries (see V. Hunink, De Pallio: A commentary (Amsterdam ) –). No title is mentioned here or elsewhere in relation to this fr., but some scholars have attributed it (for obvious reasons) to L.’s Aries (). This is possible, but, since there is no textual evidence to support such an attribution,
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
I prefer to include Tertullian’s passage amongst the unspecified mimes of L.; I am also uncertain about the grammatical case in which L. originally used these adjectives (Tertullian cites them in the accusative because they are governed by the missing verb dicit), and about the noun aries, a form of which may or may not have been included in the original extract of the mimographer. Metre: uncertain. In the apparatus criticus of his third edn Ribbeck cites Salmasius’ scansion of the fr. as a complete senarius (reciprocicornis lanicus testitrahus, abbcD A/BcD ABcD; but there are problems with the form lanicus (see below) which have implications for the scansion), and Salmasius’ translation of the fr. into a Greek iambic trimeter: nakamyikratov ri»qrix ½rceisÅrov. Bonaria accepts Salmasius’ arrangement of the words, and adds aries as the final word of the previous line. It is of course possible to arrange the words as frs. of two incomplete senarii: line reciprocicornis lanicus; line testµtr˘ahus . reciprocicornem: ‘having the horns so bent round as to point in the reverse of the original direction’ (OLD s.v.; see also OED s.v. reciprocornous: ‘having horns that curl both backwards and forwards’). This compound adjective, consisting of a denominative verb (reciproco; for the etymology of reciprocus see LHS ), a noun (cornu), and the suffix -is, with syncopation, is not attested elsewhere. See also Varro LL . Apud Accium: ‘Reciproca tendens nervo equino concita | tela’ (– = W). Reciproca est cum unde quid profectum redit eo; Fischer (Observations ) refers to Prud. Perist. . (tauricornis) and Carilli (Hapax n. ) to the compounds unicornis (in Pliny the Elder), bicornis (from Virgil), tricornis (in Pliny the Elder), and excornis (in Tertullian). It is possible that this fr. with its three compound adjectives, none of them attested elsewhere, was intended to be mock-tragic: see Pacuv. Nerei repandirostrum incurvicervicum pecus.
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
lanicutem: another compound adjective (< lana ‘wool’ + cutis ‘skin’) attested only here: ‘fleecy’ (OLD s.v.). Its nominative singular form is uncertain. OLD, WH, and EM (s.v. lana) cite it as lanicutis -is -e, but R. Heine in TLL .. argues for the form lanicus -utis (common for all three genders), and believes that L. coined this adjective on the analogy of the adjective intercus -utis ‘subcutaneous’, which is attested from Plautus (Men. ) and in almost all its occurrences governs the noun aqua to refer to the medical condition known as dropsy (see OLD s.v.). Fischer (Observations ) parallels this adjective with the adjectives lanipes (found in the comic playwright Cassius as reported by Quint. ..; but the form lanipedi of MS A is usually emended to planipedis), squamicutis (in Ps.-Cypr. Sodom. H), and testicutis (in Eustath. Hexaem. .). testitrahum: a bold word, and it is a courageous decision on Tertullian’s part to include it in his citation. This is the third compound adjective (< testis ‘testicle’ + traho ‘I drag’ + suffix -us) in succession in this fr. and, like the previous two, it is attested only here. If these adjectives were originally written in asyndeton in a single line, the acoustic effect would have been remarkable (cf. in senarii Pl. Persa – Vaniloquidorus Virginesvendonides | Nugiepiloquides Argentumextenebronides | Tedigniloquides Nugides Palponides | Quodsemelarripides Numquameripides; in trochaic septenarii Pl. Men. glandionidam suillam, laridum pernonidam (see Gratwick ad loc.); and in hexameters Hor. S. .. ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, and see E. Fraenkel, Horace (Oxford ) and n. ). L. may have had in mind, when coining this adjective, a passage of Lucilius in which the testicles of this animal are portrayed as huge: – M = – W ‘Ibat forte aries,’ inquit, ‘iam quod genus, quantis | testibus! vix uno filo hosce haerere putares, | pellicula extrema exaptum pendere onus ingens.’ (I am grateful to Dr V. Hunink for drawing my attention to this passage.) Carilli (Hapax ) parallels testitrahus with other compound adjectives, all of them attested in Plautus, consisting of a nominal stem and
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
a verbal root: bustirapus ‘a grave-robber’ (Pseud. ), damnificus ‘that causes loss’ (Cist. ), muricidus (of uncertain meaning; perhaps, ‘faint-hearted’) (Epid. ), and scrofipascus ‘that feeds sows’ (Capt. ). Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=CXDMO)]: Adulescenturire [gCXDO: adhulescenturire M] [adulescenturire nugari Hmg Vmg Emg ]. Laberius: incipio adulescenturire et nescioquid nugarum facere incipio gd: incipiunt Mercerusmg : incipit Perottus nugarier Quicherat
nugarum facere gd:
Nonius . M = . L: Adulescenturire (‘to want to behave in a youthful manner’). L.: I am starting to feel like acting childishly and doing some nonsense or other
C O M M E N TA RY This fr. survives in the section of Nonius’ treatise on unusual words attested in early authors, because it contains the infinitive adulescenturire, not found elsewhere in extant Latin literature (but see CGL . aduliscenturire nugari). Compound verbs consisting of the stem of the perfect participle and the suffix -urire normally designate someone’s desire to do something; so esurire (< edo) ‘to want to eat’, empturire (< emo) ‘to hanker after bying things’ (OLD s.v.), canturire (< cano) ‘to desire to sing’, parturire (< pario) ‘to wish to give birth’. But L. forms adulescenturire ‘to want to behave like an adulescens’ as a denominative verb from the base of adulescens, the present participle of adolesco, which is often used as a (mainly masculine) noun. This seems to be a colloquial
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
formation, especially when compared to Cicero’s sullaturire ‘to be eager to behave like Sulla’ (OLD s.v.) and proscripturire ‘to desire to conduct a proscription’ (OLD s.v.): Ad Att. .. Hoc turpe Gnaeus noster biennio ante cogitavit. Ita sullaturit animus eius et proscripturit iam diu (see LHS ; Fischer Observations ; Carilli Hapax ; R. Rocca, ‘Il preverbio ad- in Nonio’, Studi Noniani () –; E. Woelfflin Archiv f¨ur lat. Lexik. () –). Metre: Bothe prints Mercerus’ conjecture incipiunt and scans the extant fr. as two incomplete senarii: incipiunt adulescenturire et nescioquid | nugarum facere (Abbcdd ABCD AbbcD | ABCdd A). But this makes it necessary to scan n˘escio. Like Ribbeck, Lindsay, and Carilli, I prefer to retain the transmitted text and scan the fr. as a trochaic octonarius spoken by an excited person (on passages of ‘raving’ trochaic octonarii in Plautus see Lindsay Verse ): ´ıncµpµ(o) a˘ d˘ul¯esc´ent˘ur´r(e) ¯et n´escµ˘oqu´d n¯ug´ar¯um f˘ac˘er˘e (Bccdd ABcD ABccD ABCdd A). Thus the prosody here would reflect the youthful behaviour of the speaker (adulescenturire), who is likely to be a senex or an anus (otherwise the reference to adolescent attitude would not make sense). adulescenturire: see above. nugarum ‘things not serious, frivolities’ (OLD s.v. a); cf. Pl. Aul. aufer cavillam, non ego nunc nugas ago. It is noteworthy that the noun nugae can also be employed as a technical term referring to the ‘gags’ of a mime-actor; see the epitaph of Protogenes, whose fl. was about – (see pp. – and n. ).
Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Decidua [gACDMO: dicidua X] quae decidant [Quicherat: cadant FHLPV Ed: cadent V ], ut occidua [FH LPVEd: occididua H ] quae occidant. Laberius:
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
in autumno nubilo caput arboris decidua folia pandit verba Laberius . . . pandit om. d in autumno Bothe: in altum non F HV: sin altum non F E: sin alitum non P: sin alium non L: in Fullonico Bentinus: non Stephanus: †in altum [non] Onions: in [scil. titulus fabulae] autumno L. Mueller: ut (vel sic) in autumno Ribbeck in app. crit. nubilo scripsi: ubi g caput g: capit Bothe in notis: caurus Ribbeck arboris Carilli: a foliis FHL PVE: a folis L : et foliis Bothe in notis: a foliis† Onions: per terram Ribbeck : affatim L. Mueller: frondens Buecheler: populis Ribbeck : in solo Ribbeck in app. crit.: a folˆıs Lindsay pandit g: pandat Carassa: fundit Green
Nonius . M = . L: Decidua is said of things that fall down, just as occidua is applied to things that go down. L.: . . . in the cloudy autumn the top of the tree spreads out the leaves that are to fall . . .
C O M M E N TA RY This fr. survives because it contains a form of the unusual adjective deciduus ‘tending to fall’ (often cited in the glosses, e.g. CGL . deciduum cito descendet), which Nonius compares with occiduus ‘setting, going down’. Both of these adjectives are formed from a compound of the verb cado and the suffix -uus, but deciduus is not attested before L., whereas occiduus is found only after Ovid (see OLD s.v. and TLL ..–). It is not clear therefore that L. coined deciduus in order to contrast it to occiduus. None of the other extant adjectives which are derived from a compound form of cado occurs in authors earlier than or contemporary with L.: acciduus ‘falling’ (found only in Paulinus of Nola; TLL .–), succiduus ‘giving way under one’ (not attested before Ovid; OLD s.v.), and prociduus ‘fallen prostrate’ (not attested before Pliny the Elder; OLD s.v.); see EM s.v. cado (p. ). L. then appears to be the first extant literary author to have formed an adjective in -ciduus. Deciduus, like almost all the
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
other adjectives ending in -ciduus, was employed by Pliny the Elder; he used it in reference to, among others, teeth, seeds, flames, stars, horns, flowers, and thorns (see TLL ..– ). L. is the sole extant author to combine deciduus with folium ‘leaf’. Metre: uncertain. This fr. is badly corrupt, and different editors read it in different ways: Ribbeck prints aut´umno, ubi caurus p´opulis dec´ıdua folia p´andit, which he scans as an iambic septenarius. The same scansion is opted for by Buecheler (in autumno ubi frondens caput decidua folia pandit) and Carilli (in autumno ubi caput arboris decidua folia pandit). I do not find Lindsay’s scansion plausible: in a´utumno ubi caput a folˆıs dec´ıdua folia p´andit. There are problems with the conjectures involved in these suggestions (see below), and there is no cogent reason to assume that the extant fr. has to be accommodated within one line only. I tentatively suggest either in altum nubilum caput arboris | decidua folia pandit (scan: cD A/BcD aaBcD | Abbcdd a/Bc) or in autumno nubilo caput arboris | decidua folia pandit (scan: bCD A/BcD aaBcD | Abbcdd a/Bc) (see below); I scan both of these versions as incomplete senarii. in autumno nubilo: one of the problems presented by the MS tradition of this fr. is the peculiar phrase in altum non ubi, which appears in three MSS of Nonius, including the precious F (on which see pp. –). Various attempts have been made to restore the sense of this part of the fr.: L. Mueller suggested that the preposition in originally governed the (now missing) title of the mime, to which this fr. belonged; but it is unnecessary to take it for granted that the scribe accidentally omitted the title of the play, because Nonius and other authors citing L. often quote lines or words of this playwright without attributing them to specific plays. Bothe’s emendation in autumno has won great favour amongst editors of L. since , and is cited even by authoritative dictionaries (TLL and OLD). This is a palaeographically plausible emendation because, in addition
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
to the fact that it makes sense, it involves the replacement of only one letter (u for l) and the loss of another (n): inaltumnonubi → in autumno ubi. Ribbeck deleted in before autumno, but Carilli (Note and n. ) pointed out that an ablative of time indicating a season of the year could be governed by the preposition in. Some of Carilli’s parallels are not convincing because they either come from authors writing much later than L. or involve an adjective (e.g. Varro LL . cui testis aestas et hiems, quod in altera aer ardet et spica aret, in altera natura ad nascenda cum imbre et frigore luctare non volt; Prop. .. in . . . annis is not really a parallel to in autumno). But it is possible that L. originally wrote in altum, which is an expression that is both attested in Manilius as a set phrase ‘high up, far away’ (.– fulmine rursus in altum | compulsi; see also Sen. Dial. .. ut ille omnes iniurias in altum demittat; TLL .–), and would make sense with the noun caput ‘tree-top’ and the verb pando ‘I spread out’. If the reading in altum is correct, I wonder whether the letters nonubi are a corruption of the adjective nubilus which may have arisen from the omission of the abbreviated ending [-ł = -lum] or [-ł = -lo] and the misreading of nubi as nˇ ubi = non ubi. The denominative adjective nubilus ‘cloudy’ would make sense either next to caput (in altum nubilum caput . . . pandit = the clouded tree-top (i.e. the tree is so high that its top reaches the clouds) ‘spreads out’ high up the leaves that are to fall) or next to autumno governed by the preposition in (in autumno nubilo caput . . . pandit = the top of the tree ‘spreads out’ the leaves that are to fall in the cloudy autumn; on nubilus (= ‘covered in cloud’) used of seasons see OLD s.v. a). caput arboris: arboris is Carilli’s emendation for the nonsensical reading a foliis, which is most likely due to an error of dittography caused by folia. The genitive arboris is dependent on caput (= ‘top of tree’) in Val. Flacc. ., HA, Aurel. ., and Ambr. Hex. ... Caput on its own, designating the top of a tree, is found as early as Ennius ( Skutsch) and instances of it are frequent in all periods of Latin literature (see TLL
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
.–; OLD s.v. a; Carilli Note and n. ). I find this a much more plausible conjecture than Ribbeck’s far-fetched caurus populis ‘the north-west wind from the poplar-trees’, which has been adopted by Bonaria. decidua folia: see , and Cato Agr. . (cum folia cadunt), Verg. Aen. . (lapsa cadunt folia), Sen. Ep. . (arboribus amoenis et domum tuam ornantibus decidant folia), Pliny NH . (folia, antequam decidant, rubescunt). pandit: pando ‘I spread out’, in relation to flowers and trees, is attested both with a reflexive pronoun as its object (Lucr. .; Colum. .., ..; Pliny NH .; .) and with an accusative designating an object different from the subject of the verb (Verg. Aen. .– ramos annosaque bracchia pandit | ulmus; see Austin ad loc.). If pandit is the correct reading, L. is the first extant literary author not to use pando as a reflexive verb, and the only author to join it with the noun folia. But why is the speaker talking about the top of the tree spreading out foliage? Would leaves not spread out also in the remaining part of the tree? And how should we imagine a tree ‘spreading out’ leaves? (One would expect a tree to ‘spread out’ its branches, not its leaves.) Does the speaker mean that the leaves would spread forth from the branches? Or that the leaves would fall from the tree and spread out on the soil underneath the tree (hence Ribbeck’s conjectures per terram and in solo)? The lack of context makes it impossible to answer these questions with any certainty, and it may be that pandit is corrupt (R. P. H. Green suggested to me the conjecture fundit ‘pours forth’; see TLL ..–). Nonius . M = . L [g(=FHLPVE)d(=ACXDMO)]: Hillas [FH LPVEd: Hilla H ] intestina veteres esse dixerunt: unde Bohillae [Quicherat: Bohilla F HLPmg VE ACX DMO: Boilla
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
F P E X : Bochilla ed. princ.], oppidum in Italia, quod eo bos intestina vulnere trahens advenerit. Laberius: lavite item hillam. cocu’ si lumbum adussit, caedetur flagris verba Laberius . . . flagris om. d lavite item Ribbeck : labitatem F H L: labititem F H PVE: lambit autem Ribbeck : si lambit Quicherat in app. crit.: lavit item Roth hillam H PVE: illam FH L: hillas L. Mueller dubit. in app. crit. cocu’ L. Mueller: cocus FH LPVE: coccus H caedetur flagris Ribbeck : flagris ceditur H V: fragilis ceditur FH LPE: flagris caeditur ed. princ.: caeditur flagris Ribbeck : flagris caeditor L. Mueller dubit. in app. crit.: †flagris caeditur Onions: fragulis caeditur L. Mueller dubit. in app. crit.
Nonius . M = . L: Men of old called intestines hillae; hence Bohillae, the name of an Italian village, because it was there that an ox (bos) arrived with its intestines hanging out of an open wound. L.: wash the guts too. If the cook burned the loins, he will be flogged
C O M M E N TA RY On the reason why this fr. was cited see . Metre: a trochaic septenarius (bbcD AbbCD aBCD ABcD). If we are to retain the order of the words as transmitted by the MSS and print flagris caeditur at the end of the line, the fr. would still scan as a trochaic septenarius (bbcD AbbCD aBCD ABcD) but the a in flagris would need to be long (contrary to the norm, at least as far as early comic playwrights are concerned: see Pl. Amph. , ; Cas. ; Merc. ; Persa , ; Pseud. ; for bibliography on this issue see Carilli Note – and n. ). Bothe scans the fr. as two incomplete senarii but prints it as follows: lambit item cocus | hillam. Si lumbum adussit, flagris caeditur. On the so-called weak final s before a short vowel (cocu’ for cocus; this is L. Mueller’s emendation to create the sequence hillam cocu’ si lumb(um) DA bb C D), see Lindsay Verse –. But it is also possible to print cocus and scan it as c˘oc˘us with iambic shortening.
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
hillam: see and n. hillam. lumbum ‘the loin’ (here in the singular, although it is mostly attested in the plural when it does not refer to an animal’s loins as meat). Lumbi as a delicacy are associated with hares (Hor. S. ..; Mart. ..), wild boars (Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius apud Macr. Sat. ..; Pliny NH .), pork (HA, Pert. .) and chicken (Anthim. ); OLD s.v. c; TLL ..–. adussit: cf. Ter. Ad. – (the slave Syrus is speaking, pretending to address his fellow-slaves) ‘hoc salsumst, hoc adustumst, hoc lautumst parum; | illud recte: iterum sic memento’; and see TLL .–. It is unwise to conclude on the basis of Terence’s passage that the speaker of L.’s fr. was also a slave in charge of the dinner-arrangements in the house of the master who hired the cook: the speaker may have been a comic parasite keen on food, or the master or mistress of the household. For the sequence Perfect Indicative – Future Indicative in a conditional clause and its apodosis cf. Pl. Rud. dixi equidem, sed si parum intellexti, dicam denuo and see LHS (§ g); KS –. caedetur flagris: Ribbeck’s conjecture and transposition of the MS reading flagris ceditur solves the issue raised by the long a in flagris (see Metre, above) and does not violate Luchs’ law (caedetur flagris gives the desirable sequence DAB cD at the end of the line). Carilli (Note n. ) gives a list of the passages in which the expression flagro (or flagris) caedere is attested; it is found more frequently than caedere flagro (Livy ..), but this need not have any implications about the order of the words in L.’s passage. Nonius . M = . L [HLPVEACX]: Deliritas [H VE : Deleritas H LPE ACX], deliratio [H VE : deleratio H LPE ACX: deliratio Iunius: an delirio?]. Laberius:
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
quaenam mens, quae deliritas vos suppolitoris facit cum cano eugio puellitari ? quaenam HLVE ACX: quenam P: qnam E : quae nam Ribbeck deliritas H E V: deleritas H LPE ACX: dementia Scaliger suppolitoris HVX: supolitoris Lpc Aac : subolitoris Lac : subpolitoris Apc C: soppolitoris PE: subolitores Bothe: spoliatoris Ribbeck in app. crit.: sub pollictoris Zic`ari facit HLPVEACX: fecit Ribbeck lacunas statuit Buecheler cum cano eugio . . . Carilli: cum cano eugio Buecheler: cum cano eugio Ribbeck in app. crit. puellitari H LPVEAC: puellari H : puelletari X: puellitarier Scaliger puellitari Buecheler
Nonius . M = . L: Deliritas, insanity. L.: What state of mind, what madness is making you assistant-weeders with white-haired pussies keep on acting like young girls ?
C O M M E N TA RY This fr. survives in the section of Nonius’ treatise on nouns attested in more than one declension (e.g. Nonius . M = . L cites Pacuvius’ Teucer , which contains the form ferociam, instead of the usual ferocitatem), but this classification does not make sense, because both the noun at the beginning of L.’s entry, deliritas ‘insanity’, and the noun with which Nonius glosses deliritas, namely deliratio ‘craziness’, belong to the third declension. Nonius may have intended to contrast deliritas, which occurs only in this fr. of L., with the second declension neuter noun delirium, but if so he should have rephrased the wording of his entry on deliritas to that effect. As far as we can tell from the extant literary sources, although the verb delirare ‘to go off the furrow’ (Nonius .–. M = .– L delirare est de recto decedere. lira est autem fossa recta, quae contra agros tuendos ducitur et in quam uligo terrae decurrat; LHS ; and n. delenimenta . . . deliramenta) is attested from Plautus’ time (e.g. Amph. ), the abstract substantive deliratio ‘insanity’ is not found in texts until the mid-s (Cic. Div. . o delirationem incredibilem! non enim omnis error stultitia
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
dicenda est; Sen. ista senilis stultitia quae deliratio appellari solet; OLD s.v. ; TLL ..–), while the word ‘insanity’ as a medical term is first attested in Celsus, who wrote in Tiberius’ time. Celsus formed this word as a neuter noun in -ium, namely delirium (see OLD s.v.; TLL ..–; LHS –). Delirium does not appear in authors other than Celsus: authors of medical texts from the time of Pliny the Elder use the term deliratio to designate ‘insanity’ as a mental illness (TLL ..–; Langslow Medical and nn. –). It is interesting therefore that when the noun deliratio seems to be circulating in the works of Cicero and possibly others in the mid-first century BC, L. deviates from the norm and introduces two lexical variations on the theme of madness: deliritas (.) and deliramentum (). This suggests to me that these word-formations not only were imaginative but also had a topical flavour, because they may have been coined as a reaction to or a comic comment on the ‘new’ word deliratio (on its formation see LHS ). L. seems to have formed deliritas as a denominative feminine abstract noun modelled on substantives which contain the suffix -tat- (nominative singular in -tas), such as novitas or sanitas; see LHS – and (a)n. adulterionem adulteritatemque. Metre: two iambic octonarii (the second of them incomplete): scan line ABCD ABcD ABcD ABcD. The second line (consisting of the words cum cano eugio puellitari) does not scan if we assume that there is an elision in can(o) eugio, which creates a trochaic foot in eugi¯o p˘uellitari. Rightly therefore previous editors of this fr. assumed that words are missing both before and after puellitari. Ribbeck prints a lacuna between cano and eugio as follows: cum cano . . . eugio puellitari . . . ; this would give the sequence ABCBCD aBcD A. But such a sequence would violate Meyer’s law at the end of the second iambic metron, because eugio would scan as BCD (rather than the desirable BcD). The Greek derivation of eugium and its scansion elsewhere in L. () render unconvincing the attempt of M. Zic`ari (Hermes () ) to scan eugµo with a short penultimate, which would square with Meyer’s law. I prefer the arrangement of the words set up by
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
Carilli (Note ), who elides the final syllable of cano and prints cum cano eugio . . . puellitari (ABCD A aBcD A). Bothe and Ribbeck scan the fr. as senarii as follows: . . . quaenam mens, quae deliritas | facit vos subolitores cum cano eugio | puellitari? (Bothe); . . . quaenam mens, quae deleritas | vos subolitoris fecit cum cano eugio | puellitari? (Ribbeck). mens: on mens ‘referring to mental or moral balance, sanity, reasonableness, etc., or their opposites’ (OLD s.v. ) see Cic. Vat. ibi tu indicem Vettium linguam et vocem suam sceleri et menti (codd.: dementiae Gulielmus) tuae praebere voluisti; Off. . contraque falli errare labi decipi tam dedecet quam delirare et mente esse captum; [Tib.] ..– = ..– quis furor est, quae mens densos indagine colles | claudentem teneras laedere velle manus?; Ovid Met. .– quae te, germane, furentem | mens agit in facinus?; TLL .–. deliritas: . In a detailed and very learned article (Studi Noniani () –), E. Magioncalda discusses the etymology of the forms deliritas and deleritas, and views the spelling with -eas the earlier stage of the pronunciation of this noun, from which the spelling with -i- developed; but the spelling with -e(she argues) remained in rustic speech: La forma -e- e` arcaica e dialettale, derivata secondo gli studiosi da un antico dittongo ei che sarebbe passato attraverso una pronuncia -e- al principio del ◦ sec. a.C. per evolversi in -i- alla fine del secolo, mentre lo stadio -e- si sarebbe conservato nel latino rustico. Lo conferma Varrone quando dice: spica . . . quam rustici . . . vocant specam [RR ..]; ed anche: rustici etiam quoque viam veham appellant et vellam non villam [RR ..]; dello stesso parere e` Cicerone: ut Iota litteram tollas et E plenissimum dicas, non mihi oratores antiquos, sed messores videris imitari [De orat. .]. (p. )
She then remarks in passing that, although the spelling with -iis attested in Plautus (e.g. Amph. deliramenta), ‘Laberio usava probabilmente quella in -e-, giustificata da un ambiente provinciale e rustico con linguaggio quindi poco raffinato del quale
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la forma -e- e` certamente un esempio come la testimonianza citata di Cicerone sembra indicare’ (p. ). But not all of L.’s vocabulary needs to be associated with the speech of the lower classes. I also do not see why L. would form the noun deleritas if he wanted to employ a rustic word in his play; could he not simply have written deleratio, without changing the ending deler-atio (commonly attested) to deler-itas (attested only in L.)? The fact that he did change the ending suggests that he was interested not in the rustic spelling -e- but in creating a new suffix for deliratio. Furthermore, it is not helpful for Magioncalda to evoke as a supporting argument L.’s neologism deliberamenta (), which some have emended to del[ib]eramenta, because it is equally possible to emend this (if, in fact, any emendation is needed) to deli[be]ramenta. suppolitoris: if the MS reading is to be retained, this is an accusative plural which L. seems to have coined as a compound consisting of the prefix sub-, designating ‘someone who is below somebody else in position or status, an assistant to somebody’, and the noun politor ‘a weeder’ (Cato Agr. .; OLD s.v. ), derived from polio -ire ‘I clear the ground by weeding’ (Enn. Ann. Skutsch; OLD s.v. ). Similar formations may be seen in the substantives subpaedagogus (CIL .), subpraefectus (CIL .; Sen. NQ ..), subprocurator (CIL .), subpromus (Pl. Mil. ), subscriptor (Cic. Div. Caec. ), and subvilicus (CIL .). From the evidence of Cato (Agr. ) and Ulpian (Dig. ...) it has been suggested that a politor was someone who was hired to weed cornfields, and that as his fee he was given part of the fruits of the harvest (see the diss. of A. Geiss, Die Politio in der r¨omischen Landwirtschaft (Freiburg i. Br. ) –; R. Goujard Revue de philologie () –; and M. Zic`ari Hermes () ). However, in the corollarium to his second edn of the frs. of the Roman comic poets (p. ), Ribbeck argued that suppolitoris in L. was a disparaging term used figuratively and directed against adulterers (this is also the interpretation in OLD s.v.). Agricultural imagery contributes a large part to
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
the Latin sexual vocabulary, especially in relation to the female genitalia (see Adams Vocabulary –, –, –, –, –), but Zic`ari (above) has questioned the sexual interpretation of this word with reference to adulterers by saying that, unlike a politor, an adulterer, although ‘ploughing’ the same ‘field’ of a married woman as the husband does, does not normally take the ‘fruits’ of his ‘ploughing’ with him but freely leaves them to the cuckolded husband. Polio, politor, and politio have not been employed in a sexual sense in our extant sources. This (according to Zic`ari, fundamental) difference between weeders and adulterers has led Zic`ari to emend subpollitoris to sub pollictoris (see OLD s.v. pollinctor (spelled also pollictor): ‘a man employed to prepare a corpse for a funeral’), and to supply the noun adventum so that it would be governed by the preposition sub; his version would then mean: ‘What state of mind, what madness is making you with white-haired pussies keep on acting like young girls, although the mortician is about to arrive?’ Adams (Vocabulary ) adopts this view. But Zic`ari’s conjecture eliminates the agricultural flavour of the fr., which L. created and sustained with the term eugium (another originally agricultural term: ). The lack of context also makes it unwise to exclude a priori the possibility that the speaker is using the term ‘assistant-weeder’ literally. These women, who are said to behave like young girls, may have been both old and employed as assistant-weeders. If a sexual meaning needs to be given to the term, it is possible that these women functioned as go-betweens or bawds ‘assisting’ in the ‘weeding’ that took place between their mistress and an adulterer. But this does not explain what these women did so as to be rebuked for behaving ‘in a girlish fashion’ (see Carilli Hapax and Giancotti Mimo ). The other emendations (subolitor ‘assistant vegetable-grower’; spoliator ‘plunderer’) complicate the issue even further. cano . . . eugio: on the etymology and linguistic register of the noun eugium see .n. eugium. The speaker, whose identity is unknown, is talking to (or about) women who are either
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old or portrayed as old; the female genitalia are presented as white-haired, and the contrast the speaker sets up between old age (cano) and youth (puellitari) is meant to indicate that the behaviour of these women is inappropriate to and incompatible with their age. On invective against older women and on the negative portrayal of the vagina in relation to old age see Mart. .. (cano . . . cunno), .. (senemque Cynicum vincat osseus cunnus), .. (quid vellis vetulum, Ligeia, cunnum?), and the detailed discussion of Richlin Priapus – and –. puellitari: L. has formed this neologism as a denominative intransitive deponent verb derived from the noun puella and the iterative suffix -ito. This formation would presuppose the existence of the unattested verb ∗ puello -are ‘I behave like a young girl’ (cf. Varro Men. C`ebe multi pueri puellascunt ‘become effeminate’), and can also be seen in adulescentior (‘I behave in a youthful manner’; in Varro), adulescenturio (), iuvenor (‘I behave like a young man’; in Horace), bubulcito or bubulcitor (‘I drive or tend cattle’; in Plautus), febricito (‘I am feverish’; in Celsus), nominito (‘I call’; in Lucretius), and periclitor (‘I put to the test’; in Plautus); see LHS , Fischer Observations , A. Graur Studii Clasice () , and M. Zic`ari Hermes () . Josephus Scaliger, In appendicem P. Vergilii Maronis commentarii et castigationes (Leiden ) , thought that puellitari = kleitorizein ‘to touch the clitoris’ (LSJ s.v.). But puella does not have the same meaning as kleitor©v, and the analogy cannot be correct. Nonius . M = . L [HLPVEd(=ACXDMO)]: Miseriter [HLVEd: miseritur P] pro [HL PVE: secl. Lindsay: om. L d] misere [HL PVEd: miserae L ]. Laberius: maereo: mens incorrupta miseriter corrumpitur maereo Quicherat (qui in mimi versum primus hoc verbum intulit): mareo L ACX: macreo L : mereo HPVE: om. DMO: Mereo (titulus fabulae) Iuniusmg : Marco ed.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – ) : Nereo Bothe in praefatione: Macco Bentinus: Mario vel Morione Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit.: marceo L. Mueller
Nonius . M = . L: Miseriter instead of misere (‘wretchedly’). L.: I grieve: the uncorrupted mind is wretchedly corrupted
C O M M E N TA RY This fr. survives because it contains the unusual adverbial form miseriter (as opposed to the commonly attested misere). Nonius . M = . L – . M = . L lists more adverbs of a similarly irregular formation in this section of his treatise, entitled ‘De indiscretis adverbiis’. Miseriter, which gives L. one more syllable than misere does, in order to complete the metre of the line, is also attested in Catullus’ galliambics (. patriam allocuta maestast ita voce miseriter) and (according to Priscian GL .. H) in Ennius (Ennius proterviter . . . reverecunditer miseriter properiter). See also , LHS –, NW , and Fordyce on Cat. . puriter: ‘Catullus has puriter again in .: in early Latin the suffix -iter was freely used to form adverbs from adjectives of the second declension as well as from those of the third, and relics of that freedom survive in Caesar and Cicero, who both use firmiter and largiter.’ After L. miseriter is found again in Apuleius (Met. .): see TLL .–. Metre: a complete trochaic septenarius (BcD ABCD a/bbcD ABcD). If, however, maereo is not part of the fr., as Ribbeck, and Bothe have suggested (see below), the remaining words scan as a complete senarius (ABCD a/bbcD ABcD). maereo: it was only in that this word was first regarded (by Quicherat in his edn of Nonius) as part of the fr.: the textual difficulties in the transmission of the verb and its ending, which resembles an ablative singular, led some scholars to take it as the title (in the ablative singular) of the mime, from which the words mens . . . corrumpitur had been excerpted (see apparatus criticus). But
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maereo ‘I grieve’ fits the metre, makes sense (the speaker states his or her mental affliction in a melodramatic way and proceeds to expand on this statement), and adds to the alliteration of m and r: maeeo: mens incoupta miseite coumpitu. incorrupta . . . corrumpitur: although there are several examples of corrumpo (and of incorruptus) governing the noun animus from Terence to Seneca (TLL .–; ..– ), the only attested parallels for L.’s use of incorruptus + mens come from Cicero (see below), Apuleius (De Plat. .), and Cyprian (Epist. .). Unfortunately, the lack of context does not allow any definite conclusions to be drawn regarding the seriousness of this statement or the exact meaning of this fr., but it is likely that the speaker is here playfully referring to the philosophical or religious concept of ‘the innocent mind’, which Cicero, L.’s contemporary, also touched upon: Nat. deor. . cultus autem deorum est optimus idemque castissimus atque sanctissimus plenissimusque pietatis ut eos semper pura integra incorrupta et mente et voce veneremur. Non enim philosophi solum verum etiam maiores nostri superstitionem a religione separaverunt. miseriter: ; L. seems to be keen on inventing words that relate to wretchedness (see n. miserimonium). Charisius . K = . B [Nnn C]: ‘Alvum’ Vergilius feminino genere saepe dixit, sed masculine Calvus . . . et Helvius Cinna . . . et Laberius et Accius frequenter; quod magis usus celebravit. Charisius . K = . B: Virgil often used the word ‘belly’ as a feminine noun, but Calvus . . . and Helvius Cinna . . . and L. and Accius frequently used it as masculine; usage has given the latter more currency.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
C O M M E N TA RY Charisius reports that L. was one of the authors who used the noun alvus, commonly attested as a feminine substantive, in the masculine (see also Nonius . M = . L; Priscian in GL ..; .; . H; TLL .–). Charisius does not cite a fr. of L. containing alvus with an adjective to prove that this was the case, and it is unclear whether L. employed alvus as ‘belly’, gave it a new sense, or opted for a meaning other than ‘belly’ (OLD s.v. cites six meanings in total). In addition to L., alvus was employed as a masculine noun by Plautus, Cato, Accius, Calvus, and Cinna (on alvus in Calvus and Cinna see Hollis FRP and ); after L. alvus is attested in the masculine gender only in Ambrose and Venantius Fortunatus (see TLL .– and NW –). The first extant occurrence of alvus in the feminine is in Cato, who had also used alvus as a masculine noun (Ad fil. fr. ex alvo lavando; but cf. Agr. . alvum bonam). In Varro alvus is feminine (RR .. media alvo), although its meaning is special (‘bee-hive’). Sommer (Handbuch ) wonders whether the transition from masculine to feminine gender took place under the influence of the feminine noun hira ‘intestine’ (attested from Plautus’ time). The lack of more evidence prevents speculation about the influence of the language of the neoteric poets on the vocabulary of L.: see e.g. (a) and (b). Charisius . K = . B [Nnn Cp]: ‘Eber’ [C: Heber Nnn ] et ‘ebriacus’ [C: heberiacus Nnn : hebra tu Fabricius] ne dixeris. ‘bria’ [p: hebria Nnn C] enim est vas vinarium, unde ‘ebrius’ [C: hebrius Nnn ] et ‘ebria’ [C: hebria Nnn ] dicitur [ebrius] [C: hebrius Nnn : secl. Fabricius] ‘ebriosus’que [C: hebriosusque Nnn ] et ‘ebriosa’ [C: hebriosa Nnn ], sicut a negotio ‘negotiosus’ et ‘negotiosa’. cui contrarium est ‘sobrius’, quod nomen conparari non debet. neque enim ‘sobrior’ neque ‘sobrissimus’ dici potest, quamvis Laberius ‘sobrior’ [codd.: an sobriior?] dixerit.
EX INCERTIS FABULIS ebrius et ebria et ebriosus non ebriacus dicendum. bria enim est uas uinarium unde ista deducuntur p
Charisius . K = . B: One should not use the forms eber and ebriacus (both ‘drunk’). For bria is a vessel for serving wine, from which are derived the forms ebrius, ebria and [ebrius] ebriosus, ebriosa, just as negotiosus and negotiosa are derived from negotium. The opposite of ebrius is the word sobrius (‘sober’), which ought not to have a comparative and a superlative degree. For the forms sobrior (‘soberer’) or sobrissimus (‘soberest’) cannot be used, although L. has ‘soberer’. C O M M E N TA RY Charisius is here concerned with the nonsensical comparative degree of the adjective sobrius ‘sober’, the antonym of ebrius ‘drunk’. In NW – there is a full list of adjectives in -ius, -eus, and -uus, which do not follow the norm of having their comparative and superlative degrees formed with the aid of the adverbs magis and maxime, but adopt the suffixes -ior -ius and -issimus -a -um as other adjectives do. These formations are mostly attested in early Latin (mainly Plautus and Cato), but there are also some instances of them in Cicero and Sallust; irregularly formed comparative and superlative degrees of this kind are frequently attested again in the authors of the late Empire. But if anyone wanted to put sobrius in the comparative degree, should they not write sobri-ior (on the analogy of the forms innoxiiorem in Cato and industriior in C. Gracchus)? However, the point Charisius makes is not one of correct wordformation (sobrior or sobriior as opposed to magis sobrius) but one of logic. It does not make sense to put sobrius in the comparative degree (conparari non debet); furthermore, as one would expect, the form ∗ ebrior or ∗ ebriior ‘drunker’ is not attested. L. is the only extant author in whom sobrior occurs, and, although Charisius’ observation is certainly logical, it would have been interesting to
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
see whether and how sobrior made sense in its original context as part of a Laberian mime. On drunkenness in L. see n. ebriacus. Charisius . K = . B [Nnn ]: ‘Obiter’ divus Hadrianus sermonum [suppl. Barwick] primo quaerit an Latinum sit: ‘quamquam’ inquit ‘apud Laberium haec vox esse dicatur’, . . . Charisius . K = . B: The deified Hadrian, in Book One of his Speeches, discusses the Latinity of the word obiter (‘in passing’); he says, ‘although this word is said to be found in L., . . . ’ C O M M E N TA RY The reason for the citation of this fr. in Charisius (who takes it from Iulius Romanus) is the scepticism of the emperor Hadrian about the Latinity of the adverb obiter ((< ob + iter); OLD s.v.: ‘on the way, en route, in passing’ (in spatial sense) and ‘at the same time, the while’ (in temporal sense)), which has perhaps been coined as a parallel form to obviam ‘in the way or path of’ on the analogy of circiter (see LHS ). Obiter is not attested in any literary author of the republic except L. (at least, according to Hadrian’s testimony). After L. obiter occurs in Seneca the Younger (once in the tragedies), Petronius (five times in total; employed once by Trimalchio and once in the speech of an uneducated guest), Pliny the Elder (about times), Ps.Quintilian, Pliny the Younger (in his letters), Juvenal, Sulpicius Severus, Sidonius, and the jurist Pomponius (see TLL ..–.; NW ). But, since -iter is also an adverbial ending, it is conceivable that some authors objected to the formation obiter on the assumption that it contained this ending. Charisius reports that Augustus rebuked Tiberius for using the word perviam (‘way through’?) as an adverb instead of obiter, and
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that (according to Hadrian) Augustus, who was not impressively learned, would use obiter because he heard it in everyday language rather than because he read it somewhere (Char. . K = . B quamquam divus Augustus reprehendens Ti. Claudium ita loquitur, ‘scribis enim perviam ntª toÓ obiter’. sed divus Hadrianus ‘tametsi’ inquit ‘Augustus non pereruditus homo fuerit, ut id adverbium ex usu potius quam lectione protulerit’). The exciting news about obiter is that it is now attested in one of the Vindolanda writing-tablets in the sense ‘en route to a place’ (see J. N. Adams CQ () – and ). This is a good reason for associating obiter, at least in its initial occurrences, with the speech of the lower social classes. Adams summarises the literary evidence concerning the distribution of obiter and concludes: ‘The implication of all of this is that obiter was frowned on by some purists but current in popular use, and that would explain why it is absent from the classical literary language but found in mime. Augustus was well known for his readiness to accept colloquial or substandard Latin, as the fragments of his letters show’ (p. ). Regrettably, Charisius does not cite a whole line (or part of a line) of L. containing this word, and so it is impossible to be certain about the sense in which L. employed obiter. Diomedes Art. Gramm. I = GL .. K [ABMHv]: Sunt quaedam verba quae habent perfecta duplicia, ut ‘pango pangis pepigi et panxi’, ‘pungo pungis pupugi et punxi’, ‘vello vellis vulsi’; sed melius ‘velli et avelli’, ut Vergilius sine dubio ‘manesve revelli’ [ABM: manes vere velli H], idem ‘de stirpe revellit’ [ABMH: ima de stirpe revelli v]; item Laberius [ed. princ.: Lauerius AMH: Plauerius B]: aliqua parte evulserat verba aliqua parte in versum Laberii intulit Stephanus: Ribbeck seclusit Buecheler: praevulserat Keil: pvulserat M H: pevulserat ABM
evulserat
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
Diomedes Art. Gramm. I = GL .. K: There are some verbs which have two forms of the perfect tense; pango: pepigi and panxi; pungo: pupugi and punxi; vello: vulsi; it is better, however, to use the forms velli and avelli, as Virgil undoubtedly does, when he says ‘I tore out (revelli) the souls of the dead’ or ‘she tore it out (revellit) from the deep root’; likewise, L. has: . . . s/he had uprooted (evulserat) from another part
C O M M E N TA RY In his discussion of third conjugation verbs whose present stem ends in a consonant, and whose perfect tense is formed in two ways, one of them involving a reduplicated perfect stem (e.g. pepigi, pupugi; cf. ), Diomedes includes the verb vello ‘I tear up, I pluck out’, whose perfect tense is attested both as velli (found first in Verg. Ecl. .) and as vulsi (not attested before Lucan ., ., . and Sen. Dial. ..). The perfect velli is formed with the addition of the ending -i to the present stem, in which, however, the vowel has been lengthened: cf., for example, a˘ g-o ¯eg-i, ˘em-o ¯em-i (see NW ). Sommer (Handbuch ) and LHS ( ) argue that this pattern was due to the influence of the compound perfect forms of these verbs, which did not involve a reduplicated stem: for example, velli is formed (they say) on the analogy of the compound perfect forms develli and revelli (devellisse, Pl. Poen. ; revellistis, Cic. Verr. ..; revelli and revellit, Verg. Aen. . and .). In his comment on the perfect form revelli in Aen. . Servius notes: non ‘revulsi’; nam ‘velli’ et ‘revelli’ dicimus; ‘vulsus’ vero et ‘revulsus’ usurpatum est tantum in participiis contra naturam. So, in addition to Catullus (. devolsit: Haupt’s emendation of the MSS’ devolvit), L. is the only extant author of the pre-imperial era to use a compound form of the verb vello (praevello or evello, if we accept Buecheler’s emendation), without employing it in a participial form, and opting for the perfect stem vuls instead of vell. Other such forms are found
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in Ovid (Met. . divulsere; . revulsi in some MSS only), Lucan (. avulsit, . avulsitque), and Seneca (Ad Helv. . avulsit; NQ .. convulsit; Phaedra divulsit; Oedip. revulsit); for more such examples from authors of late antiquity see NW –. We cannot be sure either about the prefix which L. added to the pluperfect tense vulserat, or about the meaning of the resulting form. If L. wrote praevulserat (with the prefix prae indicated through an abbreviated p¯ ), he would be the first (and in fact the only one) to form such a compound, whose meaning I would tentatively render as ‘s/he had torn up beforehand’. The problem with praevulserat is that it does not scan with aliqua parte as part of an iambic or a trochaic line (see below, Metre). Buecheler’s conjecture evulserat ‘s/he had uprooted’ would both fit the metre and mean that L. was using a compound of vello attested already in Plautus (Truc. ), although there is no evidence that an author before L. had employed a form which originated from or was related to the perfect stem evuls. The ablatives aliqua parte, which precede the form praevulserat in the MSS, were regarded as part of L.’s fr. for the first time by Stephanus in , but his view has not been accepted by all subsequent editors of L. (Keil agrees with Stephanus but, for instance, Ribbeck and Bonaria do not include these words in the fr.). However, Diomedes’ practice of citing literary authors demonstrates that he was keen to quote not only the verbal form in which he was mainly interested but also a very small amount of the context (so he cites Virgil’s manesve revelli (not only revelli) and de stirpe revellit (not only revellit)). It is reasonable therefore to conclude that the words aliqua parte were also found in Diomedes’ source and were attributed to L.; the meaning of the fr., on the other hand, is still obscure. Metre: uncertain. The transmitted text (˘alµqu¯a p¯art˘e pr¯æv¯uls˘er˘at) does not fit into an iambic or a trochaic rhythm. Bothe scans the words as cretics, but there is no other evidence that L. used this metre. If we accept Buecheler’s conjecture evulserat, the elision of the e in part(e) evulserat solves the metrical problem, and the extant fr. may be scanned as the end of a senarius (bbCD ABcD) or of a trochaic septenarius (bbCD ABcD), or as part of a senarius (bbCD ABcD ). Macrobius Sat. ..– Willis [NGDPMBVOLKRJHFAC]: Sed quia et paulo ante Aurelius Symmachus et ego nunc Laberii fecimus mentionem, si aliqua huius atque Publilii [NP : Publii GDP MBVOLKRJHFAC] dicta referemus, videbimur et adhibendi convivio mimos vitasse lasciviam, et tamen celebritatem quam, cum adsunt, illi excitare pollicentur, imitari. Laberium asperae libertatis [codd. praeter J : celebritatis J ] equitem Romanum Caesar quingentis milibus invitavit ut prodiret in scaenam [NGDPBVOLKJ HFA : cenam MRA J C] et ipse ageret mimos quos scriptitabat. Sed potestas non solum si invitet sed et si supplicet cogit, unde se et Laberius a Caesare coactum in prologo testatur his versibus: Necessitas, cuius cursus transversi impetum voluerunt multi effugere, pauci potuerunt, quo me detrusti paene extremis sensibus! quem nulla ambitio, nulla quem largitio, nullus timor, vis nulla, nulla auctoritas movere potuit in iuventa de statu, ecce in senecta ut facile labefecit loco viri excellentis mente clemente edita summissa placide blandiloquens oratio! etenim ipsi di negare cui nil potuerunt hominem me denegare quis posset pati? ego, bis tricenis annis actis sine nota, eques Romanus lare egressus meo, domum revertar mimus. nimirum hoc die uno plus vixi mihi quam vivendum fuit. Fortuna, inmoderata in bono aeque atque in malo, si tibi erat libitum litterarum laudibus florens cacumen nostrae famae frangere, cur cum vigebam membris praeviridantibus satisfacere populo et tali cum poteram viro non flexibilem me concurvasti ut carperes?
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nuncin me deicis? quo? quid ad scaenam adfero? decorem formae an dignitatem corporis, animi virtutem an vocis iucundae sonum? ut hedera serpens vires arboreas necat ita me vetustas amplexu annorum enecat: sepulchri similis nil nisi nomen retineo.
cursus NGDPMBV: currus OLKRJHFAC: cursu vel cursum Heinsius transversi codd. praeter C: transversos C: aversi ed. : transversae Heinsius impetum NGDPB : impetu MB VOLKRJHFAC detrusti Scaliger: detrusit codd. praeter J et A : detusit J : destrusit A extremis sensibus codd.: extremis censibus Fruterius: exemptis vel ereptis sensibus Oudendorpius: externum vel extorrem vel ex mentis sensibus Burmannus nulla quem Bothe: nulla umquam codd. clemente NGDPM BRJHF: clamente M : demente VAC: clementi Heinsius di negare DPB L RJ HFC : denegare NGMB VOL KJ AC nil MOLRJHFAC: nihil NGDPBVK quis codd.: qui Meyerus ego ed. : ergo codd. tricenis MBV RJHFAC: trecenis NGDP: trigenis V OLK: tricennis Corpus– Fruterius: ed. : Heinsius . . . meo, / domum . . . NM: . . . meo, domum / revertar . . . GDPBVOLKRJHFAC mimus MBVOLK RJHF: mimum K : minus NGDPAC om. NDP litterarum codd.: Ludionum Fruterius: literati Heinsius laudibus codd.: lusibus Fruterius florens Lipsius: floris codd.: florum Fruterius cur cum codd. praeter KRJ : circum KRJ flexibilem me codd.: me flexibilem Muretus: flexilem me Buecheler carperes codd.: caeteros vel coeperas Fruterius: paceres (= pangeres) Gulielmus nuncin Gratwick: nuncine Schneidewin: nunc codd. deicis? quo? Ianus: deiicis quo codd. praeter C: deicis sed quo C: deicis quo? Fruterius: quo deiicis? ed. : deiecisti quo? Onions scaenam codd. praeter A C: cenam A C necat codd. praeter J : negat J : gravat Burmannus: secat Ziegler: negat Bothe om. J annorum codd.: annosum Bothe enecat NGDP: necat M BVOLKRJHFAC: vetat M : enicat Bothe sepulchri NGDPM: sepulchris BVRJHFAC
Macrobius ..– Willis: But both Aurelius Symmachus, earlier on, and I [scil. Avienus], just now, mentioned L.’s name; if, then, I quote some of his sayings and some of the sayings of Publilius, without presenting a licentious mimic spectacle at our banquet I will achieve, I think, as much popularity as the mime-actors, who promise to excite large crowds when they appear on the stage. L. was a harsh and outspoken Roman knight, whom Caesar for a fee of , sesterces invited to appear on the stage and to act in person in the
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mimes which he was always writing. But a potentate’s invitation, or even his mere request, in effect amounts to compulsion; and so it is that L., in the prologue to his play, testifies to the fact that he has been compelled by Caesar with the following lines: Necessity, whose slanting onslaught many have wished, but few have been able to escape, to what corner have you forced me almost at the end of my faculties! No canvassing, no bribery, no intimidation, no violence, no pressure could ever shift me from my station in my prime; behold in age how easily an outstanding man’s words expressed in gentle spirit, words quietly spoken, conciliatory nice-sounding words, have toppled me from my place! For indeed who would be able to tolerate me, a human, refusing him to whom the very gods have not been able to refuse anything? I, twice thirty years spent without reproach, having set forth my hearth a Roman knight, shall return home as a comic. Evidently this day I have lived one more than I ever should have lived. Fortune, immoderate in good and ill alike, if it was already your fancy to snap my reputation’s tip when it blossomed with literary praise, why did you not bend me to pick when still resilient, when I had the power with limbs budding at the tip to please the Roman People and would have been able to please such a man? Is it now that you cast me down? For what? What have I to offer the theatre? My grace of form, or my impressive presence? My manliness of spirit, or the sound of my melodious voice? As creeping ivy throttles the strength of trees, so Old Age throttles me with her embrace of years; and like the tomb, I retain nothing but my name. (the translation of these lines is by A. S. Gratwick)
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C O M M E N TA RY On the theatrical context and the historical background against which this fr. was apparently performed see pp. –. Rousseau may have been filled with indignation on account of what he regarded as L.’s unfair treatment at the hands of the tyrannical Caesar (see Giancotti Mimo ), but if only these lines survived from L.’s œuvre, we would have a very misleading picture of L. as a composer of mimes. For this fr. shows few signs of L.’s keen interest in colloquialisms or neologisms (see line n. blandiloquens; line n. praeviridantibus; line n. concurvasti), and contains no obscenities. Its sub-division into smaller units (lines – ‘the address to Necessitas’; – ‘the contrast between past and present in the speaker’s life’; – ‘the helplessness of the speaker and his social degradation as a result of this performance’; – ‘the address to Fortuna’; and – ‘epilogue: the symbolic death of the speaker’) with the rhetorical apostrophes to Necessitas and to Fortuna at prominent places (lines and ), and with the keyword mimus in the very heart of the poem (the middle of line ), is a sign of very careful composition. If the seriousness of these lines is justified by the fact that they are said to be a prologus, one ought not to compare L. with Terence (see Till Caesar and n. ), in whose plays the language is clearly more florid in the prologues than in the scenes which comprise the main body of the action. Unlike the belligerent mood of Terence’s prologues, the tone of this piece is sombre, almost tragic. If L. composed this piece in order to protest at Caesar’s request that he, a Roman knight, should perform in one of his own mimes to entertain Caesar and the audience at the games in , it is possible that L. by design deviated from his usual mime-style to register his disapproval of Caesar’s treatment of him. Only speculations may be made about the style of composition for the rest of this mime, let alone its subject-matter. But there are serious problems with the versification of this piece, which render the attribution of the lines to L. highly suspicious (see pp. –). Metre: senarii. Scan:
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line aBcD A/BCD ABcD line aaBCD AbbcD AbbcD line ABCD A/BCD ABcD line ABCdd A/BcD ABcD line ABcD A/BcD ABcD line aBcdd a/BcD ABcD line ABcD A/bbcdd ABcD line aBCD A/BcD ABcD line ABcdd A/BccD ABcD line aaBCD aBcD AbbcD line aaBCD aBcD ABcD line aaBcD A/BCD AbbcD line aBCD a/BcD ABcD line aBcD A/BCD ABcD line ABCD A/BCD ABcD line ABCdd A/BcD ABcD line AbbCdd A/BcD ABcD line ABcD A/BCD ABcD line ABcD A/BCD aaBcD line aabbcdd A/BCD aaBcD line ABccD ABCD ABcD line ABCD A/BcD ABcD line aBCD A/BcD ABcD line aaBCD A/BCD ABcD line abbcD A/BCD aaBcD line aaBcD A/BCD ABcD line aBCdd A/BccD AbbcD. Meyer’s law is not violated in lines (necessitas, aBcD), (timor, cD), (senect(a), cD), (blandiloquens, BccD) and (flexibilem, BccD; for the latter two cases cf. Pl. Trin. , and see Questa (Metrica ), (concurvast(i), BCD), and (virtut(em), CD; for the latter two cases cf. Pl. Aul. , and see Questa Metrica ). However, it appears to be violated at the fourth foot of the fourth line (umquam gives CD rather than the desirable cD), and I cannot see how this violation could be explained by either of the arguments
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Questa (Metrica –) sets out as exceptions to Meyer’s law. This is one of the reasons why I prefer Bothe’s emendation quem (.n. quem), which solves the metrical problem. Luchs’ law is observed at the end of lines , , , , , , , , (for the sequence DaaB cD at the end of a senarius see Questa Metrica –), , and . Remarks on individual words: in lines and I scan cuius and cui as one long syllable (on the serious tone conveyed by the monosyllabic cuius, frequently attested in Roman tragedy, see Lindsay Verse –; on cui see Lindsay Verse ). In line I scan mihi as one long syllable (Lindsay Verse ). In line I take the first four syllables of satisfacere as a proceleusmatic (aabb) with iambic shortening operating in the first two syllables. In line I scan deicis as a spondee (on e and i scanned as one long syllable in compounds of the verb iacio cf. Pl. Asin. (eicis), Rud. (coiciam), Metre, and see Lindsay Verse ). Necessitas: an impressive beginning, which occupies the first metron (aBcD). With this address to ‘Inevitability’ (OLD s.v. b) the speaker introduces the themes of destiny and death, which permeate this poem (see Till (Caesar n. ), who refers to H. Schreckenberg, Ananke: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Wortgebrauchs (Munich )). Horace (Carm. ..–) portrays Necessity as a fearsome and obedient servant to Fortune, holding beam-nails, wedges, a hook, and molten lead, presumably to convey the idea of people’s fixed destiny (see D. West, Horace Odes I (Oxford ) –); NH ad loc. remind Horace’s readers of ‘the adamantine spindle of Necessity in Pl. rep. c and the adamantine shuttles of the Mo±rai in PMG (a). ’. But the motif of the ruthlessness of Necessity was also common in the sententiae of the mimographer Publilius: N (Necessitas dat legem, non ipsa accipit), N (Necessitas ab homine quae vult impetrat), N (Necessitati quodlibet telum utile est), N (Necessitas quod poscit, nisi des, eripit), N (Necessitas quod celat frustra quaeritur), N (Necessitas quam pertinax regnum tenet), N (Nihil aliud scit necessitas quam vincere); cf. Menand. Gnomai Liapis Pr¼v tn ngkhn oÉd
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
e³v nq©statai. In his translation of a passage from a now lost Euripidean tragedy, Cicero renders the Greek word ngkh as Necessitas, which he personifies (Tusc. disp. ., line sic iubet Necessitas – dated to ). It is difficult to say whether ‘Necessity’ is personified also here, but the second person singular detrusti (line ) and the rhetorical apostrophe of the speaker, who clearly sees himself as one of Necessity’s many victims (line voluerunt multi effugere), suggests that this is the case. cursus transversi: Till (Caesar n. ) cites Cic. Brut. (sed in te intuens, Brute, doleo, cuius in adulescentiam per medias laudes quasi quadrigis vehentem transversa incurrit misera fortuna rei publicae) and Varro Men. C`ebe (nemini Fortuna currum a carcere intimo missum | labi inoffensum per aequor candidum ad calcem sivit) as parallels to this passage, showing Fortune attacking her victims as if they were rivals in chariot-racing. See Douglas on Cic. Brut. § .: ‘the simile is surely from racing (cf. .) amid the plaudits of spectators, not (as many editors assert) from riding in a triumph’. multi . . . pauci: one of the many contrasts in this passage. Cf. in iuventa (line ) – in senecta (line ); ipsi di (line ) – hominem me (line ); eques Romanus (line ) – mimus (line ). detrusti ‘to force, thrust (into a less desirable or estimable situation, expedient, activity, etc.)’ (OLD s.v. a; TLL ..– ). In his anthology of Latin poetry, Burmannus () says that this contracted second person singular perfect form is Scaliger’s emendation for the MSS’ detrusit, and that the speaker of this fr. is addressing Fortune herself. I have been unable to trace the source of Burmannus’ information; certainly in the version of this fr. which appears in Catalecta Virgilii & aliorum po¨etarum Latinorum veterum poematia (Leiden ) –, Josephus Scaliger prints detrusit, and it is odd that, in the translation of this poem into Greek, which Josephus Scaliger made two years earlier ((Leiden ) –), he employs a third (not a second) person singular
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verb to render detrusit (p m ì xwsen k jrenän krwn sced»n;). So where did Scaliger emend detrusit to detrusti? Nevertheless, detrusti is surely preferable to detrusit because the apostrophe to the personified Necessity is in keeping with the generally serious tone of the fr., and squares with the address to Fortune which the speaker makes in lines –. Till (Caesar n. ) does not accept the conjecture, because he sees this section of the passage as a statement of the facts (the speaker has been forced to do something which he regards as humiliating) in contrast to lines – (the apostrophe to Fortuna), which contain the speaker’s personal complaint about the irrational whims of Fortune. In the apparatus criticus of his third edn for this fr., Ribbeck cites Cic. Off. . (dated to ), in which readers are encouraged to undertake only the actions for which they are best suited (suum quisque igitur noscat ingenium, acremque se et bonorum et vitiorum suorum iudicem praebeat . . . ad quas igitur res aptissimi erimus, in iis potissimum elaborabimus). In this they should follow the example of actors, says Cicero, who choose not the best play but the play most suited to their talents (illi enim [scil. scaenici] non optimas sed sibi accommodatissimas fabulas eligunt). If, however, necessitas forces people to do something for which they are not suited (sin aliquando necessitas nos ad ea detruserit quae nostri ingenii non erunt), they should nevertheless try to perform this task with as much decor as possible (ut ea, si non decore, at quam minime indecore facere possimus; cf. line decorem formae). If fr. was composed by L. and delivered in , it is possible that Cicero alludes in Off. . to L.’s inappropriate but skilfully handled appearance on stage as a mime-actor (with or without Cicero in the audience). But the premise of this hypothesis is questionable, the sentiment is too general for these passages to be directly connected (cf. e.g. Phil. . sed, si illa tulimus quae nos necessitas ferre coegit, quae vis quaedam paene fatalis . . . etiamne huius impuri latronis feremus taeterrimum crudelissimumque dominatum?), and it is odd that Cicero does not say in his extant letters (as one would expect him to say) that he actually saw L., an eques, acting on stage as a mimus.
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extremis sensibus: J. Wordsworth, Fragments and specimens of early Latin (Oxford ) wrongly thinks that this phrase means ‘[Necessity] has thrust me down almost below anything I could have imagined.’ extremis sensibus = extrema vita (Cic. Cael. quo quidem tempore ille [scil. Q. Metellus] moriens, cum iam ceteris ex partibus oppressa mens esset, extremum sensum ad memoriam rei publicae reservabat); TLL ..–. The speaker implies that he is almost (paene) at death’s door (cf. line sepulchri similis), but this statement should be interpreted as part of the resentful rhetoric of the piece rather than as an accurate reflection of the health of L. or the character who is speaking. nulla . . . nulla: for similar examples of accumulating anaphora, see Cic. Sest. (quem numquam ulla vis, ullae minae, ulla invidia labefecit); Lig. (eius viri est quem de suscepta causa propositaque sententia nulla contumelia, nulla vis, nullum periculum possit depellere). ambitio ‘insistence in seeking favours, importunity’ (OLD s.v. b; TLL .). Till (Caesar ) views this word in the light of Cic. Ad Att. .., dated to December (mihi enim perspecta est et ingenuitas et magnitudo animi tui; neque ego inter me atque te quicquam interesse umquam duxi praeter voluntatem institutae vitae, quod me ambitio quaedam ad honorum studium, te autem alia minime reprehendenda ratio ad honestum otium duxit); but the notion of ambitio is much too general to support such an interpretation: the speaker in this fr. simply says that in his youth he strove to maintain his independence of authority-figures. quem: in the notes which Bothe wrote on the frs. of L. published in the Supplement to Orelli’s edn (), he remarks that the word transmitted by the MSS umquam ‘ever’ suggests a period longer than necessary in this context: the speaker refers only to his youth (line in iuventa), not to the whole of his life, as the period in which he was unaffected by canvassing, bribery, intimidation, and violence. And so Bothe emends umquam to
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quem, which is palaeographically attractive as a conjecture, since it is close to the extant reading, it creates an effective contrast with quem nulla at the beginning of the line, and it removes the metrical oddity posed by umquam, which violates Meyer’s law (see Metre; nulla quem largitio gives the sequence Bc D ABcD, which is preferable to null(a) umquam largitio = B CD ABcD). largitio ‘the giving of presents corruptly, bribery’ (OLD s.v. ; TLL ..). This word is first attested in the Rhet. Her. (..), and seems to occur only in prose in the pre-classical and classical periods. If this fr. was composed by L., then he is the first extant author to use largitio in (iambic) verse (it re-appears in verse-compositions of authors of the fourth century AD: see TLL ..–). Suetonius says that Caesar resorted to excessive bribery in order to secure his appointment to the office of pontifex maximus (Iul. deposita provinciae spe pontificatum maximum petit non sine profusissima largitione). Was the choice of this prosaic word a sarcastic comment on what was seen as Caesar’s lack of moral integrity? Even if we assume that it was L. who wrote this line, we cannot be certain that he had Caesar’s largitio in mind here: the speaker lists in a rhetorical fashion the forces (ambitio, timor, vis, auctoritas) which could have influenced him in his youth, as they influence other people (but they did not influence him), and largitio is one of them. auctoritas ‘personal influence or ascendancy’ (OLD s.v. ); cf. Cic. Lig. (of L. Aelius Tubero yielding to Pompey’s authority) cessit auctoritati amplissimi viri vel potius paruit. Not surprisingly, the word occurs mostly in prose, and was greatly favoured by Cicero and Livy (for its distribution amongst classical and post-classical authors see TLL .–). It occurs twice in Plautus (= ‘responsibility’ in Poen. ; ‘authority’ in Trin. ), three times in Terence (= ‘responsibility’ in Eu. ; ‘personal influence’ in Hec. and ), once in this fr. attributed to L., once in the sententiae of Publilius (I In amore forma plus valet quam
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
auctoritas), and twice in Phaedrus (..; .prol.). It then seems to vanish from the classical period. In Pl. Trin. , Ter. Hec. , the ‘prologue’ of L., and Publilius it appears as the last metron (ABcD) of a senarius. movere . . . de statu: Till (Caesar n. ) relates this expression to the verb labefacio, which occurs in the following line (see Cic. Sest. (cited in .n. nulla . . . nulla)); see also .n. nil nisi nomen retineo. TLL ..– suggests that the imagery of the resoluteness and determination of a person to be untouched by external factors is derived from the language of soldiers and gladiators; cf. Cic. Div. in Caec. numquam ille [scil. adversarius] me opprimet consilio, numquam ullo artificio pervertet, numquam ingenio me suo labefactare atque infirmare conabitur. On status = ‘an intellectual or moral or political position taken up by a person’ see OLD s.v. b. iuventa ‘the period of youth’ (OLD s.v. ), a mainly poetic word. In prose it occurs perhaps after Varro (certainly after Livy), while in verse it is attested twice in Cicero’s poem on his consulship, once in a poem of unknown authorship which Buecheler attributes to a contemporary of Lucretius, and once in the wedding-hymn of Catullus (), before it is taken up by Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and other poets of the Augustan and post-Augustan era (for full references see TLL ..–). It is to be contrasted with the noun senecta (line ), attested as early as Pl. Mil. . On the unusually elevated style of language of this fr. in relation to the other extant frs. of L. see Till Caesar n. . ecce: Gratwick, whose translation I reproduce here with his kind permission, renders this particle/adverb as ‘behold’. The only alternative I can offer is ‘here I am, how easily in old age . . . ’; this is based on the forceful argumentation of C. Dionisotti, ‘Ecce’, BICS () – (see, especially, and
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), who disagrees with the interpretation of ecce as ‘behold!’, ‘see!’, ‘look!’: [i]n the first place it is striking that even when the grammarians define ecce as demonstrative, they nowhere specify seeing as a particular implication. Was it too obvious? I doubt it. Both general usage of the word, from Plautus to Ammianus, and the grammarians’ comments suggest that, insofar as it has a definable meaning, it is that of expressing immediacy and engagement, in relation to happenings, people or thoughts, whether visible or not. (p. ).
senecta . . . labefecit: see n. movere . . . de statu and iuventa. viri excellentis (= Caesar) is a bitterly ironical phrase. Till (Caesar ) observes that Cicero uses the adjective excellens to characterise Greek philosophers and artists, Roman exempla virtutis (Arch. , Brut. ), politicians (Lucullus: Fin. .; Pompey: Balb. ; Ad fam. ..), but never Caesar himself (see, however, Vat. deinde . . . si iam violentior aliqua in re C. Caesar fuisset, si eum magnitudo contentionis, studium gloriae, praestans animus, excellens nobilitas aliquo impulisset). mente clemente: homoeoteleuton and paronomasia; cf. Enn. Ann. – Skutsch mentes . . . dementes and see Skutsch Ennius . On Caesar’s clementia see Cic. Ad fam. .. (dated possibly to October ) in Caesare hae sunt: mitis clemensque natura, qualis exprimitur praeclaro illo libro ‘Querelarum’ tuarum [scil. Caecinae]; H. Dahlmann, Kleine Schriften (Hildesheim ) ; Till Caesar n. . Clemente is treated not as an adjective (if that were the case, the text should have read mente clementi: Cic. Cael. leni . . . et clementi patre) but as the ablative singular of a participle which, under other circumstances, would either have functioned as a substantive (e.g. ab amante) or have formed part of an ablative absolute construction (e.g. patre amante); presumably the alteration of the spelling is done for the acoustic effect
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of homoeoteleuton. This spelling is found only here and in Livy .. (clemente legis interprete). edita: the feminine noun which this participle qualifies is revealed only at the end of the next line (oratio). It is possible that edo here does not mean simply ‘I disclose, I tell’ (OLD s.v. EDO a; TLL ..– lists this line among the passages in which edo = ‘ingenio procreare aliquid’), but is reminiscent of oracular responses (OLD s.v. EDO b ‘to utter solemnly, pronounce (an oracle, etc.)’; c ‘(of oracles, soothsayers) to announce, decree’). Caesar’s request may thus be presented as a divinely inspired demand which must be obeyed. summissa: Cicero uses this participle often as an adjective to designate the restrained and gentle style of a quiet orator (as opposed to a fierce one): De orat. . sed genus hoc totum orationis in eis causis excellit in quibus minus potest inflammari animus iudicis acri et vehementi quadam incitatione; non enim semper fortis oratio quaeritur, sed saepe placida, summissa, lenis, quae maxime commendat reos; . et ut illa altera pars orationis, quae probitatis commendatione boni viri debet speciem tueri, lenis, ut saepe iam dixi, atque summissa, sic haec, quae suscipitur ab oratore ad commutandos animos atque omni ratione flectendos, intenta ac vehemens esse debet. placide is to be taken with blandiloquens. The adjectives placidus and clemens are used by Charmides to characterise Neptune, who turns out to be mild and merciful towards Charmides in Pl. Trin. (nam pol placido te et clementi meo usque modo, ut volui, usu’ sum in alto). Clemens and placidus also occur in the speech of the apparently reformed Demea when he refers to the character of his liberal brother Micio (Ter. Ad. clemens placidu’, nulli laedere os, adridere omnibus). But Horace (Carm. ..) uses placidus in relation to the gaze of the Muse Melpomene, and Virgil (Aen. .) of the gracious behaviour of the gods towards the pii; the speaker thus continues to portray Caesar in a divine light
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suggesting that Caesar’s wish, though calmly expressed, amounted to a heavenly command. blandiloquens is attested only here. It is apparently formed from the adjective blandus ‘ingratiating through flattery’ and the participle of loquor. Similar compounds of adjectives and participles are frequent in Ennius’ epic and dramatic poetry, and have parallel Greek formations: alti-volans (Ëyi-petv), altitonans (Ëyi-bremthv), suavi-loquens (¡du-epv); see LHS for more examples of participial compounds. Skutsch (Ennius ) explains that it used to be assumed that Ennius originated these compounds, coining them to suit the hexameter and in particular its ending . . . But their occurrence in Plautus cannot be reconciled with this view: the first books of the Annals were not published before Plautus’ death, and the Scipio can hardly have exercised that sort of influence. The poet who created them was Naevius, and Plautus in his anapaests followed suit.
Plautus seems to have favoured comic compounds of words indicating or related to flattery: blandiloquentulus (Trin. ; the diminutive suffix -ulus suggests that this adjective was formed from blandiloquens, but such an adjective is not attested before L.), blandidicus (Poen. ), blandiloquus (Bacc. ), and perhaps blandicella, a word attested in Festus ( M = L), not in relation to a specific author (but it has been attributed to Plautus: see Pl. Fragm. ‘Vocabula’ in Lindsay’s edn). Ennius (Trag. Vahlen = Jocelyn) coins the noun blandiloquentia, and Jocelyn (Ennius ) gives a full list of compound substantives, found in comic and tragic playwrights and in Cicero, ending in -loquentia. Blanditia occupied an ambiguous position in the sphere of Roman morality; it was regarded as a feature of shallowness in a highranking citizen or a person of high reputation, but was deemed necessary in canvassing: Cic. Rep. . in cive excelso atque homine nobili blanditiam, adsentationem, ambitionem meam esse levitatis; Lael. nullam in amicitiis pestem esse maiorem quam adulationem, blanditiam, adsentationem; Q. Cic. Comm. pet. sed opus est magno opere blanditia,
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quae, etiamsi vitiosa est et turpis in cetera vita, tamen in petitione necessaria est. Ingratiating speech is also singled out as a typical feature of Caesar’s strategy when addressing crowds or individuals: see Cic. Ad Att. .. ille mihi litteras blandas mittit; Bell. Afr. . hac necessitate Caesar coactus privatos ambiendo et blande appellando aliquantum numerum frumenti in sua praesidia congesserat et eo parce utebatur; Bell. Afr. . ipse pedibus circum milites concursans virtutesque veteranorum proeliaque superiora commemorans blandeque appellans animos eorum excitabat; Suet. Iul. . nec milites eos pro contione, sed blandiore nomine commilitones appellabat. So it is appropriate that the noun designating Caesar’s words (oratio) is qualified by the neologism blandiloquens. – ipsi di . . . hominem: the traditional hierarchy of gods, kings, and their subjects – a theme employed in a funeral address by Caesar in (Suet. Iul. . est ergo in genere et sanctitas regum, qui plurimum inter homines pollent, et caerimonia deorum, quorum ipsi in potestate sunt greges) and evoked by Horace in the ‘Roman Odes’ (..– regum timendorum in proprios greges, | reges in ipsos imperium est Iovis; see D. West, Horace: Odes III (Oxford ) ) – is now inverted. The speaker says that not even the gods could deny Caesar anything, so how could he, a mere mortal, do so? On this meaning of homo see OLD s.v. b; TLL ..– .; Otto Sprichw¨orter . denegare: metrically more convenient than negare because of the prefix, which gives the line one more (long) syllable. For denego = ‘I refuse (a request)’ see Pl. Trin. – (si tibi | denegem quod me oras). quis posset pati?: a formula of indignation. Fordyce on Cat. . (quis hoc potest videre, quis potest pati) refers to this passage and to Caes. B.G. .. (quod vero ad amicitiam populi Romani attulissent, id eis eripi quis pati posset?). E. D. Kollmann (Hermes () –) argues that, when Catullus composed ., he had Caes. B.G. .. in mind; but Kollmann does not explore the
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implications of this conclusion for line of L.’s fr.; Kollmann’s view concerning the occasion in which L.’s fr. was performed contains many inaccuracies. bis tricenis annis: if we were to take this phrase literally, we would make L. years old at the time of the delivery of this piece. The same compound numeral appears in Martial .. (bis tibi triceni fuimus, Mancine, vocati). P. Howell, A commentary on Book One of the Epigrams of Martial (London ) translates Martial’s line as follows: ‘There were six hundred [sic] of us invited guests at your table, Mancinus’; he then comments (p. ) that ‘trecenti or triceni are commonly used for an indefinitely large number (where we would say “hundreds of . . . ” or “dozens of”)’. If this were true, the implications for the interpretation of line of the ‘prologue’ would be significant, because the expression ‘twice thirty years’ could then be taken to mean ‘a very long time’; this would have repercussions for the date of birth of L., which is placed (according to scholarly consensus) about /. But trecenti (‘three hundred’) is not the same as triceni (‘thirty at a time’), and the parallels adduced by Howell always feature a form of trecenti (not of triceni) indicating a large number: see Cat. . (with Fordyce ad loc.), ., .; Hor. Carm. .. (and D. West, Horace: Odes II (Oxford ) ), ..; Mart. .., ..; OLD s.v. trecenti b. I am therefore inclined to take bis tricenis as a precise indication that L. was years old at the time of the performance of this mime. nota: ‘a mark of condemnation placed by the censors against the names of citizens degraded by them, or the punishment itself’ (OLD s.v. a); see Livy .. (patrum memoria institutum fertur ut censores motis senatu adscriberent notas. Catonis et aliae quidem acerbae orationes exstant in eos quos aut senatorio loco movit aut quibus equos ademit); Val. Max. .. (equestris quoque ordinis . . . iuvenes censoriam notam patiente animo sustinuerunt, quos M’. Valerius et P. Sempronius, quia in Sicilia ad munitionum opus explicandum ire iussi facere id neglexerant, equis publicis spoliatos in numerum aerariorum rettulerunt). A word
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similar to nota may be hidden in the participial form ignominiatus in Gell. . (see apparatus criticus to Testim. ). eques Romanus: the mention of this title has funeral associations according to Till (Caesar n. ), who compares it to a reference to the same title in an epitaph of a Roman knight from Beneventum who was also a poet (CIL . = ILS Dessau): C. Concordius Syria | cus eq R comm reip | Benevent munerarius | bidui, poeta Latinus co | ronatus in mune pa | triae suae et [supplevit Mommsen] vibus | sibi fecit; qui vixit | ann LVIII m VI d XII | hor III. But a reference to the rank eques Romanus would surely have not appeared only at funeral inscriptions, so the comparison of Till does not seem to me to be particularly convincing. mimus: the important word of the ‘prologue’ is located half way through the fr. at its very centre immediately after the fifth element of the senarius: aB cDA BC DA B cD. (I am most grateful to Prof. A. S. Gratwick for this observation.) On the word mimus as a technical term indicating an actor in a specific type of drama, the mime, see p. . uno . . . fuit: the sentiment that it is best to die before misfortune strikes you goes back to the antistrophe of Aeschylus’ Pers. – in the words of the Chorus, who receive from the messenger the bad news of the destruction of the Persian army (§ makrob©otov Âde g tiv | a«Ün jnqh geraio±v, koÅ- | ein t»de pm ì elpton), but is also exploited in Plautine comedy in the mock-tragic words of the tutor Lydus, who is shocked to see that the young Pistoclerus, his pupil, threatens him: Bacch. – o barathrum, ubi nunc es? ut ego te usurpem lubens! | video nimio iam multo plus quam volueram; | vixisse nimio satiust iam quam vivere. | magistron quemquam discipulum minitarier? See also Cic. Tusc. disp. .– and Livy .. for the same notion.
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inmoderata: the speaker personifies Fortune and calls her ‘unrestrained’, as Cicero calls Clodia immoderata in Cael. (o immoderata mulier). See TLL ..– and cf. Cic. Pro Marc. (illa ipsa rerum humanarum domina, Fortuna). The opinion that Fortune can be excessively good (and bad) is hackneyed in popular drama: see, for instance, Publ. sent. A Affatim aequa si fortuna est, longe interitum non habet; F Fortuna cum blanditur, captatum venit; F Fortuna nimium quem fovet stultum facit. florens cacumen . . . frangere: the alliteration of the previous line (libitum litterarum laudibus) continues here with florens . . . famae frangere, a phrase which introduces agricultural imagery in connection with both youth and literary achievements. The literary reputation of the speaker is portrayed as a flower, whose top is blossoming (see OLD s.v. cacumen e and a) because of the literary praise his work has received so far, and Fortune has come at an inappropriate time in the speaker’s life to snap the head of this flower. vigebam: the speaker’s complaint is that Fortune should have humiliated him when he was flourishing; the agricultural imagery is now transferred from his literary reputation to the speaker himself (on vigeo = ‘I thrive’ (used of plants) see Cic. Fin. . itaque et vivere vitem et mori dicimus, arboremque et novellam et vetulam et vigere et senescere; and OLD s.v. c), who is portrayed as a plant with very green branches. praeviridantibus: the speaker’s excellence in his younger days is demonstrated by this compound adjective, which occurs only here and consists of the prefix prae-, which intensifies the superior quality of freshness and growth of the poet’s membra (cf. praealtus, praeceler, praelongus), and the participle of virido ‘I am green’, a verb already attested in Accius (– ubi sanctus Cithaeron | frondet viridantibus fetis), and occurring mostly in the present participle (see OLD s.v. virido a and Fischer Observations
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). On similar formations in L. see n. conlabella and cf. depudicavit ((a)) and iniquat (). tali . . . viro: whom does the speaker mean? Surely not Caesar, because, if we take at face value the statement that the speaker is at least years old, the implication is that, when he was in his prime (say, in the eighties BC), Caesar had not reached yet the stage of being a talis vir. Is the speaker projecting anachronistically to Caesar’s former self the power which Caesar had in the s and s BC? Is the speaker referring to a person other than Caesar but with power, army-support, and authority equal to Caesar’s (perhaps Sulla, who died in )? Or does tali viro refer not to a particular individual but to anyone as powerful then as Caesar is now? flexibilem . . . concurvasti . . . carperes: the implication is that the speaker portrays himself as rigid at this stage in his life; he is not easily bent (for this metaphor of ‘flexible’ youth see OLD s.v. flexibilis ; TLL ..–), and the result of Fortune’s action will be his death (a theme elaborated at the end of this fr.). Had he been younger, he would have been able to bend down without any difficulty: this notion is expressed by the compound verb concurvasti, attested only here in the classical period (TLL .–); concurvo consists of the prefix con- (intensifying the action of bending down) and the verb curvo, which may be used to designate that a person stoops because of old age (see OLD s.v. ). The agricultural imagery continues with the verb carpo ‘I pick (fruit, flowers)’ (see OLD s.v. a; TLL .– ; but TLL is wrong to list in .– this passage of the ‘prologue’ along with other passages in which carpo = ‘vexare, cruciare, urgere, demendo perdere’; this misses the point of the identification of the youthful speaker with a blossoming flower). nuncin: on nunc = ‘now (contrasted with past or future occasions)’ see OLD s.v. c.
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deicis: Till (Caesar n. ) relates this verb to detrusit in line (he does not favour the emendation detrusti) and compares it with the expression de gradu movere or de statu deici, which occurs in the vocabulary of soldiers and gladiators (see OLD s.v. d and e, TLL ..–). decorem formae . . . dignitatem corporis: on the need for a decent appearance in public (with examples from acting brought into the discussion) and the two kinds of beauty, one of which resides in bodily dignity, see Cic. Off. .–, .–; Orat. ; Quint. ..–. vocis iucundae: an agreeable voice (TLL ..– ) was deemed essential for orators and actors, both of whom should put it to good use: see Cic. De orat. .–; .–; Quint. .. (maximos actores comoediarum, Demetrium et Stratoclea, placere diversis virtutibus vidimus. sed illud minus mirum, quod alter deos et iuvenes et bonos patres servosque et matronas et graves anus optime, alter acres senes, callidos servos, parasitos, lenones et omnia agitatiora melius – fuit enim natura diversa: nam vox quoque Demetri iucundior, illius acrior erat); and Till Caesar nn. and . hedera serpens: the participle serpens (see OLD s.v. serpo b ‘(of the branches, stems, roots, etc., of plants) to extend in a serpentine manner, wind, twist’) qualifies the noun ‘ivy’ only here; but cf. Verg. Ecl. . inter victricis hederam tibi serpere lauros. In Cic. Sen. it is used of vines. The imagery of ivy embracing and almost covering trees and objects around which it twists itself is not unique to this passage: see Cat. .– ac domum dominam voca | coniugis cupidam novi, | mentem amore revinciens, | ut tenax hedera huc et huc | arborem implicat errans; Cic. Quint. fr. .. omnia convestivit hedera; Caes. B.C. .. tabernacula protecta hedera; Culex – hederaeque ligantes | bracchia; TLL ..–. But although it is not particularly poetic to say that ‘ivy kills trees’ (Pliny the Elder uses this phrase in NH . arbores autem necat candida
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
[scil. hedera] omnemque sucum auferendo tanta crassitudine augetur ut ipsa arbor fiat; . hedera necari arbores certum est; and . necant [scil. arbores] invicem inter sese umbra vel densitate atque alimenti rapina; necat et hedera vinciens), the speaker here portrays trees as animate objects possessing strength (vires), which is ‘throttled’ by the serpentine hedera. This imagery works well in the context, because in the next line the speaker will portray himself as a victim of a snake-like old age which throttles him with its embrace (amplexu). Therefore, the description involving the ivy has a bipartite structure, which resembles the structure of the ivy-simile in Cat. .– (cited above). amplexu: the embrace of the years of old age is presented as deadly; cf. Cic. Div. . (nutrix animadvertit puerum dormientem circumplicatum serpentis amplexu); Verg. Aen. .– (et primum parva duorum | corpora natorum serpens amplexus uterque | implicat). me . . . enecat: the personal pronoun me, object of the verb enecat (for its ‘serpentine’ connection see Pl. Amph. puer ambo anguis enicat; but used also of vegetation in Col. .. and Pliny NH .), is placed away from it, as if it were ‘embraced’ by vetustas, the word next to it. On the pair necat . . . enecat cf. negare . . . denegare (lines –) and mori . . . emori in Publ. sent. B Bis emori est alterius arbitrio mori. nomen: for the notion that after death or in a state of health close to death all that remains of somebody is their name see Till Caesar n. , who refers to Prop. .. (et breve in exiguo marmore nomen ero) and Livy .. (me iam non eundem sed umbram nomenque P. Licini relictum videtis. Vires corporis adfectae, sensus oculorum atque aurium hebetes, memoria labat, vigor animi obtunsus). Cf. also Ovid Met. . (et saepe in tumulis sine corpore nomina legi). The speaker probably means that through the disreputable action of performing as a mime-actor he has lost his title of an eques Romanus (line ) and is almost dead (line sepulchri similis). But since this ‘prologue’ is supposed to refer to the humiliating
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experience of a person called Lab˘erius, it is tempting to see a pun in the final four words of the last line (the second half of the senarius after the caesura), which may be connected to the statement the speaker made earlier (line ), namely that he was shaken from his position (lab˘efecit loco; n. movere . . . de statu). Macrobius .. Willis [NGDPMBVOLKRJHFAC]: In ipsa quoque actione subinde se, qua poterat, [scil. Laberius] ulciscebatur, inducto habitu Syri, qui velut flagris caesus praeripientique se similis exclamabat: porro, Quirites, libertatem perdimus perdimus Camerarius: perdidimus codd.
Macrobius .. Willis: Moreover, during the performance of the play, he [L.] was continuously taking his revenge, however he could; dressed as a Syrian, who pretended that he had been flogged, and looked like a runaway slave, he would cry out: furthermore, Roman citizens, we are losing our liberty
C O M M E N TA RY On the theatrical context of this fr. and the historical background against which it is reported to have been performed see pp. –. Metre: a senarius (ABcD A/BCD ABcD); Camerarius’ emendation is essential because it corrects the unmetrical reading of the MSS perdidimus (BccD), probably caused by dittography, to the desirable cretic (perdimus, BcD) at the end of the line. It also makes more sense to read perdimus in the present tense rather than perdidimus in the past, because the speaker is alerting Roman citizens that their freedom is in great danger now, as they watch
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
the play, and the cause of the alarm is the fact that he, a knight, has been disgracefully compelled to act in a mime. porro: since the immediate context of this line is missing, we cannot be certain about the exact meaning of this adverb; the speaker may have used it to introduce an entirely new consideration in his speech (see OLD s.v. a) or to elaborate upon a point made previously (OLD s.v. b). Quirites: a solemn address directed presumably to the free Roman citizens in the audience (at least, this appears to be Macrobius’ interpretation); the name Quirites apparently goes back to the time of the constitution of the Roman nation through the blending of Romans and Sabines (Varro LL ., .; Livy ..–; Dion. Halic. .; OLD s.v. a, b), and is first attested in Ennius Ann. Skutsch (see Skutsch Ennius ). The loss of freedom of Roman citizens is thus presented here as an immense catastrophe, which gains in seriousness through the use of this formal noun. Would this line also have made sense in its immediate theatrical context as part of the play’s plot, or do we have to imagine that it was spoken by L. (playing the role of a slave) only as a ‘meta-theatrical’ comment targeting Caesar? It is ironical that this appeal to the Quirites about freedom is made by a slave-character who is neither Roman nor entitled to freedom, but we should not exclude the possibility that this fr. would also have been understood at the level of the play’s plot (see p. n. ). perdimus: see Metre (above).
( a ) Seneca De ira ..: Quid quod semper in auctores redundat timor nec quisquam metuitur ipse securus? Occurrat hoc loco tibi Laberianus ille
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versus qui medio civili bello in theatro dictus totum in se populum non aliter convertit quam si missa esset vox publici adfectus: necesse est multos timeat quem multi timent
Seneca On anger ..: What about the fact that fear always redounds upon the persons who inspire it, and that nobody who is an object of fear is himself free from fears? In relation to this matter you may come upon the famous line of L., which, when spoken in the theatre in the midst of a period of civil war, attracted the notice of the whole audience as if the mass feeling had been loudly voiced: he whom many fear must inevitably fear many
(b) Macrobius ..– Willis [NGDPMBVOLKRJHFAC]: Et paulo post [scil. Laberius] adiecit: necesse est multos timeat quem multi timent.
Quo dicto universitas populi ad solum Caesarem oculos et ora convertit, notantes impotentiam eius hac dicacitate lapidatam. Ob haec in Publilium [D P: Publium NGD MBVOLKRJHFAC] vertit favorem. Macrobius ..– Willis: And after a while he [L.] added: he whom many fear must inevitably fear many.
At the sound of these words everyone in the audience turned their eyes and faces on Caesar alone, observing that his immoderate behaviour had received a fatal blow with this caustic gibe. Because of this Caesar transferred his support to Publilius.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
C O M M E N TA RY On the theatrical context and the historical background against which this fr. was apparently performed see p. . Although the sentiment expressed in this neat line seems to go back to Solon (¾ pollo±v jober¼v àn polloÆv jobe©sqw: see Ribbeck apparatus criticus ad loc.; Till Caesar and n. ), I was unable to trace any close Latin parallels to this notion before L.’s time. On the similar apophthegm found in the collection of Publilius’ sententiae see p. with n. , and O. Friedrich, Publilii Syri Mimi Sententiae (Berlin , repr. Hildesheim ) ; if it was Publilius who composed that maxim, the scholarly consensus is that he did so after (and that he was inspired by) L. But G. Monaco (Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa () – ) argues that L.’s source for this fr. was Sallust in one of his epistles to the elderly Caesar (De re publica .. equidem ego cuncta imperia crudelia magis acerba quam diuturna arbitror, neque quemquam multis metuendum esse quin ad eum ex multis formido reccidat), and that L. subverted the friendly feelings of Sallust towards Caesar and transformed them into a political statement against Caesar. His argument is justly criticised by Giancotti (Mimo – n. ), but not for the right reasons. The problems with Monaco’s view are that the linguistic similarity between L.’s extract and the passage attributed to Sallust is not striking, and that the letters to Caesar, which Sallust is supposed to have composed between and , were most likely composed in the early imperial period. The other Latin passage to which Monaco draws attention is Cicero’s Off. .– (dated to ). In these sections Cicero argues that in securing influence it is more effective to win the affection of those whom you wish to influence than to fill them with fear, and he cites a line from an unspecified tragedy of Ennius ( Vahlen = Jocelyn) to corroborate his view: quem metuunt oderunt, quem quisque odit periisse expetit ‘him whom they fear, they hate; and him whom all men hate they would see dead’ (trans. P. G. Walsh). This line of Ennius differs from the fr. of L. in that in Ennius the focus is on the feelings of hatred which people
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have for a person they see as an object of fear, whereas in L. the sentiment is expressed from the point of view of the tyrant, who should fear those in whom he inspires fear. Nevertheless, it is very likely that Cicero in Off. .– had L.’s fr. in mind when talking about fear as an inappropriate means of gaining support, both because he refers implicitly to Caesar in his discussion (. nec vero huius tyranni solum, quem armis oppressa pertulit civitas paretque cum maxime mortuo), and because he concludes his thoughts on the matter using vocabulary which strikingly resembles L.’s fr.: etenim qui se metui volent, a quibus metuentur, eosdem metuant ipsi necesse est (.) ‘Indeed, if men wish to be feared they must inevitably fear those by whom they will be feared’ (transl. P. G. Walsh). After L.’s and Publilius’ time the motif of the tyrant’s fear was frequently exploited by Seneca the Younger in his philosophical treatises and tragedies: De clem. ..; De ira ..; Agam. ; Phoen. ; Oed. –. Metre: a senarius (aBCD A/bbCD ABcD). Macrobius ..– Willis [NGDPMBVOLKRJHFAC]: Is Publilius [NGDP: publius MBVOLKRJHFAC] natione Syrus cum puer ad patronum domini esset adductus, promeruit eum non minus salibus et ingenio quam forma. Nam forte cum ille servum suum hydropicum iacentem in area vidisset increpuissetque quid in sole faceret respondit: ‘aquam calefacit’. Ioculari deinde super cena exorta quaestione quodnam esset molestum otium, aliud alio opinante, ille ‘podagrici pedes’ dixit. Ob haec et alia manu missus et maiore cura eruditus, cum mimos componeret ingentique adsensu in Italiae oppidis agere coepisset, productus Romae per Caesaris ludos, omnes qui tunc scripta et operas suas in scaenam [codd. praeter A C: cenam A C] locaverant provocavit ut singuli secum posita in vicem materia pro tempore contenderent. Nec ullo recusante superavit omnes, in quis et Laberium. unde Caesar adridens hoc modo pronuntiavit: ‘favente tibi me victus es, Laberi, a [om. K] Syro’; statimque
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
Publilio [NGDP: Publio MBVOLKRJHFAC] palmam et Laberio anulum aureum cum quingentis sestertiis dedit. Tunc Publilius [DP: Publius NGMBVOLKRJHFAC] ad Laberium recedentem ait: ‘quicum contendisti scriptor, hunc spectator subleva’. Sed et Laberius sequenti tamen commissione mimo novo interiecit hos versus: non possunt primi esse omnes omni in tempore. summum ad gradum cum claritatis veneris, consistes aegre et citius quam ascendas cades. cecidi ego, cadet qui sequitur: laus est lubrica. primi codd. praeter J: prime J in om. O aegre codd. praeter M: agere M et NGDPMBVK: nec OLRJHF A C: ne F A citius quam ascendas NGDP: citius quam ascendis Scaliger: citius quam descendas MBVOLKRJHFAC: citius quam escendas Schneidewin: citius quam escensti Bentley: nictu citius Woelfflin: nimio citius Buecheler cades Florilegium Gallicum: decides NGDP: decidas MBVOLKRJHFAC laus codd.: lanx Froehner: fors vel sors Burmannus: lex Meyerus lubrica Keulen: publica codd. praeter B: pullica B
Macrobius ..– Willis: This Publilius was Syrian by birth; in his youth he was taken to meet the patron of his master, whose favour he won not only by his beauty but also by his witticisms and cleverness. For when the patron happened to see a slave of his, who was suffering from dropsy, lying in the courtyard, and he indignantly asked what the man was doing under the sun, Publilius replied: ‘he is heating up the water’. Then, when, during a dinner, the question of what inactivity was objectionable happened to be humorously brought to the discussion, while everybody had a different opinion on this issue, Publilius said ‘gout’. Because of these and other incidents he was given his freedom and a quite careful education; when he started composing mimes, and after he performed in them with enormous success in Italian villages, he appeared on the stage in Rome during the games sponsored by Caesar, and challenged all those who had until then invested their writing-talent and their effort on the stage to compete with him one by one and on a theme which would
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
be set alternately to suit the occasion. Everyone agreed and everyone, including L., lost. At that point Caesar smiled and pronounced the following verdict: ‘although I favour you, L., you have been beaten by a Syrian’; and with these words he awarded Publilius the palm of victory, and gave L. a gold ring along with , sestertii. Then, as L. withdrew, Publilius said to him: ‘you competed against me as playwright; support me now as spectator’. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the next contest, L. inserted the following lines into the new mime-play: Nobody can have the first place for ever. When you reach the summit of fame, you’ll scarcely stand upright and you’ll fall more quickly than you would climb. I have fallen; my successor will fall: praise is slippery.
C O M M E N TA RY On the problems which Macrobius’ account presents with regard to the speaker of these lines, and the historical background against which the fr. was apparently performed, see pp. –. The intended ‘audience’ for these lines is said to have been Publilius, but I see no cogent reason why it could not also have been Caesar. As with fr. (n. Quirites), it is difficult to say whether this fr. would have made sense only as a bitterly expressed statement on the temporary duration of glory, thus commenting on L.’s unfair treatment at the hands of Caesar and on the result of the contest between L. and Publilius, or whether it would also have been understood in its immediate theatrical context as part of the play’s plot. The sentiment expressed here is general, and Till (Caesar ) speculates that it was included in ‘einen pers¨onlichen Prolog oder Epilog’. This is far from certain. Metre: senarii. Scan line ABCD A/BCD ABcD; line ABcD A/BcD ABcD; line ABCD A/bbCD ABcD; line aabbcD A/bbCD ABcD. Meyer’s law is observed in the second foot of the second line (gradum, cD) and of the fourth (cadet, cD). The reading of the
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
Florilegium Gallicum, which was also Sanadon’s and Schraderus’ conjecture (cades) for the MSS’ decides or decidas, restores the metre and ensures that Luchs’ law is not violated at the end of the third line. On the Florilegium Gallicum see M. J. Mu˜non Jim´enez, RHT n.s. () – (she reports about cades on p. ); R. A. Kaster, Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics Version . () n. . gradum ‘a stage or position in the scale of dignity, rank, or fortune’ (OLD s.v. ; TLL .–); see Cic. Cluent. (altiorem gradum dignitatis), Livy .. (per honorum gradus), Curt. . (in illo fortunae gradu). But there may have been a pun here, since gradus was also ‘a tier (of seats in the theatre)’ (see e.g. Hor. S. ..; OLD s.v. ; TLL .–). The highest tier in the theatre would then represent the summit of fame for the playwright; the fall from that place would be quicker (citius) than the climbing a successful individual would need to do (hence the subjunctive ascendas) to get there. claritatis ‘distinction’ (of people). The noun is not attested before Cicero and L.; if it is right that fr. was composed by L. and heard in the theatre in late September during the ludi Victoriae Caesaris, then L. is the first extant author to use the word. Cicero uses it in a letter he wrote in October or September (Ad fam. .. pro tua claritate), and it is possible that he borrowed it from L. (in October Cicero wrote that he heard the poemata ‘compositions’ of L. and Publilius in the theatre – Testim. ). Claritas also occurs, in this sense, in Phil. . and Div. ., . (see TLL .–; OLD s.v. a), but both of these Ciceronian works are dated to (after the date of the event to which this fr. belongs). cades: see Metre (above). This line seems to me to resemble a passage in Cicero’s Orator (dated to , the year of the performance of this piece): sed multum interest inter hoc dicendi genus et superiora. qui in illo subtili et acuto elaboravit ut callide arguteque diceret,
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
nec quicquam altius cogitavit, hoc uno perfecto magnus orator est, et si non maximus; minimeque in lubrico versabitur et, si semel constiterit, numquam cadet (). Did L. and Cicero draw from a common source the imagery of an intellectual’s (playwright/orator) standing upright and/or falling from a slippery surface? Or is one of them indebted to the other? cecidi ego: on the meaning of cado here see n. cecidi. The speaker, who may not have been L., says that he fell from a high position. If we are to visualise that these words were spoken by an actor (not L.) during the main action of the play, then we should interpret cecidi ego in the immediate context of the story, which is now lost to us: the character who speaks (his identity is unknown) is shown to remember his past glory and to soliloquise about the change of fortune in human affairs. But if we are to view these lines as an allusion to what may have happened to L. himself (as Macrobius invites us to do), then it is possible to explain L.’s ‘fall’ not only in terms of his defeat in the contest with Publilius in (on that occasion he was no longer the most celebrated mimographer of his time because he was defeated by his opponent) but also in relation to his appearance as an actor in mime in (the text would then mean that before he was a successful playwright and a reputable citizen belonging to the equites; but in November his claim to this prestigious social class was temporarily lost). lubrica: the MS reading publica has been interpreted in two ways: as an adjective meaning ‘public, of the public’ (so Bonaria ‘la gloria non e` monopolio di nessuno’, and J. Wordsworth, Fragments and specimens of early Latin (Oxford ) , who takes this line to mean that ‘glory is no man’s own possession but the gift of the changeful popularis aura’), or as a substantive designating ‘a public woman, a whore’ (so Till Caesar , and G. Scarpat in Poesia latina in frammenti: Miscellanea filologica (Geneva ) – ). Neither of these explanations seems satisfactory. The former explanation does not make good sense: what does the phrase
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
‘the esteem belongs to the public’ mean? Has the speaker himself not admitted in line that one can reach the summus gradus claritatis (and so gain the audience’s respect)? And how does the succession of individuals who make it to the top and stay there for a while square with the fact that renown as a general concept is the property of the public? The latter explanation is not supported at all by linguistic parallels of the pre-classical or classical period. Regrettably, very little attention has been paid to Keulen’s excellent emendation lubrica ‘slippery’, which is palaeographically close to the original reading, and fits the meaning perfectly: those who reach the summit of fame can hardly stand upright; they think they have earned and grasped the praise of the audience forever; but renown is difficult to hold and slips away from their hand. This interpretation would emphasise the instability and volatility of human affairs, which are subject to a superior force, Fortuna (. Fortuna, inmoderata in bono aeque atque in malo), and would fit with both the change of fortune as a motif in comedy and mime, and the misfortune reported to have befallen L.; on lubricus qualifying the nouns fatum, sors, and spes see OLD s.v. lubricus a; TLL ..–. Priscianus . = GL ..– H [RBZDHGLKT]: Laberius [ed. : Lauerius codd.] uxorem tuam et meam novercam a populo lapidibus consectari video
‘consectari’ passive posuit, diÛkesqai [ed. : DIKESTAI RBDT: KESTAI Z: DIOKESTAI GL: DIKESTA H: DIKESTAU K: sunakolouqe±sqai ed. : metadeiÛkesqai ed. ]. et om. B . . . lapidibus | consectari . . . Stephanus: . . . tuam novercam consectari lapidibus | a populo video Bothe
Priscian . = GL ..– H:
|
et meam
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
L. has: I see your wife and my stepmother being hunted down (consectari) by people with stones.
L. used consectari in a passive sense, like diÛkesqai. C O M M E N TA RY On the general grammatical context in which this extract survives see . Priscian cites it because it contains a form of the verb consector ‘I pursue’ in a passive sense. L. is the only extant classical author who does not use consector as a deponent verb; but Varro employs the form sectari ‘to follow constantly’ as a present passive infinitive in RR .. (qui vellet se a cane sectari). In his edn of L., Ziegler (–), for no obvious reason, attributes to Alexandrea frs. and . Metre: like Hertz, I retain the order of the words as transmitted in the MSS, and scan the extant fr. as two trochaic septenarii, the second of them incomplete; scan line : BCD aBcD aBCdd AbbcD; line BCD AbbC. Bothe rearranged the words and scanned them as three senarii, two of them incomplete ( uxorem tuam | et meam novercam consectari lapidibus | a populo video ). His scansion was adopted by Ribbeck and Bonaria (but this means that the final syllable of me˘am needs to be scanned as short). Ribbeck , having transposed lapidibus after consectari, scans the fr. (like Bothe) as three senarii, two of them incomplete ( uxorem tuam et meam | novercam a populo consectari lapidibus | video ); but his suggestion violates both Meyer’s law (uxorem, BCD, instead of the desirable BcD) and Luchs’ law (uxorem tu(am) et meam gives a DaB, rather than the preferred DAB, sequence before the final cD (meam)) in the first line. novercam: on stepmothers in mime see .n. domina . . . privignum.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( – )
consectari: on consector used of people who pursue other people (not in an amatory or military context) see also Cic. Ad Att. .. Fufium clamoribus et conviciis et sibilis consectantur; Phaedrus ..– noctua obsesso cavo | trepidantem consectata est et leto dedit; TLL .–; OLD s.v. . The lack of context does not allow any plausible reconstruction of the story-line or an explanation of the reason why the speaker’s wife and his stepmother were publicly pursued. Priscianus . = GL ..–. H [RBZDHGLKT]: Fenestella: ‘frustratus igitur a spe, devictus in castra se recepit’, ‘frustratus’ mataiwqe©v. Laberius [Hertz: Lauerius R BZDHGLKT: Leuerius R ]: frustramur inridemur
Priscian . = GL ..–. H: Fenestella has: ‘therefore, deluded (frustratus) of hope, he returned subdued to the camp’; frustratus in the sense of mataiwqe©v (‘having been baffled’). L. has: we are mocked (frustramur), made fun of
C O M M E N TA RY This fr. survives because it contains the form frustramur ‘we are deceived’ (< adverb frustra + suffix -o; cf. itero ‘I repeat’ < iterum + suffix -o, and see LHS ), and it is cited in the overall context of Priscian’s discussion of verbs attested both in the active voice and as deponent forms (. = GL .. H). Priscian’s account may be usefully supplemented by Diomedes (in GL .. K), who states that many verbs, which in his day are commonly (vulgo) employed with the endings of the passive voice (passivo more declinamus), were used by early authors (apud veteres) in a different manner. As an example he gives frustro, quod
EX INCERTIS FABULIS
vulgo frustror recte dicimus, id est decipio. The extant instances of frustror as a deponent verb = ‘I delude’ or ‘I frustrate’ (OLD s.v. and ; see TLL ..– for a list of the authors (from Plautus and Ennius to Apuleius and Tertullian) who employ it in this form) outnumber by a long way the instances of frustro as an active form (Pomponius, Caesar, and possibly Plautus and Livy; for later authors see TLL .–) or of frustror as a passive verb (Sisenna, L., Sallust, Livy, Columella, Lucan, Statius, and Silius Italicus; see OLD s.v. and for authors later than Silius TLL .–). It is possible that L. decided to use frustror in a passive sense (he was among the first to do so) in order to create a comic variation of an established grammatical form: by L.’s time there were several instances of frustror as a deponent verb, but already in Pomponius and Sisenna we see an attempt by authors of different literary genres to break free from the common use of this verb. In order to emphasise the rarely attested passive sense of frustror, L. joins it in asyndeton with another passive verb (inridemur ‘we are laughed at’, ‘we are made a fool of’), which is almost synonymous with frustramur (see Pl. Capt. per urbem inridebor and OLD s.v. irrideo a and ). Priscian sees the point of this combination, and cites both verbs. Metre: uncertain. The extant words may be scanned as the beginning of a senarius (ABcD ABc) or as part of a trochaic septenarius ( ABcD ABc).
F R AG M E N T U M D U B I U M Nonius . M = . L [HLPVE]: Dextrabus, pro dexteris [HLVE : dextris PE ]. Laberius [HLPVE: Livius Bentinus]: [supplevit Bonaria: secl. Ribbeck in textu: . . . Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit.]. [suppl. Ribbeck dubit. in app. crit.] in Odissia: ‘deque [HLPE: deniq. V] manibus dextrabus’.
T H E F R AG M E N T S ( )
F R AG M E N T D O U B T F U L LY AT T R I BU T E D TO L A B E R I U S Nonius . M = . L: Dextrabus for dexteris. L.: . , in the Odyssey, has: ‘and from their right hands’.
C O M M E N TA RY The confusion between L. and Livius (Andronicus) in this passage of Nonius may have arisen from a careless scribe who misread an abbreviated form of L.’s name (e.g. ł˜uius). If this is the case (as Bentinus thought in ), Nonius’ entry on the dative/ablative plural ending form in -¯abus (dextrabus) has nothing to do with L.: this ending was an archaic suffix normally employed to clarify any confusion concerning genders in pairs such as dis – deabus, libertis – libertabus, filiis – filiabus, gnatis – gnatabus (Sommer Handbuch ; LHS ; I. Livingstone, A Linguistic Commentary on Livius Andronicus (London/New York ) – convincingly argues that the form dextr¯abus (as opposed to dext˘eris) in Livius Andronicus’ epic was required by the rules of the Saturnian metre). Alternatively, Ribbeck tentatively suggested in the apparatus criticus of his third edn that a lacuna be posited in the MSS between L.’s name and the citation deque manibus dextrabus (= Livius Andronicus Odyssey W). This gap would originally have contained a fr. of L. (Ribbeck does not explicitly say that this fr. would somehow have exemplified the word dextrabus, but this would need to have been the case, otherwise the citation of L. would not have made sense in its context in Nonius’ treatise) and the name of Livius, from whose Odissia the words deque manibus dextrabus (a ‘translation’ of Homer Od. . tän d ì ra deisntwn k ceirän) were excerpted. Nothing else may be said with certainty about this fr.
AP P ENDI X A C ON CORDANCES OF LAB ERIUS I. TITLES The titles of mimes attributed to L. in this edn are identical to the titles of L.’s mimes in the editions of Ribbeck and Bonaria with the following exceptions:
This edition
Ribbeck
Bonaria
Aulularius Cytherea vel Cytheria Fullonicae vel Fullonica Late Loquens Natalis
Aulularia Hetaera? Fullo Late Loquentes Natal
Aulularia Hetaera Fullo Late Loquens Natal
I I . F R AG M E N T S The figures under ‘Ribbeck ’ and ‘Bonaria ’ follow the numeration of lines of L. in these editions, whereas the figures under ‘This edition’ refer to the numeration of frs. in my edn. This edition
Ribbeck
Bonaria
– – – – –
– – – – –
A P P E N D I X A C O N C O R DA N C E S This edition
Ribbeck
Bonaria
– – – – a – – – – – – – – a – – – – – a
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
A P P E N D I X A C O N C O R DA N C E S This edition
Ribbeck
Bonaria
/ –b – ex inc. fab. XIII – – ex inc. fab. XXI –
– – – – – – – – , –
A P P E N D I X A C O N C O R DA N C E S This edition
Ribbeck
Bonaria
– – –
– – –
Ribbeck
This edition
Bonaria
This edition
– – – – – – – – – – – a – – – – –
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
A P P E N D I X A C O N C O R DA N C E S Ribbeck
This edition
Bonaria
This edition
– a – – – – – a / –b – –
– – – – – – – – – –
A P P E N D I X A C O N C O R DA N C E S Ribbeck
This edition
Bonaria
This edition
– – – – – ex inc. fab. XIII ex inc. fab. XXI
–
– – – – – – – –
AP P ENDI X B LAB ER IUS’ VOCABULA RY Figures in bold type indicate frs. of L.; if a fr. has more than one line, the line number is printed after the figure in bold type (e.g. efflictim .). Square brackets [ ] mark corruption. Italic numerals indicate conjecture. An asterisk ∗ indicates a reading which I do not adopt, but consider to be especially interesting. The following abbreviations are used: a. accusative m. masculine ab. ablative n. neuter adj. adjective nom. nominative adv. adverb p. plural conj. conjunction pres. present d. dative prp. preposition f. feminine subj. subjunctive g. genitive vb. verb ind. indicative voc. vocative interr. interrogative (prp.), .; . Abderites, . . abluvium, (a) . aciem, . actione, ; .; . adfero, . adolescit, .∗ adverso (m.ab.), . adulescenti, . adulescenturire, adulterionem, (c); (a) adulteritatem, (a) adussit, aediles (a.), .
. . aequum (m.), aereo (m.ab.), . aeris, aetatis, . Africa (ab.), . agimus, .; actis (m.ab.), . alescit, . alieni (n.g.), ; alienum (possibly n.p.g.), . aliqua (f.ab.), ; aliquid (a.), . altum (n.a.), ∗ alvum, ambitio, . amat, . amor, ; amorem, ; amore,
APPE N D I X B L A BERI US ’ VOCA BU L ARY amorabundam, amplexu, . .; .; .; .; . animantium (m.), (a). animi (g.), .; animum, annosa (f.nom.), annorum, .; annis (ab.), . appetonibus (d.), . arboris, . arboreas, . ardore, . arduum (adv.), . arietem, arra, arripuit, ascendas, .; . aspexi, . Attica (f.ab.), . . auctoritas, . autumno (ab.), . Balearicum (m.), .∗ Baliaricum (m.), . beluam, (a). beneficia, bibosa (f.nom.), bidenti, ∗ ; bidentis, bipedem (f.), .; . blandiloquens, . blatta (nom.), bliteam,
bona (f.ab.), (a).; ; bono (n.ab.), . botulum, cacas, . cacumen, . cecidi, ; .; cades, .; cadet, . caedes, .; caedetur, caldonia (n.a.), camellam, cano (n.ab.), . captus, . capitium (a.), . caput (nom.), ; . carperes, . catomum, catulientem (f.), caurus, .∗ . cinerescunt, (a). cippum, ; citius, . civibus (d.), (a). claritatis, . clemente (f.), . clipeum, (a).; . clunes (a.), cocio, . cocu’, coepit, . coegit, . coicior, coleos, . colubram, columnas, . colustra (voc.), concitata, concupisti, .; concupivisti, ∗ concurvasti, . conlabella,
AP P E N D I X B L A B ERI US ’ VOCA BUL ARY conquieta (n.nom.), (a). consectari, . consistes, . constituit, (a). (a).; . contumelia (nom.), coctus, . corporis, . corrumpitur, credidi, ∗ crescit, (conj.) .; ; .; .; . (prp.) . . cursus (g.), . Cynica (f.ab.), .; . deamare, decides, .∗ ; decidas, .∗ decidua (n.a.), . decorem, . deicis, . delenimenta, deliramenta, deliritas, . Democritus, (a). denegare, . dentes (a.), . depudicavit, (a) . descendiderant, .∗ ; descendidissent, detinetur, detrusti, . di, . deverticula, . dextrabus,
dictabolaria, die, . dignitatem, . dilatatum est, . dispoliavit, . diutius, doctus, dogmam, domina (nom.), . dominium, . dominus, . domum, . .; duos, .; duas, . durum (m.), .; . ebriacus, ebriolati, ∗ ebriulati, . edita (f.nom.), . . effodere, (a).; effodit, (a). effugere, . ego, .; .∗ ; (a).; .; .; mihi, .; .; me (a.), .; .; .; ; .; .; .; .; .; nostri, egressus, . elucificare, (a). elutriare, .∗ emplastrum (nom.), ∗ enecat, . eques, . . see SUM .; ; .; .; .
APPE N D I X B L A BERI US ’ VOCA BU L ARY . .∗ evulserat, eugium (a.), .; eugio (ab.), . .; ; ; .; (bis) excellentis (m.g.), . excepisse, . exitum, (a). exoleto (ab.), exortum, (a). expeditae (f.p.), extremis (m.ab.), . facile (adv.), . facere, ; ; facit, .; feci, ; facturum, famae (g.), . familias, . farmacopoles, .∗ fers, .; tulimus, fide, figura (nom.), . filium, (a). fieri, flagris (ab.), flexibilem, . florens (n.), . folia, .; foliis (ab.), .∗ fores (nom.), foriolus, . formae (g.), . Fortuna (voc.), . frangere, . fretus, (m.), frustramur, fulgentis (f.g.), . fullonicam,
genius, gentis, . generis, geras, . glis, . gloria (nom.), . gradum, . grundientem (f.), gruem, . gubernium, gurdus, . gustes, haeresi, hedera (nom.), . (a). . , , hic, .; hunc, .; .; hoc (m.), .; hac, ; hoc (n.), ; hoc (n.nom.), .; hoc (n.a.), ; . (adv.), . hietantur, hilaria (nom.), hillam, .; hircino (n.ab.), .∗ hircorum, .∗ hirto (n.ab.), homo, ; ; hominem, .; ; ; . humana (f.nom.), . Hyperionis, (a). . . ignescitur, . ille, . impetum, . (+ a.), ; .; ; ; ; (+ ab.), .; (a).; .; .; .; . (bis); .
AP P E N D I X B L A B ERI US ’ VOCA BUL ARY incipio, .; incipiunt, .∗ incorrupta (f.nom.), indigna (f.nom.), induis, . iniciendum (m.), inimici (m.g.), .∗ ; inimica (f.ab.), . iniquat, inmoderata (f.voc.), . inpatienti, ∗ inplastrum (nom.), inquit, . inridemur, instaret, integro (n.ab.), . intellexi, . ipsi (m.nom.), . , , eo, ∗ ; eam, (a).; . . iucundae (g.), . ius iurandum (nom.), iuventa (ab.), . labefecit, . labella, . (vb.) labitur, lanicutem, lanitia (ab.), . lapidibus (ab.), . lare, . largitio, . latrinum (a.), laus, .; .; laudibus (ab.), .
lavandaria, lavite, lecto (ab.), . lenis (p.a.), . (adj.) leni (f.ab.), . lentu’, . levennam (m.), libertatem, erat libitum, . libidinem, . ₍ ₎ licentium, . licentiatu, lingua (ab.), . lintea (a.), litterarum, . loco (ab.), . lubidinitate, lubrica (f.nom.) . lucri, luculentitate, . ludum, . lumbum, luminis, (a). lupam, maereo, maestas, malas, malaxavi, malis (m.d.), (a).; malo (n.ab.), . mammae (p.), . mammosa (f.nom.), manuari (voc.), manuatus est, (a) mater, . matronali (m.ab.), . . membra (nom.), (a).; membris (ab.), .
APPE N D I X B L A BERI US ’ VOCA BU L ARY mendicimonium, (a) mens, .; ; mentem, ; mente, ; . menses (a.), . ∗ meretricium (n.nom.), ∗ meretricis, . meo (m.ab.), ; .; meae (g.), (a).; meam, .; mea (f.voc.), ; meo (n.ab.), . milia (a.), . mimus, . mirabar, . miserimonium (a.), mobilitatam (a.), moechimonium, (a) mollem (m.), . monolithas, . memordi, .; memordit, . movere, . mulieris, .; muliere, multi (nom.), .; ; multos, ; multum, ∗ mulo, mustum,
negoti, . (a). . nescioquid, . [.]∗ . .∗ ; .; . . . nomine, .; nomen (a.), . .; ; ; (quater); .; . noster, .; nostro (m.d.), .; nostra (f.nom.), .; nostrae (f.gen.), .; nostra (f.ab.), .; nostri (n.g.), , nota (ab.), . novercam, . noctu, ; nocte, ∗ nubilo (m.ab.), . nudas, nugarum, nullus, .; nulla (f.nom.), . (bis); . (bis) numero (d.), ; numerum (p.g.), ; numerorum, nummum (p.g.), . . (bis)
nanum, narravi, . (a).; (a). - . ; (bis) necessitas, . necat, . nefariis (n.ab.), . negare, .
obbam, oblitus est, oculos, . omnes (m.nom.), .; omni (n.ab.), . opimus, .∗ ope, . optimus, . oratio, .
AP P E N D I X B L A B ERI US ’ VOCA BUL ARY Orcus, osculum (a.), . palma (nom.), ; palmarum, pandit, . parens, parte, pati, . patrimonio (ab.), . pauci (nom.), . pecuniae (g.), (a). pecore, . pedarii, pedicabis, . peluem, .; peluim, . percoctus, .∗ perdimus, ; perdidisti, pedem, petis, .; petit, pharmacopoles, . pharmacopolis, .∗ philosophus, (a). physicus, (a). pittacium (a.), . . planum (a.), pluor, .; . podagricus, populacia (n.a.), . popularia (a.), .∗ populo (d.), .; populo (ab.), . porrus,
portisculi (g.), possunt, .; poteram, .; potuit, .; potuerunt, .; .; posset, (a).; . praecurris, praeditae (p.), ∗ praevulserat, ∗ praeviridantibus (ab.), . premit, .; premitur, . primi (nom.), . privignum, . procax (f.), progredi, . proici, . prolubium, proluvium, .∗ properas, provincias, . pruna (ab.), . publica (f.nom.), .∗ pudorem, ; pudore, . puellitari, . pugillar, pulsus, putas, .; putavi, Pythagoream, . (adv.) (bis), .; . , , qui, .; cuius (f.), .; cui (m.), .; quem, .; . (bis); ; quo (m.), .; quo (n.), .; qui (p.), ; quae (f.), .; quod (nom.), (adv.) (bis) . quaenam, . Quirites,
APPE N D I X B L A BERI US ’ VOCA BU L ARY , (interr.) quis, .; quid (nom.), ; quid (a.), .; quo, . .; . radiis (ab.), (a). reciprocicornem, refert, . relictumst, re, (a). retineo, .; retines, revertar, . Romanus, . sanari, satisfacere, . scaenam, . scinde, ; scindere, . scire, . scrofam, sedet, . senecta (ab.), . sensibus (ab.), . sententia (nom.), sepulchri, . sequitur, .; sequere, serpens, . servos (nom.), . . sextantis (g.), . ; . ∗ ; (a). similis (m.nom.), . simium (a.), . . ; . sobrior, solis, (a). solet,
somniculosum (n.), somnus, .; somno (ab.), sonum, . splendore, (a).; splendorem, (a). statu, . staret, ∗ stirpis, . studuimus, . ’s (= es), .; est, ; .; .; .; ; .; sunt, ; esse, .; .; (a).; (a).; ; . summissa (f.nom.), . summum (m.), . suppolitoris (p.a.), . . sustineo, suum (m.), . taberna (ab.), tali (m.), . talabarriunculos, .; (bis) tantus, tempore, . . testitrahum, timent, ; timeat, timor, . togatae (g.), .; . tollet, ; tollam (subj.), . transversi (g.), . tricenis (m.ab.), .
AP P E N D I X B L A B ERI US ’ VOCA BUL ARY tu, . (bis); .; tibi, .; ; .; te (a.), .; vos (a.), ; . see FERO tunicae (g.), . tuus, ; tua (f.nom.), .; tuam, .; tua (f.ab.), . .∗ .∗ (adv.) uno (m.ab.), . .; ; .; (a).; .; .; . utitur, . . uxorem, .; uxores (a.), . veneficia, veni, .; veneris (ind.), .; venientem (m.), . verbis (ab.), .
versorum, (adv.) .∗ vestitum, . vetustas, . viam, ; viae (nom.), . video, .; .; viderat, .; videre (ind.pres.), ; videam, (a).; videret, (a).; visus, vigebam, . viri (g.), .; viro (d.), .; virum, .∗ virtutem, . vis, .; vires (a.), . vixi, .; vivendum fuit, . volo, (a).; voluit, .; voluerunt, . see TU vocis, .
I N D E X O F PA S S AG E S Accius (Warmington) Astyanax –, Aeschylus Eum. , Pers. –, fr. . Nauck, Afranius Augur –, Fratr. , Temer. –, Apuleius Apol. , Met. ., n. .–, ., Aristotle Po. b, , Athenaeus C, n., – A, n., F, n., C, n. F–A, n., B, Augustine De civ. dei ., n. ., n. Serm. ., n. Ausonius Ep. a., ., Eph. .–, Caesar B.C. ., B.G. .., Calvus (Courtney) fr. , fr. , Cassiodorus Var. .., n. Catullus ., .–, .–, .–, Cicero Ad Att. .., , .., .., .(a)., .., .., ..,
.., , n. .., .., Ad fam. .., n. .., .., , , , –, ., .., n. .., n. .., , , n., , , .., De fin. ., De har. resp. , De nat. deor. ., De off. ., ., .–, – De orat. ., ., ., , n. ., .–, –, ., , , , , .–, , –n., , , De prov. consul. ., In Vat. , Orat. , Phil. .–, n., , n. .–, ., n. Pro Arch. , , Pro Cael. , , , , n., , Pro Clu. , Pro Rab. Post. , , n., Tusc. disp. ., ., Choricius Apol. mim. –,
I N D E X O F PA S S AG E S , n. , n., n. , n. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) , , , n. ., n. ., ., ., n. ., ., n., , n., n. ., ., ., ., ., n. ., ., n. ., n. ., n., n. ., n. Demosthenes ., , n., Dio Cassius ..–, Diodorus Siculus .., n., n. .., , n., n. /.., Dionysius of Halicarnassus .., Evanthius (Wessner) exc. de com. ., n., n. ., n. Festus (Lindsay) ., n. .–, n. , , ., n. ., n. , , , .–, n.
., n. Firmicus Maternus Math. .., Frontinus Strat. .., Fronto Ad M. Caes. et invicem ..–, , , , , Ep. ad M. Caes. .., Gargilius Martialis De arb. pom. , Gellius ..–, – .., .., n. ..–, – ., .., .., – ., , , ., .., ..–, – ., ., n. ., ., – .., .., – .., – ..–, ..–, – .., .., , , ..–, – Grammatici Latini (GL) Bede (Keil) De orth. ., Charisius (Barwick) ., ., ., ., – ., ., – ., – ., – ., – ., Diomedes (Keil) ., ., , , n.
I N D E X O F PA S S AG E S Grammatici Latini (cont.) Dositheus (Keil) ..–, Priscian (Hertz) ., – ., ., Terentianus Maurus (Keil) ., n. Helvius Cinna (Courtney) fr. , fr. , fr. , Historia Augusta De vita M. Antonini ., Maximini duo ., Verus ., n., , Horace Epist...–, n. S...–, ..–, , , , , –, Isidore of Seville Orig. ., n. ., n. ., n. ., .., Jerome Ep. .., n. ., John the Lydian De Magistr. ., Juvenal ., ., .–, n., n. .–, n. .–, Lactantius Div. Inst. .., , n. Lucilius (Marx) –, , –, –, –, , n. Lucretius ., ., .–,
Macrobius Sat. .., .., .., , , , , –, .., , , –, ..–, , , , , ..–, .., –, , –, – .., .., –, .., ..–, – ..–, , , ..–, .., , .., –, .., n. .., .., , , , – Menander, Dysc. –, Nonius Marcellus (Lindsay) ., ., – ., – ., ., – ., – ., ., ., ., ., – ., – ., – ., – ., – ., ., ., – ., ., ., Novius Maccus –, Ovid F. .–, n. .–,
I N D E X O F PA S S AG E S Tr. .–, n., n., ., P.Oxy. , n., , n. , n. , n. , , n. Petronius Sat. ., ., ., ., ., ., , ., ., – ., ., ., Plautus Asin. –, , Bacch. –, , Cas. , Cist. –, Mil. –, Persa –, , –, Poen. –, Pseud. , Rud., , , –, –, n. –, Stich. –, Trin. , –, Truc. , Pliny the Elder NH ., – ., .,
., ., , Pliny the Younger Ep. ..–, n. Plutarch Mor. E, n. Sulla .–, , n. ., , n. ., , n. Pomponius (Frassinetti) Galli Transalpini –, Maccus , Porphyry on Hor. S. .., , Pseudacro on Hor. S. ..–, , Publilius Murmurco, n. Putatores, –n. sent. A, A, B, B, F, F, F, G, I, M, M, M, N, N, N, N, N, N, N, Quintilian .., .., n. .., .., ..–, .., Rhetorica ad Herennium ., , .,
I N D E X O F PA S S AG E S Seneca the Elder Contr. .., .., .., n. .., , , , –, , , Seneca the Younger Apocol. ., Consol. ad Marc. ., n. De ira .., De tranq. an. ., n. .–, n. Epist. ., ., ., n. ., n. .–, n. .–, n. ., Servius ap. Verg. Ecl. ., n. Solinus . Mommsen, n. Suetonius Aug. ., n. Calig. ., n. De gramm. , n. ., De poetis (Rostagni) p. , , n. pp. –, n. Divus Iulius ., n. ., , , , , .,
Nero ., n. , n. Vita Terenti , Tacitus Dial. , n. Terence Ad. –, Tertullian Apolog. ., n. ., – De pallio .., – Theocritus S Arg. (), n. S Arg. (), n. S ., n. Valerius Phormio, n. Valerius Maximus ..b, n. .., , n., ..ex., Varro apud Aug. De civ. dei ., , n. ., , n. LL ., ., , RR .., Velleius Paterculus .., Xenophon Agesil. ., Symp. .,
INDE X OF TOP I CS Abdera, actors in mime, C. Fundilius Doctus, n. C. Norbanus Sorix, n., n. C. Pomponius, – Cluvius Glaber, n. F. Alexander Oxeidas, n. Favor, n. Gelasius, Herneimias, L. Acilius Eutyches, n., n. Porphyry, Protogenes, , – Publilius, , n.; see also Laberius T. Claudius Philologos Theseus, n. T. Uttiedius Venerianus, n. actresses in mime, Arbuscula, n. Cytheris, , –n., Ecloga, , Eucharis, , n., n. Tertia, n. Thalassia, adverbs in -¯atim, – in -iter, aediles, number of, Albius Phileros, M., Alexandria, , Alexis, Anna Perenna, – apophthegms, –, , , , , Aristophanes, , , , Bonaria, Mario, – Bothe, Fridericus, –, , , ,
Buecheler, Franciscus, , , Caecilius Statius, Caeculus, founder of Praeneste, – Caesar, Julius, , , , , , , , , , , ; see also Laberius; political satire Caesellius Vindex, – Carilli, Maria, – Carrion, Ludovicus, , , , – Cicero attitude towards mime, distinguishes mime from comedy, – drawing on mime, –, employs Greek terms, , fond of medical terms, , mentions Laberius in his letters, – see also Laberius Claudius Pulcher, Appius, , Claudius Quadrigarius, Quintus, , Clodius Pulcher see Laberius compounds in Laberius see language of Laberius, lexicon constellations, –, , –, , Crinitus, Petrus, , Cretans, Roman perceptions of, dating Laberius’ mimes, , , , , , , , , , , –, defecation as punishment, – Democritus, , Diogenes the Cynic, – Diomedes discussing mime, –,
I N D E X O F TO P I C S hapax legomena in Laberius see language of Laberius, lexicon Hercules, Herodas, – history, Roman, Horace see under reception of Laberius hot springs, ,
dramatisation of the Roman past, , , , , – drunkenness, , , , , editions and anthologies containing Laberius, –, Epicharmus, Eupolis, exclamations ecastor, – hem, – exoletus, – fabula Atellana, , , , , , , , , , festivals Anna Perenna, – Compitalia, – Floralia, , – Parilia, Saturnalia, – figures of speech alliteration, anaphora, , , assonance, homoeteleuton, , , isosyllabism, ¾mwnum©a, paronomasia, fish, fishermen, stage-representation of, – flattery, – food, , Fortune, whims of, , , Fronto see under reception of Laberius Fruterius, Lucas, , Gauls as stage-characters, – Gellius see under reception of Laberius grammarians and commentators accuracy in citing Laberius, –, , revival of interest in Laberius,
imagery in mimes of Laberius, , agricultural, , , , , , , , animal, –, , , , bathing, bird, , biting, , , chariot-racing, climbing, cooking, – cure and sickness, –, , , , cutting, destiny and death, – falling, , – funeral, , , insanity, – insects, mock-battle, mock-legal, , sagging breasts, sleep, violence, intestinum ieiunum, invective, , , , , , , Iunius, Hadrianus, , , , jokes introduced by utrum, par prosdok©an, , pattern of, scatological, , Laberius, Decimus competes with Publilius in public, –
I N D E X O F TO P I C S continues Plautine tradition, dates of birth and death, – distribution of the fragments, exchanges witticisms with Cicero, – exploitation of uncouth words, , fondness for neologisms, – invited by Caesar to act on stage, – place of birth, family and status, – refuses to write for Clodius Pulcher, – resembles Lucilius, , , see also Cicero, imagery, language of Laberius, prosody, reception, titles of mimes Laevius, language of Laberius influenced by the neoteric poets, lexicon, – morphology, – phonology, syntax, – literary parody in mime, in Laberius, Mamurra, marriage-bed, – Menander, mime contrast with other types of comedy, – dancing in, n. debt to Greek New Comedy, , , , , ; see also titles of mimes definition of, – development of, , – distinction between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’, –, features of, – improvisation in,
‘inferiority’ of, –, material culture and, –, – obscenity in, origins of, – oratory and, – performances of, , – plot-elements in, – theatrical guilds of, see also actresses; Cicero; Diomedes; festivals, Floralia; literary parody; mythological satire; philosophical theories; political satire; women mimographers, Roman Aemilianus Severianus, n. Catullus, –n., Cn. Matius, –, Hostilius, n. L. Crassicius, n. Lentulus, n. Marullus, –n. Nucula, n. Philistion, , n. Valerius, n., Vergilius Romanus, – see also actors in mime, Publilius Moors and their speech, – Mosellanus, Petrus, MSS tradition alienum = alienorum, confusion between: -o and -a, : Anna and Annales, –; -ario and -aria, ; bεl»nh and blanov, ; cancer and carcer, ; centonarius and centenarius, ; -icis and -iciis, ; -is and -es, ; -l and -s, ; laberius and livius, ; Laberius and Plautus, ; laverius and valerius, ; licentia and ∗licentius/licentium, ; optimus and opimus, ; prolubium and proluvies/proluvium, ; -ri- and -ni-, ; -ri- and -n-, ; -t and -c, ,
I N D E X O F TO P I C S MSS tradition (cont.) dittography, , F in MS Florent. Laurent. XLVIII. I, –, , , , , , haplography, , , numerum = numerorum, of Aulus Gellius, of Macrobius Sat., n. of Nonius Marcellus, – omission of h in Nonius, mythological satire in mime, n. in Laberius, –, , , , – neque + sg. future tense, Nigidius Figulus, Publius, , nouns change of gender and/or declension see language of Laberius, morphology ending in: -ium, : -mentum, ; -o -onis, , ; -tor, –; see also suffixes occupations, low and disreputable, , , , , , , , , pantomime, Petronius, perfect tense irregular see language of Laberius, morphology stem reduplicated see language of Laberius, phonology ‘Phaedra-motif’, – Philemon, philosophical theories in Laberius, n., , Plautus, , , , , , , , political satire in mime, n.
in Laberius, , , , , prefix e(x)-, – prosody alphabetic notation, – a˘ m¯at, bacchiac tetrameters, caesura, lack of, cretic sequences, elisions in Laberius, iambic septenarius, seventh foot, , , iambic shortening, , , , , , Luchs’ law, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , metres employed by Laberius, –, monosyllables at line-end, Meyer’s law, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ‘raving’ trochaic octonarii, synizisis, , weak final s, see also scansion; versification of Laberius Ptolemy XII Auletes, Pythagoras, – Pythagoreanism, reception of Laberius in Coleridge, Samuel, n. Cunningham, James V., n. Davies, John, Fronto, , Gellius, –, –, Goldsmith, Oliver, n. Healey, John, Horace, – Nonius,
I N D E X O F TO P I C S Caeculi, – Cancer, – Carcer, – Catularius, – Centonarius, – Colax, – Colorator, – Compitalia, – Cophinus, – Cretensis, – Cytherea or Cytheria, – Ephebus, – Fullo, – Fullonicae or Fullonica, Galli, – Gemelli, – Imago, – Lacus Avernus, – Late Loquens, – Natalis, Necyomantia, – Nuptiae, Parilicii, – Paupertas, – Piscator see fishermen Restio, – Salinator, Saturnalia, – Scylax see under Catularius Sedigitus, – Sorores, – Staminariae, – Stricturae, – Taurus, Tusca, – Virgo, as adaptations of Greek plays, , , , categories of, – Greek influence in, –
Rousseau, Sulpicius Apollinaris, Ribbeck, Otto, –, , Sallust’s epistles to Caesar, Scaevola, Mucius, Scaliger, Josephus, , –, , scansion of cuius as monosyllabic, of diutius, of mihi as monosyllabic, of peluis as trisyllabic, , see also prosody; versification of Laberius Scribonius Largus, , seers, – senators, of lower standing, – sexuality, Roman, sodomy as punishment, Sophron, –, Stephanus, Henricus, –, , , stepmothers, , suffixes in -atus, -arius, -bundus, -enna, -itas, -monium, -olus, -osus, see language of Laberius, morphology in -acius, see also nouns Sulla, – Sulpicius Apollinaris, –; see under reception of Laberius susque deque ferre, – Theocritus, titles of mimes attributed to Laberius, – Alexandrea, – Anna Peranna, – Aquae Caldae, Aries, – Augur see seers Aulularius, – Belonistria, – Cacomnemon, –
ut not accompanying inquit, – Valerius Antias, verbs
I N D E X O F TO P I C S verbs (cont.) deponent having passive meaning see language of Laberius, morphology deponent instead of active forms see language of Laberius, morphology ending in: -esco, , ; -ficare, ; -˘ul¯are, –; -urire, – future infinitive not in concord see language of Laberius, syntax onomatopoeic, see also perfect tense versification of Laberius compared with Plautus and Terence , – compared with other writers of senarii, – in the ‘prologue’, –, see also prosody; scansion Vindolanda writing tablets, Virgil and mime, n., –, ,
Etruscan, reputation of, go-between, mater familias, – matrona, – meretrix, , portrayal in mime, –, , , , – wool, Attic, words in Laberius associated with high literature, , , , , , considered vulgar by Gellius see language of Laberius, lexicon indicating ethnic origin, , of Greek origin, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , with special meaning see language of Laberius, lexicon
women associated with place-names, , ,
Ziegler, Werner, , ,
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