03. Incontri triestini di filologia classica (2003-2004)

Coronatus was a versifier and grammarian in the Vandalic Age, friend and favourite of Luxorius. His Virgilian thema begins from Aen. III 315 (the encounter with Andromache). Aeneas’ tale, in Coronatus’ reworking of the Virgilian passage, refers directly or indirectly to others sections of the context of the Aeneid (and more generally of the Virgilian context), outside the episode of Aeneas’ encounter and exchange with Andromache. The amplificatio includes recollections (also from outside the Aeneid) of the misadventures of Aeneas in exile, and of the shipwreck which will culminate with the women who were embarked on the Trojan fleet rescuing the crew. Through the examination of some textual aspects, this paper will demonstrate that the poem, edited as consisting of two distinct parts by both Riese and Shackleton Bailey, is in fact joined in an organically structured unity, even if its content differs fundamentally from the Virgilian core from which it is began.

The chronology of Maximianus is still an unsolved problem, even though in his works there are precise references to autobiographical events. On the basis of the suggested connection between the main corpus and the so-called Appendix Maximiani it has been proposed to identify the poet with the senator Maximinus, who was invested with high diplomatic responsibilities under Justinian and was praetorian prefect of Italy between 540 and 543. Investigation is called for with regard to the possible parallels with Arator, a contemporary of Maximianus whose career as civil functionary developed at the same time; and also with Parthenius from Arles, who appears to have lived slightly earlier.

A scarcely investigated fragment testifying to the “fortune” of the character of Dido is the integral reuse of Aen. IV 415 in Auson. epigr. 75 Green. The line quoted from Virgil, ne quid inexpertum frustra moritura relinquat, that in Aeneid occurs after Dido has failed to prevent Aeneas from departing, and crucially marks the queen’s resolution to kill herself, in Ausonius closes, like an aprosdoketon, the didascalia of a pornographic tableau, in which Crispa is engaged with four partners at the same time. Behind Ausonius’ mulier impudica we can glimpse the Carthaginian queen. This procedure is backed by the allegorical reading, practiced at least from the 5th century, which interprets Dido as the personification of libido (hence Dante will set her up in the second round of his Inferno). Ausonius’ epigram, then, can be read as a sneer to the commonplace that makes Dido an exemplum of feminine virtue - as the woman who ascended onto the pyre in order to escape the marriage with the Gaetulian king and to remain faithful to her late husband, Sichaeus - and, according to the Christian standard view, a paradigm of mulier uniuira. Ausonius thus stresses to the utmost that feature of the Virgilian Dido which was most popular amongst the Romans, or at any rate amongst those of Late Antiquity, namely her sensuality.

In his Textkritik (1927) Maas uttered a strongly severe assessment of the philological activity in Byzantium in the IXth-XVth centuries: a ‘real’ science of the classical Greek literature beside the mere work of transcription and collection of previous works did not exist at all. This systematic depreciation of Byzantine philology was appreciated by Pasquali, who translated and inserted it in his Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1953, at a time when the same Maas was likely to have changed his mind), and it kept on influencing generations of scholars. For example, Bruce Braswell, in some recent articles, has denied that philologists like Isaac Tzetzes and Eustathius of Thessalonica could understand the ‘responsive’ metrical structure, dyadic and triadic, of the Pindaric odes they read and commented on. On the contrary, a careful re-examination of the exegetic works of these two philologists shows beyond any doubt that both were able to understand the metrical responsio in Pindar’ strophic structure.

Book 2 of Horace’s Sermones, and most specifically Sat. 2, has been particularly neglected by scholars. While the Satires of Book 1 have a mostly subjective, discursive or narrative character, those of Book 2 are dialogic and diatribic. Sat. 2 proves to be more than a collection of the current diatribic arguments; indeed, Horace here states his intellectual and emotional solidarity to the world and to the ethical virtues of the peasant Ofellus, who speaks with the dignity of a hero – not an epic hero, but an everyday hero.

Euripides’ Medea is the earliest preserved source which depicts Medea fleeing from Corinth on the chariot sent to her by the Sun. In post-Euripidean texts, the chariot is not the Sun’s traditional quadriga pulled by horses or oxen, but these are replaced by dragons. From this moment on, the “eccentric” element represented by the dragons becomes regular in the mythographical and literary tradition (from theatre to epic), both Greek and Latin. To the literary evidence were added the iconographical monuments that, from 400 B.C., represented the escape on the chariot pulled by dragons. This paper argues that the model for the vase-painters was a Medea tragedy composed by another poet. It is notable that a dragon is present from the beginning of Medea’s story, namely, the dragon who guards the Golden Fleece, and whom the Colchian princess overcomes thanks to her knowledge of poisonous herbs, magic spells and sleep charms. The dragon-motif, closely connected with the magic element, joins together the two extremities of the myth and character of Medea: Medea-the-princess, the young enchantress who is able to stop the course of the stars and to bewitch the dragon guardian of the Golden Fleece, and Medea-the-woman, the victim of a betrayal who seeks vengeance, the infanticide mother who flees on the magic chariot of the Sun pulled by winged dragons.

Numerous epigrams referred to the rose are handed down either within the so-called Anthologia Latina or by other means, such as in Claudian and Ausonius. The epigram from Aenigmata Symposii, in the Anthologia Latina, differs from these in the way it reemploys images and previous texts. The ainigma should be read at two levels of meaning: the first is the literal description of the flower, and the second is the image of the virgo. After the analysis of the various literary sources present, as it were, in the watermark of the ainigma, this paper focuses on the references to the symbolic value of the flower in Christian culture, that is, the rose as emblem of martyrdom. This link to martyrdom emerges also in another aenigma by Symposius, about a hedgehog: just as the rose can recall the passion of Agnes, the hedgehog is the image of Saint Sebastian. The two examples, even if they cannot qualify the attitude of the author towards the Christian texts, testify to a particular compositional awareness and to Simposius’ vast knowledge of Christian culture, especially of the hagiographic genre.

In the frame of Greek lyric poetry the theme of the “most beautiful thing” is recurrent: according to some authors it is symbolized by warlike Bravery (Tyrtaeus), for others by Lovers (Sappho), by Truth (Mimnermus), by Excellence in Olympic Games (Pindar) or by some more other goods. Among the latter Wealth is differently mentioned, as it changes its characteristics according to the evolution of social and political order of the polis: starting from the absolute values of epic-heroic world, it comes to be considered an ambiguous good or even a danger (hoarded wealth is likely to bring about looseness of morals).

On the face of it Palladas (second half of IVth century B.C.), known as the iratus grammaticus of Alexandria, exhibits in his poetry a school lexicon strongly characterized by the presence of classical authors; his dialogue with the tradition is carried out through the recollection of ancient texts, either quoted or recontextualized. But the major auctores he quotes (Homer, Pindar, Plato, Callimachus, Epicurus and Anacreon) are liable to undergo a sort of ‘overturning’: under the influence of the new Jewish-Christian religious and philosophical frame, their quotations display a constant difficulty of adapting the ancient to the new, in an attempt bound to failure. Contemporary life forces the poet to resort to those same elements he would wish to get rid of: daily, biographical, private matters.

Inside Homeric poems different temporal aspects interact: Argus the dog is witness of the journey from Ithaca to Troy and back to Ithaca; Nestor, a man of the past and a bearer of a warlike memory, represents pre-Iliadic world; Odysseus coming back to Ithaca symbolizes the return to the past, a sort of restoration. But it is not a “new” time; on the contrary, the Iliadic world, as a result of cultural elaboration, follows a “norm”: the Odyssiac world of “before” and “after” is crossed by the Iliadic world that unintentionally perturbs it and casts it into question. Iliadic epic poetry tells us who we should mean to be, while Nestor, witness of a passing Age, and the epic of Odyssey, that is the continuation of that Age, tells us who we are.

Saint Jerome, a highly industrious polygraph, considerably neglected the stylistic and rythmic aspects of his exegetical, polemical, homiletical and chronographic prose; his epistolary, however, is in this sense a very notable exception. The ep. 60, written to Heliodorus in 396 marks a different and specific stylistic choice. Scourfield, in his recent edition, comes to the conclusion that “his letter of consolation to Heliodorus is testimony to how an emergent culture can absorb and assimilate the history and literature of the culture it is supplanting”. From this affirmation the textual analysis carried out in this paper takes its cue, recovering its diverse sources, both pagan and Christian. Indeed, in this epistle we find a combination of pagan laudatio funebris and reminiscences from the Scriptures, as well as from Virgil, the Ciceronian consolatio ad se ipsum (the latter openly declared by Jerome), and from St Paul’s meditatio mortis and cotidie morior (probably following in the footsteps of Ambrose’s de excessu Satyri). The pagan literary loci quoted by Saint Jerome are almost exclusively of pre-Christian authors; thus, it is as if the watershed marked by the Resurrection of Christ was felt to make impossible the fruition of the non-Christian literature composed in an Age illuminated by the Christan message: hence the only pagan texts which the author admits, as it were, into his own text are those written entirely ante Christum natum.

On the occasion of Ferrero’s death Gigante pronounced a speech, now reprinted under the title The duty of the Master, in which he tries to represent the spirit which animates and characterizes his humanistic tradition: “Memory” means to voice the past, to include it in our thoughts and in our sensitivity. No civilization could survive without forgetting and remembering in turn. In our civilization the humanistic, historical, philosophical, literary studies carry on this function. It must be remembered now his militant philohellenism, devoted to a deep understanding of all its phases, from ancient Rome to contemporary poets, practised in his lectures, in his translations, in the attentive outline of important figure of scholars, and which he lavished on the school, on scientific societies, on centres of research, on cultural institutions.

Gigante was a philologist and a historian of ancient Philosophy at the same time: we owe him the approach, tools and method from which nowadays still the Italian scholars of ancient philosophy can take profit. Gigante adopted, ante litteram, a scientific style provided of absolute rigour and effectiveness and of disconcerting actuality: a solid, careful and intelligent philological basis; an unrelenting curiosity and hermeneutic ductility, consciousness of a basically historical perspective, concern in teamwork and the development of young researchers. The interests of Marcello Gigante in the field of ancient philosophy are very broad, and can be approximately summarized in four directions: the figure of Diogenes Laërtius, the activity connected with the edition of the papyri from Herculaneum and the interest for the Epicureanism and the intertwined philosophical schools, and finally the planning and the editorship of the collection bearing the title Plato’s school.

On the first of January 456 Sidonius declaimed his panegyric for the consulate of Flavius Eparchius Avitus. The panegyric has the double purpose of presenting the new emperor to the Roman senators and of lending him credibility, in spite of the fact he was a provincial and already far advanced in age. The text which Sidonius re-employs most largely in his panegyric is the first part of Claudian’s Bellum Gildonicum, as is especially evident in the presentation of the new emperor and the rejuvenation of Rome, which in Claudian is the work of Jupiter, while in Sidonius it is the work of Avitus himself. Sidonius reminds his audience that the senate had requested ‘another Trajan’, who in the Life of Tacitus was remembered as senex, and thus constituted an optimal parallel for the sixty-year old Avitus (the historiographical tradition that remembered this “legend” is pro-senatorial, and of course the senators were the ones who needed persuading about Avitus’ role).

Even for so authoritative figure as Donatus, the only information we have is the date of his floruit, around 350 B.C. An attempt to fill in this gap, and hence also to desecrate the sacral figure of Donatus, was carried out by an unknown figure who, many centuries later, wrote a Vita domini Donati grammatici, a text which modern scholars neglected and minimized as did their forebears. The anonymous author may have been a teacher or someone who for reasons linked to his profession was deeply familiar with the practice of ars grammatica – as suggested by the fact that he uses out-of-date words that could only be known through glossaries or manuals - and could be dated to between the 7th and 9th century, in the North of France. Furthermore, the Vita Donati is closely linked to the Vita Vergilii known as the Suetoniana-Donatiana, and it employs many of its biographical τόποι, which this paper will detail.

Talentum is the transliteration of the Greek τάλαντον; the term moves from the meaning of “scale pan” or “scales” in the Iliad, to “quantity”, “weight” in Odyssey, to the generic meaning “monetary unit”. In Latin it is attested with the meaning of money. The term takes on a new meaning the parable of the talents in St Mark’s Gospel: the patristic exegesis understood these ‘talents’ as “capabilities”, “accomplishments”, with a similar meaning to the modern meaning of ‘talents’. In the first decades of 5th century, in Martianus Capella’s de nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii the term appears ([Pedia] utpote talentorum conscia), with a meaning which once again differs from the traditional monetary meaning. The translation of the term in this passage is problematic. It cannot be overlooked that at the same time as Martianus was writing, New Testament exegesis of the parable was flourishing. In this paper it will be shown that the author is intentionally referring to the contemporary debate about the parable, in particular to Saint Jerome’s work, also by means of the mention of the tale of Croesus and Darius, which is repeatedly and exclusively employed by Jerome. In the passage from Martianus, talentum is attested for the first time with Jerome’s metaphorical meaning, and the text of de nuptiis, studied reconsidering the Christian interpretation of the word talentum, reveals finally its complete sense.

Latin has four words meaning “wood”: lucus, nemus, saltus and silva. These words are more or less synonymic, and none of them shows a truly distinctive connotation when compared to the others. The association of the wood with polar entities such as locus amoenus – locus horridus, sacred – profane, work – leisure is the starting point for the understanding of the amphibology, which is conclusively clarified by the Virgilian use of the words meaning “wood”. Before Vergil, lucus referred to the sacred wood, whereas silua referred to the non-sacred wood, with its prodigious nature or even its mere antiquity. After Virgil, this basic opposition fades away; rhetoric and style become the criteria governing the selection and grouping of the words meaning “wood”. This paper suggests historical, anthropological and literary reasons for the evolution of the “wood”, emphasizing the increasing ambiguity character of the concept.

Sidonius Apollinaris concludes with these verses the ode contained in the last epistle of his collection. This letter is commonly considered his “political and literary will”, a sort of final balance of his activity as author of poetry and epistolary prose. Sidonius abandons poetry because it is less suitable to his rank of bishop, in favour of a higher genre, literary prose, which regulates the epistolary genre; he thus makes a choice which is diametrically opposed to that avowed by the classical recusatio. As a first approach to this epistle, this paper will carry out a close reading of Sidonius’ text and in parallel with Horace’s last ode.