06. Incontri triestini di filologia classica (2006-2007)

The project of Alexander was to unite the world under the law of Greek arete presented as political virtue. Alexandria became instead the starting point of a symbolic system globalizing deeply different, based on the obedience to a law that drew its authority not from human nous and material physis, but from the 'word' writed by an extra-human Being without rivals, the one and only God.

Fino ad oggi testo ed esegesi di AP IX 528 sono rimasti quelli elaborati da Reiske e Jacobs con i problemi da loro sollevati: a) sorte della statuaria pagana nel periodo cruciale della cosiddetta Christianisierung dell’Impero romano, vista in relazione ai monumenti e ai fenomeni connessi di iconoclasmo antipagano: una verifica di tutte le fonti note mostra che il loro destino non fu univoco e quando il loro ‘riuso’ passò attraverso la fusione, nessuno dice che furono trasformate in monete di bronzo o rame mentre si parla dell’utilizzazione di tale metallo per produrre oggetti utili di uso comune; b) tradizione dell’Antologia Palatina, per poter valutare il lemma di P, che dà un’insostenibile interpretazione di ἐνθάδε = εἰς τὸν οἶκον Μαρίνης; c) la monetazione bronzea nel IV secolo e la denominazione dei suoi divisionali, tra cui dovrebbe figurare φόλλις: in realtà il termine significa, come si legge nel LSJ, “bellows”, cioè “mantice”, ed è quindi un latinismo, non l’unico, di Pallada.

The translation into Friulian is a conspicuous activity, but not uniform, and even scattered in time and space, with extra episodes for the quality of writing, with significant achievements for the ideological underlying and the role assigned to language. Review and analysis of examples of translation in Friulian language of passages taken from Greek and Latin classics: the prose of Giovan Battista Donato (1534-1604), Quanti saluti che fa un i e tre o, twisted to Latine maximum translated in Friulian; Giovan Giuseppe Bosizio (1660-1743) translates Georgics and Aeneid; V.G.Blanch, alias Luigi Rodaro (1859-1932), offers translations from Latin (from Tibullus, Horace, and Ovid) in Friulian language, Pierpaolo Pasolini: for him, the Friulan is a ‘virtual language' and the antithesis of language and dialect suddenly finds its foundation in literary consciousness. In this context the role of translations is of paramount value and interest: it is demonstration of virtuosity, sometimes a provocative one, with superb assimilations, as shown by the Pasolini’s essay of translation from Sappho. Finally Alessandro Carrozzo with Lirics grêcs and Pierluigi Visintin with Batracomiomachie and Flabis di Esopo, in addition to several satires of Horace: both point to a total linguistic self-sufficiency, with the necessary acquisitions (borrowings and neologisms) to uncovered areas.

Ten out of Utinenses Graeci, half humanistic codes, with Aristotelian texts or comments, the other half Byzantine (dating from the tenth to fourteenth centuries) with patristic or ascetic content, back to a single book collection of the first '500, that of illustrious Venetian cardinal and patriarch of Aquileia Domenico Grimani, perhaps the largest library of the Europe in that age: of these, at least eight (Utinn. 254, 255, 256II, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263) were already associated in the vast library of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who after his death it was purchased in 1498 by Grimani. It is possible that the three Aristotelian codes (264, 265, 266) – in Florence with Pico, in Rome with Grimani, in Venice at San Giovanni di Castello, then at Antonio Capello, finally, with the patriarch Dolfin, in Udin, in the public library inaugurated in 1711 - were united from the humanistic origin, at one of the protagonists of the cultural hand over between Byzantium and modern Europe: Johannes Argiropulos.

From the multifaceted hero of the myth to the poikilia of comic hero: quality and nature of his erga with particular reference to the action of Trigeus in the Peace of Aristophanes. The ambiguity appears to be the dominant stretch that brings together all the different qualities of the comic hero; this joins the fact that he is usually an individual marked by a marginality, with many positive virtues, but also negative, he distinguishes himself by its extraordinary natural exuberance and he is the only architect of his erga with which it reaches the kleos.

According to Alison Brown, Cosimo de’ Medici was praised as a generous patron and an 'Augustan' governor by poets, starting from Marsuppini and Landino. From the familiarity with Cosimo shown in 1426 by Antonio Panormita in his Hermaphroditus to the respectful excess of the encomium in Xandria by Cristoforo Landino, in a few years, from the allusive quotation of Cicero and from the non-mentionable Augustus to the honorable mention of Julius Caesar: evolution of the encomium to Cosimo.

Quasi sempre le ‘citazioni’ di auctoritates e i repentini innalzamenti di stile nelle epigrafi metriche tardoantiche erano concepiti in vista di una precisa opzione comunicativa. Dunque, una volta accertata la caratura letteraria di un sintagma o di un intero verso, quel che più conta è cercare di verificarne la percezione presso i destinatari, il che equivale a interrogarsi sul repertorio di convenzioni condiviso da committenti e destinatari. Con l’aiuto di alcuni esempi si dimostra come la παιδεία tradizionale è innanzitutto un segno distintivo, uno status symbol degli esponenti delle classi elevate dell’impero, ma questa funzione ‘rappresentativa’ della cultura non appartiene solo alla classe politica e ai notabili cittadini. A livello privato, le famiglie che aspiravano ad elevarsi nella scala sociale e a veder riconosciuta la loro condizione, mostrano un uso del tutto analogo della cultura classica. Essa diviene un contrassegno prestigioso anche in epigrammi che elogiano professioni ‘tecniche’, fino a divenire l’aspetto prevalente in questo tipo di composizioni.

Cicero’s habit of citing phrases and poetically derived concepts justifies the critic in reading Cicero’s texts with special attention to reminiscences, reuses and paraphrastic re-elaborations of loci known from other sources, and even invites him to suspect and detect textual presences for which the tradition gives us no other evidence. This paper proposes the identification and a brief assessment of two Ciceronian passages variously alluding to the texts of two archaic poets. These references have gone unnoticed so far: Enn. ann. 234 ff. V.2 (= 268ff. Sk.) and Cic. Att. 1.18; Cic. Cael. 37 and Com. inc. inc. 51 ff. R.3, where the author is, presumably, Cecilius Statius.

By analyzing the celebrative epigram De Cynthio poeta and the Cynthii Cenetensis poetae Epitaphium, the essay demonstrates the good fortune and the high reputation enjoyed by the humanist Marco Antonio Amalteo amongst the Venetian-Friulian scholars of the time, with his knowledge of the authors not limited to the ancient canon of the classics, but extended to authors whose texts were still unprinted.

In the third satire of Juvenal, Umbricius, after a long tirade against the Greeks, decides to flee Rome, now invaded by Greek immigrates. Nevertheless, strangely enough, he wants to settle in Cumae, the most ancient Greek colony in Italy. But Umbricius does not reject Greek culture, he just does not feel at ease in the newly invaded city. Hence his voluntary exile in a Greek island, now uacua: it was located next to Aquinum, the birthplace of Juvenal, a bastion of Romanitas and will reunite, on the one hand, a Greece still not polluted by businessmen emigrated to Rome, and, on the other, a Rome which is still faithful to its traditions and its profound identity.

Among the Formulae spiritalis intelligentiae of Eucherio from Lyon and the Aenigmata Symposii, a collection of epigrams of at least half a century later, belonging to the so-called Anthologia Latina, there are significant coincidences in the series of images; moreover, both texts have in common a tendency towards iteration of themes whose inner organization is catalogue-like; some allegorical interpretations are shared too.

In catalogic poetry and more specifically in genealogical poetry, the extensive learned content takes a form which, by means of its very organization, is a guarantee of truth: it consists of an appropriate limitation and disposition of the internal parts of the work, but also requires that the content be framed as appropriate into the organic culture of its community. This means placing the catalogic complex from the outside into a temporal order, whose dimension and internal articulation the catalogue itself will constitute and determine. The Catalogue of Heroines is part of a plan which aims at a full integration of opposites: male-female, ancient heroes-ancient heroines; time of death -time of life; form of genealogical catalogue - form of epic mimesis. Because of its fluidity, the catalogue is open to reworkings: in a series of texts which derive from Homer and which will be considered in this paper - the great fresco by Polignotus; book VI of the Aeneid; the V canto of Dante’s Inferno, François Villon’s ballad Des dames du temps jadis - the catalogue of heroines remains a necessary tool for the representation of the Underworld, while the technique of combination of the codes - catalogic and narrative - evolves by increasingly concentrating on the sapiential importance of the catalogue while limiting its formal autonomy.

In the margins of the famous and sumptuously illustrated codex Parisinus Latinus 5690 (which contains, in addition to Titus Livius, Dictys of Crete and Florus), both Landolfo Colonna and later Francesco Petrarca left, as it were, their trace. Petrarca, and partly Landolfo, used the margins of the Parisian codex to comment upon the text as they read it: their remarks range from thoughts and reactions which establish a comparison between antiquity and their own time, and set up a dialogue with the ancient author, to notes taken in view of composing their own historiographical works. Landolfo devoted himself to filling the margins of the first Livian pages of his precious manuscript by copying extensive excerpts from Nicola Trevet’s commentary, in particular with passages concerning the foundation legend, ancient law and the ancient magistracies.

In the third and fourth centuries AD in Egypt belief in the old local religion and production of papyri in Egyptian language continued as a form of religious resistance: in this historical and cultural frame, the tradition of funerary papyri of the Book of the Dead, fashionable since the second half of the second millennium BC., continues to spread both in hieroglyphic writing and in its cursive variants (hieratic and demotic). On the ground of some funerary papyri connected with the tradition of the Book of the Dead and its developments it can be surmised that for the funerary culture of Greek-roman Egypt one should not speak only of syncretism, but also of persistence of the local culture. This phenomenon turns out to be productive and not only reproductive, in the sense that within the corpus of the textual tradition of earlier ages new elements derived from the specific religiosity of that precise historical context are accepted and worked out.

Through an accurate analysis, this paper outlines the relationship between, on the one hand, Dal greco di Simonide (XL) and Dallo stesso (XLI), two translations from Simonides which became part of the first edition of the Canti (1835), and, on the other, some further translations which originally formed a collection together with the two mentioned before. In an Indice delle proprie opere, Leopardi refers to this small collection by the title Volgarizzamenti di alcuni versi morali dal Greco. This study comes to demonstrate how the exercise of translation from ancient poetry prepares, more or less consciously, to original poetry, of which Leopardi conceives towards the end of these experiences.

At Georgics IV, 116-148 Virgil presents his personal memory of a natural edenic corner of happiness, protected and cared for by a lonely old man, the 'old man from Coryx'. Some aspects of the meeting between Virgil and the farmer remain unexpressed. This shadowy area of the narrative is explored by Pascoli in his poem Senex Corycius, where he reconstructs, with competence and familiarity, the contours of the episode.

Studies of the Latin poems of Petrarch which are not limited to philological and biographical aspects are still surprisingly rare, especially regarding texts such as the Metric epistles, which are afflicted by an unfortunate combination of unavailability of copies, philological obsessiveness and lack of serious criticism. From a brief excursus on the Epistles it becomes clear that Petrarch’s poetic space is first of all a mental space, the confluence of biographical sensitivity and historical memory, and that even when it is associated to experience, the content is dictated not by experience but by the cultural perspective, decidedly humanistic. When he writes in Latin verses, Petrarch feels he is sharing in the uninterrupted flow of writing, immersed in the vast intertext which stretches from Virgil to himself and which makes each verse into a place of textual dialogue. For this reason, the space of the Epistles is a European space only on the biographical plane, within the domain of contemporaneity. But as mythological space the space of the Epistles is mainly Italy, both as a lost homeland and as the seat of literature and the arts, especially in their historical dimension.

Francesco Robortello from Udine is unanimously considered one of the most culturally accomplished Friulian humanists. The main focus of this paper is the structural analysis and the search for the models of a short composition in hexameters written on the occasion of the death of the noble Niccolò Della Torre, Francisci Robortelli Vtinensis Sontius, siue de morte clarissimi uiri Nicolai Turriani, which occupies the first place in the miscellaneous collection of 42 poems in Latin and 13 in vernacular with the title Carmina uaria tum latina tum hetrusca Patauii conscripta et edita a diuersis auctoribus… in obitum clariss. uiri Nicolai a Turri. The paper also illustrates the cultural climate which led Robortello to write a poem on the occasion of the death of Count and Baron Della Torre.