AL914 (...again...)

[falmouth]

Acer Amor deus est: foetas domat ille leaenas.
excuset facinus vindice Scylla deo.
At, pius aeternam servet ni Juppiter Urbem,
scilicet occiderat virginis illa dolo. (AL 914.29-32)

Leofranc, you mentioned that "cantusque sciens" (AL 914.15) - the
short e before "sc" was backward looking? Is "vindice Scylla" another
example of the same thing? Which poets would have admitted such?

(I've printed verses 31-2 as well since it seems to me that some care
has gone into these lines - "vindice _Scylla_"... "_scili_cet" ...
"virgini _s illa_" - whether one approves of the effect or not).

[au...@gellius.demon.co.uk]

Short final vowel plus what the Italians call impure s was the Latin norm down to Lucretius even when a final s has to be suppressed (pendentibus structis)at the end of the verse. But Catullus prefers to lengthen the syllable in accordance with Greek practice (allowing the Homerizing exception unda Scamandri); the Augustans and their Silver successors avoid the collocation altogether. Medieval and Renaissance poets, however, revived the older practice of allowing it as a short syllable, a practice defended even in the early ninetenth century.

[falmouth]

Thanks, that is enormously helpful (if wholly frustrating..., in that
it sounds as if it's consistent with composition either in 39/38BC or
in the 15th century AD!). A renaissance poet, I take it, would regard
this as normal prosody rather than having any particularly archaic
flavour (or would they have been sensitive to the change in practice
after say Lucretius)? But if this were Augustan/Silver, the forger
would be consciously giving his composition a spinkle of archaic
prosody?

> > "virgini _s illa_" - whether one approves of the effect or not).- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[au...@gellius.demon.co.uk]

Most Renaissance poets do not seem to have noticed there was a problem; they would have taken it for normal prosody.

adria...@googlemail.com wrote:
>
> Thanks, that is enormously helpful (if wholly frustrating..., in that
> it sounds as if it's consistent with composition either in 39/38BC or
> in the 15th century AD!). A renaissance poet, I take it, would regard
> this as normal prosody rather than having any particularly archaic
> flavour (or would they have been sensitive to the change in practice
> after say Lucretius)? But if this were Augustan/Silver, the forger
> would be consciously giving his composition a spinkle of archaic
> prosody?
>
> On Mar 23, 10:33 am, au...@gellius.demon.co.uk wrote:

> > Short final vowel plus what the Italians call impure s was the Latin norm=
> down to Lucretius even when a final s has to be suppressed (pendentibus st=
> ructis)at the end of the verse. But Catullus prefers to lengthen the syllab=
> le in accordance with Greek practice (allowing the Homerizing exception und=
> a Scamandri); the Augustans and their Silver successors avoid the collocati=
> on altogether. Medieval and Renaissance poets, however, revived the older p=
> ractice of allowing it as a short syllable, a practice defended even in the=

> early ninetenth century.
> >
> >
> >
> > adrianj...@googlemail.com wrote:
> >
> > > Acer Amor deus est: foetas domat ille leaenas.
> > > excuset facinus vindice Scylla deo.
> > > At, pius aeternam servet ni Juppiter Urbem,
> > > scilicet occiderat virginis illa dolo. (AL 914.29-32)
> >
> > > Leofranc, you mentioned that "cantusque sciens" (AL 914.15) - the
> > > short e before "sc" was backward looking? Is "vindice Scylla" another
> > > example of the same thing? Which poets would have admitted such?
> >
> > > (I've printed verses 31-2 as well since it seems to me that some care
> > > has gone into these lines - "vindice _Scylla_"... "_scili_cet" ...

> > > "virgini _s illa_" - whether one approves of the effect or not).- Hide =

[falmouth]

Having been pointed in the right direction by your post, I found a
list of short-vowels followed by s[+cons.] in 'A Manual of Latin
Prosody' by Ramsay (available online).

Among those in Propertius (8 instances of which at least 2 are
suspect) is

tuque, o, Minoa venumdata, Scylla, figura
tondes purpurea regna paterna coma.

(the text here does not seem to have been challenged)

It's quite striking that one of the very few instances in Prop. is
with "Scylla", like [Gallus]. One might think that [Gallus] was
prompted by Prop. but one would still have to explain Prop.'s own
instance. Would one not suspect that Prop.'s instance is prompted by
an earlier model?

Also worth mentioning is Ciris 130

(nec fuerat), ni Scylla nouo correpta furore

"ni" is the text that Lyne prints but "nisi" also has manuscript
support. "nisi Scylla" would be a quite attractive pun on "Nisi
Scylla" (Scylla daughter of Nisus).

(Cf. Ovid Met. 8.90-92 "Nisi / Scylla" followed by "nisi" where the
pun seems obvious?

'suasit amor facinus: proles ego regia Nisi
Scylla tibi trado patriaeque meosque penates;
praemia nulla peto nisi te.)

On the same lines, but a different point, I wonder whether the
curiously specific "foetas ... leaenas" (why _female_ lion_-cubs_?) is
a gloss on Scylla via Greek "skulax"? I.e. "Love conquers 'skulakes';
Love persuaded Scylla."

(related texts are "ille etiam Poenos domitare leones" (Ciris 135) and
[Tib.] 3.6.15-6 "Armenias tigres et fuluas ille leaenas / uicit et
indomitis mollia corda dedit." - in both cases the "ille" like
[Gallus]' refers to "Amor").

> > > - Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

[Leofranc Holford-Strevens]

Since the Ciris, probably of Antonine date, imitates Catullus, _nisi_ would
be quite out of place even without regarding euphony. Propertius has some
remarkable concessions to unsophisticated speech: in the same book 3 as
uenumdata Scylla we find _operibat_ (3. 13. 37) and _lenibunt_ (3. 21. 32),
forms last found in the drama of the previous century; of course the current
literary forms operiebat and lenient would not scan, but other respectable
poets did without them. Not even Heyworth, in his dogged attempt at turning
Propertius into an upright citizen of the Respublica Litterarum rather than
a moody misfit, ventures to challenge either form.

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

tel. +44 (0) 1865 552808 (home)/353865 (work) fax +44 (0) 1865 512237

[falmouth]

Re the Ciris, not just Catullus but also almost certainly Calvus,
Cinna and Valerius Cato, and perhaps even Gallus himself (cf. "omnia
vicit amor" 437; and "Cnosia nec Partho contendens spicula cornu" 299,
if these do not come to the Ciris-poet via Vergil (or in the latter
instance Valerius Cato)). If the Ciris poet's patchwork is largely
drawn from poets nearer to Lucretius in time than the Augustans, maybe
he could have picked up a "ni_si Sc_ylla" from one of them? NB that
Eclogue 6 seems to imply that some (neoteric?) poet had treated
(both?) Scylla(s) before that date.

All the eight supposed instances in Propertius are in Books III and IV
- I wonder if there is any significance in that?

On Mar 23, 10:40 pm, "Leofranc Holford-Strevens"

[Leofranc Holford-Strevens]

I have now had a chance to look at Lyne's apparatus, from which it is clear
that nisi is a trivialization; of the only sources to matter at this point,
the Z family, not only do two MSS (H and R) agree on three minims (that one
has ni and the other in merely means that the latter scribe didn't recognize
the word or wasn't thinking), but A, the MS with nisi, belongs to the same
subfamily as the MS with in. That means that the hyparchetype of the family
must have read ni, which passed into the immediate source of AR, was
trivialized in the former to nisi, and corrupted in the latter to in. As for
the 1471 edition, I see no reason to suppose other than that nisi emerged
somewhere from the miasmatic swamp of Quattrocento miscopying and
Verschlimmbesserung; indeed it is a lot easier to see Bussi and his crew
unthinkingly substituting the more familiar word than wantonly turning 600
into 200, as they did in the first chapter of Aulus Gellius. For what it is
worth, ni here has its proper ancient sense 'if what in fact is true were
not so'.

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

tel. +44 (0) 1865 552808 (home)/353865 (work) fax +44 (0) 1865 512237
----- Original Message -----

From: "falmouth" <adria...@googlemail.com>
To: "Mantovano" <mant...@googlegroups.com>

[falmouth]

Thanks, Leofranc - that is convincing enough (even) for me!

On Mar 24, 1:32 pm, "Leofranc Holford-Strevens"