VIRGIL: unwanted ads -- moving Mantovano to Google Groups
The problem is getting worse, not better, so it's time to move. I'll make an announcement in the next few days giving details. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: bullet-proof fix
The software that runs Mantovano is old and far from bullet-proof. A possible solution is to move the list to a free mailing list service such as Google Groups. This would simplify my job, certainly! The main disadvantage is that everyone who wants to continue receiving messages would need to register with Google Groups. It's easy (and free), but it is an additional step. Right now, it's extremely easy to join the discussion -- and also easy to send spam. I do what I can behind the scenes, but some kinds of spam I can't intercept. What are your thoughts? --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: cheap Latin Virgil: is there anything in print?
As I explained several weeks ago,a couple of us at my university are teaching a course on Virgil in translation next semester and thought it might work to assign a facing-page translation, i.e., the Loeb. Trouble is, even the revised Loeb is still too stiff sounding. I've abandoned the Loeb idea, but I'd still like for students to have the Latin text ready at hand,both while they're reading and while we're discussing it in class. This will give our classicists a chance to use their Latin for literary analysis and perhaps entice some our non-classicists to start learning the language. One solution would be to require everyone in the class to buy the OCT, in addition to whichever translations we assign. But for the non-classicists in the bunch, that is going to seem unreasonable: why should I be required to purchasea $35 book that's written in a language I can't read? My question then: does anyone know of another Latin text of Virgil that's in print and cheaper than the OCT? ---Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.orgdavid@virgil.org English DepartmentVirgil reception, discussion, documents, cEast Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet---
Re: VIRGIL: cheap Latin Virgil: is there anything in print?
On 10/5/06, Helen Conrad-O'Briain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are there no second hand Mynors available on the internet? I checked: not enough cheap ones for even a small class. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: artes romanae
Yesterday I was lecturing on these lines, which we all know by heart: excudent alii spirantia mollius aera (credo equidem), uiuos ducent de marmore uultus, orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus describent radio et surgentia sidera dicunt: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere morem parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. (Aen. 6.851-53)Normally I concentrate on the last three verses. But while my mouth was unpacking pax and subiectus, my mind was thinking about the first part, which seems to confirm somethinga lot of my students think anyway, thatthe liberal arts are for sissy Greeklings. Some questions, which, one day later I still can't answer: - Is Virgil really on their side? - Is the force of these lines limited by their speaker, Anchises/Julius Caesar - Are the verses regretful? - Does it mean anything that Anchises omits poetry and philosophy? ---Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.orgdavid@virgil.org English DepartmentVirgil reception, discussion, documents, cEast Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet---
Re: VIRGIL: artes romanae
It's those exceptions, oratory and poetry, that give me pause. It's easy to be modest about poetry when you have something else to fall back on, such as a political career. So far as we know, Virgil didn't pursue that. He wrote about power, buthe didn't seek it. Of course,he did get influence, which is more than most of us have. But influence is not the same thing as imperium. Virgil's restraint, if that's what it is here, is something we don't see very often. It's difficult, whether you're a poet or merely someone whoearns his living by writing about poetry and giving lectures on it, not to makeexaggerated claims for what you do. E.g., Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I wish I'd written that, because it's a great piece of writing. All the same, I'm glad it was Shelley who saidit and not Virgil. ---Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.orgdavid@virgil.org English DepartmentVirgil reception, discussion, documents, cEast Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet---
Re: VIRGIL: Loeb for student text?
This has been helpful. Apparently, the old Loeb is hopeless. I've taught the Aeneid many times in Mandelbaum's translation, and will probably continue. I would still prefer, however, to have something with Latin on the facing page. It would give our classicists an opportunity to actually use their Latin for literary analysis, and it might lure some of our non-classicists into starting Latin. Day Lewis had a facing-page Eclogues and Georgics, but I don't think that's in print anymore. For Eclogues, there's Lee and Ferry. Does anyone make a cheap Latin text of Virgil's opera? (Cheap = cheaper than the OCT.) --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Loeb for student text?
I'm planning to teach the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid next semester in translation. Has anyone used the Loebs for this? Some of my students will be classics majors, but I'm assuming most will not. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: seduction by Aeneid
I'm sorry no one has picked up the Christianus Maro query. This is the exactly the right place for that kind of question. I have just finished watching a Spanish film, Son de mar (1998), directed by Bigas Luna. The main character, Ulises, teaches literature at a high school by the sea and wins the love of his landlord's daughter by reciting lines (in Spanish, not Latin) from the Aeneid. There's the cave, of course, and a passage which never seemed sexy to me, the description of two snakes breasting the waves and squeezing Laocoon. This second passage is apparently the girl's favorite, and he recites it to her at key points in the story (either prior to or during sex). I won't say anything more about the plot, in case anyone wants to go out and see it on DVD. Suffice it to say that the main character has more in common with his namesake than with Aeneas. If you've read Cavafy's poem Ithaka, you know more or less what the problem is going to be. I was struck by two things: 1. All poetry, even about man-eating snakes, becomes sexy when chanted slowly, in a serious voice, by a man with no shirt on. 2. There really is something erotic, and not just tragic, about Juno making the signal for marriage at the mouth of the cave. Maybe that was obvious -- it was probably obvious to me when I was eighteen and read the poem for the first time -- but it's apparently something you can forget. I had. Martin Hughes commented on the HBO series Rome a few months back: in spite of the lurid sex and all of the historical nonsense, I think that the series does convey an interesting, even in the end subtle, view of Caesar as someone half convinced of a half truth, that he is acting in the end from religious rather than self-interested motives. Also the view explored by V in E5? My reaction wasn't so philosophical. I liked the animated graffiti in the title sequence of each episode, and I thought the incest between Octavian and Octavia was just ridiculous. Don't worry, it's unlikely that I seeded you, he tells her the next time they see each other. Seeded you! What I like about this Octavian, though, is that, while he's calculating, he's not actually cold, so much as clear-seeing. I've seen cold, ruthless, administrative Octavian scores of times and this is more interesting. Don't know how much of this is the script, and how much the actor's warmth (he was the blond boy who loses his arm a few years back in Master and Commander), but I'm grateful. While I am gathering up loose threads: belated congratulations are due here to Leofranc Holford-Strevens, whose Aulus Gellius, with its learned and sometimes stinging prose, is now available in a second edition AND in paperback. This is one of the few books I know of that's written by a classicist AND takes scholarship from the Renaissance seriously. Too much of what is called reception history is really just checking to see whether your predecessors in the Renaissance agreed with you and, if they didn't, then too bad for them. The old commentaries weren't any more infallible than the modern ones, but there are still things we can learn from them. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Christianus Maro
forwarded for Andrea Severi Hello, I'm studing the so called Christianus Maro (Erasmo), i.e. Baptista Spagnoli, the Mantuan (Mantua 1447-1516). He was a carmelitan friar and a very important poet for European Renaissance (England, Germany above all..). Spenser and Milton knew before this umanistic Mantuan than the most famous Marone. Who of you has studied the 'Christianus Maro'? best regards Andrea Severi University of Bologna [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: usefulness of list
In reference to the recent advertisement for a Renoir exhibit: Mantovano is not a high-traffic mailing list. I am content with that, would boast, even, that its usefulness, such as it is, derives from the singlemindedness of its devotion to one subject, and one subject only: the life, works, and reception of the Roman poet Virgil. If it's not about Virgil -- and maybe there's a famous Renoir painting of Dido that I don't know about -- please don't post it here. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Vergil's Garden website
No bites yet on nature in the Aeneid. But I did just receive notice of a new Georgics website: Vergil's Garden by Holt Parker http://classics.uc.edu/~parker/hortus/vergilsgarden.html Vergil's Garden is an illustrated guide to the plants in Vergil's Georgics. I plan to expand the site later to include the Eclogues and Aeneid. Rationale: My students and I are triply removed from Vergil's world. First, we are almost all city kids. We barely know a oak from an elm. Second, we're Americans. Even if we have some vague mental picture of a pine tree, we're probably thinking of an American Christmas tree, a scotch pine (Pinus sylvestris) or the like, and not what Vergil saw: pinus the huge, spreading Italian Umbrella Pine (Pinus pinea). Third, we're separated by time. We read rosa, but we think huge hybridized tea roses or long-stemmed Valentine roses the color of coagulated blood, rather than the simpler flower of Vergil's day. This means that when we're reading Vergil, we look up ilex and we find holmoak. All we've done is translate one word we don't know into another we don't know. The purpose of Vergil's Garden is to give us at least some idea for what Vergil saw and smelled and tasted and heard. Ideally, of course, the only thing to do is for me and students to pack our copies of Vergil and go to Italy. We'd spend the mornings going to farms, parks, forests, and especially wineries, and the afternoons (post nap) reading Latin together. Donations are gladly accepted. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: nature in the Aeneid
I've been reading over the Two Voices controversy, and thinking about the poem that phrase alludes to. It comes, I assume, from Tennyson's early dialogue The Two Voices. The voices are those of Hope and Despair, Life and Death (Were it not better not to be). The poem ends with the speaker going outdoors: And forth into the fields I went, And Nature’s living motion lent The pulse of hope to discontent. I wonder’d at the bounteous hours, The slow result of winter showers: You scarce could see the grass for flowers. I wonder’d, while I paced along: The woods were fill’d so full with song, There seem’d no room for sense of wrong; And all so variously wrought, I marvell’d how the mind was brought To anchor by one gloomy thought; And wherefore rather I made choice To commune with that barren voice, Than him that said, ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’ This doesn't stop Tennyson from hearing voices. As he will observe in In Memoriam, nature is not consistently kindly; she is red, rather, in tooth and claw, careless of individuals and even of whole species. What does Virgil think of nature, specifically in the Aeneid? There's a lot of writing about this in the Georgics, but what about Virgil's epic? The gods in that poem are pretty beastly. Are the fields and floods any more benign? --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Dis = dis 'wealthy'?
Last week I asked: Commentators in the Renaissance routinely explain the proper name Dis as dis 'wealthy'. Cf. Plouton from Ploutos in Plato, Crat. 403a. I have two questions... Leofranc Holford-Strevens (who else?) answered: At least as old as Cicero (De natura deorum 2. 66), though Quintilian (1. 6. 34) took it to operate by contraries (quia minime dives). Please accept my belated thanks. One thing I have learned over the last ten years of writing on this subject is not to underestimate the early commentators. Some of what they say is crackers. But much of it, I have learned, turns out to be based on very old -- and therefore very relevant -- sources. Here, another case in point. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Dis = dis 'wealthy'?
Commentators in the Renaissance routinely explain the proper name Dis as dis 'wealthy'. Cf. Plouton from Ploutos in Plato, Crat. 403a. I have two questions about this. 1. Is the Dis etymology valid? 2. How old is it? --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Fall of Empire
My theory: fall of Troy = end of republican government. Virgil doesn't know what comes next, but the change FEELS necessary, permanent. Cf. September 11, 2001. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: dissertation finished
Emma T.K. Guest-Consales wrote: Also, I would like to inform the list that I recently completed my dissertation in art history at Rutgers University: The Illustration of Virgil's Bucolics and its influence in Italian Renaissance Art. I would be happy to post the abstract to the list, if that would be appropriate. Congratulations, Emma -- send us an abstract, but give it its own subject heading. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Comparetti's Virgilio nel Medioevo available online
LH-S puts us on the right track, I think, with Erictho. I hope to get back to it later in the week. In the meantime, here is something I found this morning: an online text of D. Comparetti's Virgil in the Middle Ages (1872; rev. 1895). There are errors of fact and judgement, but as a survey it has yet to be replaced. (Cf. Epic and Romance by W. P. Ker.) The original was in Italian and so is this: http://www.classicitaliani.it/index178.htm --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Virgil's knowledge of the underworld (Dante)
I've been writing this month about the underworld. Here's something I'm
curious about: when Dante and Virgil are going through hell, Dante asks
his guide whether anyone from limbo ever visits the lower circles.
Here's Virgil's response in Singleton's translation:
It seldom happens that any of us makes the journey on which I go. It is
true that once before I was down here, conjured by that cruel Erichtho
who was wont to call back shades into their bodies. My flesh had been
but short while divested of me, when she made me enter within that wall
to draw forth a spirit from the circle of Judas. That is the lowest
place, and the darkest, and farthest from heaven that encircles all.
Well do I know the way... (Inf. 9.19-30)
And here is Singleton's commentary:
Erichtho [was] a Thessalian sorceress, who, according to Lucan (Phars.
VI, 507-830), was employed by Pompey's son Sextus to conjure up the
spirit of one of his dead soldiers on the eve of the battle of
Pharsalia, so that he could learn what was to be the outcome of the
campaign. The story Dante tells about Erichtho's sending Virgil into the
nethermost Hell is of unknown authority. It probably was suggested to
Dante by one of the numerous legends associated with Virgil in the
Middle Ages, when the Roman poet was universally regarded as a magician.
Boccaccio, for instance, in his comment on Inf. I, 71, calls Virgil
'solennissimo astrolago' ('a very great astrologer) and gives a list of
his wonderful performance. (On this aspect of Virgil's reputation in the
Middle Ages, see D. Comparetti, 1955, pp. 266-67; also see E. Moore,
1896, pp. 234-37.) Referring specifically to Dante's story about
Erichtho and Virgil, Boccaccio admits in his Comento that he cannot
'recall ever having read or heard just what this story was.' Benvenuto
was of the opinion that Dante invented the tale: 'Ista est simpliciter
fictio nova.' (This is simply a new fiction.') But the 'fiction' is, in
a sense, not so new: the Sibyl who guided Aeneas through the nether
regions declared that she had beenthere once before and had seen all
(Aen. VI, 562-65).
That was 35 years ago. To my knowledge, no one has discovered a source
for the episode, and I think B. d. I. was probably right: this was
Dante's invention. But why does he drag Erichtho into it? The connection
between Aen. 6 and Phars. 6 is obvious, interesting, and one that
commentators in the Middle Ages had a lot to say about. But whom did
Virgil draw forth from the circle of Judas, and did Erichtho animate
Virgil's corpse to do it?
---
Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org
English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c
East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
---
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Re: VIRGIL: Jupiter's prophecies
Antonio Cussen wrote: I remember reading a book or an article which argues that in the Aeneid Jupiter is often wrong in his prophecies or, if you prefer, in his announcements about the future. If anybody recalls the name of this article or book, please let me know. Perhaps you are thinking of our own James J. O'Hara's Death and the Optimistic Prophecy in Vergil's Aeneid (Princeton, 1990). --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: conceptions of time (was ein Weihnachtsgruß)
Hans Zimmermann brings up something that has often troubled me. Do the Augustan poets imagine time as linear or cyclical? I tell my students that time in the Aeneid is a spiral, in which situations (a) repeat themselves (b) on a scale of increasing magnitude. E.g., Hercules vs. Cacus -- Aeneas vs. Turnus -- Octavian vs. Mark Antony. In the first iteration, the stakes are small: just some cows. In the last iteration, the stakes are high: nothing less than lordship of the known world. If this is right, then time has structure (the circle) but also progress (the line). And mostly I am content to leave it at that. What troubles me are the ruined cities, founded by Saturn and Janus, that Evander points out to Aeneas when they are wandering through the area that will become downtown Rome. What is the purpose of these ruined cities (which are mentioned only briefly)? Are they a prophecy of what Rome will come to in the end? In which case there is not going to be much progress after all... I don't think you have to read it that way: for me (and perhaps for Virgil also) ruins are romantic as well as melancholy, because they connect us with the past. Insofar as they are ruins, they are monitory. Where is the horse and rider? / Where is the horn that was blowing? And so on. But ruins are also remnants. And they invite continuation, in a way that the finished monument, intact and imposing, does not. There is a similar puzzle at the end of Met. XV: will the Golden Age of Augustus really last forever, or will it give way to the Changefulness that Pythagoras has just finished saying (at the beginning of Met. XV) is the abiding principle of the universe? --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org david@virgil.org English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: archive of old messages now online
ANNOUNCEMENT Eight years ago, when this mailing list was just getting started, we discussed whether the contents should go in a public archive. The consensus was yes, and we did in fact begin archiving our discussions. Unfortunately, the site that was hosting the archive closed. About a year ago, I found a new host for the archive, and began directing new messages to it. This was Jeff Breidenbach's Mail-Archive.com, which is a free archiving service for mailing lists like this one. Until yesterday, the archive went back to May 2003, which is when we started using the service. This week, however, Mr. Breidenbach successfully imported all of the previous correspondence from this group, going back to 1996 when we started. This was a courtesy on his part, not an obligation, and I am grateful to him for it. The address for the new, very nearly complete archive is http://www.mail-archive.com/mantovano%40virgil.org/ LIMITATIONS 1. When we discussed archiving in 1996, there were two people who objected to it. Since then, the archiving of all mailing lists, academic and otherwise, has become a standard practice. Where possible, however, I did remove any messages from those two senders. (It was not possible to do this for messages posted after May 2003.) If, in the future, you do not want your contributions to this mailing list archived, include the header X-No-Archive: yes in your message. But I would urge you perhaps NOT to do this. There is one more irregularity in the archive, which Mr. Breidenbach is hoping to fix in the future. For reasons which are not very interesting to explain, about two dozen of the old messages got sidetracked. For the time being they are here: http://www.mail-archive.com/mantovano%40joyfulheart.com/ http://www.mail-archive.com/mantovano%40wilsoninet.com/ It is to be hoped that these stragglers will one day be reunited with the main body of messages. For the present, though, they are at least online and available for browsing and searching. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, c East Carolina UniversitySparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: reading for imagery
At 08:19 AM 8/13/01 -0500, David Wilson-Okamura wrote: Now the reason that I am mentioning this to the Virgil list is that, as Kaske rightly points out, the rhetorical handbooks of the period do _not_ analyze images in this manner; imagery was not, and never had been, a term in classical rhetoric. Commentaries on classical texts may be a different sort of animal. Servius, for instance, cross-references the text of Virgil repeatedly. But does he cross-reference imagery? I haven't found any convincing examples yet, though I have Thomas's 1880 essay on Servius on order from the library and I'm hoping to find something on the subject there. In the meantime, what think ye? Do we have any evidence that Virgil's earliest readers were interested in his imagery, or was that whole method of reading something that came in with Christianity? Don't know if anyone is following this, but here's an update in any case. When I got to the library this morning, Emile Thomas, Scoliastes de Virgile: Essai sur Servius et son commentatire sur Virgile (Paris, 1880) was waiting for me. This is what he says under the heading of Lacunes de l'interpretation litteraire dans les commentaires anciens sur Virgile. (I apologize in advance for omitting accents, but accents have a way of choking some email clients.) ...Servius a defendu les droits de la raison et du bon sens, et il merite qu'on s'en souivenne lorsqu'on reconnait chez lui les defauts de son temps. Mais quoi que nous essayons pour faire la difference des ecoles anciennes et des notres, de notre gout et celui de l'antiquite, nous avons grand'peine a comprendre les enormes lacunes de cette interpretation litteraire. Comment! sur un poete d'un sentiment a la fois si vif et si doux, si rapide et si profond, pas une remarque de sentiment? Sur un style si riche d'images et de tours poetiques, rien ou presque rien, que des remarques de grammaire?... A force de se borner a l'explication des mots, a l'observation des regles (En., VI, 660), ils ne voient riens autre chose... Virgile est pour eux tout entier dans un mot, une expression, un vers. Par moments, on dirait meme qu'en le lisant et en l'expliquant, ils refusent de l'entendre. (p. 245-46) Thomas goes on to qualify this a bit, and there _are_ synoptic discussions of the text in Servius' book introductions. But the From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Sep 01 09:24:53 2001 X-Mozilla-Status: X-Mozilla-Status2: From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fri Aug 31 21:59:36 2001 Received: ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) by wilsonwork.com (8.11.6) id f813tjs13991; Fri, 31 Aug 2001 21:55:45 -0600 (MDT) X-Authentication-Warning: wilsonwork.com: wilsonwk set sender to [EMAIL PROTECTED] using -f From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 23:55:32 EDT Subject: VIRGIL: question To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 5.0 for Windows sub 138 Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-UIDL: f3e2cdafa0b26352444af52fa07154e8 In Book I of Aeneid there is a reference to people of the sky (one translation) in relation to destruction of Carthage. I don't have a Latin text. How does that phrase read in Latin? Joan Lepley --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: unjustly neglected books
The mention of Haecker's book (which I haven't read either) is a good reminder that our grandfathers' books are still useful, even if our parents don't read them anymore. Or to put it another way, good books become obsolete (if at all) piece by piece, not all at once. What are some good books (or good chapters) on Virgil that people don't read anymore but that you think are still useful? Earlier this week, I was reading Jackson Knight's Roman Vergil (1944) and learned a great deal from the chapter on meter and style. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: heroic verse
The virus-catchers seem to have caught up with [EMAIL PROTECTED] and we are back online. Thank you for being patient. A question, then. For the last few years, I have been reading and writing about epic style in the Renaissance. For someone who was trying to imitate Virgil's epic style in a vernacular language, the first question was which meter to use: dactylic hexameter, blank verse, couplets, or stanzas? This also applied to translations. My question is this: when did critics and poets start using the term heroic couplet? The online OED, which lets you search quotations, does not have an example of this phrase until 1857! As early as 1693, Dryden is using the phrase heroic verse, but this is still very late, and he doesn't write as if the term were a new one. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: virus confirmation; shutting down list temporarily
The attachments recently distributed using this mailing list (cat.cpl, fish.cpl, etc.) were created by the [EMAIL PROTECTED] virus. They may or may not have actually originated from the people whose names were listed in the From: header, so don't assume they are at fault: one of the features of this virus is that it disguises the real sender in email that it sends. I don't know yet whether these attachments actually carry the virus or not; as of this writing, Norton AntiVirus 2004 does not identify them as being the virus. To be on the safe side, though, I am going to shut down the list server for the next several days while the virus catchers catch up. If you have questions, please email me privately at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please don't ask me to help you find or kill the virus on your computer. In general, it's unwise to open an attachment unless you know what it is. If you are infected, go to http://www.sarc.com and follow the instructions for removing [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
RE: VIRGIL: teaching Aeneid in translation
At 10:28 PM 1/18/2004 -, Francis Browne wrote: I am sure that my own experience is that of many. It is delight in poetry and music that has often led me to learn about the historical background rather than historical study leading to enjoyment of a work of art. Delight in the poetry of Dante leads to exploration of Italian history and medieval philosophy ( and incidentally a different approach to the narrative skills of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan and Statius). Delight in Bach leads to a study of the Germany of his time and the Lutheran tradition. It is of course a question of emphasis . Background knowledge gained leads to deeper appreciation, but delight in the poetry remains primary and the inspiration for further study. You are right. As a teacher, I am usually most excited about the things that I am learning about the poem _right now_. Thus, it is hard for me to talk about the fall of Troy (in bk. 2) without saying something about the decline of the Republic, which comes about, in Virgil's vision, not by the deeds of one man, but by competition and by dint of little wounds inflicted over time: ac ueluti summis antiquam in montibus ornum cum ferro accisam crebrisque bipennibus instant eruere agricolae _certatim_, illa usque minatur et tremefacta comam concusso uertice nutat, _uulneribus donec paulatim euicta_ supremum congemuit traxitque iugis auulsa ruinam. (Aen. 2.626ff.) This, I am tempted to say, is what bk. 2 is really about. But when I was eighteen, I didn't know or see any of this. What moved me then were the falling star and the omen of fire and, at the end of the book, going up into the mountains. To me, then, Virgil was the great romantic poet. And I am not at all confident that, in moving from a romantic appreciation to a historical appreciation, I am somehow closer to the poet's heart. Knowing some of the history, I think I see more of the heart. But the historical chamber of that heart is not, so far as I can tell, more real than the romantic one. For us, it is more work to discern the historical chamber, and we are tempted, because it has cost us so much effort, to infer that what is secret (from us) was also sacred (for Virgil). This may be an illusion. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: teaching Aeneid in translation
On Virgil and Tolkien: what can be said has now been said. Back, then, to the original question, of how to teach the Aeneid in translation. Do you give the history all at once, before starting the poem, or do you let it dribble out as needed? I confess to being a dribbler, but as I have mentioned earlier, I don't think I have been teaching the poem very effectively. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Caesar, cold and isolated
At 01:21 PM 5/7/03 +0100, Martin Hughes wrote: Did V really weigh every word and load every word with meaning to the extent that Paschalis supposes? If Suetonius-Donatus is to be believed, Virgil composed the Aeneid at the rate of three lines per day. (That is, if you don't count weekends.) He also adopted a style that was, in contrast to his primary Greek model, restrained. He wasn't just weighing words, though; he was also weighing sounds. That makes it hard to know how much weight to put on the words. Hence the need for tact (which is, admittedly, not a method or a strategy). Perhaps it might help if we looked at other references to Caesar and Pompey. The one in book 6 is the most obvious, because it names Caesar and Pompey. But there is also a pretty clear reference to Pompey in book 2: A 2.554 Haec finis Priami fatorum; hic exitus illum A 2.555 sorte tulit, Troiam incensam et prolapsa uidentem A 2.556 Pergama, tot quondam populis terrisque superbum A 2.557 regnatorem Asiae. Iacet ingens litore truncus, A 2.558 auolsumque umeris caput, et sine nomine corpus. You don't have to know a lot about Roman history (and I don't) to recognize an allusion to the death of Pompey. According to Plutarch, the assassins cut off Pompeys head, and threw the rest of his body overboard, leaving it naked upon the shore, to be viewed by any that had the curiosity to see so sad a spectacle. Priam, in Virgil's account, is killed by Pyrrhus in a way that is both vulgar and profane. But Pyrrhus is not Caesar; if you want to read the whole episode as a historical allegory, Pyrrhus is the Egyptians, who killed Pompey in order to ingratiate themselves with Caesar. But Caesar himself was disgusted by the deed, and punished the assassins (though perhaps he was pleased with the outcome). All that we can say (and I think it is saying a lot) is that the fall of Troy (in Virgil's poem) seems to foreshadow the demise of the Republic (in Virgil's lifetime); that the death of Pompey seems to mark the demise of the Republic; and that Virgil is impressed with the dignity and majesty of the old constitution and its champion. I say Virgil is impressed with, not Virgil favors. For Virgil is impressed with, and values, many things in this poem, not all of which are compatible with each other. It is hard, for instance, not to admire Dido and Turnus, at least in some things. Why didn't Aeneas just say, Dido, I have something to do, but I'll be back in a couple of months? Then he could go to Italy, put Turnus in charge of homeland security, help Mezentius find a new hobby, and visit Carthage on the weekends. Of course, that's not how it turns out, because this is a poem for grown-ups. (Yes, I know I'm being glib. But, seriously, what did you expect to happen?) Back to Caesar and Pompey. If you want a picture of Caesar, look at Anchises. It's partially sanitized, for obvious reasons, but it's not hagiography. Anchises is a nice old man, but he is confused about the next step. Instead of sending the fleet to Italy, he takes them to Crete. Julius Caesar was not, I am assuming, a nice old man. Like Anchises, though, he couldn't figure out how to handle the transition. Troy (= the Republic) is a thing of the past. But what comes next? He doesn't know; that's for his son (= Octavian) to figure out. As for the fall of the Republic: whose fault was it? I think there's a clue, again, in Virgil's description of the fall of Troy: A 2.626 ac ueluti summis antiquam in montibus ornum A 2.627 cum ferro accisam crebrisque bipennibus instant A 2.628 eruere agricolae certatim,--illa usque minatur A 2.629 et tremefacta comam concusso uertice nutat, A 2.630 uolneribus donec paulatim euicta, supremum A 2.631 congemuit, traxitque iugis auolsa ruinam. The tree, I take it, is the constitution: not a document, of course, but the way we handle things around here. It is not brought down by anything in particular: rather, there is a series of little wounds, which are inflicted on the tree in or by competition (certatim). Pettiness on all sides: that was what destroyed the Republic -- or so I fancy. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: T. S. Eliot on diction
I am looking for something in T. S. Eliot's literary criticism, a comment to the effect that, given world enough and time, Dante and Shakespeare would have found a use for every word in their respective languages; some words, though, Virgil would never use. Does anyone recall where this is from? Can't find it in the Selected Prose or The Sacred Wood. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: dates for early Virgil critics
At 04:51 PM 4/22/03 -0500, James Greenwald [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You could try Pauly-Wissova, if you can handle German. I tried that this morning: no luck. Nothing in Kaster, either, I'm afraid. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: dates for early Virgil critics
I'm trying to find dates for the following ancient Virgil critics, mentioned by Suetonius/Aelius Donatus: - Perellius Faustus, author of a book on Virgil's furta - Q. Octavius Avitus, author of the eight-volume Resemblances Nothing on either figure in Stok and Brugnoli's ed. of Donatus, the Oxford Classical Dictionary, or the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Nothing in Perseus, either. Any suggestions? --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Was Virgil murdered?
Some of you may remember J.-Y. Maleuvre, a French scholar who believes that Virgil was murdered by Augustus. Ultimately, we decided that this was better discussed elsewhere. He does have a website, however, and adds new material from time to time.The most recent update deals with passages from Ovid. I don't endorse Maleuvre's position, but he has asked me to pass along news of the update, and I am happy to do so. The URL, for those who are interested, is http://www.virgilmurder.org --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://virgil.org English Department, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858-4889 --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: death by water
Yesterday I received the following message from Tom Bestul, my old Anglo-Saxon teacher: I am editing a commentary on Proverbs by Alexander Nequam (d. 1217), and have encountered what seems to me a very curious statement about Aeneas, namely that he drowned in the battle with Turnus, and this fact was covered up by Virgil: Eneas conflictum Turni sustinere non ualens, phaselum intrare coactus est et sic submersus, licet Eneis virgiliana ueritatem historie ob gloriam Romani nominis commutauerit. I've checked the usual places; Servius, Augustine, Orosius, Bernard Silvestris, etc., and can find the tradition that Aeneas died in the climactic battle, and that his body was nowhere to be found (Serv ad Aen 4.620, e.g). But I can't find a source for Nequam's claim that Aeneas was forced into a boat and drowned (I believe drowning is the intended meeting, rather than mere submersal (like Turnus, earlier), since the account is included in a list of other notables who drowned, such as Osiris and Frederick Barbarossa). I had a few ideas, most of which had occurred to him already: 1. Livy 1.2 states that the site where Aeneas died is above the river Numicus. For death by drowning, see 2. Ovid, Met. 14 says that the mortal part of Aeneas was washed away in the Numicus. This is probably the most important source for the tradition that Aeneas drowned. -- Might check a good commentary on this passage to see if it gives any cross-references. 3. Servius, in Aen. 1.259, 4.620 (which records the bizarre tradition that Aeneas fell into the river while sacrificing, as does Servius auctus on 12.794), 6.88, 7.150 and 7.797 (which claim that the body _was_ found in the river, contradicting what he says elsewhere), and 12.139 (which doesn't mention the death of Aeneas, but says that the water for all Roman sacrifices came from the Numicus; this explains the tradition that Aeneas fell into the river while sacrificing). 4. Tibullus 2.5.43-44 has illic sanctus eris cum te ueneranda Numici / unda deum caelo miserit indigetem, where te = Aeneas. Tibullus doesn't say how Aeneas came to be in the worshipful wave of Numicus, but this is pretty good evidence that the death by water tradition is older than Virgil. -- Might check a good commentary on this passage to see if it gives any cross-references. What I can't explain is Alexander's reference to a boat. Servius auctus (in Aen. 1.259 and 12.794) says that Aeneas may have fallen into the river while fleeing Messapus or Mezentius. Bits of Servius auctus did circulate in the Middle Ages, but not widely, and that doesn't really solve the problem anyway. A possibility: Alexander is conflating the death by water tradition with Aen. 10.653, in which Turnus is lured into a boat by a phantom-Aeneas, in order to draw him away from the fighting and save his life. -- Does anyone have a better source for phaselum intrare coactus? --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: petitions
At 09:17 AM 3/13/03 +0100, Rob Dyer wrote: Are petitions re the new war acceptable to the list? Thank you for asking. As you know, the question came up earlier today on the Spenser-Sidney mailing list, and the reaction there was, for the most part, positive. I am reluctant to dissent from my wise and learned colleagues. Nevertheless, I ask petitioners to refrain from using this list for that purpose, if for no other reason than this: if we start now, it will be hard to stop later. If recent events give you insight into Virgil's poetry, by all means share it. (I have been meaning to respond to Martin Hughes very thoughtful comments on the fathers of Augustus for many weeks now.) I do ask one thing: do not make Virgil's poetry a pretext for a sermon. Not that I have anything against sermons: I make it a point to attend one every week. But there are other places for that. Yours faithfully, but firmly, Dr. David Wilson-Okamura Listowner, Mantovano --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: online bibliography updated (5th ed.)
Last night I uploaded the fifth edition of Virgil in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance: An Online Bibliography http://virgil.org/bibliography. The fourth edition of the bibliography was mounted in Dec. 2000, so there are quite a number of new entries. If you see a mistake or omission, please email me _privately_ at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Special thanks are due to Otfried Lieberknecht, Helen Conrad-O'Briain, and Gert de Ceukelaire, who graciously contributed many of the items included here to the Mantovano discussion group. I would also like to mention Massimo Gioseffi, who sent me a collection of essays that he edited, as well as some off-prints; it has been almost exactly two years since he mailed them to me from Italy, and for that I apologize. Please note that it is NOT necessary to send me books or off-prints in order to get something included in the on-line bibliography; just email a notice with complete publication information, preferably in MLA format and I will make sure that it goes in the next edition. Yours faithfully, David --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Traditio classicorum: The Fortuna of the Classical Authors to the Year 1650
This morning someone was asking the Ficino list about the reception of Thucydides in the Renaissance. Heinrich Kuhn mentioned the following site, which I hadn't heard of. Sure enough, there's a lot on Virgil. Probably some overlap with the online bibliography at http://virgil.org/bibliography but definitely worth bookmarking: Charles H. Lohr Traditio classicorum: The Fortuna of the Classical Authors to the Year 1650 http://www.theol.uni-freiburg.de/forsch/lohr/lohr-ch4.htm --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: What others say about Virgil
Hieronymus Prechtl is right, and so is Leofranc Holford-Strevens. The problem is that the Donatus vita was expanded in early the fifteenth century. My translation, from which Prechtl cites, includes the expansions but puts them in angle brackets: 90. The success of the Bucolics was such when he published it, that the cantores recited them frequently, even on stage. As for Cicero, when he had heard some of the verses, his piercing judgement immediately perceived that these were productions of uncommon vigor, and ordered the whole eclogue to be recited from the beginning. Having familiarized himself with its every nuance, he declared it the second great hope of Rome, as if he himself were the first hope of the Latin language and Maro the second. These words Virgil later inserted in the Aeneid [12.168]. As you can see, the bit about Cicero does not appear in the original vita, for the reason that Holford-Strevens gave yesterday. (The same goes for the passage in which Virgil helps Augustus decide not to abdicate: according to Dio, Augustus discussed the matter with Maecenas and Agrippa, but there is no evidence that he consulted Virgil on the matter.) --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Virgil and Vergil revisited
We've talked about how the Virgil misspelling arose, and a few weeks ago I posted some speculation on why Poliziano failed to correct it. This is a follow-up question: when did classicists decide, once and for all, that Poliziano was right and Vergilius is spelled with an e? --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Virgilmurder.org
Some of you may recall a discussion we had a few years ago, about the possibility that Virgil was murdered by Augustus. I don't endorse this theory, but J.-Y. Maleuvre has built a large website that assembles the evidence in favor of it: http://virgilmurder.org. The reason I bring it up is that Maleuvre has now revised the site extensively and asked me to mention it. Those of you who were here for that discussion may recall that it got a bit crazy. So, if you're interested in pursuing the topic, please don't do it here. Maleuvre has a mailing list, and is eager to correspond with people on this topic. Yours faithfully, David Wilson-Okamura Listowner, Mantovano --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Early Vergil printings and another request
A few last notes on Virgil MSS. in the At 11:35 AM 8/23/2002 -0400, I wrote: For modern editions, the most important codices are (according to E. Courtney) as follows: Mediceus (Laurentian Lib. 39.1 and Vatican lat. 3225 fol. 76), Romanus (Vatican lat. 3867), and Palatinus (Vatican, Pal. lat. 1631). Palatinus was in Heidelberg until 1618, and therefore had little or no influence on Italian editions of Virgil's work in this period. Venier now confirms that Mediceus was used in the second printed edition of Virgil's works (1471). Mediceus and Romanus were also used by the most important of Virgil's textual critics for this period, Pierius Valerianus, on which see below. I have been doing some more reading on this subject, and need to make two corrections: 1. According to Vladimiro Zabughin, Vergilio nel rinascimento italiano (1923), 2:99 n. 20, Valeriano's codex Mediceus was not THE codex Mediceus (Laurenziano 39.1), which dates back to the fifth century A.D., but merely _a_ codex Mediceus (Laurenziano 39.23) which Zabughin places in the twelfth century. Note, by the way, how Zabughin spells Vergilio; 2. Venier's data does not refute the hypothesis that the real Mediceus was used in the 1469 edition, but does not confirm it, either. Looking at Venier's collation samples, I'm guessing that M probably _was_ used in the 1469 edition and that more collations would demonstrate it conclusively, but Venier is cautious on this point, and insists very rightly that we can't yet rule out convergent readings from an independent source. On the other hand, we do know that at least one scholar was looking at M in the fifteenth century, because he annotated it in his own handwriting: his name was Pomponio Leto and his corrections are recorded in Geymonat. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: The furor of Amata
At 02:03 AM 9/11/2002 +, you wrote: I'm working on tacitus' use of furor in relation to Messalina (Claudius' wife) and I remembered the Aeneid passage with Amata raging out of control (like a top) in Aeneid 7. I seem to recall reading it as an undergrad over 20 years ago. Does anyone have any current thoughts on the role of Amata and her madness (or, better yet, any images of it in medieval or modern art)? Amata appears as an example of ungoverned anger in Purgatorio 17. Might look for her in illuminated Dante MSS. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
RE: VIRGIL: naming conventions
At 02:12 PM 8/5/2002 -0400, Emma Guest-Consales wrote: Who decides or how does one decide whether to use Virgil or Vergil? Is it an American v English question? In Italian he is always Virgilio I don't recall ever seeing Vergilio even though in the 15th c. Poliziano proved that the correct spelling is Vergilius not Virgilius. Thoughts on i v e would also be most appreciated. This question has come up before, and as usual received a number of learned and amusing responses. One thing that has not, I think, been addressed, and that is why didn't sixteenth-century scholars adopt Poliziano's spelling (which he defended, by the way, with evidence from inscriptions)? I don't _know_ the answer to this, but let me take a stab at it. Once again, a figure I mentioned earlier this month, Pierio Valeriano, plays a key role. Valeriano respected Poliziano, but on this point he disagreed with him, arguing (in his commentary on Geo. 4.563, where Virgil signs his name to the end of the poem) that the MSS. favored Virgilius. Why did Valeriano's opinion carry the day? Poliziano is and was more highly regarded as a scholar; however, he did not publish his findings in a book on Virgil, but in his first series of (very aptly titled) _Miscellanea_ (1.77). Valeriano, on the other hand, gave his opinion in a book entitled _Castigationes et varietates Virgilianae lectionis_ (1521), which was regularly reprinted in folio editions of Virgil's text and rapidly became the standard work on the subject. In short, the correct spelling of Virgil's name was available in the sixteenth century, but it was not given in the place that people expected to find it; as a result, the old spelling was retained. Location, location, location. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamura [EMAIL PROTECTED]http://virgil.org English Department, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858-4889 --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Early Vergil printings and another request
At 11:35 AM 8/23/2002 -0400, I wrote: ... the situation is hopeless for anything beyond the Carolingian period -- until c. 1470, when Virgil gets into print. Looks like I spoke too soon. I've spent a couple of very happy days with Venier, and among the many topics he deals with in _Per una storia del testo di Virgilio nella prima eta\ del libro a stampa (1469-1519)_ is the character of la vulgata umanistica in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of special interest are the interpolated verses that do not appear in Carolingian MSS. (including some verses that appear to derive, by way of a composite vita, from Servius auctus). See ch. 1, Osservazioni sulla tradizione manoscritta nei secoli XIV e XV. On the subject of Venier's book more generally, I mentioned its appearance in February and posted a translation of its contents (see below, with some additions). My first impressions were positive, and now that I've actually read the thing I'm happy to report that, on closer inspection, the book is every bit as good as it looks (and it is a very handsome little paperback). Needless to say, it's not a book for the incurious. Basically, it's an attempt to identify the manuscripts that stand behind the early printed editions. If this doesn't milk your goat, you should probably look elsewhere for mental sustenance. If, on the other hand, you have a miniature bust of Poliziano on your computer monitor, you will find much to savor. Matteo Venier, _Per una storia del testo di Virgilio nella prima eta\ del libro a stampa (1469-1519)_ (Udine: Forum, 2001). xxii+158 pp. Table of Contents: Preface Bibliographical abbreviations 1. Observations on the manuscript tradition in the 14th and 15th centuries - Codices examined - The humanistic vulgate [including the status of the Helen digression] - MSS. with interpolations drawn from Servius - MSS. copied from printed editions 2. Editions in print in the 15th century - The editio princeps edited by Giovanni Andrea Bussi - The Mentelin edition - Editions derived from the first Roman printing - The edition of Vindelinus de Spira and its progeny - The second Roman printing: the Medici codex and the Pomponian variants - The editions of Leonardus Achates 3. Virgil editions, 1500-1520 - The first Aldine - The second Aldine - The edition of Giovanni Battista Egnazio - The Giunt edition edited by Benedetto Riccardini [includes a fun account of where Riccardini got his info about the codex Romanus (Poliziano), how he handled it (irresponsibly), and what Valeriano had to say about him (nothing good)] - The third Aldine and some observations on the formation of a system of punctuation - Conclusions - Stemma of editions Appendix I: Corrections to the app. crit. in current editions (Ribbeck, Mynors, Geymonat) Appendix II: On discrepancies between the first and second Giunt editions Conspectus siglorum Index of manuscripts Index of Virgil editions Index of names -- This book was available for purchase earlier this year at http://www.libroco.it but I haven't checked back since the spring. If anyone knows where I can find a miniature bust of Poliziano, please email me privately. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Early Vergil printings and another request
At 09:58 AM 8/23/2002 +0100, James Butrica wrote: Some partial suggestions have been made for secondary sources on early editions, but for a complete inventory of incunabula I suspect that you would have to create your own from Hain and the other reference works devoted to listing them (and even then you would ideally try to track down copies of the editions, since these reference works sometimes contain ghost editions that do not actually exist). This work has now been done; see: Davies, Martin, and John Goldfinch. _Vergil: A Census of Printed Editions 1469-1500_. Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical Society 7. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1992. There is even an appendix of probable ghosts! As to affinities, I assume that you mean textual ones, and I suspect that this would prove a dead end: if your interest is how the editions might be related to the important early mss of Virgil, there is probably no connection at all (some of those mss were certainly known to Renaissance scholars like Pontano and Poliziano and Leto but I have never heard that any of them was used for an early edition -- a good thing, too, since old mss could simply get thrown away once they had served their purpose: one of the Aldine editors destroyed a fifth-century uncial ms of Pliny's letters after using it for his edition); For modern editions, the most important codices are (according to E. Courtney) as follows: Mediceus (Laurentian Lib. 39.1 and Vatican lat. 3225 fol. 76), Romanus (Vatican lat. 3867), and Palatinus (Vatican, Pal. lat. 1631). Palatinus was in Heidelberg until 1618, and therefore had little or no influence on Italian editions of Virgil's work in this period. Venier now confirms that Mediceus was used in the second printed edition of Virgil's works (1471). Mediceus and Romanus were also used by the most important of Virgil's textual critics for this period, Pierius Valerianus, on which see below. and if you mean their relationship to each other and to the vulgate of the late 15th century, that would be impossible to pursue since, to the best of my knowledge, no-one has explored the Virgilian ms tradition beyond the Carolingian period (where it is already hopelessly contaminated) and so no-one is really in a position to say what was in the vulgate at any subsequent period, least of all in Italy in the Renaissance. I agree with James that the situation is hopeless for anything beyond the Carolingian period -- until c. 1470, when Virgil gets into print. For printed texts in the years 1470-1514, there is now a stemma in Venier (pp. 136-37). After that, I think you could safely derive a vulgate text from one of the following: (a) the Aldine octavos, which were endlessly pirated (b) the apparatus criticus provided by the aforementioned Valerianus, which was endlessly reprinted. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: naming conventions
This should be an easy question, but it is one that I don't know the answer to, and as it has been a quiet summer on the Virgil list, I hope no one will mind. When, and why, did we stop calling Virgil by his cognomen, Maro? (Extra points for anyone who can explain why Tully, a gentilicium or family-name, is often preferred to Cicero in the Renaissance.) One note for new subscribers: not everything we talk about on the Virgil list is this obscure. If you'd like to talk about something more literary, don't hesitate to start a new thread, either by posing a question or making an observation. Do change the subject header, though: there are over 700 subscribers on this mailing list, and I can pretty much guarantee you that a lot of them are going to delete anything labeled naming conventions on sight without reading any further. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] East Carolina UniversityVirgil reception, discussion, documents, c --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Don't leave me alone just yet!
At 09:46 AM 4/29/02 -0400, Joshua Wiley wrote: Personally, I'm mostly interested in doing history of ideas and comp litty things with V. Would like to see more this sort of discussion. Should probably just post some questions eventually. Joshua has the right idea. In the meantime, if you do want out and have trouble, please let me know PRIVATELY at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unless I'm out of town, I usually respond to these requests immediately. Complaining to the group as a whole may be emotionally satisfying, but it doesn't actually get you off the list any faster. It may, however, add a week onto your sentence in purgatory: aliae panduntur inanes suspensae ad uentos, aliss sub gurgite uasto infectum eluitur scelus aut exuritur igni... I'm trying to work out a deal with the pope as we speak. Until then, I remain Yours affectionately, David Wilson-Okamura Listowner, Mantovano --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Did Aeneas inhale?
At 08:17 PM 4/27/02 +0100, Leofranc Holford-Strevens wrote: (Suppose for instance that the wink theory could somehow be made to stand up, why should Vergil wish to play that game?) This is a fair question. There are, it seems to me, two reasons to argue for the wink theory: 1. You don't like the alternate, empire-as-nightmare theory but falsa insomnia sounds sinister so you find a benign way of reading it. 2. You know that Virgil's contemporaries sometimes resorted to allegory in order to rationalize the objectionable bits in Homer: not just the immorality of the gods, but the marvellous in general. You think that Virgil was trying to write a poem in the Homeric mode, and in this period that means allegory. For examples, see the first chapter of Michael Murrin, Allegorical Epic (Chicago, 1980). --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Eclogue plants
At 05:55 PM 4/15/02 +0100, you wrote: Hedera and Acanthus were, I imagine, the same as the plants (ivy and bear's breeches) that bear those Latin names today. Colocasia and baccar, however, seem to present some difficulties. One translator suggests sowbreads and lotuses, another gipsy lilies and wild woodbine, my dictionary indicates Celtic valerian (whatever that was)and Egyptian bean while Dryden bags them all up as 'fragrant herbs'. Robert Coleman's commentary says of baccare: the plant is again associated with ivy in 7.25-8. baccar, from Greek bakkaris, may well have been given a false etymology from Bacchus. Although Pliny lists a variety of medicinal uses (Nat. 21.132-3), Servius' attribution of magical properties -- herba est quae fascinum pellit -- may be merely an inference from 7.28. Identification is uncertain; modern guesses include a species of cyclamen and Gnaphalium Sanguineum, a relative of the edelwise. Wendell Clausen comments on baccare at Ecl. 7.27: an unidentifiable plant, on which see P. Wagner, RE ii. 2803. Dioscorides describes it as sweet-smelling and suitable for garlands, De mat. med. 3. 44. 1 euodes, stephanomatike. In Latin poetry it is found only here and in 4. 19, in both places ablative, occupying the fifth foot of the line, and linked with ivy. V. is alone in attributing magical powers to it; 'herba est ad depellendum fascinum' (DServ. here) and 'herba est quae fascinum pellit' (Serv. on 4. 19) -- both inferences from this text On colocasia, Coleman says, 'Egyptian beans' are usually identified as the subtropical Caladium, wich was especially associated with the Nile region whence its edible roots were exported. Although cultivated in Italy in Plinty's time (Nat. 21.87), it was not found wild nullo cultu except in parts of Sicily. This is in fact the only one of the plants here mentioned that does not grow wild in Italy. The miracle lies in their spontaneous appearance all over the world, passim; cf. Dion. Per. 941 'At the birth (of Dionysus) all things fragrant were growing.' Clausen cites Scholfield on Nicander, Georg. fr. 81-82: 'The plant is the Indian lotus, Nelumbium speciosum, on which see Theophr. H.P. 4. 8. 7, Diosc. 2. 106, RE 13. 1518. The Egyption bean is its seed...It has a large pink flower, and an edible root (kolokasion).' Neither plant appears in Abbe, The Plants of Virgil's Georgics. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Dante and the Vergilian commentary tradition
At 09:02 PM 3/15/02 +, Helen Conrad-O'Briain wrote: I have a student who is interested in working on Dante's possible use of Vergilian commentaries. Would anyone have any suggestions on must read material? On Dante and Servius: - Edward Kennard Rand, Dante and Servius, Dante Studies 33 (1916), 1-11 - Ernst von Richthofen, Traces of Servius in Dante, Dante Studies 92 (1974), 117-128 Did Dante use the commentary attributed to Bernardus Silvestris? - pro: David Thompson, Dante's Epic Journeys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), chs. 2 and 9 - contra: Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante's Commedia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 96-103 and idem, Studies in Dante, pp. 71-81. See also Ulrich Leo, The Unfinished Convivio and Dante's Rereading of the Aeneid, Medieval Studies 13 (1951), 41-64, repr. in idem, Sehen und Wirklichkeit bei Dante (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermenn, 1957), pp. 71-104. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Re: Charles de la Rue
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2002 23:23:16 -0800 From: Neven Jovanovic [EMAIL PROTECTED] I decided to use one of Ruaeus-like ad usum Delphini editions (London, 1819) with commentary in the proseminar (second year, undergraduate students) on Georgics 3. I liked it because the commentary is in Latin, including Latin prose paraphrases of Virgil's text; it gives the students a chance to use Latin for understanding Latin; in the process, hopefully, learning the language. (Also, this edition is available in the University library, which does not have the Heyne commentaries.) The _Argumenta Georgicon_ from 1819. school edition can be found at: http://www.ffzg.hr/klafil/georarg.htm Neven --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Helen's robe
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2002 21:05:19 + From: Terry WALSH [EMAIL PROTECTED] stiff with golden wire is Dryden's translation, which may be depended upon. The phrase embodies a hendiadys, of a type common in the Aeneid. Servius ad loc. also suggests this. signis auroque: signis aureis, ut molemque et montes. pallam rigentem duram propter aurum, sicut vel novas vestes videmus. [Commentary on Vergil, Aeneid 1, 648] Rings are inappropriate here: I rather think that Hardy has misunderstood the Latin, or his translation has let him down! Yours Terry Walsh --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Virgil's Influence on Rural Art In the Roman Era
At 10:53 PM 2/13/02 -0700, Carson G Manzer wrote: In the quest for confirmation of this influence, which to the layman seems somehow to date being in the esoteric category, I am asking for some assistance from the scholars in this website. What is required is a list of sources which could provide online reproductions of a number of paintings of landscapes of a sacral or idyllic character, depicting rural scenes of peace with nature and of the serenity and stability of such a lifestyle, which can reasonably be ascribed to Virgil's Georgics and Eclogues. That's a pretty tall order. I'd start by looking at some of the items in the online bibliography, under illustrations: http://virgil.org/bibliography/ But perhaps others can add to this. (Emma?) --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: new(ish) book on early printed Virgil eds.
As most of you know, the listowner frowns on the use of this list for commercial announcements, but smiles on notices like the following, which isn't going to make a dime for anyone but which _is_ of direct interest to the members of this group: Matteo Venier, _Per una storia del testo di Virgilio nella prima eta\ del libro a stampa (1469-1519)_ (Udine: Forum, 2001). xxii+158 pp. The book is in Italian, but I give an abbreviated table of contents in translation: Preface Bibliographical abbreviations 1. Observations on the manuscript tradition in the 14th and 15th centuries - Codices examined - The humanistic vulgate - MSS. with interpolations drawn from Servius - MSS. copied from printed editions 2. Editions in print in the 15th century - The editio princeps edited by Giovanni Andrea Bussi - The Mentelin edition - Editions derived from the first Roman printing - The edition of Vindelinus de Spira and its progeny - The second Roman printing: the Medici codex and the Pomponia variants - The editions of Leonardus Achates 3. Virgil editions, 1500-1520 - The first Aldine - The second Aldine - The edition of Giovanni Battista Egnazio - The Giunt edition edited by Benedetto Riccardini - The third Aldine and some observations on the formation of a system of punctuation - Conclusions - Stemma of editions Appendix I: Corrections to the app. crit. in current editions (Ribbeck, Mynors, Geymonat) Appendix II: On discrepancies between the first and second Giunt editions Conspectus siglorum Index of manuscripts Index of Virgil editions Index of names I only received this on Friday, and haven't done much with it yet. I can say a few things: - The book is well made, pleasing to read and pleasing to hold. - The treatment is exhaustive, but not exhausting. - It complements and builds on the bibliographical studies of Davies, Goldfinch, and Kallendorf; ideally, this book should be read in tandem with Kallendorf's most recent monograph, on _Virgil and the Myth of Venice_. - It offers a detailed picture, not only of how the first printed Virgils were assembled, but of textual criticism in the first age of print. If you're interested in the process of how printers and editors chose their copy-texts (whether it be from an unprinted MSS. or from a rival's printed edition) this is definitely the book for you; a good follow-up, in this regard, to Lowry's work on the editorial procedures (as opposed to the editorial rhetoric) of Aldus Manutius. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
RE: VIRGIL: new(ish) book on early printed Virgil eds.
At 02:35 PM 2/11/02 -0500, someone wrote: Where did you get this? Is it generally available? As of this afternoon, you could find it at http://www.libroco.it/ for 13.43 euros plus shipping. The ISBN is 88-8420-025-3, though that won't help you at Libro Co. By the way, credit for this find goes to Emma Guest, who does art history at Rutgers. Thank you, Emma. --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamura(651) 696-6643 [EMAIL PROTECTED] English Dept., Macalester College, 1600 Grand Ave., St. Paul, MN 55105 --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: recent discussions
At Sat, 15 Dec 2001 20:16:36 +0100, Robert Dyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I hope others agree with me that the discussions in the last month have been extraordinarily interesting and informative. I quite agree, Robert, and I'm wondering if it has something to do with the subject matter. Over the last year, I've noticed a revival of interest in specifically literary subjects, both in myself and in my students. When I say literary, I don't necessarily mean canonical, either. (Though I _was_ surprised at the number of people who showed up for my Milton seminar.) There is a growing hunger, though, to know what a line of verse sounds like, to feel--as it were--the shape of a poem. A few years ago, it seemed to me that the key to understanding poetry better was to read more history. Given what I knew about history when I graduated from an American university, that was probably true! Now, though, I find myself reading books and articles on prosody and poetic diction. Perhaps this just means I'm recovering from grad school. But I think there are larger forces involved -- and not just in English departments, either. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: [Fwd: [PAPY] Il Ritorno di Cornelio Gallo]
message forwarded by listowner Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 16:09:05 +0100 From: Robert Dyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] For those not on the PAPY list, I thought this would be interesting in light of our discussion. I for one am enormously grateful for the useful discussion of Latin texts discovered at Herculaneum. Rob Dyer Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 10:00:19 +0100 Sender: The papyrological bulletin '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Mario Capasso [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PAPY] Il Ritorno di Cornelio Gallo OGGETTO: IL RITORNO DI CORNELIO GALLO Dopo una ricerca durata 2 anni =E8 stato possibile ritrovare il papiro di Qas= r Ibrim contenente i versi elegiaci di Cornelio Gallo, del quale si erano perse le tracce. Esso era chiuso in una Cassa di un Magazzino di Saqqara. Con molta difficolta' ho potuto fare aprire il Magazzino e la Cassa. Ho quindi restaurato e fotografato il papiro. Mario Capasso --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: pronunciation of Virgil
message forwarded by listowner Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 23:29:39 +0100 From: Robert Dyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you, Philip. I regretted not mentioning inscriptions the moment after I punched the send button. But I actually did not know about the Gallus and contemporary papyri. I have looked at the Gallus enough times and never noticed it or been told. Does that mean if I actually try to read the Herculaneum material in the original form I will see dots for word breaks everywhere? Rob Dyer --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: pronunciation of Virgil
message forwarded by listowner Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 23:49:57 +0100 From: Robert Dyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] I am struck by another humbling piece of ignorance in a field I am meant to know about. Do we have any Latin papyri from the Piso/Philodemus library at Herculaneum? Or is it all like Philodemus and in Greek? Rob Dyer --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Aeneid 6 and Bob Dylan
message forwarded by listowner Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 13:45:13 -0500 From: Jim O'Hara [EMAIL PROTECTED] I don't think this has been mentioned on this List yet, though it has been discussed on the Classics List. Bob Dylan's latest album features a song with some words that should look familiar to Vergilians: http://republika.pl/bobdylan/lat/lonesome.htm (the site cites Vergil in a footnote) Lonesome Day Blues (words and music by Bob Dylan. Copyright (c)2001 Special Rider Music) ... I'm going to spare the defeated, I'm going to speak to the crowd, I'm going to spare the defeated, boys, I'm going to speak to the crowd, 30 I'm going to teach peace to the conquered, I'm going to tame the proud. -- Jim O'Hara Paddison Professor of Latin 206B Howell Hall phone: (919) 962-7649 fax: (919) 962-4036 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www: http://www.unc.edu/~oharaj surface mail: James J. O'Hara Department of Classics CB# 3145, 101 Howell Hall The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3145 --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: pronunciation of Virgil
message forwarded by listowner Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 00:05:57 +0100 From: Robert Dyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Emmanuel Plantade's reply is extremely interesting, and I will enjoy trying out the new theory. I suspect that if it is correct it will end up by saying something similar to, but perhaps more complex than, what my school is saying. It cannot, I hope, dismiss Cicero's observations in Orator on how to construct prose cola or word-groups. Centuries of writing Ciceronian prose, based on those rules, seem to have worked fairly well in creating real Latin prose in real Latin word order. If I understand the theory right, it rejects, as I do, the ridiculous and long-abandoned attempts to determine Latin prosody in terms of individual words. The Romans did not even write single words; they wrote in continuous breath-group units (separated by punctuation reflecting the importance of the pause) that Fraenkel and I both happen to call cola. All questions of word stress are determined by where the preeminent coinciding stresses fall in the colon (breath group or whatever - Fraenkel may have been obstinate about his chosen word but should not be judged merely on his terminology - his groups of words as the prosodic or metrical units are a simple and correct observation) and by which collocations of individual stresses (which do, of course, exist but are subordinated to the colon rules, as Cicero fully understands) are permitted, which forbidden. Zielinski's statistics are useful. It seems to me that I will accept the new theory if it ends up by proving Cicero was in accord with it - even better if it explains the facts in front of him better than I do - or even than he did. I will be startled if it proves both Cicero and me wrong, and doubt if I would accept such as proof, given the possibility that its premises are based on contemporary linguistic theories in conflict with the ancients' observations as badly as the clumsy old English overstressed word-by-word pronunciation was when it ignored the Ciceronian rules and the rapidity of Latin elisions and liaisons within the colon. Rob Dyer --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Holkham MS 311
message forwarded by listowner Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 20:49:42 +0800 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Paul Roche wrote on the 26th September 2001: Do listmembers know anything about the illustrated manuscript Holkholm MS 311? Details from it are featured on the front cover of Wilkinson's Georgics and Lee's Eclogues (both Penguin). anything will be appreciated - date, location, publications. I hope the following meagre and unscholarly bits of information are useful clues for you in your search. The Georgics illustration on the front cover of Wilkinson's translation is also reproduced in: (1) Todd,James and Janet Maclean (1955) Voices from the Past: A Classical Anthology for the Modern Reader London: Phnix House, as a full page black and white illustration opposite p.352. The illustration is labelled as a Flemish miniature, painted c.1500, [it] was used as a frontispiece for Volume I [sic] of the Works of Virgil . It illustrates in detail the four books of the 'Georgics'. (As there are apparently illustrations to the Eclogues too, I wonder if the Georgics illustration does actually belong to volume I.) (2) Grigson, Geoffrey (1981) 'The First Great Countryman? Virgil After 2,000 Years', Country Life October 29 , pp.1450-1452, and simply labelled as from a 15th-century Flemish manuscript. The back cover of the Penguin Classics Georgics states the Frontispiece to the Georgics from Holkham MS 311 Reproduced by courtesy of Viscount Coke D.L. (copyright Coke estates Ltd photograher J Lightfoot) The back cover of Lee's Penguin Eclogues says thatthe cover shows an illumination to the fifth Eclogue, from Holkham MS 307.[sic] Reproduced courtesy of Viscount Coke D.L. Copyright Coke estates Ltd Photographer J.Lightfoot. Unless this is an error (a number misprint?) it would seem that this illustration is not from Holkham MS 311. However an illustration of the First Eclogue from Holkham MS 311 appears in colour on the cover of : Barrell, John Bull, John (1982) The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse Harmondsworth: Penguin. The back cover says The cover shows a detail from a miniature in the frontispiece of the Eclogues of the Holkholm Virgil MS.311. Reproduced by kind permission of Lord Leicester and EP Microform Ltd. It is also reproduced in black and white in the Country Life article mentioned above where, although mislabelled as an illustration of the Georgics, it is likewise described as being from from a 15th-century Flemish manuscript . At a guess it would seem that Holkham MS 311 is in the library of one of the estates of the Earl of Leicester whose family name is Coke, and whose son would therefore be Viscount Coke. Best wishes, Peter J V Dennistoun Bryant [EMAIL PROTECTED] Perth Western Australia --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: versifier and grammatical rebel
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 11:11:41 +0100 From: Robert Dyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dear List, Thus sollicited!! M. Plantade and I have corresponded briefly privately, but that in no way impedes our response to the list. 1. Homer or all of those who wrote parts of the epics (whichever is the best way of looking at epics written squarely IN a tradition) used at least 2 cola (singular colon = limb) to compose one line. You can easily understand how oral poets composed words into metrical cola of the vaious formats that fit into one hexameter. It turns out that writing catalog poetry (lists of place names such as the big one at the end of Iliad II) is very easy if you follow the rules for turning long or short words into cola and fitting cola together into a hexameter line. The same is true for some lyric poems, such as Pindar, also. There is lots of scholarly literature on all this. The question addressed by Eduard Fraenkel was, Did the Roman poets such as Vergil and Horace compose by cola? There is dispute over this. As a loyal student of Fraenkel I believe they did, but Horace not always. Some of Vergil's cola are very interesting from a metrical point of view because Latin has a much stronger word stress than ancient Greek did. Both Vergil and Horace seem conscious of the conflict that arises in most Latin cola (= verse phrases) between their normal spoken word stresses (that MUST be observed in reading Latin poetry if you are not going to have nonsense) and the evident metrical patterns, which do in some poetry represent a musical pattern. Obviously the first person to raise this question on the list had a teacher in former days who read the poetry monotously (ignoring one or other of the underlying patterns, probably the word stress). 2. Here are some things to try. Open your Aeneid and read the last 5 syllables of every line you see in front of you, quickly one after another. If you know Latin word stress you will find the dum-di-di-dum-dum amusing and appalling. The beat of the verse on the first syllable of the fifth and sixth feet of the hexamer coincides with the natural Latin word stress of (normally) two consecutive words. Any hexameter line in Vergil that does not end this way is extraordinary and very interesting. In my terms the coincidence of word stress and metrical pattern at the end of the line is a resolution - the conflict in the metrical feet before it is replaced by something easy to read and indicating orally the end of the line. Some lines are full of coincidences and read in a flowing, easy way. Lines that have many different stresses and beats read much more slowly. If you read a long passage observing this difference in the resolution, as Derek Williams did, the flow of the passage becomes very interesting and far from monotonous. 3. Word order is a much more difficult question and I have never been sure how many people in the word agree with me, my teacher A.F. Wells, and his teacher Cyril Bailey (best known for the best edition of Lucretius). Latin has two systems in the clause, the sentence and the paragraph. One is the one we all learned at school and my twelve-year-old is being examined on in school as I write this (we spent last night revising). The four basic rules of Latin syntax are: Agreement a. The verb agrees with its subject; b. The adjective agrees with the noun it modifies. Governance c. The verb governs the case of its abject. d. The preposition governs its noun. Vergil must obey these rules to write Latin. But he and Horace use them in a sophisticated way to write Latin in a word order without any great logical organization but rather a word order dictated by metre and by a sort of painting which juxtaposes words to create visual or other associative images. In doing this they may well have seemed as shocking as Ezra Pound or James Joyce. I don't know. But their adjectives are often far from the nouns they agree with, verbs from subjects and objects. They also exploit the rules that a genitive noun goes with the nearest possible noun (Horace loves putting a genitive halfway between two possible nouns, creating ambiguity or rather a double use of one word) and that an adverb or adverbial phrase goes with the nearest possible verb. 4. Now let me stress something that you find rarely or never (please tell me places where it is written up, Maurice Cunningham and people in U.Kentucky have published and spoken on aspects of word order rules, but never synthetically, I believe - I cannot be the only heir of Wells and Bailey alive) in textbooks. LATIN DOES HAVE WORD ORDER RULES, not only in classical prose but in poets such as Catullus and Ovid. Therefore Latin, alongside the Tagalog and Caucasian families of languages, did have two dimensions of syntax (the grammar of agreement and governance and the logic of word order, beautifully taught in French schools but as a logic rather than a feature of syntax). It would
VIRGIL: 5-word hexameters
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura From: Tim Saunders [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 21:48:29 + I have been re-reading Aeneid 8.306-341 and was struck by the 6 instances of 5-word hexameters contained within this passage alone. Seeing that I could not entirely pin down quite why these instances seemed significant to me, I wondered whether anyone on the list had any thoughts on the significance (or otherwise) of the number of words that appear in any one line of Virgil? I THINK my attention to the 5-word hexameters in this passage was probably spurred by a dim recollection of Eclogue 2.24: AMPHION DIRCAEUS IN ACTAEO ARACYNTHO Clausen declares this to be a verse of the most precious Alexandrian sort. By this is he pointing solely to the learned allusions and the distintive rhythm of Actaeo Aracyntho - or do the number of words in the line have any part to play in this assessment? There is another notable line in the Eclogues (5.73): SALTANTIS SATYROS IMITABITUR ALPHESIBOEUS. Clausen remarks on this line that 4 word hexameters are rare in Virgil (he cites 7 other examples). So I suppose the more general question becomes: when does the number of words in a line become significant? Anyway, back to 5-word hexameters and the particular passage I had in mind, Aeneid 8.306-341. I can see that a line with 5 words in it can attain a certain symmetry (esp. in a Golden Line). As for instance in: 8.334: FORTUNA OMNIPOTENS ET INELUCTABILE FATUM and (esp if we read the variant Romano rather than Romani) 8.338: ET CARMENTALEM ROMANO NOMINE PORTAM and 8.341: AENEADAS MAGNOS ET NOBILE PALLANTEUM But is there any greater significance than the patterning of words here? And how about the other examples that do not display so obvious an ordering: 8.309: INGREDIENS UARIOQUE UIAM SERMONE LEUABAT. 8.312: EXQUIRITQUE AUDITQUE UIRUM MONIMENTA PRIORUM. 8.322: COMPOSUIT LEGESQUE DEDIT, LATIUMQUE UOCARI. I have to admit that my access to the usual reference books is rather limited at the moment, so I must apologise if some of these questions could readily be answered elsewhere. However, if this query sets off a more general discussion about Virgil's use of metre then it would have been worth it for that alone. Many thanks Tim Saunders --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Origin of Maro
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura
Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2001 16:30:02 +0800
From: Peter J Dennistoun Bryant [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Is the name 'Maro' Celtic, or does it have a long and respectable
history as a Roman name?
Patrick Roper
Apparently Maro has a meaning in Etruscan as a a word denoting an
Etruscan magistrate. W.F. Jackson Knight(p.56, Roman Vergil) speculates
that one of Virgil's ancestors held such an appointment. Larissa Bonfante
(EtruscanBMP,1990) gives the Etruscan form as maru and compares Umbrian
maron- and Latin maro.The appearance of the name in the Gododdin is
probably just as much a coincidence as its appearance in the Odyssey as
the name of a priest of Apollo.
However, Vergil's (or Virgil's)
nomen is, off course, Celtic; it is the same as the Irish name 'Feargal'
('bright/outstanding man').
Terry Walsh
It is not at all certain that Virgil's name is Celtic (in spite of
similarities to Vercingetorix etc): it may be Etruscan.
Best wishes
Peter J Dennistoun Bryant
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Perth
Western Australia
---
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Re: VIRGIL: Anthrax
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 00:02:01 +0200 From: Robert Dyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] John Geyssen a écrit : Probably so named because of his lack of cooking skills since anthrax means charcoal in Greek. jg That is the reason why the French name for the disease is charbon (charcoal). In ancient Greek medical writings 'anthrax' is applied to malignant, dark pustules, perhaps those of any fatal disease, although the modern symptoms of the skin infection of the disease anthrax are indeed charcoal-colored pustules at the point of entry. Modern encyclopedias say that the disease owes its name to the black color of the organs of animals and humans killed by this bacterium, whose scientific name is Bacillus anthracis. According to these encyclopedias, the disease known by this name was identified in the 18th Century, and Pasteur was the first to vaccinate against it. In the Georgics, Vergil describes a plague that destroys the cattle of the hard-working farmer, thus destroying the fruit of all his labor (3.478-566). The reason to believe that this plague is anthrax comes from lines 507-508, where Vergil adds to the description on which the passage is based (Nicander, Theriaca 301-2) that the blood issuing from the dying horse's nostrils is ater 'black'. Black blood appears an echo of the term anthrax. This would then suggest that ancient medical observation correctly identified charcoal-colored organs and blood of dead animals as symptoms of this particular plague. This cannot be taken as certain proof that ancient doctors, and Vergil, understood the characteristics of the plague now known as anthrax, but I accept it as plausible. I have always taught that the disease descibed in the Georgics is probably anthrax, a disease that struck cattle on the farms where I grew up in Northland, New Zealand, and indeed is accurately described by Vergil. Robert R. Dyer Paris, France Here is the poet Cecil Day Lewis's translation of some of the passage: The horse, a prize-winner once, takes no more pride in his paces, Forgets the grass, turns awy from water, keeps on stamping The ground; sweat comes and goes on his dejected ears-- A cold sweat meaning death. The hide feels dry if you stroke him, stubborn and harsh to the touch. Such are the earlier signs he gives of a mortal sickness. But when the disease begins to reach a deadlier stage, The eyes are inflamed, the breath comes deep and dragging, broken By heavy groans, the long flanks heave with profound sobs, Out of the nostrils oozes Black blood, the tongue is rough and swells in the throat and blocks it Watch that bull, steaming from the weight of the iron coulter! He drops in his tracks, his mouth drools with bloody foam, A last groan lifts to heaven. Sadly the ploughman goes To unyoke the bullock mourning his butty's death... Slowly the neck droops dispirited to the ground. He toiled for us and served us, he turned the difficult earth With the plough,-- and what does it profit him? --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Anthrax
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 13:34:05 -0400 From: Jim O'Hara [EMAIL PROTECTED] Salmon, Leigh Anne wrote: Please help. I am to give a lecture on Anthrax this week. In doing my research, I discovered that Virgil had referenced this disease in his works. I would love someone to point out the passage, or provide me with a translation of the passage for use in my lecture. On the abc website at http://abcnews.go.com/sections/living/DailyNews/011009_Living_Anthrax_Book.h tml (mind the wrap if you paste this) there is an excerpt from a book that suggests that the cattle plague in the third book of Vergil's Georgics was anthrax (I think Vergil just calls it scabies or scab). They even quote two passages. The Vergilian passage is very literary with lots of debts to, e.g. the description of the plague at Athens in Lucretius -- Jim O'Hara Paddison Professor of Latin 206B Howell Hall phone: (919) 962-7649 fax: (919) 962-4036 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www: http://www.unc.edu/~oharaj surface mail: James J. O'Hara Department of Classics CB# 3145, 101 Howell Hall The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3145 --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Anthrax
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2001 13:42:09 -0400 From: Jim O'Hara [EMAIL PROTECTED] More: apparently the idea that Vergil was talking about anthrax appears in the first paragraph of a lot of articles about anthrax See also Dirckx JH. Virgil on anthrax. Am J Dermatopathol. 1981:3:191195. [non vidi!!] Some people even think the Plague at Athens might have been anthrax, but there are lots of theories about that one. -- Jim O'Hara Paddison Professor of Latin 206B Howell Hall phone: (919) 962-7649 fax: (919) 962-4036 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www: http://www.unc.edu/~oharaj surface mail: James J. O'Hara Department of Classics CB# 3145, 101 Howell Hall The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3145 --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: why Virgil wanted to burn his poem
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 08:58:40 -0400 From: Jim O'Hara [EMAIL PROTECTED] Patrick Roper is doubly right here, first in observing that it might well have been that Vergil wanted the Aeneid destroyed because he wasn't satisfied with it, and second in asking the crucial question do we know this is what Virgil thought? The answer is no, there is no evidence about this, so one person's conjecture is as good as another's. For novelist's Hermann Broch's idea, that the dying Vergil wanted to keep the manuscript out of the hands of Augustus (also pure conjecture), see now Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception, pp. 53-54. There is so much bad biographical information about Vergil that is taken to be fact, much of it based on ancient guess or specualtion, that it's important that we always label modern specualtion correctly -- Jim O'Hara Paddison Professor of Latin 206B Howell Hall phone: (919) 962-7649 fax: (919) 962-4036 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www: http://www.unc.edu/~oharaj surface mail: James J. O'Hara Department of Classics CB# 3145, 101 Howell Hall The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3145 --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: [translations]
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 10:50:25 -0400 From: Jim O'Hara [EMAIL PROTECTED] The discussions of the translations of Dido and others are informative and fascinating. But many of the comments seem to depend on a view of great poetry that focuses only on the sublimity of the diction, which is said to be the poem's beauty. Many others might suggest that there has always been a lot more to poetry, including that of Vergil, than just beauty, and so translators of Vergil who have been inspired by him to produce a thing of beauty that rather loosely resembles his poem may have done a great and worthy thing, but they err and deceive it calling what they done Virgil's Aeneid (instead of doing what, for example, Seamus Heaney does by calling his play The Cure at Troy) Countless English-speaking readers have read Dryden's poem, and thought they were being exposed not only to the sublimity, but also to the contents, of Vergil's poem, and thus have imbibed Dryden's view of Aeneas, Augustus, Dido, and Turnus when they thought they were getting Vergil's. Many have these have even trotted through the Latin text, where either their own or their teachers' exposure (first hand or as a generational heritage) to the Vergil (or Virgil) of translators helped shape their response to the Latin. When I teach Vergil or other Latin poets in English, I never suggest to my students that their experience with the language of the translation could ever remotely approach the experience of reading the Latin. I tell them what I can about the Latin, and that poet X or Y is worth learning Latin for. For translations I just want something that reads smoothly today, and contains as much of the content as possible. Notes would be nice too: I'd like a modern Aeneid translation with modern notes, such as exist for most other Latin poets together (albeit for translations that lovers of English verse would find tedious). Good demonstration of the problems with Dryden and other in Richard Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan reception. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2001. Chapters 4 and 5. Hey, new address below. I've just tried to unsubscribe the old one and subscribe under this one. Hope it workeed. -- Jim O´Hara Paddison Professor of Latin 206B Howell Hall (919) 962-7649 fax: (919) 962-4036 [EMAIL PROTECTED] James J. O´Hara Department of Classics CB# 3145, 101 Howell Hall The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3145 --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Donatus translation
This on a somewhat personal note. My department's request for a tenure-track position in my area was refused a few months ago, so I'm going back on the job market in the fall and updating my C.V. If any of you have used my Donatus translation in the classroom or cited it in an article that has been accepted for publication, please let me know _privately_, at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you. I remain Yours faithfully, David Wilson-Okamura --- Dr. David Wilson-Okamura(651) 696-6643 [EMAIL PROTECTED] English Dept., Macalester College, 1600 Grand Ave., St. Paul, MN 55105 --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Murgia on date of Servius (notes from recent conf. paper)
This year at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (3 May 2001), C. E. Murgia (Univ. of California, Berkeley) gave what I thought was a very persuasive talk on the date of Servius. No doubt this material will appear in print at some point, but as it has a direct bearing on the research of some list members, I offer a summary of his argument below: - Aelius Donatus preserved the wording of his sources (judging from the extant fragments), so his tenses are not especially useful for attesting contemporary practice. Servius and Tiberius Claudius, by contrast, do seem to alter verb tenses (e.g., from present to past). - This is important, because Servius writes about pagan sacrificial practice in the past tense -- i.e., we can date his commentary to _after_ the suppression of pagan sacrifice. - Murgia suggests, therefore, that a good guess for the date of the Servius commentary would be the first decade of the fifth century: after the suppression of pagan sacrifice, but before the sack of Rome (in 410). This last bit follows because Servius _does_ refer to the Goths and their depradations, but does not mention the sack of Rome, and says things that would seem odd coming from someone who knew about it. Murgia settles, therefore, on a date somewhere between 400 and 410, probably closer to 410 than 400; so...around 410! Greg, I hope you'll correct me here if I got any of this wrong. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Turnus ~ Mark Antony?
While getting up a lecture on Shakespeare's _Antony and Cleopatra_ a month or so ago, I happened to notice that there are several references to a duel between Antony and Octavian. The duel never comes off, of course, but according to Plutarch (Shakespeare's primary source for the play), Mark Anthony _did_ challenge Octavian to single combat before the battle of Actium. My question is this: could this challenge have some bearing on the single combat at the end of the Aeneid? Is Turnus, in some sense, Mark Anthony? Servius mentions Mark Anthony several times in his commentary; at no point, however, does he suggest (and now I'm getting to my real point) that Mark Anthony = Turnus. Which, I suppose, shows that Servius wasn't totally crackers. But what do you think? If you buy into the idea that there is _some_ historical allegory in the Aeneid, might not the duel with Turnus represent a climactic moment in the career of Augustus? If so, which one? Anthony's defeat at Actium? Or has Virgil taken it upon himself to represent Actium in such a way as to give Octavian credit for the duel that never fought, as if to say, he could have done it, even though he didn't? One other point in favor of the loose Anthony = Turnus equation I'm proposing here: they are both very sexy, very romantic, and very doomed. I am not suggesting that the duel can't be other things as well (including itself). I don't think we should be put off, though, by the idea that Virgil might be using a single combat to represent a battle that was actually fought by large armies or navies. Think, for instance, of the battle between Prince Arthur and the Souldan in Faerie Queene book 5: in the fiction of the poem, it's just two guys fighting; but it's also a transparent allegory for the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Did Spenser get the idea from the end of the Aeneid? That's harder to say, though Michael O'Connell (in Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's Faerie Queene) has argued persuasively, I think, that Spenser's historical allegory is modeled on the practice of Virgil as expounded by Servius... But I've gone on far too long. What think ye? --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: pavit qui genuit
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 22:37:46 + From: Leofranc Holford-Strevens [EMAIL PROTECTED] Carissimi Mantovani, Randi Ellevik asked me either to answer a question, or to post it to the list, which her computer for technical reasons refuses to let her do. (David, will you unsubscribe her so that she can resubscribe under another name?) I expected to answer the question, but found I could not do; I am therefore posting it. It is this: what is the source of the hemistich pavit qui genuit which I have been unable to find on either the PHI5 Latin or the CETEDOC databases? I do not know whether pauit means 'feared' or 'fed': St Ambrose, in his commentary on St Luke, writes 'nonne te ipse genuit, nonne ipse te pauit?' However, I am sure I have encountered 'paruit qui genuit' in a hymn or sequence (obviously in syllabo-clausular or syllabic _rhythmus_, not quantitative metre), I think meaning 'She bore Him who begot', i.e. the Virgin Mary bore God the Son, who is one with God the Father', rather than 'He [God the Son] obeyed who begot', though this too would make sense. Leofranc *_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_* Leofranc Holford-Strevens 67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone Oxford scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter? OX2 6EJ tel. +44 (0)1865 552808(home)/267865(work) fax +44 (0)1865 512237 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) *_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_* --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Studia Homerica
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2000 03:05:48 -0800 From: Federico Boschetti [EMAIL PROTECTED] Apologies for crossposting... but I guess the members of your group could be interested in homeric topics. Two references: http://altaseek.com/cgi-bin/directory.pl?p=/Arts/Literature/Authors/H/Homer An archive of homeric resources and http://www.egroups.com/group/epapeironaponton;http://www.egroups.com/group/ epapeironaponton A forum about Homer We'll enjoy if you visit it and sign up! Thank you and best regards Federico Boschetti [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Virgil's tomb; archaeology
This morning I rec'd the following query: From an archeological perspective I am trying to find a book/literature that physically describes/shows pictures etc. of Virgil's tomb at Naples. Can you offer any advice? I remember seeing some very old photos of the Scuola di Virgilio (actually a rock formation on the coast) in a book a couple years ago, but don't remember the context (Virgil and Horace, I think), or whether the author had anything on la tomba. Comparetti (in the English trans., 276-77 n. 44) has this to say: It is much to be regretted that no serious archaeological researches should ever as yet have been made in the neighborhood of the poet's grave. The traditional site is generally discredited, but the unimportant work of PEIGNOT, _Recherches sur le tombeau de Virgile_ (Dijon, 1840), cannot be said to have proved the point. COCCHIA, _La tomba di Virgilio, contributo alla topografia dell' antica citta\ di Napoli, Turin (Loescher), 1889, maintains that the grave is exactly at the spot where tradition places it, at the mouth of the Grotto at Pozzuoli. The account in the ancient biography is precise and perfectly worthy of credit, and might serve to point out the spot for the excavations when the exact position of the second milestone on the Via Puteolana has been ascertained by a careful study of the topography of ancient Naples. COCCHIA maintains that this condition is fulfilled by the grave in question, and it would certainly be difficult to prove positively that htis was not Vergil's grave or to account for the ancient tradition which described it as such. This, however, was written in 1896. Surely there is something more recent. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: revised bibliography kludge
It's been about a year since I posted the last major revisions to the online bibliography Virgil in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. I'm not quite ready to render all the new material into HTML (removing frames while I'm at it), but I do have a working draft of the whole thing online now at http://virgil.org/bibliography/current.pdf It's in Portable Document Format (PDF), so you'll need Adobe Acrobat to view it (free to download at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html). As always, thanks to the many people who have contributed items, especially to Otfried Lieberknecht, Helen Conrad-O'Briain, and Gert de Ceukelaire. For those with slow (or expensive) connections: it's not small (68 pages/191 kilobytes). --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: A question (end of thread)
At 06:25 PM 1/23/00 PST, Raquel L wrote: I'm sorry I was curious, but do you know a girl by the name of Amber Skallerud who went to Mission Viejo High School? This question doesn't really belong on the Virgil discussion group. Please respond privately, to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not to the mailing list. (In other words, if you have something to say, DON'T hit reply.) David Wilson-Okamura Listowner, Mantovano --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Creusa's demise
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 11:59:05 -0600 (CST) From: RANDI C ELDEVIK [EMAIL PROTECTED] I really can't agree that Aeneas is callous and uncaring about Creusa's demise. Look at the pertinent passage: his emotional reaction is intense! It has always been very moving to me. Notice that when Creusa's ghost appears, it has to order him not to grieve insanely and to go on with life. As he is leaving the city, Aeneas does not yet know all the details of the destiny the gods have in store for him, and he has been given no reason to believe that Creusa cannot be part of his new life elsewhere. Therefore he has _not_ begun to emotionally separate from her as he leaves Troy. That is a fallacious reading. He is determined to do all he can to recover Creusa and bring her along; only with proof of her death does he give up the effort. What bothers people, I think, is that Aeneas doesn't hold her by the hand. Well, Anchises is so feeble that he has to be carried, and Ascanius is just a little kid. Call it patriarchy and disparagement of women's importance if you will, but I call it mere practicality. Randi Eldevik Oklahoma State University --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Creusa's demise
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura From: ddavis-henry [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2000 22:08:52 -0500 Creusa's separation from her family towards the end of book II is tough for me to accept and to teach. I readily understand why her elimination from the storyline is necessary (to work in Dido and then Lavinia) but did Vergil not have the time to treat this episode more compassionately or at least with a few more details to make us feel that Aeneas had some concern for her at one of the most terrifying moments of their lives together? His regard for his father and son are exemplary but what about his beloved wife? At line 673 and ff. Creusa is clinging to Aeneas' feet and holding up their small son, imploring Aeneas to take them both back with him on his mission of death (si periturus abis, et nos rape in omnia tecum, II 675). She then reminds him of his responsibility to protect his own home first and poignantly asks 'to whom will little Iulus be left, to whom will Anchises be left' and finally she asks in 1st person 'TO WHOM AM I WHO WAS ONCE CALLED YOU WIFE TO BE LEFT?' The good omens of Iulus' fiery hair and the comet ending on Mt. Ida follow. Then at 706 and following, our hero states his strategy for escaping the burning city and rendezvousing at the temple of Ceres. Anchises will be on his shoulders, Iulus will be his companion and as for Creusa, et longe servet vestigia conjunx : and let my wife observe our footprints from afar! It's hard to imagine that Creusa, who moments before had exploded with emotion at being left by Aeneas, now tacitly agrees to be parted from her husband and her only son and to make her way at a distance from them through a night filled with murder and mayhem! The scene makes me uncomfortable with Aeneas once again: though he goes through hell to find her once he realizes she is lost, his concern for her came too late.It would be great to hear what others think about this scene. D.D-Henry, Columbus, Ohio --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Creusa's demise
At 12:25 PM 1/13/00 -0500, Christine Perkell wrote: Since Aeneas is carrying his father, who in turn holds the household gods, and is holding his son by the hand, you can hardly argue that Aeneas entrusts Creusa with everything important to him! Quite the opposite! He is in physical contact with what is important to him (as he conceives it) and to his mission = the state which he will found. Good point about the penates. What I had in mind when I said everything that is important to him was the gens Aeneida that Aeneas leads to Latium in bks. 3-7. The way I imagine it, it's not just the four of them (Aeneas, Anchises, Ascanius, and Creusa) that are high-tailing it out of Troy; in addition to his family, Aeneas apparently takes with him a number of unnamed socii (mentioned in 2.748, 795, and not to be confused with the comites noui who show up later, while Aeneas is searching Troy for Creusa; see line 796). This, to my mind, is the only way to make sense of longe (from afar) in 2.711 (et longe servet vestigia conjunx): Creusa is not dawdling (as my father used to say when we were kids), she is bringing up the rear of a LONG train of people, some of whom are presumably carrying treasure and stuff, rescued from Aeneas's house. Naturally the penates travel at the head of this convoy, but Aeneas is moving a household, not just household gods here. (Someone will probably ask, Where do you get rescued treasure? From Aen. 1.119, where the narrator describes troia gaza floating in the sea after the store, and 1.679, where Achates goes back to the ships to fetch dona...flammis restantia Troiae for Dido. Virgil doesn't say how the treasure got from Troy to the ships in the first place, but I think we can assume it didn't get there by magic.) --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: apologies; no adult web site ads
The spamsters have done it again, for which I apologize to you all. If it's any consolation, we probably get two or three attempts to spam the list every day; the adult webmaster ad was fortunately an exception that somehow got through. Yours faithfully, David Wilson-Okamura Listowner, Mantovano --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: The Aeneid vs De Rerum Natura
At 03:27 PM 12/10/99 PST, you wrote: I am doing a very short paper comparing Lucretius' De Rerum Natura with another classical author's work. Do you have any suggestions as to comparisons of the Aeneid and De Rerum Natura or sources of information? Why not compare Virgil's plague scene in the Georgics with that at the end of Lucretius? --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://geoffreychaucer.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Chaucer: An Annotated Guide to Online Resources --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Is The Aeneid Finished, Or Just Done?
At 04:00 PM 12/9/99 -0500, matthewspencer wrote: maybe i am just dumb. entirely conceivable, in fact i am almost sure of it. i need to read the aeneid again. perhaps over break. i am tired, bye. Don't give up, Matthew! Regroup and reformulate! --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://geoffreychaucer.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Chaucer: An Annotated Guide to Online Resources --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Shield in book eight = dualism
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura From: Michael-janck Snydert [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 09 Dec 1999 17:58:38 UZT Everything mirrors opposites, not to sound rambling or discouraging, but infinity does exist - to quote the saying: we must repeat. Perhaps not enough focus has ever been given - aside from eccentrics like Joyce and Carrol (Vergil?)- to mirrors. But repeat-reflect - a mirror reflection is not accurate, but a flipped/horizontal of that which is looking into it. If one is going to start talking mirrors at a book, one then takes into account the reader, following basic causality, albeit possibly unconsciously. This is so ingrained in people, the dislike of infinity, that they create things like religion, or at least utilize said things, to hide from it. I heard someone once call it one of those rambling things one will never know. But its not that hard to think about. The humunculus psyche (which of course is greek for mirror) can say nothing that isn't a description of itself, even if flipped horizontally. Why can't things be straight forward extreme? I don't know, but the universe doesn't seem designed that way. Only humans dislike camoflouge (or do they?). Jerzy Kosinski made a good point when after killing someone, the difference betwixt the action and memory saved his heart from exploding. As long as people huddle together in groups, they can be labeled American or French; otherwise, can one person really represent a country? If a country, why not a region? and if a region, why not a town? And why not make towns their own seperate countries? If you live in New York for a while, you begin to forget where you are, becoming only dimply aware that you are in some giant metroplitan area on earth. But in L.A., everyone thinks and says they are on the WEST COAST in L.A. inside whatever VALLEY or SANTA MONICA, even if they grew up there. The saying goes if you aint from new york ya soft. I geuss one has to be tough to live without the security of mirrors and extensions (of the nervous system). But most of history can be explained through technology and the looking glass, an oculus of the flesh. It may be that the writer of that Aeneas has only done such a good characterization, that his model accidentally has human qualities. Or he may have known. One can't really ask him can one? --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Is The Aeneid Finished, Or Just Done?
At 12:27 PM 12/9/99 -0500, matthewspencer wrote: but to me, although the poem might end abruptly, compared to its predecessors, i am not sure how else the aeneid *could* have ended. i do not think that anybody disagrees that aeneas is greatly changed by the end, specifically in terms of how his own passions influence him. to end the poem with some allussion that creates a more perfect whole, which is i think what you want, that features aeneas not in the midst of passion, must become artificial. A few notes: 1. I'm not convinced that Aeneas has really changed over the course of the poem, at least not on the score of passion. Look, for instance, at the way Aeneas uses amens to describe himself in his account of the fall of Troy in Aen. 2 A 2.314 Arma amens capio; nec sat rationis in armis, A 2.745 Quem non incusaui amens hominumque deorumque, 2. An Aeneid that ends differently is not, at least was not, unthinkable. To my knowledge, there have been at least four different attempts to rewrite the ending or finish the poem. For more info and translations of two of them, see http://virgil.org/translations/ 3. What does it mean to call something in a poem artificial? Isn't it all artificial? To quote something from an Amazon ad I saw once, Some people say life is the thing, but I prefer books. This is an exaggeration (I hope), but one of the great things about art is that it gives us things life can't -- at least not in one lifetime. Or as Sidney puts it: Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much lovely earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://geoffreychaucer.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Chaucer: An Annotated Guide to Online Resources --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Is The Aeneid Finished, Or Just Done?
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura From: Timothy Mallon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 09 Dec 1999 10:22:36 PST It is interesting that the _Iliad_ ends with a reflection: the last element of the last word -damos is an adjective related to _damazein_ a word frequently used in the sense of slay (literally: subdue/overcome/tame). So the horse tamer is himself the tamed. But as Achilles knows, he too is fated to die (and so informed). The _Iliad_'s implications are more death and disaster, some of which is incorporated into the _Aeneid_. The _Odyssey_ follows a trajectory whose completion is a kind of rest; reunion and restored order. The _Aeneid_ can't end on either of these. There is no rest for Aeneas or for Italy (and indeed the Odyssean part of the _Aeneid_ ends only to launch the Iliadic); nor perhaps would Virgil wish to taint his vision of Rome with the _Iliad_'s insistence on the almost vegetative cyclicity of human life, rot and decay. He wants to initiate and imply a grand sweep rather than a cycle. But the pessimism of the Iliadic vision which informs the end of the _Aeneid_ undercuts this. --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: Shield in book eight
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura From: Timothy Mallon [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 11:09:51 PST Remember though, that the *Homeric* Odysseus (presumably the one whom Aeneas shadows in the first half of the A.) is neither bad nor unwise. The idea of a character having to change to keep aligned with a structure seems at first blush at odds with how a writer would conceive of the character. It is better to describe the first half of the A. as Odyssean in situation or pattern, the latter as Iliadic. Aeneas is the same man throughout, placed in different quandaries. The difference between Aeneas and Achilles is usually emphasized, on the grounds that V. envisages that Rome will escape the kind of destruction that caps human achievement in the _Iliad_, but I can't see much reason for developing the Achilles/Hector ~ Aeneas/Turnus analogy, other than as bringing forward a fundamental likeness. Had V. wished to emphasize dissimilarity, he could have set the A.'s narrative frame a little later: Iliad-style furor and conquest followed by the renewal of Italy. As it stands, the A. seems to me to emphasize the notion of repetition or reprise of situations and roles in different places and by different men. *** ecce non curo nec resisto nec reprehendo Augustinus, Confessiones, lib. XI cap. xx -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 1999 10:10 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: VIRGIL: Shield in book eight content snipped the first half of Aeneis is an Odyssee (or an Anti-Odyssee); the second half is an Ilias (or an Anti-Ilias); so in the first half Aeneas is experienced, polytropos like Odysseus, but in a good and wise form, because he is an Anti-Odysseus there; for the second half he has to change his character, because he becomes to be an Achilleus (or Anti-Achilleus), stepping though blood like an old Greek hero of the Ilias. the terrible heroic end of these lines show accuratly that the poem has not become ready. that is not the end of an epos, but an interruption, a brutal one. Aeneis is a fragment. grusz, hansz --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Visual of the shield
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 16:16:13 -0600 (CST) From: Rich Guerra [EMAIL PROTECTED] I think actually looking upon a visual representation of the shield would help me understand it's significance. Does anyone know of a book or internet site that contains this?? Rich --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Is The Aeneid Finished, Or Just Done?
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura From: Paul O. Wendland [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 17:53:27 -0600 A better place to start from if you want to look for reflections of Aeneas' character in dying Turnus is the nice parallel between Turnus' limbs being undone by cold here (solvuntur frigore membra), and Aeneas' limbs being undone by cold the very first time he appears by name in the epic, in 1.92: extemplo Aeneae solvuntur frigore membra Also a pretty typical case of inclusio--backing out of a piece the same way you came in--that may be some evidence indicating the work was not half so unfinished as Virgil thought it was. What was it Hemingway once said? I never so much *finished* a book as I *abandoned* it. Paul O. Wendland [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Shield in book eight
message forwarded by listowner, David Wilson-Okamura Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 14:07:32 -0600 (CST) From: BBsuperstar [EMAIL PROTECTED] I do not see the reason for Virgil including the images of the shield in his work. I don't think this flows well with the rest of the poem and It seems to be almost a distraction. His reaction to the shield seems that of a child playing with a toy for the first time,,I have no idea what his reaction signifies. Can someone shed light.. Rich --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Aeneid and Odyssey
message forwarded by listowner Date: Fri, 03 Dec 1999 22:54:42 -0800 From: Jeff Hiatt [EMAIL PROTECTED] I am looking for precise information on similarities between The Aeneid and The Odyssey. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Aeneid and Odyssey
At 10:37 PM 12/3/99 -0800, Jeff Hiatt wrote: I am looking for precise information on similarities between The Aened and The Odyssey. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you Try Knauer, Georg Nicolaus. Die Aeneis und Homer: Studien zur poetischen Technik Vergils, mit Listen der Homerzitate in der Aeneis. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck Ruprecht, 1964. This will provide very precise information on the many parallels between Homer and Virgil, and you don't need German to use it. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://geoffreychaucer.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Chaucer: An Annotated Guide to Online Resources --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: thank you
Dear Jim, Wanted to offer belated thanks for your long note on the Ille ego... lines. (I only just now got around to filing the printout.) Yours faithfully, David --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Funeral Games
At 10:29 PM 11/18/99 EST, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: what do you feel about the tie ins between Homer and Virgil, concerning the Funeral Games? (Iliad, book 23 and Aeneid book 5) This is a fine question, but if you're going to change the subject you need to change the subject header. That's just courtesy. --- David Wilson-Okamurahttp://virgil.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Macalester College Virgil Tradition: discussion, bibliography, c. --- --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
Re: VIRGIL: vantage on murders in Aen. 2
message forwarded by listowner Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 07:51:17 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time) From: Donald Connor [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aeneas says in 2.458 that he has climbed to the roof of Priam's palace, from which vantage point he has a view of the events unfolding before him. As he emphasizes in 2.499 (picking up his assertion in 2.5), he was an eyewitness to the fall of Troy. I don't think that Vergil or Aeneas imagined being cross-examined by a lawyer as to what he actually did see and what he heard from others. Vergil's purposes are of course different from Aeneas', and here I believe the emphasis is on pathos and on the transfer of power from the line of the family represented by Priam to that represented by Anchises and his divinely-born son. Along with the problem of how Aeneas saw what he claims goes the sight of Priam's body lying on the shore, headless and some distance from the city. Unless Aeneas had binoculars with night vision, one must examine why Aeneas and Vergil include this detail. Donald Connor Trinity School New York City --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: vantage on murders in Aen. 2
forwarded by listowner From: ddavis-henry [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 22:04:12 -0500 I am just about to begin Book II of the Aeneid with my seniors and I am never comfortable with Aeneas describing the death of Polites and Priam, at the hands of Pyrrhus: what is his (Aeneas') vantage point supposed to be during these murders, i.e. how can he see everything yet be powerless to intervene? I would appreciate any input on this issue. Denise D-Henry, Watterson HS --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Re: VERGIL: lost verses
message forwarded by listowner Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 14:04:38 -0800 From: Gregory Hays [EMAIL PROTECTED] These are the notorious verses alleged by Donatus and Servius to have been removed from the beginning of the Aeneid by its first editors: Ille ego qui quondam gracili modulatus auena carmen, et egressus siluis uicina coegi ut quamuis auido parerent arua colonis gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis It must be ages since any half-decent critic has believed in them; the likeliest explanation is that they were written above an author-portrait in an early manuscript. The standard discussion is R.G. Austin, Ille ego qui quondam ..., _Classical Quarterly_ n.s. 18 (1968), 107-115; cf. also G.P. Goold, Servius and the Helen Episode in S. Harrison, ed. _Oxford Readings in Virgil's Aeneid_, 85ff. (Though agreeing that they're bogus, Goold describes the lines as stupendous). ++ Gregory Hays Dept. of Classics, 401 Cabell Hall University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 http://members.aol.com/greghays --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Gender in the Georgics
message forwarded by listowner From: Ika Willis [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I am currently researching a paper on gender issues in the Georgics, looking especially at the 'laus ruris' in book 2 where the farmer has a disconcertingly disembodied wife (referred to as 'domus'/'home' rather than 'woman'/'wife'/etc) and at the Aristaeus- Orpheus epyllion where women suddenly come from all over the place to control the narrative - they rewrite myth (the nymph singing about Venus' *successful* affair with Mars) and it is Aristaeus' mother who sets everything in motion. This can perhaps be linked with ideas about the tension between Vergil's praise of the rural life v. his actual practice as an (urban? - certainly involved in city politics) poet, or ideas about the repression of 'the Greek' (and linked concepts - art, effeminacy etc) in the ideal hard-Roman life praised in the Georgics... This is all extremely simplistic, obviously. But if anyone can recommend any reading for me, or has any comments or suggestions about the issue, please get in touch. Cheers! --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
VIRGIL: Latin and 12 year olds
message forwarded by listowner From: Jameel Jesani [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 20:00:48 - Dear all, I am a Classics graduate faced with a challenge. I have recently agreed = to tutor some very bright 12 year olds in Latin in order to boost = scholarship opportunities at various schools in GB. The reason their = parents have sought outside help is that Latin at school has not proved = appealing enough! My job would be to enthuse as well as to edify. Do = any of the mantovani have any experience in teaching this age group or = have any ideas which might serve to catch the attention of a bunch of = kids convinced that Latin is uncool? I have only a handful of ruses but = I think I'm going to need a whole lot more. Thanks=20 Jameel Jesani --- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message unsubscribe mantovano in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
