Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Will the typos never cease?

Gregory Mellen, who attended the class I taught last summer at the Leiden IE Summer School and is now studying at Oxford, alerts me to the following typos/mistakes:

On pg. 246 fn. 22, in the quote from Aul. Gell. 13.21, read insubidius for insupidius
  
Incidentally, Aulus Gellius is almost our sole source for information on this adjective and its apparent family.  At 19.9.11 Antonius Iulianus quotes some erotic verses of a certain Valerius Aedituus:

Dicere cum conor curam tibi, Pamphila, cordis,
  Quid mi aps te quaeram? verba labris abeunt,
Per pectus manat subito subido mihi sudor
  Sic tacitus, subidus, dum pudeo, pereo.

When, Pamphila, I try to tell my love,
What shall I ask of you?  Words fail my lips,
A sudden sweat o'erflows my ardent breast;
Thus fond and silent, I refrain and die. 
[Translation  John C. Rolfe, Loeb edition]

Aside from this passage with two instance of subidus, Aulus Gellius uses insubidus  (also Aul. Gell. 7.1.2 ("nihil est prorsus istis," inquit, "insubidius,") 12.2.11 (inepti et insubidi hominis), 18.8.1 (quam sint insubida et inertia), 19.9.9 (tamquam vastos quosdam et insubidos)) and its adverb insubide (Aul. Gel. 1.2.4 (intempestive atque insubide)) multiple times. The only other example I've been able to find outside of Gellius is Lampridius Vit. Commod. 47 (= Scr. hist. Aug. 1.99.8) fuit vultu insubido ut ebriosi solent.

The adjective subidus is usually related to the verb subō, -āre 'be in heat', but I have to say that if subidus means 'horny'  it contrast rather oddly with the apparently restrained tone of the poem. But perhaps that is the point. In any case the negated forms to judge from context mean 'foolish' or 'lame' (in the modern metaphorical sense).  The semantic are also odd 'not-horny' > 'foolish' and perhaps a partial semantic contamination with the family of sapiō is responsible.

In that same footnote change Varro (L. 8.67) to Varro (L. 8.66).

On pg. 474 B. 2 for praetor read pretor.  

The point of the the Lucilius line is the monophthongization of the diphthong ae in both the name of the office and the office-seeker.  The complete line Cecilius pretor ne rusticus fiat is put together from two quotations: one by the grammarian Diomedes (Keil 1.452.17–18) omits the name Cecilius and specifically comments on the fact that the letter a was removed from the word pretor (detracta littera a); the other from Varro L. 7.96 omits the word praetor but transmits the name Cecilius in the ms. F (Codex Florentinus, 11th cent.) and here to0 the context is about the variation between  ae and e.  All in all there is no doubt that the line should read Cecilius pretor ne rusticus fiat.

More corrections to come in a subsequent post.

No comments:

Post a Comment