Search

Search Results

• The early reception of the inconsistency between the two Palinurus episodes in Virgil’s Aeneid

  21–42.

  Dániel Kozák

  Views:

  70

  The paper investigates how ancient commentators and Roman poets recognized and reacted to the inconsistency between the two Palinurus episodes in Virgil’s Aeneid (5,833-871 and 6,337-383). First, I discuss how Servius and Tiberius Claudius Donatus, in their notes on 6,348, remove the inconsistency (regarding divine intervention) by assuming a punctuation different from the one adopted by all modern editors; however, while doing so, they both give rise to another inconsistency between Aeneas’ question and Palinurus’ answer. Second, I examine a passage from Statius’ biography of his father (Silvae 5,3,124–132), where the poet alludes to the Virgilian story apparently according to the version we read in Aeneid 6, but also creatively reproduces some elements of the Virgilian inconsistency. The last text discussed is Ovid’s Remedia amoris, where the poet recalls his vision of Amor Lethaeus at the temple of Venus Erycina; here again, elements of the Virgilian inconsistency are reproduced.

• Mala bestia foras dato. Spelling mistakes and loan phrases as means of interpretation of a Latin magical text

  37–48

  Andrea Barta

  Views:

  687

  In 1911, Auguste Audollent received a lead tablet with a Latin inscription on both sides coming from North Africa. It was lying almost undetected and forgotten for nearly one hundred years until the Hungarian visiting professor György Németh rediscovered it in the storage room of the Musée Bargoin in Clermont-Ferrand, France. The recently finished complete reading of the text and its commentary will be published soon by Gy. Németh and the author of the present paper. This article aims to consider all the word forms and phrases of the tablet which differ from the Latin standard in order to look for an answer if the target, the context and the sources can be identified with the help of linguistic tools.

• The Question of Life and Death by Cicero and Macrobius

  31–41

  Orsolya Tóth

  Views:

  190

  To Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis Macrobius prepared a Neoplatonic commentary in Late Antiquity. On the grounds of these two works and Cicero’s other political or philosophical writings and letters this study seeks an answer to the question what similarities and differences can be demonstrated between the two authors’ way of thinking as regards the nature of the virtues, the issue of vita activa and vita contemplativa, the meaning of life and the necessity of voluntary death.