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Les professions de foi de Gerbert, pape Sylvestre II
207–215Views:43Sont étudiées, outre la profession de foi religieuse explicite prononcée par Gerbert lors de son accession au siège archiépiscopal de Reims en 991, toutes les professions de foi implicites et reconstituées qui ont jalonné son existence de philosophe, de savant, de penseur politique, d’érudit et de serviteur de l’Église universelle. Elles concernent la définition de la philosophia, la sagesse (sapientia), les sciences et en particulier la physique du nombre, l’unité des sciences, la morale et la politique, la culture gréco-latine, l’enseignement, le projet impérial, l’Europe, l’ Église et son unité, la Hongrie du roi saint Étienne.
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Fleeing Sisters: the Golden Age in Juvenal 6
271-280Views:97The opening of Juvenal’s longest and maybe the most well-known poem, Satire 6, is based on the ancient concept of the “Ages of Man”, starting from the reign of Saturn and ending with the flight of the two sisters, Pudicitia and Astraea. The first part of this 24-line-long passage depicts the Golden Age by making use of two different sources: the idealized Golden Age appearing in Vergil’s poetry among others and the prehistoric primitive world from Book 5 of Lucretius. The Juvenalian Golden Age, presented briefly in a naturalistic way, is a curious amalgam of these two traditions, being the only time in human history according to the poet when marital fidelity was unblemished. However, while reading Satire 6, it seems far from obvious that the lack of adultery should be attributed to higher morals.
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The role of archaisms in the Latin inscriptions of the Roman Empire: some new considerations in light of computerized dialectology
147–169Views:123This paper aims to reconsider the role of archaisms in epigraphy and, above all, their possible dialectal value. Indeed, according to a traditional theory, provinces that were colonized earlier by the Romans preserved archaic varieties of Latin. Scholars have often used inscriptions to support this idea, particularly in the case of Hispania, but the results of this paper, which rely on the methodology of modern Computerized Dialectology, are negative in this regard.
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Phonetic changes in the Latin of Noricum
75–96Views:122Previous studies analyzed the Vulgar Latin of the inscriptions of Pannonia Inferior, Dalmatia and Venetia et Histria, comparing the differences between the provincial capitals and the countryside of the provinces, in order to verify the hypothesis of Untermann (1980) and Herman (1983) about the existence of a larger regional dialect of Latin over the Alps–Danube–Adria region. The analyses made clear that these geographic unites don’t constitute a solid and uniform dialectal area, but there are undeniable common characteristics, such as the weakness of the /w/~/b/ merger or the lack of sonorization, which allow us to suppose that the Vulgar Latin variants of these provinces were somewhat more connected among each other than with the rest of the empire. This study involves another province of the Alps–Danube–Adria region, Noricum, in the examination, systematically discusses the changes in the vowel and consonant systems based on the relative distribution of diverse types of non-standard data from the inscriptions of Noricum, and contrasts the linguistic phenomena of an earlier period (1st–3rd c. AD) with a later stage (4th–6th c. AD) of Vulgar Latin, attempting to define whether Noricum fits common characteristics found in the other provinces of the Alps–Danube–Adria region.
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Several Notes on Engraved Gems from Southern Pannonia
43–57Views:46Engraved gems from Eastern Pannonia are well known thanks to the scholarly work of professor Tamás Gesztelyi on the gems from Brigetio, Acquincum, Intercissa and Gorsium. Carnuntum in Western Pannonia yielded more than 1300 engraved gems, thus outnumbering all other findspots in the Province. In order to further complement the topography of gem findspots in Pannonia, this paper provides a brief conspectus of the engraved gems from Siscia in Southern Pannonia.
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Mala bestia foras dato. Spelling mistakes and loan phrases as means of interpretation of a Latin magical text
37–48Views:557In 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.
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On the Manuscript(s) of Lazius’ Description of Transylvania
309-323Views:96The upsurge of cosmographical and geographical literature can be seen in humanist circles from the 14th century onwards. Beside chorography, the encomium of towns and cities was also a popular genre; some elements of ethnography, natural, economic and political geography were also built into the histography. A century later, this tendency reached Hungary and the social aspiration to presentation of the country appeared in Hungary too. Owing to these factors, chorography of Hungary was written by Miklós Oláh; humanist historians (for instance Antonio Bonfini) also incorporeted geographical digression into their work. Not only descriptions of Hungary, but some geographical descriptions of Transilvania were made in the second half of the 16th century; one of these was written by a 16 th century Viennese humanist polyhistor, Wolfgang Lazius. The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of the three textual variants of the manuscript of the Transylvania-description by Lazius, to explore their relationship to each other, and to establish their order of composition.
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Father or Mother? : Stories of Male Pregnancies in Phlegon’s De mirabilibus
129–133Views:36Phlegon was a representative of the genre „paradoxography”, telling stories about marvellous, interesting and fabulous events and phenomena. Frequently he is looked at as a pure fictionist without any real background and relevance from the point of view of historic research. However a comparative analysis of his stories and our recent knowledge in natural sciences indicate the feasibility of the background of his „tales”. Accordingly even such fantastic topics like male pregnancy and parturition may potentially have a core of truth.