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• Tropes and figures as arguments in textual criticism?

  117–134

  Judit D. Tóth

  Views:

  167

  In the first part of my paper, I present the so-called first homilies of St Gregory of Nyssa delivered in praise of the forty martyrs of Sebaste (Mart Ia and Ib) from two separate angles: on the one hand, focusing on how they can be related to stays of the Cappadocian Father in Sebaste and, on the other hand, identifying what sorts of internal arguments of textual criticism are cited when an effort is made to identify when they were delivered. By giving an overview of the most important research findings, I provide a basis for my query concerning whether certain tropes and rhetorical figures as well as rhetorical-stylistical-poetical solutions could be typical of specific time periods and genres in the oeuvre of the church father and, thereby, serve as arguments of textual criticism for identifying the dates for composition of his works. Using the opening lines of Mart Ib, I focus my investigation on the banquet-simile connected to the figure of yesterday/then and today/now, primarily in the epideictic speeches of the bishop of Nyssa. My conclusion is that this is a valid question, while the text analyses confirm the conventional date (383) identified for the production of Mart Ia and Ib.

• Review of Scholarship on the Admonitions of King Saint Stephen of Hungary

  151–158

  Előd Nemerkényi

  Views:

  149

  The purpose of the following discussion is to demonstrate that the philological study of the fortuna of the Admonitions of King Saint Stephen of Hungary provides important contributions to the characteristic stages of the development of Latinist scholarship from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance until today. The Admonitions, a mirror of princes composed in the eleventh century and attributed to the first Christian king of Hungary, has attracted pious and scholarly attention for a millennium – including the hagiographic tradition of medieval Hungary and the legal tradition of the Corpus iuris Hungarici. Based on its late manuscript tradition, hypercritical scholars suggested that the Admonitions was a humanist forgery or at least an interpolated and stylistically polished text. From the Renaissance on, philologists and editors have addressed various issues of textual criticism such as the problem of dating and authorship, grammatical features (orthography, morphology, and syntax), stylistic devices (vocabulary, prose rhyme and rhythm), and textual parallels (Biblical, Classical, and Carolingian Latin). The way scholars have studied the Latinity of the Admonitions against the standards of Classical, Medieval, and Humanistic Latin for centuries reveals a great deal about their own approaches to their Latinist trade in particular – and therefore about Neo-Latin studies in general.

• A Note on Ciris 218

  171–172.

  Włodzimierz Olszaniec

  Views:

  65

  This article contains a suggestion concerning the Ciris. The author tries to explain the reasons for the corruption in verse 218 and offers a tentative solution.

• Textkritische und interpretatorische Überlegungen zu Catull. 55,9-12

  161–170.

  Heiko Ullrich

  Views:

  66

  Since the apparently corrupt passages in Catull. 55,9 and 11 respectively now hide the identity of the pessimae puellae in 55,10 a solution to the porblem is proposed by interpreting Ellis' reducta pectus in 11 as a description of a certain statue that may be that of the Greek poet Anyte or Telesilla, present in Pompey's portico according to the testimony of Tatian, whose names now hide behind the corrupt auelte sic ipse and could be restored to the direct address A Anyte et Telesilla.

• When elephants weap.: Plin., Nat. 8, 20-21

  75–88

  Ágnes Darab

  Views:

  215

  The literature of classical antiquity has lost much of its attraction, and the circle of its possible readers has been narrowed significantly. Even in literary criticism that reaches beyond classical philology, its position has dwindled to a source of motifs, topics, archetypes, and we clearly lack such interpretations as would present ancient literature from an angle that would appeal to the readers of our age. This paper is devoted to an analysis of the 20th and the 21st chapters of the zoological part (book 8) of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. Through a comparative interpretation that is attentive to the cultural-medial aspects of the textual locus, the essay provides a paradigm for uncovering the meaning – which would appeal to readers in the 21st century – in ancient texts with the help of different methodological perspectives, in this case the simultaneous application of narratological and comparative approaches.