International array of contributors, bringing together both traditional and more recent approaches to provide valuable insights into the poets’ use of language.Covers authors from Lucilius to Juvenal.Of the peoples of ancient Italy, only the Romans committed newly composed poems to writing, and for 250 years Latin-speakers developed an impressive verse literature.The language had traditional resources of high style, e.g., alliteration, lexical and morphological archaism or grecism, and of course metaphor and word order; and there were also less obvious resources in (...) the technical vocabularies of law, philosophy and medicine.The essays in this volume show how the poets in the classical period combined these elements, and so created a poetic medium that could comprehend satire, invective, erotic elegy, drama, lyric, and the grandest heroic epos. (shrink)
J. N. Adams, Michael Lapidge, and Tobias Reinhardt: IntroductionJ. H. W. Penney: Connections in Archaic Latin ProseJ. Briscoe: Language and Style of the Fragmentary Republican HistoriansJ. N. Adams: The Bellum AfricumChristina Shuttleworth Kraus: Hair, Hegemony, and Historiography: Caesar's Style and its Earliest CriticsJ. G. F. Powell: Cicero's Adaptation of Legal Latin in the De legibusTobias Reinhardt: Language of Epicureanism in Cicero: The Case of AtomismG. O. Hutchinson: Pope's Spider and Cicero's WritingR. G. Mayer: The Impracticability of 'Kunstprosa'H. M. Hine: Poetic (...) Influence on Prose: The Case of the Younger SenecaHarm Pinkster: The Language of Pliny the ElderD. R. Russell: Omisso speciosiore stili genereS. J. Harrison: The Poetics of Fiction: Poetic Influence on the Languages of Apuleius' MetamorphosesD. R. Langslow: 'Langues réduites au lexique'? The Languages of Latin Technical ProseDanuta Shanzer: of Tours and Poetry: Prose into Verse and Verse into ProseMichael Lapidge: Poeticism in Pre-Conquest Anglo-Latin ProseRichard Sharpe: The Varieties of Bede's ProseCarlotta Dionisotti: Translator's LatinWalter Berschin: Realistic Writing in the Tenth Century: : Gerhard of Ausburg's Vita S. UodalriciR. M. Thomson: William of Malmesbury and the Latin Classics RevisitedGiovanni Orlandi: Metrical and Rhythmical Clausulae in Medieval Latin Prose: Some Aspects and Problems. (shrink)
The degrees of formality into which speech can be graded are in no sphere more obvious than in expressions of address and third-person reference. Methods of naming vary according to many factors: the formality of the circumstances in which naming takes place, the nature of the subject under discussion, and the ages, sex, and relative status of the speaker and addressee. Conventions of naming sometimes reflect the rigidity or otherwise of social divisions. In some societies or circles address between superior (...) and subordinate is non-reciprocal: the speaker with the greater prestige will adopt one form of address, the subordinate another. In other societies when unequals address each other both may use the same formal method of address: the difference of prestige is not explicitly acknowledged. (shrink)
Although the biographies known collectively as the Historia Augusta purport to have been written by six different biographers, it has often been thought that their similarities are so numerous that they must be the work of a single author. In this article I shall deal with a piece of linguistic evidence which supports this view. The two scholars who have treated the language of the H.A. in most detail, E. Wölfnin and E. Klebs, attempted to show that certain linguistic features (...) which are not spread evenly among the Scriptores point to multiplicity of authorship. (shrink)
The demonstration by E. Wölfflin that between the Histories and Annals Tacitus progressed towards a more archaic and artificial style is well known. From the outset Tacitus adhered to the traditional Roman view that history should be composed in an archaic language remote from everyday usage ; but he was apparently at first not fully aware of the possibilities of the archaizing style. New archaisms and artificial usages suggested themselves as he advanced ; and others, which he had used sporadically (...) even early in the Histories, were allowed to oust ordinary alternatives completely. (shrink)
It would be a mistake to attempt to identify in modern terms the disease of Galerius described so graphically by Lactantius, Mort. 33 . Consumption by lice or worms, if not genital ‘gangrene’, was a typical end for a tyrant or the impious, and there must be an element of literary exaggeration in Lactantius' account. But whatever one makes of the nature of the illness, Lactantius did set out to give the passage a scientific plausibility by his use of technical (...) medical phraseology, and by an allusion to a medical theory at 33.7. Recognition of this theory allows one to settle the text at one point, where editors have failed to agree. There is also a second place in the chapter where familiarity with medical Latin points one towards the solution of a textual problem. (shrink)
The Ars Veterinaria of the fourth-century writer Pelagonius has hitherto been known only from the MS. Florence, Bibl. Riccardiana 1179 , a codex copied in 1485 for Politian from an early manuscript. Apart from this there have only been some palimpsest fragments from Bobbio.
The text of the fourth-century veterinary writer Pelagonius, recently edited for the first time this century and greatly improved by K.-D. Fischer, poses many problems for an editor. The Latinity of Pelagonius himself in the epistles which precede various chapters is awkward and difficult to understand. Much of the rest of the work is a compilation, not all of it Pelagonius' own work, based on a variety of sources from the magical to the scientific. The work survives largely in a (...) single manuscript, codex Riccardianus 1179, a. 1485 . In this paper I pass over intractable questions of spelling and concentrate on more substantial problems of text and interpretation, some of which concern punctuation. (shrink)
It is well known that mitto comes to mean ‘put’ in late Latin and that it shows reflexes with this sense in the Romance languages . But the nature of this semantic change has not been fully explained, nor has the relationship of the word with other placing-terms in Latin. E. Löfstedt has stated simply that it ‘takes over the meaning ot ponere’.2 But as pono itself remains common in all types of Latin, the question arises whether the two words (...) did really come into conflict. It is the purpose of the first two sections of this article to show that for a considerable period pono and mitto occupied complementary places in a lexical system. This system exhibits a definite structure which remains unaltered from early Latin to at least the sixth century A.D., though its component terms undergo some changes. In section I pono and the words which in earlier Latin performed the functions later assumed by mitto will be discussed. In section I I we shall move on to mitto itself. It will be necessary to consider the nature and motivation of the transition ‘throwput’ as it appears in Latin. (shrink)
