AEVUM - 2011 - 1

SUMMARY: In Mycenaen texts records of women often mention only their work or ethnic provenance, or else their personal names. This article lists a selection of feminine personal names, which are mainly compounds and hypocoristic, are related to physical or character traits or suggest a relation with sacredness, with colours, flowers, jobs, or have metaphorical and antiphrastic meanings. The social and cultural perception of women and their role in the Bronze Age can be investigated by means of the analysis of personal names.

SUMMARY: Some ancient authors (Heraclides Ponticus, ps.-Scymnus and Dionysius Periegetes) accuse the Sybarites for attempting to organize Panhellenic Games in competition with the Olympic ones. A careful scrutiny of all evidence, including the relations between Sybaris and Olympia in archaic age, leads to disbelieve it and to pinpoint two matters of fact: a) the polis of Sybaris might have planned to increase its prestige among the Western Greeks, managing and strengthening some local athletic games, as Corinth did with Isthmian Games at the beginning of the same VI century; b) the idea that these games were set in the same days of the Olympic Games for the purpose of competing with Olympia is due to a typical postclassical misinterpretation of the wealthy past of the Sybarites, which marks the greater part of the tradition about them.

SUMMARY: Similarities in the structure of the commentarii written by Sulla and by Caesar provide a starting-point to investigate how Caesar has been portrayed in Roman literature. Five stages took place: 1) epic-historical poetry celebrating Caesar’s res gestae; 2) the commentarii written by Caesar himself; 3) other commentarii, added to create a full corpus of Caesar’s military deeds; 4) historical works composed by Sallust and Pollio, who think over and discuss Caesar’s role in the crisis of the Roman republic; 5) the biography of Caesar written by Oppius, who deals with the human aspects and personal matter of the dictator.

SUMMARY: Fr. 65 Braswell-Billerbeck of the grammarian Epaphroditus (Et. Gen. s.v. Imbrasos) appears to belong to his commentary on the Iliad rather than to that on the Callimachean Aitia. The real lemma of the etymological entry word refers to a Homeric term (the patronimic Imbrasides for the Thracian hero Peiros: Il. IV 520). The explanation involves the North-Egean (and near to Thrace) island Imbros; thus the context of the Epaphroditean interpretation seems to be coherently Thracian. Therefore the provenance of fr. 65 from the commentary on the Aitia, viz. fr. 599 Pf., which concerns Samian traditions, is to be excluded.

SUMMARY: Aim of this paper is to explain the reason why Virgil gives many topographical references about the homeland of Evander. The numerous relations between northern and southern Arcadia and the Latium are to be taken into consideration in order to discover the different stages of Evander’s life and connected places (Pheneos, Pallantion, and Pallanteum). Special attention is paid to the various genealogies linking together Evander and the Trojans or Evander and the Atridae. The status and genealogy of Nikostrate/Carmenta is also analysed.

SUMMARY: According to modern scholars, Caligula’s dynastic policy underwent a sudden change as a result of a conspiracy planned against him (even if not carried out) by his former brotherin- law and heres designatus Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, his sisters Agrippina and Livilla, and the legatus of Upper Germany, Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus. No one has ever seriously questioned the authenticity of this alleged plot. Suetonius and Dio Cassius, giving information on the fact, rely on the same common primary source, a letter addressed to the Senate by Caligula himself to explain why he had decided to order Lepidus’ execution and his sisters’ relegation into exile. But indeed the reliability of Caligula’s accuses is to be questioned, and the affair to be examined anew. Thus Lepidus, Agrippina and Livilla are no longer to be considered plotters, but victims of a plot weaved by Caligula (most probably under the pressure of his fourth wife, Milonia Cesonia). Caligula probably aimed at strengthening the dynastic position of his newly born daughter Drusilla and of her mother, and at defending them from some of his closest relatives, whose ambitions could be a serious danger for their personal safety.

SUMMARY: Angitia, a goddess of the Marsi, venerated in a temple near the Fucine Lake and in neighbouring Italian lands, was invoked for her magic arts and as a healer against venemous snakes. The Marsi were in contact with Greek-Etruscan Campania, and imported Greek gods and myths from it, among them Medea, who was often depicted as a snake charmer. The Marsi soon connected Angitia with Medea, and they did so independently of the Romans and before the Social War. The Romans could have inherited the cult of Angitia and this connection as well. When Latin texts, mainly drama, describe and perform Medea, they appear to have melted not only Greek, Magno-Greek and Hellenistic, but also Italic elements.

SUMMARY: The extant 10 fragments of Appian’s Macedonian book, concerning Philip V of Macedonia, and their sources are analysed. It has been observed that often Appian’s books on Syrians, on Illyrians, on Macedonians include information alien to the Roman point of view, as it is attested in the historiography of Polibian traditions. The non-Polybian source for these fragments is investigated and its peculiarities are singled out. It appears that Appian attempts to counterbalance Polybius’ Roman standpoint with a more Macedonian-Greek perspective, which often transmits the defeated’s point of view. This source, basically Greek, is hostile to the Aetolians, critical of the Attalids, and unbiased to the Macedonians; it has certainly read Polybius, and is well informed on the 3rd/2nd-century politics.

SUMMARY: In the ancient tradition there are two schools of thought about the four tomaı´in the heroic hexameter: recognizing in any case the first three tomaı´(penthemimeral, hephthemimeral, trochaic or feminine), some sources hold the fourth to be the tome` kata` to`n te´tarton trochaıˆon (fourth trochaic), others the bucolic. As a starting point for choosing between the two arrangements Aristides Quintilianus (I 24) took a metrical rule: ‘a tome´ must divide the verse into dissimilar parts’, i.e. an hexameter cannot be divided by a medial pause into two equal halves. The author of the Perı` mousikeˆs, however, misunderstood the rule and interpreted rhythmically the dissimilarity of the parts; thereby he counted the fourth trochaic among the ‘proper tomaı´’ and the bucolic among the other diaire´seis. Modern metricians finally speak of ‘caesura’ when the word-end falls within a metron, of ‘diaeresis’ when there is coincidence of word-end with metron-end.

SUMMARY: We know from Augustine’s Confessions that the house and garden in which his conversion took place were situated in Milan. According to a popular tradition of uncertain origin the garden exact location was identified with that of a chapel called San Remigio. This (chapel) stood in the vicinity of the monastery of Sant’Ambrogio, today the Universita` Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, and was destroyed before 1824. San Remigio’s remains were rediscovered at the end of the 1940s, and some years later Michelangelo Cagiano de Azevedo wrote an important paper regarding this chapel. It is strange that the tradition linked to San Remigio, even though quite unlikely, and Cagiano de Azevedo’s observations have been almost completely ignored by modern research on Augustine.

SUMMARY: Twelve later manuscripts (recentiores) of six speeches of Themistius (orationes II, IV, V, VII, IX, X) derive from a lost common ancestor (omega). Description and collation of the MSS are provided and a stemma codicum is given. The lost ancestor omega is identified with a composite MS, probably written in the 14th century, formerly in the library of the Escorial, where it was destroyed by fire in 1671; a previous owner was Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, ambassador of Charles V in Venice (1539-1546). Janus Lascaris saw omega in Corfu in 1491, when it was in possession of Dimitrios Trivolis, a well known Greek copyist. Lascaris described it in his notebook Vat. Gr. 1412 and had Themistius copied. This copy, Par. Gr. 2079 (late 15th century), the oldest of the twelve recentiores, was not only owned by Janus Lascaris, but shows several marginal notes in his hand. A MS of the same family lies behind the editio princeps, printed by Henricus Stephanus (1562). In 1605 Georgius Remus, a jurist, prepared the first Latin translation of the six speeches and called them orationes Augustales.

SUMMARY: The discovery of 10 pages of brief notes in Pomponio Leto’s hand in the Utrecht copy of the 1486 Verona edition of Lucretius, in which in 1492 two disciples collated a codex Pomponianus and copied a Vita Lucretii, raises questions about the identity of the textual sources used. A previous hypothesis that the Utrecht book may attest a lecture course on Lucretius delivered by Pomponio is found not to be substantiated by the evidence. It is instead suggested that the disciples were simply producing their own ‘edition’ of Lucretius, as they said they were in their colophon, with occasional help and supplementary material from their teacher.

SUMMARY: At the Catholic University, Milan, a two-day conference was held to commemorate Jacqueline Dangel (1940-2010), a distinguished Latinist who often visited our university. Eleven lectures given by scholars from France, Germany and Italy focused on different subjects which have been investigated by Dangel: Livy and Tacitus; Accius, Seneca and aspects of the Roman tragedy; Virgil, and some literary topoi.

N. OTTO, Enargeia. Untersuchung zur Charakteristik alexandrinischer Dichtung (G. Tomassi) - G. PETRONE, Quando le Muse parlavano latino. Studi su Plauto (M.J. Falcone)- F. PAGNOTTA, Cicerone e l’ideale dell’aequabilitas. L’eredita` di un antico concetto filosofico, presentaz. di B. ZUCCHELLI (D. Negro) - The Grammarian Epaphroditus. Testimonia and Fragments, ed. by B.K. BRASWELL, M. BILLERBECK (A. Filoni) - Onasandro, Il generale. Manuale per l’esercizio del comando, introd., trad. e note di C. PETROCELLI (A. Galimberti) - Filostrato Maggiore, La Pinacoteca, a c. di G. PUCCI, trad. di G. LOMBARDO (B. Anceschi) - K. HAEGEMANS, Imperial Authority and Dissent. The Roman Empire in AD 235-238 (L. Mecella) - P. FREDRIKSEN, Augustine and the Jews. A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (I. Ramelli).

M.-A. ATAC¸ , The Mythology of Kingship in Neo-Assyrian Art (S. Chiarini) - E. LEFE`VRE, Philosophie unter der Tyrannis. Ciceros Tusculanae Disputationes (S. Stucchi) - L’Umbro e le altre lingue dell’Italia mediana antica. Atti del I Convegno Internazionale sugli Antichi Umbri. Gubbio, 20-22 settembre 2001, a c. di A. ANCILLOTTI, A. CALDERINI (C. Milani) - La citta` italica. Atti del II Convegno Internazionale sugli Antichi Umbri. Gubbio, 25-27 settembre 2003, a c. di A. ANCILLOTTI, A. CALDERINI (C. Milani) - M. NEGRI, ISTIA LEUKA. Scritti scelti in occasione del 60º compleanno, a c. di M. ANELLI, M. CICERI, G. FACCHETTI, M. MUSCARIELLO, E. NOTTI, G. ROCCA, F. SANTULLI, G. SARULLO. Testi raccolti da C. NEGRI (C. Milani) - Penser, dire et repre´senter l’animal dans le monde indien, textes re´unis par N. BALBIR, G.-J. PINAULT (E. Lauzi) - M.-L. RIGATO, I.N.R.I. Il titolo della Croce (I. Ramelli).