Porphyry and ancient scholarship on Iliad 10.252–253: Edition, translation and discussion

In Iliad 10, Odysseus claims that ‘more night has passed | than two parts, but still a third part remains’ (252–253). This gave rise to a Homeric problem, which received a great deal of attention from ancient scholars: If more than two parts of the night have passed, how can a third part remain? The main source for a variety of solutions to it is a lengthy discussion written along the perimeter of three pages of Venetus B, an important manuscript of the Iliad. The source of this text is almost certainly Porphyry’s Homeric Questions. Porphyry presents six different solutions, including those of Apion, Chrysippus and Aristotle (this last a fragment from his lost Homeric Problems), as well as a discussion of Odysseus as astronomer. The present paper includes: a critical edition of this text based on a fresh inspection of the manuscript, yielding new readings; an English translation; notes to the text; and an interpretive essay. The paper demonstrates the limitations of earlier editors of the text, and the hope is that it will serve as an example of how properly to approach and present the fragments of Porphyry’s Homeric Questions. It also turns out that, for quotations from the Iliad and Odyssey, Porphyry often does not provide the text attributed to him in the recent Homer editions of West.

To the doctrine of the size and shape of the pelvis of an adult woman. - The pelvis of a Polish woman. Preliminary announcement

Three and half a century separate us from the moment in which the work of the famous anatomist Vesalius 1) shed a ray of light into the dark area of the study of his predecessors about the normal basin. The ancient scholarship about the pelvis, based on the belief that the pelvis is a narrow channel, with the walls moving apart during childbirth, should have fallen before the anatomical description of the pelvis by Vesal, despite the fact that the defenders of this scholarship were Ambroise Par 2) and, in , Severinus Pinacus 3).

Latin Literature

How did the Romans do philology? Think in terms of the Latin language, and Varro'sDe lingua Latina, Caesar'sDe analogia, or Quintilian's chapters on grammar might come to mind. Think of commentary on texts, and names like Servius, Asconius, and Porphyrio won't be far away. But few of us, it's probably fair to say, could claim a deep acquaintance with all of those, and still fewer have acquired much sense of the broader picture – and itisbroad – of ancient scholarship in and on Latin. Cue James Zetzel'sCritics, Compilers, and Commentators, a massive and remarkable study of Roman philology from antiquity into the early Middle Ages.