Niewydane tłumaczenie epigramów Sarbiewskiego, czyli uwagi o działalności przekładowej prof. Zofii Abramowiczówny

The paper describes a Polish translation of M. K. Sarbiewski’s Latin epigrams made by Zofia Abramowicz (1906–1988) during the interwar period. These epigrams (partially preserved) were prepared to be published in 1939 or 1940 by Prof. Ryszard Ganszyniec in his „Filomata” Press. Abramowicz’s translational work seems to be a part of history of the classical philology in Poland.

Jan Nepomucen Józef Braun (1926–2015), filolog klasyczny, orientalista, kartwelista, sumerolog

Jan Braun, born on 15th May 1926 in Łódź, studied classical philology and classical archaeology at the University of Lodz (years 1947–1951). His MA thesis (1951) was devoted to the ethnogenesis of the Etruscans. He also worked as junior assistant at the Department of Classical Archaeology, University of Lodz (from May 1949 do September 1950) and later as junior lecturer at the Department of Classical Philology of the same university (from October 1950 to September 1951). In October 1951, Braun left for Georgia in order to complete his doctoral studies. From there he returned to Poland as PhD, specializing in Georgian and other oriental languages, especially the ancient languages of the Near East. In the years 1955–2002, he worked at the University of Warsaw, initially as assistant professor. In 1970, he became associate professor. In 1991, he received the higher doctoral degree (habilitation), and in 1995 he obtained the position of full professor. He studied the genetic relations of ancient and modern languages, including a suggested Basque-Kartvelian connection. During his habilitation colloquium, he gave an interesting lecture entitled Basic problems of historical-comparative research over the ancient languages of the Mediterranean area (Warsaw, May 28th, 1991), which is presented in Appendix No. 1 (with some comments and bibliographical references). The paper presents Braun’s main fields of research and his achievements made in Łódź (Poland), Tbilisi (Georgia) and Warsaw. According to Braun’s view, suggested as early as 1951, Etruscan represents an external member of the Anatolian languages (deriving from Luwian), so that it belongs to the Indo-European language family. In his opinion, Basque is a western member of the South Caucasian (or Kartvelian) family.

Analogous Apes

From the dissection table of a London physician to the tropical forests of Borneo and Sumatra, this chapter places the reader amidst the bestiary of Classical animals populating seventeenth-century scientific responses to the problem of the anthropoid ape. The anatomical puzzle of a strangely man-like creature recently arrived to British shores from the Congo inadvertently reveals the influence of Classical figurations in early-modern European conceptions of the human and animal. Guided by ‘indigenous’ idioms and simian similitude, a perplexed comparative anatomist resorts to Classical philology and the authority of Homer to posit a new non-human anthropoid species also known to the ancients.

Word & Image

This chapter examines the relationships between visual and verbal media in Roman antiquity. More specifically, it demonstrates how the study of Roman art intersects with the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts, and vice versa. Despite the tendency to segregate areas of scholarly expertise—above all, to separate “classical archaeology” from “classical philology”—any critical engagement with Roman imagery and iconography must go hand in hand with critical readings of written materials. The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, it explores some of the ways in which Roman literary texts (both Greek and Latin) engaged with visual subjects. Second, it discusses the textuality of Roman visual culture, surveying the roles that inscriptions played on Roman buildings, statues, mosaics, paintings, and other media. Third, it demonstrates the “intermedial”—or, perhaps better, the “iconotextual”—workings of Roman texts and images, with particular reference to the fourth-century ce picture-poems of Optatian.

A Review of MARION KRUSE, THE POLITICS OF ROMAN MEMORY: FROM THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE TO THE AGE OF JUSTINIAN. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, 304 pp.

The monograph by M. W. Kruse—professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati—investigates the difficulties of building a new historical memory and identity in the late Roman Empire at the end of the 5th—first half of the 6th century. At that time, the emperors did not actually control Italy and Rome, a previous center and origin of imperial statehood. The study is based on an analysis of the texts of the most influential authors of this period, in particular historians of the era of the emperor Justinian, as well as the narrative of his own laws—Novellae of the Corpus Juris Civilis. The monograph represents Kruse’s substantially reworked PhD dissertation on classical philology. In his study, Kruse makes a successful attempt at a large-scale revision of the current concept of modern science about the indifference of contemporaries to the events of 476 in Italy and argues that the assessment of these events as the fall of the Western Roman Empire and a momentous event is only a construct of historical science of the 19th century, originating from the works of E. Gibbon.