“The Messengers are Called Sangandai”: the Greek σαγγάνδης and its Relationship to ἀσγάνδης/ ἀστάνδης

This article examines the Greek noun σαγγάνδης ‘messenger’ which is attested in two lexica, dated to the Roman or early Byzantine periods: the Cambridge Rhetorical Lexicon by an anonymous author and Difficult Words in the Attic Orators by Claudius Casilo. In both works, σαγγάνδης appears together with three words of likely Iranian provenance: ὀροσάγγης ‘benefactor of the Persian king; bodyguard’, παρασάγγης ‘parasang; messenger’ and ἄγγαρος ‘messenger, courier; workman, labourer’. The word σαγγάνδης is analysed in comparison with ἀσγάνδης/ ἀστάνδης ‘messenger’ occurring for the first time in Plutarch’s works and closely linked to the Achaemenid administration. According to the hypothesis put forward in the present paper, both σαγγάνδης and σγάνδης (with its secondary variant στάνδης) are connected to Manichaean Middle Persian/Parthian ižgand ‘messenger’, Sogdian (a)žγand/(ɔ) žγand/ž(i)γant ‘id.’, Jewish Aramaic ʾîzgaddā ‘id.’, Syriac izgandā/izgaddā ‘id.’, Mandaic ašganda ‘helper, assistant, servant; the Messenger’, and go back to Old Persian *zganda- or to early Middle Persian/early Parthian *žgand- (or *zgand-) with the original meaning ‘mounted messenger’. The reconstructed noun is derived from the Proto-Iranian root *zga(n)d- ‘to go on, gallop, mount’, attested in Avestan (Younger Avestan zgaδ(/θ)- ‘to go on horseback, gallop’) and in some Middle and Modern Iranian languages. The original form of the loanword in Greek was probably *σγάνδης which then underwent certain transformations.

A Dozen Lucretian Emendations

In this article, twelve new emendations are offered on the text of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. At 1.454 non tactus is proposed for the unparalleled intactus; at 2.99 et partim is suggested for the awkward pars etiam; at 2.258 quomque (late-Republican cumque) is advanced for quemque; at 2.615 the metrically problematic inuenti sint is altered to inueniantur; at 2.733 the unique use of nigrant is dispensed with by reading the expected nigra sunt; at 3.267 et tamen is made more naturally adversarial as at tamen; at 3.774 ne fessa is altered to the more Lucretian defessa (reading ne for et earlier in the line); at 4.160 the unusual feminine celer (his) is altered to (his) celeris; at 4.306 (331) the difficult gerund insinuando is changed to the gerundive insinuandis; at 4.318 (343) multisque is replaced with the more idiomatic multoque; at 5.323 the stark phrase deminui debet recreari is reordered as debet deminui et recreari; finally, at 6.266 uementes is read for the otiose uenientes. The discussion proceeds on the basis of the universally accepted stemma, namely that the three Carolingian manuscripts (O, Q, S) are the sole manuscripts with textual authority. The more than fifty surviving Renaissance manuscripts ultimately derive from O, but they remain a fertile source for conjectures.

A Reading of Fragments 926(a) and 926(g) PMG within the Context of the New Music

There has been much controversy regarding the date, the performative context, and the generic quality of fragment 926 PMG, which has been preserved on papyrus (P. Oxy. 9 + P. Oxy 2687) in a rhythmical treatise by an unknown author. The verse fragments on this papyrus were composed in iambic dactyls (∪ — ∪ –) and used as examples of the occurrence of syncope in various lyric meters. Fragments 926(a) and (g) PMG are from a composition performed by a maiden chorus which bear similarities to Alcman’s partheneia and have affinities with archaic epic and lyric poetry. Supposedly, these fragments might have been fragments of partheneia composed in the time of the New Music. Nonetheless, they are not shaped according to the bulk of the aesthetic values and the compositional rules of the New Music. These fragments seem to belong to cultic songs created for maiden choruses, possibly, to honor Dionysus. The alternative is that they imitate such songs within a dramatic context. We may assume that these quasi-dithyrambic partheneia were composed to serve religious needs or at least imitated cultic songs. They looked backward to the archaic and early classical tradition of partheneia, and their existence is an indication that, in the days of the New Music, there was a poetic tradition upheld by “reactionary” poets.

Gr. ἄφρων [adj.] ‘senseless’: a Reassessment

The present article offers a reassessment of Hom. ἄφρων [adj.] ‘unreasonable, senseless, foolish’, which is traditionally accounted for as an ablauting compound (of the type πατήρ : πάτωρ) based on the simplex φρένες [f.pl.tant.] ‘midriff, diaphragm’ (+Il.). This archaic ablauting pattern (viz. °φρων vs. simplex φρήν*) is totally unparalleled for body parts; besides, the Ancients’ interpretation of φρένες as ‘diaphragm’ is flawed. Φρονέω ‘to have (good) understanding or intelligence’ is a back-formation coined after φρονέω ‘to act senselessly, to be foolish’. From zero-graded φραίνω (via a synchronic reanalysis of -αίνω as a deverbative suffix of the type °φαίνω), an adverb * φρα-δόν ‘senselessly, foolishly’ was eventually coined, which was the starting point of a whole new group. From this group was reanalyzed a “new” synchronic root √φραδ- ‘to heed, to consider’, reflected by Hom. φράζω. The lack of comparative evidence for this sprawling word family leads the author to assume that Hom. ἄφρων [adj.] ‘senseless, fool, heedless’ is in fact the reflex of a PIE etymon *ń ̥ -gʷʱr(h1)-on- ‘without sense of smell, not able of scenting’, from PIE *gʷʱreh1- ‘to smell’ (cf. Ved. jí-ghr-a- < *gʷʱí-gʷʱr(h1)-V-). This verbal compound of the type νήφων [*-on-adj.] ‘sober’ (< PIE *ń̥ -h1gʷʱ-on- ‘not having drunk’) would have been eventually reanalyzed as a privative bahuvrīhi (viz. ‘lacking φρένες’).

Considerations on Two Cruces Philologorum (Ael. NA 15, 15)

The present article aims to elucidate an interesting narrative that forms a portion of Aelian’s paradoxographic work Περὶ ζῴων ἰδιότητος (On the Characteristics of Animals, Lat. De natura animalium). The passage under discussion describes some horned animals of oriental origin that were involved in the annual fighting contests during a one-day competition held on the initiative of a “great king of India” — probably Chandragupta (4th–3rd c. BC), the founder of the Maurya dynasty. Aelian’s chapter (NA 15, 15) was perhaps taken from Megasthenes’s Ἰνδικά (Description of India). The passage includes two hapax legomena referring to two species of animals: †μέσοι† and †ὕαιναι†. The first of these should be identified with the Ladakh urial (Ovis orientalis vignei Blyth); cf. Prasun məṣé ‘ram, urial’ (< Vedic mēṣá- m. ‘ram’). Aelian’s exact description of the horned animals called †ὕαιναι† clearly demonstrates that the alleged “striped hyena” (Gk. ὕαινα) must represent the chinkara, i. e., the Indian gazelle (Gazella bennettii Sykes). The Indo-Aryan term for ‘chinkara’ (Ved. hariṇá- m ‘Indian gazelle’, hariṇī́- f. ‘female gazelle’; cf. Pa. and Pk. hariṇa- m., hariṇī- f.) suggests that the corrupted form in Aelian’s passage should be emended as ὑάριναι [hyárinai]. This seems a near-optimal adaptation of the Pali or Prakrit appellative háriṇā pl. ‘chinkaras’.

Philology and the History of Words: Some Notes on the Humanists’ Etymological Argumentation

The article concerns the influence of humanist scholarship on sixteenth-century etymological practices, testified in the Neo-Latin reference works and special treatises on linguistics and history. Being an important part of historical research, which relied mostly on Greek and Latin literary sources, etymology could not but adopt some important principles and instruments of contemporary philological work, notably on the source criticism. The foremost rule was to study the sources in their original language, form, and eliminate any corrupted data as well as any information not attested in written sources. This presumed that every text had its own written history, which tended to be a gradual deterioration of its state, represented in the manuscript tradition that was subject to scribal errors and misinterpretations. This view on the textual history was strikingly consonant with that on the history of languages, which was treated by the humanists as permanent corruption and inevitable degeneration from the noble and perfect state of their ancient ancestors. In an effort to restore the original text, philology used emendation as a cure for scribal abuse and textual losses; likewise, language historians had their own tool, namely etymology, to reconstruct and explain the original form of words (including the nomenclature of various sciences). The intersection of both procedures is taken into account in the article and it demonstrates how textual conjectures, manuscript collation, and graphical interpretation of misreadings were employed by the sixteenth-century scholars to corroborate their etymological speculations, which established themselves as one of the ways of the reception and criticism of classical scholarly heritage.

On the Confusion of the Terms dualis and communis in Cledonius

This article attempts to provide an interpretation of a passage on the noun number written by the 5th-century grammarian Cledonius who composed a lemmatised commentary on Donatus’ Ars minor and Ars maior. The passage discussed here is a part of the explanation regarding the noun categories in Ars minor: Numerus, qui unum et plures demonstrat: et communis est numerus, qui et dualis dicitur apud Graecos, ut species facies res. (GL V 10. 19–20). Cledonius’ text confuses two terms dualis and communis, which normally signify different linguistic phenomena. Tim Denecker, whose article covers the history of the term dualis in Latin grammatical treatises, argues that dualis in this passage is indicating a pair and is equated to communis. The aim of the present work is to explain why these two terms have been confused. When comparing Greek and Latin, the Roman grammarians Charisius, Diomedes, Priscian, and Macrobius highlighted the absence of the dual number from Latin, whereas Donatus added it to the singular and plural exemplifying it with two nomina — duo and ambo. Having analysed all of Cledonius’ passages on dualis and communis and compared them with the original text of Donatus, one may notice that Cledonius did not make comments on Donatus’ observations concerning the dual number of duo and ambo. In the author’s view, the grammarian may have opined that the Latin language had no dual number at all, so that in his commentary Latin communis is juxtaposed to Greek dualis and both are opposed to singular and plural.

Epikrateia, Eparchia and a Description of the Carthaginian Presence in Sicily

Ἐπικράτεια and ἐπαρχία are two terms used by the ancient sources to describe the Carthaginian presence in Western Sicily. Due to a lack of information about the character and details of this presence, it is crucial to precisely understand the terminology employed by our sources and all its nuances. The article challenges the widely accepted opinion that the nouns ἐπικράτεια and ἐπαρχία can be treated as synonyms. To verify whether this assumption is correct or not, a careful analysis of how the ancient authors (Polybius, Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch) used both nouns, as well as other related forms, is conducted. To make up for the limited number of occurrences of ἐπικράτεια in the analysed corpus, the relevant part of the examination also includes the use of this noun in Strabo’s Geography. The analysis allows us to highlight a significant change in the meaning of the two terms between the 2nd century (Polybius) and the mid-1st century BC (Diodorus). This change reflects a development in the Greek political and administrative vocabulary, which was adjusting to a new reality of the Mediterranean world being organised into Roman provinces. The conducted analysis also allows us to better understand the complexity of the Carthaginian position in Western Sicily.

Relative Absoluteness: The Case of Participial Clauses in Latin

The aim of this article is to reopen the investigation of the ablative absolute in Latin and to analyse this construction and its use from one angle, namely, the coreferentiality rules. The examples for analysis have been taken from the Gallic Wars. As has been noticed before, in several works, the use of the absolute construction in texts written by classical authors, such as Caesar or Cicero, allows us to formulate a rule concerning its coreferentiality. As far as the syntactical coreferentiality is concerned, the classical rule requires an absolute construction to be — unsurprisingly — absolute, i. e., non-coreferential. This rule seems to be increasingly ignored by later authors. However, a deeper analysis taking into account not only syntactical but also semantical coreferentiality shows that the absoluteness of the construction is not so absolute after all, even in classical Latin. The examples of such use of the ablativus absolutus may be seen as forerunners of the change that occurred between classical and late Latin. The author proposes a hypothesis that an independent but similar development of the use of absolute constructions in different languages may suggest that there is a kind of interlinguistic tendency to substitute nominal phrases for subordinate clauses, especially in spoken language.

The “Kühner-Stegmann” of 1914 and the “Oxford Latin Syntax” of 2015 and 2021: Comparing Two Examples of a Latin syntax of Different Times and Different Approaches

Comparing the grammars of so-called dead languages is particularly fascinating. The article compares two syntactic accounts from completely different time periods — a traditional and still well-known one from the 19th century and a modern one that has currently been published: the syntactic part of the “Ausführliche Grammatik der Lateinischen Sprache” by Raphael Kühner from 1878 and 1879, and the “Oxford Latin Syntax” by Harm Pinkster from 2015 and 2021. First, the general concepts are introduced: Karl Ferdinand Becker’s theory of the three syntactic relations (2.1), S. H. A. Herling’s theory of the equivalence of sentence parts and subordinate clauses (2.2), as well as the modern functional approaches of the theory of the simple clause (3.1) and the complex sentence (3.2). Six differences between the two Latin syntactic concepts are discussed. Three common aspects are taken into consideration, namely the corpus-based approach, the restriction to a single language, and the purely descriptive method as opposed to a normative or more formal approach. Among the results, it is concluded that both grammatical systems of the Latin syntax are legitimate and both should be used to address questions concerning Latin syntax.