Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica

At Hippol. 612 - in its cryptic brevity - Euripides expressed the theme of the incautious promise, thus training a spotlight on a commitment made involuntarily. At the same time, he made it clear that the automatic fulfilment of one of the gifts of Poseidon, the curse of Hippolytus, turned out to be disastrous for Theseus himself. The line therefore justly became the symbol of the Hippolytus: attacks by comic poets, quotes from contemporaries, and subsequent citations all pointed towards a more ‘secular’ and considered use of oaths.

In the most important modern Greek dictionaries we find an entry for the word περίπολις, which is recorded as a coinage of the comic poet Phrynichus in fr. 34 K.-A. from his lost play entitled Muses (405 B.C.); but, if we consider the textual tradition of the fragment (preserved by Pollux 7, 203), this word turns out to be a conjecture by the Dutch scholar Tiberius Hemsterhuys in 1706.

Although it is widely used, the notion of ‘classical’ Greek is not easily defined with precision, since sociolectal, dialectal, and chronological criteria interact in its specification. At first sight, one might hold the Atticist grammarians of the first centuries AD responsible for the ‘classicisation’ of the particular variety of Greek thus labelled. In reality, however, all the Atticists did was codify a development that had begun much earlier, during the initial decades of the fourth century BC, when non-Athenian authors first chose to write in contemporary Attic. Whereas ‘classical’ Greek had thus been synchronically (horizontally) opposed to ‘non-classical’ Greek at the outset, this opposition turned into a diachronic (vertical) one over time; but the selection of the target variety itself remained unaffected by this change in perspective.

This article reconstructs the sanction provided by the lex de modo agrorum for those holding more than 500 iugera of land. A critical comparison between two sources, Cato Rhod. frg. 122 and Livy 7, 16, 9, affirms that the law quoted by Cato in his speech Pro Rhodiensibus contained a fine of 1,000 libral asses. So this passage may refer to an archaic context and a statute of the 4^th century BC, instead of the 2^nd century, as is often supposed.

This paper offers a new analysis of the inscription from the sepulchral building of the association of cantores Graeci near Porta Maggiore in Rome. The starting point is a new interpretation of the word decumani, used here to refer not to the association’s members, but to the treasurers attached to the collegium. Thus the inscription may recall the purchase and construction of a section of the building reserved for holders of this office. This study also affords a more precise understanding of the internal organization of the association of cantores Graeci.

At f. IIIv of codex Riccardianus 25 (Florence, second half of the fifteenth century), which contains several works by Lucian, a still unidentified hand, probably from the end of the fifteenth century, added ten epigrams that it attributes to Lucian himself. Although the poems are attested elsewhere, the text of the Riccardianus presents several interesting elements. This paper offers a critical edition of the epigrams and investigates their connections with other extant sources. In particular, it focuses on the similarities with P (Palatinus gr. 23), which had still to be ‘discovered’ when the Riccardianus was written, but whose readings seem to have exerted an influence, either direct or indirect, on the Riccardianus itself.

This paper comprises philological notes and conjectures relating to technical works in the military sphere (Vegetius, Epitoma rei militaris 4, 28) and grammatical manuals from Late Antiquity and the high Middle Ages (Priscian GL 2, 148-149 and GL 2, 228; ‘Asper iunior’ GL 8, 41 and GL 8, 42; Ars Bernensis, GL 8, 65; Clemens Scotus Ars grammatica, p. 64 Tolkiehn; Gottschalk of Orbais Opuscula de rebus grammaticis, p. 409 Lambot; ‘Donatus ortigraphus’, p. 48 Chittenden; Ars Laureshamensis, p. 3 Loefstedt).

This note deals with two Tarentine glosses transmitted by Hesychius. In the former (Hsch. α 4656 Latte ἄναυτα), I propose that the problematic form ἠπειρωτικά (printed as such, or wrongly emended, by various scholars) should be corrected into ἢ παραυτίκα, which is palaeographically very plausible and paralleled by other glosses in the Lexicon. In the latter (Hsch. τ 433 Hansen - Cunningham †τελλίην), I propose to read Τελλήν, a personal name attested in Tarentum; the interpretamentum ὁ δεῖνα tells us that it was used to describe an unidentified person, precisely like Titius and Caius in Latin (and Tizio and Caio in Italian).

In 1486, Giorgio Valla (1447-1500), scholar and teacher of humanities in Venice, published a commentary on Juvenal that preserved fleeting traces of an ancient corpus of scholia assigned to an unknown Probus. In addition to rare fragments of many ancient authors, the commentary preserved also a fragment, until now ignored, of an unknown Nestus Fustius, whose grammatical pamphlet would have been directed to the famous politician Asinius Pollio. Other fragments of this mysterious grammaticus, extracted from an encyclopedic work of G. Valla that was published in 1501, are here listed and discussed.

Cicerone, Bruto. Introduzione, traduzione e commento di Rosa Rita Marchese - Mario Lentano

Giorgio Ferri, Tutela urbis. Il significato e la concezione della divinità tutelare cittadina nella religione romana - Maria Federica Petraccia

Hesychii Alexandrini Lexikon. IV. Τ-Ω. Editionem post Kurt Latte continuantes recensuerunt et emendaverunt Peter Allan Hansen - Ian C. Cunningham - Renzo Tosi

Maria Noussia-Fantuzzi, Solon the Athenian, the poetic fragments - Stefano Caciagli

Priscien, Grammaire. Livre XVII - Syntaxe, 1. Texte latin, traduction introduite et annotée par le Groupe Ars Grammatica animé par Marc Baratin et composé de Frédérique Biville, Guillaume Bonnet, Bernard Colombat, Alessandro Garcea, Louis Holtz, Séverine Issaeva, Madeleine Keller et Diane Marchand - Tom Keeline

Ben Tipping, Exemplary epic. Silius Italicus’ Punica - Giovanni Laudizi

[Maximi Victorini] Commentarium de ratione metrorum, con cinque trattati inediti sulla prosodia delle sillabe finali. Introduzione, testo critico, traduzione e commento a cura di Doriana Corazza - Maria Chiara Scappaticcio

An outline of the life of the well known scholar Vincenzo Di Benedetto, recently, from his education deceased (at Saracena and Calabria, Pisa and Oxford, his relationship with Eduard Fraenkel, Sebastiano Timpanaro and other prominent scholars of the 50s and 60s of the last century, and his membership to the Partito Socialista di Unità Proletaria) until his last years. Special attention is devoted both to the wide area of his copious intellectual endeavours (not just Latin and Greek but also Italian philology, and linguistic) and to the political, cultural and didactic engagement which gives his thought and method a strongly original character.