διπλῶς όϱῶσιν οί μαθόντες γϱάμματα

Menandri Sententiae, number 180 in Pernigotti (2008) 234.

This proverb, attributed to Menander in a Byzantine collection, points to the simple paradox of reading: readers are able to see both the shape of letters and the meaning conveyed by them. How does mind get from visual recognition to the recognition of meaning? The step sounds incredibly simple when we make it, but becomes exceedingly complex to explain. Strangely enough, the step is not executed in the same way for all languages and scripts.

The ability to recognise shapes must be assisted by the interpreting activity of specific parts of the brain. A famous nineteenth-century medical case tells the story of a ‘French Businessman and amateur musician who woke up one day to discover that he could barely read a word’; as a consequence of a stroke, he could ‘no longer read words, name colours, or read musical notes, despite having completely intact vision’ (Wolf (2008) 171). Vision is thus a necessary but not sufficient requisite for reading.

Different systems of writing make use of different parts of the brain. Another case tells us yet again about a businessman ‘proficient in Chinese and English’ who ‘suffered a severe stroke in the posterior areas. What was amazing to all at the time was that this patient, who had lost his ability to read Chinese, could still read English’. In fact, people reading alphabetic scripts use some specific parts of the brain, whereas others are active when people read logographic script. In the Japanese writing system, two syllabaries (Katakana; Hiragana) as well as a large set of ideographic characters (Kanji) are used side by side, activating different parts of the brain when each of the types of characters (syllabary or ideographic signs) occurs.

The present paper explores two main areas: the cognitive implication of the lack of spaces between words in ancient Greek script; the length of the line in prose texts, in musical texts, and in lyric texts (colometry). I will offer a short presentation of some basic concepts about the cognitive aspects of reading (section I), before discussing the textual layout of papyri (sections 2–7).

There is, alas, no secret code or mystical number lurking in the text of Propertius' first book of elegies which, if discovered, could reveal essential truths about the book. Or at least there is none that I can claim to have found. The search for some key to unlock secrets of meaning and authorial design is a well-known phenomenon of the interpretation of Roman poetry books, and Propertius' ‘single book’ has featured prominently in such investigations. The present paper does not put forth a new structural scheme for understanding the Monobiblos or another description of numerical patternings in it, nor does it insist that a true appreciation of the book's ‘architecture’ is essential for understanding its meaning. Instead, it has the goal of considering how the book format affects the experience of reading and the interpretation of this one important work of Roman poetry in light of its generic identity and the literary-historical context in which it was produced.

In particular, I am interested in describing how the book format makes available to readers of the Monobiblos a sense that even in the absence of a single narrative spanning all of the poems of the book it is nevertheless possible to supplement them so that something like a plot or story emerges. I first consider how this sense of a possible plot or plots arises in the reading process, looking also at how some previous influential studies of the Monobiblos have relied upon various ways of construing a story or plot for the book.

3.912–18:
hoc etiam faciunt ubi discubuere tenentque
pocula saepe homines et inumbrant ora coronis,
ex animo ut dicant: ‘breuis hic est fructus homullis;
iam fuerit neque post umquam reuocare licebit.’ 915
tamquam in morte mali cum primis hoc sit eorum,
quod sitis exurat miseros atque arida †torrat†,
aut aliae quoius desiderium insideat rei.

917 torrat OIQ: torret Oa.c. : terra FC : torreat Gifanius : torres Lachmann: tortet Romanes : torqueat Wakefield : torrant Bockemüller aridus torror Housman

The sole difficulty of this passages lies at the close of 917. If atque introduces a second (necessarily subjunctive) verb, torrat of the paradosis would be an unparalleled third-conjugation form and is therefore highly improbable; the ungrammatical torret in O pre-correction can be readily dismissed. I find little attraction in Lachmann's and Housman's introduction of nominal forms, particularly since 918 implies that the reference in 917 is to a single torment (i.e. sitis). Romanes (1934) 25 conjectured tortet, which is supported neither by Lucretian usage nor the corpus of extant Latin.

In a long and colourful passage from Book 3 of his elegiac poem Leontion, a veritable manifesto of Hellenistic erotics, Hermesianax of Colophon (early third century BC) presents us with an amusing list of poets and their loves (fr. 7 Powell = Athen. XIII 597B). This catalogue features, inter alia, an enamoured Hesiod inspired by a woman. The notion of surly old Hesiod in love with a girl may come as a bit of a surprise to most students of classical philology. After all, one might suppose that the harsh, archaic misogyny of the didactic poet does not bode well for amorous relationships with members of the opposite sex. That makes the statement of Hermesianax (7.21–26) all the more remarkable:

I claim that even Boeotian Hesiod, keeper of all legends, left his home and came out of love to the Heliconian village of the Ascraians. There, wooing Ascraian Ehoie, he suffered many a thing and wrote down in books all his Catalogues, as he hymned her, starting up again and again from the first girl.

When Gregory of Nazianzus composed the Poemata Arcana in the early 380s AD, he had long been through the ‘moral and intellectual boot camp’ of Greek paideia. He was both a man of (Greek) culture and a Christian. He had plucked the ‘roses from the thorny field’ of paganism, and could now turn to the pressing issues of the day: the impieties of heretics. It is important to keep this in mind when reading Gregory's Poemata Arcana. Written in the form of didactic epic, these poems set forth the orthodox doctrine of the ineffable nature of Godhead and its manifestation in this world. In 713 hexameters, they expound the essential unity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit (poems 1 to 3), Christian cosmology (poem 4), Providence (poem 5), the relationship to God of human beings and angels (poem 6), the soul (poem 7), and finally the unity of the two Testaments and (the circumstances surrounding) the incarnation of Christ (poem 8). Because of this peculiar combination of Greek literary form with Christian content many modern critics have felt encouraged to pit Christian (content) against pagan (form) and locate the Arcana in the context of an on-going struggle of Christian writers anxious to appropriate Greek culture. But this entails not only a misplaced historical emphasis which overplays ‘struggle’ and ‘antagonism’. It has also led to an impoverished and truncated sense of the poems' literary style: a sizing up of Gregory against the didactic tradition of which to these critics he seems so anxious to be thought part.

Discussions of economic growth in antiquity have been primarily concerned with whether or not it occurred. Can we, from the array of unsystematic and often random information we have about individual and community wealth, and in the face of our very considerable ignorance about even such basic matters as population levels, find ways of measuring either aggregate or per capita growth? The second focus of scholarly energy has been on how growth might have been achieved, on levels of productivity and what limited them, on how institutions might have impeded or facilitated growth, and on the degree to which barriers may have been deliberately removed over time and growth consciously encouraged. This paper is not directly interested in either of those sets of questions. It is interested in who wanted growth in the first place.

The default assumption in discussions of growth often seems to be, at least implicitly, that it is brought about either by need or by greed. The desire of individuals to satisfy their needs more fully leads to an increase in, at the very least, aggregate productivity, and might be expected inevitably to drive growth from the supply side. The desire of individuals to increase their consumption drives growth from the demand side. The default assumptions tend to stop there, as if what counts as need is absolute, a matter of a certain minimum number of calories or ‘wheat equivalent’ a day, and as if greed is simply part of human nature.

The study of Propertius has been greatly facilitated by the publication by Stephen Heyworth of his Oxford Text and of his Cynthia. Many problems are now resolved or at any rate as near resolution as they are likely to be in the absence of some unexpected MS discovery. Other problems remain, and this very corrupt text will no doubt continue to provoke attempts at emendation; here are three. All citations are taken from Heyworth's OCT; references to comment by Heyworth are to his Cynthia.

The private collection of the Villa Albani-Torlonia in Rome holds the only surviving large-scale sculpture of a hunchback [fig. I]. Although this hunchback has been intensely studied, it remains enigmatic. The hunchback is generally agreed to be Roman and dated to the second century CE on the basis of its portrait head, particularly in the drilling technique of its hairstyle, though the realism of its misshapen and ugly body is in the direct tradition of works of the third century BCE.

Whether this hunchback is an original of its time or a copy of a now lost Greek work is still contentious. Since its discovery in the Baths of Caracalla, the figure has been identified as the famous Greek fabulist Aesop, who, according to literary tradition, may have been a hunchback. Although several scholars have suggested new possibilities for the identity of this hunchback, including the proposition that it is a Roman original representing a jester of the imperial court, its association with Aesop has remained. But is its identity necessarily key to understanding its significance? This article intends to move away from the identification of this figure to consider the hunchback primarily as a type, rather than a person, and shifts the emphasis to its context within a bathhouse.

In ‘the only coherent piece of autobiography which we possess from Horace's pen’, as Fraenkel has called it, the poet wrote these famous lines (Epist. 2.2.49–52):

unde simul primum me dimisere Philippi,
decisis humilem pinnis inopemque paterni 50
et laris et fundi paupertas impulit audax
ut uersus facerem.

As soon as Philippi discharged me thence, poverty drove me—grounded as I was, with my wings clipped, and deprived of my ancestral home and farm—boldly to produce verses.

As is remarked by Lyne, however, ‘Horace here omits an intervening and prosaic stage’. The evidence for this omission comes from Suetonius' biography of the poet, in which the same period of Horace's life is described slightly differently: ‘uictisque partibus uenia impetrata scriptum quaestorium comparauit. ac primo Maecenati … insinuatus…’ (‘after the defeat of his party and a successful request for pardon he procured the position of scriba quaestorius. And having first become involved with Maecenas…’). What was the exact sequence of events? Lyne, like Brink, proposes that Horace after Philippi derived income from his position as scriba quaestorius and that this in turn enabled him to write the poetry which eventually brought him to Maecenas' attention. Nisbet, on the other hand, thinks that Horace's early poetry elicited subsidies from ‘grandees like Pollio and Messalla’ and that these provided him with the wherewithal to buy his position as scriba, from which he was effectively relieved by his later association with Maecenas.