Desde los orígenes del mensaje cristiano, la astrología fue vista como una amenaza por la creencia en el fatalismo astral que ponía en crisis no solamente la libertad humana sino también la fe en la Providencia divina. No obstante, el rechazo al influjo de los astros presentó diferentes matices tanto entre los Padres de la Iglesia como en las escuelas gnósticas. Los argumentos que se usaron contra la astrología provenían, en algunos casos, de la filosofía helénica precristiana y encontraban su principal apoyo en el rechazo al determinismo cósmico. El cristianismo agregó su reticencia a las prácticas adivinatorias de los astrólogos. El episodio evangélico de la estrella del Oriente fue el más estudiado para la elaboración de las diatribas cristianas más antiguas contra la astrología, destacándose entre ellas la de los valentinianos que están detrás del texto de los Extractos de Teódoto, recensionados por Clemente de Alejandría.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
Recensione di Guido Fabrizio MILANESE, Filologia, letteratura, computer. Idee e strumenti per l’informatica umanistica, Vita e Pensiero, Milano 2020, 344 pp., ISBN 978-88-343-3751-6.
Philology. Linguistics, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
In the vast bloodshed of the Ilioupersis, the king of Troy Priam – an old man, burdened with sufferances – faces death at the hands of Neoptolemus, Achilles’ young son. Far from the mercy shown by his father towards Priam in Iliad 24, Neoptolemus is eager to slaughter the king on the very altar of Zeus Herkeios, forsaking the protection granted to a suppliant and violating the heroic behavioural ethos. The three accounts of Priam’s death here discussed – Vergil’s Aeneid 2, Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica 13, Triphiodorus’ Halosis Iliou – rather than focusing on the thematic structure of a hikesia-scene, elaborate on the motifs of a paradoxical and perverted monomachia.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, History of the Greco-Roman World
A preferência dos duces gregis pelo papel de Balião, em detrimento do de Psêudolo, que dá o seu nome à peça, resulta do carácter espectacular de duas cenas em que pontifica o alcoviteiro, a meio do chamado "acto 1". Mas o mortalis graphicus, que compara a sua inventiva à dos poetas, capazes de tirarem do nada as suas composições, é o verdadeiro herói da comédia, que anima com a riqueza das emoções vividas no palco e o brilho de uma inteligência pronta a aproveitar os favores da Fortuna para derrotar o alcoviteiro e o seu próprio senhor.
History of the Greco-Roman World, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
The problem of personality in philosophy has been significant since the emergence of Christianity. In Soviet Russia, this problem has been actualized since the 2nd half of the twentieth century, since the Thaw, when the books of Russian religious philosophers became known. We were the original heirs of Christian ontology and ethics, which assumed that a personal appeal to God on You (Tu) testified to a change of places in the interior of being itself, which becomes intimate, close, because the infinite God, being in a person, makes him the same infinite person. The Latin term "persona" is translated as "mask" (personality). V.V. Vinogradov in the "History of Words" says that the word "personality", associated with Latin and Greek meanings (persona, prosopon), was not used massively in the Old Russian language until the XVII century, and in the XVII and XVIII centuries it began to denote only the official position of a person. It is impossible to associate this meaning of the face with what was in antiquity and the Middle Ages. This is a homonym. Reflecting on Greek literature, S. S. Averintsev wrote that the term "creativity" is poorly applicable to the Greek philosophers: "poyesis" is a matter understood as an invention. The Greeks invented an objectified type of communication-through-literature, i.e. dialogue, consciously separated from life communication. Dialogue as an invention revealed the fundamental undialogical nature of Greek literature, and Socrates is the ideal of a radically undialogical person who cannot be internally hurt by the word of the interlocutor. Therefore, for Averintsev, a personality is a mind free from a "dialogical situation", it is a mask, an individual understood as an eidos. It is the mask — "immobile-clear, fully revealed and appeared" — that is the semantic limit of a continuously emerging face. By opening the "mask", the Greeks emphasized the importance of individuality. V. S. Bybler, criticizing Averintsev, argues that dialogue is not a construction, it is an internal dispute of the philosopher taking place in his own soul. He is in the thought itself, pushing its definitions to the limit and reaching the border of other possible definitions, concepts, understandings. According to Bybler, the thought itself is dialogical, communicating with itself within itself and forming a gap between itself and the other "I". At the same time, Bibler defines his philosophy as the philosophy of an eternally borderline culture. Dialogue is a tense collaboration between an author who worked in a past culture and a reader who lives in a modern culture. Personality for the Bibler is the ultimate embodiment of the individual — the reverse course of Averintsev. M. Ya. Gefter and V. V. Bibikhin worked out this problem 20 years later. Gefter, based on the unmotivated appearance of homo sapiens and the unexplained appearance of speech, emphasized that speech destroyed the limit of understanding between people. This is also connected with his reliance on the concept of the World of Worlds and the definition of personality, which, in his opinion, is not a higher form built over the individual, but a later phenomenon that entered into a dispute with individuation. Personality is a choice, a form of overcoming oneself with access to others, a case. Bibikhin, not agreeing with the theoretical positions of Averintsev and Bybler, turns out to be closer to Gefter. It does not proceed from the development of the individual or personality, having changed the aspect of reasoning. He posed the problem of the wholeness of a human (homo) who initially deals not with knowledge, but with being and non-being. Before knowledge there is affirmation and negation, which sound in speaking silence before any speech and push a person to act. A human (homo), i.e. not an individual or a person, begins with an act; he is, first of all, such an act. The difference between Bibikhin's approach, which is closely related to the ideas of hesychasm, from Averintsev and Bybler lies in his understanding of philosophy as timeless. For him, everything known is the World, not even modernity. Personal properties (prosopon) are possessed only by God, who is "personal" and "hypostatic", because He expresses energy. This problem of the action of the energetic Word is the most important witness of the world given through man and recognized through language. Language poses the problem of understanding, assuming an initial misunderstanding between people.
One of the more mystifying aspects of the grammars of ancient and Oriental languages produced in the West during the Renaissance is how students were expected to proceed. They were obviously intended to memorise the tables and there seems to have been an assumption that to advance any further the help of a teacher was essential. But what about the chrestomathies, the texts frequently added to the grammars as linguistic exercises? In his study of early Greek grammars Paul Botley wrote that ‘the language was approached through Greek texts that the pupils already knew by heart in their Latin translations: the Greek Scriptures and the liturgy.’1 In the case of Arabic a similar approach seems to have been adopted, particularly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Lord’s Prayer remained a favourite text, together with Arabic versions of the Psalms. Thanks to the manuscripts which Guillaume Postel had pawned with the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg, the German authors of early Arabic grammars who frequented the Palatine library – Jacob Christmann, Ruthger Spey and Peter Kirsten – could use the Arabic versions of the Epistles and Acts of the Apostles. Otherwise knowledge of Arabic literature was highly limited, and the most obvious text to choose, the one regarded as the perfect expression of the Arabic language, was the Qur’an. Postel, who compiled the first proper grammar of classical Arabic to appear in the West, set a precedent.2 His Grammatica arabica, published in about 1539,3 gave as reading material, in Arabic and Latin, the Lord’s Prayer and the
This paper is about the relation between natural and grammatical gender in Greek and the ways in which the twain are matched or mismatched. A variety of topics is discussed, including the relation between grammatical gender and declension, the resolution of gender clashes in epicene nouns and the marking of natural gender in common nouns. Particular attention is given to the gendering of neuter diminutives with male or female referents. Age and particular aspects of “maleness” or “femaleness” are shown to be major determinants in triggering male or female instead of neuter agreement patterns, especially on anaphoric pronouns, but occasionally also on other word classes such as predicative adjectives and participles.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
Throughout his life, Cicero paid considerable attention to astronomical and meteorological issues, and specifically he focused on the work of Aratus. For this reason, it is not possible to isolate the Aratea (Phaenomena and Prognostica) in Cicero’s younger years or to study their presence in his other works merely to extract textual fragments or to derive historical information about their composition. The purpose of this study is to follow the cosmological and meteorological theme through the various literary genres and to reveal its connection to other aspects of Cicero’s work. In particular, this research addresses Aratus’ citations in the Epistulae ad Atticum, De re publica, De legibus, Orator, De natura deorum and De divinatione.
Cicerone prestò molta attenzione alle questioni astronomiche e meteorologiche e, in particolare, per tutta la sua vita, alle opere di Arato. Per questo motivo, non è possibile isolare gli Aratea (i Phaenomena e i Prognostica) negli anni giovanili di Cicerone o studiare la loro presenza nelle altre sue opere solo per estrarre frammenti testuali o per ricavare informazioni storiche sulla loro composizione. Lo scopo di questo studio è seguire il tema cosmologico e meteorologico attraverso i vari generi letterari e trovare le connessioni con altri interessi e aspetti del lavoro di Cicerone. In particolare, la ricerca riguarda le citazioni di Arato in Epistulae ad Atticum, De re publica, De legibus, Orator, De natura deorum e De divinatione.
Philology. Linguistics, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
The article is connected with evolution investigation of the grammatical category which is recognized as the Oblique Mood in the Dutch language. The evolution of that grammatical phenomenon is reconstructed involving authentic texts of different periods, starting with very restricted material of early middle Dutch period and finishing with numerous and different texts of modern Dutch period. The transformation of morphological structure of the Dutch Oblique Mood moves into the direction of growing analytical structures with the parallel degradation of synthetical forms with traditional flexion markers. Taking into consideration the fact that the Oblique Mood is very well reflected on the syntactical (sentence) level, the attention is focused not only on the simple sentences but on the developed system of subordinate clauses. All the steps of transformation are reflected in the stages of diachronical analysis too. For the better definite differentiation of the Oblique Mood Construction and finding differences in the constructions, all the variants of the Oblique Mood are compared with the variants of the Indicative Mood. It helps to provide the comparison in the dichotomy of the Indicative – Oblique Moods. The special attention is given to the description of periphrastic constructions which were formed combining preterite-present verbs with infinitives I, II and further grammaticalisation of two-component verb combination. The ruining of the synthetical paradigm was caused by the reduction of corresponding suffix reflection. There was the attempt to restore the synthetical forms in translation of the Bible from Latin and Greek into Dutch, it was the marker of the literature language but not the colloquial one. The influence of the French and German languages was definite but sporadical. The analytical forms were created in the conditional clauses and were recognized as the Conditional Mood I, II. This type of mood had some meaning of supposition forming the corresponding subgroup of the Suppositional Mood. If the preterite-present verb zullen was a productive form but willen was not involved into the Oblique Mood analytical form creation, remaining outside of that grammatical category. There is some resemblance between the Dutch and English Oblique Mood, in particular the structure of analytical forms.
The Classics department at my school has 32 Apple iPads. This allows for extensive individualised use of ICT in Classics lessons. Having access to tablets opens up many possibilities, not least the fact that students can stay in their usual classroom and pick up their tablet periodically to aid their learning. This facility lends itself perfectly to the Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) electronic resources. There are many online activities, games and exercises on the CLC website which were developed to support learning through supplementary activities based on the original print materials. However, it is only when students have frequent and individual access to these resources that they can reap the benefits. My school, equipped with iPads, has provided the perfect opportunity to conduct a case study on the experiences of students using a CLC online resource in Latin lessons. As a PGCE student who has recently completed an undergraduate degree in Classics, I have had a lot of experience using electronic tools to aid the translation of Latin texts, namely the programme ‘Diogenes’, and the website http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. For this reason I was particularly interested in the use of ICT as a tool to aid the reading of Latin and enhance language acquisition.
Generalmente se considera que el género cómico es uno de los que mejor reflejan la realidad social del momento, aunque es importante distinguir cuándo la invención de los poetas predomina sobre la verosimilitud de los hechos auténticos. Esta realidad se refleja también en el ámbito lingüístico, en el cual se pueden distinguir diferentes estratos y condiciones sociales, dependiendo del tipo de lenguaje que empleen los personajes. En nuestro estudio nos ocupamos de una determinada parte de la sociedad, la femenina, y de la comedia de Aristófanes y Menandro. Nuestro objetivo es ofrecer una síntesis de las características más destacadas de los sociolectos mostrados por ambos cómicos, tratando de insistir en su evolución.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
The Gate of Alexander in Hebrew Alexander Romances
However surprising it may seem, the story of the gate of Alexander in the Hebrew versions of the Romance is associated rather with certain geographical and historical facts than with the eschatological dimension and the popular association of Gog and Magog with the Unclean Nations are not a part of the narrative. This does not mean that the eschatological aspect was absent from the Jewish interpretation of the figure of Alexander. Quite the contrary: it seems a crucial part of Alexander’s role as presented especially in Hellenistic Jewish literature. But this eschatological significance of Alexander in Jewish tradition is more often suggested by Alexander’s linking with the end of prophecy2 or the beginning of the new universal kingship. The Unclean Nations episode is not so important in that aspect. It is rather used by the authors of the Hebrew Alexander Romances to stress the exotic and fanciful elements in the narrative, thus eliciting the curiosity of the reader, or to comment on Alexander’s decisions as a king and on political aspects of his rule.
Ancient history, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature