No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
In the last number of C.Q. (XXV., p. 207) Mr. A. D. Knox has drawn up a list of Theocriteans who, he suggests, ‘have all of them made the most elementary mistake’ of failing to consider the possibility at least that it is the Boy, and not the Fox, who is the subject of καθξῃ in Id. I. 51. From that list he will have to with-draw two names, Gow and Campbell. This construction, which Mr. Knox propounds as a novelty, had been suggested by Mr. Gow in C.R. XLIV., pp. 9–10. For my part, I am not ingenious, and that syntactical possibility would no more have occurred to me independently than would Mr. Gow's three renderings of it, two of which are ‘until he sets her vinous breakfast upon a more solid basis’ and ‘until he sets her grapes on toast’; as little could I ever have thought, with Mr. Knox, of ‘the obvious necessity’ for this fox ‘of rest after a heavy meal’; still less of those further (I must admit) inevitable eventualities1 at which he hints with such delicacy in his quotation (p. 209, item g) of Aelian V. 39. In regard to these and all such matters, to my mind ‘it were to consider too curiously to consider so.’ For even in Greek which represented for my ears some such English as ‘until she set him a-breakfastant upon the dries,’ if there was one thing with which I was completely satisfied it was with the Fox as subject; that seemed so perfectly in keeping both with the happy playfulness of the passage and with the richly idiomatic φατ as applied to a graven image of an animal. But from the fact that I criticized Mr. Gow's note it is obvious that I was familiar with his idea.
page 55 note 1 Did K. read the context of his quotation from Aelian? The lion (says that zoologist), when he has eaten to plethora, will evacuate himself either by resting and fasting, or, if he has the luck to meet a monkey, he will eat that as an aperient. Now how can such circumstantial orthodoxies of the faculty throw any light upon the language of a mere poet, who must convey his meaning currents calamo or not at all?
page 55 note 2 Cf. Xenophanes I. 5, Eur, . Hclid. 215Google Scholar, Kirchhoff.
page 55 note 3 And that K.'s interpretation ‘fails on this most simple canon.’
page 55 note 4 States; but does not, of course, observe. I note on his first page (n.) ‘unknown elsewhere in the literatures or common parlances of the world,’ and it is not I who will be so dull as to ask K. whether he has then made an ‘exhaustive survey.’
page 55 note 5 K.'s worst misunderstanding concerns a point which does not affect him but is important for this passage. ‘C.'s “full current sense of a present participle” is a man of straw’—this introduces an argument based upon the pictorial situation. With that the statement which he criticizes had absolutely nothing to do. My point was not one of logic, but of Greek syntactical practice pure and simple. Take Xen. Symp. III. 11 δναται πоλλоὺς κ λ о ν τ α ς κ α θ ɭ ζ ε ɭ ν; now while the phrase here emphasized itself only occurs some half-dozen times, this kind of phrase, a verb of rendering, finding, displaying, etc., with an active (or middle) participle, βλπоντ' άπоδεξω σ' ξτερоν Ar. Pl. 210, occurs innumerably; never once, that I could discover, does a verbal in -τоς take the place of such a present participle. And with reason; for while you might say ‘the swallows migrant muster on the wires,’ you would never say ‘this weather will start the swallows migrant’ or ‘migratory,’ you must say ‘migrating.’ But passive verbals are used predicatively with some freedom to denote a fait accompli.
page 56 note 1 Reasons: (i.) By what are we to interpret the unique περστατατоν πоιεῖν but by the very common νστατоν πоιεῖν? (ii.) That and all the other compounds δια- μετα- σѵ- ὑπо- are passive.(iii.) Cf. L. and S. περιστημι A. I. i. (iv.) This is comedy and that is the joke; by her shouts she assembled the village, (v.) Cf. prec. n. [What people might correct are my inadvertences; I ought not to have cited as a neuter ‘στατóς as just as in Soph., not Hom.,’ since even in Soph. (Fr. 844P) it is pass, as everywhere else except Phil. 716, if indeed not also there, for so I now think, ‘settled’; water in Greek can be ‘stayed,’ cf. PI. Crat. 437B, it never ‘stands’ in that sense, contrast Il. XXI. 240.]
page 56 note 2 For the view that this word means ‘to have supper,’ a view which flies in the face of all ancient testimony, K. cites only Dio Cassius LXV. 4, a passage which itself, as anybody may see, proves the sense ‘to breakfast.’ Obvious advantages of my interpretation are not thus to be forced into the MS. reading.
page 56 note 3 In all this matter the history of fashion was substantially the same in Rome; see Pauly-Wissowa III. 1895 fix.
page 56 note 4 Cf. Neil, on Knights 41, 729, 805, 1164, 1166–7, 1394Google Scholar. Will K., who professes respect for the library and erudition of Athenaeus, dispute his statement (X. 428B) that κλῖναι in place of δφρоι at banquets were an innovation due to τρνφ? Plato's happy farmers recline at Rep. II. 327B just as we do when picnicking (cf. Hdt. I. 126, 3, Theocr. VII. 133); but observe the implications of Plat. Rep. 420E. Ath. loc. cit. says that even in his own day the old custom remained in some parts of the Greek world (the case of Crete is notorious), and there would presumably have been more such survivals in our poet's time; it is certainly remarkable that the recherché dinner given in Idyll XIV. by a gallant of Cos to his friends and mistress (not wife) was apparently an affair of sitting, διφρακоς 41. The Euboean countryfolk of Dion Chrys. VII. recline, it is true, π στιβδоς, but that is some centuries later; their women of course sit, §§ 65, 67, 76.
page 57 note 1 Although feminine! (Or will K. now question her chastity?)
page 57 note 2 K. here and on p. 211 (d) alludes to the boy's falling asleep, and as there is of course no hint of any such episode in the original, I take it I am confronted with some playful mystification.
page 57 note 3 ‘Aulus ate his crust from the floor because the guest took his chairs’—but what would A. have done with those chairs anyway, since ex hypoth. K. he cannot sit to dine? He could recline on the floor. And how can καθισας alone mean ‘sitting not on chairs but on the floor’? The satire is on greed, not theft; cf. foil, pieces 206–8, and the imitation by Martial II. 37. ἦρε δ πντ' πσω cannot include chairs (hardly to be slipped into a slave's napkin), but is as in 207, 2. But there is a point in καθσας; to a meal of dry bread one does not recline, this adult no more than our Boy; it is informal, and anyhow the reason why one reclines at dinner is because it is the most convenient posture for drinking, see Plut, . Quaest. Conviv. VII. 10Google Scholar, § 3 κλνη τоῖς πνоνσι τ ς κ α θ δ ρ α ς μενων, ὅτι κτλ.