Post
by Milito » Thu Aug 07, 2003 6:35 pm
You're right on on your translation. Good job! See! I told you you could do it!<br /><br />I meant to give you another note for "nec" - it means "nor".<br /><br />As for Cicero.... I rather suspect that he roughed things out, and then polished, and then repolished, and then editted some more, and then polished just to be sure.... The book I'm reading is phrased as though it's a letter to his son who was at the time frittering away his time in Athens, rather than studying as he was supposed to be doing. But the book goes on for 3 rolled-up-scroll-equivalents, so I don't think he just dashed it off. He also had the tendency of having things he wrote published, often by his buddy Atticus, who owned a publishing house. (Useful, that!) <br /><br />Also, reading the most interesting "Scribes and Scholars" book, it pointed out that when things were published, they were copied by hand (by a small corps of slaves, usually...) and thus subject to copying errors. Add this to the fact that the authors would decide to amend what they've written, and would write to the publisher who might (or might not) put the change into other editions of the text. But now you've got two versions floating around, and eventually, you can have a whole bunch. The result is that for some more popular books, we now have to make choices about which words/word order to use, because we may have sources stemming from these several editions, with or without amendments.....<br /><br />You won't necessarily see all this in a reader like the one you're looking at, because it's choosing small sections of various works, doing the word choice for you. When you find a modern published version of a major work, there will be an explanation at the beginning to explain the sources of the text, and why what choices were made. Really, it doesn't matter if you're just interested in reading; it only matters if you're interested in figuring out how we wound up with what we have.<br /><br />And then, going back to Cicero, from what I've been able to gather about him, he was (for an ex-Consul and major lawyer) pretty much a perfectionist and kind of low in the self-esteem category, mostly because he kept trying to measure up to all the old aristocratic types, "fit in" with them and be accepted by them - and they weren't having any of it. He was also quite vain so far as his speaking and writing abilities were concerned, and he cared very much that he lived up to his reputation on that score, so I very much doubt that even one of his sentences didn't get crossed out on the way to the final copy at least once!<br /><br />Oh dear..... I appear to have climbed onto a soapbox again....<br /><br />Sorry about that....<br /><br />Kilmeny
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