Here’s a link to David Kovacs’ article, in which he discusses the word αὐθέντης and why he proposed excision of the entire passage:
http://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/view/6351/5131
Scroll down to page 36.
Maybe Chandler will explain why Philodemus talks about rulers or tyrants who are deinois erosi toxeuomenoi – aimed at [with arrows] from all sides by fierce erotic passions (I translated erosin as “erotic passions” rather than as “loves” because the latter would seem even more puzzling.)
Bill, it turns out that this fragment is actually from On Rhetoric Book 5 according to Sudhaus and Hubbell, or Book 7 (?) in a recent book. So it’s not in Chandler.
I liked Kovac’s argument that if αὐθέντης could have the ‘master’ meaning in Attic times, it would not have been criticised by the Atticists. Here’s Phrynicus:
Αὐθέντης μηδέποτε χρήσῃ ἐπὶ τοῦ δεσπότου͵ ὡς οἱ περὶ τὰ δικαστήρια ῥήτορες͵ ἀλλ΄ ἐπὶ τοῦ αὐτόχειρος φονέως.
Andrew
Thanks for looking, Andrew. It doesn’t look as if either Book 5 or Book 7 is currently on the Philodemus Project agenda. So the passage I tried to translate will likely remain forever opaque to me. I was hoping for some explanation of the bizarre use of “deinois erosin toxeuomenoi” apparently to refer to tyrants, which in this context seems entirely out of place. I might have thought it a quotation from tragedy, except that I can’t see how it would scan metrically.
Just to complete the circle here for the curious–probably of no interest in connection with Timothy–there are three words that seem to be similar formations but without theta:
αὐτοέντης, “murderer,” attested in Sophocles and Dio Cassius:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dau)toe%2Fnths ;
αὐτοεντία, which LSJ defines as “= αὐθεντία,” i.e., “absolute authority,” not “murderer,” also attested in a fragment of Dio Cassius:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dau)toenti%2Fa ; and
αὐτοεντεί, “by one’s own hand” (suicide?), again, Dio Cassius:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dau)toentei%2F
It looks to me as if there are two families of words here which were liable to confusion.
Bill
I just got round to looking up the original from Euripides, fragment 850 [Nauck, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 1889, p.637], which it looks like you already did:
ἡ γὰρ τυραννὶς πάντοθεν τοξεύεται δεινοῖς ἔρωσιν, ἧς φυλακτέον πέρι.
For sovereign rule/despotic rule is aimed with strong desires..
The relative pronoun is feminine, so it looks like it must be:
Despotic rule, which one must be on guard against, is aimed at with strong desires.
Presumably it can’t be:
Sovereign rule is aimed at with strong desires, which must be guarded against.
Euripides, Trojan Women 255:
ἔρως ἐτόξευσ᾽ αὐτὸν ἐνθέου κόρης.
Love for a frenzied girl has hit him. (or somesuch)
αὐτοεντία, which LSJ defines as “= αὐθεντία,” i.e., “absolute authority,” not “murderer,” also attested in a fragment of Dio Cassius:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dau)toenti%2Fa > ;
This is interesting. Do you know what the εντια refers to?
Andrew
αὐθεντία occurs in 3rd Maccabees 2.29
τούς τε ἀπογραφομένους χαράσσεσθαι καὶ διὰ πυρὸς εἰς τὸ σῶμα παρασήμῳ Διονύσου κισσοφύλλῳ, οὓς καὶ καταχωρίσαι εἰς τὴν προσυνεσταλμένην αὐθεντίαν.
‘those who are registered are also to be branded with the ivy-leaf emblem of Dionysus and assigned to their former status.’ [NETS]
'that those who were thus registered, were to be marked on their persons by the ivy-leaf symbol of Dionysus, and to be set apart with these limited rights. [Brenton]
Muraoka gives ‘autonomous district’ for αὐθεντία. συστέλλω is to shorten, restrict, so it could be that their area of jurisdiction was being restricted, perhaps.
Andrew
Do you know what the εντια refers to?
This is a nominal suffix fromt the verb ἵημι.
ἡ γὰρ τυραννὶς πάντοθεν τοξεύεται δεινοῖς ἔρωσιν, ἧς φυλακτέον πέρι.
For sovereign rule/despotic rule is aimed with strong desires..
The relative pronoun is feminine, so it looks like it must be:
Despotic rule, which one must be on guard against, is aimed at with strong desires.
Presumably it can’t be:
Sovereign rule is aimed at with strong desires, which must be guarded against.
Yes.
ἔρως ἐτόξευσ᾽ αὐτὸν ἐνθέου κόρης. This is Cassandra. ἐνθέου – “having the god inside her”, i.e., gifted with prophecy by Apollo; like the Sibyl or the Delphic priestess, she’s possessed by the god. Agamemnon has been hit by the arrow, i.e., he has fallen in love with her.
The association of love or physical desire with archery is of course pervasive and persists even to this day in popular culture. What I find perplexing is the use of the image by Philodemus, first in a quote from Euripides (incidentally, the two lines do scan as trimeters) and a second time, in a context that seems utterly inappropriate.
Does the Euripides fragment use τυραννὶς as metonymy for a specific tyrant in a particular tragic situation–where a tyrant has fallen in love with a tragic heroine–or is this simply a general statement about tyranny in general? And what’s it’s relevance in the passage from Philodemus? Puzzling. Maybe Ph. is just showing off his familiarity with classical literature.
Bill
I’m hopeless when it comes to Philodemus, but just looking at this, I’d say it meant something like “To state the truth and the actualities, rhetors do great harm to many great men on the subject of those ‘targeted by dire passions’ [i.e. tyrants]: on every occasion they contend against VIPs and with ‘rulers in authority’ on similar subjects in just the same way.” There follows an invidious comparison between rhetors who make enemies of politicians and philosophers who can improve them by making friends of them.
I’d have thought the participle αυθεντοῦσιν was better than αυθενταισιν. Either way the immediate context seems to tell against taking it as meaning “murderers” rather than “exercising authority.” — Or maybe not? In epic αυθενταισιν would surely mean murderers: does the phrase here represent the language of the rhetors? But there can’t be much doubt that by Philodemus’ time αυθεντεῖν could mean “exercise authority” or the like. (LSJ cites a 1st cent. BC papyrus, and I expect there are more; haven’t checked.) If this is a hexameter phrase (which doesn’t seem certain) you’d expect it to be earlier; perhaps Philodemus has switched the meaning. Anyhow, I incline to the simpler reading, which has the rhetors inveighing against (and hence alienating) the powerful and gives αυθεντεῖν (if in fact this is the verb) the same meaning it self-evidently has in Paul.
But I could be completely off base.
Philodemus would have been – I’m trying to think of a polite term – toadying to a powerful Roman senator in the last days of the Republic, wouldn’t he?
“targeted by dire passions” isn’t erosin specifically erotic passions? That’s what makes this so strange.
Ἀλλ` εἰ δε[ῖ τἀληθῆ κα[ὶ γι]ωόμενα [λέγειν, οἱ ῥ[ήτ]ορες καὶ μ[εγάλα βλάπτ[ουσι] πολλοὺς [καὶ μεγάλους καὶ περὶ τῶν [,δει]νοῖς ἔρωσι το[ξ]ευομένων” πρὸς τοὺς ἐπιφαν[εστάτους ἐκάστοτε διαμάχονται καὶ “σὺν αὐθεντοῦσιν ἄν[αξιν]” ὑπὲρ τῶν ὁμοίων ὡσ[αύτως.
Michael, I had read the fourth καί (καὶ περὶ τῶν) as coordinating the two indicative verbs βλάπτ[ουσι] and διαμάχονται, whereas you seem to have περὶ τῶν [,δει]νοῖς ἔρωσι το[ξ]ευομένων” modifying βλάπτουσι. If this fourth καί were adverbial, then I feel there would need to a coordinating conjunction before πρὸς. Am I wrong?
But there can’t be much doubt that by Philodemus’ time αυθεντεῖν could mean “exercise authority” or the like. (LSJ cites a 1st cent. BC papyrus, and I expect there are more; haven’t checked.)
Basically, there are two that have a definite dating before, say, 100 AD:
BGU IV 1208 (28-7 BC):
κἀμοῦ αὐθεντηκότος πρὸς αὐτὸν περιποιῆσαι Καλατύτει τῶι ναυτικῶι ἐπὶ τῷ αὐτῶι φόρωι ἐν τῆι ὥραι ἐπεχώρησεν.
Aristonicus, On the Signs of the Iliad, at Il. 9.694 (late 1st century BC):
τότε γὰρ εἴωθεν ἐπιφωνεῖσθαι, ὅταν ὁ αὐθεντῶν τοῦ λόγου καταπληκτικά τινα προενέγκηται.
Andrew
Qimmik,
I wouldn’t be quite so cynical about Philodemus, but that’s a valid enough point. One of the things that makes Philod so fiendishly difficult, however, is his habit of presenting someone else’s view before proceeding to refute it, and when the texts are so fragmentary it’s often hard, sometimes impossible, to know whether the views expressed are his own or his opponent’s. This has led to much confusion in the past (and in the present).
Yes, “targeted by fierce lusts” might have been better than “dire passions” for the Euripides. I take it as referring to lust for tyranny, much as Oedipus assumes of Cleon in the OT.
Andrew,
I was mentally punctuating before the προς (giving asyndeton), but you might well be right about that και. I haven’t given this any real consideration. If you really want to pursue this, you should use not Sudhaus but Longo Auricchio, who reedited the first two books and made many improvements. (The books themselves have been reorganized/renumbered since Sudhaus, but bks 1-2 are still that, I think.) I don’t know if she improved the text of this particular passage, though. I haven’t seen Chandler, who used her text.
Your report of attestations of αυθεντειν seems still to be up to date. A quick check of the papyri.info site turns up only the BGU text before 100 CE, plus a handful of occurrences of the adjective. But that and Aristonicus (who’ll be reporting earlier tradition; may himself be AD not BC however) are enough to show the word was in current use.
Clearly NT scholars leave no stone unturned (even if they then misuse what they turn up: that extract from the 2nd edition(!) of the Women in the Church book is truly shocking). If only such devotion to elucidation of Paul could be directed to elucidation of Philodemus, who did no harm to the world.
EDIT – Sorry, I should have read the whole thread before posting. I was thinking it was bk.2, but now I gather it’s Sudhaus’ bk.5. This was assigned to bk.7 in Tiziano Dorandi’s major reorganization of the fragments (ZPE 82, 1990, 59–87) and to bk.10 by Longo Auricchio (CErc 26, 1996, 169-71), but so far as I know has not yet been reedited. So I guess we still have to use Sudhaus for this part of the work. There have been more scraps of the Rhetorica papyrus since Sudhaus, but I don’t know if this passage is affected.
Sorry, I am not with you re the second use of the image of archery by Philodemus. The first is [,δει]νοῖς ἔρωσι το[ξ]ευομένων” but I am not sure what you mean by the second one.
I have had a quick look (in Wikipedia etc) at hexameters and trimeters, but it doesn’t look that easy. If it’s not too much to ask, how would these two divide up:
[,δει]νοῖς ἔρωσι το[ξ]ευομένων”
σὺν αὐθεντοῦσιν ἄν[αξιν]
Andrew
Well, ἔρως does have a wider range of meanings than erotic love/desire/lust, and you’re probably right that here it must mean lust for power. But with τοξευομένων the erotic association automatically leaps to mind before anything else. And it seems strange to think of a tyrant as beset from all sides by desire for power–that seems more appropriate for erotic passion.
This thread has gone in several different, and, to me at least, interesting, directions. I hope Andrew doesn’t feel he has been led on a wild goose chase.
Bill
You’re right, I was mistaken. Just one reference to δεινοῖς ἔρωσι τοξευομένων.
Iambic trimeter – the pattern of the iambic metron is x _ v _ , where x is a syllable that can be either long or short (anceps). A substitution of two shorts for the first long is occasionally allowed, but somewhat sparingly in tragedy. (Comedy allows more licenses, so that iambic trimeter in comedy is very close to natural Greek speech.) There are three metra to a verse.
Euripides fr. 850:
ἡ γὰρ τυραννὶς πάντοθεν τοξεύεται _ _ v _ / _ _ v _ / _ _ v _ //
δεινοῖς ἔρωσιν, ἧς φυλακτέον πέρι. _ _ v _ / v _ v _ / v _ v b //
Hexameter (just the end of a line):
σὺν αὐθεντοῦσιν ἄναξιν
[_ v v / _ v v / _ v] v / _ _ / _ v v /_ b //
I’ve used b to stand for a short syllable at the end of a line, which is always treated as a long syllable.
The word-break before σὺν, i.e., after the first short syllable in the third foot (where the third foot is a dactyl), is a normal place for a major word-break (caesura) in the hexameter. This is a “feminine” caesura, less common that a “masculine” caesura (after the long syllable of the third foot) but still quite common. So this fragment looks very much like the second half of a hexameter.
As I mentioned, it’s the archaic word ἄναξιν in a 1st century BCE text that makes me think this is a quotation from poetry–and it happens to scan as the end of a hexameter.
των δεινοις ερωσιν τοξευομενων
Philod is recasting the original, evidently a well-known saying. (Andrew) The participle itself doesn’t scan, unlike the original τοξευεται; and (Qimmik) what was aimed at in the trimeter was not tyrants but tyranny. Lust for tyranny, ερως της τυραννιδος, doesn’t seem that strange, either as an idea or as Greek. And what ερως does is take aim and shoot at its object/his target—here not an actual girl but ἡ τυραννις (you can imagine her personified). ερωσι plural: there’s any number of wannabe tyrants out there, each with his own ερως to be top dog. Tyranny is (or tyrants are, in Philod’s allusion) targeted by these ερωτες from all sides. I don’t have too much of a problem with this.
συν αυθεντ[?ου?]σιν αν[αξιν]. If this is right, it’s self-evidently a hexameter ending. I had momentarily wondered whether the articulation could be αυθεντ[αι]ς ἵνα ν[, in which case it would be simple prose, but this seems intractable and the syllabification tells against it (line division at |sin rather than –s|in). But I don’t know if e.g. –ουσιν ανδρασι(ν) is excluded by the size of the hole; that would be prose. But συν is extremely odd with διαμαχεσθαι as meaning “against” rather than “along with” (English can say “contend with, fight with,” but can Greek?). I’m not at all happy with this passage. But that’s nothing new for me with Philodemus.
Fresh inspection or MSI of the original or the disegni might help resolve the questions. Or not.
Is it not from bk.2? The Sudhaus page you linked to (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3myvzj … tDNlU/edit) has bk.2 at the top of it. Is that wrong? - And now I see that transcript again, I fear I may have been misread a high point after τοξευομενων and respected that in the translation I offered. Much better to construe as you do, Andrew, so special thanks for picking me up on that.
And now I really should absent myself from these boards for a while.
Best,
Michael
Thanks a lot, Bill. Let me see if I have understood this at all - I think I have half got it..
I have read that a short vowel in an open syllable is counted as short, but in a closed syllable is counted long (http://www.aoidoi.org/articles/meter/intro.pdf). So then we have:
ἡ γὰρ τυ/ραν _ _ v _
νὶς πάν/το/θεν _ _ v _
το/ξεύ/ε/ται v _ v _
which is almost the same as yours except that I have το short in τοξεύεται. If it should be long, could you explain why, and is the rest of it right, with the break in the middle of τυραννὶς?
Thanks, Andrew
That’s an interesting idea. If they are fighting against (πρὸς) the VIPs (ἐπιφαν[εστάτους), but are fighting with the αὐθεντ[ ]σιν ἄν[ ], and they are the bad guys so to speak, then perhaps it could be murderous αὐθένταισιν ἄν[ ] they are fighting with?
Fresh inspection or MSI of the original or the disegni might help resolve the questions. Or not.
There is an image of P.Herc.220 fr. s.n. here: http://163.1.169.40/cgi-bin/library?e=d-000-00---0PHerc--00-0-0--0prompt-10---4------0-1l--1-en-50---20-about---00031-001-1-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=PHerc&cl=CL5.1.21 and the image itself here: http://163.1.169.40/gsdl/collect/PHerc/index/assoc/HASH01fd.dir/herc.v006.1576.a.01.hires.jpg I can’t make any sense of it - it doesn’t seem to correspond to Sudhaus’s text at all, so far as I can see.
Is it not from bk.2? The Sudhaus page you linked to (> https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3myvzj > … tDNlU/edit) has bk.2 at the top of it. Is that wrong? - And now I see that transcript again, I fear I may have been misread a high point after τοξευομενων and respected that in the translation I offered.
I typed out the transcript from Sudhaus, because I couldn’t find a digital copy. P. Herc. isn’t on the list here, for example: http://www.papyri.info/browse/hgv/. So I apologise if I misled you with my quotation marks - I started trying to imitate what I think may be German quotation marks with commas etc. and then decided to use English ones, and wasn’t consistent. Here it is again:
Ἀλλ` εἰ δε[ῖ τἀληθῆ κα[ὶ γι]νόμενα [λέγειν, οἱ ῥ[ήτ]ορες καὶ μ[εγάλα βλάπτ[ουσι] πολλοὺς [καὶ μεγάλους καὶ περὶ τῶν [„δει]νοῖς ἔρωσι το[ξ]ευομένων“ πρὸς τοὺς ἐπιφαν[εστάτους ἐκάστοτε διαμάχονται καὶ „σὺν αὐθεντ[οῦ]σιν ἄν[αξιν]“ ὑπὲρ τῶν ὁμοίων ὡσ[αύτως.
[edited 26.9.14 to correct γιωόμενα in line 1]
It’s volume 2 of Sudhaus. My fault again, I took it in that form from the text of Wolter’s Semantic Study, where he has it as Philodemus, Rhet. 2.133 Sudhaus (= P.Herc. 220); but I see now that in his references he makes clear that the 2.133 belongs to Sudhaus and not to Philodemus. Here is the extract from Sudhaus again, with corrected reference, and a couple of critical marks on page 134 which I had omitted: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3myvzj5H9WVQUpBa1ZZb1pTQUk/edit?usp=sharing
Andrew
There’s some useful information in a footnote in Wolters Semantic Study, JGRChJ 1 (2000) 145-75 at 156.
The Herculaneum papyrus fragments in question
(now known as P.Herc. 220) are no longer extant,
although a hand-drawn copy was published in the
nineteenth century. For an extensive bibliography
on P.Herc. 220, see M. Gigante, Catalogo dei Papiri
Ercolanesi (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1979), pp. 107-108.
It is usually assigned to Book V of Philodemus’s
Rhetorica, which is being prepared for publication
by Matilde Ferrario of Milan; see her ‘Per una nuova
edizione del quinto libro della “Retorica” di Filodemo’,
in Proceedings of the XVIIIth International Congress of
Papyrology, Athens, 25–31 May 1986 (2 vols.; Athens:
Greek Papyrological Society, 1988), I, pp. 167-84.
However, P.Herc. 220 has been tentatively referred
to Book VII in T. Dorandi, ‘Per una ricomposizione
dello scritto di Filodemo sulla Retorica’, ZPE 82
(1990), pp. 59-87 (85).
It looks like she might still be working on it at the University of Calabria, or at least until fairly recently: http://polaris.unical.it/user/report/visualizzacurriculum.php3?IDutente=2097592015
Principali interessi di ricerca dell’ultimo quinquennio
Il primo testo critico completo dei PHercc 1669, 220, 1078/1080, contenenti un libro incerto del trattato “Sulla retorica” del filosofo epicureo Filodemo di Gadara, è nella edizione di quest’opera pubblicata da S. Sudhaus a Lipsia negli anni 1892/1896.
Andrew
I have το short in τοξεύεται. If it should be long, could you explain why,
ξ consists of two consonants: κ + σ. The syllable τοκ- is followed by a consonant and therefore long (or heavy, in the newer terminology). A better way of thinking about this is that closed syllables (syllables ending in a consonant) and syllables with long vowels or diphthongs are heavy.
ζ is also treated as two consonant: σ + δ.
A mute + liquid is sometimes treated as a single consonant, so that the preceding syllable is treated as light if the vowel is short.
Your scansion of the rest is correct.
Bill
The Herculaneum papyri rolls of Philodemus were charred in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. When they were unearthed around 1810, transcriptions were made as they were unrolled, but the process of unrolling them destroyed them. I believe modern technology allows those that weren’t unrolled in the early 19th century to be unrolled without destroying them, and to be read more accurately, but all we have of the earlier ones are disegni, i.e., drawings or transcriptions.
The order of the texts that have been recovered is very uncertain.
There may be more texts in the library of the Villa, but the Italian authorities have so far refused to allow further excavation, which threatens to undermine the stability of the Villa itself. The rolls may in fact be original manuscripts of Philodemus himself, who is thought to have lived in the Villa as a guest of Calpurnius Piso.
Of course, that’s obvious really, and natural. But I got misled by checking in Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek, and found his rules, and decided to follow them. But it’s my fault because he implied that they were the basic rules and not necessarily complete.
δει/νοῖς/ ἔ/ρω _ _ v _
σιν/, ἧς/ φυ/λακ _ _ v _
τέ/ον πέ/ρι. v _ v b
That’s nearly the same as yours except that I have σιν heavy. If it is light, why it that?
Now I am going to try to match σὺν αὐθεντοῦσιν ἄναξιν with the scansion you gave. To make it fit, I am going to make the closed syllables with υν and ιν ending light. But θεν is heavy, if I am following you correctly.
σὺν v
αὐ/θεν/ _ _
τοῦ/σιν ἄ/ _ v v
να/ξιν v b [edit: should be να(κ)/σιν _ b - hadn’t learned from my mistake above!]
Assuming I have this right, then there seem to be four feet (if that is the right word) and they seem to be shorter than the feet in the two trimeters we looked at above. So I don’t yet see how it can be half of a hexameter. Thank you for bearing with me.
Andrew
