This is a question (or, what I learned about reading Latin) on punctuation:
The context of the passage is that Livy is discussing what would have happened if Alexander the Great had invaded Italy and basically presents three areas of comparison, (1) the capabilites of the Roman commanders vs. Alex. (2) the element of luck and (3) number of troops available on both sides. As he winds up his comparison of commanders, Livy decries Alexander’s degeneration by the Persian culture and the extension of that to his army, thus implying that he would come to Italy with a much weaker force than the one he took to Asia and asks the question “Do we allow our commanders’ excellence to be degraded so?” This is the final sentence of his commander comparison:
id vero periculum erat, quod levissimi ex Graecis, qui Parthorum quoque contra nomen Romanum gloriae favent, dictitare solent, ne maiestatem nominis Alexandri, quem ne fama quidem illis notum arbitror fuisse, [7?] sustinere non potuerit populus Romanus; et adversus quem Athenis, in civitate fracta Macedonum armis, cernentes tum maxime prope fumantes Thebarum ruinas, contionari libere ausi sunt homines—id quod ex monumentis orationum patet—adversus eum nemo ex tot proceribus Romanis vocem liberam missurus fuerit (!?.)
“There was certainly a danger, which the shallowest of Greeks, who also favour the glory of the Parthians to the Roman name, are wont to proclaim, that the Roman people could not have withstood the majesty of Alexander’s name which I don’t think they (the Romans) had even known and against whom in Athens, a city broken by the Macedonian arms, seeing at close hand the smoking ruins of Thebes, men have dared to freely harangue -that is evident from the records of the orators- that against him no one out of so many Roman nobles would have been able to speak freely (!?.)”
Now here’s the question: I have seen the end of this period punctuated (OK, a small pun) three different ways. I have been using an old textbook by Omera Floyd Long, who uses the Weissenborn text and there it ends in a question mark. I have looked at the version on Perseus, which is supposed to be the Weissenborn text, and the sentence ends in an exclamation mark! I then looked at my SPQR app on my I-Phone and it ends in a period. Checking the original Weissenborn text, I saw that it ends in a question mark. Which is correct? Knowing that the Perseus has a lot of transciption and OCR errors and that the SPQR app is largely a mirror of Perseus, I decided to trust Weissenborn and went with the question mark.
This all probably seems a bit trivial, but I had a bugger of a time understanding this sentence, because I didn’t really notice the difference in punctuation right away. Once I decided to treat it as a question and realised that Livy is asking (rhetorically) how is it that the Athenians dared to voice their ideas and the Romans couldn’t, the whole sentence fell into place (Of course, the use of missurus fuerit should have been a big clue!).I got into this “predicament” because I usually read Long’s book at home, the SPQR app in waiting rooms, restaurants, etc. and use Perseus on my desktop for quick vocabulary lookup and to check my work. Anyway, what I learned was that even small clues like punctuation can make a difference and that attention to detail is paramount. I think I’ll just go back to scrolls and deal with scriptio continua!
P.S. I really couldn’t think of a good word for levissimi. All I know is Livy really didn’t hold the Greeks in any level of esteem, so the more deprecatory, the better.