The subject of ancient shipwrecks just came up on the Classics list, and I promised to make a PDF version of a pertinent paper I wrote. It’s actually more philological than historical, and defends the transmitted ripas in Horace, Odes 3.27.24 against conjectures of Bentley and Shackleton Bailey. The title is “Seneca, St. Paul, Synesius, and the Text of the Europa Ode” (Syllecta Classica, 1994), and the PDF version (8 pages) is here.

Some time in the next few weeks I will turn all my published papers into PDF files and upload them, at least until the journals in which they were published object. (There could be copyright problems.) If everyone did that, we could all save a lot of time and nickels making copies of each other’s articles in university libraries, though we would also drain our printer cartridges even faster. It’s quite easy, but you have to use Acrobat Distiller rather than PDF Writer to get the Greek to come out right. As I understand it, the former creates a compact PDF file that uses the viewer’s own fonts, while the latter embeds the fonts in a much larger file, so the viewer need not have whatever Greek font you use.

I promised these to a reader. They are handouts I’ve used in various Latin classes to introduce second-year students to meter, beginning with Ovid and Martial, and continuing with Horace. I kept them down to two pages each, so they could be printed out as single-sheet double-sided handouts. That meant a certain amount of simplification, but I’ve included the essentials.

The first handout, Latin Meter I: Ovid and Martial is here (.doc), here (.pdf), and here (.pdf). The second, Latin Meter II: Horace, is here (.doc), here (.pdf), and here (.pdf). Please feel free to use them in your own classes, and to suggest improvements in the comments or by e-mail.

Finally, I’m hoping someone can tell me whether the first or second of each PDF file is better in any way. It’s been a long time since I’ve used Acrobat, and I wasn’t sure whether to use PDFMaker or Acrobat Distiller, so I did them both ways and in that order. The metrical marks are done in Century Gothic, whose U’s are the best approximation I’ve found of a breve. If interested readers can let me know whether they come out right on their computers, I will be very grateful. It looks to me like the Distiller files add tiny tails to the U’s, making them less useful as brevia, but I can’t tell how others see them. I used Word 2000 for Windows and Adobe Acrobat 4.0, which should both (I hope) be old enough for compatibility with most reader’s systems.

It looks like the transfer of this site and domain to their new host (Hosting Matters) is complete. Welcome again to anyone who got here by using the domain name rather than the complete numerical address (http://138.247.138.2/~curculio). If you have a link to the latter, you can update (or backdate) it to http://www.curculio.org. Coming up in a few minutes: a couple of handy meter handouts. But first, I think I’ll change the color of my curculio logos (signa?). More format changes will follow.

Welcome to the new improved WordPress Curculio. The overall appearance will change frequently, perhaps drastically, over the next few weeks, but I’m eager to start posting again, so here it is. No need to update your blogrolls: as soon as my domain is transferred, the old URL will bring you straight here. At that time, the links to other pages of this site will also start working. Until then, anyone desperate to read some Juvenal or Claudian can try substituting 63.247.138.2/~curculio for www.curculio.org in the URLs of the linked pages. That should work, though I can’t promise that I have everything in the same (relative) place as on the old site yet.

Comments are open, but moderated (the WP default). Please behave if you want me to loosen the comment rules. In the mean time, comments left between midnight and 8am Eastern time (later on weekends) will languish until I get out of bed.