Tag Archives: Cicero

Casaubon – and Cicero?

At Laudator Temporis Acti, Michael Gilleland quotes a witticism of Casaubon. It looks to me like a far more succinct variation on a story Cicero tells in his De Legibus – or rather has his character Atticus tell, since it’s … Continue reading

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Too Bad About the Gender

I love puns, even (or especially) the unintentional and bilingual kind. Browsing Cicero’s Verrines recently, I was very glad to run across a ‘most experienced and hardworking ploughman’ (experientissimus ac diligentissimus arator) named ‘Nympho’ (2.3.53-54).

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Truer Today, But Already True Then

Dicaearchus, that great and prolific Peripatetic, wrote a work called On the Extinction of Human Life. Having assembled the other causes – floods, epidemics, ravages of nature, sudden invasions by hordes of wild beasts, the onset of which he demonstrates … Continue reading

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When Bad Things Happen to Good Databases

From the site of a bookseller whose name (and URL) I will kindly omit: Cicero was a primate, and letters are no doubt symbols as well as collections of symbols, and Cicero’s letters are a “particularly highly-developed form of primate … Continue reading

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Worst Classical Typos

Here are my nominations: 1. In a Greek text: In Volume I of R. D. Dawe’s Teubner Sophocles (1975), the first word of Oedipus Tyrannus is misspelled. The fact that it’s a one-letter word is particularly impressive:  τέκνα Κάδμου … Continue reading

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Memorial Day Texts

(This is a rewrite of a previous Memorial Day post.) 1. Simonides’ epitaph on the 300 Spartans who died at Thermopylae: ὦ ξεῖν᾿, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε     κείμεθα τοῖς κείνων πειθόμενοι νομίμοις. Stranger, tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here, … Continue reading

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Fulke Art II

Here’s another neoclassical poem from Caelica, number XCIII complete: The Augurs were of all the world admir’d, Flatter’d by consuls, honor’d by the State, Because the event of all that was desir’d, They seem’d to know, and keep the books … Continue reading

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