Latin Poetry Research Articles

Simeon Polotsky’s Preaching Heritage and its Sources: Some Observations

The study attempts to investigate created within the framework of other denominations sources of Simeon’s Polotskij two sermons: «Slova o perenesenii Ubrusa iz Edessy» (Sermon to a feast of the Mandylion’s translation from Edessa) from sermon’s collection «Vecherya Dushevnaya», 1683 and interpretation of the evangelical parable of the Good Samaritan from collections of homilies «Obed dushevnyj», 1681. The study confirms existed in the literature disparate observations about the significant commonality of the sources of inspiration and factual material of Simeon’s collections and his poetic encyclopaedia «Vertograd mnogotsvetnyj» (A Garden of Many Flowers; Latin poetry sources identified by Anthony Hippisley); in particular, that in both cases Simeon used Latin collections of annual sermons by Bavarian Jesuit Matthias Faber (1586/87–1653). The techniques of translation of Latin sermons were also investigated: these techniques give the reader (researcher) the impression that in one case the biblical fragment of Song of Songs (5:10–16) acts as the structuring text for Simeon’s «Slovo», and in the other case – interpretation of the evangelical parable of the Good Samaritan by John Chrysostom, while Simeon both compositionally and textually reproduces homilies written by Faber and his elder fellow of the Jesuit Order, Spanish exegete Alfonso Salmerón (1515–1585).

Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer and Classical Latin Poetry in Scholarly Debate on Early History of Ancient Rus

This article is dedicated to a stylistic feature of 17th-century scholarly texts, namely the incorporation of poetic quotations into polemical scientific discourse, which enhances the expressiveness of evaluations concerning opponents and their concepts. An analysis of Gottlieb Bayer's texts is conducted. A number of works by the academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer (1694–1738), focus on the early history of Ancient Rus. In preparing these works, Bayer extensively relied on ancient historical sources, and his articles were written in Latin, which naturally involved the traditions of classical literature in discussions pertaining to the historical issues of early Rus. This publication examines quotations and reminiscences from classical Latin poetry introduced by G. S. Bayer in his article “Origines russicae” (“The Origins of the Russians,” posthumously published in 1741). The poetic interpolations within the scholarly text serve as elements of the author’s style and fulfill two purposes. Firstly, they are utilized by the author to illustrate his assertions, lending emotional depth to academic reasoning and subtly indicating the breadth of his intellectual horizon, which enhances the perception of the scholarly reliability of his work. Secondly, they sustain Bayer’s polemical stance towards certain established historical concepts of his time, allowing for a sharp critical tone that accentuates the polemical fervor without resorting to personal attacks.

Increase of Complexity from Classical Greek to Latin Poetry

In this paper a method is developed to analyze the increase of complexity from classical Greek poetry to classical Latin poetry by mapping large samples of poems onto a symbolic time series. This mapping setup intends to characterize the regular succession of rhythms, that is, the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in a verse. Using techniques from information theory; more precisely, the mutual information function, it is shown how the rhythmical patterns in Greek poetry evolve to more complex behavior in Latin poetry. Some interesting results are reported.

Les batalles de Roses i de les illes Formigues en els "Gesta Comitum" i en les "Cròniques" de Bernat Desclot i Ramon Muntaner

This paper contains a study of the narration of the naval battles of Roses and the Formigues Islands, transmitted by three fundamental works of Catalan histo­riography, namely Bernat Desclot’s Crònica (1288), the Gesta Comitum (definitive Latin version, early 14th century), and Ramon Muntaner’s Crònica (1325–1328). The collation of the different versions of the events described, crucial moments of the crusade against the Catalan-Aragonese Crown (1285), makes it possible to identify the key aspects of the differences considered irreconcilable by the scholars who have studied them previously, to deepen the theme, shed new light on it and suggest a new interpre­tation.

The Road Not Taken: Dante’s First Eclogue and Virgil’s Career

Near the end of his career, Dante wrote two eclogues, instigating a literary fashion which was to outlast the Renaissance. These poems—Dante's only known compositions in Latin verse—were prompted by a verse epistle from Giovanni ‘del Virgilio’, in which the humanist scholar goaded Dante to compose a martial epic in Latin celebrating contemporary Italian military victories, which would prove him a worthy successor to the author of the Aeneid. Dante’s response is an elaborate bucolic recusatio, which engages in a rich and intricate intertextual dialogue both with Virgil and with his correspondent. Through a pattern of allusions emphasizing the theme of land-confiscation and dispossession in Virgil’s Bucolica and his denunciation of the avarice and violence of contemporary Rome in the Georgics, Dante makes the case that his own career has fulfilled the noble aspirations which Virgil himself compromised, when he abandoned the idea of a cosmological epic, entertained in the second Georgic and chose instead to glorify war and the emperor in the Aeneid.

The Tacuinum Sanitatis

The article concerns an Arab physician whose works were among those translated into Latin in the early medieval period -- Ibn Butlan, an eleventh-century Christian physician from Baghdad, who compiled the Taqwim al-Sihha (Tables of Health). This is a a tabular compilation of 280 items which was translated and published in several editions, mostly of Italian origin. These versions – nearly all known as the Tacuinum Sanitatis – became quite popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The reason for its popularity is a matter still subject to debate. The original Arabic version includes no images; however, this was not the case in the Latin versions of the late Middle Ages. Each entry included a detailed illustration. The article compares the Arabic and Latin manuscripts for the purposes of examining two key differences and to discuss what they show us about the two cultures that generated and used them.

Из истории антиковедения в Императорском Казанском университете: кафедра римской словесности в 80–90-е гг. XIX в.

The article deals with the history of classical studies in the Imperial Kazan' University in 1880-1890s, which was connected with the activities of two professors at the Chair of the Roman Literature, Darius Naguevskiy (1845-1918) and Stanislaw Opatskiy (1847-?, after 1900). According to the students of the history of classical research at the Kazan' University in the late 19th century, studies in the Roman history and literature were represented there in this period at a considerably lower scale than those of the Ancient Greek history, language and literature. One should ask why the Kazan' University failed to shape the specific tradition of studying the Roman antiquity, in spite of its employing throughout the 19th century prominent Romanists (N.M. Blagoveshchenskiy, V.I. Modestov). Besides the Ministry of Public Enlightenment was obviously interested in promoting the courses of the Chair of the Roman Literature, as it appointed for it with a brief interval two Classical philologists specialized in Latin poetry and prose, Dr. Lit. D. Naguevskiy in 1883 and M. Lit. S. Opatskiy in 1885. The article attempts to answer this question taking into account both essential and personal factors of the problem, the latter being the individual features of the two professors and their conflicts.

Enlivening Wit

The birth of such innovative newspapers as The Tatler and The Spectator enables the readers to observe and join the public debate through a new intellectual lens. The use of Latin epigrams opening every issue of The Spectator emphasizes not only the close interest in classical literature and culture, but also the communicative strategy focused on the celebration of wit through the moral paradigms of ancient Roman poets, at a time of the rise of modern public opinion. The poetical and rhetorical choices of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, along with other Latin poetry enthusiasts such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, bitingly denounce social hypocrisies and contradictions through parody and mockery. Their purpose was to rebut conventional behavior through the permeating force of Enlightenment wit inspired by cleverness, satire and sarcasm.

Octopodal Pictoriality: The Self-Reflexivity of the Octopus in Graeco-Roman Art

Abstract The octopus was renowned in Graeco-Roman thought for being a master of visual imitation insofar as it could imperceptibly mimic rocks by changing the colour of its skin. What did it mean, then, for the Greeks and Romans to imitate nature’s consummate imitator in art? This essay takes two sets of artefacts that featured octopuses—Greek red-figure ‘fish plates’ and Roman ‘fish mosaics’—and contextualises them alongside Greek and Latin poetry, biology and philosophy to explore the self-reflexivity of picturing polyps in Graeco-Roman culture. In establishing the octopus as mise-en-abyme, the essay salvages the sophisticated self-referentiality of the marine ‘still life’ and recovers a more ecologically grounded way of understanding the relation between art and nature than is traditionally associated with classical art history. Ultimately, seeing the self-consciousness of these octopodal artworks entails becoming more self-aware of ourselves and our place in the world at this juncture of climate crisis.

Hebban olla vogala: An Eleventh-Century Link Between Dutch and English Literary History

The short eleventh-century lyric Hebban olla vogala is considered the earliest literary text in Dutch. Yet it only survives as a badly faded pen trial, written in England by a monk from the Low Countries. As a result, the exact reading of the text and even the language it was written in remain uncertain. Now, multispectral imaging of the manuscript has made it possible to provide an improved reconstruction of the text. An analysis of this new reading suggests that the scribe deliberately used the similarity between dialects of late Old English and Old Dutch to produce a rhyming verse text that was intelligible in both languages. As a multilingual and translingual poem, Hebban olla vogala must therefore be situated in English as well as Dutch literary history. The scribe’s other pen trials in the same manuscript demonstrate an interest in different Latin verse forms, indicating that Hebban olla vogala may also be a literary experiment. In exploiting the mutual intelligibility of Old Dutch and Old English, the poem points to an easily overlooked current of influence on late Old English and early Middle English literature. While this is hard to trace due to the similarities between the two languages, Dutch emerges as another potential influence, alongside Anglo-Norman French, on the development of rhyming verse in English after the Norman Conquest. In this way, Hebban olla vogala can be seen not only as a monument of Dutch literary history, but also as a testament to its interaction with English literature.

Poetic Baggage: Representations of Camp Followers in the Latin Verse Inscriptions

Each unit of the Roman army constituted a major logistic operation that cannot be reduced to the fighting men who formed their core and purpose. While camp followers are depicted in literary sources especially as an hindrance to war operations, inscriptions provide a different picture of the world that gravitated around the military forts and fortresses. In the military settlements that guarded the limes, the presence of paramilitary and non-military personnel did not represent a burden, but an important part of the military economy, which in some cases even led to the emergence of a new business class. In this paper, we provide an anthology of verse inscriptions dedicated by, or to, camp followers, with a view to showcase how their everyday interactions with the army were conceptualised and verbalised, ultimately contributing to a richer picture of the limes social ecosystem.

Dialects and Languages in the Poetic Oeuvre of Laurentius Rhodoman (1545–1606)

This paper analyzes the choice of languages and dialects in the poetic oeuvre of the German Protestant humanist Laurentius Rhodoman. The first section discusses an instance of Latin-Greek code-switching in the poem Iter Lipsicum, arguing that it is influenced by the common educational background of both author and addressee. The second section considers two of Rhodoman's poems written in the Greek Doric dialect and tries to explain the dialect choice by analyzing their context and intended audience. The third section examines some of his bilingual poems (both Latin-German and Greek-Latin prose), and the final section is dedicated to the handling of Greek and Latin verse in Rhodoman's bilingual poem Troica. The analysis proves that Rhodoman made a highly deliberate choice of languages and dialects. 

The Nose at the Crossroads: An Intersectional Reading of the Pseudo-Vergilian Moretum

summary: This article provides a new interpretation of the anonymous poem Moretum as erotic satire. Mindful of Shelley Haley's invitation to read it through a Black feminist lens, this article turns to recent Black feminist scholarship on pornography to argue that the presence of sex does not automatically negate the agency of Scybale, the African woman described in the poem as Simulus's custos . Further, I review the evidence for Simulus's own identity. Through a combination of Audre Lorde's Black queer lens and Paul Preciado's trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced. Lastly, I heed Haley's invitation to read Black protagonists of Latin poetry through Yoruba mythology, and turn to Henry Louis Gates Jr. to argue that Simulus's Blackness brings them closest to Esu, the genderqueer trickster god, which in turn helps us identify him with the author themselves.

The Catasterism of Diogenes the Cynic in an Epigram by Ausonius

In the collection of Ausonius’ Epigrams by Green (1999), three are dedicated to Diogenes the Cynic. One of them (ep. 54) constitutes an epitaph for the philosopher’s tomb, and is composed as a paraphrase of an epigram from the Anthologia Palatina (7, 64). Moreover, a rare tradition on Diogenes’ catasterism appears in this text: here, in fact, we read that the philosopher is placed in heaven by the star of Leo as the guard dog of the heroine Erigone. Therefore, this research starts with an analysis of the transition from the Greek to Ausonius’ Latin version, and then the investigation of the issue of Diogenes’ catasterism is developed, by examining the broader context of Graeco-Roman sources on related topics.

Renesansa in humanizem v zahodnoslovanskih književnostih: primerjalna bilanca in izgledi

Humanism in Western Slavonic literature manifests itself in a number of shared aspects, conditioned by the confluence of a similar spectrum of historical cultural streams, which came about within the territory of Poland, the Czech Lands and Upper Hungary (Catholics vs. Protestants, exclusive vs. plebeian art, etc.). The production of Latin humanists shared the greatest affinities, especially in the first development phase, when Latin poetry was the sphere of a narrow, cosmopolitan, intellectual elite. There are both similarities and differences in the area of literature in the vernacular languages, reflecting the influence of distinct social-cultural situations in particular countries, as well as a different genre system and foreign orientation. Polish literature displays the most direct links with the Italian Renaissance centre and is firmly associated with the aristocratic elite. These differences are also apparent in Czech-Polish literary contacts, which are rich but occasionally experience mutual dissonance.

ПСАЛОМ 88 (89) В ЧЕТВЕРТОМ ВИДЕНИИ ПЕРПЕТУИ

The paper explores the fourth vision of Perpetua from the early Christian work “Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis”, focusing on her battle with an Egyptian. We identify liturgical allusions in the passage where Perpetua is anointed with oil by her helpers, drawing connections to Psalms, especially Psalm 88 (89). The term “ἀντιλήμπτωρ” is highlighted, linking it to God’s role as a helper in Psalms and its appearance in the vision. The anointing with oil in Perpetua’s vision is compared to New Testament references, where it serves purposes of exorcism and healing. The paper delves into the liturgical significance of oil, connecting it to the defense against defeat and the exorcism of evil. The paper suggests that the term “ἀντιλήμπτωρ” may have entered Perpetua’s vision through liturgical practices or the Psalter. Connections to Psalm 88 (89) are analyzed, with parallels found in Perpetua’s victory song, the image of a Lanista, and the defeat of an Egyptian reminiscent of Rahab in the Psalm. The transformation of Perpetua into a man is linked to the image of David in Psalm 88 (89), highlighting her role as a king-military commander. The image of the Egyptian is related to the images of Goliath and Pharaoh from Ezekiel’s prophecy. The paper concludes that these intersections between the vision and Psalm 88, such as the use of specific terms, anointing, and victorious themes, are not likely accidental and may indicate an unconscious influence. The Greek version of the vision is suggested to contain more recognizable liturgical allusions than the Latin version. The findings encapsulate the key points of a detailed analysis of the connections between Perpetua’s vision and Psalm 88 (89), highlighting the significance of these intersections in understanding the theological and liturgical context of the vision.

A short note on typesetting Latin verse scansion with LaTeX and LuaLaTeX

A short note on typesetting Latin verse scansion with LaTeX and LuaLaTeX

Латинские раннесредневековые путеводители и описания Святой Земли

The article presents an overview of Latin early medieval characteristics and descriptions of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, written from the very first decades of the Christian era, – starting from the first third of the 4th century. This is a Latin version of the Onomasticon by Eusebius of Caesarea (ca 320 AD), created by Jerome the Blessed ca 388 AD. The so-called Bordeaux Itinerary dated to 333 is an independent author's description of a pilgrimage from Bordigala (Bordeaux) through Constantinople to Jerusalem and other places of Palestine and back – through Rome to Bordeaux. At the end of the 4th century a unique monument of Latin pilgrimage literature was created, the Peregrinatio to the Holy Places by Egeria, or Etheria, or Sylvia the Virgin, which not only lists but describes in detail the holy places of Palestine and the Middle East by a pious pilgrim lady. An example of early Byzantine Latin-language monuments of this kind may be On the Location of the Holy Land by Theodosius and Itinerarium by Antoninus of Placentia in the late 6th – early 7th century. Around 670 there appears the Narration of the Holy Places by the Gallic bishop Arculphus in the Records of Abbot Adamnan, who lived and died in Ireland at the beginning of the 9th century. The Tale of the Disasters in Jerusalem of the time of the Jerusalem patriarch George (796–806?) describes the beginning of the Arab conquest of Near East. These monuments developed the canon of pilgrimage descriptions, terminology, localization and identification of Biblical events with modern geo- and topography, and created the foundations of the genre in its various modifications.

Bitchy ladies: domestic violence against ornatrices in Latin poetry—protest femininity, toxic femininity?

ABSTRACT In a revisionist historical environment in which scholars are increasingly invited to reconsider readings of classical texts from a philological perspective, or from an approach that privileges strict historicity, numerous interpretative possibilities present themselves. Working within such an environment, this study aims to delve into several literary expressions of domestic violence meted out to female slaves—explicitly, ornatrices—by female mistresses—particularly, elegiac dominae and satirical matronae—by combining the traditional methodologies of classical studies with theories of both protest femininity and toxic femininity. In so doing, it considers words and their meanings—notably the language of legalese as well as violence—and gender theories of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century—to read domestic violence among women as a cultural dynamic underpinned by patriarchal institutions that not only institutionalize the abuse of slaves but both initiate and permit it at the hands of disempowered females.

Гуюк ханның Рим Папасы Иннокентий IV-ке жолдаған жолдауының латын тіліндегі аудармасы

The article contains the Latin text and annotated Russian translation of the letter from the supreme ruler of the Mongol Empire, Guyuk Khan, to Pope Innocent IV. The original letter was translated from Mongolian into Latin with the personal participation of the Pope’s envoy, Franciscan John of Plano Carpini, at Guyuk’s camp near the capital of the Empire, Qaraqorum, on November 11, 1246. In parallel, the original letter was translated into Persian and, together with the Latin translation, delivered to Pope Innocent IV. The original Persian translation is preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Archives. It was discovered in 1920 and published along with a French translation and annotation by Paul Pelliot in 1923. The Latin translation of the letter survives in two versions made at different times. The article contains the text of the Latin translation of the letter according to a copy in the autograph of Salimbene de Adam from the Vatican Apostolic Library. Salimbene de Adam inserted a copy of the letter into his chronicle written between 1283 and 1288. The Latin text from the chronicle of Salimbene de Adam has been collated with other copies of the Latin translation of the letter. The Russian translation based on a critical edition of the Latin version of the letter is published for the first time. The notes contain the necessary clarifications and correspondences in the translations of the Persian original into French and English