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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
R. J. Tarrant has remarked that ‘Latin poets from Ovid onward...felt an almost irresistible urge to mention the Isthmus of Corinth wherever possible’,2 and A. E. Housman admitted to a similar, though less urgent, inclination to introduce the city of Corinth into the passage quoted: ‘inter 295 et 296 excidisse uidetur uersus cuius clausula fuerit Corinthus’. Corinth would, of course, be very much at home in this list of depraved and wealthy (or formerly wealthy) Greek cities, and would suitably head the list.
1 Text and apparatus are quoted from W. V. Clausen's Oxford text, Flacci, A. Persi et D. Iuni Iuuenalis Saturae (Oxford, 1992 2). Editors and commentators referred to by surname are C. A. Ruperti (Glasgow, 1825), A. E. Housman (Cambridge, 19312), and J. Ferguson (London/New York, 1979). References to ‘Courtney’ are toCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Courtney, E., A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal (London, 1980). When not further specified, all references are ad loc.Google Scholar
2 Tarrant, R. J., ‘The Reader as Author: Collaborative Interpolation in Latin Poetry’, in Grant, J. N. (ed.), Editing Greek and Latin Texts (New York, 1989), pp. 121–162, at 141–2Google Scholar
3 Housman's additions to his text of Juvenal are lines 1.156a, 14.229a, 16.2a, and most of 9.134, where 134a is Juvenal's. He uses asterisks to mark lacunae after 1.131, 2.169, and 6.585.
4 It might be more natural to take the second et with the third, pairing Rhodos and Miletos. However, that would leave us with an even more awkward hinc … et … hinc anaphora, or rather with a perfectly normal anaphora of hinc and a totally superfluous et. Neither possibility is at all attractive, and both seem much worse than Courtney's parallel in Aeneid 10.369
5 In 2.1–2, Vltra Sauromatas fugere hinc libet et glacialem/Oceanian, a bare hinc certainly means ‘away from Rome’.
6 Courtney refers to 4.67 and 14.179, both of which are familiar and perhaps colloquial, which our passage is not. Friedlaender adduces 3.29, in which Umbricius refers to Rome as istic, but there he is already outside the gate, and is speaking to one who is remaining.
7 Ruperti reports that some have tried to read the passage this way. After recording Indosfrom three of his manuscripts, he adds ‘non improb. Pithoeo, si mox, suadente Jac. August. Thuano, reponatur Rhodon et Mileton, ut sensus sit, paupertatem Roma excedentem fluxisse ad illas civitates, quae ante deliciis et voluptatibus insignes fuerint’. The problem with this solution is that it only applies to the first city named. Paupertas had certainly come to Sybaris, or to the place where Sybaris had been, but the Istrians had never been known for their wealth, and the Rhodians, Milesians, and Tarentines, if not as wealthy as they had been, were hardly poverty-stricken. On the other hand, wealth can come from these cities to Rome without every one of them having to have become poor, though it is poetically effective that the one that has is put first. It appears that we are back with the usual interpretation, and all its difficulties. However, we will see that my own solution is not entirely unlike this one, achieving the same end by a different set of changes.
8 Although several of these problems converge on the first et in 296, I should perhaps mention here that it is one of the few words in the vicinity that I believe to be sound: the reader is warned.
9 One of the problems in composing a satisfactory interpolation would be deciding whether to insert a third hinc: the two that ate already there would be rather far apart without it, but a third might make things a bit crowded.
10 Scribes no doubt found the unwieldy sequence of consonants in isthmos difficult, and dealt with it in two opposite but, for our purposes, equivalent ways, either dropping one or more of the consonants, or adding an epenthetic vowel. In Juvenal 6.295 and Propertius 3.22.2, they dropped a consonant or two: certainly the t, and perhaps also the h, though that may have been lost long before. In Apuleius, Metamorphoses 1.1, on the other hand, the scribe of the surviving archetype (F) or one of his predecessors, faced with Isthmos Ephyraea, inserted a vowel in the first word while dropping an aspirate in the second, to produce isthomos epyrea. (The scribe of one manuscript of Statius′ Thebais, Klotz's M, at 6.557, faced with the adjective Isthmiaca or some previous perversion of it, was sufficiently confused or demoralized to insert an extra m and produce the grotesque imstmiaca.)
11 It may be worth mentioning that Courtney has some doubts as to the existence of Nogarola, ‘quoted, unless this is a literary fiction, by J. Parrhasius in his “Liber de Rebus per Epistolam Quaesitis 29”, published in 1567 long after the death of Parrhasius in 1522’ (‘The progress of emendation in the text of Juvenal since the Renaissance’, ANRWS3.1 [1989], 824–47, at 826). He also reports (ibid.) that Balbus had proposed istos in the interval (1524).
12 Courtney notes: ‘The cities are Italian, Greek, Greek, Italian’. I think it is more important that all four—five with Corinth added—are culturally Greek. The arrangement of my list of five, though not chiastic, is, I think, at least as elegant as the transmitted list of four, with a pair of cities, one Greek and one (geographically) Italian, each destroyed at the height of its wealth and power; another pair, both Greek (‘note the Greek termination, pointed in the anti-Greek J.’, Ferguson); and finally one Italian city given an entire line to itself, with three epithets to provide a further reminder of luxury, hubris, and disaster. Courtney refers to, but does not describe, the theatre-incident of 281 B.C. to which Juvenal surely alludes: the details are most readily available in Ferguson.
13 Juvenal uses huc in three other passages, and in two of the three (3.308 and 6.466) the meaning is ‘to Rome’. (The third is 6.416.)
14 This paragraph is particularly indebted to the Latin editor's advice, though Dr Heyworth also convinced me to suppress my own emendation of colles and tentatively proposed felix, among other improvements.
15 Umbricius depicts Orontes as a tributary of the Tiber in 3.62: iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes. It might appear that Juvenal is doing much the same thing with Sybaris in our passage, except that the other names are not suitable.
16 Misreading of the ending would presumably have come after the stem had been corrupted, since the Greek endings of Rhodos and Miletos in the next line did not bother the scribes. In the Oxford fragment, a scribe who did not recognize neruos as a nominative singular corrupted aliusque in carcere neruos to aliosque (6.0.13, corrected by Housman), making hash of the thought. Once a Greek word had been corrupted in such a way as to look Latin, it would have been that much more likely to suffer the same fate.
17 The anaphora would not have protected it. Once either huc had been corrupted to hinc, a scribe who realized that they were intended to match would be as likely to alter the right one as the wrong one—more likely, if the wrong one came first.