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New Light on Festus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

W. M. Lindsay
W. M. Lindsay
Affiliation:
St. Andrews
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Abstract

In Italy, at the end of the tenth century, a pedant named Regulus (?) who had a copy of the De Verborum Significatu (or had made extracts from one), wishing to read Plautus (so often quoted by Festus), took the opportunity of an illness to appeal to certain prelates whose church-library contained a MS. of the comedian. Through their stupidity he received not Plautus, but Plato, i.e. Chalcidius' translation of the Timaeus. Disappointed, but not deterred, he wrote the following letter (in a sort of rhyming prose, affected by the litterati of that time) on the fly-leaf and returned the MS. (now Bamberg. Class. 18), hoping that by much repetition he might hammer into their dull heads the difference between PL-AU-TUS and PL-A-TO and yet save them from chagrin and resentment (the material for the letter was supplied by Festus, although the opening illustration comes from Chalcidius):

Differentia est qua differunt singula: in Timeo Platonis legitur ANIMA-M post ANIMA-L non perire: in Plauto legitur CANCRUM imitaris, item aeneis COCULIS excocta est mihi omnis misericordia.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 3-4 , June 1932 , pp. 193 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1932

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References

page 193 note 1 I always cite Festus from the small Teubner edition, in which the paging of Miiller's large edition is also given. The Thesaurus linguae Latinae now cites from my large annotated Festus in Vol. IV of my Glossaria Latino. (Paris, ‘Les Belles Lettres,’ 1930)Google Scholar . The paging of Müller not mentioned there because this book is meant to supersede Müller.

page 194 note 1 The leader of this band recently (C.R. XLIV 115), after wrongly accusing Heraeus and me of not knowing that draucus meant ‘a strong man,’ dogmatically divined dracti (a word he had found in the new Liddell and Scott) in Martial XI viii, I:

Lassa quod hesterni spirant opobalsama drauci. Heraeus and I remembered—but he did not remember—Mart. XIV lix, 1:

Balsama me capiunt, haec sunt unguenta virorum.

Moreover, Heraeus and I knew—but he did not know—the Cyrillus gloss:

ΔΡΑϒΚΙΟΝ: monile.