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An interpolated line of Terence at Cicero, De finibus 2.14

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

P. G. McC. Brown
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Oxford

Extract

Hanc quoque ‘iucunditatem’, si vis, transfer in animum (‘iuvare’ enim in utroque dicitur, ex eoque ‘iucundum’), rnodo intellegas inter ilium qui dicat

Tanta laetitia auctus sum ut nihil constet

et eum qui

Nunc demum mihi animus ardet,

quorum alter laetitia gestiat, alter dolore crucietur, esse ilium medium [Quamquam haec inter nos nuper notitia admodum est] qui nee laetetur nee angatur, itemque inter eum qui potiatur corporis expetitis voluptatibus et eum qui crucietur summis doloribus esse eum qui utroque careat.

Type
Shorter Notes
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1997

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References

page 583 note 1 Reid, J. S. claims in his commentary on De Finibus 2.14 that ‘The three persons are three fathers exhibited on the comic stage...; the father who is delighted with his son, the father who treats his son ill, and the tolerant, indifferent, father’. But we do not know that the first speaker is a father, and the fact that the second speaker is a father is not relevant to Cicero's point in this context (unlike Pro Caelio 37)Google Scholar

page 583 note 2 Manuscripts are divided between the readings crucietur and excrucietur. Prof. L. D. Reynolds tells me that he will read crucietur in his forthcoming Oxford Classical Text of De Finibus, as do most editors.

page 584 note 3 For the common ancient practice of referring to a literary work by quotation of its opening words, even when the work was also known by a title, see Nachmanson, E., Der griechische Buchtitel (Goteborg, 1941, repr. Darmstadt, 1969), pp. 3749Google Scholar, Kenney, E. J, ‘That Incomparable Poem the ‘ille ego’?’, CR NS 20 (1970), 290. Admittedly the examples there discussed are not of dramatic works, except that the opening of Ennius‘ Medea is quoted by Cicero at De Finibus 1.5 shortly after he has referred to the work by its title. But Greek dramatic hypotheses commonly quote the opening words of a play in addition to giving its title. Terence's prologues are so clearly separate from the dramatic action that it would (I think) be quite natural to regard line 53, rather than line 1 of the prologue, as the opening of the play. I have not found an example of the use either of the first line of the opening scene or of the first line of the prologue to refer to one of Terence's plays, so perhaps I have not hit on the right explanation; but that does not weaken my conviction that the line has been interpolated at this point in Cicero's work.Google Scholar

page 584 note 1 Quotations and statistics in this paper are taken from the Oxford text of Cicero's letters and the Teubner text of his philosophical works, with the exception of the De Legibus, which was only available to me in a Loeb text. References and abbreviations follow the conventions of the Oxford Latin Dictionary.

page 584 note 2 I am using ‘to address’ in its technical, linguistic sense (= ‘to use a word referring to the person to whom one is speaking’) rather than in the general sense of ‘to talk to’. For the purposes of this paper, the noun ‘address’ is synonymous with ‘vocative’ (including not only names, but also any other vocative addressed to a character in the dialogue), or what linguists refer to as ‘free forms of address’ (see Braun, F., Terms of Address: Problems and Patterns of Address Usage in Various Languages and Cultures [Berlin, 1988], pp. 1112). Cicero's dialogues often contain addresses other than those from one character to another, such as addresses to the dedicatee of the work (e.g. ‘Brute’, Fin. 1.1), or to a philosopher or other figure not actually present (e.g. ‘Epicure’, Fin. 2.21). Such addresses are not relevant to the current discussion and are not included in any statistics given in this paper.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 584 note 3 1.15,1.25, 1.27,2.16,2.18,2.20, 2.23,2.44,2.48,2.51,2.60,2.67,2.69,2.74,2.80,2.99,2.103, 2.107,2.109,2.113, 2.116, 3.8, 3.11, 3.12, 3.40,4.1,4.2,4.3,4.14,4.19,4.24,4.37,4.44,4.50,4.60, 4.62,4.65, 5.4, 5.6, 5.8, 5.75, 5.76, 5.78, 5.85, 5.95