BMCR 2008.11.34, Federico Biddau, Q. Terentii Scauri De orthographia

Federico Biddau (ed.), Q. Terentii Scauri De orthographia. Bibliotheca
Weidmanniana, 6, Pars. 5.  Hildesheim:  Weidmann, 2008.  Pp. cxiv, 244.
ISBN 9783615003413.  EUR 58.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Oxford University Press
([email protected])
Word count:  2331 words
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Q. Terentius Scaurus, perhaps the most eminent grammaticus of Hadrian's
time having already flourished under Trajan,[[1]] wrote, besides a
number of works now lost or but partially preserved, a treatise on
spelling previously edited by Helias Putschius and Heinrich Keil in
their collections of Latin grammarians, which now appears by itself in
a new critical text translation and detailed commentary. It must now be
accounted the standard edition, and deservedly so.

The long introduction begins with a bibliography; then, after a survey
of the scanty evidence for Scaurus' life and works,[[2]] and a synopsis
of De Orthographia, Biddau vindicates the work's authenticity against
the doubts of Anna Maria Tempesti, who deemed its language too
reminiscent of treatises from late antiquity; the obvious comparison is
with Velius Longus, whom he finds not only writing in a similar vein
but taking issue with its doctrines. Indeed, failing demonstration that
language or content was incompatible with a second-century date,
resemblance proves only that the style of such texts, purely practical
as they were, was little affected by the changing fashions in higher
literature. Nor indeed were Scaurus' precepts: despite his Hadrianic
connection, he rejected archaic or Republican spellings such as ai for
ae, ei for long i, maxumus, and caussa, and is silent on the
intervocalic ii attested for Cicero by Quintilian and for Juvenal by
the corruptions in his manuscripts.

There follows an account of Scaurus' sources: opinions may vary on the
value of such exercises, but this one is sensibly conducted. I should
like to know, however, how Scaurus (or another author subjected to such
analysis) is supposed to have used his sources: the likeliest model for
an ancient author is not repeated direct recourse to unwieldy rolls,
but excerpting into notebooks as he read, often collecting extracts on
the same topic from several writers who may have said the same thing
with slightly different wording or emphasis, occasionally neglecting
through human frailty to note a passage that might have served his
purpose (whence modern surmises of why he abandoned his usual source),
and then choosing and combining when he wrote. Added to which must be
the casual recollection of things heard from childhood onwards, and
oral or epistolary discussions with other litterati; after all, there
is much that we ourselves know but could not say how first we came to
know.

Next comes a description of the textual witnesses, detailing their
date, provenance, contents, and history, their reliability is reserved
for later. Although it is usually desirable to preserve one's
predecessors' sigla, Biddau's adoption and imitation of those in Keil
has unfortunate consequences. The Greek letters <greek>y</greek> and
<greek>w</greek> for the first two printed editions may suggest
families of manuscripts, and the Parisini lat. 13025 olim Saint-Germain
des Pre/s 1180 and nouv. acq. 763 are indicated by F with superior s
and n respectively, as if they were correctors of F (Par. lat.
7521).[[3]] To make things worse, since the sigla are printed in
italic, the superiors run into the serifs of F, making the two sigla
hard to distinguish; that is particularly unfortunate on pp.
LXXXIV-LXXXVI, concerning their relationships to M (Clm 14252).

Before constructing his stemma, Biddau turns to demonstrating that the
text designated by Keil 'Appendix Scaurina' (by analogy with Scaurus'
son Scaurinus, though Cicero's Pro Scauro was known as his Scauriana)
was not written by Scaurus and contradicts his doctrines. The stemmatic
discussion proper is well reasoned and convincing; the sources offering
a complete text are divided into a 'Romance' and a 'Germanic' branch,
and even those presenting only the start of the text are classified,
though their only useful contribution is the definition of orthography
[I.1], omitted in the integri. An ensuing treatment of the tradition
discusses the characteristics of the surviving and lost manuscripts and
their editorial history.

Amidst so much detail, Biddau occasionally forgets to mention things at
the proper moment: at p. LXV, referring to the copy of the editio
princeps held at Fano, he passes over the sixteenth-century annotator
designated the 'anonimo fanese' at p. CXIII (cf. p. 2), and likewise at
p. LXVII we are told that the text in V (Vat. lat. 1491) breaks off at
prae(ponitur, but are not given the place till p. CXI, namely V.18, p.
25, l. 6.

To dwell a moment on V: I do not understand how a scribe's failure to
turn the last written page causes the text's incompleteness to be due
'alla sua posizione all'interno del codice'. Still, the main point is
clear: whatever caused the scribe to break off from his task, it was
not a defective Vorlage; indeed, as Biddau following Keil shows (p.
LXXVIII), the text of Scaurus added to V is taken from Adam Petri's
edition of 1527,[[4]] which presents the word in midline (fo. 23r, l. 8
up).

Biddau divides the text into numbered chapters, sections, and
subsections, which he cites in preference to both Keil's pagination and
his own; since internal references are always preferable to external,
this is very welcome. He also deserves praise for his freedom in
emendation: apart from some twenty changes of his own (several of them
spelling adjustments in accordance with Scaurus' own teaching), most of
which are persuasive,[[5]] he incorporates numerous conjectures from
his predecessors. Notable amongst them are those entered by Janus
Parrhasius in a copy of the first edition now in the Bodleian Library,
which often anticipate other scholars' corrections, including Biddau's
own. At III.4.2, p. 11, l. 2, where uertant is corrected to uertunt,
the apparatus reads 'conieci, et postea iam Parrh(asium) adnotasse
cognoui';[[6]] but at IV.9.4, p. 17, l. 12, where for grecie or the
like Biddau reads 'Graece', he omits to mention that Parrhasius had
done so before him, albeit turning 'faedae [sic for 'foedus'] . . .
incisum' into 'titulus . . . incisus'.

One could wish that Biddau had gone further in emending. In the very
first sentence, p. 5, l. 3, 'Orthographia igitur est ratio recte
syllabis scribendi', the translation 'quanto alle sillabe' hardly
allays doubts about the syntax and sense of syllabis: what is 'writing
with syllables'? The commentary does not explain. Nor will adjustment
of the case to syllabas suffice: it is not only syllables that we
write. To be sure children, having learnt their letters, were taught
their syllables; to be sure Scaurus says not a little about syllabic
structure and correct word-division; but these topics do not exhaust
either the discipline or his treatise. The word should be omitted
altogether, thus restoring the definition to its standard type;[[7]] in
the grievously truncated original one may suppose a reference to
letters, syllables, and words from which syllabis was displaced into
the definition by the process described at p. XCI.

V.11, p. 23, l. 7. G begins the syllable when followed by digamma, 'ut
gue'; the same equation of the 'Aeolian letter' with consonantal V
recurs at V.18, p. 25, l. 6, (Q) 'neque subiicitur excepta uau'. After
'ut gue', however, the paradosis offers gfe, where K. L. Schneider saw
that f stood for digamma; thus emended, the sequence remains appended
to gue as a phonetic transcription (so Biddau 137), but with no
syntactical connection such as hoc est or tamquam. This seems unlikely;
rather we have a reader's annotation incorporated in the text and
needing to be deleted.

VI.3.2, p. 27, l. 10 = Lucilius 353 Marx: the short i as a letter-name
may be defended by Plautus, Mercator 304,[[8]] but there is no
justification for the biblicizing construction 'pilam in qua lusimus'
when in is so easily deleted as a dittography of m: Biddau's parallel
Varro, LL 10. 22 'in tabula . . . in qua latrunculis ludunt', tells
against him, for board-games are played on a board with pieces as
ball-games are played with a ball. Marx cited v. 641, where 'in duplici
. . . pila' means 'by playing double-ball', and examples in which money
is lost in alea or in vino, in dicing and drinking; thus at Digest 11.
5. 4. 2 'repetitio eius quod in alea lusum est' means 'a claim for what
was gambled away in dicing'. Why for that matter should Lucilius use
the perfect lusimus rather than the present, particularly in parallel
to piso = pinso? Scaliger saw all this over four hundred years ago (as
Biddau knows, p. CV), and ought to have been followed.

VI.8.2, p. 33, ll. 4-5: 'ea nomina . . . quae in "<greek>y</greek>"
Graecam uocem efferuntur'; psi is not a sound but a letter, nor do
Latin words end in Greek letters. Biddau translates 'col suono dello
"<greek>y</greek>" greco', and should have read Graeci.

VIII.5.2, p. 49, l. 4, with p. 210: 'cum in illis [sc. 'obseruo',
'obsido'] "b" littera euidenter sonum suum uindicet': since there is
not the slightest doubt that bs was pronounced [ps] as in French
(contrast English [bz]), Biddau ought to have promoted his conjecture
'"p" littera' from apparatus to text.

The apparatus is very full; too full, recording all manner of
quisquiliae and even readings of the codex descriptus V that cannot be
conjectures: even if at IV.9.5, p. 19, l. 12, V's Caruitio for its
model's Carutio is worth recording, since it is discussed at p.
LXXVIII, there is no need to note that it abbreviates the praenomen
elsewhere spelt out as spurio. Redundant too is the repetition of
'etiam' in the note on VIII.4.3, p. 45, l. 11: sufficient was 'in r
seclusi: r <greek>w</greek>: in er B' (nor do I understand 'secludens
conieci').

The translation is clear, except when Biddau includes matter deleted in
the text, and accurate, except when he seeks sense where there is none.
It is enlivened at VI.3.2, p. 26, l. 8 up, by the ambiguous 'falli
tenui', meaning in fact 'make them thin' (the original is 'tenues',
jussive subjunctive).

The commentary is abundantly learned and should be read on any point
discussed by Scaurus whether or not his own views are of primary
importance to the reader. It is, however, concerned with text and
content rather than diction, saying nothing for instance on the syntax
of  'nemo autem umquam tam insulse per "u" <">artubus" dixerit'
(VIII.2.6, p. 43, ll. 15-16), where the translation 'nessuno d'altra
parte sarebbe mai tanto insulso da dire "artibus" con la "u" reproduces
the normal construction "tam insulsus fuerit qui . . . dixerit"; and
though in discussing the tradition Biddau notes certain sources'
propensity to change the indicative into the subjunctive or vice versa,
he is silent on Scaurus' own unclassical uses of the subjunctive after
'quoniam' (e.g. II.3.2, p. 7, ll. 2-3; VIII.5.3, p. 49, l. 11),[[9]]
and 'sicubi' (VIII.4.7, p. 47, l. 10). That apart, I shall confine my
remarks to a few observations on matters of detail.

IV.4.1, pp. 92-3. The use of l for r is not confined to speakers of
languages that do not distinguish the sounds: it has also been reported
among Welsh children.[[10]]

V.4, p. 134. Biddau notes that the name uau was described as Aeolian by
Priscian. It was the original Semitic name, which no doubt remained in
use amongst those Greeks who retained the /w/ phoneme, becoming digamma
amongst those for whom it was a mere shape; at Rome its appearance in
Sappho and Alcaeus, together perhaps with the supposed closeness of
Aeolic to Latin, earned it the name of littera Aeolica.

V.10, p. 136. The mysterious syllable fne is plausibly ascribed to a
post-Scaurian interpolator for whom <greek>f</greek> was f not ph; if
so, then we shall surely think of Dafne. To be sure e, as Biddau does
not seem to recognize, stands in these expositions for any vowel: when
he writes (ibid., on V.11) that gne does not seem to occur since igne
was probably divided ig-ne, tautosyllabic gne may indeed not be found
as such, but gn followed by a vowel is exemplified by Gnaeus and
gnatus.

V.12, p. 138 n. 29. hac is said to be '[i]l nome della h in catalano
antico'; and in modern Catalan too.

V.15, p. 139. Scaurus notes that the only consonant-group beginning
with m is mn as in Mnester, but Biddau refers to discussions elsewhere
of cm, dm, gm, tm without observing that in them m is the second letter
not the first.

VI.5.1, p. 156. Scaurus claims that uemens is the correct form, not
uehemens, since the word is derived from uis mentis not ueho; Biddau
might have noted that the pronunciation /ehe/ is first attested in
Marcus' letter to Fronto Ep. M. Caes. 2. 10. 2, written in 142, whereas
/e:/ is required by several passages in the classical poets.

VII.3.2, pp. 179-82. Scaurus' understanding of Greek acrophonic
numerals is clearly defective, but is <greek>du/o d tri/a t</greek>
sheer invention or misinterpretation of <greek>*D</greek> used for
<greek>de/ka</greek> and <greek>*T</greek> for
<greek>ta/lanton</greek>? (How Velius Longus equated <greek>*P</greek>
with 50 let another guess.)

VII.3.4, pp. 182-3. That ad and da, ha and ah 'aliam uocem et aliam
efficiant potestatem' is plain enough, but what of as and sa? The
former is indeed a Latin word, but what potestas ('significato' rightly
Biddau) has sa? One might have expected '"es" et "se"' or '"is" et
"si"'; but how should either pair have been corrupted?

VIII.6.4, pp. 217-24, on Scaurus' quotation from the Carmen Saliare.
Biddau demonstrates at great length that the divine name should be
Leucetie not Leucesie, but fails to address the difficulty in
understanding tremonti as the ancestral form of tremunt, namely that
the Indo-European third-person plural primary ending -onti, preserved
as such in Doric and as ut' in Ukrainian, should have retained its
final *i unscathed in even the earliest Latin.[[11]]

Matters of detail apart, Biddau's edition is a meritorious achievement,
and should restore Scaurus to modern scholars' attention; may one hope
for a study of his principles, and their consistent or inconsistent
applications, in relation to those of other grammarians, notably his
contemporary Velius Longus, and to actual usage as revealed on
inscriptions and in other documents?

------------------
Notes:


1.   Gell. 11. 15. 3. He was Hadrian's teacher according to HA Verus 2.
5; the younger Pliny submitted a speech to him for approval (Ep. 5. 12;
strangely doubted by Sherwin-White). (As to the HA, at p. XXVII the
name 'Giulio Capitolino' is rightly put in quotation marks, yet at p.
XXXII Biddau can still speak of 'gli scrittori della Storia augusta' in
the plural.)

2.   In which Gellius' Noctes Atticae are given the publication date
169, long known to rest on a fifteenth-century scribe's unsuccessful
attempt at patching up an absurdity in his twelfth-century author Ralph
of Diss: Gotthold Gundermann, Trogus und Pompeius bei Radulfus de
Diceto, ed. Georg Goetz (Berichte ueber die Verhandlungen der
Saechsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Phil.-hist. Klasse, 78/2;
Leipzig, 1926), 29; Leofranc Holford-Strevens, 'More Notes on Aulus
Gellius', Liverpool Classical Monthly, 145-51 at 151; id., Aulus
Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and his Achievement (Oxford, 2003), 15-16.

3.   Cf. O with superior s, the siglum for Du/ngal, later bishop of
Pavia, as the corrector of the Lucretian Oblongus in Leiden, miscalled
'corrector Saxonicus' (not the last Irishman to be so traduced) till
identified by Bernhard Bischoff in the exhibition catalogue Karl der
Grosse, Werk und Wirkung (Aachen, 1965), 206, no. 365.

4.   The demonstration is so convincing that I fail to understand why
at p. CX he suddenly develops cold feet ('pur non avendo una prova
veramente inoppugnabile di un tale rapporto').

5.   At IV.3, p. 11, ll. 17-18 'utraque enim <est> ut flatus', one
might prefer Keil's 'est flatus' (Biddau himself admits that 'la
sistemazione scelta m'eparsa meno sicura', p. CXIV); at V.3, p. 21, p.
6, where the paradosis has '"O" praeiectiua est "e" litterae ut "d"',
Putschius' oe  for 'd' seems better accommodated to the structure of
these precepts than Biddau's 'a', though palaeography favours the
latter (his attempt to find a parallel at V.2.1 depends on interpreting
'[A littera] "u" sequitur ut uau' as 'segue la "u" usata come vau',
which only an Olympic hurdler should attempt).

6.   More elegant would have been 'ante conieceram quam Parrh. iam idem
fecisse cognoui'.

7.   So 'bene dicendi scientia' for rhetoric at Quintilian IO 2. 14. 5,
cf. 2. 15. 38, 7. 3. 12), 'scientia bene modulandi' for music at
Censorinus, De die natali 10. 3, Augustine, De musica 1. 2. 2 (cf.
Lucio Cristante, Martiani Capellae de nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii
liber IX (Padua, 1987), 36 n. 5). All these formulae no doubt go back
to Varro.

8.  Where Demipho specifies the three letters he claims to have learnt
as a m o; see Wilhelm Schulze, 'Die lateinischen Buchstabennamen',
Kleine Schriften, 2nd edn. (Goettingen, 1966), 444-67 at 460-1.

9.   Cf. VII.1.1, p. 35, ll. 8-10 'quoniam genetiuus singularis non
debeat minorem numerum habere syllabarum quam nominatiuus -- quin immo
interdum etiam maior sit', where the 'Romance' branch has 'debet'
(supralinearly altered into 'debeat' in MS Bern, Burgerbibliothek 330)
and 'fit', both noted under 'abuso dell'indicativo' at p. XCV; rightly
as to the witnesses, but 'abuso del congiuntivo' as to the author.

10.   J. Morris Jones, A Welsh Grammar Historical and Comparative
(Oxford, 1913), 19. Cf. the Russian tongue-twister Karl u Klary ukral
korally, a Klara u Karla klarnet ('Karl has stolen corals off Clara,
and Clara a clarinet off Karl').

11.   Against, see e.g. Andrew L. Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of
Greek and Latin (New York, 1995), 467 n. 1.