| Title | Lucretius Contra Empedoclen: A Textual Note |
| Type | Article |
| Language | English |
| Date | 1977 |
| Journal | The Classical Journal |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 27-29 |
| Categories | no categories |
| Author(s) | Clay, Diskin |
| Editor(s) | |
| Translator(s) |
| In what must be the shortest textual note ever published, Bailey and Maas recovered the text of Lucretius I. 744: aera solem imbrem terras animalia fruges Imbrem scripsimus; ignem codd. This is their note. Why they wrote imbrem for ignem, they did not say, perhaps because any reader familiar with Lucretius' argument and Empedocles' poem On Nature knows why. Our manuscripts present us with a world composed of air, the sun, fire, the earth, and the products of the earth (aera solem ignem terras animalia fruges); Empedocles presents us with a world that is rooted in the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water. These he describes variously, but Lucretius has already powerfully invoked them at the very beginning of his poem, well before he returns to them in his refutation of Empedocles' theory of matter. Within the first nine lines of his proem, he evokes the stars (which are soon associated with fire, I. 231, 1034), the sea, the earth, the light of the sun, winds, the earth, the sea, and again light: in short, not the familiar Roman universe of three elements—the heaven, earth, and water—but the Greek world of air, earth, fire, and water. This world he returns to as he presents the elemental theories of "those who multiply the elements which generate the world," and who join air to fire and earth to water: I 714 et qui quattuor ex rebus posse omnia rentur ex igni terra atque anima procrescere et imbri. There are no textual problems here, although anima and imber are striking and unusual as descriptions of air and water. Nevertheless, they stand in the text. But the theory of four elements presents a problem when it is reduced by one in the manuscripts of Lucretius: aera, solem, ignem, terras. Christ saw the problem, and in 1853 he emended the text to give a world of four elements: he took the offending term to be solem, which he emended to rorem—creating a world of air, dew, fire, and earth. This emendation has the virtue of changing only two letters of the manuscripts to create water from the sun, and rorem is a perfectly good Lucretian word for water (cf. I. 771). Dew is a form of water, but Empedocles does not use it as a term to represent this elemental mass. ὕδωρ (hydor) is a word he used to represent water: Simplicius (commenting on Aristotle's Physics) noticed this—καλεῖ ὕδωρ ὄμβρον—and at least three passages from Empedocles survive to prove him right. Simplicius knew of Empedocles' various ways of naming his elements, but neither Lucretius' ancient nor modern editors seem to. Imber seemed strange for water, so an early editor or reader of Lucretius emended the text of I. 784-785 to read: "first these followers of Empedocles make fire transform itself into the gusts of air," I 784 hinc ignem gigni terramque creari ex igni retroque in terram cuncta reverti. Marullus understood what had gone wrong and emended ignem by imbrem and igni by imbri, making water out of fire and recovering how a Presocratic could imagine a ladder of elemental transformations moving down from air to precipitation to earth. Lucretius' attack on Empedocles' elemental theory is only one of the many signs of his knowledge of the Περὶ φύσεως (Peri Physeōs). De Rerum Natura I. 744 and 784-785 are not the only passages that reveal this, and these passages are not the only ones where Empedocles' Greek allows Lucretius' modern reader to recover his original text: II. 1114 ignem ignes procudent aetheraque (aether) This is restored by Empedocles (DK 31 B 37): (πυρὶ γὰρ αἰεὶ πῦρ ἐπὶ πυρὶ) αἰεὶ δὲ ξυνοίσει καὶ ἀὴρ ἀέρι Lachmann, with the confidence inspired by knowing too much and too little, emended aeraque (aer). Simplicius could have pointed him in the right direction when he gave one of Empedocles' terms for aether as aer, as could Empedocles himself. This has become a long note on one word in the manuscripts of Lucretius. Its justification is this: Bailey and Maas published their note in 1943. The emendation was incorporated into the text that accompanies Bailey's three-volume commentary on Lucretius (Oxford 1947), but unaccountably, it did not appear in the Oxford text reprinted in 1947 or in any later reprinting. In the tenth edition of his Lucrèce (Paris 1959), Ernout prints the text of our manuscripts; so does Josef Martin in the five editions of his Lucretius published since 1953. Büchner (Wiesbaden 1966) accepts Christ's rorem as "less drastic" (levior) than imbrem, and so, evidently, does Müller (Fribourg 1975). Only one of the major editions of Lucretius to appear since 1943, that of Martin Ferguson Smith (London and Cambridge, Mass. 1975), prints what Lucretius wrote: the rest prefer dew to rain. So weak is the force of ratio et res ipsa. [the entire text p. 27-29] |
| Online Resources | https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/a3Cc8mgHkQFW4AL |
{"_index":"sire","_id":"1272","_score":null,"_source":{"id":1272,"authors_free":[{"id":1862,"entry_id":1272,"agent_type":"person","is_normalised":1,"person_id":50,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"},"free_name":"Clay, Diskin","free_first_name":"Diskin","free_last_name":"Clay","norm_person":{"id":50,"first_name":"Diskin","last_name":"Clay","full_name":"Clay, Diskin","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/1069425435","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}}],"entry_title":"Lucretius Contra Empedoclen: A Textual Note","main_title":{"title":"Lucretius Contra Empedoclen: A Textual Note"},"abstract":"In what must be the shortest textual note ever published, Bailey and Maas recovered the text of Lucretius I. 744:\r\n\r\n aera solem imbrem terras animalia fruges\r\n Imbrem scripsimus; ignem codd.\r\n\r\nThis is their note. Why they wrote imbrem for ignem, they did not say, perhaps because any reader familiar with Lucretius' argument and Empedocles' poem On Nature knows why.\r\n\r\nOur manuscripts present us with a world composed of air, the sun, fire, the earth, and the products of the earth (aera solem ignem terras animalia fruges); Empedocles presents us with a world that is rooted in the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water. These he describes variously, but Lucretius has already powerfully invoked them at the very beginning of his poem, well before he returns to them in his refutation of Empedocles' theory of matter.\r\n\r\nWithin the first nine lines of his proem, he evokes the stars (which are soon associated with fire, I. 231, 1034), the sea, the earth, the light of the sun, winds, the earth, the sea, and again light: in short, not the familiar Roman universe of three elements\u2014the heaven, earth, and water\u2014but the Greek world of air, earth, fire, and water.\r\n\r\nThis world he returns to as he presents the elemental theories of \"those who multiply the elements which generate the world,\" and who join air to fire and earth to water:\r\n\r\n I 714 et qui quattuor ex rebus posse omnia rentur\r\n ex igni terra atque anima procrescere et imbri.\r\n\r\nThere are no textual problems here, although anima and imber are striking and unusual as descriptions of air and water. Nevertheless, they stand in the text. But the theory of four elements presents a problem when it is reduced by one in the manuscripts of Lucretius: aera, solem, ignem, terras.\r\n\r\nChrist saw the problem, and in 1853 he emended the text to give a world of four elements: he took the offending term to be solem, which he emended to rorem\u2014creating a world of air, dew, fire, and earth. This emendation has the virtue of changing only two letters of the manuscripts to create water from the sun, and rorem is a perfectly good Lucretian word for water (cf. I. 771).\r\n\r\nDew is a form of water, but Empedocles does not use it as a term to represent this elemental mass. \u1f55\u03b4\u03c9\u03c1 (hydor) is a word he used to represent water: Simplicius (commenting on Aristotle's Physics) noticed this\u2014\u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03b5\u1fd6 \u1f55\u03b4\u03c9\u03c1 \u1f44\u03bc\u03b2\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd\u2014and at least three passages from Empedocles survive to prove him right.\r\n\r\nSimplicius knew of Empedocles' various ways of naming his elements, but neither Lucretius' ancient nor modern editors seem to. Imber seemed strange for water, so an early editor or reader of Lucretius emended the text of I. 784-785 to read:\r\n\r\n\"first these followers of Empedocles make fire transform itself into the gusts of air,\"\r\n\r\n I 784 hinc ignem gigni terramque creari\r\n ex igni retroque in terram cuncta reverti.\r\n\r\nMarullus understood what had gone wrong and emended ignem by imbrem and igni by imbri, making water out of fire and recovering how a Presocratic could imagine a ladder of elemental transformations moving down from air to precipitation to earth.\r\n\r\nLucretius' attack on Empedocles' elemental theory is only one of the many signs of his knowledge of the \u03a0\u03b5\u03c1\u1f76 \u03c6\u03cd\u03c3\u03b5\u03c9\u03c2 (Peri Physe\u014ds). De Rerum Natura I. 744 and 784-785 are not the only passages that reveal this, and these passages are not the only ones where Empedocles' Greek allows Lucretius' modern reader to recover his original text:\r\n\r\n II. 1114 ignem ignes procudent aetheraque (aether)\r\n\r\nThis is restored by Empedocles (DK 31 B 37):\r\n\r\n (\u03c0\u03c5\u03c1\u1f76 \u03b3\u1f70\u03c1 \u03b1\u1f30\u03b5\u1f76 \u03c0\u1fe6\u03c1 \u1f10\u03c0\u1f76 \u03c0\u03c5\u03c1\u1f76) \u03b1\u1f30\u03b5\u1f76 \u03b4\u1f72 \u03be\u03c5\u03bd\u03bf\u03af\u03c3\u03b5\u03b9\r\n \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u1f00\u1f74\u03c1 \u1f00\u03ad\u03c1\u03b9\r\n\r\nLachmann, with the confidence inspired by knowing too much and too little, emended aeraque (aer). Simplicius could have pointed him in the right direction when he gave one of Empedocles' terms for aether as aer, as could Empedocles himself.\r\n\r\nThis has become a long note on one word in the manuscripts of Lucretius. Its justification is this: Bailey and Maas published their note in 1943. The emendation was incorporated into the text that accompanies Bailey's three-volume commentary on Lucretius (Oxford 1947), but unaccountably, it did not appear in the Oxford text reprinted in 1947 or in any later reprinting.\r\n\r\nIn the tenth edition of his Lucr\u00e8ce (Paris 1959), Ernout prints the text of our manuscripts; so does Josef Martin in the five editions of his Lucretius published since 1953. B\u00fcchner (Wiesbaden 1966) accepts Christ's rorem as \"less drastic\" (levior) than imbrem, and so, evidently, does M\u00fcller (Fribourg 1975).\r\n\r\nOnly one of the major editions of Lucretius to appear since 1943, that of Martin Ferguson Smith (London and Cambridge, Mass. 1975), prints what Lucretius wrote: the rest prefer dew to rain.\r\n\r\nSo weak is the force of ratio et res ipsa. [the entire text p. 27-29]","btype":3,"date":"1977","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/a3Cc8mgHkQFW4AL","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":50,"full_name":"Clay, Diskin","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}}],"book":null,"booksection":null,"article":{"id":1272,"journal_id":null,"journal_name":"The Classical Journal","volume":"73","issue":"1","pages":"27-29"}},"sort":[1977]}
| Title | Lucretius Contra Empedoclen: A Textual Note |
| Type | Article |
| Language | English |
| Date | 1977 |
| Journal | The Classical Journal |
| Volume | 73 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 27-29 |
| Categories | no categories |
| Author(s) | Clay, Diskin |
| Editor(s) | |
| Translator(s) |
In what must be the shortest textual note ever published, Bailey and Maas recovered the text of Lucretius I. 744:
aera solem imbrem terras animalia fruges
Imbrem scripsimus; ignem codd.
This is their note. Why they wrote imbrem for ignem, they did not say, perhaps because any reader familiar with Lucretius' argument and Empedocles' poem On Nature knows why.
Our manuscripts present us with a world composed of air, the sun, fire, the earth, and the products of the earth (aera solem ignem terras animalia fruges); Empedocles presents us with a world that is rooted in the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water. These he describes variously, but Lucretius has already powerfully invoked them at the very beginning of his poem, well before he returns to them in his refutation of Empedocles' theory of matter.
Within the first nine lines of his proem, he evokes the stars (which are soon associated with fire, I. 231, 1034), the sea, the earth, the light of the sun, winds, the earth, the sea, and again light: in short, not the familiar Roman universe of three elements—the heaven, earth, and water—but the Greek world of air, earth, fire, and water.
This world he returns to as he presents the elemental theories of "those who multiply the elements which generate the world," and who join air to fire and earth to water:
I 714 et qui quattuor ex rebus posse omnia rentur
ex igni terra atque anima procrescere et imbri.
There are no textual problems here, although anima and imber are striking and unusual as descriptions of air and water. Nevertheless, they stand in the text. But the theory of four elements presents a problem when it is reduced by one in the manuscripts of Lucretius: aera, solem, ignem, terras.
Christ saw the problem, and in 1853 he emended the text to give a world of four elements: he took the offending term to be solem, which he emended to rorem—creating a world of air, dew, fire, and earth. This emendation has the virtue of changing only two letters of the manuscripts to create water from the sun, and rorem is a perfectly good Lucretian word for water (cf. I. 771).
Dew is a form of water, but Empedocles does not use it as a term to represent this elemental mass. ὕδωρ (hydor) is a word he used to represent water: Simplicius (commenting on Aristotle's Physics) noticed this—καλεῖ ὕδωρ ὄμβρον—and at least three passages from Empedocles survive to prove him right.
Simplicius knew of Empedocles' various ways of naming his elements, but neither Lucretius' ancient nor modern editors seem to. Imber seemed strange for water, so an early editor or reader of Lucretius emended the text of I. 784-785 to read:
"first these followers of Empedocles make fire transform itself into the gusts of air,"
I 784 hinc ignem gigni terramque creari
ex igni retroque in terram cuncta reverti.
Marullus understood what had gone wrong and emended ignem by imbrem and igni by imbri, making water out of fire and recovering how a Presocratic could imagine a ladder of elemental transformations moving down from air to precipitation to earth.
Lucretius' attack on Empedocles' elemental theory is only one of the many signs of his knowledge of the Περὶ φύσεως (Peri Physeōs). De Rerum Natura I. 744 and 784-785 are not the only passages that reveal this, and these passages are not the only ones where Empedocles' Greek allows Lucretius' modern reader to recover his original text:
II. 1114 ignem ignes procudent aetheraque (aether)
This is restored by Empedocles (DK 31 B 37):
(πυρὶ γὰρ αἰεὶ πῦρ ἐπὶ πυρὶ) αἰεὶ δὲ ξυνοίσει
καὶ ἀὴρ ἀέρι
Lachmann, with the confidence inspired by knowing too much and too little, emended aeraque (aer). Simplicius could have pointed him in the right direction when he gave one of Empedocles' terms for aether as aer, as could Empedocles himself.
This has become a long note on one word in the manuscripts of Lucretius. Its justification is this: Bailey and Maas published their note in 1943. The emendation was incorporated into the text that accompanies Bailey's three-volume commentary on Lucretius (Oxford 1947), but unaccountably, it did not appear in the Oxford text reprinted in 1947 or in any later reprinting.
In the tenth edition of his Lucrèce (Paris 1959), Ernout prints the text of our manuscripts; so does Josef Martin in the five editions of his Lucretius published since 1953. Büchner (Wiesbaden 1966) accepts Christ's rorem as "less drastic" (levior) than imbrem, and so, evidently, does Müller (Fribourg 1975).
Only one of the major editions of Lucretius to appear since 1943, that of Martin Ferguson Smith (London and Cambridge, Mass. 1975), prints what Lucretius wrote: the rest prefer dew to rain.
So weak is the force of ratio et res ipsa. [the entire text p. 27-29] |
| Online Resources | https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/a3Cc8mgHkQFW4AL |
{"_index":"sire","_id":"1272","_score":null,"_source":{"id":1272,"authors_free":[{"id":1862,"entry_id":1272,"agent_type":"person","is_normalised":1,"person_id":50,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"},"free_name":"Clay, Diskin","free_first_name":"Diskin","free_last_name":"Clay","norm_person":{"id":50,"first_name":"Diskin","last_name":"Clay","full_name":"Clay, Diskin","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/1069425435","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}}],"entry_title":"Lucretius Contra Empedoclen: A Textual Note","main_title":{"title":"Lucretius Contra Empedoclen: A Textual Note"},"abstract":"In what must be the shortest textual note ever published, Bailey and Maas recovered the text of Lucretius I. 744:\r\n\r\n aera solem imbrem terras animalia fruges\r\n Imbrem scripsimus; ignem codd.\r\n\r\nThis is their note. Why they wrote imbrem for ignem, they did not say, perhaps because any reader familiar with Lucretius' argument and Empedocles' poem On Nature knows why.\r\n\r\nOur manuscripts present us with a world composed of air, the sun, fire, the earth, and the products of the earth (aera solem ignem terras animalia fruges); Empedocles presents us with a world that is rooted in the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water. These he describes variously, but Lucretius has already powerfully invoked them at the very beginning of his poem, well before he returns to them in his refutation of Empedocles' theory of matter.\r\n\r\nWithin the first nine lines of his proem, he evokes the stars (which are soon associated with fire, I. 231, 1034), the sea, the earth, the light of the sun, winds, the earth, the sea, and again light: in short, not the familiar Roman universe of three elements\u2014the heaven, earth, and water\u2014but the Greek world of air, earth, fire, and water.\r\n\r\nThis world he returns to as he presents the elemental theories of \"those who multiply the elements which generate the world,\" and who join air to fire and earth to water:\r\n\r\n I 714 et qui quattuor ex rebus posse omnia rentur\r\n ex igni terra atque anima procrescere et imbri.\r\n\r\nThere are no textual problems here, although anima and imber are striking and unusual as descriptions of air and water. Nevertheless, they stand in the text. But the theory of four elements presents a problem when it is reduced by one in the manuscripts of Lucretius: aera, solem, ignem, terras.\r\n\r\nChrist saw the problem, and in 1853 he emended the text to give a world of four elements: he took the offending term to be solem, which he emended to rorem\u2014creating a world of air, dew, fire, and earth. This emendation has the virtue of changing only two letters of the manuscripts to create water from the sun, and rorem is a perfectly good Lucretian word for water (cf. I. 771).\r\n\r\nDew is a form of water, but Empedocles does not use it as a term to represent this elemental mass. \u1f55\u03b4\u03c9\u03c1 (hydor) is a word he used to represent water: Simplicius (commenting on Aristotle's Physics) noticed this\u2014\u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03b5\u1fd6 \u1f55\u03b4\u03c9\u03c1 \u1f44\u03bc\u03b2\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd\u2014and at least three passages from Empedocles survive to prove him right.\r\n\r\nSimplicius knew of Empedocles' various ways of naming his elements, but neither Lucretius' ancient nor modern editors seem to. Imber seemed strange for water, so an early editor or reader of Lucretius emended the text of I. 784-785 to read:\r\n\r\n\"first these followers of Empedocles make fire transform itself into the gusts of air,\"\r\n\r\n I 784 hinc ignem gigni terramque creari\r\n ex igni retroque in terram cuncta reverti.\r\n\r\nMarullus understood what had gone wrong and emended ignem by imbrem and igni by imbri, making water out of fire and recovering how a Presocratic could imagine a ladder of elemental transformations moving down from air to precipitation to earth.\r\n\r\nLucretius' attack on Empedocles' elemental theory is only one of the many signs of his knowledge of the \u03a0\u03b5\u03c1\u1f76 \u03c6\u03cd\u03c3\u03b5\u03c9\u03c2 (Peri Physe\u014ds). De Rerum Natura I. 744 and 784-785 are not the only passages that reveal this, and these passages are not the only ones where Empedocles' Greek allows Lucretius' modern reader to recover his original text:\r\n\r\n II. 1114 ignem ignes procudent aetheraque (aether)\r\n\r\nThis is restored by Empedocles (DK 31 B 37):\r\n\r\n (\u03c0\u03c5\u03c1\u1f76 \u03b3\u1f70\u03c1 \u03b1\u1f30\u03b5\u1f76 \u03c0\u1fe6\u03c1 \u1f10\u03c0\u1f76 \u03c0\u03c5\u03c1\u1f76) \u03b1\u1f30\u03b5\u1f76 \u03b4\u1f72 \u03be\u03c5\u03bd\u03bf\u03af\u03c3\u03b5\u03b9\r\n \u03ba\u03b1\u1f76 \u1f00\u1f74\u03c1 \u1f00\u03ad\u03c1\u03b9\r\n\r\nLachmann, with the confidence inspired by knowing too much and too little, emended aeraque (aer). Simplicius could have pointed him in the right direction when he gave one of Empedocles' terms for aether as aer, as could Empedocles himself.\r\n\r\nThis has become a long note on one word in the manuscripts of Lucretius. Its justification is this: Bailey and Maas published their note in 1943. The emendation was incorporated into the text that accompanies Bailey's three-volume commentary on Lucretius (Oxford 1947), but unaccountably, it did not appear in the Oxford text reprinted in 1947 or in any later reprinting.\r\n\r\nIn the tenth edition of his Lucr\u00e8ce (Paris 1959), Ernout prints the text of our manuscripts; so does Josef Martin in the five editions of his Lucretius published since 1953. B\u00fcchner (Wiesbaden 1966) accepts Christ's rorem as \"less drastic\" (levior) than imbrem, and so, evidently, does M\u00fcller (Fribourg 1975).\r\n\r\nOnly one of the major editions of Lucretius to appear since 1943, that of Martin Ferguson Smith (London and Cambridge, Mass. 1975), prints what Lucretius wrote: the rest prefer dew to rain.\r\n\r\nSo weak is the force of ratio et res ipsa. [the entire text p. 27-29]","btype":3,"date":"1977","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/a3Cc8mgHkQFW4AL","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":50,"full_name":"Clay, Diskin","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}}],"book":null,"booksection":null,"article":{"id":1272,"journal_id":null,"journal_name":"The Classical Journal","volume":"73","issue":"1","pages":"27-29"}},"sort":["Lucretius Contra Empedoclen: A Textual Note"]}