The philosophical debate presented in these pages is extracted from a 13th-century Coptic Arabic summa ecclesiastica . The venue is alleged to have taken place in Alexandria under the aegis of its proper founder. In a gathering of five philosophers or sages coming from India to the Maghreb, passing of course through Greece, amongst whom was present the great Aristotle, Alexander's preceptor and the undisputed authority that summed up the debate and put an end to it. The disputation turns on (...) the existence or not of a supreme creator and organizer, reminding the public sessions convened by the Sassanid and Muslim Rulers. However, the mise en scène here is linked without contest to the famous encounter of 325 b.C. between the Macedonian Conqueror and the Brahmans or Indian gymnosophites. We know how this episode was glossed in different ways in the Greek literature until it was “recovered” in an apologetic monotheistic view by the new Christian imperial order from the 4th century a.C. onward. Although our Coptic writer from the Middle Ages intends to prove with the text he offers to us the rightness of the “miaphysite” teaching of his Church, he, or his source, stands fully in line with that tradition, despite the fact that we could not trace a specific source from the rich variety of linguistic traditions on the matter. All the same, the ideological and linguistic analysis of the text brings us to suggest a Greek original that goes back to Late Antiquity. Résumé Tiré d'une somme ecclésiastique copto-arabe du XIII e siècle, le débat philosophique que nous présentons ici , est prétendu avoir eu lieu à Alexandrie, sous l'égide de son propre fondateur. S'y trouvent réunis cinq sages ou philosophes , venus depuis l'Inde jusqu'au Maghreb, passant bien sûr par la Grèce, dont la délégation ne manque pas d'inclure le grand Aristote, le précepteur d'Alexandre le Grand et l'autorité incontestée qui récapitule et clôt le débat. La ‘dispute’ porte sur l'existence ou non d'un créateur-ordonnateur suprême, rappelant les sessions publiques convoquées par les souverains sassanides ou musulmans. Mais la mise en scène ici se rattache incontestablement à la célèbre rencontre du Conquérant macédonien avec les brahmanes ou gymnosophistes indiens en 325 av. J.-C. On sait comment cet épisode a été glosé de différentes manières dans la littérature grecque, jusqu'à sa cristallisation dans le Roman d'Alexandre , avant d'être “récupéré”, dans une perspective monothéiste apologétique, par la nouvelle donne impériale chrétienne depuis le IV e siècle ap. J.-C. Si notre auteur copte du Moyen Âge arabe veut voir dans le texte qu'il nous livre une confirmation de la doctrine “miaphysite” de son Église, il se situe néanmoins, lui ou sa source, dans cette ligne-là, sans qu'on ait pu, pour autant, en retracer la source dans les différentes traditions linguistiques existantes. Ceci dit, l'analyse idéologique et linguistique du texte du débat nous mène à suggérer, comme source immédiate, un original grec de la Basse Antiquité. (shrink)

Understanding Javanese philosophy through wayang wong performance.

I present first what I take to be a more interesting item than the others. O.C 716–19. δ' ερετμος κπαγλ' λα χερ σ ✝παραπτομναπλτα θρσκει, τν κατομπδων νηρῄδων κλουθος. The above is Pearson's text, except that I have transferred the last syllable of his 716 to the beginning of my 717. Careful consideration of the metre of this stasimon has convinced me that 716 is rightly regarded by Schroeder as an ionic trimeter ; further, that 717 is what most people (...) call a glyconic, as is also 718. Naturally therefore I follow Hermann and Jebb as regards the text in 704, and have thus no use for the three conjectures mentioned by Pearson as substitutes for our admittedly corrupt παραπτομνα. (shrink)

‘A sweet life without lamentation’ renders Mr G. Thomson, who discusses the passage in C.Q. XXVIII 74 f. That is beyond question what this Greek will naturally and properly mean; if there were any doubt, his citations dispel it.

The ‘four famous cruces’ of this satire are as interesting as notorious. I regard the first as solved, since I cannot imagine anybody improving upon Postgate's line 13 . But I find instead a hitherto undetected but quite palpable flaw in the opening words.

cum prorepserunt primis animalia terris, mutum et turpe pecus, glandem atque cubilia propter unguibus et pugnis, dein fustibus, atque ita porro pugnabant armis, quae post fabricauerat usus, donec uerba, quibus uoces sensusque notarent, nominaque inuenere; dehinc absistere bello, oppida coeperunt munire et ponere leges, ne quis … uoces and sensus are not in pari materia; indeed, uoces notare is nonsense, as Gow says. The defect was first pointed out by Housman, J. Phil. xviii, pp. 5–8; his remedy was to transpose (...) one word and read donec uerba, quibus sensus, uocesque, notarent, nominaque inuenere. I doubt if any scholar not already familiar with Housman's note could understand his Latin here without considerable analytical effort; and I cannot but think that Housman was for once demanding from a pair of commas a cabalistic virtue hardly resident in the seal of Solomon. Admittedly he supplies a long list — one page and a half—of illustrative dislocations; but in my opinion two objections remain. In the first place, ‘interlacing’ of the clauses A B in the form A B A B is quite frequent in Latin verse; but A B A B A is rare in the extreme, not to be found in Horace, not perhaps in any Latin author except Lucretius. Secondly, the insertion of uoces, ‘expressions’ generally , in such a way as to disrupt the pair uerba nominaque ‘verbs and nouns’ would be awkward, and for Horace anomalous, in the most lucid of contexts; here it makes confusion worse confounded. (shrink)

Professor H. J. Rose's article in C.Q. xxxiii. 69 f. has advanced the study of this perplexing passage in two important respects. He has observed that, in order to determine the ‘eye’ as metaphorical, ỏΦθαλμός requires a dependent genitive, and he has therefore restored μεαλν πολων to this relation by punctuating as above instead of after πολίων And he is surely equally right in maintaining that this plural genitive must have a plural reference; it must mean ‘of great cities’ and (...) not ‘of Cyrene’. For although there is a figure called pluralis maiestatis, such obscurity in the use of it seems too affected, such ambiguity too perverse; a poem honouring the prince of Cyrene will refer to this famous city in unmistakable terms. (shrink)

‘ “I desire”’ Jebb, whose note I now take as read. In this and my ensuing discussion I seek to show that never has that meaning. The scholiast's note is a sophism, and Jebb's is another. Jebb says that the primary sense is to love; he prudently leaves unstated the next step in the fallacy, that to love might mean to have just fallen in love with; and he concludes that poetry ‘could easily draw’ the sense to desire. Actually applies (...) as between parents and children, rulers and their subjects, and to other not necessarily amenable persons or not prima facie acceptable things with whom or which one has to associate continually ; its general sense is to ‘do with’, to brook; it ranges from like to either extreme, be fond of or tolerate. In its various nuances it resembles which never means to ‘desire’. (shrink)

In the last number of C.Q. Mr. A. D. Knox has drawn up a list of Theocriteans who, he suggests, ‘have all of them made the most elementary mistake’ of failing to consider the possibility at least that it is the Boy, and not the Fox, who is the subject of καθξ in Id. I. 51. From that list he will have to with-draw two names, Gow and Campbell. This construction, which Mr. Knox propounds as a novelty, had been suggested (...) by Mr. Gow in C.R. XLIV., pp. 9–10. For my part, I am not ingenious, and that syntactical possibility would no more have occurred to me independently than would Mr. Gow's three renderings of it, two of which are ‘until he sets her vinous breakfast upon a more solid basis’ and ‘until he sets her grapes on toast’; as little could I ever have thought, with Mr. Knox, of ‘the obvious necessity’ for this fox ‘of rest after a heavy meal’; still less of those further inevitable eventualities1 at which he hints with such delicacy in his quotation of Aelian V. 39. In regard to these and all such matters, to my mind ‘it were to consider too curiously to consider so.’ For even in Greek which represented for my ears some such English as ‘until she set him a-breakfastant upon the dries,’ if there was one thing with which I was completely satisfied it was with the Fox as subject; that seemed so perfectly in keeping both with the happy playfulness of the passage and with the richly idiomatic φατ as applied to a graven image of an animal. But from the fact that I criticized Mr. Gow's note it is obvious that I was familiar with his idea. (shrink)

That after that is just too ghastly. Jebb's citations are no parallels; the difference is that and have both precisely the same reference. Read ‘which reflections … time-honoured as they are’. In this well-known construction a term which logically belongs to the antecedent is deferred and inserted in the relative clause—‘for emphasis’.

In C.Q. XXVII. 178–181 Mr. S. G. Owen has raised some interesting questions, but it may be doubted whether he has in every case discovered the correct solution. Panntalia 30, 6: quaeque sine exemplo in nece functa uiri. Mr. Owen's pronece removes the hiatus, but I think has no other merit. The sense ‘a death for a death,’ even if not necessarily or best represented by repetition of the same term, is at least not happily represented by such combination of (...) euphemism with dysphemism; ‘in place of the slaughter of her husband, she finished her days.’ Read funere, and you get an expression characteristic of this school; Paulinus of Pella applied it to death; patris de funere functi 236, ‘of my father's death,’ i.e. funere defuncti, cf. 241 defuncti patris. But Paulinus of Nola applied it also to a vicarious death, Christus … morte mea functus, carm. 31, 191 . Both were pupils of Ausonius. (shrink)

In C.Q. XXVI. 45–51 I contended that in Aesch. Agam. 1227–30 Cassandra describes Clytemnestra in terms of a Greek proverb, the proverb of the Treacherous Hound; and I restored the passage thus:— νεŵν δ' παρχоς 'Ιλоν τ' νασττης оκ оδεν оα γλŵσσα μιστης κννς λεξασα κα σνασα φαδρ', ооν δκоς Ατης λαθραоν δξεται κακ τχν.

In C.Q. N.s. iv , 10–12, I gave an elaborate diagnosis of the morbid symptoms in sense and syntax of the traditional text. I then proposed , rendering ‘as I now am doing, without success’. Professor W. M. Edwards wrote to me that he accepted ‘this very helpful analysis of the trouble', but not my emendation, on the ground that O.'s admission of failure would be ‘a factual statement requiring ’.

The spinal cord provides an alternative model for nerve tissue grafting experiments. Anatomo-functional correlations are easier to make here than in any other region of the CNS because of a direct implication of spinal cord neurons in sensorimotor activities. Lesions can be easily performed to isolate spinal cord neurons from descending inputs. The anatomy of descending monoaminergic systems is well defined and these systems offer a favourable paradigm for lesion-graft experiments.