Plutarch: On the Face Which Appears in the Orb by Luisa Lesage Garriga

Author:Luisa Lesage Garriga [Garriga, Luisa Lesage]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789004458079
Amazon: 9004458077
Goodreads: 104908294
Published: 2021-05-03T13:52:50+00:00

Commentary to the Critical Edition

The commentary is organized to both illustrate and solve the difficulties within De facie. In general, a passage is included in the commentary when it presents one or more of the following aspects:

– The manuscripts have a physical lacuna or a lacuna is deducted by the context, affecting the understanding of a passage.

– The passage has serious syntactic or semantic difficulties.

– This edition proposes a new correction or conjecture.

Each heading normally keeps the following structure: first, in includes the text of the present edition, accompanied by the reading transmitted in the manuscripts; second, a summary of the problems that are involved in the passage; third, plausible solutions proposed by previous scholarship, and fourth, the plausible solution adopted in the present edition.1

With a view to avoiding the overload of footnotes in the commentary, previous proposals are referred to by means of the editor’s name. Their interventions in the text are easily traceable, since the section “Editores citati” provides full references. Differently, when emendations are not included in an edition but in specific studies, a full reference is provided in the footnotes.

920B 1

… Ὁ μὲν οὖν Σύλλας ταῦτα εἶπε· “τῷ γὰρ ἐμῷ μύθῳ προσήκει κἀκεῖ-

θέν ἐστιν·”

EB

Ὀαυνοσυλλας E / ὁ μὲν οὖν σύλλας B ταῦτα εἶπε. τῷ γὰρ ἐμῷ μύθῳ

προσήκει· κἀκεῖθέν ἐστιν·

The beginning of the treatise is plausibly lost.2 With most editions, I accept B’s reading for the first sentence (Ὁ μὲν οὖν σύλλας), against the corrupted reading of E (Ὀαυνοσυλλας). Raingeard and Cherniss preferred to start directly with ὁ

Σύλλας; and Pohlenz, in his edition, maintained the corrupted form of E, preceded by the crux philologica, and suggested (in the apparatus) the conjecture ἀκούσωμεν οὖν ὁ Σύλλας.

B’s reading, interestingly, coincides with the beginning of Quaest. conv. 3.4, which also starts by referring to the same Sulla: Ὁ μὲν οὖν Σύλλας ταῦτ’ εἶπεν. B’s beginning might consequently be an attempt to correct the incomprehensible 1 Translation of singular terms is not provided unless the issue at stake is precisely the meaning of the words transmitted by the manuscripts.

2 L. Lesage Gárriga, Plutarch’s Moon, in preparation.

© Luisa Lesage Gárriga, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004458086_006

commentary to the critical edition

113

form of E into an existing form found elsewhere in Plutarch’s work.3 However, it must be kept in mind that the current beginning most probably was not the original beginning of De facie.

E’s reading (Ὀαυνοσυλλας) could be explained as a corruption of ὁ οὖν followed by an erroneous repetition of the article: ὁ οὖν ὁ Σύλλας. Without the erroneous repetition, this construction is used elsewhere in Plutarch for the introduction of a character.4

The plausible loss of the beginning has caused different interpretations of the first sentences’ syntax. The pronoun ταῦτα could allude to the previous words, from the lost part of the treatise, thus functioning as object of the verb εἶπε (… Σύλλας ταῦτα εἶπε.); or the pronoun ταῦτα could be part of Sulla’s following words, thus functioning as subject of the verbs προσήκει and ἐστιν, which would make the whole sentence as object of εἶπε

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