-
Bellum Alexandrinum Cynthia Damon, et al. Society for Classical Studies TEI XML encoding: Samuel J. Huskey Programming for automatic generation of TEI XML: Virgina K. Felkner Coauthor of content related to section 2.5: Dallas Simons Coauthor of content related to sections 12.1–2 and 13.5: Tom Vozar Coauthor of content related to section 26.1–2: Marcie Persyn Coauthor of content related to sections 35.3 and 36.4–5: Maria Kovalchuk Coauthor of content related to sections 47.2, 49.1, and 49.2–3: Tim Warnock Coauthor of content related to section 60.2: Isabella Reinhardt Coauthor of content related to sections 63.5 and 66.3–4: Brian Credo Coauthor of content related to sections 67.1 and 68.1: Amelia Bensch-Schaus Coauthor of content related to sections 72.2–3 and 74.4: Wes Hanson First Edition The Digital Latin Library 650 Parrington Oval Carnegie Building 101 Norman OK 73071 USA The University of Oklahoma Norman, OK 2022 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-SA 4.0) Library of Digital Latin Texts Edited by Samuel J. Huskey 1 ​ Born digital. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ 31.3 Cynthia Damon Quorum perturbatione nostrorum animi adeo sunt incitati ut paene eodem tempore ex omnibus partibus, primi tamen editissimum castrorum locum caperent.“The spirits of our men were so incited by the enemy’s confusion that they captured positions at nearly the same time from all directions, the stonghold’s highest point, however, first.” partibus (sc. loca caperent nostri; cf. Hirt. 8.36.4 et, de figura apo koinou, BC 1.19.5) | p- impetus fieret Kübler (cf. BG 1.22.3) | p- inrumperent Schneider (cf. BG 4.14.3) The problem here lies in the change of subject at primi tamen, which leaves the implicit subject in the first part of the result clause, presumably nostri, without a verb. Kübler accordingly posited a lacuna before primi and suggested filling it with impetus fieret; the expression is paralleled at BG 1.22.3: ut undique uno tempore in hostes impetus fieret. Klotz prints this in preference to Schneider’s subsequent suggestion inrumperent, imperfectly paralleled at BG 4.14.3 quorum timor cum … significaretur, milites nostri … incitati in castra inruperunt. Inrumperentur improves on impetus fieret by supplying a subject that can stand more easily in antithesis with primi tamen, but even Schneider claims no more for this repair than that it suits the sense of the passage (“Hinter partibus fehlt ein Verbum von der Bedeutung ‘vorstürmen’ oder ‘einbrechen’; das von mir eingesetzte inrumperent genügt dem Sinne nach.”). Andrieu leaves an unfilled lacuna in his text but supplies l’assaut se produisait in the translation. Yet there is no palaeographical motivation for an omission here. Furthermore, these supplements leave the logic of tamen unsatisfactory: they require an antithesis between “everyone attacking simultaneously” and “the first group capturing” (primi tamen caperent) that is not intuitively obvious.The antithesis between rex and Caesar in a similar construction at 28.2 is much clearer because it hinges on the relative expeditiousness of their respective routes: celeriore fluminis Nili nauigatione rex est usus …. Caesar … circumuectus eo mari quod Africae partis esse dicitur, sicuti supra demonstrauimus, prius tamen regis copiis occurrit quam is Mithridaten aggredi posset. So either the lacuna is longer than has yet been suspected or a different solution should be sought. Rather than accept an imperfect or incomplete repair, we print the text as it stands, as an apo koinou construction in a moment of narrative excitement. According to Leumann/Hoffmann/Szantyr this construction, while occasionally attested in prose, “bei Caes(ar) ganz fehlt” (LHS 2.834; the anonymous authors of the corpus Caesarianum are not mentioned).However, they do (2.444) cite a Caesarian example of an apo koinou modifier (BG 4.24.4 non eadem alacritate ac studio); this is obviously much simpler than our passage. However, it is also the sort of figure of speech that would be emended out of editions of Caesar and his followers, as it has been here, since it has been taken to be (or simulate) a feature of colloquial language (ibid.). On textual disputes over apo koinou neque see LHS 2.517; the topic is discussed at length in Baehrens (1912) passim, with Caesarian examples on 266–67 and 300 and passages of comparable complexity to ours on 280–81. On the figura as a device used in pursuit of the “Gesetz der wachsende Glieder” see LHS 2.724. Other stylistic features of the clause, including the omission of the subject and the predicate use of primus, are in fact characteristic of this text. See Gaertner-Hausberg (2013) 36 nn. 31–32. For the collocation ex omnibus partibus loca capere cf. Hirt. 8.36.4 repente omnibus ex partibus … loca superiora capiuntur. Taking caperent as the verb for both halves of the result clause sharpens the antithesis (eodem tempore vs. primi), and tamen introduces a correction to an overstatement, as it often does, for example at 18.4 perterriti … ad oppidum enatauerunt. Multi tamen ex his capti interfectique sunt (cf. Hirt. 8.8.3 omnium impedimentorum agmen, quod tamen erat mediocre). On the relatively high frequency of tamen in the Bellum Alexandrinum, particularly in chapters 22–78, see Gaertner/Hausburg (2013) 67 n.184 (the numbers in their Appendix K, p. 288, are mistaken).