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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. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ 68.1 Amelia Bensch-Schaus and Cynthia Damon Contra quem Caesar cum plurima sua commemorasset officia quae consul ei decretis publicis tribuisset cumque defensionem eius nullam posse excusationem eius imprudentiae recipere coarguisset, quod homo tantae prudentiae ac diligentiae scire potuisset quis urbem Italiamque teneret …“In reply to him, Caesar, after he had recalled his own very numerous services, which he as consul bestowed upon him by public decrees, and after he had argued that his (sc. Deiotarus’) defense could not contain any excuse of ignorance on his part, since a man of such great foresight and attentiveness was able to know who held the city and Italy …” defensionem (defensonem Uac) eius MUcSTV | defectionem eius ς teste Dübner (cf. BG 7.67.7) | defensionem eius seclusit Dauisius 1727 ut glossema ad excusationem (u. et infra), sed cf. de pleonasmo Cic. Rab. Post. 27 Rufum necessitatis excusatio defendet || posse MUSTV | posse se Dauisius (u. et supra) (cf. Sen. Ben. 7.16.3) || eius2 MUSTV (de iteratione cf. BG 1.20.5) | eius Clarke The transmitted text of this passage contains a bold personification and an apparent pleonasm: recipere has defensionem as its subject and excusationem as its object. A lesser objection is the fact that defensio has a military meaning in its seven other occurrences in the corpus Caesarianum. Madvig condemned the construction in no uncertain terms (1873, 285 n.1 “hae sordes”) and praised the repair found in Clarke’s 1712 edition and in some manuscripts—replacing the objectionable defensionem with defectionem—on the grounds that “factum recipit aut non recipit defensionem excusationemque imprudentiae” (ibid.). However, the textual support for Madvig’s obiter dictum is rather thin. The best parallel for a “factum” as the recipient of an excuse is Cic. Agr. 3.5 inuidiosa lex … habet excusationem, where the verb is different. It is in fact clear from the TLL entry on excusatio that a person is normally the subject of such expressions, as at BG 6.4.3 libenter Caesar petentibus Haeduis dat ueniam excusationemque accipit (TLL 5.2.1299.73–82, with verbs including accipere, adimere, dare, habere, obtendere, parare, praebere; there are two examples of recipere). The “factum” is normally expressed with a genitive, e.g., imprudentiae in the present passage (TLL 5.2.1298.55–82). In 1727 Dauisius, who had printed the paradosis in 1706, criticized the emendation that Madvig would later pronounce “certissima” on the grounds of its historical inaccuracy: Deiotarus never defected from Caesar (as Litauiccus, for example, did in BG 7) because he was on Pompey’s side from the beginning of the civil war.The charge of defection does occur in Dio’s account of these negotiations, where Caesar blames Pharnaces for deserting his benefactor Pompey (42.47.4): ἐπεκάλεσεν αὐτῶι … ὅτι τὸν Πομπήιον τὸν εὐεργέτην ἐγκατέλιπεν. Instead of changing the noun, Dauisius excised defensionem eius as a gloss on excusationem eius imprudentiae; he also added se after posse to supply the requisite personal subject. The implicit innovations are plausible enough individually, but the combination is less so.The repair printed by Kübler is even less plausible. He accepted the addition of se but also transposed coarguisset to follow defensionem eius and punctuated the sixty-two words from nullam to deprecandum as a parenthesis. And the historical case against defectionem depends on a literal interpretation of a highly rhetorical passage. Klotz suggests in his apparatus that the transmitted text can perhaps be explained as a pleonasm. Cicero uses a similarly pleonastic expression for “defense by excuse” at Rab. Post. 27: Rufum necessitatis excusatio defendet. The wording is different, but the concept is perhaps sufficiently similar to defend the paradosis, particularly given the problems inherent in the repairs currently on offer. The fact that defensio is exclusively military elsewhere in the corpus Caesarianum should not make us reluctant to accept its forensic meaning here, since the context contains other “courtroom” words: 67.1 reorum habitu, 67.2 iudicem esse, 68.1 de controuersiis tetrarcharum … se cogniturum esse.