Pub Date : 2018-10-01DOI: 10.1525/CA.2018.37.2.187
B. Gray
This article shows how the public inscriptions of Hellenistic poleis, especially decrees in honor of leading citizens, illuminate Greek ethical thinking, including wider debates about questions of central importance for Greek ethical philosophers. It does so by comparing decrees' rhetoric with the ethical language and doctrines of different ancient philosophical schools. Whereas some scholars identify ethical views comparable to Stoic ideas in Hellenistic decrees, this article argues that there are more significant overlaps, especially in decrees from Asia Minor dating to after 150 BC, with fourth-century BC ethical philosophy, especially Aristotle's, and its Hellenistic continuators. The overlaps between decrees and philosophers' approaches had complex, diverse causes (section 4), probably sometimes including philosophical education and influence. Comparison of philosophy and epigraphy shows that, in the same way as the polis continued to flourish after Chaironeia, critical reflection about the ethical foundations of civic life also remained vibrant, among both philosophers and citizens.
{"title":"A Civic Alternative to Stoicism: The Ethics of Hellenistic Honorary Decrees","authors":"B. Gray","doi":"10.1525/CA.2018.37.2.187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/CA.2018.37.2.187","url":null,"abstract":"This article shows how the public inscriptions of Hellenistic poleis, especially decrees in honor of leading citizens, illuminate Greek ethical thinking, including wider debates about questions of central importance for Greek ethical philosophers. It does so by comparing decrees' rhetoric with the ethical language and doctrines of different ancient philosophical schools. Whereas some scholars identify ethical views comparable to Stoic ideas in Hellenistic decrees, this article argues that there are more significant overlaps, especially in decrees from Asia Minor dating to after 150 BC, with fourth-century BC ethical philosophy, especially Aristotle's, and its Hellenistic continuators. The overlaps between decrees and philosophers' approaches had complex, diverse causes (section 4), probably sometimes including philosophical education and influence. Comparison of philosophy and epigraphy shows that, in the same way as the polis continued to flourish after Chaironeia, critical reflection about the ethical foundations of civic life also remained vibrant, among both philosophers and citizens.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1525/CA.2018.37.2.187","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46101995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-10-01DOI: 10.1525/CA.2018.37.2.236
Peter A. O’Connell
By analyzing the parallels between Sappho's Brothers Song and archaic Greek songs of welcome, especially Archilochus fr. 24 West, this essay offers a new interpretation of the Brothers Song. It clarifies that ἔλθην in the first preserved stanza represents an original aorist indicative. The chatterer repeats over and over a welcome song that begins, “Charaxus arrived with a full ship.” The rest of the song continues to engage with the welcome song tradition, anticipating the welcome song that will celebrate Charaxus' return to Mytilene, when and if that occurs. By pointing beyond itself to other, real or notional, songs about Charaxus, the Brothers Song also demonstrates Sappho's nonlinear method of storytelling that relies on her audiences' imaginations.
{"title":"“Charaxus Arrived with a Full Ship!” The Poetics of Welcome in Sappho's Brothers Song and the Charaxus Song Cycle","authors":"Peter A. O’Connell","doi":"10.1525/CA.2018.37.2.236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/CA.2018.37.2.236","url":null,"abstract":"By analyzing the parallels between Sappho's Brothers Song and archaic Greek songs of welcome, especially Archilochus fr. 24 West, this essay offers a new interpretation of the Brothers Song. It clarifies that ἔλθην in the first preserved stanza represents an original aorist indicative. The chatterer repeats over and over a welcome song that begins, “Charaxus arrived with a full ship.” The rest of the song continues to engage with the welcome song tradition, anticipating the welcome song that will celebrate Charaxus' return to Mytilene, when and if that occurs. By pointing beyond itself to other, real or notional, songs about Charaxus, the Brothers Song also demonstrates Sappho's nonlinear method of storytelling that relies on her audiences' imaginations.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1525/CA.2018.37.2.236","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48757193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scholars have long recognized that hypothekai , or instructional wisdom sayings, served as building blocks for larger structures of Greek wisdom poetry. Yet the mechanism that gets from saying to poem has never been traced in detail. If the transition involves more than piling sayings on top of each other, what intervenes? Focusing on the archaic hexametrical tradition of Homer and Hesiod, the paper develops a repertory of variations and expansions by which the primary genre, the hypotheke speech-act, is transformed into a secondary genre—the larger-scale wisdom constructions we find in various Homeric speeches and much if not all of the Works and Days . The paper first argues for a precise formal description of the hypotheke saying in the archaic hexameter; it then develops a toolbox of variations on the saying9s basic form. Finally, the toolbox is put to work in order to read a forty-verse excerpt of Hesiod9s Almanac.
{"title":"Hypothêkai: On Wisdom Sayings and Wisdom Poems","authors":"A. Horne","doi":"10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.31","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have long recognized that hypothekai , or instructional wisdom sayings, served as building blocks for larger structures of Greek wisdom poetry. Yet the mechanism that gets from saying to poem has never been traced in detail. If the transition involves more than piling sayings on top of each other, what intervenes? Focusing on the archaic hexametrical tradition of Homer and Hesiod, the paper develops a repertory of variations and expansions by which the primary genre, the hypotheke speech-act, is transformed into a secondary genre—the larger-scale wisdom constructions we find in various Homeric speeches and much if not all of the Works and Days . The paper first argues for a precise formal description of the hypotheke saying in the archaic hexameter; it then develops a toolbox of variations on the saying9s basic form. Finally, the toolbox is put to work in order to read a forty-verse excerpt of Hesiod9s Almanac.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":"37 1","pages":"31-62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.31","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48555853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Roman writing of the late Republic and early Empire, especially historiography, is filled with exempla , stories of the past meant to serve as models for contemporary and future behavior. This period also witnessed the rise of an encyclopedic mode of composition among Latin authors, which purported to collect and organize the totality of knowledge in a given field. The following essay proposes that exemplarity and encyclopedism were not just literary devices, but deep organizational principles throughout Roman culture. It seeks to show how they were operative in the visual arts in the first century BCE, focusing especially on a frieze depicting the baking process on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces in Rome. By approaching a monument like the frieze of Eurysaces through such principles we may better articulate both visual and thematic relationships across a variety of genres within the broader Roman image world.
{"title":"Exemplarity and Encyclopedism at the Tomb of Eurysaces","authors":"Nathaniel B. Jones","doi":"10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.63","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.63","url":null,"abstract":"Roman writing of the late Republic and early Empire, especially historiography, is filled with exempla , stories of the past meant to serve as models for contemporary and future behavior. This period also witnessed the rise of an encyclopedic mode of composition among Latin authors, which purported to collect and organize the totality of knowledge in a given field. The following essay proposes that exemplarity and encyclopedism were not just literary devices, but deep organizational principles throughout Roman culture. It seeks to show how they were operative in the visual arts in the first century BCE, focusing especially on a frieze depicting the baking process on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces in Rome. By approaching a monument like the frieze of Eurysaces through such principles we may better articulate both visual and thematic relationships across a variety of genres within the broader Roman image world.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":"37 1","pages":"63-107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.63","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48600495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-04-01DOI: 10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.108
L. Reitzammer
This paper examines the appearance of theoria (sacred sightseeing) as metaphor in Sophocles9 Oedipus at Colonus. Once Oedipus arrives in Colonus, the local site on the outskirts of Athens becomes, in effect, theoric space, as travelers converge upon the site, drawn there to visit the old man, whose narrative is known to all Greeks. Oedipus, as panhellenic figure, serves simultaneously as spectacle and theoros (sightseer), attaining inner vision as he goes to his death at the end of the play. Oedipus offers salvation ( soteria ) to Athens within the logic of the play, but in order to confer benefits upon Athens, he requires the travel and vision of his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, who serve as supplementary theoroi . The essay concludes with a glance at outsiders-as-saviors in Oedipus at Colonus and beyond, with an emphasis on the contribution of female travelers to soteria in classical Athenian drama.
{"title":"Sightseeing at Colonus: Oedipus, Ismene, and Antigone as Theôroi in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus","authors":"L. Reitzammer","doi":"10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.108","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the appearance of theoria (sacred sightseeing) as metaphor in Sophocles9 Oedipus at Colonus. Once Oedipus arrives in Colonus, the local site on the outskirts of Athens becomes, in effect, theoric space, as travelers converge upon the site, drawn there to visit the old man, whose narrative is known to all Greeks. Oedipus, as panhellenic figure, serves simultaneously as spectacle and theoros (sightseer), attaining inner vision as he goes to his death at the end of the play. Oedipus offers salvation ( soteria ) to Athens within the logic of the play, but in order to confer benefits upon Athens, he requires the travel and vision of his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, who serve as supplementary theoroi . The essay concludes with a glance at outsiders-as-saviors in Oedipus at Colonus and beyond, with an emphasis on the contribution of female travelers to soteria in classical Athenian drama.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":"37 1","pages":"108-150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.108","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47942434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-04-01DOI: 10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.151
G. Ryan
In mid-imperial (late first to mid-third century) Asia Minor, visually unified cityscapes played a critical role in the strategies local elites used to bolster their corporate authority. The construction of formalized public spaces facilitated the display of wealth and status in the traditionally isonomic world of civic politics. The rhetorical practice of describing cities as physical and socio-cultural unities demonstrated a community9s – and especially its leading citizens9 – possession of qualities instrumental in competition with local rivals. As presented in the context of public ritual, finally, harmonious urban landscapes were used to convince travelling imperial officials that cities and their elites conformed to Roman expectations.
{"title":"Building Order: Unified Cityscapes and Elite Collaboration in Roman Asia Minor","authors":"G. Ryan","doi":"10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.151","url":null,"abstract":"In mid-imperial (late first to mid-third century) Asia Minor, visually unified cityscapes played a critical role in the strategies local elites used to bolster their corporate authority. The construction of formalized public spaces facilitated the display of wealth and status in the traditionally isonomic world of civic politics. The rhetorical practice of describing cities as physical and socio-cultural unities demonstrated a community9s – and especially its leading citizens9 – possession of qualities instrumental in competition with local rivals. As presented in the context of public ritual, finally, harmonious urban landscapes were used to convince travelling imperial officials that cities and their elites conformed to Roman expectations.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":"37 1","pages":"151-185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2018-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1525/CA.2018.37.1.151","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47772911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-10-01DOI: 10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.236
L. Kurke
This paper considers Pindar9s diverse appropriations of elements of the sacred topography of Aegina for different purposes in epinikia composed for Aeginetan victors. It focuses on poems likely performed in the vicinity of the Aiakeion for their different mobilizations of a monument that we know from Pausanias stood beside the Aiakeion—the tomb of Phokos, an earth mound topped with the “rough stone” that killed him (N.5, N.8, O.8). The more speculative final part of the paper suggests that it may also be possible to track a coherent ideology attached to the island9s sacred topography across several Aeginetan odes, thereby detecting a broader structural unity that accompanies and frames the different individual appropriations of different poems. This part starts from Pausanias’ mythic narrative of the exemplary justice of Aiakos banishing his own son Telamon as the aetiology for a distinctive Aeginetan justice system inscribed in a whole set of man-made monuments that ring the island with concentric circles of rough stones.
{"title":"The “Rough Stones” of Aegina: Pindar, Pausanias, and the Topography of Aeginetan Justice","authors":"L. Kurke","doi":"10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.236","url":null,"abstract":"This paper considers Pindar9s diverse appropriations of elements of the sacred topography of Aegina for different purposes in epinikia composed for Aeginetan victors. It focuses on poems likely performed in the vicinity of the Aiakeion for their different mobilizations of a monument that we know from Pausanias stood beside the Aiakeion—the tomb of Phokos, an earth mound topped with the “rough stone” that killed him (N.5, N.8, O.8). The more speculative final part of the paper suggests that it may also be possible to track a coherent ideology attached to the island9s sacred topography across several Aeginetan odes, thereby detecting a broader structural unity that accompanies and frames the different individual appropriations of different poems. This part starts from Pausanias’ mythic narrative of the exemplary justice of Aiakos banishing his own son Telamon as the aetiology for a distinctive Aeginetan justice system inscribed in a whole set of man-made monuments that ring the island with concentric circles of rough stones.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":"36 1","pages":"236-287"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.236","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42742126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-10-01DOI: 10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.288
Carolyn Macdonald
This paper examines the cultural antagonisms of Martial9s Apophoreta 170–82, a unique series of epigrammatic gift-tags for artworks to be given away during the Saturnalia. In these poems, I argue, Martial thematizes and enacts Rome9s transformative appropriation of cultural capital from Greece and elsewhere. First, he adopts the Hellenistic trope of the ekphrastic gallery tour in order to evoke the “museum spaces” of the Flavian city, where artworks became testaments to the power and culture of Rome (Section 1). While evoking these masterpiece collections, however, the epigrams in fact describe miniatures changing hands at a banquet. Martial thus tropes a second Roman practice of appropriation, namely the widespread consumption of transmedial miniature copies (Section 2). Third and finally, the epigrams dramatize the vulnerability of plundered objects by reevaluating their significance within the Roman frameworks of Latin literature and the Saturnalia (Section 3). In this miniature ekphrastic series, then, Martial9s apophoretic poetics converge with Roman forms of appropriation both imperial and domestic, concrete and conceptual.
{"title":"Take-Away Art: Ekphrasis and Appropriation in Martial's Apophoreta 170–82","authors":"Carolyn Macdonald","doi":"10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.288","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the cultural antagonisms of Martial9s Apophoreta 170–82, a unique series of epigrammatic gift-tags for artworks to be given away during the Saturnalia. In these poems, I argue, Martial thematizes and enacts Rome9s transformative appropriation of cultural capital from Greece and elsewhere. First, he adopts the Hellenistic trope of the ekphrastic gallery tour in order to evoke the “museum spaces” of the Flavian city, where artworks became testaments to the power and culture of Rome (Section 1). While evoking these masterpiece collections, however, the epigrams in fact describe miniatures changing hands at a banquet. Martial thus tropes a second Roman practice of appropriation, namely the widespread consumption of transmedial miniature copies (Section 2). Third and finally, the epigrams dramatize the vulnerability of plundered objects by reevaluating their significance within the Roman frameworks of Latin literature and the Saturnalia (Section 3). In this miniature ekphrastic series, then, Martial9s apophoretic poetics converge with Roman forms of appropriation both imperial and domestic, concrete and conceptual.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":"36 1","pages":"288-316"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.288","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44444485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-10-01DOI: 10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.317
Dan-el Padilla Peralta
This article proposes a new interpretation of slave religious experience in mid-republican Rome. Select passages from Plautine comedy and Cato the Elder9s De agri cultura are paired with material culture as well as comparative evidence—mostly from studies of Black Atlantic slave religions—to reconstruct select aspects of a specific and distinctive slave “religiosity” in the era of large-scale enslavements. I work towards this reconstruction first by considering the subordination of slaves as religious agents (Part I) before turning to slaves’ practice of certain forms of religious expertise in the teeth of subordination and policing (II and III). After transitioning to an assessment of slave religiosity9s role in the pursuit of freedom (IV), I conclude with a set of methodological justifications for this paper9s line of inquiry (V).
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Pub Date : 2017-10-01DOI: 10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.370
Michael Weiss
The shadowy Roman god Sēmō and the plural group Sēmōnēs have long been associated with sēmen ‘seed.’ But the evidence that Sēmō or the Sēmōnēs have anything to do with seeds is lacking. The Sēmōnēs first appear in the Carmen Arvale : here they constitute Mars9s retinue. The Sabellic evidence also puts Semo firmly in the Martial sphere. The form Semo appears, in addition, as part of the Semo Sancus Dius Fidius complex. These divinities are connected with the sanctity ( sancīre ) of treaties ( foedus , fidēs ) and oaths. In “Dumezilian” terms Semo is a god of the first (priestly) and second (warrior) function, but not a god of the third (agricultural) function, precisely the opposite of what the standard etymology predicts. New evidence from Oscan allows us to reject conclusively the connection between sēmen and Sēmō . In an inscription from Pietrabbondante the god9s name is spelled seemunei (dat. sg.) and this spelling with ee is not the expected one. If the Oscan form were a derivative of the root seen in sēmen , the spelling would have to have been † siimunei . The spelling ee shows that the Oscan form, and its Latin cognate, must have a different origin. The only plausible source is *seγVmōn -. A form that matches reconstructed * seγVmōn - exactly is Gaulish Segomoni and Ogham Irish SEGAMANAS. The Gaulish god is identified with Mars. The Celtic and Italic forms continue a Proto-Italo-Celtic * seĝ h omōn - ‘strong one,’ ‘strongman,’ which is a derivative of a noun * seĝ h om ‘strength.’ The root * seĝ h - (Gk. ἔχω etc.) had the original meaning ‘hold firmly’ and this developed to ‘be strong,’ ‘conquer’ in Indo-Iranian and Western Indo-European. The god * seĝ h omōn- is the sole example of a divine name that perhaps can be considered a unique and innovative feature of the ancient Proto-Italo-Celtic speech community.
{"title":"An Italo-Celtic Divinity and a Common Sabellic Sound Change","authors":"Michael Weiss","doi":"10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.370","url":null,"abstract":"The shadowy Roman god Sēmō and the plural group Sēmōnēs have long been associated with sēmen ‘seed.’ But the evidence that Sēmō or the Sēmōnēs have anything to do with seeds is lacking. The Sēmōnēs first appear in the Carmen Arvale : here they constitute Mars9s retinue. The Sabellic evidence also puts Semo firmly in the Martial sphere. The form Semo appears, in addition, as part of the Semo Sancus Dius Fidius complex. These divinities are connected with the sanctity ( sancīre ) of treaties ( foedus , fidēs ) and oaths. In “Dumezilian” terms Semo is a god of the first (priestly) and second (warrior) function, but not a god of the third (agricultural) function, precisely the opposite of what the standard etymology predicts. New evidence from Oscan allows us to reject conclusively the connection between sēmen and Sēmō . In an inscription from Pietrabbondante the god9s name is spelled seemunei (dat. sg.) and this spelling with ee is not the expected one. If the Oscan form were a derivative of the root seen in sēmen , the spelling would have to have been † siimunei . The spelling ee shows that the Oscan form, and its Latin cognate, must have a different origin. The only plausible source is *seγVmōn -. A form that matches reconstructed * seγVmōn - exactly is Gaulish Segomoni and Ogham Irish SEGAMANAS. The Gaulish god is identified with Mars. The Celtic and Italic forms continue a Proto-Italo-Celtic * seĝ h omōn - ‘strong one,’ ‘strongman,’ which is a derivative of a noun * seĝ h om ‘strength.’ The root * seĝ h - (Gk. ἔχω etc.) had the original meaning ‘hold firmly’ and this developed to ‘be strong,’ ‘conquer’ in Indo-Iranian and Western Indo-European. The god * seĝ h omōn- is the sole example of a divine name that perhaps can be considered a unique and innovative feature of the ancient Proto-Italo-Celtic speech community.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":"36 1","pages":"370-389"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2017-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1525/CA.2017.36.2.370","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48755393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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