A calque ‘under the sea’ ?

… with apologies to fans of The Little Mermaid.

The adjective ὑπό-σαλος ‘under the sea’ is suspicious as a Greek word. It functions, so it seems, as an equivalent to a prepositional phrase such as ὑπὸ τοῦ ἁλός (‘under the sea’, but more likely to mean ‘because of the sea or salt’). The chief cause of suspicion is that Greek ἇλς ἁλός, ‘salt’, did not begin with a [s], at least not in historical Greek. We should find ὕφαλος (see also Buck-Petersen, p. 357 i), as, indeed, we do in Sophocles’ Antigone and subsequently. Indeed, the adjective occurs as a name in the context of ὑπόσάλος.

Before the Greek language was even written down, it lost the sound [s] at the beginning of words and between vowels. By contrast, Latin kept [s] at the beginning of words, so we get sets like ἇλς, Latin sal, and English ‘salt’, ἑπτά, septem, and seven, etc. ([s] between vowels in Latin is a story for another day…). The loss of [s] in both enviroments means that there was no Greek stem sal– on which to build our compound adjective and, if there had been such a stem at the time of that compound’s creation, the [s] between vowels would have been lost subsequently.

Where we find Greek words that begin with a sigma, that sigma cannot be original (one problem is that σῦς, ‘pig’, appears in Homer alongside the expected ὗς; cf. Latin sus, English swine). Explanations include the simplification of a cluster of consonants or that the word in question came into Greek after the loss of initial [s] had ceased to operate. As examples of the latter, consider σιμικίνθιον (semicinctium an apron), σουδάριον (sudarium a towel), and συμψέλια (subsellia seats of a certain kind), words that were borrowed from Latin by Greek speakers alongside what we may call the lexical residue of the Roman Imperial jackboot, or sandal: e.g., κεντυρίων (centurion), λεγιονάριος (legionarius), and πραιτώριον (praetorium).

Here’s the context for that sole instance of ὑπόσαλος as ‘under the sea’ in the Periplus Maris Magni or ‘Voyage around the Great Sea’ (aka Stadiasimos or ‘Measuring by Stades’), as quoted by one third-century Hippolytus in his Chronicle:

(72) Ἀπὸ τοῦ Εὐσχοίνου ἐπὶ τοὺς Ὑφάλους στάδιοι οʹ· νησίον ἐστὶν ὑπόσαλον· ἔχει δὲ καὶ αἰγιαλὸν βαθύν.
‘From Euschoinos to Hypaloi, seventy stades; the islet is under water; and it has a deep (or thick) beach.’

Before we try to explain how the sigma in ὑπόσαλος could be the [s] lost from the Greek equivalent of English ‘salt’ and Latin sal, let us consider whether salt or the sea needs to be involved in the word at all.

The sigma in ὑπόσαλος is so suspicious that the other analysis given in the same LSJ entry is worth considering:

‘II. shaken underneath, undermined, γῆ Plu.2.434c (ὑπὸ σάλου codd.); ὀδόντες ὑ. loose teeth, Dsc.1.105.5′ [also in Dsc.5.102.2, but that’s the lot] .

On that analysis, the sigma is unimpeachable: it was always there in σάλος, σαλεύω, etc., whatever the origin of the word (Beekes, true to character, classifies it as ‘Pre-Greek’), and, hence, could be justified in an adjective like ἐπίσαλος, which is also used by our Stadiasmos:

(55) Ἀπὸ Ναυσίδος εἰς Πτολεμαΐδα στάδιοι σνʹ· πόλις ἐστὶ μεγίστη· ἐπίσαλός ἐστιν ὁ τόπος, καὶ νῆσον ἔχει· Ἶλος καλεῖται· ἀσφαλίζου.
‘From Nausis to Ptolemais two-hundred and sixty stades: the city is very big; the place is rough (subject to storms), and has an island; it is called Ilos: go carefully!’

Could the islet in (72) — named Ὕφαλοι ! — simply mean ‘shaken underneath’ or ‘undermined’, or even ‘slightly shaken or storm-tossed’, since ὑπο- can add the notion ‘slightly, a bit, somewhat,…’ (trust me, I am/was a lexicographer)?

There are only a few other compound adjectives in -σαλος (ἀ-, εὔ-, and κονί-; very different are βήσαλον and φύσαλος: see Buck-Petersen, p. 359 ii) and none support the idea that the -σαλος part could be the salt sea rather than ‘shaken’.

So, it is likely that since ὑπό with χρῡσός means ‘with gold underneath’ (of the ground), ‘underneath/covered by gold, gilded’ (of an iron ring), or ‘containing a mixture or proportion of gold‘ (so LSJ, for some of the children in Plato’s Republic), ὑπό with σάλος could describe the islet as ‘with turbulence below’, ‘covered by rolling swells’, or ‘somewhat storm tossed’. There might be some sense in that in the Stadiasmos, a guidebook for sailors. If so, we can delete the first section of ὑπόσαλος from LSJ and make an improvement on its Supplement and Revised Supplement.

If not, can we explain why a salty word in Greek has a sigma? Does any help come from the long-term contact between speakers of Greek and speakers of Latin, especially in nautical contexts in texts from the time of the Roman Empire?

Could the sigma reflect a Latin (partial) origin for our ‘under the sea’ adjective? If so, how?

One possibility is that we have a ‘hybrid compound’: one part of the word is from one language, another from another. If that seems strange, it is no stranger than a tele-vision or an auto-mobile  or a hetero-, homo-, or metro-sexual, all of which with a Greek start and a Latin finish. Perhaps, a seafarer who used Latin and Greek with some degree of mixture took Latin sal as the root of a new adjective and then qualified it with an element from his knowledge of Greek word-formation. Real ancient parallels would be ὑπο-καμίσ(ι)ον or ὑπο-καμάσιον ‘a shirt (Latin camisa) that is worn underneath (Greek), an undershirt’ and ὑπο-νοτάριος ‘a notary (Latin) who is underneath or subordinate (Greek), a deputy or sub-notary’.

Can we go a step further and see a ‘calque’ here? A ‘calque’ is an element-by-element translation of a term from one language into another. The Paradebeispiele or ‘Parade-Examples’ (or, in English, the ‘oft-cited examples’, if not ‘examples on parade’) are Modern Greek ουρανοξύστης, German Wolkenkratzer and French gratte-ciel, both based on English ‘skyscraper’, but not necessarily with the elements in the same order as in English.

In our case, the Latin term behind ὑπό-σαλος would be sub-salsus, ‘slightly salty’ (Oxford Latin Dictionary, p. 1848, s.v.), which is found in the medical writer Celsus and the encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder, respectively of water and of a plant. The calquer did not think to drop the [s] in his element-by-element translation: ὑπό- for sub-, Latinate σαλ(ο)-, not ἁλ- for sal, and then adjusting the formation to a Greek pattern (without sigma before the ending). It migth be a problem that σάλος is a noun, but salsus is an adjective. Should we expect ὑπ(ο-σ)άλιος as a calque of sub-salsus (cf. ἐνάλιος)? That said, a compound adjective ending in -αλ-ο-ς would be fine. Indeed, as we saw, ὕφ-αλος is attested — as is ἔναλος.

As a further complication, could the direction of calquing be the other way round: from Greek into Latin? Pliny the Elder is a major source of evidence for us of Latin borrowings of Greek words and of Greek words known only (or chiefly) from Latin authors and their texts. Celsus, as a medical writer, is exactly the kind of borrower and calquer of Greek words that we would expect to meet. (I know nothing about how much Greek influence Celsus actually shows…) An element-by-element translation of the Greek adjective would give a Latin adjective — something like sub-sal_sus. Besides, compounding is so restricted in Latin that Greek is normally involved at some level. I do not know how common it is for Latin sub- to add the notion of ‘slightly’, whereas for ὑπό- it is somewhat ubiquitous. The Oxford Latin Dictionary, p. 1835, s.v. sub- prefix., notes, ‘Before verbs and adjectives it indicates a reduced intensity in the action or quality…’. When and why sub- does so and in which authors are questions for another time. Even if the calquing happened into Latin from Greek, the sigma in ὑπόσαλος would remain unexplained.

Further, if, in ὑπόσαλος, we do have a calque from Latin and if ὑπόσαλος, ‘shaken underneath’, was already in use by the same speakers and/or in nautical registers (the writer of the Stadiasmos also used ἐπίσαλος…), we have a loan-shift or a semantic calque. That is, a Greek word gained a meaning through the use of a Latin counterpart or near-counterpart. For example, the Roman Republican historian Sallust used amare as ‘to be in the habit of’ (as well as ‘to love’), because Greek φιλεῖν could mean ‘to be in the habit of’ as well as ‘to love’. One of my suspicions about the entry in LSJ, second to the sigma between vowels in a salty word, was how the same word could have two meanings that were so different: ‘under the sea’ and ‘shaken underneath’. If one meaning is to do with salt and the  other is to do with σαλός ‘shaking’, we have homonyms and should have two entries.

One final angle: with the meaning ‘under the sea’, ὑπόσαλος would be a ‘prepositional governing compound’, one, that is, that originated in a prepositional phrase. Let us suppose that a bilingual seafarer wanted to say ‘under the sea’ and began in Greek (ὑπό), then started to continue in Latin, either with sale (ablative of sal) or with the dative sali with the genitive salis (because Greek did not have an ablative for him to use), but finished with a Greek ending. Such a hypothetical prepositional phrase would be a peculiar kind of code-switch: a speaker’s (or writer’s) switch from one language to another mid-sentence, mid-phrase, or even mid-word. My favourite code-switch is still that in the title of a paper by Poplack: ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN ESPAÑOL’.

The last word: as St Paul was on his way to Italy by sea, the Acts of the Aposles 27:14 (a turbulent text) names a wind as εὐρ-ακύλων, which has a counterpart in Latin script in euro-aquilo (CIL VIII 26652: see below) a east-north wind. The first part is Greek, the second Latin (whatever the script). The Bauer-Danker Lexicon quaintly calls it ‘a hybrid formation of Lat.-Gk. sailor’s language’. Was the Greek element ‘borrowed’ into Latin and then the whole borrowed into Greek or was the Latin element borrowed into Greek and then the whole borrowed back into Latin?

ZETA ROROPES

On Friday, I was very fortunate to be invited to a wonderful conference at the University of Verona (“Beyond Lexicon: Diachronic language contact on the structural and systemic level”), brilliantly organised by Paola Cotticelli and Federico Giusfredi. After a series of excellent papers and before a particularly pleasant evening dinner, I walked to the nearby Museo Archeologico al Teatro Romano, open till 7 pm most nights, to enjoy its spectacular views over the city. There is also a good selection of inscriptions, and this third century mosaic caught my eye.

As you can see from the photo below of the museum label (I learned always to photograph the label from Katherine),  the text is said to read ROROPES ZETA meaning ‘Roropes lives’. This attracted my attention at first because I thought it seemed a nice parallel to the modern habit of pronouncing letter-names of abbreviations rather than spelling out the whole phrase: people now say ‘oh em gee’ for OMG, the abbreviation of ‘Oh my God/gosh!’, and ‘double u tee eff ‘ for WTF, even though the abbreviation is no shorter, indeed in the second case longer than what is being shortened. In the Museum’s reading, ZETA would stand her for Z, the abbreviation for Greek ζήσῃς, which is not uncommon in the formula pie z (also written out in full pie zeses) ‘drink and may you live’ found on a number of Latin drinking cups from the later Roman Empire. There are other examples of Romans using the letter name to stand for a Greek word: a fragment of Varro’s Menippea has labda as a cover term for the obscene verb λαικάζειν (probably following Aristophanes who has the same euphemism).

But a bit of further reflection made me think that there was a better explanation for this text. After all, ‘may you live’ would be a typical sentiment on a goblet, but less usual on a private mosaic. Furthermore, the name Roropes is, as far as I can tell, unparalleled anywhere in Greek and Roman texts, and isn’t built out of any recognizable elements. I would read RODOPES (note that the right hand leg of the second R of the mosaic is entirely drawn in), genitive singular of the well-attested Greek name Rhodope (34 examples from Rome alone according to Solin Die griechischen Personennamen in Rom). ZETA has nothing to do with the Greek letter, but is a later Latin way of writing the Greek loanword diaeta, which means not only ‘way of life’ (hence our modern diet) but also ‘room’. So the text just means ‘Rhodope’s Room’—incidentally, a nice example of a Latin text containing only Greek words and Greek morphology.

I should say that this was the only slip I found in the museum labels, and I hugely enjoyed the wonderful displays and stunning layout of the Museo. Highly recommended as a prelude to dinner for anyone visiting the beautiful town of Verona.

Greek in Italy at the BSR

Wednesday 29 March saw the Greek in Italy team in Rome for a one-day workshop looking at the impact of the Greek language on the languages of ancient Italy. I think I can speak for everyone in the Greek in Italy team, and for our invited speakers, in saying that the conference was a huge success. We were extremely fortunate to be able to make use of the excellent offices of the British School at Rome, and to make use of their fabulous lecture hall, accommodation and dining facilities. Thanks go especially to the Director, Christopher Smith, and the residence manager, Christine Martin for their superb generosity and efficiency.

We were very pleased to have enjoyed excellent papers from our three invited speakers. Marina Benedetti discussed the treatment of Greek terms in Latin grammatical works, and included a fascinating discussion of the Ars of Dositheus, a grammatical work written in Latin with interlineal translation into Greek. The Greek terms include those which seem to be calqued back from Latin, such as συζευκτικός for coniunctivus, and show that grammarians understood there to be an equivalence between the Latin suffix –ivus and Greek -ικός, a relationship that doesn’t seem to hold in other domains, such as medicine.

Albio Cassio spoke about some Greek dialect terms of Magna Graecia which we know mainly from ancient glossaries. These show not only how much we don’t know about the Greek dialects spoken in the area, but also some fascinating glimpses of the interactions between Greek and local languages. One case in point is a word for bread, πανὀς (and related terms), found in Greek comic playwrights, including the intriguing Blaesus, born in Capri in the second or first century BC and whose attributed works include a Saturnus and Mesotribas (meaning something like ‘The man who rubs his genitals’).

As Albio Cassio pointed out, Blaesus has a fascinating name: in Greek βλαισός means ‘distorted’ or ‘splay-footed’, but in Latin blaesus means ‘lisping’ (it is thought to be borrowed from Greek with shift in application from the feet to the tongue). Blaesus is not uncommon as a Roman cognomen (and Blaesius as a nomen), and is also found used as a cognomen in a fourth-century Oscan curse-tablet (in the form Blaisiis). In Greek, however, excepting Romans recording their names in Greek, the playwright Βλαῖσος is the only instance of the name recorded. The example of Blaesus was an appropriate taster for Paolo Poccetti’s paper, a tour de force of linguistics and onomastics, in which he gathered many examples of interaction between Greek and local languages from personal names. As with the name of Blaesus, in many cases it was difficult to be sure about whether a feature was local or a Greek import, and in some cases it is probably impossible to disentangle the two.

The Greek in Italy presentation (which attracted famous bloggers from the other side of Rome) showcased some of our recent work, and the event was a very enjoyable opportunity for the whole team to get back together. All six current and former project members were there, so we nearly filled up an entire table in the BSR dining hall and made serious inroads into the BSR’s stocks of limoncello.

 

‘Greek in Italy’, the Lexicon of Liddell and Scott, and the ‘what’s-its-name, thingumbob’

Please scroll down for the lighter and less technical part of this post…, namely the ‘thingumbob’…

Recently, a colleague and friend asked me why it was that Liddell-Scott-Jones (from hereon ‘LSJ’ and, as available through the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, ‘TLG LSJ’) accented τριακόντακις ‘thirty-times’ proparoxytone, not τριακοντάκις paroxytone like all other adverbs in -κις, ‘-times’. The short answer is that LSJ doesn’t. The misaccentuation suggests that TLG LSJ was tripped up by the abbreviated headwords of the printed edition of LSJ. All that was printed of the headword was -κ̆ις, its accent inferred from τριακοντά-δραχμοι to give τριακοντάκις (rightly). The classic rant on the abbreviation of headwords is John Chadwick’s own in BICS 11 (1994) 1-11, at 2. Whether the accent was placed on TLG LSJ’s headword automatically or manually, I do not know.

It was then that the entry for τρῐᾱκοντάμερος came to my attention:

‘Dor. word, dub. sens. in IG14.256.27 (Phintias Geloorum); cf. Jahresh.4 Beibl.21.’.

This inscription is from Phintias of the people of Gela, which was the settlement that ‘replaced’ Gela, the Rhodo-Cretan colony where Aeschylus had his lethal encounter with a tortoise: something of a hotspot of Greek in Italy).

Entries that contain ‘dub.sens.’ are always intriguing, and this one is especially so in that its general meaning, if not its precise application and referent, are clear from the elements that form this compound: the two stems seen in τριάκοντα ‘thirty’ and ἁ̄μέρᾱ (or, as here, ἀ-) ‘day’ [Attic ἡμέρᾱ]. All this was put right in the 1996 Revised Supplement, which adapted a comment in the 1968 Supplement: (as a new word) ‘τριακοντά̄μεροι, οἱ, prob. a board of officials performing duties for thirty days,…; cf. πεντάμεροι’. The original entry is then signalled for deletion.

Of greater interest (and amusement) and of no less relevance is the entry for τραγέλαφος ‘goat-stag’. Apart from ‘a what’s-its-name, thingumbob‘ (s.v. I 3), there is also the quaint charm of the transition from (s.v. I 1) ‘a fantastic animal, represented on Eastern carpets and the like‘ to (s.v. II) ‘later, a real animal of Arabia, or on the Phasis, prob. a kind of wild goat or antelope, LXX Jb.39.1, D.S.2.51, Plin.HN8.120, etc.‘.

This word is thought by some to have appeared on the Nile Mosaic of Palaestrina (s.v. Wikipedia), whose captions were published as IG XIV 1302 (but see also SEG XLV 1452)  and feature other lexical and animal rarities, including the non-standard form ἄρκος, ‘bear’, known from the Zenon papyri, a Carthaginian curse tablet, and the Greek Bible. The mosaic has been dated either to 120-110 BCE or to the time of the Emperor Hadrian (117-138 CE). A large and high-resolution image of the mosaic is available through Wikimedia Commons.

In the detail below, the ‘lynx’, ΛΥΝΞ (not the standard spelling, λύγξ), is clear, as are the letters ΔΓΕΛΑΡΥ (underline for underdot to mark a letter as difficult to read). However, that label is not closely associated with a depiction of any animal.

Georg Kaibel, the editor of IG XIV 1302, conjectured [ΤΡ]<Α>ΓΕΛΑ<ΦΟ>[Σ], which requires a certain amount of charity from the viewer-reader and their acceptance of an invisible ‘thingumbob’.

The re-reading, <Α>ΓΕΛΑΡΧ[ΟΣ] (see SEG XLV 1452), the ‘leader of the pack’, makes better use of the letters that are visible. But, a pack of what, exactly? Perhaps, the leader (bottom left of the following detail) of the relatively-distant three hunters (bottom right).

An amusing alternative is that this label continues that for the lynx, who, then, is the leader of the pack of monkeys depicted elsewhere.

For more on the mosaic itself as well as its captions, see P.G.P. Meyboom, The Nile Mosaic of Palaestrina: Early Evidence of Egyptian Religion in Italy (Leiden, New York, and Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1995). For the reading and re-reading, see Meyboom, The Nile Mosaic, 25 and 238-239.

Since the mosaic is thought (at some stage) to have depicted an elephant (Meyboom, the Nile Mosaic, 25), we may recall that some time ago, Katherine posted about words for ‘elephant’. I encountered those boves lucas while teaching Lucretius last term (DRN 5.1302) in relation to the remarkable compound anguimanus, ‘such that has a snake for a hand’: itself a lexical rarity (an accusative plural of a fourth-declension adjective to boot!) and once described, as one of my supervisors used to quote, as ‘an atavistic zoonym harking back to a protohabitat, proper to an animal with an prominent appendage of ophidian resemblance’.

Greek in Italy Rome Workshop

We are delighted to announce that we will be hosting a workshop “The impact of Greek on the languages of Ancient Italy” in the British School at Rome, Via Gramsci, Rome, on the afternoon of Wednesday 29 March, 2017. We are very pleased that three of the leading Italian scholars of the Classical and Italic languages have kindly agreed to speak at this workshop. The  programme will be as follows:

3.00 Prof. Marina Benedetti Università per Stranieri di Siena

Latin loan translations from Greek: suffix conversion in the grammatical terminology.

3.45 Prof. Albio Cesare Cassio Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

Doric Identity and Linguistic Melting Pot in Ancient Tarentum:  Evidence from Some Italiotic Glosses.

4.30 Break

5.00 Prof. Paolo Poccetti Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”

Language contacts in the light of morphological adaptation of proper names in Southern Italy and Sicily

6.00 Prof. James Clackson and members of the “Greek in Italy” project

Greek in Italy – the Cambridge project

Please get in touch we me (jptc1@cam.ac.uk) if you would like to know more or are interested in attending.

Hypermobile Mamertines?

At last year’s Laurence Seminar (‘Migration, Mobility, and Language Contact‘), Nick presented a paper about ‘the Mobile Mamertini’, mercenaries from Campania or Samnium who captured Messina circa 288 BCE.

While investigating the earliest appearances of Italians in Egypt, I found that Csaba La’da, one of my papyrology teachers, had reported an instance of the ethnic Μαμερτῖνος in his Foreign Ethnics in Hellenistic Egypt (2002). Thanks to the amicitia papyrologorum, I have obtained a copy of the original edition. I have not yet seen an image or the inscribed surface itself…

The funerary inscription (TM 47467), which remains in situ in Hadra in Alexandria (ad Aegyptum), is still cited from its 1915 (re-)publication as SB I 419f and is dated between 199-30 BCE. It reads:

Μαραῖος Βακείου | Μαμερτῖνος.

‘Maraeus, son of Baceus, a Mamertine’.

So, we have another Mamertine, but outside Italy this time and later than expected (the items in Nick’s dossier are all assumed to belong to the third century BCE, the latest being coinage c. 225 BCE).

The content follows the Greek pattern of the deceased’s name in the nominative case, his father’s name in the genitive case, and, then, the deceased’s ‘ethnic’ (or equivalent for the context). The orator Demosthenes illustrates this pattern, but with his Attic demotic rather than this ethnic Ἀθηναῖος: Δημοσθένης Δημοσθένους Παιανιεύς (D.18.187). (The Latin pattern, in full, includes the tria nomina and F(ilius) after the father’s name in the genitive.)

Maraeus, Nick informed me, is a good Oscan name: Marahis. It is rarely attested in Greek texts. The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN) knows nine instances, all more-or-less Late Hellenistic in date, several from Asia Minor, and two, comfortingly, from Naples in Campania (e.g.). The nine instances include two father-son pairs. Trismegistos People (TM), as a whole, adds only two more bearers of this name (from two Petrie papyri, both found at Gurob and both written in the last decade of the third century BCE). One of them was a τακτόμισθος (as LSJ puts it, ‘a rank in the army of the Ptolemies‘…). That term is confined to papyri and, on the face of it, might have something to do with soldiers for hire (μισθός). Fischer-Bovet suggested ‘(mercenary) with a fixed wage’ as a gloss.

The father’s name, Βακεῖος is hard to parallel. LGPN’s online search silently corrected it to Βακ<χ>εῖος (the printed edition is transparent on this point), a name that seems unremarkable except that it has only one other attestation: Baccheius of Tanagra, a third-century BCE Hippocratic commentator. Trismegistos People treats the father’s name as a spelling variant of Βάκιος, a name attested on a Roman-period ostracon , whose most recent editors instruct ‘l. Βάκχιος’. (Simplification of <κχ> to <χ> in βακχ- words is illustrated by Gignac (1976:100) and by Threatte (1980: 542f.) and the interchange of <χ> and <κ> between vowels by Gignac (1976: 92) and Threatte (1980: 453ff.). Mayser-Schmoll (1970: 186) provides comparable Βακχ-, Βαχχ-, and βαχ- data, but not βακ-. The simplification of <κχ> to <κ> is not illustrated. <κ> may have been written for <κκ> or Latin .)

Since Greek and Latin texts provide no supporting evidence for the father’s name and the alternative readings proposed in the databases both have weaknesses of their own, what are we to do? Nick drew my attention to the abbreviation BAK() at Pompeii in L BAK() inscribed right to left in Oscan script on a (small) black slip bowl (uasculum) after it had been fired. Whatever name was so abbreviated could give us a point of comparison with the father of our Maraeus and Southern Italy.

However, our knowledge of that inscription is very shaky because it depends entirely on H. Dressel’s drawing and description, which underlie CIL X (1883) 8055.67. On the basis of that drawing, some have read BAD with Oscan <R> for /d/ (Rix, ST Po 88), while others maintain that the final <K> cannot be an incomplete Oscan <R> (Crawford et al., Imagines Italicae, Pompei 86: L(ucius) Bac(culeius) is suggested there, with the Pompeian M. Bacculeius of CIL IV, Supp. 3 (1963) 9256 as a comparison).

Whatever is going on with ΒΑΚΕΙΟΥ, we have a Mamertine with an Oscan name buried in Hadra in Alexandria in the Ptolemaic period.

What about later Μαμερτῖνοι in Egypt? Connections with the Mamertine mercenaries faded and Μαμερτ(ε)ῖνος (LGPN and TM) remained in use only as a cognomen (and hence, from an agnomen, Μαμερτινιανός), Marcus Petronius Mamertinus, the second-century statesman, being its most well-known bearer.

Party Games

A colleague asked me about the inscription on a Greek vase painting earlier this week. The pot in question is of a type known as a psykter – or wine cooler, designed to sit inside a larger bowl containing cold water; it was found in a tomb in Cerveteri in the nineteenth century and is now in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. The red-figure painting around the sides shows four naked hetairai drinking and playing the after-dinner game known as kottabos. According to Athenaeus, who devotes a good chunk of Book 15 of his Deipnosophists to the topic, the game involved expertly throwing the dregs of wine (λάταξ or λατάγη) from your cup at some sort of target. Our pot is signed by the painter Euphronios, active in Athens at the end of the sixth century. The charming female making the throw, named as Smikra, says (in Doric Greek, written from right to left) τὶν τάνδε λατάσσω Λεάγρε ‘I am making this throw for you, Leagros.’

There are many vase paintings depicting the kottabos, and four other Attic examples have shorter forms of the same formula, although in a different dialect, starting τοὶ τήνδε.

Why does Smikra speak Doric? The other inscriptions on this vase are all Attic (note names such as ΑΓΑΠΕ = Ἀγάπη with η not α). Kretschmer suggested that this was because the game of kottabos was invited by the Sicilians, and so the players used the Doric of Sicily, much as the sport of fencing uses French terms such as ‘Allez!’ and ‘En garde’. But then why do the other vases have τοὶ τήνδε – which isn’t even completely Attic (which would be σοὶ τήνδε)? Smikra’s Doric has a literary feel to it (dative τίν ‘to you’ is only otherwise attested in Alcman, Pindar and Doric epigrams), and indeed the dative τοί is found in Ionic poetry (I don’t buy Csapo and Miller’s theory (Hesperia 60, 1991) that this is to be read as the article τῶι). Is it possible that the painter is alluding to Doric literary traditions that might be known by the eventual buyers of the pot in Etruria? We know from archaeological finds that the Etruscans also played kottabos, and they may well, like Athenaeus’ philosophers at the dinner table, have capped each other’s poetry as they did so.

Finally, another puzzle. Greek λάταξ seems to turn up in Latin as latex, a poetic word meaning ‘water’ or ‘liquid’. A distant memory of the party games?