From Quinn@webmail.hope.edu Wed Feb 28 10:59:54 2001 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id KAA17278 for ; Wed, 28 Feb 2001 10:59:51 -0800 Received: from hope.edu (webmail.hope.edu [198.110.98.17]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id KAA05956 for ; Wed, 28 Feb 2001 10:59:48 -0800 Received: from [198.110.99.158] (Quinn@webmail.hope.edu); Wed, 28 Feb 2001 13:59:28 -0500 X-WM-Posted-At: hope.edu; Wed, 28 Feb 01 13:59:28 -0500 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 13:59:53 -0500 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: John Quinn Subject: Re: cassius allusion JLPB: >Well, I'm certainly disappointed that *recorded* history doesn't seem to >support my interpretation. Yes, inconvenient thing, history. But the contemporary sources for Lepanto are many & varied. And so we know that Don John didn't arrive at Messina, Sicily to take command of the Holy League fleet until August 23, that the fleet didn' set sail from there until September 15, that bad weather meant it didn't arrive off Corfu until Sept. 24, and that scouting reports from both sides were then active to locate the exact location & size of each fleet before meeting at the mouth of the gulf of Patras) on Oct.7 for the "Battle of Lepanto". It was over by 4 PM; there was a bit of talk on the Holy League side of sailing to Byzantium, but it was late in the season for safe travel on the Mediterranean, folks were eager to return safely with their loot, and there really wasn't the manpowe available to capture Byzantium. And so back to Sicily. The Holy League would never muster such forces again, though Don John would capture Tunis in the next summer. Thereafer, the alliance of the Holy League fell apart, mostly because Venice decided that it'd be more advantageous to resume its role as middleman in the Turkish/European trade. >Also there's no "like" in the Latin, though one could introduce a postponed >"ut" in place of "hunc": "DJ seemed to attack just as JC did when [with >"ubi" postponed as well] the captive Cassius once accompanied him as >oarsman" Right, there's no "like". But I don't think we need supply an "ut". The *visus* just has to work harder, with resonances of *videtur esse*. I agree that it'd be nice to find precedent for the dative with *captus*. I admit to not having started doing that until I had some understandinf of the allusion to Caesar/Cassius/Hellespont. E.Christian Kopf's suggestion on "unus" = "alone" is very possible. I'll have to go back to the poem & check the other passages where "unus" occurs. However, it was my impression that "alone" didn't always make the best sense in other spots in the poem. >I still need more context -- like a chance to read the whole thing and get >some grasp of the author's style. It sounds like a genuinely intriguing >poem: where can I get my hands on a copy? Here's how I find mine, via Books in Print, last fall: > > The First African Authors to Write in Latin > Author : Latinus, Ioannes > Publisher : Germantown : Periodicals Service Company > Subject Heading(s) : > 00901325 > 0026703X > AFRICAN LITERATURE--COLLECTIONS > LATIN LITERATURE (COLLECTIONS) > Series Title : > B. E. Ser. > Other Name : > Amo, Antonius G. > Capitein, Jacobus E. > ISBN : > 0811529525;Trade Cloth USD 60.00 Retail The volume is not really called " The First African .." It's a reprint -- or just a surplus copy -- of a Kraus photoreprint from Nendeln (Lichtenstein) in 1971, of the original publications of the first volume of Juan Latino's poetry (two later, smaller publications are not included), plus the treatise on logic by Anton Amo, and the infamous J.E.J. Capitein's dissertation on how slavery is not incomatible with Biblical teaching. All three authors were indeed African ex-slaves. Later this afternoon, I'll finish teaching a half-semester advanced Latin course on selections from Juan Latino & Capitein (and Francis Williams, who wrote a short elegy in the last decades of the 18thy century). Amo's treatise, from what I skimmed of it, was too drily technical to inflict on undergraduates -- or anyone else, I fear.) I'll share with my class the preliminary findings on this pasage, which had troubled us. Thanks to James & E. Christian for their help. Interestingly, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.& Maria Wolff recently published an article on Juan Latino -- which they had hoped would appear as part of an introduction to an English translation by John Winkler. But perhaps the project came to nothing. Certainly, Winkler & Wolff give no indication that they've even read the *Austriad*; their comments are based on extracts that appeared in earlier scholarly work. jtq Prof. John T. Quinn quinn@hope.edu Dept. of Modern & (616) 395-7562 Classical Languages Hope College Holland, MI 49423 "The Quinns are of course exotics -- their language and their selves are fantastic and extreme. But the orotundity of their language is about the energy and imagination required to divert from the actual poverty." -- Chris Hannan, author's note to *Elizabeth Gordon Quinn* (1985) .