Friday, July 21, 2017

 

Learning to Read

Inscription preserved by Plutarch, Education of Children 20 (= Moralia 14 B-C), tr. N.G.L. Hammond, The Genius of Alexander the Great (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 3:
Eurydice, daughter of Sirras, dedicated this (statue probably of Hermes) to her city's Muses, because she had in her soul a longing for knowledge. The happy mother of sons growing up, she laboured to learn letters, the recorders of the spoken word.
The Greek, from Plutarchi Moralia, Vol. I, ed. W.R. Paton and I. Wegehaupt, rev. Hans Gärtner (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1993), p. 27, with my apparatus:
Εὐρυδίκη Ἵρρα πολιῆτισι τόνδ' ἀνέθηκε
    Μούσαις εὐκταῖον ψυχῇ ἑλοῦσα πόθον.
γράμματα γὰρ μνημεῖα λόγων μήτηρ γεγαυῖα
    παίδων ἡβώντων ἐξεπόνησε μαθεῖν.


1 Ἵρρα πολιῆτισι Wilamowitz, "Lesefrüchte, CLXIX," Hermes 54.1 (Jan., 1919) 71-72; Σίρρα πολιῆτισι Adolf Wilhelm, "Ein Weihgedicht der Grossmutter Alexanders des Grossen," Mélanges Henri Grégoire (Brussels, 1949 = Annuaire de l'Institut de Philologie et d'Histoire Orientales et Slaves, 9), Vol. 2, pp. 625–633, rpt. Kleine Schriften, II.iv (Vienna, 2002), pp. 627–635: πολιῆτις Ω, ἱεραπολιῆτις Μ2Π
2 Μούσαις εὐκταῖον Wilamowitz; ἐμ Μούσαις εὐκτὸν Wilhelm: Μούσαις εὔιστον codd.
Hammond translated Wilhelm's conjecture in the first line, but the manuscripts' εὔιστον (hapax according to Liddell-Scott-Jones) in the second line. I haven't seen Wilhelm's article. See also Jeanne and Louis Robert, "Bulletin épigraphique," Revue des Études Grecques 97 (1984) 419-522 (at 450-451).



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