Friday, April 09, 2021
Gods of the Hills
Guy Davenport (1927-2005), "Finding," The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), pp. 359-367 (at 364):
On the other hand cf. Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 11, which is ambiguous:
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Some slackness of ritual, we are told, that hurt the feelings of the dii montes, the gnomes of the hills, allowed Rome to fall to the barbarians.The phrase dii montes, two nominative plural nouns in apposition, looks odd to me. Did Davenport mean to write dii montium, as in 1 Kings 20.23?
dii montium sunt dii eorum. (Vulgate)Or perhaps dii montani?
Their gods are gods of the hills. (KJV)
On the other hand cf. Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 11, which is ambiguous:
erat mater eius deorum montium cultrix.Update from Eric Thomson:
Another possibility, a little closer to Davenport's 'montes' (if it is his and not a kind of haplographic misprint), would be 'montenses', as in ILS 3051, discussed in Robert E.A. Palmer, "Jupiter Blaze, Gods of the Hills, and the Roman Topography of CIL VI 377," American Journal of Archaeology 80.1 (Winter, 1976) 43-56.
