Wednesday, July 07, 2021

 

The Vandal Epigram

D.R. Shackleton Bailey, ed., Anthologia Latina, I: Carmina in Codicibus Scripta, Fasc. 1: Libri Salmasiani Aliorumque Carmina (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1982), p. 201 (number 279):
                  De conviviis barbaris

Inter 'eils' Goticum 'scapia matzia ia drincan'
non audet quisquam dignos edicere versus.

1 'Massmannus in Hauptii annal. german. I, p. 379 sqq. eils salutem, skapja procuratorem peni vel skap "procura, praebe", jah matjan jah drigkan "et cibum et potum" interpretatur Riese

2 audit A    educere sched. : anne ded- ?    uersos A
Id., p. 202 (number 280):
Calliope madido trepidat se iungere Baccho,
    ne pedibus non stet ebria Musa suis.

Separavit L. Mueller    2 sobria idem : deb- Peiper
Magnús Snædal, "The 'Vandal' Epigram," Filologia Germanica/Germanic Philology 1 (2009) 181-213, regards 279-280 as one poem and translates the Latin thus (at 184):
On foreign guests.
Among the Gothic 'eils scapia matzia ia drincan'
No one ventures to recite decent verses.
Calliope hurries to depart from the wet Bacchus,
So it does not happen that a drunken muse doesn't stand on her feet.
Snædal identifies the foreign words as Vandal and interprets them as follows (at 205):
eils! scapia! matzia ia drincan!
Hails! *Skapja! *Matja jah *drigkan!
'Hail! Waiter! Food and drink!'
Snædal on the Sitz im Leben (at 210):
The simplest assumption is that the author had himself tried — with limited success — to recite poetry among drunken Vandals, had witnessed such an attempt, or had been told about one. He composed the epigram about this and, although it is presented as a general truth, most likely he had a certain incident in mind. He is not making fun of Vandal poetry but only saying that dignified verses cannot been [sic, i.e. be] read while they are always ordering food and drink because Calliope flees from there. This is indeed all we can say with some certainty about the occasion of the epigram.
See also Yuri Kleiner, "Another hypothesis concerning the grammar and meaning of Inter eils goticum," NOWELE: North-Western European Language Evolution 71.2 (2018) 236–248, who glosses scapia as the 1st person singular of the verb corresponding to Gothic skapjan 'make'.

Eric Thomson suggests (via email):
...the 'pedes' are both anatomical and metrical. Alcohol plays havoc with the diction, making 'dignos edicere versus' impossible (cf. Martial's tipsy Terpsichore: quid dicta nescit saucia Terpsichore, 3.68.6), so I would take 'non quisquam' as 'no one' among those doing the 'drincan'...



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