The most beautiful of worlds? (or, sarma police)

Because today was part of a long weekend in Naples—yesterday was the feast of San Gennaro, the city's patron, known among other things for the miracle (officially speaking, "just" a prodigy, per the Church) of the liquification of his reliquary blood, which I witnessed in the cathedral—the school building shut a bit earlier than usual. So, on my way home along Spaccanapoli, I stopped and got a gelato. Since the side gate to Santa Chiara, where I usually enjoy my gelato, was closed, I continued on to Piazza del Gesù, where a small crowd was gathered round for some minor television personality talking with passers-by on camera. I eavesdropped in hopes of overhearing who exactly it was while I ate my foresta and fiordilatte, without real success (overhearing, that is; eating was a great success). When that got old I turned and headed for the little bookshop in the corner of the piazza, Dante & Descartes, to browse the offerings and say hi to Giancarlo the libraio. I picked up Louise Glück's Averno and the first of Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale—I read them all some time ago in English, but I've been meaning to read them in Italian, especially now that I've been living in Naples for a few years.

Giancarlo mentioned that shortly there'd be a book presentation, a sort of epistolary novel of dialogue between two women in Venice, so I decided to stick around. It was a fun discussion between the two interlocutors and the author, which convinced me to add another book to my stack (Bruceremo by Caterina Serra). The book's epigraph is attributed to Heraclitus:

Il più bello dei mondi non è che un mucchio di rifiuti gettati a caso ("The most beautiful of worlds is nothing but a randomly tossed heap of trash")

Not remembering this particular Heraclitean fragment, and curious about its potentially archaeological reception, I looked it up, Diels 124. Diels' Greek text reads σάρμα εἰκῆ κεχυμένον. Σάρμα is a very rare word, attested in the fragmentary comic poet Rhinthon and, possibly, in this fragment of Heraclitus; the noun derived from the verb σαίρω "to sweep, clean," hence σάρμα would be "sweepings": "sweepings piled up (κεχυμένον) at random (εἰκῆ)."

The textual tradition, however, is messier than this. Like the rest of the so-called Pre-Socratics, we don't have any complete surviving text of Heraclitus. This particular fragment is found in Theophrastus' \so-called Metaphysics, and the manuscript tradition transmits σὰρξ εἰκῇ κεχυμένων, which is seemingly grammatically problematic in a few ways and so has been subject to various emendations, among them Diels's σάρμα... κεχυμένον. Similar is the conjecture σάρον, another noun related to σαίρω meaning "sweepings, rubbish" but rather better attested than σάρμα. Another option is that of Most, followed by few, σωρῶν εἰκῇ κεχυμένων positing a form of σωρός "heap": "just like the most beautiful of the heaps piled at random [is] the world-order." 

But the manuscripts of Theophrastus transmit σὰρξ: flesh.

"Σὰρξ is universally attested: all the Greek manuscripts and the Arabic (Ψ) and Latin (Λ) translations have it, so that if it is indeed erroneous it would be one of the primitive errors of the Neoplatonic archetype manuscript. With few exceptions, all scholars have thought it untenable and emended it,  mostly with a word that means “a heap or a pile [of sweepings]... However, what is untenable is this emendation, because it presents the wrong comparison and ruins the point that Theophrastus is trying to make" (Gutas, p. 328).

"Flesh" though art, and unto "flesh" thou shalt return... 

Gutas's streamlined version of this passage of Theophrastus, taking into account the various traditions: "for example, Heraclitus should have realized the absurdity of his own statement when he said that the human body, made up of elements “poured out at random” (i.e., by random and indeterminate first principles), is nevertheless the most beautiful arrangement of such elements." (You will have to go read Gutas's extensive commentary for translating κόσμος as "arrangement" rather than "world" or "universe.")

Another perfectly good, evocative, slightly mysterious pre-Socratic aphorism ruined by philology...

(As usual, there's more that I intended to say here, but the night is getting away from me, and I already don't know where I got the energy to write this all in the first place. And the role that the pre-Socratics play for the non-specialist—and I mean the non-specialist in the pre-Socratics—as a sort of mystical mists of mystery will have to wait for a future post.)

Gutas, Dimitri, ed. 2010. Theophrastus On First Principles: (known as his Metaphysics) : Greek Text and Medieval Arabic Translation. Philosophia Antiqua. Leiden: Brill.

South Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean: Cultural Interactions Conference

17th - 21st July 2012
La Trobe University
Melbourne, Australia

This conference will focus on the movement of people and interactions of culture in the Mediterranean region of Southern Italy and Sicily from antiquity until the present. The program will include exhibitions at the Hellenic Museum and the Museo Italiano of ancient Greek vases from Southern Italy and Sicily as well as other pieces from the collection of the Trendall Research Centre...

This inter-disciplinary conference seeks to foster critical analysis of geographical and chronological interconnections in Southern Italy and Sicily. Consideration of cultural interaction, population movements, and changing religious and philosophical ideas over a period of approximately 3000 years will prompt scholarly discussion around continuity and change over time in this region of the Mediterranean.

Program and abstracts available via the conference website. [I note that La Trobe has a TARDIS: Teaching Archaeological Research Discipline In Simulation.]

[Via rogueclassicism and the Classicists list]

Contextualising "early Colonisation." Rome, 21-23 June 2012

Contestualizzare la “prima colonizzazione”:

Archeologia, fonti, cronologia e modelli interpretativi fra l’Italia e il Mediterraneo.
In memoria di David Ridgway (1938-2012)

A whopper of a conference this week in Rome, hosted by the Academia Belgica along with the Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut and the British School at Rome. The substantial program is here, including substantial abstracts/outlines.

(Photo source: Lefkandi Excavations).

Don't Eat That, Elmer, That's Horse [Finch]!

There's been some controversy about a free distribution of On the Origin of Species with a "special" introduction; in any case, I gladly note the existence of a counterpoint group, "Don't Diss Darwin," with the tongue–in–cheek motto "noli fringillidas edere!" I had to look up the middle word, which as it turns out is the scientific Latin term for the family of finches, of course. The Classical form on which it's based is fringilla, -ae which the OLD tells me means "a song-bird, perhaps the chaffinch," attested in Varro and Festus (usually a bad sign), and Martial in a form fringillus, cf. Greek φρυγίλος. This latter occurs once in Classical Greek—where else?—the Birds of Aristophanes, 763, where it gets trotted out for a pun with Φρὺξ.

For what it's worth, there was a Cistercian monastery of S. Angelo in Fringillis (or Frigido) founded in Calabria in 1220, as well as a Fringilla: some tales in verse of 1895 by Richard Doddridge Blackmore (famous today for his novel Lorna Doone), with the doddgy lines quorsum haec? non potui qualem / Philomela querelam; sed / fringilla velut pipitabunda vagor adorning the frontispiece. The illustrations are passerable, but the verse, oh, the verse! The one snippet ought to be enough; the rest is available freely at Google Books:

God is with us ; He shall speed us ;
Or (if this vile crew impede us)
Let some light into their brain,
By the sword of Tubal Cain.
-Lita of the Nile, Part I, XII

All that said, Wikipedia informs me that Darwin's finches are now placed in the tanager family of Thraupidae rather than the true finch family, Fringillidae. θραυπίς occurs only in Aristotle History of Animals 592b30 and refers to a small bird. Such is the nature of scientific Latin. So noli fringillas edere, noli thraupidas edere, noli θραυπίδας edere, as you like.