Language and Linguistics

Linguistic contact between Greek and Latin in the first thousand years of our era is often seen as a stream of ideas, concepts, and words flowing in one direction: from Greek East to Latin West. (Berschin, 15-17) While Introductory Latin textbooks are careful to point out Greek loanwords like poeta and philosophia, their Greek analogues are silent on parallel processes from West to East. Scholars who treat the subject of cultural influence usually frame their discussions from a Greek to Latin perspective (Hutchinson, 149-153).

In this paper I shall look at how notaries produced the records of the Council of Chalcedon (451) and what such records can tell us about the spoken language of educated men in Late Antiquity.

In this paper I examine the scholarly Latin translations of W. Holtzmann (a.k.a. Xylander), who produced multiple bilingual editions of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, as well as the nachleben of these editions in Méric Casaubon's edition of Meditations.

Although it is conventional to consider the prominent women of the Bronze Age as queens, the Homeric poems indicate otherwise, for the title "queen" (basileia) was a specific and limiting term. The word does not appear in the Iliad, and was not used for most of the famous royal women who are mentioned in the Odyssey. Homer did not consider Clytaemnesta or Helen to be queens. It is only by the fifth century BC, in drama, that these and other royal women would be called a basileia, clearly an anachronism.

Statement of purpose

This paper will lay out the terminological system used to distinguish between concrete and abstract nouns in Pseudo-Arcadius’ Epitome of Herodian’s Περὶ καθολικῆς προσῳδίας (‘On prosody in general’), and show that this system is fundamentally different from those found in other Greek grammatical texts.

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