Linguistic Strategies and the Hermeneutics of Reading

For modern readers, the table of contents is an essential element of a scholarly work, offering a synoptic view of the text. In contrast, only four such indices survive in Latin literature that were definitively composed by the authors of the original works: Scribonius Largus’ Compositiones, Columella’s Res Rustica, Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, and Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae (hereafter NA).

It is generally recognized by hermeneutists today that St. Augustine argues for a multiplicity of meanings in Scripture beyond what any of its human authors intended, and that he grounds these interpretations in the intention (voluntas) of the Holy Spirit, who also inspires such interpretations in readers. These ideas are particularly appealing to literary scholars who welcome the multivalence of texts.

A more refined understanding of Greek word order, address terms, and directives: these are some fruits of recent work belonging to a “21^st Century Philology” (Dik 1995, 1996; Dickey 1996, Denizot 2011; Goldstein 2015: 695 for the term). Such scholarship makes use of inferential statistics and insights from relatively new fields in linguistics to analyze extensive and carefully gathered data. Inspired by this scholarly method, the present paper focuses on the Greek aorist and present imperative.

Diogenes Laertius (7.56-7) preserves for us the linguistic theory of the Stoic philosopher Diogenes of Babylon. Part of this theory included a distinction between voice (φωνή), which is both articulate and inarticulate, and utterance (λέξις), which is only articulate. There is also a further distinction between utterance, which contains both significant and non-significant utterances, and language (λόγος), which is a significant utterance.

Archaic inscribed epigram often allows an object to speak in a bold first person. Noting this, Jesper Svenbro observes that the ancient reader must have had no countervailing “conviction that the first person necessarily implies an inner life and voice” (1993: 42). I have often found it necessary to repeat this observation to my students, as they immediately assume that even such simple statements as “Iphidice dedicated me to Athena” (CEG 198) imply an assumed mind behind the voice. In my twenty-minute paper, however, I pose the question: what if my students are right?