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The Vocabulary of the Later Decades of Livy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

J. N. Adams
J. N. Adams*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Extract

It is widely accepted that in the later books Livy to some extent discarded the highly archaizing and poeticizing style of the first decade, in which the events belonged to the remote past. But by no means all of the relevant evidence has been presented, and discussions of the question have also usually suffered from inadequacies of method. Now that Packard's Concordance has appeared, it is possible to give a more comprehensive treatment of the lexical evidence, though the difficulty of finding syntactic modifications in such a long work remains the same.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 8 , 1974 , pp. 54 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1974

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References

1 See Wölfflin, E., Livianische Kritik und livianischer Spracligebrauch (Berlin, 1864), pp. 29Google Scholar f. = Ausgewählte Schriften (Leipzig, 1933), pp. 18Google Scholar f.; Stacey, S.G., ‘Die Entwickelung des livianischen Stiles’, ALL 10 (1898), 17Google Scholar ff.; Skard, E., Ennius und Sallustius (Oslo, 1933), pp. 10, 32, 35, 45, 46, 48, 55Google Scholar. For an attack (itself in many details unconvincing) on Stacey's view, see Gries, K., Constancy in Livy's Latinity (New York, 1949)Google Scholar. More recently Tränkle, H., ‘Beobachtungen und Erwägungen zum Wandel der livianischen Sprache’, Wien.Stud. 81 (1968), 103Google Scholar ff., has listed some archaic and poetic usages which occur either in the early books and then again much later, or in the later books but not earlier.

2 Packard, D.W., A Concordance to Livy (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).Google Scholar

3 See further Adams, J.N., CQ n.s. 22 (1972), 350 f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Even the modifications discussed by Stacey do not consist entirely of the discarding of archaisms and poeticisms. See p. 67 on the replacement of the intransitive praecipitare by the middle praecipitari; cf. p . 78 on ad ultimum, ad extremum and ad postremum.

5 Cf. Skard, op. cit., pp. 20 f.

6 Tacitus made use of primores civitatis for principes civitatis. He almost certainly took the phrase over from Livy, for no other pre-Tacitean writer uses it.

7 On the distribution of primores in general in Livy, see Stacey, op. cit., 76. Statistics are not given for principes.

8 I omit the passive forms of exspecto, which are obviously not substitutable by opperior, and also examples of the gerund and gerundive, in which forms Livy does not use opperior.

9 See Adams, , BICS 20 (1973), 129.Google Scholar

10 For details see Adams, , CQ n.s. 22 (1972), 363.Google Scholar

11 See Tränkle, op. cit., 118 ff.

12 See Peterson, 's apparatus at Verr. iii 62 (OCT).Google Scholar

13 At i 57.9, however, the correct reading may be lusu. See Ogilvie, R.M., A Commentary on Livy, Books 1-5 (Oxford, 1965), p. 222.Google Scholar

14 See Wölfflin, , Philol. 25 (1867), 104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 ALL 4 (1887), 208Google Scholar. Cf. Stacey, op. cit., 65; Löfstedt, E., Syntactica: Studien und Beiträge zur historischen Syntax des Luteins ii (Lund, 1956), p. 298.Google Scholar

16 However the decline in the frequency of imperito, territo and prenso may be genuine.

17 CQ n.s. 22 (1972), 369.Google Scholar

18 Details will be found in the article cited in the preceding note.

19 There is a single example at xli 8.4.

20 Philologischer Kommentar zur Peregrinatio Aetheriae (Uppsala, 1911), p. 168.Google Scholar

21 For some reservations concerning Löfstedt's case, see Ross, D.O., Style and Tradition in Catullus (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 70CrossRefGoogle Scholar ff.

22 See Adams, , BICS 20 (1973), 140Google Scholar n. 25.

23 See Skard, op. cit., pp. 56 f.

24 See Hofmann, J.B. and Szantyr, A., Lateinische Grummatik unci Stilistik (Munich, 1965), p. 507Google Scholar on the use of the word.

25 See Axelson, B., Unpoetische Wörter (Lund, 1945), p. 47Google Scholar n. 4.

26 See Wölfflin, , Philol. 25 (1867), 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 See Kunze, A., Sallustiana ii (Leipzig, 1897), p. 10.Google Scholar

28 On which see Hofmann and Szantyr, op. cit., pp. 667 f.

29 See Löfstedt, , Syntactica ii, p. 284.Google Scholar

30 ‘Die Synonyme adulescens und iuvenis’, Melanges Marouzeau (Paris, 1948), pp. 7ff.Google Scholar

31 Cf. Fraenkel, E., JRS 41 (1951), 193.Google Scholar

32 See Adams, , BICS 20 (1973), 129Google Scholar f. on this word.

33 See TLL V i.406.64.

34 TLL V i.406.59ff.

35 Hofmann and Szantyr, op. cit., pp. 264 f.

36 These proportions are based on all examples of e and ex before c, d, f, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, and t. The exact figures are 458:45. 421:95, 413:47, and 229:37. 37

37 Cf. for example the use of -ere and -erunt (Lease, E.B., AJP 24 [1903], 40 ff.)Google Scholar, referre gradum = referre pedem (Stacey, p. 24), the future passive infinitive -tum iri (Stacey, p. 59), necopinutus = inopinatus (Stacey, p. 63), quippe = nam (Stacey, p. 70), iterare = redintegrare, renovare, instaurare (Stacey, p. 79), tempestas = tempus (Tränkle, 111), ob = propter (Tränkle, 134 n. 142).

38 See for example Tränkle, 144 ff.

39 I do not see the stylistic change as a deliberate return to the Latin of Cicero and Caesar, as if that were a model to which everyone, like modern composers of Latin prose, aspired. The non-technical vocabulary of Cicero and Caesar must have been largely that of the educated class in the late Republic and early Empire, though admittedly the vocabulary of no two individuals is exactly alike. When Livy abandoned certain words from the archaic register in the later books and turned to words of wider currency, he was not necessarily attempting to imitate Cicero or Caesar.

40 These were first pointed out by Wölfflin. For a convenient summary, see Löfstedt, , Syntactica ii, pp. 276Google Scholar ff.

41 See Adams, , CQ n.s. 22 (1972), 350CrossRefGoogle Scholar ff.