Learned Babble _sive_ Babel (long and foolish)

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 10 1995 - 10:07:12 EST


In view of the fact that recent exertions in the great flame war over
Inerrancy petered out ultimately into what may only be termed "learned and
luxurious levity" at the expense of the pygmied Bildad the Shuhite, I am
taking the liberty of forwarding to b-greek the learned nonsense of
participants in a "sister" list, by which I do not mean a list of
"sisters," ecclesiastical or otherwise, namely Classics. Those who are
innocent of Latin (if it is possible to be innocent in that respect) will
not, I believe, find their ignorance an impediment to appreciation of the
thread herebelow reproduced. Remembering that George Bernard Shaw once
advised, "Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you,
becauses tastes differ," I pray that all may be blessed with a healthy
sense of humor. I, at least, find this thread utterly hilarious.

Forwarded material:
====================-
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 1995 00:34:36 -0800
From: mcmenomy@halcyon.com (Bruce McMenomy)
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: courses taught in Latin?

Brian Lund asks:
>By the way, what was meant by "Toto, vir nox in Kansas animo" in Nicholas
>Winton's letter of 6 Dec? Is it just a phonological joke, or is there
>actually something to it?
>

<Toto, vir nox in Kansas animo [est]>:

  This is just one of the over-wrought lines from the now mostly-forgotten
tragedy _Kansa_ (based on an original by Hippoplectus of Alexandria,
sometimes called "The Stupid") in the translation of Seneca the Very Young.
The form 'Kansas' is explained by the fact that the wee Seneca was showing
off by trying to retain a Greek genitive. As near as we can piece together
the evidence, the young Kansa had been ravished by a ne'er-do-well uncle,
and by the end of the play earns the well-known epithet "Bloody Kansa"
through her terrible but misdirected vengeance upon her nephew. ("Medea?"
said Gilbert Murray once to an undergraduate. "A piker next to Kansa,
believe me.") Prior to these actions, however, toward the middle of the
play, she has a long scene in which she apparently sits brooding and silent
on stage for several hundred lines. (Actually she speaks no lines
throughout the entire play, leaving her presence on stage to be intuited
from the dialogue that takes place around her.) After trying to offer
consolation, and being interrupted three times by Kansa's wordless but
metrically ornate outbursts, her maid helpfully sums up (in Dryden's
galloping rendition):

  "The brooding season's bleakest blight
    Gnaws at her self-control:
  In all, it is a man who is
    The night in Kansa's soul."

  The Latin forms of these lines, preserved by one or two late-Latin
grammarians, are mercifully all that remains of this curious but colossally
tasteless play. Dryden, of course, strove manfully to reconstruct the
remainder of the play from these lines, and succeeded with his usual
aplomb.

  There has been in scholarly circles some discussion about whether the
original line does or does not include the final 'est', which would make it
trivially easier to construe. Manuscript evidence varies, and it is
impossible to determine either on semantic grounds (since the meaning is
clear and unaffected by the matter), or on metrical grounds (since the
'est' would elide without altering the length of the final syllable.)
Therefore, after three German classics departments noisily split over the
issue in the spring of 1891, each citing "SprachgefŸhl" as its chief
argument, it was agreed that this should be left as a nugget for
dissertations. To date only one student has risen to the challenge, and
that was L. Frank Baum, who decided after years of tail-chasing toil to
pursue another line of work. But the issue troubled him to the end of his
days. Like Kansa herself, he took a misdirected vengeance upon the world,
and wrote _The Wizard of Oz_ chiefly for the sake of working in this arch
allusion. By a peculiar twist of fate, Baum's editor, detecting his
purposes, struck the line, as being inappropriate for younger audiences (in
an age when children were still learning Latin); the 1939 Judy Garland
extravaganza, however, restored the line in perhaps its only attempt to
capture the intent of the author. The editors of the later Oz books did
not get as much opportunity to tamper with the text of the now-famous
author; in fact, the rest of Baum's Oz books contain similar obscure
references. Can you find them?

-- Bruce
====================
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 1995 08:42:06 -0700
From: Elizabeth Vandiver <vandiver@hass.usu.edu>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Toto vir nox ... and Seneca

Toto, vir nox in Kansas animo [est]>

In his otherwise magisterial posting on the too little known play "Kansa"
("the Bloody"), Bruce McMenomy oddly overlooked an obvious cipher
encrypted in the line quoted above. If we ignore vowels and look only at
the consonants, we have TTVRNXNKNSSNM. Surely only the most
obtuse could fail to see the obvious message:

Vae te, Nero! Seneka sum; non exit.

This line is most commonly rendered "Nuts to you, Nero! I'm Seneca, and
he ain't leaving." (Scholars are, of course, divided over whether the
"he" refers to Seneca himself or to some other, unidentified person.)

I bring this up, not in any way to denigrate the learned Dr. McMenomy's
scholarship, but only because it seems important to recognize that there
is more to the play *Kansa* than one might at first think. Far from being a
youthful lapse in taste, this play is obviously a mature work, a brilliantly
crafted expose of the corruption in the Julio-Claudian family, and should
be recognized as Seneca's last attempt to control his erstwhile pupil. I 'm
sure others can contribute more evidence ...

Elizabeth Vandiver
(who'll spend time on just about ANYTHING other than grading!)
====================
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 1995 10:09:24 -0600
From: pmgreen@mail.utexas.edu (Peter M. Green)
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Kansa

In his learned exegesis of this now seldom-studied work, Bruce McMenomy
unaccountably omits the textual emendation by Fraenkel that potentially
threw the whole tradition into question, and was certainly known to Baum:
lurking in the apparatus of his 1939 recension---the arsenals of divine
vengeance, as Housman once, with less reason, termed the Bodleian--we find
the deadly little entry: [*Kansa* codd.; *Kanga* Fraenkel , fortasse
recte.] Readers of *Winnie Ille Pu* will at once see the potential
significance for the evaluation of the tradition.

Peter Green
====================
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 1995 13:57:19 -0500
Reply-To: classics@u.washington.edu
Sender: CLASSICS-owner@u.washington.edu
Precedence: bulk
From: "Jenny S. Clay" <jsc2t@faraday.clas.virginia.edu>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Kansa
Status:

I hate to impugn Peter Green or Fraenkel, bot I have had the
oportunity to collate Bod. 1249783 (Ogouashius) and have
discovered a unique v.l. :kango omega.

JSC
====================
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 95 11:50:17 PST
From: Michael Chase <GOYA@UVVM.UVic.CA>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Kansas and Seneca

Dear friends,

I am somewhat disappointed by the recent discussion on this List of that
unknown masterwork _Kansa_. One might think, judging by all the outmoded
philological considerations which have been adduced, that the List was un-
aware of the most recent and cutting-edge trends of Continental scholar-
ship. It has long since been recognized that the reading *Kansa* *must*
be emended to *KansO* - regardless of what the *text* actually *says* - as
if the repressed and ideologically incapable scribes of the Middle Ages
had not been forced by patriarchal authoritarianism deliberately to fal-
sify the manuscript "evidence". It leaps to the eye, moreover, that KansO
is a demoted mother-goddess; as Jean Bollack has pointed out in a seminal
article in _Foutaises_ (vol. 79, no. 348, annee 1995): the name of the
demoted mother-goddess *BaubO* also ends in omega! Moreover, Derrida,
picking up on a suggestion by Foucault (unpublished overheard Parisian
cafe telephone conversation, June-July 1964) has convincingly shown -pace
the reactionary objections of Habermas - that KansO *is* The Repressed
(a meaning the word carries in proto-Ugaritic) while her uncle "is"
Repression, whether we speak of the ideological depersonalization in-
trinsically and innately inherent in any "society" so oppressive as that
of Rome (or was it Greece? Peu importe..), or whether we are, perhaps
simultaneously, or even in a non-diachronicative sense, envisageing the
necessarily subordinate role of women when faced with their ineluctable
de-autonomisation *qua* substantifications of their essence (cf. Derrida,
_De la grammatologie, de mon chien, et de tout ce qui va me faire paraitre
hyper-intello_, Paris: Editions du milieu de la nuit, 16 vols., 1968ff.).
Yes, KansO takes her rightful revenge at the end of Seneca's immortal
yet deliberately suppressed masterwork - as well she should - in a scene
a scene of mass castration and disembowelling which is said to have made
Bataille retch, and can perhaps only be compared, in the annals of proto-
revolutionary theatre, with the Carthaginian love-goddess cAnat's relent-
less slaughter of her entourage. When staged as a play by Cocteau in the
early thirties, Seneca's exquisitely brutal, yet sensitive masterwork sent
progressive elements amongst both crtics and audience into ideologically
justifiable transports of ecstasy. Who can ever forget the final scene, in
which a trimuphant KansO, neck-deep in blood, the necklace formed of the
severed members of her patriarchist foes gleaming about her throat, cries out
"J'y suis et j'y reste"! (as translated by Stravinsky: "I am Swiss and I'm
spending the night!").

I would have much more to say on this theme, but my baker has just phoned
to tell me my baguette is ready.....

A la prochaine - et Vive KansO! -

Michael Chase.
====================
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 1995 22:56:33 -0700 (MST)
From: FEROMER@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Kansa and Hippoplectus

Please! Let common sense prevail!
1. "animo" < animus = anima = Grk. psyche = "butterfly"
2. Note the fourth letter in each word occupies exactly that
   position and no other. "Toto" is not really an exception
   since it contains, in fact, two o's, not one, and hence the
   second must be in fourth position (note the caesura). This
   is, after all, the most famous case of Milvius' Bridge.
   (N.b. The corollary also holds: words of three orthographic
   positions or fewer do not have a fourth unless a fifth is
   present too.)
3. Also, since the first o in "Toto" is radical, and the second
   is finial, this is only an apparent, not a true case of a
   reduplicated vocative.
4. In cases of anti-hephthemimeral caesura (as here, placed after
   the fourth orthographic position instead of after the first
   metrical position of the fourth foot), *cola ridicula* and
   *dicola ridicula* REQUIRE syncretic, not synchronic syntagms.

Finally, but with some trepidation, may I make a prosopographical
suggestion? Hippoplectus must have lived in Parthia and been a
descendant of that Apoplectus the Stupid who founded the
Alexandropolis in Parthia. Pseudo-Pseustes was a Parthian, wrote
a "Parthika," and used the word *Parthikos* at least once in the
now-lost "Skythika" (in the famous passage cited by Ioannes Tzetzes,
where *. . . . . . . s* has been restored as *Parthikos*). Once the
recognition of the biographical fallacy (cp. Ps.-Pseust., *Hipp.* 4.2-3)
eliminates Alexandria in Egypt as H.'s *locus operandi*, then all the
Alexandrias (or at least the 18 identifiable ones--19 if you count the
*Rhesus*) must also be eliminated. Besides, *Alexandreia* will not do as
an emendation of *ALEXANDROPOL.S* in P.OxyMoron 722.13, where the
dot stands for the bottom of the iota-stroke, which was, in fact,
more on than off when Strobius read the fragment in 1763--before
the discovery of the Rosetta Stone confirmed that a single downward
stroke (I) *could*, in certain circumstances, be taken as an iota (cp.
also CIP XIII, 13.97, and perhaps XIV, 97.13 as well). If so, then
Hippoplectus the Stupid is a direct descendant of Apoplectus the
Stupid, who founded Alexandropolis (which should have been named
Alexandria, after all). There were two men called Apoplectus the
Stupid, and both founded a city called Alexandropolis. Both were
also called "the right hand of Alexander", although one is known to
have been left-handed (PIA 768). What made them "Apoplectus" was that
no contemporary was known to have recognized that the more westerly
(or left) Alexandropolis was west (or left) of the Borysthenes Flumen
(Dnepr River), while the more easterly (or right) Alexandropolis was east
(or right) of the Mare Caspium. Thus, we have the neat solution to an elegant
Alexandrian puzzle: the right solution (i.e. that the western Alexandropolis
is on the left) means that the other Alexandropolis was left on the right.
Thus, left-handed Apoplectus founded right-most Alexandropolis, and
right-handed Apoplectus founded left-most Alexandropolis. Our
Hippoplectus is the descendant of left-handed Apoplectus. However
"stupid" it was for H. to introduce into the original *Kansa* the
King of Aria (cp. frag. 3 [soon to be published]), it was deliberate.
(N.b. Frag. 3 will be published before frag. 2 [not yet discovered].
I follow the numbering of Surus.)

Ridiculus Mus
(a Mac user)
====================
Date: Sat, 9 Dec 1995 11:46:06 -0500 (EST)
From: Ronnie Ancona <rancona@shiva.hunter.cuny.edu>
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Kansa and Hippoplectus

On Fri, 8 Dec 1995 FEROMER@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU wrote:
> > 3. Also, since the first o in "Toto" is radical, and the second
> is finial, this is only an apparent, not a true case of a
> reduplicated vocative.
>
  a "finial" o? how decorative!
====================-
Date: Sat, 09 Dec 1995 11:36:17 EST
From: "McMahon, John M" <mcmahon@lemoyne.edu>
To: CLASSICS@U.WASHINGTON.EDU
Subject: Milvius' Bridge

        Among many insightful comments, it has been noted:

        "*Toto* is not really an exception
   since it contains, in fact, two o's, not one, and hence the
   second must be in fourth position (note the caesura). This
   is, after all, the most famous case of Milvius' Bridge."

        This is especially so here because of the gap between
        the two dentals.
====================
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 18:24:10 -0700
From: pepper@bvsd.k12.co.us (Timothy Pepper)
To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Kansa and Hippoplectus

> This is just one of the over-wrought lines from the now mostly-forgotten
>tragedy _Kansa_ (based on an original by Hippoplectus of Alexandria,
>sometimes called "The Stupid") in the translation of Seneca the Very Young.

        I am told that a copy of the original play by Hippoplectus (who
incidentally is now thought not to be from Alexandria, Egypt, but Alexandria
in the Kingdom of Aria, modern day Herat) was found about twenty years ago
by a graduate student in the lining of a leather jacket he bought in Cairo.
Unfortunately, the suitcase in which he put the jacket was lost in a
connection through Paris and has not been found to date. All that the
graduate student could remember about the text is that Hippoplectus himself
appears as a character in the play, extolling his merits at combining comedy
and tragedy in a single play, and begging for the prize in both tragedy and
comedy in the year's combined competition. We are told by his biographer,
pseudo-Pseustes, that Hippoplectus gave the name of the King of Aria to
Kansa's uncle as part of the "comedy" of the play, leading to his swift
execution and earning him the epithet "The Stupid." The loss of this work
is a great one, for it would have revealed the extent of Hellenization in
literature at the fringes of Alexander's Empire.

        As with all of Seneca's "translations," *Kansa* was heavily adapted,
including the addition (as several later sources tell us) of a gladiator
show, several unintellible rhetorical speeches by Kansa, and the mauling of
a slave on stage by an agitated poodle.

Vale! Tim Pepper

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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