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VALERIUS FLACCUS’ LANIABOR-ACROSTIC (ARGONAUTICA 4.177-84)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2017

Neil Adkin
Neil Adkin*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
*
nadkin3489@aol.com
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Extract

‘Of course laniabor is not a name.’ Thus very recently Cristiano Castelletti in a discussion of this notorious acrostic, which he associates with Aratean ἄρρητον (Phaen. 2) and Virgilian MA VE PV (G. 1.429-33). If, however, laniabor is itself ‘not a name’, the aim of the present annotatiuncula is to argue that it is an etymological play on a ‘name’. Laniabor spans the description of Amycus’ cave, which is adorned with the dismembered limbs of his victims: Amycus himself will shortly suffer the same fate at Pollux’ hands. The name ‘Amycus’ was etymologized from ἀμύσσω (‘tear’; LSJ s.v. I), which exactly matches lanio (‘tear’; OLD s.v. 1a). Hence by a cutely etymological jeu onomastique ‘Tearer’ says ‘I'll be torn’.

Information

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , May 2017 , pp. 327 - 328
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Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2017 

litore in extremo spelunca apparuit ingens
arboribus super et dorso contecta minanti,
non quae dona die, non quae trahat aetheris ignem,
infelix domus et sonitu fremibunda profundi. 180
at uarii pro rupe metus: hinc trunca rotatis
bracchia rapta uiris strictoque immortua caestu
ossaque taetra situ <et> capitum maestissimus ordo;
respicias quibus aduerso sub uulnere nulla
iam facies nec nomen erat. 185
(Argonautica 4.177-85)

‘Of course laniabor is not a name.’ Thus very recently Cristiano Castelletti in a discussion of this notorious acrostic, which he associates with Aratean ἄρρητον (Phaen. 2) and Virgilian MA VE PV (G. 1.429-33).Footnote 1 If, however, laniabor is itself ‘not a name’, the aim of the present annotatiuncula is to argue that it is an etymological play on a ‘name’. Laniabor spans the description of Amycus’ cave, which is adorned with the dismembered limbs of his victims: Amycus himself will shortly suffer the same fate at Pollux’ hands.Footnote 2 The name ‘Amycus’ was etymologized from ἀμύσσωFootnote 3 (‘tear’; LSJ s.v. I), which exactly matches lanio (‘tear’; OLD s.v. 1a). Hence by a cutely etymological jeu onomastique ‘Tearer’ says ‘I'll be torn’.

This acrostical jeu de mots has a bearing on the text. At the start of line 184 V’s respiceas was altered by Madvig to per piceas.Footnote 4 This emendation was ignored for a century by editors, till it was put into the text by Courtney, whose apparatus criticus referred by way of justification to line 192 (silua):Footnote 5 Courtney was then followed by Ehlers and Liberman. Two objections may, however, be raised to Madvig's conjecture. On the one hand, per piceas in place of respicias eliminates the SOP wink-wink nudge-nudge for an acrostic: ‘Look!’Footnote 6 Since on the other hand the ‘r’ of respicias yields passive laniabor, Madvig's line-initial ‘p-’ trashes a witty oxymoron: ‘Tearer is torn’. It would seem therefore that Madvig's latterly fashionable Verschlimmbesserung should be reconsigned to the other side of Lethe.

When ‘Tearer’ Amycus is himself ‘torn’, he is no longer the ‘Tearer’: he thereby forgoes his ‘lacerative’ name. A subtextual pointer to this onomastical shift would seem to be provided by the line that comes immediately after the laniabor-acrostic: iam … nec nomen erat (4.185).Footnote 7 Here wink-tipping nec nomen, which ‘is held back’,Footnote 8 is also semantically off-beat enough to require elucidation: ‘und (infolgedessen) keine Namen mehr hatten, d.h. unidentifizierbar waren’.Footnote 9 Line 185's iam … nec nomen erat as subtextual tip-off that, when ‘Tearer’ Amycus is ‘torn’, this ‘name’ is ‘no longer’ rightly his would appear to be corroborated at the end of the episode by the short speech which Pollux makes to Amycus immediately after dealing him the death-blow (4.312-14): ‘Pollux ego missus Amyclis | et Ioue natus’ ait, ‘nomen mirantibus umbris | hoc referes, sic et memori noscere sepulchro’. Here particular importance attaches to the last line: the ‘name’Footnote 10 on Amycus’ tomb is not ‘Amycus’, since he is no longer ‘Tearer’, but ‘torn’.

References

1 Castelletti, C., ‘Aratus and the Aratean tradition in Valerius’ Argonautica ’, in Augoustakis, A. (ed.), Flavian Poetry and its Greek Past (Leiden, 2014), 49–72, at 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Castelletti's recent review (Gnomon 84 [2012], 367–9, at 369) of Murgatroyd, P., A Commentary on Book 4 of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica (Leiden and Boston, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar chides this commentator for resembling all his predecessors in failing to be aware of this acrostic, which was also discussed by Castelletti in ‘Riflessioni sugli acrostici di Valerio Flacco’, GIF 60 (2008), 219–34, at 221–4Google Scholar, where (221) Castelletti wrongly describes this acrostic as ‘l'unico di Valerio accettato da Hilberg’: laniabor was in fact dismissed as a ‘neckisches Spiel des Zufalls’ in Hilberg's canonical collection (‘Ist die Ilias Latina von einem Italicus verfasst oder einem Italicus gewidmet?’, WS 21 [1899], 264–305, at 269)Google Scholar, though he did qualify it as ‘die merkwürdigste Stelle’ of all his ‘Zufallsakrosticha’.

2 Cf. Korn, M., Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 4.1-343: Ein Kommentar (Hildesheim, 1989), 138 Google Scholar, who on line 192 ([te] … tua silua ferat) comments: ‘Pollux denkt wohl daran, die Leiche des Amycus bzw. deren Teile (damit entspräche die Rache dem begangenen Frevel; vgl. bracchia 182, ossa 183, capitum 183) an einem oder mehreren Bäumen dieses Waldes aufzuhängen.’

3 Cf. Roscher, W.H., Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie (Leipzig, 1884–1890), 1.326 (s.v.)Google Scholar.

4 Madvig, J.N., Adversaria critica ad scriptores Graecos et Latinos (Copenhagen, 1873), 2.142-3Google Scholar.

5 For the preference of earlier editors for respicias, cf. the conspectus in Korn (n. 2), 134.

6 Cf. Adkin, N., ‘“Read the edge”: acrostics in Virgil's Sinon episode’, ACD 50 (2014), 45–72, at 49–52Google Scholar.

7 For nomen as an etymological hint, cf. O'Hara, J.J., True Names: Vergil and the Alexandrian Tradition of Etymological Wordplay (Ann Arbor, 1996), 75–9Google Scholar.

8 So Murgatroyd (n. 1), 113.

9 So Korn (n. 2), 135. A similarly subtextual wink would seem to be tipped by immediately antecedent aduerso sub uulnere (4.184), which likewise requires explanation by commentators (cf. e.g. Korn [n. 2], 135). Aduerso (‘facing’; OLD s.v. 1a) fits a ‘facing’ acrostic; sub (‘[denoting a position lower than or beneath something] under’; OLD s.v. A1a) fits its position ‘under’ an acrostic; uulnere (‘wound’; OLD s.v. 1a) fits acrostical lanio (‘wound savagely’; OLD s.v. 1a). Nomen itself in the next line (4.185) would seem to be anticipated by oddly periphrastic maerentem nomen amici exactly fifty lines earlier (4.136) at the start of the entire section: here amici is an exact homonym of Amyci, whose nomen is at issue in the acrostic. A similarly preparative function would seem to be served exactly halfway between nomen amici (136) and nec nomen (185) by the strikingly twofold nomen of line 161, where the second nomen is generally subjected to emendation or athetization. For such ‘long-distance’ clues to an acrostic, cf. Adkin (n. 6), 52–4, 59–62, 65–8.

10 Nomen was etymologized from nosco; cf. Maltby, R., A Lexicon of Ancient Latin Etymologies (Leeds, 1991), 413 Google Scholar (s.v. nomen).