That’s how it worked when I was 13 or so for the dirty bits in Aristophanes. (…) Ok it took me about a year or so of reading this particular Greek comic poet at school to realise that the reason the line numbers apparently went from 1205 to 1210 in only 3 lines of verse was NOT to do with problematic and corrupt textual transmission — but because some Victorian nanny-state editor had taken out a possibly corruptING couple of lines that were something to do with sex (or occasionally bottoms).
Their expurgation served to make them much more alluring. So, as soon as we got a chance, and we were up at the boys school, where they had a much bigger classical library (thanks to Dr Kennedy among others), we rushed to the unexpurgated version in some complete, not-for-kids, text and pored over it with the boys in a kind of academic version of “doctors and nurses”. It was, of course, extremely good for our Greek…but that hadnt been the object of the expurgatory exercise.
Maurizio Bettini, Tiberio e il ministro dei piaceri su Repubblica 3-11-2010
[con Augias a dare l’imbeccata, su Repubblica del 29/10]
Avevamo parlato di questi parallelismi (Berlusconi-Nerone, Tiberio, etc.) sous rature qui (per quanto riguarda Tiberio, si segnalava la latinista Mary Beard sul Times del 3-6-2009 ”“If the emperor has no clothes, history will expose him - The Roman ruler Tiberius was as notorious for his sexual frolics as he was keen to keep them quiet. Remind you of anyone?”:
According to his Roman biographer Suetonius, “Bevies of girls and young men, collected from all over the place, used to have sex in threesomes in front of him, to excite his waning appetites.” More likely, perhaps, than the implausible rumours of Mr Berlusconi’s activities?
Rammento che, qualche tempo fa, a proposito delle nuove scoperte papiracee (l’Artemidoro, il Posidippo), con particolare riferimento alla ”nuova” Saffo, Franco Montanari commentava così:
Per Saffo non abbiamo avuto mia simile abbondanza, ma nessuno può dire se qualcosa di analogo non accadrà in futuro. Bruno Snell si rammaricava spesso del fatto che, se un evento cosi felice si fosse dato, non avrebbe vissuto abbastanza per vederlo: l’angoscia di molti studiosi è sapere che qualcosa certamente accadrà prima o poi, e forse non potranno esserci.
Bene. Ecco, invece, come Mary Beard, recentemente alle prese col quesito Would it have been better had some surviving works of ancient authors been lost? si è trovata ad argomentare, prendendo ad esempio proprio Saffo:
Or think, rather differently, of the archaic Greek poetess Sappho. A few of her poems survive, brilliant enough to define the history of love poetry for the next two and a half millennia (“Phainetai moi …” as the best one goes in Greek, copied by the Roman poet Catullus in “Ille mi par esse …”). But maybe Sappho’s reputation has been helped by what we no longer have. Most of her output was, we fear, interminable marriage hymns for the young ladies in her entourage. Lost, and well lost, perhaps.
Fama (ed immortalità) paradossalmente assicurata e garantita dal fatto che non sia sopravvissuto gran parte dell’ouput poetico di questi lirici greci, apprezzati non più nonostante ci siano pervenuti frammentari, ma proprio perché tali…
Un vero rovesciare le aspettative (o, se si vuole, le pretese da veri e propri “professionisti della parola”) di quegli stessi poeti greci che affidavano fama e immortalità al proprio canto, tra cui, appunto Saffo (cfr. proprio in connessione alla “nuova” Saffo Helena Rodríguez Somolinos, Los nuevos versos de Safo y el tema de la inmortalidad en la poesía (PKöln. inv. 21351re fr. 1.1-8), in E. Calderón Dorda-Alicia Morales Ortiz, M.Valverde Sánchez (edd.), Κοινὸς λόγος. «Homenaje al Profesor José García López», Murcia 2006, 897-903), secondo una tradizione che almeno risale a Pindaro (cfr. Nemea 7.12-16 o il fr.121 Maehler), Teognide vv.237-254, e Simonide (fr.594 P.: in questo caso, in contrasto con Pindaro, fama non immortale, cfr. B.Gentili Poesia e pubblico nella Grecia antica, ediz. aggiornata Feltrinelli, Milano, 2006, p.233), per giungere - via le celeberime dichiarazioni poetiche di Orazio e Ovidio - ai giorni nostri:
(…) the text endures. The reader’s life is measured in hours; that of the book, in millennia. This is the triumphant scandal first proclaimed by Pindar: `When the city I celebrate shall have perished, when the men to whom I sing shall have vanished into oblivion, my words shall endure’. It is the conceit to which Horace’s exegi monumentum gave canonic expression and which culminates in Mallarme’s hyperbolic supposition that the object of the universe is le Livre, the final book, the text that transcends time. Marble crumbles, bronze decays, but written words - seemingly the most fragile of media - survive
George Steiner No Passion Spent Essays 1978-1995, cap.1 “The Uncommon Reader”
