Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana
Posted: May 19th, 2018, 9:54 am
Working through the Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, mainly mining it for interesting sections to spring on my Latin students, found this in the Greek:
ἑνεχυρον θέλεις; μὴ γένοιτο, οὐ χρείαν ἔχω...
Lest you thought Paul was the only one ever to say μὴ γένοιτο!
Lee Irons on Facebook pointed out that the phrase appears a number of times in Epictetus, and someone else mentioned that it can even be heard in modern Greek, but finding it in late third century text was for me pretty amazing (but I have a very low fun threshold).
The Colloquia was a collection of "teaching manuscripts" mostly designed to teach Greek speakers Latin. There are paralleld columns in Greek and Latin, and the students were apparently expected to memorize the phrases. It even includes in at least one manuscript paradigms, although they go backwards from our perspective, starting at the 3rd singular. It was truly sermo cottidiana for both languages as spoken in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries C.E.
Eleanor Dickey has done a great deal of work on these, including the critical edition of the manuscripts (if you want to spend that much), but some popular textbook level materials as well.
ἑνεχυρον θέλεις; μὴ γένοιτο, οὐ χρείαν ἔχω...
Lest you thought Paul was the only one ever to say μὴ γένοιτο!
Lee Irons on Facebook pointed out that the phrase appears a number of times in Epictetus, and someone else mentioned that it can even be heard in modern Greek, but finding it in late third century text was for me pretty amazing (but I have a very low fun threshold).
The Colloquia was a collection of "teaching manuscripts" mostly designed to teach Greek speakers Latin. There are paralleld columns in Greek and Latin, and the students were apparently expected to memorize the phrases. It even includes in at least one manuscript paradigms, although they go backwards from our perspective, starting at the 3rd singular. It was truly sermo cottidiana for both languages as spoken in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries C.E.
Eleanor Dickey has done a great deal of work on these, including the critical edition of the manuscripts (if you want to spend that much), but some popular textbook level materials as well.