Remarks on the transformation of tum into tunc before a guttural consonant

Courtney, Edward

Firenze University Press: E-Journals

TUM Al.lD TUNC
An editor of a text is gripped in a vice; he has to plump for some reading
which he will print in his text, and his ability to equivocate extends no farther
than adding afort. recte to some other reading in his critical apparatus. When
the text is in Latin the editor often has to choose between variants tum and
tunc.Whichever he opts for, the world will go on its way without noticing
any momentous impact;but I hope to show that this seemingly insignificant
matter actually implies some methodological questions of wide import, and
that if the editor thinks seriously about it he will learn lessons which he can
apply in more momentous circumstances.
I might take any number of starting points, but I shall choose two quota-
tions from A. Perutelli's commentary on Valerius Flaccus VII (Florence
1997): p. 20 "Courtney... sostiene che di fronte alle parole che iniziano con
c-, QU- e g- va sempre restituita la forma tum, anche quando è nadito tunc.
Tuttavia a 7.369 e 570 non muta nell'edizione il testo tradito. Su questo
punto mi sono gia pronunciato altrove (n.4. Nel mio commento al Moretwn,
Pisa 1983, 126) per la conservazione di tunc in casi siffatti".
p. 342 on 369: "Courtney, praef. xlix, ritiene che in tutti i casi in cui la
tradizione riporta tunc davantr a gutturale sia di correggere in twn ('qaae om-
niain îum corrigenda censeo'). Di fatto però corregge nel testo solo a 1.4O2,
dove C, distinguendosi dal resto della tradizione, dà turn.La scelta dell'edito-
re non sembra coerente, anche perché la sua edizione e inficiata da una pes-
sima considemzione del valore di C...".
Against this let us set the remarks of Housman (ed. Juvenal, praef. xxi
note; Perutelli refers to this in the note which I have abbreviated): "The better
the manuscripts we possess of any Latin author, the seldomer do we find
tuncbefore a guttural; in Virgil the authority for tum is overwhelming. And
we know that scribes, when a guttural followed, would change tumto tunc;
for in Lucr. 1 . 130 we frnd tunc cum primis and in Val. Ft. I .4O2 tunc caela-
ta, where the authors must have written tum,because tunc is excluded by the
sense".
Contrast this pronouncement with those of Perutelli, and you will observe
that a new factor has been introduced, namely that prima facie evidence,
which Perutelli simply accepts as it stands, has been subjected to testing by
rational criteria. Lachmann's note on the passage of Lucretius referred to
runs thus: "Twtc ante consonantem contra poetarum antiquiorum usum uter-
que codex praeter hunc locum bis, in Itr 710 tunc periit, in VI 250 îunc per;
quadratus solus Tunc porroI426 etTunc vigilare fV 455... Sed in hoc versu
Antonius Marii maiorem linguae Latinae peritiam exhibuit quam
Wakefieldus..., scripsit enim ille ideo TUM, quia praecessit cum...".
236 E. COURTNEY
From all this three questions arise:
!)Do poetae antiquiores (in Lachmann's somewhat evasive phrase) place
tuncbeforcconsonants in general and gutturals in particular?
2)Is cum,. tunc correctlatin for "both... and"?
3) Can tuncbe used to mean "in addition, besides" (OLD s.v.8d, quoting
instances from Seneca and Apuleius)?
We should start consideration of the first part of question (1) on the basis
of the text of Vergil, for which we have manuscripts dating from the ancient
world. Vergil vses tunc rarely and only before vowels except at Aen. 8.566
tunc tarnen, so read in the capital manuscripts MPR; since each of these on
occasion can be found to corrupt tum to tunc, it does not seem unreasonable
to suppose that here they have united in this comrption, and that we should
rcad tum with the respectable Carolingian manuscript b, as Ribbeck does.
While there are not lacking cases in which scribes have demonstrably altered
tunc to tum (e.g.P atAen.8.423, remarked by Housman on Lucan I.490),
the tide runs strongly in the opposite direction. This can be illusfrated by two
observations.
Salanitro, "Sileno" 16,1990,313 remarks that in the Vergilian centos pre-
served in the codex Salmasianus of the 'Latin Anthology' (nos.7-18 Riese),
in every case tunc appears in the initial position of the line where Vergil had
had tum. He does not list 17.2.16, where the Salmasianus offers dum in
place of Vergil's (Aen.5.866) tumi even if it is right to restore fzrn, this does
not weaken but in fact strengthens the point, since this cento, the Medea of
Hosidius Geta, is much earlier (late second century A.D.) than the other
dateable centos. He might also have remarked that in the interior of the line
the rum of Aen. 12.444 is altered to tunc at Il.l22,bat turn is maintained at
10.6 and 15.28, and even introduced at 16.58 in adaptation of Aen.6.6ll.
Salanitro reaches the conclusion that tunc in initial position should be
regarded as a scribal error and that tum should be restored throughout. My
conclusion would be different, namely that the composers have, consciously
or unconsciously, adopted the speech habits of their time, in which tum had
become or was becoming obsolete, as will be shown below.
The second observation relates to Nonius Marcellus. In the part of
Lachmann's note which I have not quoted, Lachmann (besides Caesar BG
6.32.5, where tum is now known to have better authority) notes Nonius'
quotation of Cic. De off. 1.123 as a prima facie exception to his dictum about
cum... tunc. There Nonius has tunc as opposed to the vastly predominant
authority for tum in the manuscripts of Cicero. If we now look at Nonius'
quotations from Vergil, we find that in 11 cases (on my count) he substitutes
tunc aganst the consensus of the primary manuscripts of Vergil (in two of
these instances, Georg. 1.388 and Aen. 11.775, before c); similar instances
TUM AND TUNC 237
can be found in the lemmata and quotations of Servius (e.9. at Aen. 6.573,
also in Anth. Lat. 16.55 withtunc).
In the light of this established tendency to replace tum with tunc we can
now, postponing the second part of question (l), turn to question (2). The
passage of Lucretius runs thus:I.Izt Enpropter bene cwn superts de rebus lnbendn
nobis est ratio...
130 ......... tunc curn prirnis ratione sagaci
unde animn atEte anirni constet natura uidendutn
What is at stake here is the difference between tumc- andtuncc-. The final
quotation in Lachmann's note is of Juv. 9.L18-20, where in my opinion
Housman was right to restore the text thus:
uiuendurn recte, cu.m propter plurimq twn est his
li.dcirco ut possis linguam contemnere seruif
praecipue causis, ut linguas mancipiorurn / contetnnas.
For discussion of the complex problems of this passage I must refer to my
commentary (London 1980); here I will just remark that R.G.M. Nisbet,
Collected Papers on Latin Literature (Oxford L995) 287 = "ICS" 14,1989,
298 calls tum est lris a "questionable elision". This it would be if it were an
elision, but it is not; it is an aphaeresis, in which what is discounted is not
t(um)but (e)st, and aphaeresis is permitted by Roman poets where elision is
not (see e.g. our note in the Teubner text of Ovid's Fasti on 4.456).In sum,
the basis for believingin cum... tunc "both... and" is wholly inadequate.
The passage of Valerius Flaccus referred to by Housman raises both
question (3) and the second part of question (1); it runs thus:
tmc NSL; tutnc) caelntametus alios gerit arma Eribotes,
where the first word must mean "next, moreover". To deal with question (3)
first, there is reasonable, though not abundant, evidence for tunc used in
enumeration s after primum etc., and in fact there is an instance of this in the
palimpsest of Cicero, De Rep. 2.15-16, altered by editors to tum. Tunc on lts
own, meaning "in addition, besides", I cannot exemplify from any antique
manuscript; I cannot deny the usage, but think that we should reserve judg-
ment on it. I should like to repeat from my note on Juvenal l.c. a warning
against the indiscriminate and uncritical collections of J. Svennung, Untersu-
chungen zu Palladius (Uppsala 1935) 4I3 sqq., a waming made more neces-
sary by the undeserved compliment paid by Clausen on Persius 1.9; I shall
point out the fallibility of this work in some cases. He adduces the testimony
of grammarians who make the distinction 'tunc' ternporis adverbium est,
'tum' ordims,' what they mean becomes clear from Servius on Aen. 5.513:
TVM. deinde. et est aduerbiurn ordinis: nam 'tunc' temports est; i.e. tum is
alleged to mean "then" in the sense "next", tunc inthe sense "at that time".
238 E. COURTNEY
As for tunc before gutturals, Svennung 408-10 provides a list of occru-
rences which is over-optimistic in detail; for instance, Cassius Hemina fr. 44
comes from Nonius, whose unreliability in this matter has already been
documented. Out of his instances only Plaut. Persa 730 comes from an an-
tique manuscript, and even without deductions his list is meagre indeed. The
avoidance of tunc in this position can be confirmed, as I pointed out in my
Musa l^apidaria (Atlanta 1995) in my note on my 199A.A35, from inscrip-
tions. The concordances now available for CLE show that in pre-Christian
verse inscripions there are only two cases of tunc in this situation as against
sixof tum (not counting one or two dubious instances); similarly the index to
CIL VI shows only 10234 (= ILS 7213; belonging to A.D. 153).21 tunc
qaaestores against four cases of tum.
It follows that in Valerius Flaccus we have two independent and weighty
reasons for suspecting tunc, and when, as in Lucretius 1.e., what is at stake
is the difference betweeî turnc- and tuncc-, and we now know that C, al-
though it is still a thoroughly unreliable source, belonged to the twelfth cen-
tury (Ehlers in Ratis omnia vincet. ed. M. Korn- H.J. Tschiedel, Hildesheim
1.99I,29), how can one argue against the adoption of tum, which is accepted
by G. Libermann in his Budé text?
But now it is time to put the avoidance of tunc before gutturals in a wider
linguistic context. First, it is well-known that, as languages grow older,
unobtrusive words tend to lose their impact and to be replaced by weightier
(i.e. longer) or more forceful synonyms, and that this happens particularly in
the spoken vernacular; one might instance the replacementof utby quomodo
and quemadmodurn, which live on as French "comme" and Italian .,come",
whereas utleaves only very faint traces in the Romance languages. on these
línes tum was driven out by tunc (i.e. tum-ce, with a demonstrative suffix);
svennung 417 points out that the vulgate always uses tunc,nottum (as do
the Peregrtnafio Aethertae and other works; Hofmann-szantyr, Lateinische
syntax und stilistik 520). However, his point that tumleaves no Romance
descendants is not quite fair since, as he is aware, surviving traces of tunc
Íne sparse indeed (see w. Meyer-Liibke, Romanisches etymologisches
wòrterbuch, ed. 3, Heidetberg 1935 s.v., though oddly he does not mention
Rumanian "atonci" = ad tunc, for which see svennung 352; this word is
known to me from Hofmann, "Ph'W' 59,1939,1224).
The consequent tendency to replace tumby tunc canbe illustrated from
ancient manuscripts in other traditions besides that of vergil. For example, at
Lucan 5.192 the fourth-century Naples fragment reads tum maestus, whereas
the mass of the medieval manuscripts has tunc. At Sen. Med.2rg the fifth-
century Ambrosian palimpsest and the medieval A-family have tum meos,
whereas the eleventh-century codex Etruscus has tunc; I think it uncritical
TUM AND TUNC 239
here to follow this generally more reliable source' as Zwierlein does (the
contrasted nunc in219 makes no more difference than at Lucr' 3.710). It is
fair to draw attention to Verg. Georg.2.317 tum clauditP, tunc MR; from
this too we should draw a lesson, that the last thing for which one should
look in scribes is consistencY.
Secondly, we can document in other forms an aversion to the collision of
two gutturals over word-boundary in such words. For the avoidance of sic-
qu",1on"que, hincque in Golden Latin see Kùhner- Stegmann, I-ateinische
Gro**oik,n Satzlehre 2.l3.Inthe light of this it is impossible to believe in
the transmitted tuncque at Manil. 3.481 (especially in view of tunque at
1.75), though such combinations make their way into silver Latin. There is
also a (less sftong) distike of ac before a guttural (KS 2.15-16; in Lucretius,
who avoids this at 2.272 by similest ut cum instead of the usual ac, only
6.440); yeafs ago my former student Dr Bruce Hedin established for me by
electronic means that there are 15 transmitted instances before c in Cicero
(which is no encouragement to introduce another by conjecture at De ftn.
5.50). This too becomes less pronounced in Silver Latin.
Where does that leave us? As I see it, here:
(a) curn... tunc'both... and" is a solecism.
(b) tunc before gutturals is not absolutely excluded, particularly in post-Au-
gustan authors, though many instances, which we cannot individually iden-
tify, must according to all the odds be corruptions of tum. Editors in most
cases will have to content themselves with voicing general suspicion of tunc
but not altering the text; that will explain the 'inconsistency' in my procedure
which so perplexes Perutelli. I did feel (see my note on Val. Fl. 6.564) that
an occrurence of the combination tum quoque atS.26justified alteration of
two occurrences of tunc quoque, just as tum quoque at Manil. 1.346 justifies
alteration of tunc quoque at 5.611. In earlier writers suspicion must be
heavier still. In the Teubner text of Ovid's Fasti p. xvi I drew up a summary
of the spellings tum and tunc; of the three examples found unanimously
transmitted of tunc before c, all come after the best manuscript terminates,
and one of them is in a couplet deleted (rightly, in our opinion) by Bentley.
Given the choice between variants, the prudent editor willptefet twn.
(c) tunc before other consonants is not in itself objectionable, but each
author's usage has to be examined. In Lucretius I would agree with Lach-
mann and Munro against Bailey that two instances cannot be credited against
manifold cases of tum (when Bailey calls this "arbitrary", what that means is
'I have not felt it necessary to evaluate the facts'). Again I will remark that in
Svennung's list (408-10) Accius 256 comes from two quotations in Nonius,
one of which in any case offers dum' Hete too, given a choice, it would
seem prudent to prefer tum. The best editors generally do this in six such
244 E. COURTNEY
cases in Horace. At Epode 17.I7 tunc mens is unanimously transmitted, and
has no parallel in Horace; I pose the question, without answering it, whether
we should readtum.
(d) Can tunc oÍr its own mean "moreover" in classical writers? Instances
quoted are so few that I would certainly follow Housman in altering Manil.
2.213 and (with somewhat less certainty) Pincianus in altering Sen. Ep.
1 15.3, while sparin g tunc at Apul. Met. 6.4.
I began by stating that the point of this article was to be methodological;
what lessons have we learned? First, that prima facie evidence should not be
swallowed without question, but each item needs to be scrutinised carefully
and sorted into its proper class. Second, when we have amassed the data
which have passed scrutiny, we will not.at once rush to our conclusion, but
will evaluate the validity of those data against rational criteria both internal
and external to them. Finally we will ensure that we are not pushing every-
thing into a straight-jacket, but are making proper allowance for exceptions
for which there is motivation; I hope that the results of this particular en-
quiry, as listed above, show a reasonable degree of leeway. We classical
scholars have the paradoxical advantage that our evidence is often lacunose
and/or unreliable in some respect. We therefore have the privilege of exer-
cising our brains in weighing up one side of a controversial matter against
another and applying judgment in striking a balance of probabilities. Why
would we want to abandon this exhilarating intellectual exercise? Let us leam
to enjoy living on the edge and to be happy in a sceptical life; after all, would
not our politicians pay dearly to have us accept without question everything
we are told?
As an appendix to this discussion I shall add another to illusftate a similar
methodology on another subject. Perutelli (on 7.186) is at a loss to think
why I should adopt the accusative formlrin there when the manuscripts have
Irirn; in fact in such cases the Vatican manuscript usually presents -n. lJn-
doubtedly the practice of different poets differs in such cases (Housman,
Collected Papers 823), but metre often gives us the sort of external test
which we need. In the case of Valerius, where metre permits a decision about
the form of the accusative of Greek proper nouns in -ls and -y.î, we find sev-
en instances in which -in and -yn are required to be scanned short before a
following vowel (L.I24,2.739,3.152, 157, 158 [this one slightly doubt-
full, 5.15, 6.65). And how often does the metre require -írn or -ym? Never!
Now look at Svennung's off-the-point rhetorical question (a15): "Dúrfen wir
also nur solchen sprachlichen Erscheinungen Glauben beimessen, die durch
das Metrum gesichert sind?". Those are the words of a scholar looking a gift-
horse in the mouth.
Charlottesville, Virginia (USA) E. COURTNEY


Tum and tunc

http://www.fupress.net/index.php/prometheus/article/download/14412/13411

Tum and tunc

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Firenze University Press: E-Journals