Z 2776
1. The Triopian inscription to which Leopardi alludes (2, 14; see Visconti, Iscrizioni greche Triopee, pp. 32–33), is transcribed on Z 2791.
Z 2777
1. Scapula, Lexicon, p. 319, where we find Eustathius’s account of the formation of this verb, which is just as Leopardi gives it.
2. See Cicero, De divinatione 1, 8, 13. Cicero entitled the second part of the Phenomena of Aratus, which he had translated, Prognostica.
Z 2779
1. That is, addition.
2. This treatise, attributed to Ammonius Grammaticus, is in reality a Byzantine extract from a treatise on synonyms by Herennius Philo of Byblus (c. 64–141 CE). The work was published at the back of Tusanus and Scapula’s lexicons. The following references were in fact in Scapula, as well as the ones above.
Z 2780
1. That is, according to Pacella, Jacopo Facciolati, Compendiaria Graecae grammatices institutio in usum Seminarii Patavini, Padua 1746, which however is not to be found in the LL.
Z 2786
1. On the derivation of apto see the comment by Timpanaro cited on Z 1121, note 1.
2. Today it is regarded as proparoxytone.
3. For these passages see Z 2790–91, where Leopardi goes on to reject the definition of appellative for the word. See Visconti, Iscrizioni greche Triopee, p. 81.
Z 2787
1. As may be deduced from these words, Leopardi no longer had Visconti’s Iscrizioni greche Triopee to hand, though he had translated them in 1816. The precise spelling now escaped him, and he was not able to verify Visconti’s solution, namely, ἅρπυιαι, but he plainly recalled the fact that the facsimile of the stone published at the end of the edition featured no accents at all (Pacella). Cf. Z 2787 and 2791.
2. Cf. Visconti, Iscrizioni greche Triopee, p. 61, who reproduces in a note, and wholly endorses, a remark on this problem by Philippe Brunck.
Z 2788
1. See Visconti, Iscrizioni greche Triopee, p. 81.
2. Leopardi here endorses Visconti’s hypothesis, which is still accepted today (Pacella). On this whole question, see Pacella and Timpanaro in Scritti filologici, pp. 547–49.
Z 2789
1. The first of these two lines is transcribed on Z 2791. Both are cited by Seber in his Index.
2. Leopardi is here stressing the linguistic connection between raptim (1. violently, greedily, rapaciously, etc.; 2. hastily, speedily, etc.) and rapio (to seize, carry off, snatch, etc.).
Z 2790
1. See Virgil, Aeneid 1, 316–17.
Z 2791
1. Theogony 265–69. There is no copy of the Theogony in the LL, and it is unclear where this citation came from (only l. 267 is in Tusanus). Leopardi had translated and published in 1817 ll. 664–723a of the poem with the title “Titanomachia di Esiodo”; we also know that he cited in Greek ll. 142–44 as early as 1815.
2. By Latin poets Leopardi here means those of the Augustan age.
3. Monti, Proposta, vol. 3, part 1, p. 32, who cites Dante, Purgatorio, 7, 74 and Paradiso, 2, 32, recalling Homer, Iliad, 16, 801–802.
4. Odyssey 1, 96–98 may be found in an almost identical form in Iliad 24, 340–42, and in Odyssey 5, 44–46.
5. See Z 2775.
6. This and the preceding quotation are from the Odyssey. Leopardi gives the references to the books in Greek.
Z 2792
1. Scapula, Lexicon, p. 192. There follows a marginal addition, with a reference to Lucian dating to January 1824.
Z 2793
1. See Choricius of Gaza, Orationes 4, 18 in Opera, eds. R. Förster and E. Richsteig, Leipzig: Teubner, 1972, p. 74. Choricius was the panegyrist of Summus, who commanded the troops in Palestine in 531–32 CE, and again 537–38 (see A.H.M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris, eds., Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1971–1992, vol. 2, s.v. “Summus,” pp. 1038–39).
Z 2795
1. The importance of this thought, revisited and further elaborated on Z 2827ff., 3024ff., and 4026ff., has been brought out by Timpanaro, La filologia, pp. 77–78 and note 51 (B11).
2. See Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, vol. 4, pp. 119ff. and 215ff.
Z 2796
1. Choricius of Gaza, Orationes 8, 42–44, in Opera, eds. Förster and Richsteig, Leipzig: Teubner, 1972, p. 125.
Z 2799
1. As Leopardi explains in what follows, he is here quoting from a text by an unknown writer usually entitled the Dissoi logoi and ordinarily positioned after the works of Sextus Empiricus. Fabricius, however, called them the Disputationes antiscepticae and published them in vol. 12 of the Bibliotheca Graeca, bk. 6, ch. 7, pp. 617–35, together with a Latin version by John North.
Z 2801
1. Leopardi alludes here to a well-known precept of Stoic ethics (cf., for example, Epictetus’s Handbook 1). Leopardi’s attitude to Stoic ethics is ambivalent: sometimes he is fascinated, other times critical, as in this paragraph. In 1825 he translates Epictetus’s Handbook in which the arguments under discussion here are maintained. See also Z 316–17.
Z 2804
1. See Z 262 and note 2, 531–32.
2. This reference to Barthélemy’s Travels of Anacharsis (in the Italian translation, Viaggio d’Anacarsi, vol. 10, pp. 106ff.) is a marginal addition.
Z 2809
1. See also Z 3310–12.
Z 2810
1. Leopardi refers here to the anthology in two volumes entitled Raccolta di prose e poesie a uso delle regie scuole. Of the other two anthologies cited below—where the same letter is printed—the first is still in Recanati, the second is now missing.
2. G. Roscoe, Vita di Lorenzo de’ Medici detto il Magnifico, translated by G. Mecherini, Pisa 1816, tome 3, p. 165.
Z 2811
1. Homer, Iliad 9, 433 and 11, 557; Plutarch, Moralia 231f (both cited by Scapula).
2. This quotation from Fabricius is in Latin. In his interpolation Leopardi refers to a lexicon of the second century CE by Aelius Moeris (the Atticist), Lexicon Atticum, ed. J. Pierson, Leiden 1759.
Z 2812
1. See Lucretius, De rerum natura 5, 1071.
Z 2813
1. The affinities between Greek and Italian are “none too reliable where etymology is concerned” (Timpanaro, La filologia, p. 59 [B11]). In the ms. there follows an addition.
Z 2814
1. The material in Leopardi’s note is a later marginal ms. addition.
Z 2818
1. The passage from “Save in the case” is a marginal ms. addition.
Z 2819
1. Cicero, Brutus 310.
Z 2821
1. Forcellini is in fact citing Silius Italicus, Punica 5, 191–92 (Pacella).
2. Festus, De verborum significatione, p. CIX.
Z 2824
1. An example of etymology “by ear” (cf. Z 1121, note 1).
2. Leopardi reads Servius’s comment on Aeneid 5, 682 in Forcellini, as is clear from the following lines, added to the margin of the ms.
Z 2825
1. In this passage Falsterus observes that Fortunatianus had written this book but that it had disappeared from view.
Z 2826
1. The references to both the Etymologicon Magnum (cf. Z 2788), and to Eustathius originally derived from Scapula’s Lexicon.
2. Leopardi translates the Greek title of a collection of fragments edited by A. Moustoxydes and D. Schinas (Venice 1817, here p. 12), using the Grecism aneddoti, which is meant to stand for “unpublished.” The title in Greek is on Z 4240 and 4462. The Physiologus is not now attributed to Epiphanius.
Z 2828
1. See Z 2795 and note 1.
Z 2829
1. That is, literary exercises.
Z 2830
1. In Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem, a work that Leopardi did not own, there is a “Contrat passé entre le capitaine Dimitri et Monsieur de Chateaubriand,” Paris 1812, tome 2, note b, pp. 369–72, which, the author observes, has been “copied w
ith the clumsy spelling mistakes, wrong accents, and barbarisms of the original” (Pacella).
Z 2832
1. Leopardi had read the passages in Montesquieu’s Essai sur le goût on the pleasures of “surprise” and of “contrasts” (Damiani). Many traces of his reading of this work are to be found from Z 51 (1819) until August 1820.
Z 2835
1. This passage from Plautus, Casina 347, is corrupt and various attempts have been made to emend it. Forcellini read “emptitem titivillitio”; both Lindsay and McCary/Willcock read “empsim tittibilicio” (Pacella).
Z 2837
1. The sentence that follows and the internal reference are an unattached marginal addition.
Z 2839
1. As was said on Z 2682, nonchalance “conceals art” and gives a text the appearance of being “done without labor, and almost without thinking about it.”
Z 2840
1. See Z 1526 and note 2.
Z 2842
1. Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina 8, 3, l. 167. In fact this hymn is titled In nomine Domini nostri Iesu Christi et dominae Mariae matris eius de virginitate (ed. Reydellet).
2. Johannes de Janua’s lexicon, the Catholicon, is cited by Du Cange.
Z 2843
1. See Monti, Proposta, loc. cit., p. 249.
Z 2845
1. The implied subject here is Madame de Staël. Compare the passages from De l’Allemagne cited and discussed on Z 1948ff. and 2079ff.
Z 2851
1. The metaphor of “wax” (signifying here the “material form” of the language, as opposed to its “spirit”) significantly recurs in Wordsworth (with biblical undertones) in a Leopardian context: “Call ye these appearances— / Which I beheld of shepherds in my youth, / This sanctity of Nature given to man— / A shadow, a delusion, ye who are fed / By the dead letter, not the spirit of things; / Whose truth is not a motion or a shape, / Instinct with vital functions, but a block / Or waxen image which yourselves have made, / And ye adore.” (Prelude 8, 428–36, editors’ emphasis.) See D’Intino, “Il poeta e la tecnica,” pp. 274–78 (B12).
Z 2852
1. The ancient Greek version of the Bible, attributed by legend to seventy translators, was completed around the beginning of the second century CE.
Z 2856
1. Cf. Staël, De l’Allemagne, part 1, ch. 9 (a passage cited in part on Z 1851).
Z 2861
1. The word was coined by Robert Barker (1787–1788) to describe his circular paintings of Edinburgh and London displaying the whole of the landscape. According to Dolf Sternberger, Panorama of the Nineteenth Century (1938), trans. J. Neugroschel, New York: Urizen Books, 1977, the combination of real objects and painted surfaces of the “panorama,” and its scheme of continuous dramatic detail, questioned the relation of nature to artifice and the organic coherence of experience.
Z 2862
1. This thought was prompted by the cooling of relations with Carlo after the journey to Rome.
Z 2865
1. Lirici antichi serj e giocosi fino al secolo 16, Venice 1784, pp. 28 and 31. Leopardi takes these two quotations from a filing card, one of the very few such to have survived (see Peruzzi, vol. 10, pp. 537–38 [B1]).
2. Le rime d’Angelo di Costanzo, Venice 1759, p. 47.
Z 2866
1. In the margin an example is added from the second discourse “De precatione,” attributed to John Chrysostom and read by Leopardi in July 1823 (see Sanctorum Patrum Basilii Magni … et Jo. Chrysostomi … Homiliae selectae, Padua 1687 [= LL], p. 113), and a second example taken from Ast’s edition of Plato, Republic 340d.
Z 2875
1. See Z 75 and note.
Z 2877
1. Macrobius, Saturnalia 6, 5 (ed. von Jan): “Multa quoque epitheta apud Vergilium sunt, quae ab ipso ficta creduntur, sed et haec a veteribus tracta mostrabo” [“Also many epithets are to be found in Virgil, which were thought to have been invented by him, but I will show that these too are drawn from old writers”].
Z 2878
1. Most of the quotations have been identified by Pacella (vol. 3, pp. 811–12).
Z 2880
1. The Greek text of Dionysius comes from Pietro Giordani’s Letter to Giambattista Canova on Mai’s edition of Dionysius cited on Z 2881, pp. 25–26. The translation is given on the following page of the ms.
2. Corticelli, Regole, pp. 162 and 149 (cf. Z 2069); Buommattei, Della lingua toscana, p. 218.
Z 2881
1. See Z 2880 and note 1.
Z 2882
1. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae 23, 4, 11. See also Z 2137.
2. Festus, De verborum significatione, p. XXIII.
3. Cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei 22, 24; De doctrina christiana 1, 14; De trinitate 4, 2.
Z 2883
1. Compare the unfolding of one of the central motifs in Goethe’s Faust (cited on Z 4479), and in particular the scene in which Faust dies (and is compelled according to the terms of his agreement to yield his own soul to Mephistopheles) precisely because he wishes to stop time at a moment of absolute satisfaction: “Then to the moment I might say: / Beautiful moment, do not pass away!” (ll. 11581–82). To which Mephistopheles replies: “Poor fool! Unpleasured and unsatisfied, / Still whoring after changeful fantasies” (ll. 11588–89, trans. David Luke, London 2005). But see also what Faust says at ll. 11433–52. On Leopardi’s knowledge of Faust, see Z 4479 and note 2.
Z 2885
1. The “canzone d’amore” of Girolamo Benivieni may now be read, with commentary, in G. Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, ed. Eugenio Garin, Florence: Vallecchi, 1942, pp. 443–581 (Damiani). The LL had the Venetian ed. of Benivieni’s Opere.
Z 2886
1. Pliny, Natural History, 11, 54, and 57.
2. Perticari, Degli scrittori del Trecento, p. 143; “P. Giordani a V. Monti,” in Monti, Proposta, vol. 1, part 2, pp. 256–58.
Z 2887
1. Servius on Aeneid 4, 482 and 11, 202.
Z 2890
1. Despite the use of this formula, Leopardi had not previously concerned himself with this Homeric periphrasis. Leopardi writes ἧμαρ with a rough breathing.
Z 2892
1. This sentence is a later addition, which explains the forward references.
Z 2896
1. The pioneering work in Europe on the education of those who had no or limited speech and hearing was Cours d’instruction d’un sourd-muet de naissance, Paris 1799–1800. Roch-Ambroise Sicard’s book was reviewed in the Antologia by Matteo Marcacci in a long survey of the literature published in five parts between 1823 and 1829. See also ibid., tome 11, July 1823, pp. 30–41. See Z 1569 and note.
2. Dante, Paradiso 26, 130.
Z 2897
1. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (in Oeuvres, vol. 3, p. 147): “… and if we consider the inconceivable troubles and the infinite time that the first invention of Languages must have cost … then we can judge how many thousands of centuries it must have taken, to develop successively in the human Spirit the Operations, of which it was capable.”
Z 2900
1. Leopardi’s critique of anthropocentrism (see Z 84 and note 1) adapts a key notion in pre-Darwinian life sciences, that of Scala Naturae (“the scale of nature”) which originated from Aristotle’s classification of living beings: it pictured beings in a progressive order of perfection, starting with inanimate minerals and rising to plants, animals, and humans. The theory was widespread in the eighteenth century (see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1936). Leopardi places at the top of the scale not man, but living beings occupying “the midpoint in organization, sensitivity, and conformability” (see the premises and the first emergence of this idea on Z 56 and 418), a model which recalls his preference for a “middling civilization” (Z 404 and note) and a “half-philosophy” (Z 520 and note). One might observe that the structure of this scale resembles that of the “wheel of fortune,” a symbol originating
within agrarian cultures, where the ascending movement from right to left reverts at the top into a descending movement (see Giorgio Stabile, “Ruota della fortuna: tempo ciclico e ricorso storico,” in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura, Florence: Olschki, 1982, pp. 477–503).
Z 2902
1. See Z 1452–53 and note.
Z 2903
1. Fronto, Ad Antoninum de orationibus, bk. 2, fr. 3 (Opera inedita, ed. Mai, 1815), that is Epistulae … de eloquentia 4 (ed. Van den Hout, p. 148).
Z 2904
1. Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum 70, 1.
Z 2905
1. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 9, 21.
2. This note of gaiety seems to be an exception in modern music: cf. Z 3310–12.
3. In a letter in French to the Belgian André Jacopssen, written on 23 June and therefore just two weeks before this thought, Leopardi had confessed that his life was “plus fade et plus insipide que les parole de notre Opéra” [“more drab and more insipid than the parole {words} of our Opera”] (Epistolario, p. 725).
Z 2906
1. In the Preface to Esther, Racine claimed to have at last succeeded in “linking, as in ancient Greek tragedies, chorus and song with the action, and employing to sing the praises of the true God that part of the chorus which pagans employed to sing the praises of their false gods” (Oeuvres complètes, ed. G. Forestier, Paris: Gallimard, 1999, vol. 1, p. 946) (Damiani).
Z 2910
1. The references to the Age of Louis XIV are added to the ms. margin.
Z 2911
1. The “poeticity” of ancient Hebrew, contrasted with modern European languages, was a prevalent concern in the period; cf. J. G. Herder’s Vom Geist der Hebräischen Poesie (1782–783), which identifies the ancient Hebrews as a “Poetical nation,” due, in part, to “the spirit of the language.”
Z 2913
1. A point made by Staël. Cf. Z 1948.
Z 2914
1. The two following sentences are added to the margin of the ms.
Z 2917
1. See Z 3472–77 and note 1 to Z 3473.
Z 2920
1. See Plato, Symposium 185d.
2. That is, Gregory of Corinth, De dialectis, printed by Tusanus at the back of his Lexicon, fol. e3r. The example is from Phaedrus 230d.
3. Plato, Sophist 252e. Leopardi translates only the last part of the sentence. There follows a marginal addition, with references to Plato, Sophist 254b, 256b, 261d, 252e, and to Petau’s edition of Synesius of Cyrene, Opera, Paris 1612.
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