My colleague, Professor W. M. Lindsay, invites, or challenges, me to reply to his note on ‘Ciris’ ; I can but take him at his word.Professor Lindsay seeks to identify the two birds Haliaetus and Ciris, and finds the task an easy one; he identifies Ciris with a Tern confidently and categorically. We learn ‘from Gallus' epyllium … that it was a sea-bird with red legs, so rapid in flight that it always evaded the swoop of the (...) sea-eagle. What can this be but a tern?’. (shrink)

It is argued in this note that the word quattuor in line 15 of the “Ciris” should be emended to quatenus. A possible cause of error is also suggested.

As the narrator of the Ciris prepares to describe Cupid's attack on Scylla, daughter of Nisus, he offers a concise aretalogy of this powerful god : sed malus ille puer, quem nec sua flectere materiratum potuit, quem nec pater atque auus idemIuppiter,idem tum tristis acuebat paruulus irasIunonis magnae...

The paper proposes to restore Ciris 471-2 hinc uenus illi | sunius by accepting Heyne’s Sunion for sunius and changing uenus to simul.

Carme fears that Scylla is in love with her own father ; Scylla replies that she loves no one she should love, but one of the besiegers—though she can hardly bring herself to utter his name : nil amat hic animus, nutrix, quod oportet amari,in quo falsa tamen lateat pietatis imago,sed media ex acie, mediis ex hostibus—eheu,quid dicam quoue aegra malum hoc exordiar ore? 265dicam equidem, quoniam tu nunc non dicere, nutrix,non sinis: extremum hoc munus morientis habeto.265 aegra Baehrens: agam (...) Z: ipsa ρ: ausa Sillig. (shrink)

This note offers a new emendation in the Ciris. The author suggests that the text of line 118 should read: deicere et indomita Minoa retundere mente.

Scylla's nurse Carme has just learned that Scylla is in love with Minos, who in turn was once in love with Carme's daughter Britomartis and chased her to death. Carme opens her speech with an address to Minos.

The most popular emendation has been Heinsius's somnia sunt. I find the tone of this misplaced. Thepoet has since 66 laboriously catalogued variant aetiologies of Scylla monstrum. It is inappropriate that he should immediately follow this with the statement that all of them were ‘fancy’ or ‘nonsense’. For a start, we may note that the summation quidquid et ut quisque … presumably includes the version of Homer, to whose authority the poet had appealed in the case of the erroneous contamination (...) of the two Scyllas. Next, I suppose that if Scylla monstrum had been the subject of his poem, the poet might have wanted to say that some of the versions were wrong—or at least of less good authority, or less attractive than others for one reason or another. But Scylla monstrum is not the subject of his poem. He confutes, because it is his concern, the contamination; the listing of the rest, variants in a story not his subject, issues largely from an ‘Alexandrian’ delight in such learned display. It calls for no estimation of their lightness or wrongness: neither relative to one another—and certainly not absolutely. (shrink)

Among other things, R. O. A. M. Lyne's recent edition and commentary of the Ciris has established the general method of composition followed by this pseudo-neoteric poet: he demonstrably lifted wholesale and applied to his own poem words, phrases, lines, and even entire sequences from the works of the neoterics and the poets of the following generation. Accordingly, one of the poem's chief attributes is that it serves as a means for recovering the general content, and at times the (...) actual wording, of earlier, more important poetry. This paper offers some additional areas in the Ciris where such influence may exist. I confine myself to Cinna and Calvus, whose poetry may justly be considered the missing two-thirds of the neoteric movement. (shrink)

Once we have accepted that theCirisstems from neither Virgil nor Gallus, but was written by a post-Virgilian poetaster, the obvious task for us is to try and formulate some more specific idea of the date of the poem. I think that it has been sufficiently proved that theCirisis not only post-Virgilian, but post-Ovidian in origin, including as it does unquestionable imitations of that author. But this, to date, is really as far as we have got. It is the purpose of (...) this paper to put forward the thesis that the author of theCirislived late enough to know and be influenced by Statius and other poets of the later first century A.D.Now of course any theory that theCirisknew and used Statius and other Silver poets is rendered highly unlikely if it can be maintained that Suetonius considered it, with the otherminora, a genuine Virgilian work. And so we are brought back again to the famous list in the DonatanLife:deinde Catalepton et Priapea et Epigrammata et Diras, item Cirim et Culicem, cum esset annorum XXVI. cuius materia talis est. pastor fatigatur aestu; cum sub arbore condormisset et serpens ad eum proreperet, e palude culex provolavit atque inter duo tempora aculeum fixit pastori. at ille continuo culicem contrivit et serpentem interemit ac sepulchrum culici statuit et distichon fecit. (shrink)

Poetic incompetence is often blamed for infelicities or incongruities which appear in the poems collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, and in many cases such censure is justified. However, in the passage which is the subject of this note, Ciris 297–300, it is possible to reinterpret the incongruity which critics have remarked: when the pertinent evidence from antiquity is adduced, the lines are revealed as a display of scientific and etymological doctrina.

Abstrak: Perkembangan yang sangat cepat dalam teknologi komunikasi digital telah mengubah pola-pola adaptasi manusia terhadap lingkungannya. Sudah saatnya filsafat merenungkan ciri manusia di era digital ini bukan sebagai homo sapiens, melainkan sebagai homo digitalis. Homo digitalis, berbeda dari sosok manusia pra-digital, mengalami perubahan tidak hanya dalam cara berkomunikasi, melainkan juga dalam cara merespons dunia dan menangkap kebenaran. Penulis memberi paparan fenomenologis yang kritis tentang kerumitan baru yang timbul akibat digitalisasi masyarakat. Dia berpendirian bahwa dampak revolusi digital bersifat ambivalen, yakni: membuka (...) kebebasan-kebebasan baru dalam komunikasi, tetapi sekaligus juga melepas kebebasan alamiah manusia dalam bentuk brutalitas dalam dunia digital. Sebuah rekomendasi dan kesimpulan diberikan di bagian akhir tulisan ini. Kata-kata kunci: Homo digitalis, kebenaran, digital state of nature, revolusi digital. Abstract: The fast development of digital communication technology has changed the pattern of human adaptation to their environment. Such shift has prompted philosophy to contemplate on the nature of humans in the time of digital era not as homo sapiens but as homo digitalis. Homo digitalis, being different from the figure of humans in the pre- digital world, has seen changes not only in the way of communication but also in the way of responding to the world and capturing the truth. The writer will discuss the new complexity arising from the digital society through the lens of critical phenomenology. He asserts that the impact of digital revolution is ambivalent in nature, i.e.: giving access to freedom in communication on one hand, but unleashing human natural freedom that has driven brutalities in the digital world on the other hand. A recommendation is offered and conclusion drawn at the end of this paper. Keywords: Homo digitalis, digital communication, truth, new freedom, digital revolution. (shrink)

The Kingdom of God is central to the whole message of Jesus Christ. Through the kingdom of God, we can discover and understand the entire mission of Jesus. The Kingdom of God is the embodiment of God’s saving presence in human life. Compared with the Jewish religious movements of that era, especially the apocalyptic movement, which also awaited the coming of the Kingdom of God, Jesus’ preaching about the kingdom of God has a special feature, that the Kingdom of God (...) is an act of forgiveness and salvation from God, and not God’s judgment; moreover, the action is happening now in people’s life, rather than being something that is expected in the future. Through Jesus, through his word and his work, God is now present in the midst of the people. Through his parables and his words in the Sermon on the Mount and in the act of casting out demons, in healing the sick and in the forgiveness of sin, Jesus reveals the presence of a compassionate God, a God who frees people from the power of sin and leades them in the power of divine grace. Jesus not only preached the kingdom of God but gave himself so that people would experience God’s saving work. Through His death on the cross, Jesus freely poured God’s mercy and goodness upon human beings. Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God has important implications for the understanding of the Christological and ecclesiological renewal. Keywords: Kingdom of God, salvation, forgiveness, word of Jesus, work of Jesus, human life, Christological and ecclesiological renewal. Abstrak: Kerajaan Allah merupakan inti seluruh pewartaan Yesus Kristus. Melalui Kerajaan Allah kita dapat menemukan dan mengerti seluruh perutusan hidup Yesus. Kerajaan Allah berarti perwujudan kehadiran Allah yang menyelamatkan dalam hidup manusia. Dibandingkan dengan gerakan keagamaan yahudi pada zaman itu, khususnya apokaliptik yang juga menantikan kedatangan Kerajaan Allah, pewartaan Yesus tentang Kerajaan Allah memiliki ciri khusus bahwa Kerajaan Allah adalah tindakan pengampunan dan penyelamatan Allah, bukan penghakiman Allah dan tindakan itu kini terjadi nyata dalam hidup manusia, dan bukannya sesuatu yang dinantikan di masa depan. Melalui diri Yesus, dalam sabda dan karya-Nya, Allah kini hadir di tengah-tengah umat-Nya. Lewat perumpamaan dan sabda bahagia maupun dalam tindakan pengusiran setan, penyembuhan orang sakit dan pengampunan orang berdosa, Yesus menyatakan kehadiran Allah yang penuh belas kasih dalam hidup manusia, yang membebaskannya dari kuasa dosa dan menuntunnya dalam kuasa rahmat Ilahi. Yesus tidak hanya memberitakan Kerajaan Allah tetapi juga memberikan diri-Nya, sehingga orang sungguh mengalami karya penyelamatan Allah. Melalui kematian-Nya di salib, Yesus mencurahkan dengan cuma-cuma kerahiman dan kebaikan Allah dalam hidup manusia. Pewartaan Kerajaan Allah Yesus ini memiliki dampak penting bagi pembaruan pemahaman kristologis dan eklesiologis. Kata-kata Kunci: Kerajaan Allah, penyelamatan, pengampunan, sabda Yesus, karya Yesus, kehidupan manusia, pembaruan pemahaman kristologis dan eklesiologis. (shrink)

The ancient evidence about the Culex is collected by Miss Jackson in her article in the Classical Quarterly . There seems no reason to doubt that Lucan said ‘et quantum mihi restat ad Culicem!’; and, whatever Lucan meant by it, Statius turned it into a compliment for the poet by making Calliope predict the various works he would produce ‘ante annos Culicis Maroniani’ . In the Neronian age, we may take it, it was not an obscure or conjectural matter, but (...) one of common knowledge or belief, that a certain known poem, the Culex, was the work of Virgil. About the other opuscula there is no evidence as early as that. The Aetna and Moretum are ascribed to him dubiously; the Ciris, Dirae, Epigrammata, Priapea, Catalepton are attributed to him with more confidence, but not so confidently as the Culex. It almost looks as if the belief in the Virgilian authorship spread from the Culex to certain other poems which were in some way or other connected with it. Here there is admittedly a great difficulty for those who are inclined to deny or to doubt that it is Virgil's. Are not the facts most easily explained by supposing that it was Virgil's ? At all events it is in various ways improbable that it was written, and produced as Virgil's, at some time between Virgil's death and the youth of Lucan. It is difficult to imagine who would have a motive for doing such a thing, or who could do it successfully. So it is incumbent upon the sceptic to produce some plausible view of what may have happened. (shrink)

There has been much discussion in recent years regarding the date and authorship of the poems included in the Appendix Vergiliana, and about the Civis and the Culex in particular. Evidence of very various kinds has been brought to bear on the question. My chief aim in this paper is to propound a criterion which as far as I know is new—though it seems to me a fairly conspicuous thing, and I do not know why it has not been investigated (...) —and to examine certain criteria which seem to me to have been treated quite wrongly—treated in a way which could lead to no conclusion—even by so distinguished a scholar as Norden. I propose in a second paper to examine the argument from diction, especially in regard to the Culex, and to try to show that the evidence adduced for Virgilian authorship by Miss Jackson is not so conclusive as it has been supposed to be; and, next, to point out certain features or mannerisms in the Culex which seem to me to be on the whole against authorship by Virgil. I have hardly any doubt that both the Ciris and the Culex were written before 44 B.C., and the Lydia and Dirae only two or three years later; but, while the evidence for the early date of some of the Vergiliana grows stronger on further examination, the evidence for Virgilian authorship seems to me to grow weaker, even in the case of the well-attested Culex. (shrink)

Belum begitu lama dua buah berita menggoncangkan dunia (astro-fisika). Yang pertama, CERN, Pusat penelitian atom di Geneva, yang dalam dua eksperimen berturut-turut menemukan bahwa neutrino (bagian mikro paling kecil) bergerak dengan kecepatan sedikit melampaui kecepatan cahaya. Yang kedua, pada minggu kedua Januari yang lalu pengamatan astronomis mutakhir menengarai bahwa dalam Bimasakti kita rata-rata setiap dari 10 milyar bintangnya mempunyai sekurang-kurangnya satu planet yang mirip dengan planet kita, bumi. Berita pertama begitu dahsyat sehingga para ahli fisika yang membuat eksperimen itu belum (...) mau mempercayainya, karena kalau amatan mereka betul, salah satu pilar fisika modern—teori relativitas khusus Einstein— runtuh. Sebuah revolusi baru dalam fisika. Salah satu implikasinya: kemungkinan menjalin komunikasi dengan extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI)—kalau ada—bertambah besar. Berita kedua lebih dahsyat lagi implikasinya. Sampai sekarang banyak astronom berpendapat bahwa probabilitas terjadinya planet dengan ciri-ciri seperti bumi adalah sedemikian kecil sehingga tidak mustahil kalau manusia merupakan satu-satunya makhluk berakal-budi di alam raya. Tetapi kalau di Bimasakti kita saja—satu di antara (diperkirakan) 1011 Bimasakti di seluruh alam raya—terdapat 10 milyar planet mirip bumi, adanya makhluk berakal budi di luar bumi (aliens) merupakan kemungkinan kuat. Dua penemuan ini mengangkat salah satu tantangan paling serius bagi teologi Kristiani: kalau ada makhluk berakal budi di tempat lain di alam raya, apa implikasinya bagi inti iman Kristiani, peristiwa Yesus Kristus? Apakah mereka juga perlu ditebus dari dosa? Dan kalau perlu, apakah karya penebusan Yesus juga berlaku bagi mereka? Kalau penyelamatan ilahi di planet-planet tidak berkaitan dengan Yesus Kristus, apa Yesus Kristus masih mempunyai relevansi universal dalam rencana penyelamatan ilahi? Pertanyaan-pertanyaan ini bukanlah pertanyaan iseng-iseng, melainkan menyangkut hakikat iman Kristiani. Persis masalah inilah yang dibahas oleh Armin Kreiner—guru besar teologi fundamental pada Fakultas Teologi Katolik Universitas München—dalam bukunya (yang, sayang, baru tersedia dalam bahasa Jerman). Buku ini membahas tantangan bagi teologi Kristiani andaikata ternyata selain manusia ada makhluk berakal budi lain di alam raya......................................... Apakah Kreiner berhasil menjawab pertanyaan-pertanyaan teologis berat yang diajukannya sendiri? Inti masalahnya adalah bagaimana dua keyakinan berikut dapat dipersatukan. Pertama, bahwa kalau ada ETI di alam raya, mereka tidak kurang dicintai oleh Allah dari pada manusia bumi dan karena itu inkarnasi ilahi tidak mungkin merupakan kejadian hanya di planet bumi. Kedua, bahwa dalam manusia Yesus Allah mewahyukan diri sendiri secara unik dengan makna penyelamatan universal. Dan hal itu perlu dijawab tanpa jatuh ke dalam pluralisme relativistik àla Knitter, Hick dan Schmidt-Leukel di mana Yesus hanyalah salah satu dari pewahyuan diri Allah yang pada hakikatnya semua sama derajatnya. Kiranya Kreiner berhasil merumuskan tantangan. Ia menunjukkan arah pemecahannya, tetapi ia belum memecahkannya. Bisa diteliti apakah pemecahan dapat dicari ke arah pemikiran baru tentang Pan-en-teisme sebagai pola yang lebih cocok untuk memahami hubungan antara Sang Pencipta dan ciptaan, sebagaimana akhir-akhir ini diangkat oleh beberapa teolog (Herderkorrespondenz Spezial 2-2011). Yang jelas, kemungkinan adanya aliens menghadapkan teologi Kristiani dengan tantangannya yang barangkali paling berat, yang sampai sekarang pernah dihadapinya. Sebagai catatan penutup, tetap benar bahwa probabilitas adanya ETI, melawan segala tulisan populer dan ilmiah (sampai sekarang), tetap minim! Probabilitas matematis bahwa di sebuah planet dengan kondisi-kondisi seperti bumi kita terjadi evolusi sampai ke kehidupan intelektual adalah kurang dari satu di antara 10100 (bdk. Erbrich, 1988, dll.). Kalaupun dalam setiap dari seluruh 1011 Bimasakti terdapat 10.000 planet mirip bumi, maka jumlah planet di alam raya yang kondisi-kondisinya mirip bumi adalah 1015. Jadi probabilitas adanya ETI tetap teramat rendah. Kemungkinan besar kita tidak pernah akan mengetahui apakah ada ETI. Selama itu pertimbangan-pertimbangan dramatis di atas bisa saja hanyalah sebuah permainan teologis, namun dengan daya tantang yang memang tinggi. (Franz Magnis-Suseno, Program Pascasarjana, Sekolah Tinggi Filsafat Driyarkara, Jakarta). (shrink)