Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Edoardo Bona, Carlos Lévy, Giuseppina Magnaldi (ed.), Vestigia notitiai: scritti in memoria di Michelangelo Giusta. Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 2012. Pp. xii, 549. ISBN 9788862743532. €70.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Simone Beta, Università di Siena (beta@unisi.it)

Version at BMCR home site

[The Table of Contents is listed below.]

Michelangelo Giusta (1921-2005) was Professor of Greek and Latin at the Liceo Classico di Mondovì for twenty years (1946-1966) and Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Turin for a quarter of a century (1966 to 1991); a few years after his death, his University, together with the Université Paris Sorbonne and with the contribution and support of many institutions such as the Societé Internationale des Amis de Cicéron, the municipality of Mondovì (in two different moments of his life, 1953-1957 and 1900-1994, Giusta was appointed mayor of this town, which lies about 80 km from Turin, the capital of the Piedmont region) and the Accademia delle Scienze of Turin, organized the conference Vestigia notitiai as a tribute to this colleague.

But the volume under review does not contain only the eight papers delivered during the conference, which was held in Turin on February 10^th, 2011: since more than forty colleagues and pupils of Giusta wished to dedicate a paper to their friend and teacher, the book is a perfect witness of the "partnership of passion" that binds those who dedicate their lives to the study of classics.

Since the topics dealt with in the almost fifty papers are many and extremely multifarious, this review cannot be other than a short summary of its main themes; the index (copied at the end of the review) will let the readers to get an idea of the contents of the book.

Each of the volume's two sections (the conference papers and the essays from students and colleagues) is divided in two parts, philosophy and philology, in accord with Giusta's scholarly interests. The four papers of the philosophical part of the first section (Lévy, Prost, Viano and Dorandi) form a coherent group on moral doxography (the subject of Giusta's most famous book, Dossografi di etica, published in Turin by the publisher Giappichelli in two volumes in 1964 and 1967); among the four papers of the philological part, particularly interesting and fit to the purpose of the conference are Roselli's accurate analysis of the philological competence of Galen, De Paolis' detailed description of a grammatical manuscript written in Carolingian times and Ceporina's exhaustive discussion of the complicated situation of the text of Marcus Aurelius' To myself.

Again, the inner cohesion of the four philosophical essays of the second section (Cambiano, Donini, Repici and Wildberger) is counterbalanced by the great variety of the philological essays (arranged, as the other papers in each section, in alphabetical order): they range from proposals of emendations to classical (Aeschylus, Pindar, Xenophon, Varro, Tacitus, Apuleius and others) and less classical (some Byzantine authors such as Tzane Koroneos or John Oxites) texts, including the Homeric scholia and Eustathius of Thessalonica, to lexical discussions (the use of "panourgos"), historical questions (the role of synegoroi in classical Athens) and theoretical problems (the necessity of conjectures, the art of translation).

Some essays are openly dedicated to authors and works studied by Giusta during his long career (Manca on Censorinus and Mazzucco on the Gospel of John) or are in a way connected and therefore contribute to the unity of the book (such as the essays of Balbo and Magnaldi on the "parola-segnale"), but the great majority reflect the interests of their authors. Most are very short (between four and six pages), but a few in my opinion add valuable chapters to the history of philology.

Among the last, I wish to mention the essays of Edoardo Bona, Federica Ciccolella, Ermanno Malaspina and Luigi Silvano. The analysis of the textual variants of some passages of the Holy Scripture leads Bona to investigate the difficult task that awaits those scholars who have chosen to apply their philological skills to the Scriptures, as Giusta did in the last year of his life. The survey of the different features of some Greek grammars written during the Renaissance leads Ciccolella to open new paths to the study of the diffusion of the Greek language in the Western worlds after the fall of Constantinople. The funny story of the birth (and the growth) of a non-existent Latin word (the mysterious topiographia) leads Malaspina to reflect on the consequences of the carelessness of some classical scholars. And the painstaking study of the manuscript tradition of the pseudo-Demosthenic epistle To Alexander (a patent forgery) leads Silvano to make some insightful remarks on the widespread diffusion of false classical texts in the late Renaissance.

Such a warm tribute to the memory of Michelangelo Giusta would have been more effective had it contained a list of his publications (perhaps the list published by G. Magnaldi and G.F. Gianotti in Ricordo di Michelangelo Giusta, "Quaderni del Dipartimento di Filologia Linguistica e Tradizione classica 'Augusto Rostagni'" n.s. 5, 2006, 7-11); one or even two indexes (primarily a subject index, but also a list of the authors cited) might have encouraged the use of such a bulky book; and a unified bibliography might have saved space and removed repetitions.

Table of Contents

PRIMA PARTE: RELAZIONI
Filosofia
Carlos Lévy, Michelangelo Giusta et la doxographie du souverain bien: esquisse de bilan
François Prost, Ariston et Hérillos chez Cicéron
Cristina Viano, Ario Didimo e la sua Epitome dell'etica stoica
Tiziano Dorandi, M. Giusta 'lettore' delle Vite dei filosofi di Diogene Laerzio
Filologia
Luciano Canfora, Le scoperte di Simonidis in Caria e lo pseudo-Artemidoro
Amneris Roselli, Galeno e la filologia del II secolo
Paolo De Paolis, Un manuale scolastico da Corbie
Matteo Ceporina, Una paradosis particolare. L'eis eauton e il filologo

SECONDA PARTE: CONTRIBUTI
Filosofia
Giuseppe Cambiano, Platone e Speusippo in una dossografia di Sesto Empirico
Pier Luigi Donini, Felicità e theoria nel primo e nel decimo libro dell'Etica Nicomachea
Luciana Repici, L'elogio della felicità: Aristotele tra etica e retorica
Jula Wildberger, Copia-e-incolla e la struttura del Compendio di etica stoica attribuito ad Ario Didimo
Filologia
Roberta Angiolillo, Tzane Koroneos, le Gesta di Mercurio Bua. Verso una nuova edizione
Andrea Balbo, Applicazioni del fenomeno della 'parola-segnale' ai Declamationum excerpta di Calpurnio Flacco
Luigi Battezzato, Timeo e l'October equus: FGrHist 566 F 36 e Euripide, Troiane 13-14
Elisabetta Berardi, Un 'problema' di gratitudine: Ael. Ar. or. 29, 2 k (e or. 3, 255 lb)
Edoardo Bona, Non solo Origene e Gerolamo: gli autori cristiani antichi e le varianti testuali della Scrittura
Luciano Bossina, Qualche nota ai Cesti di Giulio Africano (e ai Taktika che ne dipendono)
Serena Buzzi, Il cod. Paris. Suppl. gr. 446 dell'Ad Glauconem de medendi methodo
Antonio Carlini, Nota sull'uso di panourgos nella schermaglia dialogica
Michele Carretta, A proposito di sues e porci. Nota critica a M. Terenzio Varrone, Rerum rusticarum 1, 13, 3
Bruno Chiesa, Apologia della congettura
Federica Ciccolella, Riflessioni sull'edizione di alcuni testi grammaticali di età umanistica
Vittorio Citti, Aesch. Suppl. 429 sgg.
Gianluca Cuniberti, Synegoroi e corruzione politica in Aristofane
Michele Curnis, Un frammento di Teleclide e un apoftegma di Esopo
Paola Dolcetti, Alcmena, Zeus e le promesse nuziali di Anfitrione (Schol. Od. 11, 266)
Silvia Fenoglio, Due passi di argomento grammaticale nei Commentari all'Odissea di Eustazio: note testuali
Giovanna Garbarino, Note su un frammento di Catone in Plinio
Gian Franco Gianotti, Vent'anni dopo: postilla a Senofonte, Costituzione degli Spartani 11, 10
Valeria Lomanto, Tra dispotismo e ostruzionismo
Giuseppina Magnaldi, Tracce di antiche omissioni-integrazioni nel De Platone di Apuleio
Ermanno Malaspina, La doppia vita di una congettura: Pierre Grimal e il falso della *Topiographia
Enrico V. Maltese, Notae vix legentis
Massimo Manca, Censorino, l'uovo e la gallina (De die natali 4, 4). A scuola di congetture da Michelangelo Giusta
Paolo Mastandrea, I supplizi dei Cristiani e la croce testuale di Tac. Ann. 15, 44, 4
Clementina Mazzucco, Michelangelo Giusta e il Vangelo di Giovanni
Dina Micalella, Achille e gli inganni della poesia. Nota in margine a Iul. II Const. 61b 2-5
Davide Muratore, Due note sulla tradizione degli Scholia D in Homeri Iliadem
Patrizia Mureddu, 'Tradurre' Omero
Francesca Piccioni, Sul De magia di Apuleio. Alcune proposte di constitutio textus
Elisabetta Pitotto, Note a Pindaro, Olimpica XI, v. 10
Amedeo Raschieri, Un testimone ambrosiano della Periegesis di Prisciano
Robert H. Rodgers, A few Thoughts on the Text of Varro's Res rusticae
Luigi Silvano, Per il testo della versione umanistica dell'Oratio ad Alexandrum pseudo-demostenica
Raffaella Tabacco, Una presunta interpolazione nelle Res Gestae di Giulio Valerio (I 31)
Anna Maria Taragna, Un compagno infido in Teofilatto Simocatta: congettura a Hist. Univ. 6, 2, 7
Gabriella Vanotti, Filisto in Cicerone. Addenda (e non) a Felix Jacoby FGrHist 556
Paolo Varalda, Osservazioni critiche sul testo dell'Oratio de monasteriis laicis non tradendis di Giovanni l'Oxita