Questions tagged [passage-identification]
The passage-identification tag has no usage guidance.
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"Bene docet, qui bene distinguit."
Where does the phrase "Bene docet, qui bene distinguit." ("He who teaches well distinguishes well.") come from?
James T. Bretzke in Consecrated Phrases says this is a
Classical ...
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Cicero about paragraph marks
I have looked on the Internet about books with no punctuation marks and found a post by Thomas Musselman at Quora:
Punctuation is a post-3rd Century invention so when you read older texts you are ...
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Identifying a classical Latin quotation to the effect of "My affairs are a mess, but I manage others'"
I recall a Latin quotation I encountered some years ago, ex memoria in John Gray's Lawyer's Latin, but I don't have the book to hand and can't find the source of it. It was something to the effect ...
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Is "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end" correctly attributed to Seneca (the younger)?
The quote is a fairly well know lyric in the 1998 song Closing Time by Semisonic. In the Wikipedia entry for the song, it claims "The song ends with a quote attributed to Roman Stoic philosopher ...
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Finding the original Latin text of Seneca ("No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it.")
In what text of Seneca will I find the Latin for the statement, one English translation of which is, "No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it."
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How to say "We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden" in Latin?
News sources have reported that China sent boxes of face masks and other medical supplies to Italy, stamped with this quotation and attributed to Seneca. For example, https://www.theguardian.com/...
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Origin of Auspicium Melioris Aevi
Auspicium Melioris Aevi, commonly translated to “Augur/Omen/Hope of a Better Age” serves as the motto of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George.
Does it have any ancient origin? Or is it's ...
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Is "The beginning is half of every action" truly a Greek proverb?
I found in a book from 2015 a box with the quote:
The beginning is half of every action. (Greek proverb)
I googled it and there are many "pop websites" with the same quote. But none with a ...
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A poem that works in both Latin and Italian
Years ago an old colleague showed me a poem which had a miraculous feature:
it was perfectly valid Latin and perfectly valid Italian.
With clever choices of words one can make that happen, but it also ...
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Is this an actual quote from Euripides?
There's a passage I've seen quoted in several books on self-help and spiritualism:
Look what the goddess does when she is sad: she takes up a tambourine, made of taut skin and rimmed with castanets ...
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Latin words remembered from high school 50 years ago
Can anyone help with information about the words below, which we sang in language class, which I think was the English national anthem?
Forgive the mistakes, as I never studied Latin.
Salve ...
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Tracing mysterious line ends in a combination of Sappho fragments found in an Italian anthology
Somewhat recently, I stumbled upon this Italian Sappho anthology, where, among other combinations, the following is found:
First off, they are not listing all the fragments joined into this ...
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What papyrus is this?
The image shows two papyrus fragments, and seems to suggest they should join as placed, perhaps with some space in between. In fact, it seems there is sellotape putting them together.
The bigger ...
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Where does the saying "Quod licet Jovi not licet bovi" come from?
Where does the saying "Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi" come from? My Google research was not satisfactory. Any book or article you know of that can guide me?
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Translating a Latin phrase from an animated show
I remember a cartoon show named "Gargoyles" (follow this link please) I used to see when I was young.
The hero there used to use a sort of magic tool to travel through time.
He used to say something ...
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Roman adage: The best death
There is a very famous quotation from one of the Roman authors to the effect that the best death is the one for which you can choose the time, and the second best is the one that comes unexpected. For ...
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Identifying papyri
Sometime in Jan/Feb 2018, the Bodleian library published this image showing a number of P.Oxy. 1231 fragments with some P.Oxy. 2166(a) fragments attached. Recently, I tried to identify each and every ...
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Tracing apparent book-IV colophon not found in Voigt but found in a Spanish Sappho book based on Reinach's French edition
Ah, here we are again. The Spanish edition I mentioned in a recent question has produced another piece of trivia. Here is the offending fragment, numbered 89:
Σαπ[φοΟί με[λών δ'?
Apart from the ...
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Latin phrase that means, dissolve and reintegrate
A couple of months ago, I heard this story of a demon or some entity that was cursed to eternally break something down and reintegrate it together. There is even a photo of the demon crying in the ...
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Identifying alleged Sappho fragment from mishmash on otherwise generally good online resource
I'm back with another question like this one, to which I leave the background part. So among the sources I found while researching Sappho back in the days is The Complete Poems of Sappho, which I am ...
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Identifying corrupted Sappho fragment or mention of Sappho found in just-newly-found-online Spanish edition of Sappho
OK, so this question is perhaps somewhat weird, but I have no idea where to start, so here I am. Let me give some introduction.
Me, languages, and Greek
Let's start very far back. As my blog ...
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A story of a king who wanted to simplify Latin grammar
I vaguely remember reading a story years ago, and it was something like this:
A king in medieval Europe knew some Latin but made mistakes.
I think there was something like him writing plurals ...
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What is the meaning of this quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero?
I came across this quote:
"Laudant quae sciunt, vituperant quae ignorant; laudare a bonis et vituperari a malis unun atque idem est."
It was attributed to Cicero, but it seems that this ...
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Translation of "trumped up charges"
There was a Greek play translated to Latin wherein a term was translated then to English as "trumped up charges".
Might somebody know the play and more particularly the term itself?
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