Allegorism

Cornutus was a Roman philosopher who wrote this compendium on the Greek gods in Greek language in the first century A.D. He wanted to teach the basics of Stoic philosophy to an unknown Roman boy using this mythological work by etymologizing and allegorizing the gods' names and epithets.

This is the first critical edition of the compendium since 1881.

Cornutus’ mythological handbook employs Δεύς as an alternative form for Ζεύς (cf. 2, 3 10-11 Lang); Liddell-Scott-Jones’ Greek-English Lexicon regards this as a Boeotism. In this paper we try to show that this is not the best suitable explanation for Δεύς within the global context of Cornutus’ Epidrome, a work in which no other dialectal form appears. A better explanation for Δεύς can be found if we take in account that Cornutus is one more of those relative numerous Roman, in Greek writing authors; his use of lat. Deus with the meaning Ζεύς has, moreover, philosophical implications.

The purpose of the present article is to show that there is a clear line of continuity between the early Stoics' and Cornutus' works, as all of them assumed that the ancient mythmakers had transformed their original cosmological conceptions into anthropomor-phic deities. Hence, the Stoics from Zeno to Cornutus believed that the names of the gods reflected the mode of perceiving the world that was characteristic of the people who named the gods in this way. Accordingly, the major thesis advanced in the paper proposes that the Stoics conducted their etymological analyses so as to gather ethnographical information about the origin and development of the existing religion. When doing so, they treated the conventional mythological narratives as sources of information about the early conceptions of the cosmos. Thus, the Stoics from Zeno to Cornutus employed etymology as a certain research strategy: they analyzed the names of traditional deities so as to extract the physical and moral beliefs that constituted the ancients' world picture. Treated as ethnologists, the Stoics seem to equate piety with retrieving philosophical truths obscured under the guise of primitive mythical formulations. Furthermore, when unravelling the original worldview inadvertently transmitted by the poets in their poems, the Stoics reconstruct the history of religion and contribute to the development of ancient anthropology.

Whoever wants to read Cornutus’s Summary of the Greek Theological Traditions must still employ the old and controversial edition published by C. Lang in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana in 1881. My contribution first analyses the multifarious problems which vitiate Lang’s edition. Its principal (and obvious)  defect is the editor’s proclivity to identify as interpolated many passages of the text without an objective reason. Once that the possibility of rescuing Cornutus’s ipsissima verba – as Lang intented – is discarded, I present the materials on which a new critical edition of the Summary should be based. For this purpose it is underlined that the stemmatic analysis of Cornutus’s forty manuscripts published by P. Krafft in 1975 must be taken as a point of departure. Then, some critical decisions by the new Cornutus’s editor are proposed in relation to the linguistic form of the the transmitted text. It is likewise discussed the kind of conjectures that can be proposed to improve Cornutus’s text as it is read in the manuscripts.

Cornutus occupies a peculiar place among those Latin authors that wrote in Greek as he is particularly prone to disclose his Roman origins; this has already been perceived by previous scholars when analyzing some passages in his mythographical treaty. Following these previous works I will add in this paper a new interpretation of Corn. ND 30 (61). I will try to show that Cornutus in-cludes in this place a not yet detected reference to Roman Bacchanals.

This contribution analyses some textual problems related to the interpretation of three theonyms in Cornutus's mythographical treaty. In each case the textual testimonies and the solutions adopted in the critical editions by Lang (1881) and Torres (2018) are considered. A text is proposed for each case on the basis of the etymological and allegorizing method employed in the treaty.

Three years ago, the latest critical edition of Cornutus’s mythological treaty was the one published by C. Lang in 1881 (Cornuti Theologiae Graecae Compendium, Leipzig, Teubner). In 2018, a new critical text and apparatus appeared in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana (J. B. Torres, ed., Lucius Annaeus Cornutus. Compendium de Graecae Theologiae traditionibus, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter). Unfortunately, some typos, mainly concerning superscript letters in the name of some manuscripts, appeared in its Praefatio. So long, no reimpression of the work has been published. The following list presents all the misprints of that Praefatio and the corresponding emendations.