Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  Z 995

  1. That is, at the time of the displacement of imperial power from Rome to Byzantium in the course of the fourth century CE.

  2. To the autonomy and continuity of the Greek language Leopardi devotes many thoughts (e.g., on Z 996–98, 1590–93, 2408–10, 2450–51, 2829–31, 4237), in the footsteps of Pietro Giordani (see his letter to Canova, “Sul Dionigi trovato dall’Abate Mai,” in Opere, tome 10, p. 205). This idea is clearly linked to that of political independence: Leopardi does not refer here explicitly to the insurrection in Greece, but no reader of European journals and reviews can have been unaware of it in the spring of 1821. See, more explicitly, Z 1593 (August 1821) and note 1, 3583 (October 1823).

  Z 997

  1. The last two sentences are a marginal addition, dating almost certainly to early 1827, when Leopardi composed the “Discorso” which prefaced his translation of the oration by Gemistus, cited on Z 4240 (both texts now published in Volgarizzamenti, pp. 209–20).

  Z 998

  1. Edward Gibbon referred to Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople 858–867 CE, as “this universal scholar, who was deep in thought, indefatigable in reading and eloquent in diction” (Decline and Fall, ch. 53). Leopardi later had access to his Bibliotheca in Bologna, August–October 1826, and copied many excerpts from it (see Z 4191–224).

  2. The study of Ancient Greek was reintroduced to Europe with the migration of Byzantine scholars to Italy, especially after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. See note to Z 1025.

  Z 1000

  1. Fabricius refers here to the work by Eutychius edited by John Selden (London 1642), mentioned below by Leopardi. On this Aramaic word cf. Ferdinando Luciani, “Giacomo Leopardi e l’ebraico. Testimonianze edite e documenti inediti,” Aevum, 51 (1977), p. 531, note 20.

  2. Josephus, a Jewish priest and Pharisee, born 37 (or 38) CE, not only wrote the celebrated account of the Jewish revolt, De bello Judaico, but also an Antiquitates Judaicae, which in Greek was entitled ᾿Ιουδαική Αρχαιολογία, hence the Archaeology to which Leopardi’s ms. refers.

  3. Scapula, Lexicon Graeco-Latinum novum, p. 478. See also p. 443, where he clarifies the second meaning of ethnicos: “with no link to the Christian religion, profane.”

  4. Vol. 2, p. 390. This long passage (“Conversely … at the end”) is a marginal addition from 1825, when Leopardi once again became interested in Jewish history (Pacella).

  5. See Thomas Ittig, Appendix (but in fact originally the Prolegomena to the Cologne 1691 ed. of Josephus) to Josephus’s Opera omnia, Amsterdam 1726, tome 2, p. 80, column 2.

  6. See Samuel Basnage, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes historico-criticae, Utrecht 1692, pp. 385–97, where he discusses the use of Hebrew and Aramaic in a number of texts, scriptural and otherwise. The reference has hitherto been assumed to be to Jacques Basnage, another Huguenot author of a Histoire des Juifs (1716). But on p. 230 note p, Fabricius mentions Samuel Basnage, who on his p. 388 does indeed say that Josephus writes in Syriac (“Sermo autem ille Syriacus erat”).

  7. It is Josephus who explains, in the Proem, § 2, of De bello Judaico, in Opera omnia, tome 2, p. 48, that the Parthians, Babylonians, etc., and the Adiabeni (that is, the Assyrians, as Havercamp’s note (h) to De Bello Judaico, in Josephus’s Opera omnia, tome 2, p. 47 makes plain) were able to understand his account in the language in which he had first written it. Josephus was not so much proselytizing as writing for the diaspora, that is to say, scattered Jewish communities living amid the Parthians, Babylonians, etc. (cf. L. Troiani, “I lettori delle ‘Antichità Giudaiche’ di Giuseppe: prospettive e problemi,” Athenaeum, 64, 1986, 343–53). Scholars now reckon that Josephus did write originally in Syro-Chaldean, that is Aramaic (cf. Tessa Rajak, Josephus: the Historian and his Society, London: Duckworth, 1983).

  8. That is, Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, tome 3, p. 230 note p, and Ittig, in Josephus’s Opera omnia, tome 2, p. 80, column 2.

  Z 1001

  1. Josephus, Proem, § 1, to De Bello Judaico, in Opera omnia, tome 2, p. 47.

  2. The references here are to the texts by Ittig and Fabricius cited above, and to Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, Histoire des empereurs, Venice 1732, vol. 1, art. 80, p. 582 (= LL).

  Z 1005

  1. In 133 BCE, when Scipio Aemilianus laid siege to the Spanish city of Numantia, many of its citizens were reported to have preferred suicide and the torching of their own houses to surrender.

  Z 1006

  1. Cf. the same expression on Z 3613, 3911, 3934. Some of its consequences are described on Z 3932–36.

  Z 1010

  1. That is, the review of Charles Wilkins’s Grammar of the Sanskrita Language cited on Z 929.

  2. Lodovico Antonio Loschi, the editor of Andrés’s book, had added the following note to p. 256: “Moreover one Celso Cittadini, not without adversaries, but not without followers either, maintained that our present language was used in Rome in ancient times by the populace, and was the popular language, of which Cicero speaks, different from the other language as used by the patricians and the writers.” In 1601, Cittadini, a Sienese librarian, bibliophile, and theorist of language, had published a pioneering treatise on the origin of Italian, his claim being that literary Latin had split off very early from Vulgar Latin, and that the modern Romance languages, among them Italian, were directly descended from the latter.

  3. Daniel Georg Morhof, Fabricius’s idol, was the author of Polyhistor sive de notitia auctorum et rerum commentarii, Lübeck 1688 (1747 ed. = LL).

  4. Dolendum is the word with which the passage from Morhof quoted in Andrés, p. 249, begins.

  Z 1011

  1. Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 11, tome 2, loc. cit.

  Z 1012

  1. Jean-Pierre Tercier, author of a “Dissertation” on the German language in Mémoires de Littérature, tirés des Registres de l’Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, tome 24, 1756, pp. 569–81. This volume—and not volume 41, as Leopardi says three times in this paragraph—also contained the essays mentioned in the following paragraph and on Z 983, note 2.

  2. Leopardi quotes Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 11, tome 2, pp. 251–53.

  3. The quotation is from Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 11, tome 2, p. 252, who refers to Pierre-Nicolas Bonamy, three of whose key essays originally appeared in the Mémoires listed in note 1 above. The reference to Jean Astruc, a celebrated physician from Montpellier, is obscure, since there is nothing by him in tomes 24 or 41 of the Mémoires described above. He did, however, publish a natural history of Provence, and is mentioned twice by Andrés, part 2, bk. 2, tome 14, pp. 265 and 351. In the parentheses Leopardi reproduces Andrés’s footnotes.

  Z 1013

  1. Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 11, tome 2, p. 256, note (the same quoted on Z 1010, note 2).

  2. Leopardi refers here to Joseph Hager’s article in the Spettatore italiano, tome 10, 1818, no. 14 (97), also cited on Z 980, note 2.

  3. Perhaps an allusion to a treatise Leopardi planned to write, to judge by the entry on “Vulgar Latin” in the separate slips not referred to in the 1827 Index and by the title mentioned on Z 4521. See also Z 855–56, 979, 1020–21, 1031–37, 1679–80, 2319–22, 2649–52, 3372–73, 3904–905. The passage that follows may be seen as tending toward a social theory of language, such as will first be fully formulated by Saussure in his Cours de linguistique générale (Lausanne-Paris: Payot, 1916): “language never exists apart from the social fact, for it is a semiological phenomenon” (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, rev. ed., introd. by Jonathan Culler, tr. by Wade Baskin, London: Peter Owen, 1974, p. 77).

  Z 1014

  1. The remark was made by Lodovico di Breme, Romantic writer and critic, in his review of Byron’s “Il Giaurro, frammento di novella turca” analyzed in detail by Leopardi in the opening pages of his diary (Z 15, note 1).

  2. Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 11, tome 2, p. 254; Be
de’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, in Opera Historica, trans. by J. E. King (Loeb), 1962, vol. 2, pp. 141–51, though nothing precisely matches the quotation given, which may therefore be Andrés’s paraphrase.

  Z 1015

  1. Keller, Notitia, vol. 1, bk. 2, ch. 2, p. 187.

  2. For the derivation of the French verb planer, see Z 109.

  Z 1016

  1. In 1814 Leopardi had made a translation of Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, preceded by a lengthy introduction (see Porphyrii De vita Plotini, ed. C. Moreschini, Florence: Olschki, 1982; for the reference to Sicily and the Sophists, p. 144). Porphyry’s Greek text was reproduced in full in Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, bk. 4, ch. 26, tome 4, pp. 91–147, together with Ficino’s Latin translation.

  2. Constantine Lascaris, the Byzantine grammarian, was responsible for rediscovering the fragmentary writings of Caecilius Calactinus Siculus, as Fabricius records, Bibliotheca Graeca, bk. 6, ch. 11, § 2, tome 14, in particular pp. 34–35 on Caecilius.

  3. Titus Julius Calpurnius Siculus and Marcus Aurelius Olympius Nemesianus were both pastoral poets, third century CE, influenced by the earlier Calpurnius, and by Virgil.

  Z 1020

  1. Leopardi in fact speaks here of Livy’s “Patavinity,” a term in Quintilian that is derived from Livy’s birthplace, Patavium (Padua), and refers to the historian’s use of dialect words and expressions. See Quintilian, Institutiones 1, 5, 56.

  Z 1021

  1. Cf. René Massuet, “Dissertatio secunda,” ch. 2, prefaced to St. Irenaeus’s Contra Haereses, Paris 1710 (= LL), pp. XCIXff., where Irenaeus’s Greek and Latin are discussed. In 1814–1815 Leopardi had edited Irenaeus’s fragments in his philological ms. work Fragmenta patrum Graecorum (pp. 299–383 of Moreschini 1976 ed. [B2]), based on Massuet, with little significant improvement (Moreschini, p. XXXIX).

  2. On this point cf. Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, Rome-Bari: Laterza, [1963], 1983. The first census of united Italy, carried out in 1861, established that 78 percent of the population was illiterate, and it cannot be assumed that the remaining 22 percent all knew Italian. In De Mauro’s view, barely 2.5 percent of the population could be regarded as Italian-speaking (p. 43), and therefore in possession of any substantial access to the written word.

  Z 1022

  1. Carlo Goldoni wrote many of his plays in Venetian; Giovanni Meli composed long discursive and narrative poems, as well as shorter lyrics, in Sicilian dialect. For Leopardi’s negative opinion of dialect literature see Z 3012 and note.

  Z 1024

  1. In Della lingua toscana, treatise 3, ch. 5, p. 48, Benedetto Buommattei uses similar expressions speaking of Tuscan orthography, “not yet fixed and well-established.”

  Z 1025

  1. This was the seventeenth ecumenical council (started in Basel 1431, later transferred to Ferrara and Florence 1438–1439), which discussed the union of the Greek Church with the Latin. This was also the occasion when a number of Greek men of letters came first to Italy and contributed to Italian humanism, among others Gemistus Pletho. The reference is to Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 12.

  Z 1027

  1. Horace, Odes 1, 22, 19–20.

  2. On this roll call of capitals see note 1 to Z 867.

  Z 1028

  1. Soave, Appendix 2, “Saggio sulla formazione di una lingua universale,” in Locke, Saggio filosofico, bk. 3, ch. 11, tome 2, p. 63. See Z 3262 and note.

  2. Alfieri, Vita, Epoch 4, ch. 27, vol. 2, p. 184.

  3. This reference to Dante is a marginal addition, dating, in Pacella’s judgment, from 1827.

  Z 1029

  1. Leopardi refers here to Constantinople, “the new Rome,” implying the medieval concept of translatio imperii, for which see note 1 to Z 867.

  2. Phaedrus was the author of Aesopian fables, and is reckoned now to have been born in Macedonia. On Linus and Orpheus see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1, 10, 9 (and Dante, Inferno 4, 140–41). Dionysius Thrax was a pupil of Aristarchus, and later a teacher of grammar and literature at Rhodes. Leopardi quotes from the preface by François-Joseph Terrasse Desbillons, in Fabularum Aesopiarum libri V, Mannheim 1786, p. vi.

  Z 1032

  1. Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 11.

  Z 1034

  1. Here Leopardi refers to Latin, defined by him as the mother language of what we would term the Romance languages.

  2. Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 11, loc. cit. The following reference is to the review of Charles Wilkins’s Grammar of the Sanskrita Language discussed on Z 929 and 1010.

  Z 1035

  1. Cf. Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 11, tome 2, pp. 252 and 286–87.

  Z 1037

  1. Oration 60 is now generally reckoned to be spurious (it features in Demosthenes, vol. 8, Loeb ed., 1962, pp. 8–13).

  Z 1043

  1. The final sentence of this paragraph is a later, marginal addition.

  2. Montesquieu, Considérations, ch. 22, p. 264: “The Greeks, great talkers, great disputants, natural sophists…”

  Z 1044

  1. The reference here is to the Charte, the constitution adopted in France in 1814, suspended and replaced during the Hundred Days and then reimposed in 1815.

  Z 1046

  1. Andrés, Dell’origine, part 2, bk. 4, tome 9, ch. 1, pp. 290–91, ch. 2, pp. 315–16.

  2. Pietro Giordani, “Sul Dionigi trovato dall’abate Mai. Lettera al chiarissimo abate Giambattista Canova,” in Opere, tome 10, pp. 147–206.

  Z 1049

  1. In Italian sixteenth-century criticism, Lodovico Castelvetro is usually considered one of the champions of the strict imitation of Petrarch.

  2. Horace, Ars poetica 46–52.

  Z 1051

  1. Algarotti’s essay is printed in Opere, tome 4, pp. 38ff.

  2. In the ms. the names of Amyot and Montaigne have been Italianized “Amiot” and “Montagne” (the same spelling on Z 1997 for the second, probably following Andrés, Dell’origine, tome 3, p. 97, where, however, we read “Amyot”).

  Z 1052

  1. In this note, added by Loschi to Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, ch. 13, tome 3, p. 97, he praises the style of the three authors mentioned, and that of Amyot in particular, noting that his translation of Plutarch was as imitated as it was admired.

  2. Lucian, How to Write History 21. In this text, which Leopardi had begun to translate, probably in the summer of 1818, Lucian commented on the tendency of the Greeks to produce Greek versions of Latin proper names.

  Z 1053

  1. Soave, Appendix 1 (“Influenza delle lingue sulle umane cognizioni”), in Locke, Saggio filosofico, loc. cit., tome 2, p. 61, gives the two bibliographical references to Sulzer’s work cited below by Leopardi.

  2. Sulzer’s “Osservazioni,” featuring in Scelta di opuscoli interessanti, Milan 1775, pp. 42–102 (cf. Z 807) are an Italian version of “Anmerkungen über die gegenzeitigen Einfluss der Vernunft in die Sprache und der Sprache in die Vernunft,” in Sulzer, Vermischte philosophischen Schriften, Leipzig 1773, pp. 166–98.

  Z 1054

  1. Leopardi refers to the anonymous note (in fact by Soave) following Sulzer’s “Osservazioni,” pp. 101–102, where several authors are discussed, among them Locke, Condillac, Herder, Rousseau, etc.

  2. I.e., his 1815 Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients, referring here to ch. 14 (Prose, pp. 821–22).

  Z 1055

  1. In the passage cited of Locke’s Saggio filosofico Soave had argued that the creation of a universal language would be possible, if a new mode of writing analogous to the Chinese were introduced everywhere. Cf. Z 3254–62.

  Z 1057

  1. Lucretius, De rerum natura 1, 136–39: “Nor does it pass unnoticed of my mind that it is a hard task in Latin verses to set clearly in the light the dark discoveries of the Greeks, above all when many things must be treated in new words, because of the poverty of our tongue and the newness of the themes” (ed. Cyril Bailey
, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947, pp. 182–83). There is a reference to this same passage on Z 748.

  Z 1058

  1. Alessandro Verri, Preface to I quattro libri di Senofonte dei detti memorabili di Socrate, trans. by Michel Angelo Giacomelli, with notes and variant readings by Alessandro Verri, Brescia 1806, pp. XIV–XV, XVIII–XIX.

  2. The reference here is to the fourfold distinction advanced by the Greek grammarian and rhetorician Demetrius of Phaleron between the high and the elegant, the plain and the vehement style (cf. A Greek Critic: Demetrius on Style, trans. G.M.A. Grube, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961).

  Z 1063

  1. Staël, De l’Allemagne, part 2, ch. 7, writes: “at first, one is astonished to find coldness and even something like stiffness in the author of Werther, but when one manages to get him to feel at ease…”

  Z 1065

  1. Cf. Z 1637 and note.

  Z 1066

  1. Leopardi refers here to Sulzer’s “Osservazioni,” already mentioned on Z 807 and 1053.

  Z 1067

  1. Andrés, Dell’origine, part 1, chs. 15 and 13 of tome 3; part 2, bk. 1, tome 4. The purist Clementino Vannetti wrote a biography of the Venetian Alessandro Giorgi, together with a selection of letters they had exchanged (Commentarius de vita Alexandri Georgii, Siena 1779 = LL), where he affirms what Leopardi is noting here.

  2. See Varro, De lingua latina 6, 38, and Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 6, 7, 5, cited by Forcellini.

  Z 1068

  1. That is, the age of Cicero and Brutus.

  Z 1070

  1. That is, Sulzer’s “Osservazioni” (cf. Z 807, note 1, 1053, note 2).

  2. The two quotations are from Varro, De lingua latina, bk. 8, respectively §§ 3 and 5. The first quotation lacks the beginning “Declinatio inducta.” In the second quotation most eds. read “Imposititia” instead of “Imposita.” Leopardi was reading one of the fifteenth-century editions (mentioned also on Z 759) now missing in his library, in which books 7–10 were entitled De analogia: this is why he cites from bk. 1 of De analogia, that is bk. 7 of the whole work, which in subsequent editions has become bk. 8. For the opposition between impositio and declinatio Varro is indebted, according to Pohlenz, to the Stoic theory of language.