mP" UC-NRLF $B 31 t.2S Ube "Clnlverstts of dblcaoo ANTONIUS RHETOR ON VERSIFICATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND LITERATURE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF OLD TESTAMENT LITERATURE AND INTERPRETATION IN THE GRADUATE DIVINITY SCHOOL BY MARTIN SPRFNGLING Private Edition, Distributed By THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARIES CHICAGO, ILLINOIS a. o >- Reprinted from The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures Vol. XXXII, No. 3, April 1916 EXCHANGE Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/antoniusrhetoronOOsprerich Ube mniverstt^ of Cbtcaao ANTONIUS RHETOR ON VERSIFICATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND LITERATURE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF OLD TESTAMENT LITERATURE AND INTERPRETATION IN THE GRADUATE DIVINITY SCHOOL BY MARTIN SPRENGLING Private Edition, Distributed By THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARIES CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Reprinted from The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Liter atji^es Vol. XXXII, No. 3, April 1916 '.WOJ? • • • ANTONIUS RHETOR ON VERSIFICATION WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND TWO APPENDICES By Martin Sprengmng University of Chicago Ephrem Syrus is not a great poet to everybody's taste. Singing a simile to death in praise of a saint or applying strong epithets to dead-and-gone heretics in long, carefully numbered series of syllables will not impress many modern, occidental readers as good poetry. Yet, such as he is, in the very bulk of his works, in the variety of topics treated and of legitimate meters and strophic structures employed, in a kind of facile inventiveness, in the esteem in which he was held by a great number of his contemporaries and a still greater number of his countrymen of succeeding generations, Ephrem is the Sjn-iac poet par excellence; and perhaps it is, as Duval (Lit. Syr^., p. 13) says, that the Syrians ''saw excellences, where we find faults." As Ephrem is the first of Syriac poets whose works have been preserved to us in quantity, so he became a kind of Syriac Homer, the type and model of classic Syriac poetry. A new, sumptuous edition of Ephrem's complete works, as pre- served in the original tongue and in translations, is in process of publication, as the first fasciculus of the first volume, dated Rome, 1915, shows. ^ The former attempt at a similar edition, made at 1 The full title is: S. Ephraem Syri Opera. Textum Syriacum Graecvun Latinum ad fldem codicum recensuit, prolegomenis notis indicibus instruxit Sylvius loseph Mer- cati. Tomus primus, Fasc. primus. Sermones in Abraham et Isaac, In Basilium Magnmn, In Eliam .... Romae, Siunptibus Pontiflcii Instituti Biblici, 1915. It forms in turn Vol. I of a larger series : Monumenta Biblica et Ecclesiastica. 145 ^ 405948 r46' ' ' ^HE American Journal of Semitic Languages Rome under papal auspices, was good enough in its day, the end of the first half of the eighteenth century, but has long since become superannuated. Both flow through the channel of papal munificence. The former was a gift of the Orient to the Occident; it was brought out by that brilliant Maronite family, who laid in Europe the founda- tions of an adequate knowledge of Syriac literature, the Assemanis {as-Sim dm) , and by their friend Father Benedictus (i.e., Mubar- rak). In the present edition the Occident returns the favor with interest. Not only will the text of Ephrein here published have the benefit of all the improvements modern technique can supply, but it is avowedly the intent of this whole edition with all the labor therein involved to furnish a reliable basis for the exact study of classical Syriac poetics and versification and its supposed influence on the new turn taken by Byzantine and Latin verse in the early Middle Ages. It is a significant fact that the chief interest of the new editor of Ephrem is. centered in the laws of Syriac and Byzantine and" mediaeval Latin versification. Mercati is a pupil and evidently a thoroughgoing follower of W. Meyer of Speyer (Mercati, op. cit., Proem passim, and especially p. xiv). W. Meyer is an expert pioneer and explorer in the field of mediaeval Latin, and incidentally also of Byzantine, versification, as his two volumes of Gesammelte Abhand- lungen zur mittellateinischen Rhythmik (Berlin, 1905) amply demon- strate. He is interested in Syriac versification in general and in Ephrem and the Greek translations of his works in particular as in one of the influences which gave rise to the Christian poetry^ of Byzantium and Rome, and through these to some of the peculiarities of our own modern poetry, Germanic and Romance. For his knowledge of Syriac and Hebrew versification he seems to have depended chiefly upon Hahn and, perhaps, Bickell, and was accord- ingly misled in several particulars. One of these faulty assump- tions, a supposedly rigid disposition of accents at the close of each Syriac verse, he has since retracted upon the advice of Noldeke (op. cit. J I, 11). On the matter of rhyme Meyer is still somewhat at fault, and Eduard Norden (Antike Kunstprosa, 810-908; Nach- trdge, 11-13) is fuller and nearer right, though Meyer's presentation (op. cit., II, 122-26) is neither so one-sided nor so hopeless as would Antonius Rhetor on Versification 147 appear from Norden's statements. For the rest, in his supposition that Semitic models had much to do with the prevalence of the acrostich and with the principle of syllable-counting in mediaeval Christian poetry, Meyer has in matter and manner a better case than Norden and others seem willing to admit. ^ It is largely to furnish a trustworthy text as a basis for the demonstration of this theory that Mercati has undertaken the new edition of Ephrem. The undertaking is praiseworthy enough, and the object is not unworthy. It is to be hoped, however, that the theoiy will no{ bias the restitution of the text. For Ephrem after all is of some value in other directions, and his works contain, besides much mere verse-making of more than Victorian length and tiresomeness, some poems^ and passages of great beauty, as the opinion and the loans of the great Byzantine poet Romanos testify (Krum- bacher, loc. cit.). And for our better knowledge of classical Syriac versification also one of the prime requisites is a text of Ephrem resting upon sound general text-critical principles not unduly influenced by any special theory on the history of versification. As does this introductoiy r^sum^,^ so must eveiy examination and exposition of classical Syriac verse take Ephrem for its starting- point. It is one of the merits of Hubert Grimme,^ for which he has been unduly criticized, that he recognized this and acted upon it. If Becq de Fouquieres was justified in basing his fundamental treatise » Cf. Krumbacher. "Die Griechlsche Literatur des Mittelalters " in Kultur der Oegenwart, Griechiache und Lateinische Literatur und Sprache, 1905, pp. 259 and 262; also Baumstark, Die chr. Lit. des Orients, I (Sammlung Goschen, No. 527), Leipzig, 1911, p. 16. « Cf.. e.g., the sprightly hymn^on the Virgin Mary, Lamy, II, 538 ff., No. 6, and the stately and impressive 11th hymn on the holy martyrs. Lamy, III, 711 flf. 3 This sketch of the work hitherto done on Syriac prosody, written partly in appre- ciation of Mercati 's new edition of Ephrem, partly as an introduction to the publication of a portion of the Harvard manuscript of Anthony of Tagrit, covers the ground with some fulness, because nothing of the sort, accessible to English students and readers, seems to be in existence. The only thing of the kind of which I have found any trace is a treatise by Lamy On Syriac Prosody, said by Duval, Journal asiatique, 9f S6rie, t. X (1897), 65, n. 1, to be "dans les Actes du Congr6s des Orientalistes de Londres de 1891." A diligent search of the Harvard College Library failed to bring to light this essay, which from Duval's statement must have formed an intermediate stage between Lamy's first effort in the Prolegomena of Vol. Ill of his Ephraem Syri Hymni et Ser- mones in 1889 and his finished presentation of the final results attained by him in Vol. IV of the same work (1902), coll. 469-96 (but see also the Foreword of this latter volume, p. vii). In any case, whatever Lamy did does not conflict with the present sketch, nor does ^he one make the other unnecessary. < On Grimme's work in this field see pp. 157 fl. 148 The American Journal of Semitic Languages on French versification for the classical period upon Racine alone — and his results would seem to have amply justified the brilliant Frenchman's procedure — then the needful refoundation of our knowl- edge of Syriac prosody will have to proceed from a thorough investi- gation of just such a text of Ephrem as Mercati intends to give us. It should be Ephrem and no other. In the facility wherewith he molded the Syriac language into a variety of rhythmical forms, Ephrem represents the finished product of a developmental process of considerable length and intensity. Of what preceded him only the smallest remnants are preserved. The Carpenfras stele (CIS, II, 141; with an English translation, in Cooke, Northsemitic Inscrip- tions, 'pp. 205 f . ; photogravure in Lidzbarski, Nordsem. Epigraphik, Vol. II, Plate XXVIII, 3), in Egyptian Aramaic of the fourth or fifth century B.C., is almost certainly composed in verses of seven syllables each or thereabouts. Though not found in any extant document, yet of more significance than a mere accident, is Professor Charles C. Torrey's unforced retranslation of the Lukan Lord's Prayer into the Jewish Aramaic of Jesus' time, which -fell naturally and without seeking under Professor Torrey's skilled hands into the same meter. ^ Coming thence to the two old gnostic hymns in the acts of Judas Thomas, the Soul's Wedding and the Song of the Apostle Judas Thomas in the Land of the Hindus, the latter often called the Hymn of the Soul, we are somewhat nearer the home of Edessene Syriac and on rather firmer ground. ^ The exact date of neither is known, but the time of Bardaisan, to whom they have by some scholars been assigned, the turn of the second and third centuries a.d., will not be far wrong. Both are composed in distichs of six-syllable verses. As to whether these beautiful rhapsodies belong to Bardaisan or not, no conclusive evidence has yet been offered. Very eminent authorities in various related fields — Noldeke, Burkitt, Preuschen — have expressed their opinion in the affirmative. The present writer's feehng inclines in the same direction. This 1 Cf. Torrey in ZA, XXVIII. 2-4 (March, 1914), 312-17. The more important literature on the Carpentras stele is named by Professor Torrey in this article. 2 First published by W. 'Wright, Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, London, 1871, I, pp. 1^^ r. f. and y.4Ci9-,.ik9 ; English translation, II, 150 ff.. 238-45; cf. also Bevan's text of the Hymn of the ScJul with translation in Robinson's Cambridge Texts and Studies, Vol. V, No. 3. The best edition of the texte is that published with German translation by G. Hoffmann, in ZNTW, IV, 4 (1903), 273-309. See also Baumstark. op. cit., p. 41. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 149 IS nut the place to argue the question in detail. The pitiful shreds which the parsimonious hand of Ephrem has preserved for us (five fragments constituting in all ten lines of five syllables, one of eight, and two of six each, is the sum total) ^ are all that we can be abso- lutely sure of. A six-syllable line, quoted by Philoxenus (see Appen- dix I, 1), is certainly Bardaisan's property, probably a poetic verse. Though much too little to give us any adequate idea of Bardaisan's style or thought, and though culled and presented with all the fairness and honesty of a modern war censor or hostile headquarters, they are yet sufficient together with the comment of Ephrem and Rabbula to give the impression of poetic powers distinctly greater than Ephrem^s. Clearly and flagrantly, now wilfully, more often stupidly, Ephrem misunderstood Bardaisan, and a better basis for just such misunderstanding could hardly be furnished than just such songs as those in the Acts of Thomas. Moreover, Bardaisan's fame as a poet rests upon fairly good evidence (cf. Appendix I, 2). It seems hardly in accord with the principle of the economy of documents, since we are restricted to supposition, to assume another unknown author for the "gnostic" hymns of the Acts of Thomas. In any case Bardaisan's is the earliest name of any Syriac poet preserved to us, and, aside from the few lines positively known to be his, the hymns of the Acts of Thomas are the earliest extant Syriac verse. And these two constitute about all the pre-Ephraimite Syriac verse in our possession, upon which, manifestly, no very extensive treatise on Syriac versification may be based. ^ Those who follow Ephrem within the classical period of Syriac poetry, i.e., before the dominance of Arabic and Islam, or, from an inner-Syriac 1 The 55th Hymn against Heresies of Ephrem, which contains all of Ephrem's direct quotations from Bardaisan's verse, in English translation preserving the form of the original, will be found in Appendix I, 1. The Philoxenus fragment is printed there also. 2 The syllabic construction of the Bardaisanite fragments is clearly set forth in Appendix I ; all that may safely be said will be found there. The hymns of the Acts of Thomas exhibit six-syllable verse throughout, gathered into distichs by a Hebraic paral- lelismus membrorum for the most part unmistakably clear; larger strophic structure has not been successfully demonstrated. With the elimination of the Sozomenus tradition it becomes increasingly clear that with our present resoiu-ces nothing can be known except by inference concerning pre-Ephraimite stropliic structures. Lest the unwary think them forgotten, it is distinctly stated here that the Odes of Solomon have been deliberately omitted from this review ; though it may still be possible to doubt that they are translations, no doubt is possible to the knowing that they follow no known methods of versification, Syriac or otherwise. Sooner or later they will be claimed to represent a stage preceding Bardaisan's introduction of vowel-counting verse and regular strophes. 150 The American Journal of Semitic Languages point of view, before Anthony of Tagrit, tread no great distance beside Ephrem's footsteps. Even the most renowned of them, Balai, Cyrillona, Isaac of Amid, Isaac of Antioch, Narses, James of Sarug, acknowledge Ephrem as their master and do not appreciably remove from the well-trodden paths by him approved as good and safe. And if a late^ "tradition" connects the name of Balai with a five-, that of Narses with a six-, that of James of Sarug with a twelve-syllable meter, as that of seven syllables is named after Ephrem, tlien on the one hand this tradition is not in every case corroborated by known facts, on the other it means no more than that such a meter was the favorite of such an author, in which he excelled, not by him invented. It is Ephrem, therefore, who must furnish the basis and by far the greatest amount of material for any investigation of the laws of classical Syriac verse. But it must be a corrected, carefully edited text of Ephrem. The insufficiency of the editio princeps in this respect is notorious. Overbeck in his Ephraemi Syri aliorumque Opera Seleda, Oxford, 1865, published for the most part simply the text of his manu- script, mistakes and 9,11, and that not always faultlessly; he gives no hint, e.g., of the manifest superfluity of ji^a^j^, end of line 12, p. 3, i.e., the very first page of text printed by him. Lamy, too, leaves something to be desired. ^ The best work in this direction yet done is that of Bickell in his Carmina Nisihena. Grimme^s statement, ZDMG, XL VII (1893), 278, that scarcely a single Syriac poem, though it be of the simplest form, exhibits the regular number of syllables in all its verses, may not in its entirety be ascribed to exaggeration; it is in no small part due to bad texts. A text which constantly necessitates conjectural emendation by the reader will not do ; one of the next necessary steps in the investigation of Syriac verse is the production of a reliable text of Ephrem, such as the Vatican contemplates in its new edition (see above). What has just been said, not only expresses one of the needs of modern scholarship in this field, but it also uncovers one of the sources of -'error, one of the reasons for the insufficiency of the work hitherto done by moderns in the investigation of Syriac poetrv' and 1 It can be traced to Antonius Rhetor, at least. 2Cf. Noldeke, GGA (1882), 1505-14; (1887). 81-7; WZKM. IV, 245-51; XVII, 196-203. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 151 I poetics. It is, however, by no means the onty point at which this work needs correction and completion in fundamentals as well as in ultimate detail, as a brief review will speedily show. The foundations of all knowledge on the subject were laid in Europe by the writings and teachings of Maronites. George Amira, a Maronite teacher of Syriac grammar in Rome, was the first to publish in Europe a crude and insufficient statement of the elements of Syriac poetics, as a sort of an appendix to his Syriac grammar (Rome, 1596). He was rediscovered by Lamy, Ephraem Syri Hymni et Sermones, t. IV, coll. 496 ff., upon whom this statement is based, as Amira's grammar is found neither in the Harvard nor in the Chicago libraries, nor, indeed, so far as I know, in America. Amira taught, briefly, that Syriac verse is not quantitative; that Syriac liturgical books contain many different kinds of verses (he calls them carmina)^ the heptasyllabic being named after Ephrem, that of twelve syllables, subdivided into three groups (significantly called pausae) of fours, after James of Sarug; that he considered most elegant distichs of six pausae, ornamented with various species of artificial rhyme; and that certain synizeses and diaereses were permissible to bring about the requisite number of syllables. The fragment of Petrus Metoscita's Syriac grammair, published by Martin from the Vatican manuscript, No. 435, p. 168, in Metrique chez les Syriens, p. 18, n. 1, is not very clear, being separated from its con- text. Its meaning can hardly be other than: There are two kinds of verse, that which counts vowels or syllables, as clo we, the Syrians, and that which measures their length or brevity. Assemani, quoted ibidem from the Vatican manuscript, No. 389, adds the distinction between simple and composite meter, and names of the former, in addition to those mentioned by Amira, that of Mar Balai. From Petrus Mubarrak (Benedictus) we learn (Ephr. Syr., 0pp. Syr.-Lat., t. II, Praef. ad lectorem, p. xxvi) that this Balaean measure was the pentasyllable. He adds further the information that Syriac tunes, named by hirmi or model strophes, are often given at the head of hymns (as our "Old Hundredth," and sometimes the count of musically valid syllables, is printed over our hymn tunes), and the misinformation that Hebraic meter is exactly like the Syriac, and that the Greeks possess but eight hymn tunes, whereas the Syrians 152 The American Journal of Semitic Languages have 275. Al. Assemani, Codex liturgicus Ecclesiae universae, Rome, 1756, t. IX, Praef. xciv, adds some information on the denotation and use of hymn tunes, which need not be quoted in detail. J. S. Assemani, Bibliotheca Orientalis, I, 61, explains the naming of some meters after poets, makes a faulty distinction between Sermones {Mlmre) and Hymni (Madrdshe) and calls attention to the acrostics used by Ephrem. To complete our enumeration of modern works on the subject by native Syrians, wholly or partially published, mention must be made of two further authors. The first is Stephanus Petrus Aldoensis, patriarch of the Maronites in the second half of the seventeenth century. His work, referred to by Mubarrak and Hahn, quoted by Al. Assemani, was described in more detail by Pius Zingerle, in ZDMG, XVII, 687 ff.; XVIII, 751 ff. As pre- served in manuscript in the Vatican (Angelo Mai's catalogue. No. CCCCXLI), it is a full and explicit list of hymn tunes, named after first lines; together with this the first strophe is written out in full, the number of verses and of syllables in each verse (set out in red before each verse) being specially noted. It is not, therefore, a scientific book on verse or versification at all, but rather a book intended for practical use in churches. From it are derived the statements of modern Syrians concerning the many hymn tunes of the Syrians; his own enumeration is probably not wholly original, but goes back through whatever intermediate stages to the funda- mental work of Antonius Rhetor of Tagrit. The other author, chronologically the last, who must not be forgotten in this list, is Gabriel Cardahi (al-Qarddhl) . Of his three books. Liber thesauri de arte poetica Syrorum, Rome, 1875; AV Yhkam seu linguae et artis metri- cae Syrorum institutiones, Rome, 1880; and Al-Manahegh seu syntaxis et rhetoricae Syrorum institutiones, Rome, 1903, the latter has been inaccessible for this review. The other two, in Arabic, present the author's ideas on Syriac poetry and poetics. They are marred by an untrustworthiness, which one is inclined to designate as oriental, though it is by no means limited to the Orient. In ArYhka7n, p. 72, he definitely ascribes (on what authority ?) the introduction of rhyme into Syriac poetry to Yuhannan bar Khaldun, whom he places in the fifth century a.d.; he lived in the tenth (cf. Duval, Lit. Syr., p. 18, n. 1; "Vie du moine Rabban Youssef Bousnaya," Revue de V Orient Antonius Rhetor on Versification 153 Chretien, 1897-98). His distinction of ten kinds of meter, to each of which he assigns a fanciful name in Arabic and Syriac, is valuable only as it exhibits to us a modern native's feeling of what constitutes a verse and its subdivisions in Syriac. He distinguishes, e.g., three kinds of twelve-syllable verse, one divided into three equal groups, one into two, and one without subdivision. His Thesaurus offers a valuable collection of Syriac poems, ranging in time from Ephrem to the present; the historical notes are very unreUable throughout. Starting from such printed and similar oral instruction, European scholars began to study the subject of their own accord. The first of these to make public his lucubrations was August Hahn in hie noteworthy book, Bardesanes Gnosticus Syrorum Primus Hymnologus (Leipzig, 1819; especially Part I, §4, pp. 28-51). Some of the erroneous conclusions in historical matters arrived at by Hahn in this brilliant study, as pointed out in Appendix I, were due to the insufficiency of his means and sources rather than to any lack of acumen or honest diligence on his part. He was similarly handi- capped in his work on Syriac meter; the faulty text of the editio princeps, than which he had no other, led him to the assumption of unnecessary and incorrect synizeses and diaereses. In spite of this, his real contributions to a scientific knowledge of the subject were of no mean order. He was the first to pay any attention to accent, which, it seems, must play a rather important role in the rhythm of non-quantitative verse. Reading as he did in the manner of modern Syrians, with a stress-accent prevailingly placed on the penult (on what authority ? orally taught ? by whom ?), the scansion of Syriac verse seemed to him in the main quite self-evident, much easier than Greek. With a word of three syllables frequently closing the verse, an accent on the next to the last syllable of the verse w.as natural, and he records it as obtaining in other cases as well. He noted the similarity of Syriac to Greek Christian ecclesiastical poetry, being careful not to express too decided an opinion as to priority. The Syriac manner of slurring together the words of a phrase, like the Arabic and the French, did not escape his notice. Besides the five-syllable verse with which he began, he discovered and pointed out hymns in verses of four, six (the Bardaisan distich translated in Appendix I), and seven syllables, and some in mixed meters. 154 The American Journal of Semitic Languages* Faulty ascription of the model to Bardaisan did not prevent Hahn from perceiving the strophic form of the hymns. Ady. Scrut., 49-65 (eleven five-syllable verses), nor yet from discerning, wherever possible, the refrains: no small feat considering the text he had to work with. In the chrestomathy which he edited together with Siefert in 1825, Hahn further correctly defined the strophe of Adv. Scrut., 67 (five four-syllable verses). If in the attempt to classify and describe the wide and apparently loose Syriac nomenclature for a variety of poetic forms he was not fully successful, this is no crush- ing demerit; for neither was he wholly unconscious of his short- comings, nor has a full and exact definition of these terms been attained even at the present day. All in all, the pioneer labors of August Hahn, as compared with the advances made since his day, merit rather more attention and credit than it has been customary to give them.^ Following Hahn five other German scholars under- took to make such contribution as they might to the work in this field. The first of these, Pius Zingerle, has been mentioned above, in connection with his work on Stephanus Petrus Aldoensis, one of the native writers enumerated in the previous section. In addition to this and other editorial and translation work, Zingerle published an extensive, and, in its day, valuable study of strophic structures (now absorbed by Grimme, and especially by Lamy), the beginning and end of which appeared in Lassen's short-lived Zeitschrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, VII, 1-25, 185-97, while the middle went with the rest of Lassen's journal into the pages of the ZDMG, X, 116-26. Of Fr. Uhlemann it need only be said (with Lamy, op. cit., t. 4, col. 472) that he appended to the second edition of his Granimatik der syrischen Sprache, Berlin, 1857, a brief section on versification based wholly on the work of August Hahn. This appears to be the only grammar in print, besides Amira (and Cardahi's Manaheghf), which has ventured on this ground. Gustav Bickell represents on the one side a distinct advance, on the other an aberration. His greatest single contribution made 1 Praetorius in his little note, ZDMG, LIU (1899), 113, is fairer to Hahn than most others, Joh. Christian Wm. Augusti, De Hymnis Syrorum Sacris, 1814, quoted by Hahn, Bardesanes, p. 29, does not deprive Hahn of pioneer's honors. Augusti accepted Hahn's corrections in his Denkwurdigkeiten aus der christl. Archaologie, V (Leipzig, 1822), 350-77. For the best descriptions and definitions of Syriac poetic forms now obtainable see Baumstark, op. cit., pp. 98-106. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 155 to the subject directly is his edition of Ephrem's Carmina Nisibena (Leipzig, 1866). In this book Bickell has edited, better than anj^- thing previously published of Ephrem's, 73 songs on various places and themes, the whole collection being named after 21 songs at the head, which treat of Nisibene men and matters. In the introduction sec. VII, De re metrica, describes correctly a number of strophic structures with their denotations, expatiates upon the refrains and their Syriac origin, and gives a classified list of diaereses and syn- aereses (Bickell's term), with criticism and correction of Hahn's errors. Thus far Bickell's work represents a notable advance toward the securing of trustworthy material and a firm foundation for the study of Syriac meters and metrics. From this point onward Bickell walks on uncertain or wholly unsafe ground. It is signifi- cant that henceforth his observations on Syriac verse are found in books and articles on Hebrew metrics, a list and description of which is given in W. H: Cobb's Systems of Hebrew Metre (Oxford, 1905), pp. 108-28. He believed himself to be following and elaborating a brilliant and original conjecture of Cardinal Pitra (found in the Hymnographie de Veglise grecque, 1868), but actually he and Pitra were simply accepting at far beyond its real value a piously patriotic supposition made public in Europe by Petrus Benedictus (Mubarrak) in the preface to Vol. II of Ephrem's 0pp. Syro-Lat. (how far original with him, is hardly worth while investigating), when they assumed a far-reaching identity in the fundamentals of Syriac and Hebrew versification. In a brief summary from one of Bickell's articles in the ZDMG, printed in English translation by Cobb {op. cit., p. 113), these fundamentals are enumerated. Of the six listed, the counting of syllables, the disregard of quantity, the coincidence of the verse- lines (stichoi) with the divisions of the sense, and the connecting of homogeneous stichoi into symmetrical and mutually equivalent strophes are in no sense new ; the identity of metrical and grammatical accent was assumed by Hahn without express statement (the term ''grammatical" is not very apt; what is meant is modern everyday speech); the regular interchange of toned and untoned syllables, producing trochaic measure in verses of an even and iambic in those of an odd number of syllables, is wholly Bickell's own, wholly un- founded, and probably wholly wrong, for Syriac as well as Hebrew. 156 The American Journal of Semitic Languages The greatest improbability of all, as Grimme (ZDMG, XL VII, 278) has pointed out, lies in the further assumption that in strophes com- posed of dissimilar verses all must be read after the manner estab- lished by the first verse. A name, which is scarcely ever, or rather never, mentioned in such a survey as this, is that of K. Schlottmann. The reason for this is twofold. First and foremost, his work is hidden away in the older volumes of the ZDMG (XXXII, 187-97 and 767 f.; XXXIII, 252-91, more especially 279-84) under the title ''Zur semitischen Epigraphik," with the subtitle in Vol. XXXIII, '^Nebst Unter- suchungen iiber die verschiedenen Grundprinzipien der Metrik im Arabischen, Hebraischen und Aramaischen." Secondly, the great, but rather embittered De Lagarde overspread it with scathing criticism, which was meant to annihilate, but which, as is now per- fectly clear, in this as in other cases, went beyond De Lagarde's evidence. In spite of this, Schlottmann's work stands forth today as one of the most significant expositions (in the writer's opinion the best to date) of the fundamental principles of Aramaic and in par- ticular of Syriac prosody. Assuming as proved (as well he might) the counting of syllables with disregard of their quantity and extensive use of parallelismus membrorum, he makes the observation that under the circumstances, even with the aid of music, the use of the accent was indispensable to the production of a rhythmic movement. Touching briefly upon similar phenomena in Byzantine-Greek and Bactrian poetry, he enters more extensively upon a comparison of Aramaic with French prosody. Neither the French nor the Syriac lays nearly as much stress upon accent as do the Germanic peoples. Both French and Syriac count syllables. Both French and Syriac are largely, if not wholly, limited to quasi-iambic and trochaic rhythms and experience serious, if not insurmountable, difficulties in the creation of anapaests and dactyls. French (and Syriac, 1 .A. also?) does not suffer strict iambic scansion, e.g., ''Qui je viens dans 3 11 8 son temple," etc., "la fameuse journ^e," etc.; but rather suggests and sustains a general iambic rhythm by certain heavier accents, regularly recurring at the end of hemistichs, e.g., "Oui je viens dans son temple adorer Teternel, Je viens selons I'usage antique et Antonius Rhetor on Versification 157 solennel Celebrer avec vous la fameuse journ^e, 0\i sur le mont Sina la loi nous fut donnee." Read in this wise the French Alexandrine exhibits the graceful and vivacious beauty native to it. At this point we find that with similarities French and Syriac also exhibit great dissimilarity in their essential structure. The very reason for the similarities in prosodic phenomena found in the two languages lies in a fundamental dissimilarity. French syllables are evenly light and the accent suspended and hovering, making impossible the thoroughgoing use of other verse measure than the count of syllables. Syriac and Aramaic, with its multitude of greatly or utterly reduced vowels, is brought to the same pass by the evenly massive weight of its syllables, which makes its iambus and trochee a mere spondee with the accent on the first or second syllable. Thus each language must be understood from the peculiarities native to it. Thus far Schlottmann, who is manifestly more than a precursor of Duval and Grimme. Grimme is the fifth of those German scholars who labored inten- sively and wrote extensively on the problem of Syriac metrics. His results are summed up in two treatises, the "Grundzuge der syrischen Betonungs-und Verslehre," ZDMG, XLVII, 276-307, and Der Strophenhau in den Gedichten Ephraems des Syrers (Collectanea Frihurgensia, fasc. II), MDCCCXCIII. As Bickell was at least stimulated by Cardinal Pitra, so Grimme took up and elaborated a suggestion of W. Meyer of Speyer (see above, p. 146). And his contribution to our knowledge of the subject is not unlike that of Bickell. On the one hand he has added greatly. In the discovery of Ephrem's strophic structures he is surpassed only by the consum- mate master in this field, Lamy. No one has been more acute than he in the discernment of the acrostics that mark out the madrashas of Ephrem. These madrashas he has correctly defined as songs of varied strophic structure with a refrain, intended to be sung by alternating choirs, or by a soloist alternating with a choir, in contra- distinction to the mimras, really metrical homilies, much more limited in strophic structure (in Ephrem four or six verses of equal length only), to be spoken by a single performer in a sort of recitative. But these things would be counted by Grimme himself as scarcely 158 The American Journal of Semitic Languages more than chips and by-products of his labors. He no doubt con- siders his best work and his real contribution to be the attempt to establish once for all the part played by accent in the rhythmization of Syriac verse. Since his attempt is the most pretentious and his system the most fully elaborated of any yet undertaken, though it is far from being generally accepted, it is only fair that it should be presented with sufficient accuracy and completeness to enable the reader to judge for himself. We shall try to reproduce his ideas as nearly as may be in his own words in translation, since they are in the main beautifully simple and clear. With Hahn and Bickell he assumes for poetry the same accent as for prose and for everyday speech, and for the earliest extant poetry practically the same accent as that which obtains in modem spoken Syriac, namely a strong stress prevailingly on the penult, the only difference between the ancient and the modern being the treatment of certain monosyllables as enclitics. The specific rules formulated by Grimme are as follows: (1) All words of two or more syllables (even foreign loan-words are included) are accented on the penult. Initial yodh may constitute a metrical syllable both accented and unaccented; with initial aleph pethoho and revoso are mere Shewas, all others full vowels; jj] is usually monosyllabic, .qJ] and .^] are frequently bisyllabic. (2) An enclitic monosyllable draws the accent of a preceding polysyllabic word to the ultima. Enclitics are: (a) personal pronouns following the verb to emphasize the subject; {h) the pronominal copula; (c) the post- positive auxiliary verb; (d) every monosyllabic verb form at the end of a sentence; (e) every monosyllabic composition of a preposi- tion with suffix or noun, when it follows its governing verb; (/) a monosyllabic second word in any genitive-relation; (g) a mono- syllabic word dependent upon a polysyllabic preposition; (h) post- positive particles and monosyllabic vocatives at the end of a sentence. (3) When two enclitics succeed each other, the first is accented, and the penult of a preceding polysyllabic word may be accented as well. (4) Words of four or more syllables may have two accents, one on the penult and one on the syllable preceding the antepenult. (5) When three or more monosyllables succeed each other, exact rules for the accent cannot be given. To these rules, which obtain Antonius Rhetor on Versification 159 in poetry and prose, must be added for poetry alone the possibility of raising initial Shewa-syllables to the status of metrical syllables/ not only unaccented, as Bickell had assumed, but accented as well. A bisyllabic anacrusis may cause the suppression of a legitimate accent by rapidity of pronunciation. Having laid down these rules of accent, Grimme proceeds to make the count of accents rather than the count of syllables the law of Syriac meter. From two to four accents (not more) constitute the measure of the Syriac verse. The last syllable is in all cases unaccented. Before and between accents one or two unaccented syllables may be used; in verses of two or three accents three successive unaccented syllables are permitted between accents. Of twenty-five metrical forms distinguished by Grimme he accepts nine as fundamental, the others serving as sub- stitute meters. The arbitrariness and uncertainty of some of these rules and procedures is patent without further comment. The best criticism of Grimme's unlikely assumption of an abiding accent during a mil- lennium and a half of great changes and shifts in other factors of the Syriac language will be found (without mention of Grimme) in Brockelmann's Syriac Grammar and in the same author's various expositions of the comparative grammar of Semitic languages, which supersede the incomplete statements of the Brockelmann-Grimme controversy {ZDMG, LII [1898], 401-8; LIII [1899] 102-12 [cf. 113], and 366-67). Less trenchant at this point, but more thorough in the matter of strophic structures, to which Grimme devoted a third section of his article and the major portion of his book, is the criticism of the Bel- gian master, Thomas Joseph Lamy. Lamy's greatest contribution to the subject, as has been pointed out before, lay in the exposition of Ephrem's strophes and their denotations. Further direct con- tributions made by him are: a good edition of a large number of Ephrem's poems and a correct definition of certain technical desig- nations of several poetic forms, notably sehlHhd and bauthd (less good is his opinion of sugithd; cf. Grimme, ZDMG, XL VII, 301). Besides this, Lamy gave a good though not a very deeply penetrating r^sum^ » What this leads to may be seen in Schlottmann's exposition of a faulty reading of French meters. Schlottmann's articles had evidently not been read, at least not care- fully, by Grimme, or he would hardly have risked this assumption. 160 The American Journal of Semitic Languages of the work of his predecessors in the field of Syriac metrics. Lainy's work was published in his Sanctt Ephraem Syri Hymni et Sermones, t. Ill, pp. i-xxviii, and t. IV, coll. 460-96.^ Since it would be worse than useless to reiterate Lamy's lists of strophes, it is no reflection upon his work that toward the end of this review we can sum it up in comparatively brief space. There is still another point at which Grimme's theories are open to criticism. What Grimme assumes to be the only way in which accent may be used to produce rhythm is after all the Germanic way, not the universal way. The term ''Germanic" (including English, of course) is used because it is undoubtedly the feeling of this ethnic group, which Grimme shares and from which he proceeds. The use of this term is not meant to deny the well-known fact that other groups, e.g., the Byzantine Greek, the mediaeval Latin, the Italian, proceed upon similar lines in the rhythmical use of accent. But there are differences as well as similarities between these groups. The Italian tongue does not employ the heavy, hammering stresses of English and German; nor does accent appeal to the Itahan ear so exclusively as the rhythm-producing factor in its poetry. It allows more room for the count of syllables and musical pitch as well.^ At a still greater remove from Germanic usage and feehng in this matter stands the French, in whose oldest Alexandrines but two regular accents (on the sixth and twelfth) were required in a series of twelve full syllables,^ the count of syllables seemingly playing the chief role in the production of rhythmically measured speech, as native metri- cians feel to be the case in Syriac. There are other affinities between the French and Syriac languages, the sloughing off of open, final syllables, a strong stress-accent developing into a prevailing ultima- accent of much less vigor (cf. Brockelmann, Syrische Grammatik, §36, p. 21), etc. It was fitting, therefore, that the criticism of Grimme at this point should proceed from the ranks of French 1 Cr. p. 147, note 3. 2 Cf. H. P. Tozer in Edward Moore's Textual Criticism of the " Divina Commedia'" and almost any book or treatise on Italian prosody. For his knowledge on Italian and French versification, though he is not entirely without personal experience in the matter, the author is greatly indebted to Professor C. H. Grandgent of Harvard University. » Cf . Becq de Fouquieres, Traite general de versification frangaise, Paris, 1897 ; Maurice Grammont, Le Vers franqais, Paris, 1913, et al. If my ear and the mutual understanding of myself and my Chinese friends mistake not, the Chinese feeling and procedure are nearer to the French than to the Germanic. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 161 scholarship. Most modestly and most delicately was this criticism made by Rubens Duval, for many years before his death the dean of French Syriac scholars, in the Journal asiatique, 9® Serie, t. VII (1896), pp. 162-68. According to M. Duval's feeling, Grimme has erred in not distinguishing the prose accent or accent of intensity from the prosodic or tonic accent, and in dividing the Syriac verse into a mere succession of accented and unaccented syllables, instead of rhythmic groups or measures of syllables. M. Duval has written more extensively on Syriac poetics and poetry in the same journal, same series, t. X, pp. 57-73, and in his Litterature syriaque, 3d ed., pp. 10-23. His further contributions to the science in these publications, and in his latest article on the subject, "Notice sur la rhetorique d'Antoine de Tagrit," in Orienta- lische Studien Theodor Noldeke gewidmet, I, 479-86, will be presented more extensively a little farther on. With no attempt to set forth a system of his own, the latest writer on the subject, Dom J. Jeannin, criticizes as insufficient the system of Grimme, both in itself and as complemented by Duval. Jeannin's contribution consists, as did that of Dom Parisot, in his Collection de chants orientates, Paris, 1899, and in various other works, before him, of a series of excellent and extensive treatises dealing with the church music of the Syriac-speaking churches, especially the Maronites. Jeannin's work appeared under the general title, "Le Chant liturgique syrien" in the Journal asiatique, 10® S^rie, t. XX (1912), pp. 295-363 and 389-448; and 11® S^rie, t. II (1913), pp. 65-137, including in its last part a section on "Rhythme musical et rhythme poetique" (pp. 74-111), which contains among other things the critique of Grimme and Duval mentioned above. Interesting in this connection is the statement based on observation of Maronite practice in the liturgical chant, that "quant aux accents, c'est bien sur les syllabes qu'indique le systeme Grimme qu'ils sont en realite places," for which one would much desire to see tabulated lists. In any case, that he had hit upon some of the rules of modern Syriac practice was known in some measure to Grimme himself and was only natural with the views on Syriac accent held by him. As for the rules governing the production and recitation of classical Syriac poetry, the criticism of Jeannin remains true, any 162 The American Journal of Semitic Languages that have yet been formulated are insufficient and uncertain. Nor can they be otherwise, unless and until the proper foundations are laid. What these foundations are has in part been indicated and in part, at least, indirectly suggested. One of the prime requisites are texts, especially of Ephrem Syrus, that should be as reliable as they can be made. Another is a broader knowledge of what actually does and what may produce the feeling of rhythm in the writing, reciting, chanting, or singing of poetry, ancient and modern, and greater ability and training in the art of perceiving these rhythmical elements than has yet been brought to bear on Syriac or any oriental poetry (cf . Schlott- mann, op. cit.) . To Grimme, by his own confession, a certain manner of reading poetry sounds like the ticking of a telegraphic instrument. To the French ear, unless many of us be misinformed, the Germanic manner of conceiving and reciting poetry, the Germanic employment of strong stress-accents, is anything but pleasing, a fact which in part accounts for the exceptions Duval takes to Grimme's reading of Syriac poetry. He whose ear cannot perceive without displeasure, at least, these two kinds of poetic rhythm, the French and Germanic, which stand very nearly at opposite poles to each other, should hardly hold himself able to pass judgment on what may or may not have seemed rhythmical in a "dead'' language or a past and gone phase of a language. This art of hearing must for our purpose be supplemented by the best attainable knowledge as to what actually does and what may produce the feeling of rhythm, especially in the writing, reading, recitation, and singing of poetry. For such information the student will probably first turn to the professional metricians, from Aristoxenos to Riemann, Sievers, and Sidney Lanier, etc. From these he who is critically inclined and trained will take leave with the impression that, though great and delicate powers of observation and statement have been expended upon many of their pages, yet they exhibit not infrequently a lack of breadth or depth, certainly for the most part in more or less measure a lack of scientific control of their experiences and observations, and in consequence leave with the reader a feeling of insecurity and uncertainty as to the universal validity and applicability of the laws and rules formulated by them. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 163 Rhythmic feeling being a psychological phenomenon, it is to experimental psychology that we must look for such scientific con- trol of our '' facts. "^ Without presuming to pose as an expert in this intricate field, or even as a second-hand connoisseur of the literature on this particular subject, the writer, upon the basis of a rapid review of what seemed to him the most important articles and essays, would set down here a few of his impressions in order to call more gen- eral attention to the importance of this side of his subject, until those who are competent shall speak with authority.^ First may be registered a general impression, which would be less needed if it were more heeded: the psychological study of the subject up to date has made reserve of judgment and restriction of statement more impera- tive than ever. The work of the psychological experts is so far from offering a complete solution of the more complicated rhythmic structures that what seems to be the best and most advanced exam- ination of the simplest rhythmic phenomena, that by Kurt Koffka (op. dt.), distinctly disclaims finality. Though some work has been done, notably by Americans and Canadians, on poetic rhythms, this has not gone far; in fact, it has for the most part most properly been confined to" particular details, because precisely the rhythms » My attention was called to the psychological side of the rhythmic experience and to the psychological literature on the subject by Professor Karl Schmidt, head of the Department of Philosophy, Tufts College, Medford, Massachusetts. » In order to leave no one under any misapprehensions as to the limitations of the writer, and in order to facilitate the approach of younger students, a list of books and articles more or less reported to by the writer is here given: (1) General works on psy- chology: Gruridzuge der Psychologic, von H. Ebbinghaus, 3. Aufl. von E. DUrr, 1911, pp. 522-24; W. Wundt, Physiologische Psychologic, 6. Aufl., 1911, pp. 141-57 and passim (cf. Sachregister). (2) Special articles and treatises: Ernst Meumann, " Untersuchungen zur Psychologic und Asthetik des Rhythmus" in Philosophische Studien, Bd. 10 (1894), Heft 2. pp. 249-322. and Heft 3, pp. 393-430; Thaddaeus L. Bolton, "Rhythm" In American Journal of Psychology, VI; Shaw and Wrinch, "A Contribution to the Psy- chology of Time," University of Toronto Studies, Psychological Series, No. 2; Hurst and McKay, "Experiments on the Time Relations of Poetical Metres," ibid.. No. 3; Scripture, Studies from the Yale Psychological Laboratory, VII; Margaret K. Smith, " Rhythmus und Arbeit," Phil. Stud., Bd. 16; Eberhardt, " Zwei Beitrage zur Psychologie des Rhythmus und des Tempo," Zeitschr. fiir Psych., XVIII; Triplett and Sanford, "Studies of Rhythm and Metre," Amer. Jour, of Psych., XII, 361-87; C. R. Squire, "A Genetic Study of Rhythm," ibid., pp. 492-589; Robert MacDougall, "Structure of Simple Rhythm Forms," in MUnsterberg's Harvard Psychol. Studies, I (1903), 309-411; R. H. Stetson, "Rhytlxm and Rhyme," ibid., pp. 413-66; Kiu-t Koflfka, Experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Lehre vom Rhythmus, Leipzig. 1908, more complete in Zeitschr. f. Psych. LII (1909), 1-109; Karl Marbe, Cber den Rhythmus der Prosa, Giessen. 1904; H. Unser, Vber den Rhythmus der deutschen Prosa, Freiburger Dissertation, Heidelberg, 1906; Abram Lipsky, "Rhythm as a Distinguishing Characteristic of Prose Style" in Archives of Psychology, New York. 1907; Paul Kullmann, Zeitschr. f. Psych., LIV (1909). 290 ff.; M. Beer, ibid., LVI (1910), 264 ff.; A. Prandtl, ibid., LX (1911), 26 ff. 164 The American Journal of Semitic Languages of poetry are one of the most complex phenomena in the whole field of rhythms. What has been done is sufficient to give pause to theorists on the ''only" correct method of reading ancient Syriac verse, though an occasional summing up of our knowledge on this as on other subjects and even a bold, intuitive forward thrust may not be wholly out of place. Even though we assume what is anything but generally admitted, that the part played by accent is exactly alike in old Syriac and in modern Germanic poetry, the case is not so simple as might appear. The fact that a certain method of reading sounds well to certain modern ears is no guaranty that it correctly represents the intention of the author or the practice of early readers. If, fgr example, Grimme's readings are not unhke modern Syriac, it is a well-known fact that BickelFs declamation of Hebrew and Syriac verse enthralled his hearers by its smoothness and beauty. Very instructive is an example, adduced by Triplett and Sanford (op. cit.), of a well-known nursery rhyme, which may with equally pleasing effect be read in three different ways: J_ 8 3 3 4 Sing a song o' six pence {or six pence), i 1 3 A pocket full o' rye; or 1 8 Sing a song o' six pence, 1 8 A pocTiet full o' rye; etc. But the similarity of old Syriac to modern Germanic is not at all certain — quite the opposite, in fact. Before we can be certain of anything in the reading of classical Syriac poetry, much special investigation is still needed. Even in the most attractive and promising field of modern, living tongues and peoples, whether it be the task of the psychologist or of the psychologically trained student of modern philology, the work, especially comparative work, has been very much restricted* for lack of interested workers. Some Japanese, Slavs, and Latins have, indeed, taken part in a few of the Wundtian experiments,^ but by far the greater part of the people subjected to psychological observation and experiment have been 1 Wundt, op. cit., Ill, 90, n. 1. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 165 of Germanic stock and rearing. And aside from the fact that some of Wundt's observations have been partially vitiated by precon- ceived theories (cf. e.g., Squire, op. cit.), his as well as other investi- gations have thus far been too restricted, not only in number and types of people studied, but also in range of inquiry, to admit of any generalizing conclusions of validity and value on the varied and composite rhythms of poetry. The part played by elements other than accent in creating the impression of rhythm is far from clear for both Latin and Germanic languages. In the older Romance and Germanic poems, just as in those of the Syriac poets, the end of the verse, sometimes that of a half-verse, coincides with logical sense-divisions. How did this help the sense of rhythm ? Was it in turn supposed to help bring about regularly recurring variations in pitch, which would assist materially in marking larger or smaller rhythmic groups ? Since by the unanimous statements of all the native metricians the counting of syllables played so large a role in the writing of Syriac verse, is it possible that in poetry produced in the meticulously artificial studies of an Ephrem, an Antonius Rhetor, an Ebedjesu, a Severus bar Shakko, the visual sense was meant to take part in creating a sense of symmetry and rhythm ? For all such questions the preliminary, general psychological investigations have not yet been completed. And that is but natural, for professional psychologists cannot be expected to turn to what for them is a remote and obscure corner before clearing their own general field. In order that this particular work may be more expeditiously concluded, a larger proportion of Semitists must turn their attention to experimental psychology than has been the case hitherto. But before the problem of Syriac meters may be attacked directly with a propitious outlook for a successful solution, there remains no small amount of preHminary work to be done in Syriac, in the fields of hnguistry, literature, and history. Not only tools and workers are lacking, but materials to work upon. And these materials must consist of more than rectified texts of the poets. Grimme and those who have given him more or less qualified assent base their conclusions upon a pure and simple assumption with regard to the word-accent of classical Syriac prose. This 166 The American Journal of Semitic Languages assumption rests upon no secure basis of known facts. Before plunging farther, therefore, it behooves us to seek for such facts. Up to the present this has been done energeticalfy and effectively by few Semitic scholars, notably Praetorius, Philippi, and Carl Brockelmann. Brockelmann's work, which sums up the results of his predecessors, has been severely censured and even light-heartedly rejected in some quarters. But whether his results be finally accepted- or no, nevertheless it remains that he has vigorously attacked this knotty problem and brought to bear upon it all the resources of a great intellect and an excellent equipment. Instead of carping censure, this pioneer work deserves help, be it by fair and helpful criticism or be it by supplementary investigation. As a matter of history the relation of Syriac hymn-writing to music demands attention. Parisot, Jeannin, and a few others have applied themselves to the task with excellent results. The ultimate goal has hardly been attained. Yet the task is an important one, if we wish to solve the problem of Syriac rhythmization. If certain methods of reading Syriac poetry sound to some of us like the click- ing of a telegraph, perhaps it was never meant to be read. And if it was written to be sung, then it must be remembered that musical accent may be very different from that of the spoken word; the two may complement each other, they may have little or nothing to do with each other. ^ Especially hymns written to fit existing tunes, even in modern times, are frequently by no means faultless in this respect. Now the hirmi which served the Syriac hymn-writers as models for their strophes were probably in many cases not mere skeleton frames of syllables and accents, but actual tunes.^ If, therefore, Ephrem wrote his madrashas upon such hirmi, as we positively know him to have done in many cases, and if, as we have good reason to believe, he laid chief stress upon their being sung, and if, further, he wrote his mimras for recitative declamation (the times of the Gracchi saw flute-players accompanying or at least giving the pitch to orators at Rome) rather than for simple reading, is it not at 1 Cf . R. H. Stetson, op. cit.; Jeannin, op. cit.; Frances Densmore, "Chippewa Music," Bulletins of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, Wash- ington, D.C., Nos. 45 (1910) and 53 (1913), and almost any collection of old songs, hymns, ballads, etc. * Cf. Severus bar Shaklco in Martin, Mitrique, p. 33, 11. 15 ft.; the translation, p. 43, is not exact. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 167 least possible that he had regard in his composition to the number of syllables only and to accent much less or not at all ? Finally, if we wish to attain any reasonable certainty in regard to many of these questions, we must not, as has frequently been done, utterly ignore the older Syriac literature on the subjects of versifi- cation and rhetoric. We may distrust the modern, native writers named in the earlier pages of this introductory essay, as having come too much under the influence of modern Europe. The suspicion is not wholly justified. All of them (Cardahi, perhaps, least, being under Arabic influence) exhibit information which through some channel, in whatever dilution and distortion, has come to them from the older masters of their people. The dean of these older masters, the man who claims to be the first to have written an extended and systematic treatise on Syriac versification, Antonius Rhetor of Tagrit, acknowledges himself indebted to the Greeks both for the impulse to write and for his models.^ But this indebtedness does not constitute undue influence; in this manner every writer is indebted to his predecessors. Antonius learned from the Greeks, he did not merely translate and copy them, as, indeed, he could not, his material differing too widely from theirs. To walk your own dogmatic way in determining what may or may not have been the essence of Syriac meters, neglecting totally what men like Antonius and his successors wrote on the subject, will not do. These men after all register for us in a most compact and comprehensive way the native thought and feeling as to what constitutes poetry, and as to what is demanded and what is permitted in Syriac versification, both in the rules and opinions which they advocate, and in those which they oppose. Antonius, moreover, registers and describes differences between the poetry of his own time, the ninth century, and that of the period which we have called the classical. Such statements and treatises must be more extensively published and more intensively studied than has been done hitherto, if we would make progress in our knowledge of Syriac meters. 1 It is not improbable that among the factors which moved Antonius to write his treatise was the desire to become the al-Qalll of his people. He does not say so; perhaps he studiously avoids giving any such impression. But the dates are significant. Antonius floruit ca. 825-50 a.d.; al-^alil died 791; SIbawaihi, 793 or 796; al A^faS al Ausat, 830 or 835. It is well to recall that Severus bar Shakko, also, had studied ' with the Arabic master, Kamal ad-din b. Junus. 168 The American Journal of Semitic Languages Again the names of two French scholars appear as those at whose hands this side of the subject has received attention. What may be called the first native statement on Syriac meters, Ephrem Syrus, Adv. Haer., 0pp. Syr.-Lat., II, 553 f., has been reprinted three times by Duval, though in fairness August Hahn must be given credit for having been the first to point it out and use it in this connection. Since it is brief and admits of discussion, it may here find a place both in the original and in translation : ♦ ]Li>n^ ^^^° • i^'V* t-^ ''^'-^ , — kO,_s ♦ )lVi\nii? ari^ )] : ]ii^a^|^9 l^t-^fs ♦ ]Zn»\M^ ]hp£ : ]\^^\^L^ : >..£is'f ^i i>Vimo ||1>o : . m\nL29 (7i.*l£0|^ -> L^^^ oij^o.^^ : 90^9 l^, ciJ-uiac ^j^o :^ > nn4> cn9j-4. ♦ ]Zj-iiiD] o(ji ws] , ''He [i.e., Bardai- san] wrote madrashas and provided [literally ''mixed"] them with tunes; he composed psalms and put them into metrical form [cf. Appendix I]; by means of measures and balances he dis- tributed the words. He offered to the guileless bitter things in sweet guise, in order that, though feeble, they might not choose wholesome food. He sought to emulate David, to deck himself out in his graces; that like him he might be extolled, one hundred and fifty psalms did he too compose. His truth he forsook, my brethren, and imitated his number." What is translated above "by means of measures and balances," Duval translates "En mesures et en poids, il divisa les mots," and remarks, "C'est-a- dire il divisa les vers en mesures rythm^es et accentuees." In this as in another interpretation (cf. Appendix I) he follows Hahn, somewhat too docilely, it would seem. The one like the other is giving exaggerated value to a casual statement. Ephrem never intended to give us valuable information on Syriac meters and their history; he was trying to express contempt and ridicule for Bardaisan and his followers. This and Ephrem's well-known tendency to obscurity in the simplest matters by reason of overcrowding with laborious and far-fetched figures of speech should have warned Duval, if not Hahn, not to ascribe to this state- ment a meaning which would make it unique in Syriac metrical literature, in that it contained so much as a reference to accent in versification. Besides, this is at best a specious possibility; the Antonius Rhetor on Versification 169 probability lies elsewhere. A word of the same root is used in Severus bar Shakko (ed. Martin, p. 55, n. 1, 1. 3) to designate the count of syllables; in another place (p. 67, 1. 10) another form is used with reference to the proper length and balance of clauses. Why then should not measures in Ephrem's statement refer to the measured count of syllables within each verse, and scales or balances (not weights) to the arrangement of the verses in parallel distichs, so frequent in Ephrem, and so clear in the hymns of the Acts of Thomas ? A much more extended and pretentious publication is that of a large part of the section on metrics from the Dialogues of Severus bar Shakko (ecclesiastical name Jacob, of Bartela — not of Tagrit, bishop of ^lar Mattai) by I'abb^ Martin in Abhandlungen fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, VII, No. 2 (Leipzig, 1879). This is of consider- able importance, both in itself, as Severus is neither stupid nor poorly educated, and because it makes use, at times verbatim or nearly so, of the similar treatise by Severus' predecessor, Antonius of Tagrit, a fact which Duval was first to observe. Appendix II of this essay gives a description of a Harvard manuscript, which contains a por- tion of these Dialogues, and a collation of the Harvard text with Martin's, together with a few corrections of Martin's translation. There remains to be mentioned only one further publication and Ihe promise of a publication by Duval. In Orientalische Studien Theodor Noldeke gewidmet, I, 479-86, Duval announced that after an unsuccessful attempt to prepare for publication the insufficient fragments contained in British Museum MS Add. 17208 (described in Wright's Catalogue, p. 614), he had succeeded in securing a good copy, written in 1904 by Elias, son of Deacon Homo, deceased, of Alqosh, of a Mosul manuscript of the Rhetoric of Antonius Rhetor of Tagrit, which was fragmentary only in the last section, where it was spoiled by moisture and gnawed by mice. He published in the same essay the title of the whole volume and the chapter and book headings, both in Syriac and in translation, and a few sentences of one or more colophons in translation only. At the end he refers to M. Manna's Morceaux choisis de la litterature arameenne, Mossoul, Imprimerie des Peres Dominicains, 1902, in the second part of which (pp. 95 ff.) a few extracts from the Mosul manuscript are 170 The American Journal of Semitic Languages published; a copy of this work, which was secured by the University of Chicago Libraries, while this essay was in print, shows that none of the extracts printed by Manna are from the fifth book here pub- lished.- In his Litterature syriaque (3d ed., 1907, p. 300, n. 2), Duval promised a speedy publication of the entire text of the Rhetoric in Chabot's Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium. The promise lapsed, so far as he personally was concerned, with the death of the revered master on May 10, 1911. Nor has anyone else up to the present writing fulfilled it in his stead. In the meantime the writer found in the Semitic Museum Library of Harvard University, among the Syriac and Karshuni manuscripts purchased for the library by Professor David Gordon Lyon from J. Rendel Harris, a similar manuscript of Anthony's Rhetoric. The description and the collation with DuvaFs published text-frag- ments which follow will show that this manuscript is not inferior to that of Diival. The writer is happy to be able in the following pages to contribute his iota of help to M. Duval's literary heir or heirs. It is in no wise the intention of the writer to steal a march on M. Chabot or anyone else who has undertaken the work in the stead of M. Duval. These times of all times would be the least fitting for such a coup. ''High" politics and wars and opinions of wars and warring parties need not and should not interfere with such calm and peaceful onward march of science as is possible under the circum-' stances, nor with international intercourse and the courtesies which govern the relations between men following scientific pursuits in times of peace. What follows is a description of the Harvard manu- script with a translation of the colophons, a collation of the general title and the headings with those published by Duval, and the text of the fifth book of the Rhetoric, which is avowedly a treatise on versi- fication. Against the description and collation no objection can be made on any score. The text is published purely as manuscript text, not as an edited text. The publication is made primarily to enable the French editors to use this manuscript for their edition. The writer believes that this is a legitimate function of scientific journals, which might well be made use of more freely. And until the final text be published, this may serve as a makeshift text for such as need or desire this. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 171 If the writer has criticized French work, neither has he spared German where he found it in error; and he hopes that he has given to all alike due appreciation. Finally the writer's own work is herewith laid open to any criticism which its fault or faults may merit, so that only the cause of science, which is dear to his heart, be advanced thereby. DESCRIPTION OF THE HARVARD MANUSCRIPT OF ANTHONY OF TAGRIT's RHETORIC The Harvard manuscript, Semitic Museum No. 4057 (formerly Cod. Syr. 122 of J. Rendel Harris' collection), is a paper manuscript, containing 113 leaves, 23.8X16.5 cm., in 12 gatherings of 5 double leaves, except the first, which consists of 2, and the last, which con- sists of 4 J (5+4). From the second to the twelfth the gatherings are numbered in Estrangelo letters, |-U , at the beginning and end of each, the first at the end only, and the last at the beginning only; ^-U bear in addition the Arabic numerals, ^ , U , and It ; the second ^ and the first } are drawn in outline only, not filled in. Two folio- numberings run through the book, one in the upper left-hand corner of every recto, 1-113, is penciled in occidental numbers in J. Rendel Harris' hand; the other in the lower left-hand corner of rectos from fol. 6 to 107 bears the Syriac letters from ^c to ^, supplemented twice only (an:, *i1 and |-o , Ul) by Arabic numerals. Catchwords insure the proper sequence from verso to recto, that of fol. 916 being omitted at the beginning of 92a (cf. the printed text). Rulings on versos mark lines (24 on each page) and margins; on fol. 6a all mar- gins are bounded by an inked frame; fol. 56, the initial page of the book, bearing the title also, is elaborately ruled in little squares. An ornamental design is blocked out in black ink on this page, but only partially filled in in colors (red and light brown), depicting a sort of hanging, arched, oriental gateway for the book to enter. The paper, of a kind much in use in the modern Orient, is stamped with a water- mark, consisting on some pages of a shield-shaped escutcheon with double outline bearing in the center a crescent with fanciful human face, on others of the Italian legend Cartiera de Mori and under this Vittorio. The book is bound in light-green cloth with back and corners of dark-green sheepskin. Heavy guards and fly-leaves have been 172 The Amebican Journal of Semitic Languages supplied by the binders, who have set their mark, ''Bound by Wilson & Son, Cambridge," on the inside of the left guard. The title is printed in gold on the back between the second and third of eight pairs of lines: Antoninus (sic!) Rhetor of Taghrith. On the inside of the right-hand cover is pasted J. Rendel Harris' bookmark. The first four leaves were left blank and unpumiced, though ruled by the original scribe. At the top of fol. la, however, the legend Cod. Syr. 122 and thereunder Antonius Rhetor of Taghrith on Rhetoric is written in J. Rendel Harris' hand, and under this Semitic Museum No. 4057 in the handwriting of Professor D. G. Lyon. Fol. 5a contains the table of contents and a colophon, trans- lated below. On foil. 56 to 107a is written as much of the Rhetoric of Anthony of Tagrit as is known to be preserved: Book 1 on foil. 5a-556; Book 2, 556-656; Book 3, 656-72a; Book 4, 72a-876; Book 5, 88a-107a; 1076-1136 are ruled and pumiced but left blank. Large lacunae occur on fol. 616 in the midst of Book 2, 19 lines, w^^j^ . ^U^j-o to -lyJi. y l^a-^ul T^r^i; foil- 656/66a at the very beginning of Book 3, U^^^^^z ^o-p]? to j^wiJ-j-i*] jZai-kZLi^ r^? ; fol. 756/76a, 22 lines, ^^s^zLaIc? ^oi to o| ]?e, 1\ :o,^o^sn\ . The lacunae of Book 5 will be found in the printed text. Minor lacunae from one word to a line or more are found here and there in the last four books, increasing in frequency and size toward the close. The incipit will be found in the collation compared with Duval's text; explicit, fol. 107a, 1. 21: >c-».i^| jj-ca^ . z,-^ 1,-Mli. ]t-«*?o. A marginal note, which closes the book, is translated below. The Karshuni colophon on fol. 5a reads as follows: Now is this valuable book completed by the kindness of God, exalted is he, the one, the eternal, in the year 1895 a.d.; which corresponds to the year 2207 Greek, in Tishri II, by the weak and lowly deacon Matthaeus, son of Bulus, of old Syrian [faith]. And he wrote it in the city of Mosul, the famous, in Assyria, whose capital is Niniveh. And we toiled exceedingly, when we found this book, entitled the Book of Anthony of Tagrit, of which mention is made in the book of the History of Mar Gregory Barhebraeus Abu-'l-Farag. It was in the days of Mar Dionysius the Tellmahrensian, in the year 1136 Greek [ = 825 a.d.], at that time lived this chaste monk and excellent priest, ^^ there was the excellent monk and -priest, Mar Anthony the Antonius Rhetor on Versification 173 Tagritensian, Rhetor/'^ of good repute and well known in his time, as Mar Gregory writes of him. And as for the book from which we copied, it was damaged [read >coji^ for ?©ri»^ , "counted"!] by the rain and water and eaten by mice and of ancient date and worn with time and .old age. He who wrote it was named Dioscoros in Tur Abdin Arbaya, son of Shimeon, in the year 1714 Greek [ = 1403 a.d.]. And as for the places which were damaged and destroyed hj the gnawing of mice, we have left blank space in their stead, in the hope that perhaps another, supplementary manuscript might be found, whence we might supply the gaps. As for this manuscript, we found it in the monastery of the holy, the excellent, the famous [monas- tery of]2 Sheikh Mattai in Mt. Aloof,' and as we found it, so we carefully copied it. And now we humbly beg of every father and teacher who hap- pens upon tliis writing, let him not cast blame upon us, but let him seize the opportunity for meritorious works and say: Oh God, oh thou, who spreadest out the earth and raisest up the heavens, forgive thy servant, the deacon Matthew, the writer of these ugly characters. And if he discover error or oversight, let him correct them, for no one is perfect save God alone. "And let Mary, the mother of God, remember and all the saints^ Amen. At the end of the table of contents is given the reference: "The dating of the' ancient book from which we made this copy is on fol. 83," and under this, in Arabic letters and numerals, is repeated the date of the present copy: 1895 a.d. On fol. 87 (old count 83) 6, 11. 21-25, at the end of Book 4, are found the following notes: (1) in red, 1. 21, Karshuni: "This is the dating of the book from which we copied";. (2) in black, small and cramped, beginning of 1. 22: "The dating of the ancient book, thus is it"; (3) in black, 11. 22-24, in Syriac: ,^i, ns £ui^ 9049 . jl > mV ^i0o9Q.aj0a^9 ^^^^^ |^^ -^ ol^; .^ o| U^Q-*. l^ju^^Po :• UJq-^? ijaL.i.£9|o ; (4) in black, 1. 35, in Arabic: " 1714 Greek year." At the very end of the book is written a marginal note, similar to many others accompanying the lacunae throughout, fol. 107a; "From here until its end the book from which we copied is wanting; for it was an old book." The note is in Syriac. » Words in italics and inclosed in quotation marks both here and below are written in Syriac. - The words in square brackets are an interlinear "correction." 'Jebel 'Aloof should be read Jebel "Alfaf, i.e., Jebel Al-Maqloob; cf. Duval, Or. Stud. Th. Moldeke gew., I, 486. On the monastery and mountain cf. Georg Hoflfmann, " Auszuge aus syr. Akten pers. Mart.," Abh. f. d. Kunde des Morg., VII, 3, p. 19. n. 142; p. 17.5, n. 1371; p. 194, n. 1533; Felix Jones, "Notes on the Topography of Niniveh" in Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, No. 43 (1857), p. 599; Badger, The Nestorians and Their Ritual, I (1852), 95; Ritter, Erdkunde, 9, 572; Yaqut, 2, 694. 174 The American Journal of Semitic Languages The following collation with the portions of Duval's copy pub- lished in the Or. Stud. Th. Noldeke gew. will show that the Harvard text is, to say the least, not inferior to Duval's. Parallels between Antonius Rhetor and Severus bar Shakko, i.e., unacknowledged quotations of Severus bar Shakko from Antonius, occur as follows:^ A(ntonius) 92a, 11-14 = S(everus), 11, 11-13; A 92a, 15—926, 8 = S 11, 15—13, 1 (A 92a, 20, cf. S 11, 9f.; 'A926, 5, cf. S 13, 1, 2); A 926, 17-19 = S 11, 9-11; A926, 23, 24 = S 13, 4-7; A 93a, 1-18 = S 13, 10—14, 6; A 93a, 21 =S 13, 5; A 93a, 22 = S 13, 7f.; A93a, 23f.=S14, 8f.; A 936, 1-3 = S 14, 10-12; A 94a, 24 = S23, n. 2, 11. 6f.; A 946, 1=S 23, 3; A9462 = S58,1; A946,4-7 = S 24, n. 7; A 946, 7=S 58, 2 (cf. n. 1); A 946, 12 = S 25, 1; A 946, 14-16=S 26, 2-4; A 95a, 1=S 25, 10; A 95a, 14, 15 = S 26, 1; 956, 6+ 956, 11 =S 14, 18; 956, 12-19 =S 14, 19—15, 2 (Antonius' text, as used by Severus, seems to have been already defective); 96a, 23, 24, 966, 1-4 = S 27, n. 3; 966-996 are in general parallel to S 27-31, but in detail little or no verbal agreement is to be found; 996, 13/14 =S 31, 5, 6; 996, 17— 100a, 4 = S 31, 7-32, 15; 100a, 5 = S 34, 13 (100a, 5, 6 = S 33, If. ?); 100a, 6-23 = S 34, 15-35, 14; 1016, 4/5 = S 36, 13; 1016, 7-14 = S 36, 14-20; 102a, 16 = S 37, 1; 102a, 18, 19=S 37, 2; 102a, 22, 23 = S 37, 2, 3. COLLATION OF HARVARD MS OF ANTONIUS RHETOR TAG- RITENSIS WITH DUVAL'S TEXT The symbol H is used for the Harvard manuscript. 4- Above the title is written, in red like the title: oi— k In title, Ir^l^ : H ]^Ls ; post li*«i^ H add. . Uoil ; post ^o-iuJ] H add. I^^ajc ; post l-kJ^-k^^ H add. ''io^^h ; Uia:^ : H U^ioik ; jZoj^oi??: H jZoj-^-Kni? ; v^9?^Z? : H ^^h^AZ't ; H om. . .,-kic] .J^9|^ ^^ . chap, i: !■»-»•]: H \i^] . chap, ii: jZoj^oi?: H ]ZOf4^c,-o H add. psi . chap, x: ■ m • w ^.gvl^? : H » m'^rcnN? ; oci : H g<3\ . chap, xi: ti-*'- ^ '^^r^J V^st ^\L&as> H add. ooi . chap, xii: H ' n? i mn\ (as chap, x, and so throughout, unless otherwise noted). chap, xiii : H ^ m'i'mnN? ; ^AS^-fcA^°i'=ii| |-i^ : /f l^u^J^aUio .^.^^^ul i-i^^. chap, xvii: ooi (1): i/ooi?; ]z^Ni°4. : i/ jZiStq^. (i.e., donne ahon- dance d, enrichit, not with Duval abaisse [?]). chap, xviii: > m i m t-fS with marginal note ]b^o^Z: H > m i m j^js with ]£u*a^Z (71 . chap, xix: H has marginal note as for xviii, but in sg. : 7 chap, xxi: Uiacojoj^?: // |-a:»oo]j^? . chap, xxii: ante ^^>iws H add. ? . chap, xxiii: latica-*.; H jsi^aoo^; the list of examples given by Duval under this chapter is not exhaustive; this is misleading, since Duval's list covers but one of five methods of the use of names. Duval's translation is faulty, resting upon his reading of the sg. loiioa-^, ; not "qui a Heu par la denomination tir^e des faits," but "which through names proceeds to facts.'' chap, xxv: \L,]: H \L] . chap, xxvi: ante t^ * \ »| H add. ?; ,»n-i4ie-^: H ^^^lL^]'^^, H om. Zol. (2). chap. XXX : ant^ \x*Z-^ H add. U\^o; this will again change Duval's translation for better sense in view of the "double exhortation," which one is led to expect; not "instructive sous forme de r^cit," but "sous forme de r^cit et par proc^d^ instructif." This corresponds to the facts in chap. xxx. Closing formula of Book 1: post ^^a^jp H add. h^^h; post l-k|^?o H add. U^9Qju |-ijL»i^Z ; H om. . ,^-^1 )Xi^] ) Mon 4. ol^o . Title, Book 2: post ^a4J|? H add. .Ui-^?o j 4i ao |-JiL^Z; ooi jJLie?: H a2^9 ; U&^a-o : H Uofka^ . Title, Book 3: l^Zy. H l^w^^z?; U^j^Z: H U^L^-f^z. 176 The American Journal op Semitic Languages 1.1 ■Of^J^^r-r^t^ 6\ Antonius Rhetoe on Versification 177 v.- 178 The American Journal of Semitic Languages 4 1^ m i ^fi; 4 4-. m ^IM^ ^-3 ! 1411 * " ?? ^ » y Antonius Rhetor on Versification 179 lalkj.Mltiailllllffii^^ --l-i-!r='>iaa.ri.cHil *' Mi- ll i - ' i'l f 1 lit i^' 3-4 1 W-|1 i* 1 U i-n^- ill 1 1tiii 1 1 1 12 180 The American Journal of Semitic Languages > ^ ^ J -^ - :-^-t I' 1 J ^1^11 if J ^1 11- II 1 A lii^ 1.1 Antonius Rhetor on Versification 181 J 182 The American Journal of Semitic Languages 4ai > \ ^^'^, f r^ •^ Antonius Rhetor on Versification 183 lliilitlilulfilM I- I1 1 1 ill i 1-5 i^ VMa P- ?"- 1 1- }" If - ^ ! ^ ' i 1 •< J 1 i ii 42 l It 3 .■liq. ..4iu:^.U.., i.ii54i^iHi 5 * 184 The American Journal of Semitic Languages > mnjuiij-mmim A. A- Antonius Rhetor on Versification 185 a ■^■A.A ?4J ■H4 1 1^1- i a i i l,i. S ^..^^i|l i: i. 1 „ .iH.ii n. ii i I lill- /I 186 The American Journal of Semitic Languages i0h iis M- f -4--? .ll Antonius Rhetor on Versification 187 i>i J-^-A 188 The American Journal of Semitic Languages / :ilJ .M 1 if! If 'j Antonius Rhetor on Versification 189 IfH ^1# i^f i^Jll 190 The American Journal of Semitic Languages y ■ i ■i A ^ A- A' i i ;i J ^ ••,* ^ » ,"<( ' hi Ml -1 .1 4 ==• Antonius Rhetor on Versification 191 y ^ -1 i iili- -i4 .1 -fc 192 The American Journal of Semitic Languages 4 i/f'">H,d K- Antonius Rhetor on Versification 193 mm ^MM 194 The American Journal of Semitic Languages M1^.t raiH ^- i-^S Antonius Rhetor on Versification 195 iij] Hiij'iU imp ■1 A ^ -^ Icufrx /m^ZU l»Aa'V>.«>l-^Va«.x w«^ «^^ u^u»rl^-'ep ^v. 196 The American Journal of Semitic Languages APPENDIX I I In order to give English readers, who are not specialists in Syriac, an adequate idea of the poetic fragments of Bardaisan preserved to us and of the manner of their preservation, it has been thought best to append here an EngHsh translation of the only one of his extant works in which Ephrem Synis makes direct quotations from the poems of Bardaisan, the 55th Mad- rasha or Hymn against Heresies {Opera Omnia, Syr.-Lat., t. II, 557 f.). The only other place where what seems to be a Une of poetry is quoted from the works of Bardaisan is the fragment of a Philoxenus letter printed by Cureton in the introduction to his Spicilegium Syriacum, which will be found both in Syriac and in translation following Ephrem's madrasha in this appendix. The attempt has been made to preserve in the English the five-syllable verse of the original, maintained throughout except in vss. 29 f. and vs. 61, on which see the footnotes. The exact contents of each line could not, of course, be transferred into English in anything worthy the name of trans- lation. The number of lines, however, both for the whole poem, and for the larger logical sections, such as would be closed by a period, interrogation, or exclamation point, have been scrupulously maintained. The sense- divisions do not at all points bear out Lamy's classification of this hymn e V V ^ V (IV, 494, No. 74) under the strophic model of ^^?i^? nj-i^-fc.? , i.e., its fellow, Adv. Haer. 56,^ which exhibits a strophe of 11 five-syllable verses. This may be due to a corrupt text, printed in the Roman editio princeps, which certainly omitted or, at least, failed to distinguish from the body of the poem the refrain which almost certainly belongs there. We cannot but follow the printed text, numbering the verses consecutively, and marking the logical sense-divisions, which in most cases do fall naturally into eleven- line strophes. The translation follows: Pray, oh my brethren, 5 Something went forth, came For Bardaisan's sons, Down from life's father; That no more they rave. And a mystic son Saying, like infants, The mother conceived 1 It was a note concerning this "tune" wliich was misread by the Roman editor, Father Benedict (Opera Omnia, Syr.-Lat. t. Ill, 128 AB) : ^ ^'i^ ^ yrvrkA o ^^ ^V/^V a. .^9^5 ^oio'j-i-^9 \Ld ^Iii , which in somewhat halting Hebraic Syriac would mean: " Finished are seventeen hymns according to the tunes of the songs of Bardaisan." The able Hahn {Bardesanes Gnosticus, 32 f.) was misled by this reading to find here corrective corroboration of the statement of Sozomenus referred to below (pp. 199 flf.), which makes the songs of that mysterious son of Bardaisan, Harmonius, models for those of Ephrem. Lamy has shown {op. cit.. Ill, Proleg., IV, 475/6, n. 4) that the correct reading merely states that the seventeen hymns, Nos. 49-65, Adversus Scruiatores, follow p A ^ ^ A the tune and strophic model of . w^i^? '^^ At-*- , "Sect of Bardaisan," the opening words of hymn No. 56, Adversus Haereses. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 197 And bare, called life's child. 10 O holy Jesus, Praise to thy father! (11) He says, in no wise May one alone bud, Be fruitful, and bear. 15 Our Lord's own nature He claims born of two By mystic union. Our Lord, whose body Of two was not born! 20 How spotless must be His divine nature, Which is Kght from light! (11) Who would not stop his Ears, not to hear them 25 Say, the Holy Ghost Brought forth two daughters. Their words make her^ say To these in deep love: "Be she that follows thee 30 My daughter, thy sister. ' Shame were it to tell, How she waxed pregnant. Jesus, cleanse my mouth! (11) Lo, my tongue defiled 35 Their secret's telling! (13) Two daughters she bare: One, the dry land's shame; One water's image.' See, how they blaspheme! 40 No mean demon's form In water appears; How shall it mirror Forth the pure, mystic Holy Ghost's nature, 45 Which even in mind Cannot be pictured?* (11) He says: "When again Shall we see thy feast,^ And behold the maid, 50 The daughter, to whom On thy knee thou croon' st" f {or .) He proves by his songs, Vile in lullabies. Womanish in lilts, 55 That he soils the fair Holy Spirit's name, Which is alway pm-e. (11) Enough of reproach Is their secret song 60 Of her now, who says: "My God and prince, hast left me , lonef" (or.y Ashamed of his vice He clothes his song in A psalm's beauteous form, 65 Chaste, holy — which spake Our Lord: "God, my God, Why hast thou left me?"^ (10, or counting 61 as 2, 11) Professing to teach From Moses, the law, 70 He scoffs Moses' words: " The chief est delight Whose gates by command To mother are oped." In a place of shame 75 He puts paradise. The clear law reproves 1 The word for "ghost" or "sphit" is in Syriac feminine; used of the Holy Ghost it is later commonly masculine, in this context consistently feminine. » A distich of six-syllable verses; cf. following note. » Nau. Patrologia Syriaca, II, 504, footnote, says of verses 29-38: "Auctor trans- lationis latinae ilia verba non intellexit. Hilgenfeld [pp. 40-42] credit se intellegere. Cer- tmn ne est ipsummet Sanctum Ephrem versus Bardesanitarimi [p. 557C1 intellexisse et expressisse? .... legi potest: Filia pedis tui (femoris tui) erit mihi filia et tibi soror Genuit duas Alias: aliam terram miserabilem et alteram cpnflgurationem (congregationem) kquarum." Cf. Gen. 1:9-10. *Cf. II Cor. 3:18; Hymn of the Soul, distich 76-78, and G. Hoffmann's remarks on the latter in ZfNTW, IV (1903), 4, 288. ' Or " We shall": "thy" is feminine. • One eight-syllable verse, or distich of four-syllable verses. » Ps. 22:2; Mark 15:34 and parallels. 198 The American Journal of Semitic Languages As in a mirror Their hateful teaching He hates paradise, 80 The blest, of the saint, ^ And lauds another, A place of reproach. Which gods have laid out Father and mother 85 In union planted. By footsteps seeded. In the par'dise tale Their judge^ is Moses, For he wrote not so. (11) 90 In Eden there placed The Lord paradise.^ But one^ Moses preached; Two this one proclaims, Which gods have laid out 95 In a place I blush To mention by name. The snake that seduced Adam in the tree Deceived this man in 100 The paradise tale. (11) (11) Sun and moon he sees, The sun as father. As mother the moon; Both male and female 105 Gods and their offspring. With full mouth blasphemes He, and praises hosts. "Praise to ye, oh lords Of the hosts of gods," 110 He shouts unashamed. (10) The Maccabees found Slain men of the Jews; Finding in their breasts Heathenish idols, 115 They offered for them Prayer and sacrifice.^ And ye, oh ye saints. Pray for Bardaisan, Who died a heathen, 120 Legions^ in his heart, The Lord in his mouth.^ (11) The Philoxenus passage, in which a line, probably poetic, of Bardaisan's is quoted, is one of several fragments published by Cureton in his Spicile- gium Syriacum (London, 1855, pp. vf.), from a manuscript in the British Museum No. 12164. Further than these few fragments nothing has ever been published of this treatise. The third of the quotations reads in Cure- ton's edition as follows: ,-JLi4 ali ooi PoL j'viNs wa-kiJi* ]^si ws] ^^i,v U3Zy^ jjLal^o-. ^-J* ^zal* ,--:^ oui^i^o, i.e., ''So then this also 'The Ancient of Eternity^ is an infant,' not did we take it from Bardaisan, but he used it artfully to conceal his error, and he took it from us, i.e., from the ecclesiastical teaching." » I.e., Moses. ' Literally : opponent. » Gen. 2:8, 10, 15. * I.e., one paradise. 6 11 Mace. 12:38-45; cf. Testament of Ephrem, ed. Duval, Journal asiatique, 9« S§rie, t. XVIII (1901), 234-319. strophe 13, pp. 261 and 295. •Mark 5:9, 15; Luke 8:30. 'Mark 7:6; Matt. 15:8. •This is a counterpart of the idiom "ancient of days," Dan. 7:9, 13, 22, which simply means "humanly" or "temporally old." This means, therefore, "eternally old," as the divine being is conceived to be. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 199 II . Aside from these scanty quotations, our knowledge of Bardaisan's activity and fame as a poet rests upon the following evidence : the passage of Ephrem's hymn, No. 53, Adv. Haer., quoted in Syriac and in translation on p. 168; six lines of the first hymn. Adv. Haer. (t. II, 438) : " In Bardaisan's dens [are found] tunes and melodies intended for youth eager for sweetness; by his songs' harmony he rouses the desire of childhood," i.e., of the child- ish mind; Hymn 54 (t. II, 555 C/D) mentions "the hymns of one of them," viz., of the Bardesanites. Ephrem, 0pp. Syr.-Lat., t. Ill, pp. lif., the sec- tion of the Vatican Acts of Ephrem dealing with Bardaisan's poetry, is largely based on these passages of Ephrem. The same section of the Pari- sian Acts (Lamy, Vol. II, col. 66) contains a criticism of its own chief source, the Church History of Theodoret of Cyrrhus (see below), based upon a slovenly quotation of the passage from the 53d hymn. Adv. Haer. The Acts of Rabbula (Overbeck, S. Ephraemi Syri aliorumque Opera Selecta [Oxford, 1865], pp. 192, 11. 13-16, reprinted in the chrestomathy of Brockel- mann's grammar) say: "The accursed Bardaisan had been beforehand in his guile, and by the sweetness of his melodies had bound to himself all the great ones of the city [Edessa], that by them instead of strong walls he might be protected." These are all the extant witnesses for the native Syriac tradition, which is indirectly corroborated by Eusebius, H.E., IV, 30; Jerome, De Vir. III., c. 30. Sozomenus, H.E., III, 16 (copied by Nicephorus Callixtus), presents what seems to be in part, at least, an independent tradition, which intro- duces into history that elusive phantom-image of Bardaisan, his son Har- monius. Bardaisan is passed over with very brief mention, whereupon Harmonius proceeds completely to usurp the place of his father. Indeed, we leam to our surprise — and this is Sozomenus' trump card — that Har- monius has sprung from absolute obscurity to be the founder, not only of all Bardesanite, but also of all Syriac poetry. In spite of this his tremendous importance, he is passed over in utter silence, not only by Eusebius, but by Ephrem, also. All that is said of him, when he does appear, is either pre- posterous, or it is a mere repetition of what is elsewhere said of his father. Two other sons of Bardaisan, mentioned by Michael the Syrian {Chronique, ed. Chabot, Paris, 1900, pp. 109 f., 183 f.), bear Syro-Arabic names, Abgarun and Hasdu. Harmonius is, therefore, one of the unsolved mysteries of history. In view of all this suspicion does not seem unwarranted that this Har- monius' fame as a poet rests largely, if not wholly, upon his harmonious name, and, indeed, that this Bardaisan-son of the Greek name, "dis- covered" by Sozomenus, is nothing more nor less than a mere misreading or miswriting of ^m^wi] , ^Jtusohai , or > m • n??]gi into > M*1Sn?gi , > Wi1V>i|qi in a sentence very like that of the Vatican Acts of Ephrem, p. li, 11. 15 ff., followed 200 The American Journal of Semitic Languages naturally by the insertion after it of cij^ , perhaps supposed to be omitted by haplography, and by the ''correction" of the preceding verbal form, to the right gender, not improbably under the impression that its final ^ (Estrangelo) was a miswriting for initial m of Harmonius. Mistranslation of some epithet of Bardaisan's formed by means of har^ or inner-Greek corruption, v\o% dp/xonas becoming vtos 'Ap/xovtos, may or may not have helped the "discoveiy." That the "one of them" of Ephrem's Adi. Haer. No. 54 {vide supra) had any influence in the matter is highly improbable, though it shows us, what we might have expected, that Ephrem knew more than one Bardesanite poet. It is hardly to be supposed that Sozomenus himseK committed this error (if error it be), which his writings introduce to us. Sozomenus, born and reared near Gaza, probably knew Syriac too well for such misreading or mistranslation. Schoo {Quellen des Sozomenus, Berlin, 1911, p. 142) is almost certainly at fault when for the chapter of the church history quoted above he assumes oral or written native Syriac sources, except for a little section dependent on Palladius' Historia Lausiaca. Sozomenus depends, as did Gregory of Nyssa^ before him, on Acts of Ephrem, written and pub- lished, and wdthout much doubt translated into Greek no long time after Ephrem's death, as Gregory's use of them would show. If a year ago so speedy a growth of legend might have seemed improbable to many of us, recent events have shown to him who will not close his eyes that, in this most modem of worlds, myth, legend, and pure fable do grow contempo- raneously with or even before the event upon which they fasten themselves. To the regular stock of these Acts belonged a section on heresies at Edessa with mention of Bardaisan as Ephrem's chief adversary, and of his songs. Gregory omits the name of Bardaisan altogether, as of no concern to himself, and coolly substitutes therefor that of his own pet opponent, Apollinarius of Laodicea, whose name is in turn not mentioned by Ephrem, though his doctrines are said to be referred to in the hymns Adversus Scruta- toreSy Opera Omnia Syr.-Lat., t. Ill, 1-208.^ And it is in this section, just where the Vatican Acts {loc. cit.) expatiate upon the impetus given to Bar- daisan's heresy by his poetic activity, that Sozomenus out of a clear sky introduces the son Harmonius, who immediately displaces his illustrious father and speedily grows out of all bounds. The place, therefore, and the manner, in which the Harmonius fiction comes to hght, indicate that it is the Greek translator of such acts, or the redactor of such a translation, who 1 Encomium on Ephrem, in Migne, PG, 46, 819-50, He already knew a day dedicated annually to the memory of Ephrem (col. 821D). For this festive occasion Gregory composed his encomium, and on such a day some biographical accoimt of the hero would, as a matter of coiirse, be read, wherever the festival was kept, as the Nyssene's own homily, decked out in the colors of the Metaphrast, is read to the present day. The writer of this essay is not unaware of the fact that Gregory also made liberal use in this homily of the s. c. Testament of Ephrem. « On the life and teachings of this Apollinarius we are much in need of more light. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 201 served Sozomenus as a source — a man, probably, to whom the early history of the Edessene church meant little — who is responsible for the Athenaean birth of the mysterious Harmonius and for the impetus toward his inordi- nate gro^vth. With some €Kpa(TL^ of his own, it is probably merely this man's error which Sozomenus has been the means of perpetuating. Upon Sozomenus rests Theodoret of Cyrrhus {Haer. Fab., I, 22; H.E., IV, 29 ;V Epist., 145; cf. Gtildenpenning, Theodoret von Kyrrhos (Halle, 1889), p. 41; Rauschen, Jahrbucher der christl. Kirclie unter Theodosius d. Gr., Freiburg, 1897, p. 7; Leon Parmentier, ''Theodoret, Kirchenge- schichte," in Griech. christl. Schr., Leipzig, 1911, Einleitg., esp. pp. Ixxxiii-xc). But as he goes beyond Sozomenus to Eusebius and to Greek translations of original Syriac sources (?) for his information on Bardaisan, so he seems to have gone directly to the source of Sozomenus for his state- ment of the history of Harmonius. True, he adds to Sozomenus only one detail: that Harmonius received his Greek education at Athens; and that might be only a shrewd guess, if not of Theodoret himself (note the a(Tl 8k Koi introducing this very statement), then perhaps of some Greek reader of Sozomenus, or of his source. But he has modified the extravagance of Sozomenus so far, that what remains of Harmonius is no longer anything more than the alter ego of Bardaisan's own poetic abiUty and work, not the originator of Syriac poetry. As against Sozomenus, who wrote at Constan- tinople, the influence of the native tradition on Theodoret at Cyrrhus, scarce more than 100 miles west of Edessa, is unmistakable; his own words are against rather than for his use of Syriac sources in the matter. It is in this emaciated form given him by Theodoret that Harmonius henceforth leads a tenuous, troubled, and wraith-like existence in the histories of the ancients. The author of the Parisian Acts of Ephrem {vide supra) in § 31 has incor- porated bodily the section of Theodoret 's church history above referred to, stopping in the middle of it to give voice to his doubts about Harmonius. ^ 1 Accusations of faulty chapter-quotation with regard to this passage are due to faulty Icnowledge on the part of the accusers. The facts are — as a careful look into Mlgne, or even into Schulze's edition of Sirmond, will make fairly clear — that the count of the chapters at this point varies widely in the various editions: our numbering, 29, follows with Parmentier's definitive edition the covmt of the editio princeps, Basel, 1535, Stephanus and Valesius; Migne reprinted Noesselt's revision of Sirmond, who niunbered this chapter 26; Christophorson is alone in counting this as chapter 27; the manuscript nvunbering, probably that of Theodoret himself (cf. Parmentier's Introduction, p. xlii), departs from all these, in counting this section as a' =30. ' Lamy's delimitation of the quotations at this point is in need of precision. The direct quotation from Theodoret begins with < n?n n,V?]gi9 ^V-^^itf and continues to )j|.s|] . where it is interrupted by an insert of the author's which contains the verses of Ephrem above referred to (p. 199) ; the insert extends from |j-Oa4 _-*? cai to iJLai^ ■ a\?i \Ld . where with ■ '^r^^ ^^ ^^ the Theodoret text is again taken up and continues without further break to its end, |.AJa.X . 202 The American Journal of Semitic Languages Michael the Syrian^ borrows the name only of Harmonius from Theodoret, to add it to the other two {vide supra), whose source is unknown. And this is the sum and substance of our source material for Harmonius, son of Bardaisan. Manifestly it is a thin and unclear stream of Greek, non-Syrian, non- Edessene tradition alone, which has carried to us the name of this bloodless poet, who has been a thorn in the flesh of historians for lo these many years. Neither Eusebius with Jerome nor the native Syriac tradition, represented by Ephrem, the Vatican Acts of Ephrem, the Acts of Rabbula, Philoxenus of Mabbugh, the critical editor of the Parisian Acts of Ephrem, the hesitant attitude of Theodoret (c^ao-t 8c koI in Haer. Fab., I, 22), know aught of him. Gregory Abulfarag Barhebraeus, though he uses Michael the Syrian as a trusted source, omits the fated Harmonius from all mention. This does make the compromising attitude of the revered Hort {DCB, s.v. " Bardaisan ") seem over-careful, and the hypothesis set forth above does not appear in this light as too extreme a solution of a knotty crux historiographorum. With Harmonius, indeed, there disappears also all foundation for any claim, that Bardaisan may have, to be the founder or inventor of Syriac poetry, or, at least, hymn-writing. The loss is not a serious one. This claim was urged first, I believe — most strongly, at any rate — by August Hahn in Bardesanes Gnosticus Syrorum Primus Hymnologus, p. 29. Hahn, here as elsewhere too implicitly followed by Duval, bases it upon a phrase of the passage from Ephrem, alluded to at the beginning of this excursus (p. 199): \h mh> n^ Vl|o , which "literally" does mean ''he introduced meters." But this is one of not a few cases in which a literal trans- lation is absolutely wrong and misleading. The sense of the Syriac in its context (p. 168) is perfectly clear; it is best conveyed to the English reader by some such phrase as "he put them [i.e., his songs] into verse" or "into metrical form." Thus Hahn's chief proof text vanishes, as we have seen his "corroborative" evidence melt away (p. 196, n. 1). There is no evidence whatsoever that Bardaisan considered himself the inventor of any new pro- cedure in Syriac poetry. Ephrem neither says nor hints anything of the sort, nor does any Syrian writer of repute. They knew better. Hahn was tricked into this mistranslation by a statement, which he believed himself to be refuting, viz., the Harmonius tale of Sozomenus. But this tale of the "invention" of Syriac poetry which attaches to the Greek name Harmonius is on the face of it a Greek invention, whose purpose is perfectly plain in the history-book of the Byzantine courtier Sozomenus: Harmonius, the man of the Greek name, had received a Greek education; and this accounts for the barbarian's ability to introduce to his countrymen su^h unheard-of things as meters and musical strains. From the Greek point of view a highh' patriotic hypothesis! Rather less likely than W. Meyer's, however. And little wonder that it found no adherents among educated Syrians. . 1 Loc. cit.; cf. Nau, Une Biographic inedite de Bardesane, Paris, 1897, p. 1. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 203 APPENDIX II Among the Syriac manuscripts purchased by the Semitic Museum of Hansard University from "J. Rendel Harris there is further a manuscript of the first three books of the Dialogues of Severus of Mar Mattai (bar Shakko). The manuscript (Semitic Museum No. 4059, formerly Cod. Syr. 124 of J. Rendel Harris' collection; cf..fol. 2a; see below) consists of 136 leaves, 22.6X15.8 cm., in gatherings of double leaves, as follows: Nos. 1 and 15 (the latter marked on the lower margin of its first page g-*) of twos; Nos. 2-13 (marked in the lower margins of first — except I and '^ — and last pages from ! to ws^) of fives; No. 14 (^^) of four. RuUngs of 19 lines block out a writing-surface of 16 . 7 X 10 cm. The leaves are numbered on the recto in the upper left-hand corner in penciled, occidental numerals, 1-136 (prob- ably by J. Rendel Harris); in the lower left-hand corner, foil. 6-134, in Syriac letters ^£-V.o , sometimes supplemented by Arabic numerals (written in ink). Catchwords insure the proper succession of leaves. Headings throughout are in red; an arch of oriental scrollwork, blue, white, and black on a red background, not wholly without taste, incloses the opening words on fol. 5a. The heavy paper, of a kind much in vogue in the modem Levant, bears the watermark of the Fratelli Palazzuoli in Latin and Arabic characters. The Enghsh binder has added guards and fly-leaves of his own, leaving his stamp on the guard under the left-hand cover: "Bound by Wilson & Son, Cambridge." The binding is of dark-gray cloth with black sheepskin back and comers. The title, stamped in gold on the back, between the second and third of eight pairs of lines, reads: Jacob Bar Shakko-Dialogues. Within the left-hand cover is pasted J. Rendel Harris' bookmark. Fol. la contains a line and a quarter of Syriac script in the hand of the main scribe: | . j ^ N ,-aifl:^ . ilo Zj^ ULi .]^.l^ ] ^ ^m .jJ-ft^ j n ^ ^ it ?|J , an unfinished saw, warning against careless speech — an inscription not unmeet for a book on grammar, rhetoric, and versification. The legend, "Jacob bar Shakko-Dialogues," is written under the mark "Cod. Syr. 124" on fol. 2a, both in J. Rendel Harris' hand. Farther down on the same page another hand (Professor D. G. Lyon's) has written "Semitic Museum No. 4059." Foil. 2b-Ab and 135a contain models of letter-writing, chiefly ecclesiasti- cal, in a cramped, uncertain hand (supplementing foil. Slb-92 ?). The body of the book is in a flowing, professional, modern Jacobite hand, and is cor- rectly defined by the index, fol. 5a, as follows: The first Mlmra, on grammar, extends from fol. 56 to 50 (oio) b, being divided into two sections at fol. 34 C^) a; Mimra 2, on rhetoric, covers foil. 51 (>ie) a to 102 (w-»^ , ^\ ) a; and Mimra 3, on poetics, foil. 1026-134 (^^=»-d) a. Under the index, names and dates of Severus together with a bibliographical note on his writings are given from the Chronicon Ecclesiasticum of Barhebraeus. 204 The American Journal of Semitic Languages Colophons are found as follows: fol. 33 (^4^) b: "The book from which we copied was written in the year 1938 of the Greeks ( = 1626 a.d.), and its writer's name was Bar§auma"; fol. 50 (oLo) b: "Finished by the mean and sinful deacon, the Jerusalemite Matthaeus, son of Paul, deceased, in the city of Mo§ul on the third of Kanun I, 1895 Christian; in the days, when [an erasure has here blotted out a word, probably 'Moslems'] rose against the Christians and killed them without mercy in the city of Amid [i.e., Diarbekr] and the surrounding towns and villages"; fol. 102 (^-*^) a mentions merely the date 1895; the longest and most important colophon closes the main body of the book on fol. 134 (Vjs) 6; Finished and ended is this precious book called The Book of the Dialogues of our Father, celebrated among celibates and a saint among bishops, Mar Severus, i.e., Jacob bar Talia, the Syrian; in which are contained various sciences; in the year 2207 of the Greeks and 1895 Christian, in the middle of the month Kanun I, in the days of our Fathers elect, filled with wisdom and truth, Maran Mar Ignatius, Patr, servant of Christ; and Mar Dionysius, Metr, Behnam of Mosul; and Mar Cyrillus, Metr, Elias in the monastery of Mar Mattai; with the rest of the fathers. May the Lord prolong their lives and by their prayers guard their flocks! Amen. And it was written by the mean and sinful deacon, the Jerusalemite Matthaeus, son of Paul, deceased, in the city of Mosul, surnamed Asshur and Niniveh, in the quarter [hostelry ?] of the church of Mary, Mother of God, in the quarter of the carpenters; and we copied it from an ancient book, which Barsauma wrote in the year 1938 Gr; and this book was written in the days, when [another erasure; read "the Moslems"] rose up against the Christians and massacred them in the city of Amid and the villages round about, and in Melitene, and in §e'erd and Batlis; and in all the countryside and cities and villages, where there were Syrians and Armenians, they killed them without mercy; and in Severak. If one became [a Moslem: partly legible through an erasure] he was safe, but a Christian was slain. And their wives and children were led away captive; and they killed them [and despoiled them in their houses: this by the cramped hand in the lower margin]. This is that which happened: [corrector as before: In this] [the flowing hand now continues in the right-hand margin :] an admonition for the generations [this last word stands in place of another erasure] who shall come after.i 1 A note of no small interest in the present. Tlie excited, broken sentences at the end are eloquent. Of the places mentioned Amid-Diarbekr is well enough known. Melitene is probably better known by that name than by its modern equivalent Mala- tiyeh. For Se'erd, written also Se'ert, Se'ort, Sse'ort, Sa'irt, Si'ird, and Is'irt, now So'ord, J AS, X serie, 15 (1910), p. 107, cf. Ritter, Erdkunde, IX, 99, 534; Shiel. Jour. Roy. Geogr. Soc, VIII (1838), 81 f.; Fr. B. Charmoy, Cheref oud-din (Petersburg, 1868-75), 1,463; Socin, "Tur Abdin," ZDMG, XXXV (1881), 240; Prym und Socin, Dialekt des Tur Adbin, p. 418; G. Hoffmann, Ausz. aus syr. Akten (Abh. f. d. Kunde des Morg., VII, 3), p. 5, 259, and n. 1359. Batlis, Badlis, more usually Bitlis, Ritter, Erdkunde, IX, 93, 1004; Southgate, Narrative of Tour through Armenia (1840), I, 218; Layard, Discoveries in .... Niniveh (1853), p. 37; Prym und Socin, op. cit., pp. v and 416; Severak or Sewerak, also written Suverak, Baedeker, Palestine and Syria, 4th ed. (1906), p. 389. Map of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Babylonia, west of Diarbekr, a little east of the Euphrates. See also LeStrange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, pp. 108, 113 f., 120. Antonius Rhetor on Versification 205 Of this work of Severus bar Shakko portions not contained in this manu- script have been published in some form by J. Ruska, Das Quadrivium aus S, b. S. Buck der Dialoge, Leipzig, 1896 (inaccessible to the writer); cf. ZA, XII; of the portions contained in the Harvard manuscript, Merx pubHshed an analysis of the grammatical sections in his Historia artis grammaticae apud Syros (Leipzig, 1889) {Abh. f. d. Kunde des Morg., IX, 2); and eleven chapters of the third Mimra with a few pages of the first were pubUshed in fuU, together with a French translation, by M. I'abb^ Martin in De la Mitrique chez les Syriens (Leipzig, 1879) (Abh.f. d. Kunde des Morg., VII, 2), cf. Jour. As. (1872, Avril-Mai). Up to the present time this pubHcation of Martin's represented the oldest, most extensive, and pretentious work on Syriac versification by a native author yet pubHshed. It is of especial importance for the present publication, though the text published by Martin is bound thereby to lose in intrinsic value, since, as Duval (Or. Stud. Th. Noldeke gew., loc. cit.) has pointed out, Severus has in this portion of his work made extensive use, often verbatim, of the work of Anthony of Tagrit, published in the foregoing pages (a Hst of parallel passages in the Introduction, p. 174). This is a discovery doubly welcome to us, since this particular part of Anthony's work seems, so far as yet known, to be very poorly preserved. As Martin's work is subject to improvement,* this col- lation with notes of the Harvard manuscript with Martin's text will be found of some use. It is hoped that the remaining ten chapters of this treat- ise may be made pubhc at a date not too far in the future. COLLATION The symbol H is used for the Harvard manuscript. The numbers fixing the location of variants refer to the lines of pages and notes (n.) in Martin's edition. H fol. 1026; Martin p. 8 ft. H add. ^^oZ at the beginning of the title (8:1). H om. U^t-^ in the title, with 0; it vocalizes l-cz^? (8:1). 8:3, Uzal^U: H j-lzol^cus^c ; 8:4, I^ula^l^os : H |^.n»?u>oU; 8:6, cf. n. 3. H = 0; .8:8, Vr^: H Vj^'; 8:11, ^o?o£c^: H wiao^o^^; 8:12, [.]]^-.^i-.^o|^: H = 0, cf. n. 8. 9,n.l,H = 0; 9:1, t^U^y^: H i^U:^y^; 9, n. 5, H = 0; 9:3/4, no indication of any lacuna after iIqI^ia.? in H, which has full stop : •:• . 9:5, Ui? lluJIuo^o: H jiuJZuc^o \L^9; H fol. 103a (^^), init. ]Lm1^L^; » Cf. Ndldeke, ZDMG. XXXIV (1880), 569-78. 206 The American Journal of Semitic Languages 9:8, jSffiim]: H iLaaio] ; post 1^1 H add. ^^ ; 9:9, j-^Zu^Z: H -^ (in red); l-i^^-^9: i/ 1:^-^9; 9, n. 10, // = L; 9:11, ."Tn^V: H :^ii«*n4V; 9:12+n. 11, // Uo^oji?; om. ^=0; 9, w. 12, ^ ^z:^^? . 10, n. 1, H=L; 10, n. 2, H = 0; 10:3, // ^i], slightly indistinct in the text, is written by another hand, distinctly, in the margin; 10:4, Z^h:^: H ^inqi^^; 10, n. 3, H = 0; 10:8, j-air; : ^ ILols; n. 5 H = 0; H foL 1036 mi7. oli^ ^ j^o ; 10:9, ^r-*]o : H ^r^l© ; 10, n. 6, H=0; XQ-.n^y'iaC^. HU'if!^; lO,n.8,H = 0; 10, n. 9, H om.\4^; 10:13, iuj « i , n *gi : /f UQ-fccn|-a-k(ji ; 10:12-14, not fairly represented by Martin's translation; "but then the meter runs evenly (or 'as an equahzing agent') through every kind of plot and figure of speech." ll,n. 1, i7=0; n,n.2,H = 0; 11:4, aC^: H ^; H ioll04a( = ^), incip. ]h^^ P]a^ (in red); n. b. sine ? ac Seydme; 11:9, ^^As : H U"^-^^ ', item 11:10; jZalAliac: H ]Z ni ii> i\i^ (the correct reading: "meter is con- stituted of fines that correspond to each other in beats of syllables"); 11 : 10/11, H add. .^ooi^ post ^mOf^iL ; 11 : 12/13, H om. ^^^1:^^ to U^ by homoioteleuton; 11:13, I3©ai? : H |3offi?; idem 11:14; 11, n. 7, H = 0; 11, n.8,H = 0; 11:15,^: ^^. 12 : 5, ^oioM : H ^Kl| ; 12:6,^ trsp. Unl^.TV ] j-*.? ; 12:9, post U^^ H add.: :]~^q^ "Kl, ^? It-^^-^ .Ji-*^^ ©1 om , plainly an omission by homoio- teleuton in the text printed by Martin; this makes a real translation a simplematter; 12:10, jlSnlvc: H rUioijo; 12, n. 3, H = 0; here HO are wrong by homoioteleuton; 12:12, oiLclJaic: H ^jaslJaJc; 12, n. 4, H = 0; 12, n.Q,H = 0. 13:1, .sjso]: i/aaiflol; 13, n. 2, F = 0; 13:2, H om. <|-s] ; r=: H r^; 13:4, ©M: H ^noL^]; |iai : Hoax; lS,n.S,H = 0; 13:5, r-^?: H rf^o; 13, n. 5, H = 0; 13, n. 6, H = 0; 13:5, Martin, inexact: "de meme que, avec de la paifie et de la boue, on fabrique de la brique"; better "for, as by Antonius Rhetor on Versification 207 means of a brickmold and clay, brick is formed." H fol. 105o=|-e , Ul incip. UJos (in red) ; 13 : 9, n. 7 H (in red) » Pl'a-^ ; 13 : 10, ^r^l? : H ^'^h \ 13, n. 9, H = 0', 13, n. 9, H=0 ( = "by the scanner" rather than "by the versifier " ?) ; 13 : 13, U^^^ : H U^ ] 13 : 14, Ij^^o : H \i^LLo ; 13 : 18, ^ (1): H rr^; post ^SZ H add. ^Z (both without Seyanw); 13, n. 12, I do not understand this note; there seems to be no variant. 14 : 1 , ^ (2) : H ^^Z (a senseless scribal error) ; 14:3, Nvi ito : H mo; 14, 71. 2, H = 0, fol. 1056, incip. :Ui^5i?; 14:5, 1^-i.aALov. H ]^--a-Aio ; 14:6, ante r^hLs: H add. ^^o^; 14:7, |>^>Sn>. tfjoA : H Uiol? |3|aA (in red); 14 : 8, ^mol^] : H ©M ; 14, n. 3, /^ U^h ; 14, n. 4, H oiLL*ioo uoi^oio? ; 14, n. 5, // jJi^a-tt; i.e., "the first genus is that which is formed by the first placing of Munitas and is named from them Su^rana z'^urd (the small category) "; cf. Antonius Rhetor, Canon II fin., H fol. 93a 11. 23 f.; 14, n. 6, H = 0, a. mere scribal error; 14:14, ,^1 > n^ n v : H ,^i>-i'nv (scribal error); 14:15, ^3io2uk]i : H ^oioM ; 14: 17, ^^ : /7 ^oio ; 14, n. 8, H=0, sed sine Seydme; 14, n. 9, H = 0; the remark is misplaced; it should follow ^Z">z ; 14:20, under gui^J 7/ has in the margin: ^-^ ^-k'-^; H fol. 106a, ^£lo {/tci;?. >> | * mS ^^Z :,^; 14:21, j iAiSntie : /f | > ^iSnti . 15, n. 1, i/ = 0; 15:1, ooio: Hon; ,^: H ^^o; 15:3, ^^l^i^: ^ ^j::iJi^?; 15, n. 4, i/ = 0, sed scribit Ir-^; 15, n. 5, H = 0; 15:6, fl^ (WW. ^5; 15, n. 6, I do not understand this; no variant is apparent; 15,n.7,i7 = 0; 15:10, ^.j-afli^za^Z: H ^f^^^Z; 15,n.S,H=L(a.meTe scribal error, repetition, in 0); 15, n. 10, H = 0; H fol. 1066 incip. Ns^Sn ; 15:16,^?: i^^; 15:17, U-*.] : H]^^; 15:18, post .^ H add. ^r, 15:20, post T^5 fl^ add. ^31; j-^U^^j-i^oi : ^ j^Vitjigqi; 15:21, >o,-do: 208 The American Journal of Semitic Languages 22, n. 1, H=0; 22, n. 2, H = 0; was the name of the scribe of that text to which and H, and H's immediate predecessor at Mosul may be traced back, Peter ( ?) ; 22, n. 3, H om, ^Woi-s . 23, n. 1, H = L; 23, n. 2, I. 2, >^) ..a:i^a^: H lionicl ,°\mL>>; 1^^ ^9^: Jy i^^ ^^z ^9Z; 23, n. 2, /. 3, H om. ]o(jU ; ii^Vjo (2): H U^i] ; |:.Q£ii| ^ : ^ ^ iiaiol ; 23, w. 2, d, H = 0; H fol. 107a, w^ , incip. issn ^ n o ; 23, n. 2e, /f =0; 23, n. 2, Z. 6, |JL^oi? : H Ui^oi? ; H om. r- ; jooi : H oai; 23, n. 2, Z. 7, Unli.;iv? : H Un»i>iSn? ; 23, n. 3, // = 0. 24, n. 1, H=0; 24, w. 2, ^=0; 24:6, ax^UC^y. H UU^? ; 24:9, iiDi: ^liDi; 24, n. 5,^=0; 24, n. 7, -.a^i^c^ ; fl^ wsi^a^ ; 24, n. 7 (p. 25), ]l^^ (1): ^ jz^Zo; ^o: H ^ . 25,n.l,H=0; 25, n. 2, H=0; 25,n,S,H = 0; 25:9,J.^^:H ZoU^; 25, n. 4, H=0; H fol. 1076, mci>. post >Q-.^i-?; 25:12, j-^r^ : H r^rfo; 25, n. 5, Zf=0. 26, n. 2, ^ ^l^ii'; 26:3, N : // |i]o; 26, n. 4, i7 = 0; 26:5, 7/ om. ^? , add. ^ post P ; 26:9, >^-kio? : H >^ii»e? ; "that thy son, who is of thee, will stah" or "pierce thee," not "te perdra"; 26: 11, |]]o : H \i]; 26, n. 5, H ,^i ^TnVo . 27:1, "If thou ask as much as a Uttle drop of water, he is harsher than poison" (but cf . also Noldeke), not "Faire bou-e de I'eau m^l^e k de Turine c'est pis que donner du poison " ; 27,n.l,H= 0; 27 : 2, >aL : H >a:^ ; 27, n. 3a, H=0; H fol. 108a, j-o, incip. \h^^^o ; 27, n. 36, H=0; 27, n. 3, Z. 5, ^z : H Ui^o ; 27, n. 3, Z. 6, UUs^ : ^ UoU^ ; 27, n. 3c, i/=0; 27, n. 4, fl^ = (correct : 4 X 3 syllables) ; 27 : 5, post z^sut^ H add. >q1^ ; 'fsso : H j-ajo ; 27, w. 5, iy l^ije ; 27:7,1^: H L^^r^; jj^o^o: H ]^^o; ^ia^r H jilia^ (all three correct). 28, n. 1, jy=0, exc. L^^proL*^; 28:5, r^iJ : H fTLi^Li ; j-aL : // h=^ ; n. 2 ^ = L (all three correct) ; 28, n.3,H=0; 28 : 6, >ai. : iJ >a:^ (probably Antonius Rhetor on Versification 209 also the reading intended by Martin); 28:7, ^ n h \ : H ■ n ms ; post aimlu H add. ^? ; 28, n. 5, H ^o (correct); 28, n. 6, H = 0; 28: 10, nXiJ^ : H oiJLlI^s (Martin's translation needs correction; "The tongue of the man who is wise speaks all manner of fair things of those good hoards, which are hidden in his heart ") ; 28 : 13, U--^o : H U^o ; H f ol. 1086, incip. ^ o| iJali ; 28, n. 7, H jjioiajo Uy-oaao (correct) ; 28 : 16, UU^o : // Ul^r^o . 29:2, r&^y. H j^?; n. \, H j^f ; 29:4, ^>s\: i/^gini>sN; 29:6, post wSoZo H add. ^ ; 29:7, Horn, ai^ ; oJ-^ajc : H ^oioJ-^aio ; "imitates" or "emulates him," not "I'irrite"; 29: 10, >^^^ : H l^i^ ; 29: 12, Vs : H ^1 ; Ills : H ]yi] ; 29, n. 3, H J^h^ ; 29 : 14, '^jalz^ : H VclI:^ (intended by Martin; cf. translation). 30:2, UUfii:^: H UU^li); H fol. 109a, oud, incip. U-^ ( = 0, 30, n. 1); 30:4, ^i.mS4,Z: i7 ^^-^^lso^Lm ; 30:7, ^*i*imS: i/ ^-kj-uaL; 30,n.3,// = O; 30, w. 4, // = 0; 30:11, ^ii :// l^^Ics ; Uio : 77 |Loo; ]:ul1s : H l2ui-^ . 31:1, ]:w.^oiD5: H ]l^^^y, 31, n. la, H = 0; 31, n. 16, ^" = 0; 31 : 8, Vn£s-,\jc) : HUa^s^jc] ; H fol. 1096, map. .^jjcjicac ; 31 : 11, ^oiiaias ).£L^9 : H lLc^9 ^qiainrnr ; jJcnZo l-t-o^? : /f )J isp (probably a mere misprint in Martin) ; post r^ H add. >^] ; 31, n. 1 {p. 32, I. 4), ^-4-JZZ? : H > >**V//?; j^j^ : B ]rf; 31, n. 1 (p. 32, /. 5), aa-JLis : F |.a^iio ; c(ji : H ooi ; 31, w. 1 {pp. 32/), // = 0; 31, ?i. 1 {p. 32, Z. 5), w..»-JZ2J : ^*^z^?; 31, n. 1 {p.'S2g),H .^h, ^ \l1. 32, n. 1, iy ^H=^o; 32, n. 2, S^y. H Vi.; 32:8, P?: ^ h^?; H fol. 110, c-o, incip. |-*-»i.s JJ-a-^J? . 33, n. 1, // = 0; 33:2, w^£cs: ^ l:^^; 33:3, ^|: ^ ^1; 33, n. 2, // ^^ *i>* iv ; 3S,n.S,H = 0,H omits also one UM (as probably does 0, the 210 The American Journal of Semitic Languages fault lying either with Martin's notation or with the printer) ; 33 : 7, U^ : H oi^ „-a^]; 33:9, ante r* H add. ooaiJ: H >«a«^ (intended by Martin?); 34:4, H om. ^ais: 0(jiJ]o . A.sj-4/ |jfl.£Q4aflis ; 34:5, ]^i\n«i^^ : H ]LLa^L:iC ; n.5 H ^ajgnVnl ^; 34:6, ^^?: H Ua^^?; 34, n. 6, H n i Sr ]z|; 34:8, jiOLar;: H |£uL,ji£5 ; ^^2!Jifi : H rJ-5^ ; 34, n. 8, H >o?? ^}^ : U tjInViN ; 34, n. 9, H = 0; 34:9, H om. ^; 34, n. 10, H=0; 34:11, o^ : H o^s; 34, n. 11, H = 0, sed ^lLo: H hb^o; ^oli*: F t^; H fol. Ilia, l-o, incip. |*iiVZ |31a-fc/ (in red) ; 34 : 14, )snVnTfi|? : H iiaaiol? ; 34 : 15, ,--.<3i^i^? : H om. r, 34, n. 12, iJ = 0; 34, n. 13, H ^o : ^1«-^»N ; 34 : 17, ^r^J? : jy ^r-*J? (correct) ; 34 : 18, jViVnm ] : H |Vnm ] (so consistently, unless otherwise noted). 35:1, Ih^: H 1^4; 35, w. '2, H=0; 35, w. 3, // = 0; 35, n. 4, /f = (so consistently henceforth, unless otherwise noted); 35:6, ^:la.|o : H ^Lj^o ; ]l1jo : H ]l^o ; 35:7, |M^ : H ||^I-^ ; i7 fol. 1116, incip. oai ^^31^.? (35:10); 35, n. 10, /jT |£u.*Q-iJ^ ^^]; 35:11, U^L^: H Ij^l:^; 35:12, jjil: i^ ILa-*' 6is; 35:11-14 should be read: "Eskima is meter which is diversely beaten {or measured), though it be the same in stature; just as a straight leg and a crooked leg, which are both of one cubit, — not in stature, but in form (esktma) do the lines differ," or better Antonius Rhetor on Versification 211 still with Antonius Rhetor 100, 23: "not in stature {or height), but in the form of the lines do they differ." 35, n. 13, H = L; but writes the word in red; 35:16, H om. ,^?; 35:17, ]i^-*i-o?: H jiu.-^? (mcorrect); Martin's translation "le vers" is ambiguous, to say the least; the meaning is "The reading (or recitation) of four-syllable meter may be imposed if it disturb not the sense, upon the eight-syllable meter"; the context makes this clear beyond a doubt. 36:3, 1H»^^' H^'r^^LL] ^ots: hJji^] 36:4, ^soZo: H ^oZ; 36:5, Hom.^; 36:6, Valo: H ILalo; oil^?: ^oi:^^?; H M. 112a, ^..^j) , indp.^ i-asj^ (36:7); 36 : 8, loio : /^ ^(Jio ; 36 : 9, jjil : i? ILcL*. ; 36:10, ^oio: H loic; 36:11, H om. ^ U^^ *^^^«" H^i^t^Z; 36, n. 7, H I^iTijiMS; 36:14, ^^^ : H U^^yLa^; 36:15, ^o:^! : H ]^^io^'\; 36:16, i/ without abbrev.; 36, w. 9, H ^^^^ (corrected by first hand); 36:17, U without abbrev.; SzJi^y, H Zobo:^}; 36:19, j-: i/ Ij-^; Ur^]: H ]^r^] ; 36:20, I^licj-a : H >^ . H fol. 1126, incip. i^aas? , om. ^? (37:1 f.); 37, n. 1, H ♦U3-^ ^? >a-joZAJ; 37:3, Uj^ajc: H U't^aso; 37:4, lU^: /^ 11-^; 37:7, ooi?: ^ 001 ; 37, n. 6, // = L; 37:11, cn^: H ks>; S7, n. 8, H a^ ^; 37:15, /f om. ^; 37:16, H without abbrev.; H fol. 113a, w^^, iwa'p. Ikui^ (37:18). 38:1, H . C|V]v • o^iiiu^; 38:2, v*gui^9 . ^oi i mV : H ^010^109 >aoio > mSp (incorrect) ; 38 : 7, oii^ia--*.] : /f oil^i^l ; 38, n. 6, // .jjL.j»|^ls|i; ; 38 : 11, . Tff i V VaU^ : H . m i TffH ^|j (correct); 38:12, H without abbrev.; b«mVo : H InimV) (correct); // fol. 1136, incip. U^lI; 38:14, ucm*nV: H sjgnlinS ; 38: 18, H ^-kooi . Iu*ooi . ^^ooi . jooi . josi . jcoi ; 38:20, ante .oJ] H om. ,—1^01 . 39:2,^: H^; Uo^y. H Uo4y, 39:5,1^^^: H\l^^i^; 39:7, 212 The American Journal of Semitic Languages iifll^o-i,?: H lLa:^aA; H fol. 114a, ^, incip. UH (39:9); 39:10, // ♦ h^'^z\ . 'i^-^hz] . Lcj^z) ; 39: 17, H om. jJ^Za:^ . 40:4, post ^\ H add. ,^oi; 40, n. 5, H h'axZ; 40:5, ^ . >«v : H r^ h m X^ (correct) ; H fol. 1146, iTicip. ^? ^v^ (40 : 7) ; 40 : 13, ^«v^^^ : H ^qN««v (correct) ; 40: 17, 18, ♦ j^^oi^so . I^o^ic . ^oa^ic : H \^o^ . l^oiJsc 41 : 1, ante -^^^r^ H add. ^oai? U»os (Martinis notation for is unclear, but probably means the same); 41:3, l3o©|-*.: H Pjo-*.; o| U'a-i^ : H \mL^4jD\ Jo-i^; 41:4, ,--Jio2\ic : H ^--JLLi^; //^ fol. 115a 1— •— o , III, incip. ji^^jios; 41:5, H without abbrev.; 41:7, ,-L:acluLjc: H U^ioiwAic; 41:8, liwaimsLs: F i^ n « wq^ (misprint in Martin?); 41:14, H without abbrev.; not "en plagant au premier vers de chaque strophe une lettre," but " at the beginning of every line in the same strophe " ; 41 , n. 7, i7 ^ooi^ ; 41:17, viOi: H ^fsx) n. 8 H o^; 41:19, ^? LJy. H ^?^? (the mistake of an ignorant scribe); 41:20, H without abbrev.; ^,^|o: H ^i-s|o . H fol. I15b,indp. ,,-*:^1 ^ (42:2); 42:4, ^C^^^: H ]L^r^; 42, n. 3, H ^31^ (as Martin intended for Of); 42:6, Z^: H ^^al^; w^?: H li-fl^i^? ; 42, n. 4, H eJoio ; 42:7, . V^:^]!^ : H . M:^ ; 42:8, Uooi : H Uooi; 42:9, o^oo]?: H Udso-joc]?. 48:2-5, pro ♦ H. aut :, exc. '''-W^', the sUghtly different pointings throughout this verse did not seem worth noting in detail; H fol. 116a, ^a-j, indp. ^A (48, n. 3, p. 49, /. 2); 48, n. 3, p. 49, ;. 3, q:^ . 49, n. 3, >^aM : /f ^^ij^^o^ ; 49, w. 4, Z. 1, . |o ^ : ^ . I . ^ ; 49, n. ia=H; 49, n. 5, H iJVs] ; 49, n. Q, H=L. 50, n. 1, /. 1, ws] : ^ wsjo ; 50:7, |3 : i/ |3o; 50 : 8, Uo^ : H Uooi . Antonius Rhetor on Versification 213 H fol. 1166, incip. r:^^ (51, n. 1, I. 1) ; 51, n. la, H ILaJo ; 51, n. 1, I. 7, U-i-Li^: H U—li^; 51, n. Id, H ^aLLLis (intended for by Martin?); 51, n. 1, 1. 8, H om. r^y, 51'A, ^^y. H r^V, 51:5, ^soZ: H ^oZo ; 51, n. 3, H ^1 ns\4o ; 51, n. 7, ^aJo : H ^o; 51, n. 8, H = L; 51:9, j^o: if U-^jJjo . 52, n. 1, .oJo: ^ .aJ; 52, n. 3, H=L; vs. 3, omitted in the text, is inserted by the first hand in the lower margin; ^^ i n\n £^ : H ^-^ieiy-kLo ; 52, n. 4, H = L; i/ fol. 117a, -.^ , indp. }^y (52:5); 52:9, r^] (kso: 53, n. 1, I. 1, ^: // ^; UU^: H ]U^; ^>^?: i^ ^>^; ^^i H ,J-k?V ; 53, n. 1, Z. 2, ^\v\?o : H ^\»N? ; 53, w. la, H = L, exc. oi pro Vim: ^ >^iA» ; not "le vers commence par une lettre, s'appuie sur une seconde et finisse par une troisi^me," but "one and the same verse opens with one letter and arrives at and ends in another"; 53, n, 1, I. 9, loi© : H .a%o . Hiol 1176 indp. ^^^^(54:1); 54:11, l^jJo j^.^: H 1,-^ 5^;. 54:12, 1oui.aso: H loukAs ; 54, n. 5, H trsp. j:^ . qi^n^iiV j a»vzi^ 55, n. 1, I. 1, ^01 : /f ^a ; 55, n. 1, I 2, ,^-i-.^io : H ,-iAie?o ; F om. pS ; ^y-k ; H '^j-k ; 55, n. la, H l?. Nil* 4, (62:1); 62:1, iL-^ia: i7 jlai; 62:2, |jiu»9: /f Vi^9; post U^cL^ H add. -Ir^; 62:4, ocn IL. : /f on 1L»; 62:10, 13, H without abbrev.; 62:11, ooi iLa^^: H o^ U^^; 62:15, Uo-^?: ^ Uoji?; 62:17, Pu^r^: H U^ U*j.s . 63: 1, ^cnoa^i^ : H wsl^ ; 63:3, N^is : H |^as ; 63, n. 3, imY. ^ : H ^; 63, n. 3, I. 3, M >cl..uu. : H Ll] >ax(Li. ; F fol. 120a, o-.^ , incip. I^Um (63, n. 3, Z. 4); 63, n. 3, Z. 4, ^n., Iu.|JLBLsa4 : /f I^lLsc^ ; 63, n. 3, p. 64, Z. 2, jJBo : // r^o ; 63, w. 3, p. 64rf, /7 Ijaso^jojo (probably intended by Martin for 0); hereafter resolutions of abbreviations in H will not be noted. 64, n. 1, U| imSy^ . jJooU*,: // r^^r^ PI^-a. (in red). 1 The writer would seem to want the last three verses of this example read in reverse order. Antonius Rhetor on Versification ' ^^^ — 2I6 65, the numbers after the colon, pp. 65, 66, refer to Hnes of the Syriac text continuing n. 1 of p. 64; 65:2, ^] : H ^]; U^Uy. H U-4y, 65:4, ).AaJ : H ^-^l-oaJ ; 65, n. c, H : jZoaiaso i^oj^ o) . |-La^ o] JZclsjos ; 65 : 5, 7, ILa-fc- : H \Lcl^ (but with plural adjectives) ; 65:Q, H om. ^01 ^\ ; 65:8, .fciOJl^: i/ ..nJUli; jjoo:;^ : i/ JjsaioJ; 65 : 5-8, " Thirdly, (one must avoid the use) of short and long vowels, e.g., susep(p)d, 'aupa; bas{s)im, h^slm; tuk{k)e, mdsuke. Therefore, either let him take like vowels," etc.; H fol. 1206, indp. Z^y, (65:9); 65:10, H om. (ii-J::^ jJ ^Ji-^li^ ^o£J? ^a\ ^] . ]iwL£"| (homoioteleuton) ; 65:13, ^.01 (1): H ^31; U^^t^: i/ N * ^ ; ^o: ^r-iac; 65:14, U-^ : /f U-^ . 66:1, Uiiaa]?: H |-aifls]io; 66, n. 1, H j-k^o «; 66:2, ]^: H l^i; 66:5, ^01 l?ai : j^ saoi Ijoi; oiZoj-o-iio: // oiZo^-a-iio; 66, n. 4 = ^ (probably text of 0) ; 66 : 4/5, translate : " These, because doubled, destroy the essence of Aleph; Aleph preserves its full value, when doubled upon itself," i.e., when it serves as the starting- or turning-point of the syllable, as the examples show. 67:1, ViJ: H '^^U ; w:a.*U?: H ^n^^l?; H fol. 121a, >^ , indp. \aL:L (67:1 fin.); 67:2, ^y.UjL^: H ^l^y^jLLc; 67:3, Uaio?o: H Uioio^o; 67:8, U^i^: H\L^LLo; 67:11,13): H ]L:^; 67:12, ^o H ^ . c 216 The American Journal of Semitic Languages (68: 11) ; 68: 12, Uohz : H UohU ; 68: 13, U-^^ojc (1) : H U-^i^ ; 68, n. 7, H [|-i^j-o]i ]-i^y-o? , i.e., deleting the second; 68: 14, i> in;' ^? : // U^il^? . 69:1, |?