Expert: Maria - 1/7/2007

Question
Dear Maria,

Tacitus has the following to say about the Emperor Galba:

…pecuniae alienae non appetens, suae parcus, publicae avarus; amicorum libertorumque, ubi in bonos incidisset, sine reprehensione patiens…

1 publicae (pecuniae) avarus
Does this mean “greedy to get his hands on public money” or “miserly about spending public money”. Did the Emperor officially own the public purse? In that case, you can't really talk about him being “greedy to get his hands on public money” as it already belonged to him.

2 sine reprehensione patiens
Does this mean that he was patient to the point of it being impossible to fault him, or that he didn't find fault with those he was so patient with?

Best wishes,

Simon

PS You translate “Ne di sirent!“ as «May God prevent this” – is this because the plural is being used for the singular, as I believe often happens in poetry?

PPS I find myself unable to understand the following short sentence, given in Liddell and Scott’s small lexicon to illustrate the meaning of the word ólené (elbow):
“perI ólEnas dEra (the a has iota subscript) bAllein”, translated as “to throw one’s arms round a person’s neck”.
Surely “perI ólEnas” means “round (someone’s) elbow”, not “round (someone’s) neck”? How would you translate the above four words to show the literal meaning, please?
Incidentally, I use accents to show that a letter is long (eta, omega), and capitals to show where the stress is.

Answer
Hello Simon,

here are my answers.

1-“publicae (pecuniae) avarus”  does not mean “greedy to get his hands on public money”, but  “miserly about spending public money”.
In fact, according to Tacitus, The Histories , book I, Galba  did not covet other men's money, he was parsimonious with his own and miserly with that of the State.
In the Roman Empire there are the AERARIUM, i.e. the public purse, and the FISCUS, i.e. the imperial purse which belonged to  the Emperor.

2 – “sine reprehensione patiens” means that towards his freedmen and friends Galba showed a forbearance, (i.e. was tolerant,'patiens' in Latin), which could not be blamed (sine reprehensione, in Latin), if he had run into nice persons (ubi in bonos incidisset), while he was culpably blind (usque ad culpam ignarus),if these persons were worthless (si mali forent).
This is in fact the complete paragraph:
“Pecuniae alienae non appetens, suae parcus, publicae avarus. Amicorum libertorumque, ubi in bonos incidisset, sine reprehensione patiens: si mali forent, usque ad culpam ignarus.”.

Hope all is clear enough.
Best regards,
Maria
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PS. “Ne di sirent!“ means literally  «May not the gods allow this” , i.e. “May the gods prevent this”.
In fact NE SIRENT (NE SIVERINT) is the negative imperative in the plural as it agrees with the nominative plural DI (the gods), contracted form of ‘Dei’ or ‘Dii’, from DEUS (god).

PPS. First of all  the phrase “peri olenas derai balein” is  a quotation from Euripides' Phoenissae (Phoenician Women), line 165, where Antigone says that she would speed through the sky, swift as a cloud before the wind, towards her own dear brother Polyneices, and throw her arms about her darling's neck…....
Note that:
-PERI (preposition which takes the dative ‘derai’)  means ‘round’

-OLENAS (accusative plural of ‘olene’, elbow, or better the arm from the elbow downwards) means just ‘the arms’.

-DERAI (dative singular of ‘dere’, neck) means ‘the neck’

-BALLEIN in the infinitive means ‘to throw’.

Therefore the above four words have this literal meaning : “to throw (ballein)  the arms (olenas) round
(perì) the neck (derai ).