In this contribution, I aim to reflect on the Greek translations of Roman official acts, with a focus on the reconstruction of the offices and secretaries that had to deal with this task. For the republican age, through an analysis of some linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of the texts, I will try to demonstrate that the scribae who worked in the aerarium were responsible for the translations. They were required to translate not only scc., leges, or foedera, but also, if necessary, the letters of Roman magistrates. Secondly, I will focus on some official documents of the Augustan age: the Edicts of Cyrene, the so-called s.c. Calvisianum and a letter of Augustus to Cnidus. All of them are united by a pronounced Atticism, a stylistic unicum that allows us to speculate that they are the product of the hand of a single translator in the service of the princeps. The translator must have been an intellectual of his court, influenced by the spread of literary Atticism that took place in Rome in the I cent. BC. Although a formalized officium did not yet exist, we can see that a semi-official administrative secretariat was already in operation at the time of Augustus, an embryo of what would later become the offices of the age of Claudius.
Negli uffici dei traduttori: alcune riflessioni sulla traduzione in greco dei documenti ufficiali romani tra Repubblica e Principato augusteo
Mattia Capponi
2024-01-01
Abstract
In this contribution, I aim to reflect on the Greek translations of Roman official acts, with a focus on the reconstruction of the offices and secretaries that had to deal with this task. For the republican age, through an analysis of some linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of the texts, I will try to demonstrate that the scribae who worked in the aerarium were responsible for the translations. They were required to translate not only scc., leges, or foedera, but also, if necessary, the letters of Roman magistrates. Secondly, I will focus on some official documents of the Augustan age: the Edicts of Cyrene, the so-called s.c. Calvisianum and a letter of Augustus to Cnidus. All of them are united by a pronounced Atticism, a stylistic unicum that allows us to speculate that they are the product of the hand of a single translator in the service of the princeps. The translator must have been an intellectual of his court, influenced by the spread of literary Atticism that took place in Rome in the I cent. BC. Although a formalized officium did not yet exist, we can see that a semi-official administrative secretariat was already in operation at the time of Augustus, an embryo of what would later become the offices of the age of Claudius.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
