Image: The Royal Hunt of Dido and Aeneas by Francesco Solimena, painted c.1712, downloaded from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston with the permissions appropriate for works in the public domain.
During the “reading” phase of writing a lexicographical entry, the day’s work can come with many surprises. A few days ago, after reading passages about the word rostra in Pliny’s Natural Histories (so, so many bird beaks), I found myself forced to consider whether the biological taxonomy of a hyena made it inappropriate to include it in a subgroup with dogs and wolves. After all, hyenas are genetically closer related to felines than canines, but since the main point is about muzzle shape and the Romans were not experts in genetic analysis, could I get away with this for a dictionary?1 Who knew that being a biologist (also astronomer, astrologer, land surveyor, doctor …) was a prerequisite for being a lexicographer?2
So today, when sitting down to read through a number of Silver Age Latin authors, I was primed for more phylogenetic dilemmas or yet more descriptions of Cicero’s head stuck on the rostra, the latter of which indeed appeared. I was not primed to pick a fight with every 20th century translator and commentator of Martial whose works appear on the shelves of the TLL. But so it goes.
The issue comes in a very small poem only two lines long from Martial’s fourteenth book of epigrams, the Apophoreta. This book is filled with brief poems about gift objects received at dinner parties. Poem 31 is for a hunting knife, culter venatorius, and goes as follows:
Si deiecta gemas longo venabula rostro,
Hic brevis ingentem comminus ibit aprum.
After so many days reading passages with rostrum (I have catalogued 425 of them so far with more to go), I felt pretty confident on my first reading when I interpreted the poem about as follows:
If you are groaning over the spears that were dislodged from the long snout,
This little knife will enter close combat with the huge boar.
Although the first associations most people have with the term rostrum will be either the speakers’ platform in Rome known as the rostra or possibly a bird’s beak, its association with a pig’s snout is also pretty well established. Before Martial, there are at least 15 direct attestations, including one we will be coming back to from Ovid.
Armed with this rough translation, I figured I should check against the commentaries just in case. Imagine my surprise, then when I found in T. J. Leary’s 1996 commentary on the Apophoreta:
“If you lament your long-pointed hunting spear which has been knocked down…”
The rostrum has been moved from the boar to the spear, interpreted as its point. A spearpoint would naturally fall under a much different section of a dictionary article than a boar’s snout. Wondering then if this was an isolated translation, I started to pull every translation off the shelf. It was not.
It was in D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s 1993 Loeb translation:
“…your hunting spear with its long blade…”
It was in every language I could find. In French, from H.J. Isaac in the 1933 Budé:
“…ton épieu au long fer…”
In German, from R. Helm in 1957:
“…den Spieß mit der langen Spitze…”
and from P. Barié and W. Schindler in 2002:
“…dein Speer mit der langen Spitze…”
In Italian from G. Norcio in 1980:
“…gli spiedi dalla lunga punta…”
and from M. Scàndela in 1996:
“…degli spiedi dalla lunga punta…”
The idea behind this translation, so far as I can find, traces back to an 1886 German commentary by Ludwig Friedlander. There, he provides two comparison passages to the phrase “longo venabula rostro,” which over 100 years later T.J. Leary would also cite in approximately the same phrasing and sequence. The passages are Vergil’s Aeneid 4, 131 (lato venabula ferro) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses 10, 713 (pando venabula rostro). Both are in sections about hunting, making the comparison thematically similar, so we’re on good ground to think Martial could have been imitating one or the other, but there are issues with taking each as supporting “long-pointed hunting spear” in Martial.
The Vergil passage comes at the start of the hunting sequence that will lead Dido and Aeneas into their fated cave, as the assembled heroes and nobles are getting ready to leave at dawn. They are bringing their hunting accoutrements in a list: nets, snares, horses, dogs, and lato venabula ferro: spears with broad heads. Vergil has rendered this rather poetically. He doesn’t actually say spearheads directly, but speaks of “wide iron,” using the collective singular of the material in place of the actual plurality of the spearheads. That collective singular doesn’t fit as well in Martial, who would be saying (rendered literally) “spears with long point.” Changing it to plural, longis venabula rostris would still metrically sound and points are indeed countable, unlike Vergil’s choice of “iron.” Not an impossible poetic choice, but it would be an odd one.
Taking rostro as spearpoint also runs into the issue that rostrum is very infrequently used with the generic idea of “point” or “head” if ever at all. Rostrum, when not part of an animal’s head, has a long history of meaning “naval ram,” the part attached to the front of a warship to sink enemy ships. From there, or from analogy to curved/sharp bird beaks, it also can mean an analogous metal formation at the front of a battering ram (Vitruvius 9.15.6), one of the blade segments on a scythe (Columella 4.25.1-2), a type of plow blade (Pliny, Natural Histories, 18.171), the spout of an oil lamp (Pliny, NH, 28.163), or the claw side of a hammer (Pliny, NH 34.144).3 It might, miiiiiiight mean “fishing spear tip” in a hopelessly muddled passage of Propertius (4.1.142), but that passage is so heavily reconstructed that rostrum itself is only printed out of possible conjecture. As is the fishing spear. As is the adjective that would again change its meaning from animal snout (this time a fish) to the point of a spear, if the noun is correct. For Martial to use rostrum of the hunting spear would be unique, although again not entirely impossible.
“But what about Ovid?” I hear you ask. I did promise I would get back to Ovid. Both Friedländer and Leary only cite three words from the Metamorphoses: pando venabula rostro. As quoted, next to the Vergil, this seems implied to mean one should translate this passage “spears with a broad head/point.” But in the longer context, that is certainly not what Ovid means, nor to Ovid’s translators take it so. One more word beforehand points to the meaning: excussit pando venabula rostro, “it shakes the hunting spears from its curved snout.” This is the trux aper, the ferocious boar of line 715. Further confirming that the rostrum belongs to the boar and not the hunting spears, Ovid turns out rather to like talking about a boar’s pandum rostrum. Odysseus’s crewman Macareus tells in Metamorphoses 14.282 that he felt his face growing into a pando rostro and in the voice of Pythagoras Ovid tells the reader at 15.113 that it was considered good to sacrifice pigs because otherwise they would root up seeds with their pando rostro.
So to Ovid’s trux aper who excussit pando venabula rostro (ferocious boar who shook the hunting spears from its curved snout) we can compare Martial’s promise that the hunting knife will take care of the aprum (boar), Si deiecta gemas longo venabula rostro (if you are groaning over the spears that were dislodged from the long snout).
Fortunately, I do have some other supporters in my corner against the slate of translators who will quietly be disagreed with by the placement of Martial’s passage in the group with other pig snouts and not the group with various inanimate objects other than naval rams (that’s it’s own, quite long section). The 1897 Bohn’s Classical Library translation4 — free online with the more scandalous Martial poems left untranslated — renders it as “hunting spear knocked down by the boar’s large tusk” and similar routes are taken in the 1865 German translation by Alexander Berg and a 1739 commentary in Latin by Vincentius Collesso.
All told, this represents just one of the over 600 passages that will eventually shape the TLL entry on rostrum, standing at #382 in my itemized list of passages I’ve read and taken notes on. It will get one small line that shows the citation, and some select words that justify its position in the article, and the reader and I shall both move along. But as passage #2 from my work this morning, it made a suprising start to the day to realize that one little line would be defying a century of translations. Good thing I double checked.
- Signs point to yes. ↩︎
- Answer: every other lexicographer in history. This is also why my German speaking skills dramatically tank between the classroom and the workplace. Sure, I can tell you what I ate today and where the restaurant is, but explain to me editor the grammatical issues in a passage about how the earth breathes in and draws the ocean back before exhaling to release it toward the shore? Now do one about metaphysics, please. ↩︎
- We must thank Pliny for keeping things interesting, as ever. ↩︎
- https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/index.htm#Martial_Epigrams ↩︎
A TLL Fellow Rambles 
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