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458 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY.
On map as an Adjective.
In the Fragments of Solon, XXXVI, vv. 18-21 (ecL Bergk)
occurs the following passage :
xivTpov d' aXXoq ai? iym Xafiwv
xaxoypaSys re xat a>iXoxTij/iu>v av-qp
out av xariays drj/iov out lizauaaTo,
nplv av TapdSag map i^iXrj ydXa. 1
Now it is commonly held that map is a noun, and noun only, and
accordingly it has been so translated here. This would make the
passage mean : " before he had stirred up the milk and taken out
the fat." But as it is not usual to stir up milk when it is wanted to
skim off the cream, this is hardly a satisfactory interpretation, and
it seems necessary to take map as an adjective, and to understand
with Buchholtz, from the preceding line, dJjpov as the object of
Tapd$as ; or simply to render it : " before he had stirred up and
filched away the creamy milk," i. e. the milk made fat by being
serenade or rather aubade under the windows of a prisoner. In fact my impres-
sion of the plaintive character is so strong that I cannot force myself to read v.
273 (rl nor' oti) and v. 281 (raxa d' av) logaoedically or otherwise than as a
modification of ionici, as Dindorf and Fritzsche would have us to do. Metricians
should remember that Aristophanes could be frolicsome. Of course the ortho-
dox thing to do, as soon as the notion of parody presents itself, is to look for
the original word. After I had amused myself with the parallel between
Philokleon.and the lovely heroine, I examined the fragments of the Danae
of Euripides. Unfortunately there are no lyric remains. The prologue and
the beginning of the first scene are by a late hand, but it would appear from cer-
tain indications that the play began at the point in the story where Danae is
still shut up in the tower after having borne the babe Perseus to Zeus; and we
can readily imagine Akrisios to have announced to the chorus the sin or the
misfortune of the heroine, and the chorus to hold converse with Danae, who
wishes to come out or to be metamorphosed in common with all the discon-
solate widows, wives and maids of Euripides. But I maintain that the fun of
the situation is not dependent on -the parody of any definite scene, and we must
be satisfied with that general travesty of the mythological world which was one
of the elements of the old comedy. B. L. G.
1 Mr Allinson's note reminds me that I have always been tempted to give v.
21 its normal syntax by reading : nplv a v arapdl-as map i^tlXev yaXa. The read-
ing nplv av with the subj. after an unreal condition of the past requires a rather
violent repraesentatio , such as I cannot at the moment parallel for this conjunc-
tion. Of course we might also have avaTapai-as efeteZv as in Eur. Ale. 362. In
looking over my collection I find a droll coincidence under npdrepov jj in Hdt.
8, 93 : ovk av en ai) aaro npdrepov % e I % s fiiv. B. L. G.
NOTES. 459
stirred up with the cream. "A man less pure than I," says Solon,
" would have broken down class distinctions to take advantage of
the result."
Were this the only instance where it seemed preferable to trans-
late map as an adjective, we might well hesitate to do so ; but in
Homer Od. II 135, iicel ,adXa map viz oZdaq, the sense is certainly
better, if we translate the word as an adjective. Buttmann, it is
true, in his Lexilogus (art. map), denies very emphatically that
there is any ground for considering it an adjective. But he had
neglected altogether the passage of Solon quoted above, which, as
will readily be admitted, more than doubles the uncertainty about
translating the word as a noun in the Homeric line. Buttmann's
objections to the sense of the translation, " fat is the ground beneath,"
seem entirely without weight, as it surely requires no imagination
to speak of the ground as " beneath," whether it be in relation to
anything in particular (as here to the standing crop) or left indefi-
nite (as in the imitation of the passage in the Odyssey, Hymn, ad
Apoll. v. 61). Furthermore, it seems perfectly evident that map
stands just in the relation to p-dAa that @adb does to the same word
in the preceding line.
One further consideration to be weighed against Buttmann's
arguments is the definition of Hesychius, who gives us as the third
meaning of map, " xa\ fonapov."
Turning now to the structure of the word itself, we find this form
map : the adjective of two terminations m'cuv, mov : the rather anom-
alous feminine adjective mstpa : and finally, in Aristotle and Hip-
pocrates, the adjective mapds or mepot;. All of these come from
the root m and are perfectly well established.
The Sanskrit correlates are very striking, and help to throw light
on the question : 1. Pivan=mPov. 2. With the derivative suffix
vara is formed pivara, which is the same as mPapa (stem of map6<C).
3. As feminine of the Sanskrit adjective pivara we have plvari ;
if this, as is very probable, represents an original pivarid, we should
have an exact correspondence with the Greek mpzpta, which by
metathesis gives us the existing form mPsipa.
Without further support, this correspondence, complete as it is,
might seem only a curious coincidence. Some corroboration, how-
ever, may be obtained within the Greek itself. The adjective
fxdxap, pdxaipa (pdzap), seems to have been formed nearly, if not
quite, analogously to map. Buttmann, it is true, notices it only to
deny this analogy ; but the word is composed of pax (cf. Lat. mac-td)
460 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY.
and the suffix ap, which is the same in both words whatever it rep-
resents. It is further objected that the feminine form nieipa cannot
bear the same relation to itiap that ,udxacpa does to its masculine.
But Curtius, Gr. Etym. No. 455, says: " pdyetpot; ist wohl aus
alterem payapo-s wie iratpos aus irapo-s, ovstpog aus ovap abgeleitet."
These examples furnish analogy for the change of a to £ and of the
metathesis of the i. But it is thought that izisipa as a feminine to
iziiov is justified by the analogy of -iitwv, irimtpa, and that they are
all to be referred to a group (cf. Mehlhorn Griech. Gram. 1845) of
adjectives forming their feminines with the suffix -eya, to which are
also referred Tzpia^uq, xpiafizipo. and Uao$, IXdstpa. But there ex-
isted (date uncertain) a masculine nineipos, and Udetpa is probably
to be referred to ttapos (vid. Lobeck Paralip. p. 210) ; hence, with
the exception of itp£<rpu<;, none of this group of five can be quoted
against the proposed theory, while some of them support it. But
the metaplastic (?) nominatives pdxapos (vid. Boeckh T. I. 449 b.)
and mapoq (cf. the adj. 4> a P°s from (pap) can scarcely be more than
illustrated by reference to the Sanskrit stem pivara.
The existence, then, of an adjective form itlap parallel to *i<ov
may be inferred :
1. From the interpretation of the two passages quoted.
2. From the testimony of Hesychius.
3. From the survival of the corresponding feminine form nkipa,
supported by the analogy of pdxap and other words.
Francis G. Allinson.
Je ne sache pas.
Mr. Samuel Garner, in his remarks on je ne sache pas, in the
second number of this Journal, gives his reasons why he does not
believe sache in that phrase to be a subjunctive, and concludes with
the words, " It is an indicative or it is nothing."
If this statement be correct, the phrase je ne sache pas ought to
be equivalent to je ne sais pas ; but whoever has observed how
Frenchmen use the phrase in question, knows that such is not the
case. I do not see any reason to doubt the correctness of Besch-
erelle's remark, that it is " une des nombreuses delicatesses " of the
French language, or to differ from Mr. Littre when he says :
" D'ailleurs le sens denote un subjonctif plutot qu'un indicatif ;
car je ne sache pas implique quelque chose de plus dubitatif que
