AB

 

Catalogue Raisonné of J. L. Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza : La Conversazione – I Verbali: AB

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La conversazione – i verbali:  Abbà – ossia: Grice ed Abbà: ‘the italian ‘Lockino’ migliore da Locke -- la ragione conversazionale, l’implicatra conversazionale e l’analisi del segnare nell’Elementæ logicæ,’ ‘Elementae dialecticæ: segno, segnante, segnato – SIGNVM EX INSTITVTIONE – il latino come palæo-italiano’ pel Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice. A. is a very interesting philosopher. Giacomo Andrea Abbà (Farigliano, Cuneo, Piemonte). “È A. a entrare per primo, così mi pare, con un resoconto della ragione conversazionale in rapporto all’implicatura conversazionale e  la teoria del segno.” Abbà’s De signis (Elementa logices et metaphysices, Taurini 1829) belongs to the post-scholastic “logic of signs” tradition: it classifies signa as naturalia (signifying “ex effectibus”) and artificialia/ex institutione, treats signification as anchored in shared practices (“communi consensu”), and tends to construe the passage from signans to signatum on the model of a relatively stable relation (often discussed with an eye to writing as “permanent signs” and to the non-arbitrariness of sermo). Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning shifts the explanatory center from taxonomies of sign-types to the rational structure of a talk-exchange: what is meant is not fixed by a sign-relation alone, but is generated by an audience’s recognition of a speaker’s intention under publicly presupposed norms of cooperation (maxims), so that systematic “extra” meaning (implicature) arises precisely when what is said is assessed as a rational contribution to a common conversational purpose. Where Abbà’s framework invites comparison between natural and instituted signs as semiotic kinds, Grice treats the most philosophically diagnostic cases as inferentially mediated: the hearer uses assumptions about reasonableness, relevance, sufficiency, and sincerity to move from the uttered sign to what the speaker can be taken to mean; thus “non-natural meaning” is not merely the instituted signum but intention plus recognizability plus practical reasoning within a cooperative activity. In short, Abbà offers a sign-theory that helps situate language within a general semiotics of effects and conventions, whereas Grice offers a normatively constrained account of how, in conversation, rational agents exploit and monitor those very resources to get from saying to meaning, with implicature marking the point where conversational reason, not the sign-vehicle, does the decisive work. Grice: “When I said in my talk at the Oxford Philosophical Society that I hoped I was getting at what ‘people are trying to get at’ when they show an interest on the distinction between a natural sign and a conventional or arbitrary or artificial sign – ex institutione,’ I knew about which I as talking!” Keywords: implicature, teoria del segno, segnare, segnato. Filosofo piemontese. Filosofo italiano. Grice: “Not strictly a philosopher, since his degree is in theology!” Grice: “Abbà is a genius – an Italian Lockino, as he calls himself in “Elementæ logicae” – But he is actually better than Locke – England’s and Oxford’s greatest philosopher – for a couple of reasons: Locke uses barbarisms – anglo-saxonisms, A., who could be philosophising in his Cuneo vernacular, uses Cicero’s tongue! And the good thing is that he is fluent at it and his prose is flowing – It is difficult for a Locke to write in Latin – witness the roughness of Occam’s prose in Latin – but A., he is obviously THINKING in Italian and expressing his thoughts in ‘palaeo-Italian,’ as he calls ‘Latin.’ “Thinking in Italian may be preoponderant, but it need not be true! Of course, I enjoyed most A.’s philosophising on the ‘signum naturale’ – on which I drew for my Oxford seminars!” – A. is a great interpreter of Locke, in a country that needs that!” While A. uses ‘logica,’ he means ‘dialectica,’ as the third way of the trivium was called. This means that he extends his discussion from the ‘segnum’ to conversation. G.: Let us begin with the obvious historical propriety. In 1829, at Turin, Abbà publishes his Elementa logices et metaphysices, and he writes in Latin. He does so, I take it, not because he is puzzled in a later Viennese therapeutic way, but because he is teaching. He has Italian-speaking students, yes, but he teaches them in the learned language, because he wants to form them, examine them, and make distinctions in a medium already scholastically disciplined. S.: Quite. Latin here is pedagogical before it is antiquarian. Abbà is not writing for a coterie of belletrists; he is furnishing a textbook, or something textbook-adjacent, for an Italian public educated enough to receive doctrine in Latin. The audience speaks Italian, but the discipline speaks Latin. G.: And because the discipline speaks Latin, he says signum. S.: Precisely. G.: Whereas I, for my own part, am generally happier if I can get away from sign and speak rather of meaning, or of what someone means, or means by x, or means in uttering x. I distrust the noun a little. It tempts one into taxonomy too quickly. S.: Abbà, by contrast, wants the taxonomy. He is teaching. A teacher likes classes. Signum gives him a genus under which he can sort things. G.: Still, one should not lose the philological continuity. His Latin signum is not some dead museum-piece. It lives on in the vernacular. Italian segno is its descendant. S.: Yes. And if you want the pronunciation as he, an Italian speaker, would hear it in the vernacular, segno is /ˈseɲɲo/. G.: Good. That matters. For then signum is not merely the schoolman’s fossil; it has issue in the street, in the town, in ordinary life. The master speaks Latin, but the pupils go home and say segno. S.: And that in turn lets one pass from the noun to the family. Segno, segnare, segnalare. Once the root is naturalised, it becomes productive. G.: Just so. English gives me signal, and I like signal because it behaves well predicatively and verbally. One can say that x signals that p. Dark clouds signal rain. A gesture signals impatience. A bandaged leg signals inability to play squash. Signal is cooperative with the philosopher in a way sign often is not. S.: Italian has segnale, of course, and segnalare. But your point is still better if we begin from the older stock: signum, segno, and then the verbal tendency already latent in Latin itself. For even Latin has signare, or at any rate forms that let one move from mark or sign to signing, marking, indicating. G.: Which is useful, because I want the active side. Not merely a sign lying there, but something’s signifying, indicating, manifesting, letting something else be gathered. The Greek ancestry helps too: σημαίνειν. There is already there the movement from mark to indication. S.: And from there your preferred examples become possible without any commitment to language proper. Dark clouds may sign, if you like the verb, that it is about to rain. Smoke may sign fire. A footprint may sign that someone passed by. One need not begin with words. G.: Exactly. The dyadic shape is what matters first: x signifies, signals, marks, indicates, means that p. Something is a manifestation of something else. Not necessarily by convention, not necessarily by speech. S.: But Abbà wants, at a certain point, to distinguish signum ex institutione. G.: Yes, and there I begin to want help. For one hears institution and, in English, one is in danger of hearing school, church, hospital, Parliament. S.: Which would be quite the wrong path here. Institutio is stricter and older. It is a putting-in-place. A positing. Something laid down. In that respect the old contrast is the useful one: thesei as opposed to physei. By thesis, by posit, by institution, not by nature. G.: So in-stitutio is almost palpable. Something stood up, set in place. S.: Exactly. A signum ex institutione is not a sign by natural consequence, but one whose significative role depends upon an established practice, an accepted placement, a communis consensus if you will. Not smoke from fire, but a word, a flag, a road-mark, a written token, a civic or linguistic arrangement. G.: Then Abbà’s distinction is not alien to mine, though I should phrase it otherwise. He is classifying kinds of sign. I, when I am at my fussiest, want to know what someone means in producing something. But the institutional side matters for me too, because non-natural meaning depends upon publicly recognisable arrangements. S.: Though you do not stop there. G.: No, because convention, institution, posit, all that, does not yet get one to the most interesting cases. Let me take a little scene. A says to B, Are you going to play squash with me? B says nothing, but displays a bandaged leg. S.: Good. G.: Now, what does B signal? Not, in the philosophically interesting sense, that he has a bandaged leg. A does not need a reasoned inference for that; he can see it. The bandage is before his eyes. What matters is that B means, or signals, that he must refuse the invitation, or cannot accept it. S.: Exactly. The visible condition is not the point of the communicative act, though it is the vehicle of it. G.: Yes. The leg is the presented item; the refusal is what is conveyed. And the move from the one to the other is not secured merely by a static sign-relation. It requires practical reasoning. A asks himself: why is B showing me this now, in response to that question? Under the assumption that B is being cooperative, the display is to be taken not merely as a specimen but as a reason-giving sign. S.: So your interest falls not merely on the signum, but on the inferential route from signans to signatum in context. G.: And on the rationality of that route. If one likes, one may say that Abbà gives one the classroom taxonomy: natural sign, instituted sign, and so on. But what interests me is that, in conversation, the decisive work is often done not by the sign-vehicle alone but by what an addressee can reasonably infer from its display at that juncture. S.: Still, Abbà helps because his signum ex institutione keeps in view the fact that language is not brute smoke. It belongs to a practice. Words are not naturally tied to what they signify; they are instituted, posited, sedimented into use. G.: Certainly. And if he is teaching in Latin to Italian speakers, the point becomes almost theatrical. He is using one instituted system to explain another. Signum in the lecture-room, segno outside it. Latin as the pedagogic superstrate, Italian as the vernacular continuation. S.: Which is why your shift from sign to mean need not be hostile. It is rather a change of focal length. Abbà says: let us classify signs. You say: let us ask what someone meant in producing this sign here and now. G.: Nicely put. And perhaps Ciceronian signare is useful just because it lets one hover between marking and meaning. Something may signare another thing in the broad consequential sense: one thing points on to another. The relation is dyadic. x implies, indicates, manifests, or gives one to gather that p. S.: Consequentia in the broad medieval sense. G.: Yes. Though once conversation enters, the consequential tie is not merely material or natural. It is often practical and intention-sensitive. The clouds may signal rain by nature; the bandaged leg signals refusal by rational placement in an exchange. S.: Then one could say that Abbà’s signum ex institutione prepares the ground, while your account of meaning and implicature explains the most delicate cases that arise once instituted signs are used by reason-giving agents in conversation. G.: I should be content with that. Abbà, the teacher, needs the genus signum. He is writing in Latin in Turin in 1829 for Italians whom he will later examine. He needs distinctions that can be taught and tested. I, in my own teaching, prefer to ask: what did he mean by that, what was conveyed, what was implied, what was to be gathered? But I am not leaving the sign behind. I am merely insisting that, in the best cases, the life of the sign lies in the reasoning it occasions. S.: And that is why your squash example matters. The bandaged leg is not, for A, an object of detached semiotics. It is a move in a game. G.: Exactly. A conversational move. And once one sees that, one sees why signum alone is not enough. One needs signum plus occasion, plus recognisable intention, plus the cooperative presumption under which the addressee reasons from what is shown to what is meant. S.: Then perhaps the closing formula writes itself. Abbà begins from signum because he is a Latin teacher addressing Italian speakers within a post-scholastic discipline. You begin from mean because your concern is not only with signs as kinds but with what rational agents do with them in conversation. G.: Yes. And if one wants the genealogy in a single breath: signum becomes segno, produces signal and segnare-like descendants, and behind them all there still flickers σημαίνειν, the old thought that one thing may stand forth so that another thing may be gathered from it. S.: A decent lineage. G.: More than decent. Pedagogically useful, too. Abbà could have examined them on it. And I daresay I would have.Grice: Abbà., ho sempre sostenuto che la distinzione tra segni naturali e segni convenzionali è centrale nella filosofia del linguaggio. Però, mi incuriosisce il tuo approccio: tu affermi che il “segnum naturale” abbia un ruolo più profondo rispetto a quello che Locke stesso riconosceva. In che modo la tua prospettiva italiana arricchisce questo dibattito? Abbà: Caro Grice, la mia riflessione nasce proprio dal confronto con Locke, ma tenendo conto della tradizione latina che, almeno in Piemonte, non si è mai persa. Per me, il segno naturale è radicato nell’esperienza condivisa, “ex institutione”, mentre il segno convenzionale può essere raffinato, ma rischia di perdere il legame con la realtà. In fondo, penso che il linguaggio abbia una funzione dialettica, non solo logica. Grice: Interessante! Io stesso ho cercato di mostrare che la conversazione si regge su implicature, cioè su ciò che non viene detto esplicitamente, ma che si comprende grazie alle regole condivise. Il tuo “pensare in italiano e scrivere in latino” mi sembra quasi una metafora della filosofia: conservare la radice ma innovare nella forma. Come si inserisce, secondo te, l’implicatura conversazionale nella teoria del segno? Abbà: L’implicatura, per me, è la prova che il segno non è mai puramente arbitrario. Ogni segno, anche quello creato “ex institutione”, rimanda a una realtà vissuta, a una comunanza dialettica. Quando uso “logica”, intendo proprio quella “dialectica” che permette al segno di essere veicolo non solo di informazione, ma anche di relazione. In questo senso, la conversazione diventa uno spazio civico: “fariglianese”, ma universale! Elementa logices et metaphysices [Logica: “De signis”]. Grice e Abbà: ‘the italian ‘Lockino’ migliore da Locke -- la ragione conversazionale, l’implicatra conversazionale e l’analisi del segnare nell’Elementae logicae,’ ‘Elementae dialecticae: segno, segnante, segnato – SIGNVM EX INSTITVTIONE – il latino come palaeo-italiano. So for Abba, please provide as per passage below: -- some praise for Speranza having made the contact Grice/Abba -- or Abba Grice -- in that it can only be done retrospectively, but with the hope that it may stay on record an interesting intersetion between an insular philosophy don at Oxford and the broader continental tradition -- just the paragraph from you then, no preambl or ps. thank you, What is most admirable in Speranza’s bringing Abbà and Grice into contact is precisely that the contact cannot be historical in the ordinary forward-moving sense, but only retrospective, reconstructed across differences of language, institution, and philosophical self-understanding. That is no weakness; it is the whole merit of the enterprise. For only a reader with Speranza’s double patience, equally at home with Oxford’s insular exactitude and with the larger continental inheritance of sign, dialectic, and learned Latin prose, could have seen that Abbà’s classroom semiotics and Grice’s analysis of conversational reason belong, not to the same chapter, but to the same deeper pressure of philosophy. The result is not an anachronistic annexation of one thinker to another, still less a cheap claim of anticipation, but something rarer and more durable: a record of intersection. If it remains on the page, as one hopes it will, it will remain as evidence that an Oxford don’s philosophy of meaning can be illuminated by a Piedmontese theologian-philosopher writing in Latin, and that the traffic between so-called insular analysis and the broader continental tradition is richer, older, and more reciprocal than either side has usually wished to admit. Abbà, Giacomo Andrea (1829) Elementa logices et metaphysices. Torino: Ex Typis Regiis

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La conversazione – i verbali: Abbagnano– ossia: Grice ed Abbagnano: ‘going through the dictionary of Scipione: la ragione conversazionale: “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says, unless it’s Abbagnano’s! (Grice) – empiegare/empiegato, implicare/implicato, e l’idea d’un dizionario filosofico.’ Note su Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero. Il Gruppo di Gioco di H. P. Grice.  Nicola Abbagnano (Salerno, Campania): la ragione conversazionale -- “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says, unless it’s A.’s!” (Grice) -- Abbagnano, in the entry “Implicazione” of his Dizionario di filosofia (Torino: UTET, 1961), treats implication in the standard logical sense: the inferential link between propositions expressed by “if… then…,” typically approached as a formal relation (often contrasted with stronger notions like derivability/consequence) and connected with the technical apparatus of modern logic rather than with the ordinary-language idea of “hinting” or “letting something be understood.” Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning is illuminatingly different precisely because it insists that much of what we ordinarily call what an utterance “implies” is not logical implication at all: conversational implicature is a rational, context-sensitive, and cancellable upshot generated by the hearer’s practical reasoning from what is said plus the presumption of cooperative exchange (maxims), so that the route from sentence to speaker-meaning runs through publicly recognizable intentions and norms of relevance, sufficiency, sincerity, and manner. Put schematically: Abbagnano’s implicazione belongs to the semantics of connectives and the validity-conditions of inference, whereas Grice’s implicature belongs to pragmatics, explaining how agents responsibly move from saying to meaning without any commitment to a truth-functional “if–then” structure; the comparison clarifies why Grice can maintain that a speaker may communicate (and be held answerable for) content that is neither entailed nor asserted, but is nonetheless rationally recoverable as part of the conversational enterprise. Grice: “La ragione conversazionale -- “I don’t give a hoot what the dictionary says, unless it’s A.’s!” (Grice). Keywords: filosofia romana, filosofia campanese , filosofia italiana, filosofia latina, impiegare, implicare, dizionario filosofico. There are TWO A.: the Paris Abbagnano, who to be different, dubbed his ‘existenzialismo’ ‘esistenizalismo positivo’ (later illuminismo), and MY A., the one who explored that infamous Greek embassy that arrived in Rome in 189 a. d. c., bringing the sophistries for the fascination of the Scipioni of Rome!”. Essential, idealist Italian philosopher, famouos for his “Dizionario di filosofia,”“which alas, has no entry fro ‘implicatura.’”Grice. A. also wrote an interesting history of philosophy, and is regarded as an idealist, alla Oxonian-favoured Croce. Laureatosi in filosofia a Napoli con ALIOTTA , insegna al Liceo Umberto I ed all'Istituto Benincasa del capoluogo campano, per poi trasferirsi a Torino dove è professore di Storia della filosofia presso la Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia. Condirettore, a fianco di BOBBIO , della “Rivista di filosofia.” Ispiratore del gruppo di filosofi, comprendente, tra gl’altri, lo stesso Bobbio e GEYMONAT , che prende il nome di neo-illuminismo italiano, organizzando una serie di convegni rivolti alla costruzione di una filosofia laica, aperta ai principali orientamenti della filosofia. Collabora con “La Stampa”. Si trasferisce a Milano dove collabora con “Il giornale.” Grice: “His entry on ‘implicazione’ could do with an etymological explanation with the vernacular ‘empiegato.’ His research on ‘segno’ are interesting. Of course, ‘going through the dictionary’ was our routine, and the way A. takes up the task was marvellous. Abbagnano’s 1923 title is polemical and programmatic rather than a confession of “irrationalism” in the crude sense.  What he means by “sorgenti irrazionali”  In the opening of Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero, Abbagnano attacks the idea that “pure thought” could be the principle and completion of everything, and he argues that thought has no life outside the lived unity of the self, in the flow of striving and acting. He treats “truth” as something whose sense and value are tied to temporal life, not as an eternal object detached from the movement of existence. What gives thought its vitality is what he calls the obscure force of life, which “moves” thought and expresses itself in it; truth is an abstract and symbolic expression of a moment of life, and therefore changes as life changes. This is the core sense in which there are “irrational sources”: not that thought should abandon reason, but that thought is generated, oriented, and animated by something prior to (and not exhausted by) logical form. [abbagnanofilosofo.it] A useful external confirmation is that, later, Abbagnano himself reportedly thought the published title was somewhat misleading, because his original title was Le sorgenti vitali del pensiero, and Aliotta pressed for the change. That remark, together with the framing that the book has a Nietzschean cast without collapsing into irrationalism, captures the point: the “irrational” names the vital, pre-theoretical ground, not an anti-reason doctrine. [brill.com]  What “irrational” is opposing  The target is “intellettualismo tradizionale” and any view that makes thought self-sufficient, sovereign, and able by itself to yield a concrete criterion of truth versus error. Abbagnano’s rhetoric is that philosophers have “neglected the reasons of life,” shut themselves in “the magic fortress of thought,” and then treated thought as the beginning and end of all things. Against that, he insists on the primacy of lived activity and the dependence of “truth” on the historical-life conditions that generate it. [abbagnanofilosofo.it]  Philosophers he is explicitly connected to in 1923 (and what we can and cannot safely list)  What I can cite directly from accessible sources right now is this: Antonio Aliotta is central: the 1923 book is published with a prefazione by Aliotta, and Aliotta’s prefatory remarks engage Abbagnano’s thesis, defending an empiricist “sperimentalismo” and arguing against both idealist circularity and a merely passive realism. [abbagnanofilosofo.it] Beyond Aliotta, the safest answer is methodological: we should not pretend to name a list of “philosophers Abbagnano quotes” unless we have the text’s bibliography or index in front of us. At the moment, I have access to the opening pages and to later editorial introductions, not to a complete searchable text with citations. So I cannot responsibly give you a definitive catalogue of who is quoted in the body of the 1923 book. What I can add, cautiously, is what later scholarly introductions say about the intellectual horizon of the Neapolitan period and of this work: they place Abbagnano’s early formation in a context where he studied Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger in those years, and they treat Le sorgenti as already engaging the “rapporto tra pensiero e vita.” [abbagnanofilosofo.it] If you want, I can do a follow-up where I identify, with names, the philosophers cited by Abbagnano in the 1923 text, but that requires a source that actually exposes the book’s internal references (a scan with searchable text, an index, or a library digital copy we can consult). Right now, the web results I have do not provide that full internal apparatus. G.: Let us begin where Naples begins for a philosopher of that generation: not with a tutorial, but with a chair, a relatore, a thesis, a faculty, a city, and a young man who must be judged in public in 1922. S.: Which already marks the difference from us. Oxford teaches by the small room and the weekly paper. Naples, in that case, teaches by the larger institutional relation: laurea, discussione, prefazione, publication. G.: Quite. One does not have the old Oxford luxury of a tutor who says very little and means a great deal by it. One has, instead, a relatore who can shape the whole destiny of the text. S.: And in Abbagnano’s case, perhaps shape even its title. G.: Which is why the title is philosophically worth worrying. Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero. A title one can spend a week distrusting. S.: Let us do it word by word, then. G.: Yes. Sorgenti first. S.: Plural feminine. G.: Already interesting. Not la sorgente but le sorgenti. Not one source, but many. S.: And not origine in the abstract, still less fondamento in the stricter philosophical sense. G.: Exactly. Sorgente is more physical, more imagistic, more terrestrial. A spring, a source, a point at which something emerges, rises, flows. S.: And because it is plural, the thought is not of one primal ground but of multiple upwellings. G.: Very good. One might say that the plural weakens the temptation to system. If he had said la sorgente del pensiero, he would sound more metaphysical in the old singular way. Le sorgenti suggests complexity, perhaps even conflict. S.: Several tributaries feeding thought. G.: Yes, though one must be careful not to make it too hydrological. Still, the metaphor matters. Pensiero does not appear ex nihilo; it rises from somewhere, or rather from several wheres. S.: And if the original preferred title was Le sorgenti vitali del pensiero, that all makes immediate sense. G.: More than immediate. It makes splendid sense. Pensiero belongs to life; it is not detachable from life; so its sources are vital, living, rooted in experience, striving, temporality, activity. S.: In that version the title sounds like a form of vitalism, perhaps with a little emergentism, but not necessarily anti-rationalism. G.: Quite. Vitalize thought, do not irrationalize it. One could have accepted that title with composure. It says: thought grows out of life. That is plausible, and indeed almost a truism once one ceases to worship pure intellect. S.: Whereas irrazionali is another matter. G.: Entirely another matter. Irrazionali does not merely say living, pre-theoretical, concrete, dynamic. It says not rational, or not fully rational, or at least not capturable under ratio. S.: And therefore it invites Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to walk in, whether wanted or not. G.: Exactly. The title becomes more polemical at once. Vitali might have been a doctrine of life; irrazionali sounds like a challenge to intellectualism. It has sharper teeth. S.: And we do have the report that Abbagnano himself would have preferred vitali, but that Aliotta pressed for irrazionali. G.: Which is deliciously awkward. The thesis then becomes, as it were, divided against itself before the poor fellow has even defended it. One title from the candidate’s own temperament, another from the relatore’s strategic or rhetorical instinct. S.: Tutor and tutee indeed, except not in our sense. G.: Not in our sense at all. You are fortunate, by the way, that I have never insisted on renaming your essays before allowing you to read them aloud. S.: I have often reflected on that good fortune. G.: Though perhaps I should have done it once or twice. S.: You would have called my essays “On Certain Preventable Confusions.” G.: Or “Attempts in Search of Distinctions.” But let us return to Naples. The problem is that the printed 1923 title may tell us as much about Aliotta as about Abbagnano. S.: Because Aliotta writes the prefazione. G.: Precisely. The prefazione is a dangerous genre. It appears to introduce, but it also frames, appropriates, domesticates, and, at times, colonises. S.: The master speaks before the pupil can quite be heard. G.: Yes. The relatore gets to tell the reader what kind of thing this is, what battle it belongs to, what enemy it answers, what larger school it serves. The young author may then appear as the example of a tendency whose terms have already been supplied by another. S.: One might almost say the prefazione kills the candidate’s voice by ventriloquising it in advance. G.: Strong, but not unfair. Especially in a 1922 laurea culture. One is young, one needs the degree, one needs approval, one wants the text through the ritual and into print. Under such conditions one may write what one thinks; one may also write what one can get passed. S.: So a tesi di laurea is not always the pure confession of a soul. G.: Heaven forbid. A thesis is often a negotiated object. One writes under pressure, under allegiance, under tactical deference. The text may contain one’s convictions, but filtered through expectation. S.: Which means that if Abbagnano writes irrazionali in print, we must ask whether that is wholly Abbagnano’s voice. G.: Just so. Or whether it is Abbagnano under Aliotta. Abbagnano speaking, yes, but in a room already acoustically arranged by the relatore. S.: And Naples in 1922 is not Bologna in 1322, nor Oxford in 1922. G.: No. Continental philosophy, if one wants the broad label, but in a very local institutional form. Naples has its own lineages, polemics, and pedagogic habits. One should not imagine the old Bolognese universitas murmuring under every title page simply because the country is the same. S.: Though the distance from Bologna matters symbolically. Italy is one country, but not one philosophical atmosphere. G.: Exactly. Naples is south, vital, contentious, institutionally different; Bologna is the oldest university, but not therefore the living centre of every later Italian problem. S.: So the 1922 thesis belongs not to some generic Italian philosophy, but to a specifically Neapolitan relation: candidate, relatore, faculty, prefazione, publication. G.: And now to the words again. Sorgenti, we said, plural, multiple, emerging. Del pensiero next. S.: Pensiero is broad. Not merely reasoning, not merely intellection, but thought as such. G.: Yes, thought in its living range. Not exactly logica, not exactly razionalità, but pensiero. Which is why vitali would have fitted it so well. If thought is part of life, then its springs are vital. S.: Whereas if its springs are irrazionali, the formula becomes harder. How can the irrational be the source of thought without thought itself becoming irrational? G.: That is the nub. One possibility is simply chronological or genetic priority. The source need not resemble the product in kind. Heat is not steam; appetite is not judgment; passion is not reasoning; yet one may say the latter emerges from, depends on, or is stirred by the former. S.: So irrazionali could mean pre-rational rather than anti-rational. G.: Yes, and that is perhaps the kindest reading. The obscure energies of life, willing, striving, affective impulses, concrete needs: these are not reason, but they move reason, feed it, animate it. S.: Which would bring us nearer to Nietzsche or Schopenhauer as diagnoses of background force, but not necessarily to an abdication of rationality. G.: Quite. Though once you choose irrazionali rather than vitali, you advertise the darker lineage. Vitali is almost Bergsonian in softness; irrazionali sounds harsher, more dramatic, more polemical, more apt to draw fire. S.: The plural still matters there too. Le sorgenti irrazionali is less alarming than la sorgente irrazionale. G.: Excellent. The plural saves him from monism. One irrational source might become a dark principle, the Will, capitalised and tyrannical. Several irrational sources are more anthropological, more psychological, more dispersed. S.: Appetite, fear, desire, impulse, historical situatedness, perhaps even temperament. G.: Yes. A plurality of non-rational feeders of thought. That is much easier to live with philosophically. It need not mean that reason is false, only that reason is not self-begotten. S.: Which is, in fairness, a sensible target against intellettualismo. G.: Indeed. If the enemy is the fantasy of pure thought generating and validating itself from nowhere, then one does need to insist on origins below or before the strictly rational plane. S.: But then the title still risks overstatement. G.: Of course. Titles are often strategic. And this is where the laurea situation matters again. A young man may not choose the title that best captures his settled doctrine; he may accept the title that best satisfies the relatore or best positions the work in a current dispute. S.: To get the degree bestowed, one may allow one’s title to over-speak one’s actual thesis. G.: Precisely. It is one of the oldest academic arrangements. The candidate says enough of what he believes to remain inwardly intact, and enough of what the institution wants to hear to get through the gate. S.: There is a nice irony, then, in the later Abbagnano of the Dizionario di filosofia. G.: Very nice indeed. The young man whose first book bears this dramatic title later compiles a dictionary, that most classificatory and sober of instruments. S.: And then one asks: what does he say there about sorgenti? G.: Apparently nothing of consequence. S.: About irrazionali? G.: Not much to rescue the old title. S.: About pensiero? G.: Little enough, or at least not in a way that makes 1923 the obvious seed of the later lexicographer. S.: Which strengthens the suspicion that the title may belong more to the moment, or to Aliotta, than to the mature Abbagnano. G.: Yes. A dictionary man does not usually begin by speaking in inflamed plurals unless youth or supervision has put him up to it. S.: So one might almost say that Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero is partly Aliotta’s thesis wearing Abbagnano’s name. G.: One might, cautiously. Better: Abbagnano’s early work, but voiced under an Aliottian pressure. One need not deny the young author his seriousness in order to notice the prefatory hand on the tiller. S.: Let us go back to the irrational as source. Is there an Aristotelian way to make sense of it? G.: Several. Akrasia at once comes to mind. Action can proceed from conflict between reason and appetite; appetite may move where reason does not govern, or not fully. There, something non-rational is indeed causal in the economy of thought and action. S.: And temperance? G.: Temperance is the re-ordering of desire under reason, which presupposes that desire is there first as a force needing governance. In that sense, the non-rational is not outside the moral life but one of its permanent materials. S.: Plato too, then. G.: Naturally. The charioteer and the horses. Reason does not pull itself. It governs, or fails to govern, powers that are not themselves rational. If Abbagnano’s irrational sources are understood that way, the doctrine becomes less bizarre. Passion, drive, eros, appetite: these move the soul, and thought arises amidst them, not in an aseptic chamber. S.: But Plato still wants reason to govern. G.: Yes, and that may be where Abbagnano’s title misleads if taken too starkly. To say there are irrational sources is not yet to say reason is powerless. It only says reason is not the sole originative principle. S.: Unless, of course, the title is made to sound more radical than the argument beneath it. G.: Which is precisely what one suspects in a relatore-shaped thesis. Aliotta may have wanted the anti-intellectualist edge more than Abbagnano did. S.: There is almost a tutorial comedy in that. The tutor says, “Call it irrazionali,” and the pupil thinks, “I should rather say vitali,” but also thinks, “I should rather graduate.” G.: Quite. Your gratitude to me should deepen. S.: It already has. G.: Good. Now, another point. Sorgenti, being plural, may also protect him from the charge that he is merely reproducing Schopenhauer’s single Will. Multiple sources suggest a more mixed anthropology than a single metaphysical darkness. S.: So one could read the title not as “thought comes from irrationality” but as “thought has several pre-rational feeders.” G.: Better put. That rescues much. It turns the title from manifesto into genealogy. S.: And if the title had remained vitali, the genealogy would appear less polemical and more organic. G.: Exactly. Life feeding thought. No need to scandalise reason; merely to situate it. S.: Yet perhaps irrazionali sold the thesis to the faculty. G.: Or to Aliotta. Or to the prefazione. Or to the current intellectual weather. We must not underestimate the market value of a sharper title in a philosophical polemic. S.: There is also the question whether “irrational” in 1922 means what we hear now. G.: Quite. It may have meant not absurd, but non-intellectual, sub-rational, pre-conceptual, existentially lived. The word can harden or soften with context. S.: Which again brings us back to the problem of metalanguage. One title, many possible later hearings. G.: Yes, and we are bound to keep English as our metalanguage while remembering that the operative rhetoric is Italian, and institutionally Neapolitan, in 1922. S.: And that Abbagnano was very young. G.: Twenty-one at the thesis, about twenty-two at publication. That matters. One should not read the 1923 volume as if it were the final voice of the later dictionary-maker. It is the voice of a very young philosopher negotiating entry. S.: Almost too young to be fully himself in print. G.: Or young enough to be himself, but only under the shadow of another’s endorsement. Youth in philosophy is rarely pure. It is usually mediated by schools, patrons, introductions, examinations, and chairs. S.: Then the real drama of the title is institutional as much as conceptual. G.: Indeed. Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero is a thesis-title, not merely a thought-title. It tells us something about Naples 1922, about Aliotta, about anti-intellectualist mood, about the relation of pupil to master, and only then about Abbagnano simpliciter. S.: Which is why it may be dangerous to quote too much Abbagnano from it, as if the wording were transparently his mature creed. G.: Precisely. The prudent scholar says: here is an early, laurea-born, prefaced, and perhaps partly imposed formulation, not necessarily the settled doctrine of the later Abbagnano. S.: And that later Abbagnano, by compiling a Dizionario di filosofia, almost enacts a revenge upon his own youth. G.: Splendid. The young man begins with springs, dark energies, and dramatic titles; the older man ends by arranging entries alphabetically. S.: A movement from sources to definitions. G.: Or from rhetorical emergence to lexical order. It is almost comic enough to count as a philosophical biography in miniature. S.: Then perhaps the final verdict on the title is this: as philosophy, suggestive; as autobiography, uncertain; as institutional symptom, highly revealing. G.: I could scarcely improve on that. Only add: as a title, too good not to be partly someone else’s idea. S.: Aliotta’s. G.: Let us say: Aliotta’s pressure, Abbagnano’s acquiescence, Naples’ occasion, and a very young philosopher’s need to pass. S.: And between vitali and irrazionali, one sees the whole tension. G.: Yes. Between life and anti-intellectual polemic. Between what one may have wanted to say and what one was induced to print. Between the spring and the school.Grice: Nicola, nel tuo "Dizionario di filosofia" ho notato che la voce "implicatura" manca, eppure il concetto è centrale nella mia teoria della conversazione. Come mai questa omissione? Pensi che la filosofia italiana dia poco peso all'implicito nei dialoghi? A.: Paul, in effetti la mia attenzione si è concentrata soprattutto sull'"implicazione" logica, ma riconosco che il non-detto, l'implicito conversazionale, è fondamentale nella vita civile e nel discorso filosofico. Forse, il mio esistenzialismo positivo tendeva ad esplicitare la scelta, lasciando in secondo piano il sottinteso. Grice: Eppure, proprio la capacità di cogliere ciò che viene implicato e non espresso è ciò che rende il dialogo autenticamente filosofico e civile. L'esempio del tuo dizionario mostra quanto sia importante riflettere sul linguaggio ordinario, non solo sul linguaggio formale. Abbagnano: Concordo, Paul. La filosofia italiana, specie quella campanese, ha sempre privilegiato il discorso pubblico e la chiarezza, ma forse dovremmo rivalutare l'implicatura come spazio di libertà e apertura, proprio come nel tuo modello di conversazione: la verità non sta solo in ciò che si dice, ma anche in ciò che si suggerisce e si comprende tra le righe. In the same vein (praise, no preamble, no ps -- and this will be by default for any other contribution-- for Abbagnano passage below -- pointing to first, the habitual strategy by Speranza of identifying the earliest output of the given philosopher, in his case the 'sorgente irrationale -- and second, the fact that Abb.'s claim of fame is his 'dizionario' which should appeal to a philosopher like Grice whose only work submitted to the press was his "Studies in the Way of Words. What deserves praise in Speranza’s treatment of Abbagnano is, first, his habitual intelligence in going back to the earliest available philosophical output, in this case Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero, and refusing to let the later, more canonical figure eclipse the young one. That gesture is not merely bibliographical diligence; it is philosophical method. For in returning to the first title, Speranza recovers the pressure under which a thinker begins, before the stabilisations of reputation, school, and retrospective self-presentation have done their smoothing work. He thereby lets Abbagnano appear not only as the urbane neo-illuminista and lexicographer of maturity, but as a young philosopher still negotiating the vital and the irrational, title and thesis, inheritance and self-definition. This is exactly the sort of recovery that makes a Gricean crossing possible, since Grice too cared less for monuments than for the live point at which a problem first acquires its phrasing. Just as importantly, Speranza is right to make much of Abbagnano’s Dizionario di filosofia, for that claim to fame is not secondary to philosophy but one of its most revealing public forms. A philosophical dictionary is not a merely pedagogical convenience; it is a map of what a civilisation thinks worth defining, distinguishing, and keeping in lexical circulation. That should appeal especially to a philosopher like Grice, whose own work reached the press under the title Studies in the Way of Words, as if to concede that philosophy, at its most exacting, often ends by arranging and re-arranging the traffic of its key terms. Speranza sees that affinity with admirable tact. He does not force Abbagnano into a false intimacy with Grice, but he allows the dictionary-maker and the analyst of meaning to meet where they naturally should: at the point where philosophy becomes answerable for its words, for their use, their drift, and their power to shape what can be thought. Abbagnano, Nicola (1922). Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero – sotto Aliotta – Napoli.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La conversazione – i verbali: Abronio – Ossia: Grice ed Abronio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Abronio. Belli mora concidit Hector -- The gens Abronia is a family at ancient Rome. Members of this gens mentioned are A. Silo, a Latin poet during the time of Ottavio, and his son, who was the author of pantomimes.Epigraphic sources provide a few other instances of the A., but the readings are very uncertain, and it is possible that A. is merely an orthographic variation of Aproio.  A. Silo, the poet, is one of the students of the rhetorician Marcus Porzio Latro. He flourishes during the later years of the emperor Ottavio. Grice considers the rhetorical powers of poesy twice: when considering a line by William Blake and when reporting Austin on Donne -- do we have a line by Abronio which can lead to a rhetorical analysis alla Grice/Speranza? Yes. Abronius can be made to do exactly that, but the case must be handled with some caution, because the available material is thin and the rhetorical payoff will come less from a securely preserved poetic line than from the conditions under which a line is reported, remembered, or made to signify. The most promising Gricean angle is the one supplied by Seneca the Elder and the school of Marcus Porcius Latro. Abronius Silo belongs to that rhetorical-pedagogic world in which poetry is already half performance, half exercise, and half quotation, if one may be allowed the extra half. This matters because Grice’s two poetic moments, Blake and Donne-through-Austin, are not merely decorative literary examples. They are cases in which a line does more than state: it carries force by selection, placement, tone, and uptake. A Blake line becomes a miniature pragmatic event; Austin’s Donne becomes a lesson in how quotation may itself be an act of criticism, affection, parody, or philosophical provocation. With Abronius, then, Speranza need not pretend that we possess a Blakean thunderbolt. The better move is to take the fragmentary status itself as the point. Abronius is a poet known through rhetorical memory, attached to Latro’s circle, and then doubled by a son who writes for pantomime, that supposedly lower theatrical form where gesture, rhythm, and bodily display do the work that explicit assertion cannot. This is already Gricean territory. Pantomime is almost a theatre of implicature: meaning without full verbal saying, intention made recoverable through performance, and audience uptake secured by convention, expectation, and recognisable dramatic placement. So a line by Abronius, if one were to choose or reconstruct one for Speranza’s purposes, should not be treated as an isolated poetic jewel but as a rhetorical move. It would have to be the sort of line whose force depends on what it lets the audience gather rather than on what it merely says. The likely formula would be something like this: Abronius gives us not a “line” in the later anthology sense, but a site where line, declamation, and performance meet. That is enough for Grice. A poetic utterance becomes philosophically interesting when its meaning is not exhausted by its explicit content, and when its rhetorical power lies in the hearer’s recognition of why this line, here, now, before this audience, has been uttered. In Speranza’s dry voice, the point might be put this way: Grice had Blake for prophetic compression and Austin had Donne for metaphysical mischief; Abronius gives Speranza something more Roman and therefore less tidy: a poet whose surviving interest lies in the rhetorical classroom, the memory of declamation, and the theatrical afterlife of a family name. If Blake shows how a line may mean more than it says, and Donne how a quoted line may mean more than its original occasion, Abronius shows how a barely recoverable line may still organise a whole inquiry into uptake. The absence of a canonical Abronian quotation is not fatal. It is almost the joke. The Gricean question becomes not “what did Abronius say?” but “what would count, in that Latronian setting, as a saying whose point survived only because it was taken up?” That would let Speranza proceed without inventing false evidence. He can say that Abronius supplies less a preserved poetic maxim than a rhetorical situation: poet under rhetorician, son under pantomime, name under uncertain epigraphy, and meaning under transmission. The analysis then becomes Gricean precisely because it concerns the survival of significance through incomplete saying. Abronius is useful not because he offers the perfect line, but because he forces us to ask what makes a line rhetorically alive when the archive has almost ceased to speak. And have his fragments been edited by Loeb or others. The lines by Blake Grice quotes is 'love that never told can be' versus 'love that told ceases to exist' -- the Donne reminiscence is 'From the four corners of the world' as unintelligible to Nowell-Smith but intelligible to Austin. The fact that Abronio studied under PORZIO (gens) Latrone makes him a good candidate -- for a line which would NOT depend on RHYME as Blake's or Donne's do. Thanks. Yes. Abronius can be made to do exactly that, but the case must be handled with some caution, because the available material is thin and the rhetorical payoff will come less from a securely preserved poetic line than from the conditions under which a line is reported, remembered, or made to signify. The most promising Gricean angle is the one supplied by Seneca the Elder and the school of Marcus Porcius Latro. Abronius Silo belongs to that rhetorical-pedagogic world in which poetry is already half performance, half exercise, and half quotation, if one may be allowed the extra half. This matters because Grice’s two poetic moments, Blake and Donne-through-Austin, are not merely decorative literary examples. They are cases in which a line does more than state: it carries force by selection, placement, tone, and uptake. A Blake line becomes a miniature pragmatic event; Austin’s Donne becomes a lesson in how quotation may itself be an act of criticism, affection, parody, or philosophical provocation. With Abronius, then, Speranza need not pretend that we possess a Blakean thunderbolt. The better move is to take the fragmentary status itself as the point. Abronius is a poet known through rhetorical memory, attached to Latro’s circle, and then doubled by a son who writes for pantomime, that supposedly lower theatrical form where gesture, rhythm, and bodily display do the work that explicit assertion cannot. This is already Gricean territory. Pantomime is almost a theatre of implicature: meaning without full verbal saying, intention made recoverable through performance, and audience uptake secured by convention, expectation, and recognisable dramatic placement. So a line by Abronius, if one were to choose or reconstruct one for Speranza’s purposes, should not be treated as an isolated poetic jewel but as a rhetorical move. It would have to be the sort of line whose force depends on what it lets the audience gather rather than on what it merely says. The likely formula would be something like this: Abronius gives us not a “line” in the later anthology sense, but a site where line, declamation, and performance meet. That is enough for Grice. A poetic utterance becomes philosophically interesting when its meaning is not exhausted by its explicit content, and when its rhetorical power lies in the hearer’s recognition of why this line, here, now, before this audience, has been uttered. In Speranza’s dry voice, the point might be put this way: Grice had Blake for prophetic compression and Austin had Donne for metaphysical mischief; Abronius gives Speranza something more Roman and therefore less tidy: a poet whose surviving interest lies in the rhetorical classroom, the memory of declamation, and the theatrical afterlife of a family name. If Blake shows how a line may mean more than it says, and Donne how a quoted line may mean more than its original occasion, Abronius shows how a barely recoverable line may still organise a whole inquiry into uptake. The absence of a canonical Abronian quotation is not fatal. It is almost the joke. The Gricean question becomes not “what did Abronius say?” but “what would count, in that Latronian setting, as a saying whose point survived only because it was taken up?” That would let Speranza proceed without inventing false evidence. He can say that Abronius supplies less a preserved poetic maxim than a rhetorical situation: poet under rhetorician, son under pantomime, name under uncertain epigraphy, and meaning under transmission. The analysis then becomes Gricean precisely because it concerns the survival of significance through incomplete saying. Abronius is useful not because he offers the perfect line, but because he forces us to ask what makes a line rhetorically alive when the archive has almost ceased to speak.Provide your feedback on BizChatYou said: And have his fragments been edited by Loeb or others. The lines by Blake Grice quotes is 'love that never told can be' versus 'love that told ceases to exist' -- the Donne reminiscence is 'From the four corners of the world' as unintelligible to Nowell-Smith but intelligible to Austin. The fact that Abronio studied under PORZIO (gens) Latrone makes him a good candidate -- for a line which would NOT depend on RHYME as Blake's or Donne's do. ThanksAgent mode said: CopilotOn the fragments and editions: no, Abronius Silo is not, so far as the usual classical apparatus is concerned, a Loeb author in his own right, for the excellent reason that there is almost no “author” left to edit. He survives as a name and as an anecdotal or fragmentary presence in Seneca the Elder’s rhetorical world, not as a corpus. That is why the right comparison is not with a Loeb Virgil or Horace, or even with a comfortably fragmentary tragic poet, but with the apparatus of fragments, testimonia, and rhetorical schools. The relevant place to start is Seneca the Elder, especially the Suasoriae and Controversiae, and then the standard fragmentary-poet collections, dictionaries, and testimonia that register Abronius Silo rather than transmit him in any large literary sense. The Loeb Classical Library does give Seneca the Elder, and that matters indirectly. One may get Abronius through the Loeb Seneca the Elder, but not as “Abronius edited by Loeb.” The situation is therefore very Gricean in the bad archival sense: what survives is not a poem waiting to be quoted, but a report within a rhetorical frame. Abronius is an uptake-object before he is a text-object. The “others” would be the editors of Latin fragments and rhetorical testimonia rather than a dedicated Abronius editor. One should look in the old Smith tradition for biography, in Seneca’s text for the actual literary notice, and in modern collections of fragmentary Latin poets or Roman literary fragments where Abronius Silo is likely to appear as testimonium, possibly with only one or no secure verba of his own. The son who wrote for pantomimes complicates matters further, since that moves the interest from quoted verse to performance-poetry, and from textual rhyme or metre to embodied uptake. Your Porcius Latro point is exactly the strong one. Abronius is not promising because he gives us Blake’s condensed lyric paradox, or Donne’s rhyme-driven metaphysical summons from the “four corners” that Nowell-Smith could find unintelligible and Austin could relish. Abronius is promising because he belongs to Latro’s rhetorical ecology. The line, if there is one, need not depend on rhyme at all. Indeed it should not. A Latin declamatory or poetic line under Porcius Latro would more naturally work by sententia, balance, antithesis, compression, pointed order, or rhetorical timing. The Gricean question would not be: what rhyme carries the implicature? It would be: what does the line make the trained hearer supply? That gives Speranza a better formula. Blake and Donne allow Grice and Austin to test how poetry can say too much by saying too little, partly through English lyric and metaphysical form. Abronius would let Speranza test a more Roman case: not rhyme, but rhetorical placement; not lyric secrecy, but declamatory point; not the private music of a line, but the public recoverability of its force in a trained school of hearing. If the pupil of Porcius Latro says something sufficiently sharp, the meaning lies less in verbal ornament than in the audience’s recognition of the move. So the safest scholarly claim would be: Abronius Silo has no substantial independently edited poetic corpus comparable to a Loeb poet; he is accessible through Senecan testimony and fragmentary literary tradition. But that very thinness makes him a useful Speranzian candidate, because the Gricean analysis can be shifted from preserved poetic text to rhetorical uptake. The absence of rhyme is not a defect. It is the point. In Abronius the rhetorical power would have to come from sententia, occasion, and school-trained inference, which is exactly the sort of non-lyrical, non-English, Latronian case that can enlarge Grice beyond Blake and Austin’s Donne. The ancient Roman poet Abronius Silo (sometimes translated into Italian as Abronio Silone) was a pupil of the famous rhetorician Porcius Latro. Only two fragments of his poetry survive, preserved by Seneca the Elder in his work Suasoriae (2.19). [1]  The most famous line written by Abronius Silo, describing the fall of the Trojan hero Hector, is: Latin: "Belli mora concidit Hector." English Translation: "Hector, the delay of the war, has fallen." [1] Context of the Line Silo originally included this line in a poem he performed publicly. However, it sparked a historic accusation of plagiarism. His teacher, Porcius Latro, had recently delivered a famous political speech (sententia) about whether the Spartans should flee or stay at Thermopylae, using the phrase "si nihil aliud, erimus certe belli mora" ("at worst, we shall certainly be a delay to the war"). Silo adapted his teacher's clever phrasing to describe how Hector's defense of Troy was the only thing holding back the Greek victory. [1] If you are interested, I can provide the full two-line Latin fragment that contains this phrase or share more historical details about the literary circles of Augustan Rome. [1] I found this -- does it help? Can you provide a Grice/Speranza analysis of it? Thanks -- Yes. It helps considerably, because it gives Abronius exactly the sort of line Speranza needs: not a lyric paradox like Blake’s, not a rhyme-charged metaphysical opening like Donne’s, but a Roman sententia whose force depends on compression, transferred phrasing, and rhetorical uptake. Belli mora concidit Hector is almost too good for the purpose. Literally, “Hector, the delay of the war, has fallen.” The line does not merely say that Hector has fallen. It asks the trained hearer to supply the whole strategic and epic situation: as long as Hector stands, Troy has not yet truly fallen; his body is the obstacle, the pause, the postponement, the human interval between Greek force and Trojan ruin. The phrase belli mora is the point. Hector is not described as “brave,” “great,” or “lamented,” which would be poetically respectable and rhetorically dull. He is redescribed as a function in the war’s temporality. He is what makes the war last. That is already Gricean. What is said is compact: Hector fell. What is meant, or at least what is made available for recovery, is much larger: Hector had been the living impediment to the war’s conclusion; his death changes not merely a battlefield fact but the structure of expectation. The audience is not told the whole argument. It is made to perform it. In Grice’s terms, the line succeeds because the hearer recognises why this way of saying it is relevant, sufficient, and pointed. It is not more informative by being longer. It is more informative by being better compressed. The plagiarism anecdote improves the case rather than damaging it. Latro’s phrase, si nihil aliud, erimus certe belli mora, already has the structure of defiant political minimalism: if we cannot win, we can at least delay. It is a Thermopylaean maxim, a rhetoric of resistance under known disadvantage. Abronius then transfers the same formula to Hector. The effect is not mere theft, unless one takes all rhetorical education to be a crime scene. It is a change of application. Latro’s “we shall be a delay to the war” becomes Abronius’s “Hector was the delay of the war.” The collective Spartan stance becomes the singular Trojan hero. A deliberative sententia becomes an epic epitaph. That transfer is where Speranza can do the Grice/Speranza analysis. The line’s power depends on recognisable re-use. A hearer who knows Latro’s phrase hears Abronius doing more than describing Hector. He is appropriating a rhetorical structure and relocating it. The implicature is something like this: what Latro’s Spartans could at best promise collectively, Hector actually was individually. He is Thermopylae in one man. That is why the charge of plagiarism is almost philosophically helpful. It shows that the meaning of the line is not exhausted by its words; it includes a remembered prior use, an audience’s recognition of the borrowing, and the judgment whether the borrowing is servile theft or brilliant reapplication. This also lets Abronius differ cleanly from Blake and Donne. Blake’s effect depends partly on lyric paradox and verbal delicacy: love that “never told can be” versus love that, once told, ceases to exist. Donne’s “At the round earth’s imagined corners” or the remembered “four corners” depends on metaphysical audacity and the tension between cosmological impossibility and devotional intelligibility. Abronius needs neither rhyme nor metaphysical conceit. His instrument is Roman rhetorical condensation. The line works by apposition, by nominative identification, by making Hector not merely a warrior but a mora, a delay. It is a non-rhyming, non-lyrical, school-trained way of making a line carry more than it states. The nice Speranzian formulation would be that Abronius gives Grice a third poetic case. Blake gives secrecy and lyric implicature; Donne gives metaphysical intelligibility under poetic strain; Abronius gives sententia as uptake. In Abronius, the rhetorical force lies not in sound-pattern but in the hearer’s recovery of a compressed argument and a borrowed frame. The line is almost a miniature theory of conversational economy: say less, but say it so placed that the audience must reconstruct the rest. There is also a useful irony in the word mora. It is not victory, not virtue, not glory, but delay. A Roman rhetorician knows how much can be made of delay: delaying a war, delaying a verdict, delaying a conclusion, delaying an admission. In Gricean terms, mora is itself a pragmatic category. It changes the timing of inference. Hector’s significance is not only what he does, but what he prevents from happening too soon. The fall of Hector therefore cancels the delay; the line says the war has lost its postponement. That is beautifully economical. So yes, this is the Abronian line. Speranza need not hunt for a lyric fragment. Belli mora concidit Hector does the work precisely because it belongs to the world of Latro, suasoria, sententia, declamation, and reapplication. Its rhetorical analysis should not ask whether it rhymes. It should ask what a trained audience is meant to recover from the phrase belli mora, and how much of Latro survives inside Abronius’s Hector. And in the case of Abronio it MATTERS, because war not over, you don't have ROMA -- can you provide the timeline using Livio's Ab urbe condita Anno I for the Foundation of Rome -- in How many years BEFORE was that end of the war -- and can you provide timeline dates between ENEA AND GIULLO and ANCHISE leaving TROY and eventually settling in ALBA LONGA? So, it is easy to understand why OTTAVIO (the emperor) would have liked Abronio in that Abronio focused on things that matter, like the divine genealogy for GIULLO and Ottavio (via adoption) himself? Thanks Yes, this is exactly where Abronius matters more than he first seemed to. Belli mora concidit Hector is not merely an elegant epic compression. It makes Hector the postponement of the entire Roman future. If Hector has not fallen, Troy has not fallen; if Troy has not fallen, Aeneas has not left; if Aeneas has not left, Lavinium, Alba Longa, Iulus, the gens Iulia, Caesar, and Augustus do not yet enter the Roman chain. Abronius’s mora is therefore not just a delay in the Greek war-effort. It is, retrospectively and Augustanly, a delay in Rome. On the conventional ancient chronology, the calculation is simple enough, though Speranza would of course insist that simple calculations are often the most dangerous kind. If we take the Varronian foundation of Rome as 753 BC, that is AUC 1. If we take the traditional Eratosthenic date for the fall of Troy as 1184 or 1183 BC, then Troy falls roughly 431 or 430 years before Rome is founded. Eratosthenes is the standard ancient chronographer behind the 1184/1183 BC Trojan date, while the 753 BC foundation-date is the usual Varronian basis for AUC reckoning. [en.wikipedia.org], [en.wikipedia.org] So in Livian-AUC form one may say, with due mythological solemnity: the fall of Troy belongs not to AUC at all but to ante urbem conditam, about 430 years before AUC 1. Livy’s own opening gives the narrative sequence rather than a strict modern synchronism: Troy falls; Aeneas wanders; Aeneas reaches Latium; Lavinium is founded; Ascanius/Iulus later founds Alba Longa; the Alban line eventually leads to Numitor, Rhea Silvia, Romulus, and Rome. Livy explicitly says that about thirty years elapsed between the founding of Lavinium and the planting of the colony at Alba Longa. [loebclassics.com], [perseus.tufts.edu] A compact timeline, using 753 BC as AUC 1 and the traditional Trojan date, would be as follows in prose rather than schoolmaster bullets, since bullets would be a barbarism here. The fall of Troy occurs about 1184/1183 BC, or about 431/430 years before AUC 1. This is the moment Abronius’s line retrospectively makes possible: Hector, the belli mora, has fallen, and with him the last human delay before the Trojan catastrophe that sets Roman genealogy in motion. Eratosthenes’ date of Troy’s fall became the conventional ancient chronological anchor. [en.wikipedia.org], [academia.edu] Aeneas then escapes from Troy with Anchises and Ascanius, in the familiar Roman version; Livy begins his history by treating Aeneas as one of those spared after Troy’s capture, and then sends him through wandering to the Laurentian territory in Latium. Livy’s account is careful, and pleasingly unmodern: he does not pretend certainty where antiquity gives him variants. [en.wikisource.org] Aeneas reaches Latium and is joined to Latinus’s house, either after battle and treaty or after direct conference, depending on the tradition Livy records. Lavinium follows as the first Trojan-Latin settlement. Here Rome is still only implicit: not a city, not even yet Alba Longa, but already a direction. Ascanius, whom the Julian house identifies under the name Iulus as the author of its name, later leaves Lavinium and founds Alba Longa. Livy says that about thirty years stood between the settlement of Lavinium and the foundation of Alba Longa. This is crucial for the Augustan point, because Livy explicitly preserves the uncertainty whether this Ascanius/Iulus was the son of Creusa from Troy or another Ascanius, while still recording the Julian claim. [loebclassics.com], [perseus.tufts.edu] Alba Longa then becomes the dynastic bridge. The Alban kings fill the large legendary interval between Aeneas and Romulus; the tradition makes this line the one from which Romulus and Remus eventually descend, and also the line with which the Julii claimed kinship. [en.wikipedia.org] Rome is founded in 753 BC, AUC 1, under the Varronian reckoning, by Romulus after the Alban genealogy has done its slow mythic work. The 753 BC date remains the ordinary basis for AUC calculation. [en.wikipedia.org] This makes your point about Augustus and Abronius quite strong. Abronius is writing in an Augustan atmosphere, and the Augustan settlement is saturated with Trojan and Julian genealogy. Augustus does not descend biologically from Aeneas in a naive direct sense; politically and gentilicially, he inherits the Julian claim through adoption by Julius Caesar. That makes Iulus/Ascanius indispensable. Without Iulus there is no gens Iulia as mythic argument; without the gens Iulia there is no Caesar as son of Venus in the public imagination; without Caesar’s adoption there is no Augustus as the heir who can convert genealogy into regime. So Hector as belli mora is not merely “the delay of the war.” In an Augustan ear, or at least in a Speranzian reconstruction of one, Hector is the last obstruction before the whole chain of Roman destiny can begin. His death does not produce Rome immediately; that would be crude and not even Roman enough. It releases the sequence by which Rome becomes possible. That is why mora is so powerful. It marks a suspended future. Troy must end before Rome can begin, and Hector is the heroic body by which that ending has been deferred. The Gricean analysis then becomes sharper. What Abronius says is: Hector has fallen, the delay of the war. What the trained Augustan hearer may recover is: the fall of Hector removes the last great obstruction to Troy’s fall, and therefore to Aeneas’s departure, Lavinium, Alba Longa, Iulus, the Julian claim, and Augustus’s divine-political genealogy. The line is economical because it does not say any of this. It lets the hearer supply it. That is implicature in a high Roman key: not conversational tea-table politeness, but dynastic inference under epic compression. Speranza might put it dryly thus. Blake’s line makes secrecy the condition of love; Donne’s line makes geographical impossibility intelligible through devotional strain; Abronius’s line makes the death of one Trojan the temporal condition for Rome. No rhyme is needed. Rhyme would almost vulgarise the mechanism. The force lies in apposition: Hector is not said to have caused delay, or to have fought bravely during delay, but to have been the delay. Belli mora is identity compressed into political chronology. That is why Augustus would have liked the line, or at least why the line belongs perfectly to an Augustan culture of reception. It turns epic loss into Roman precondition. It flatters Rome without mentioning Rome. It flatters the Julii without naming Iulus. It flatters Augustus without the indecency of direct praise. In Gricean terms, it is admirably mannered because it leaves the compliment to be inferred. And compliments, like empires, are often stronger when not made too explicit. While it is said that two fragments survive, it's actually an elongated one -- supply a Grice/Speranza analysis of the pre-face to the Ettore line -- as per mentioning then Rome's enemies -- the GREEKS! Ottavio must have loved this! Thanks -- Passage: To clarify, the surviving work of Abronius Silo is actually preserved as one single, continuous two-line fragment. Rather than a completely separate piece, the "other" part is the preceding line that builds up to the phrase about Hector. [1, 2] The full, complete text preserved by Seneca the Elder in Suasoriae (2.19) is as follows: [1, 2, 3] Latin: "Ite agite, Danai, magnum paeana canentes, ite triumphantes: belli mora concidit Hector." English Translation: "Come now, Greeks, singing a great paean, go in triumph: Hector, the delay of the war, has fallen." [1, 2, 3] Literary Nuance In his commentary, Seneca the Elder uses this exact fragment to show how Roman authors borrowed from one another. He notes that while Silo adapted his teacher's prose into this poetry, Virgil later took Silo's famous phrase ("belli mora") and improved upon it in the Aeneid (11.288-290) to describe both Hector and Aeneas holding back the Greeks. [1] If you are researching ancient literary history, I can provide the exact lines from Virgil's Aeneid that adapted Silo's phrase, or explain how Seneca viewed plagiarism differently than we do today. Which direction would you like to explore? Yes. The preceding line helps a great deal, because it prevents the Hector phrase from being isolated as a merely epigrammatic fragment. The whole surviving piece is performative before it is descriptive: Ite agite, Danai, magnum paeana canentes, ite triumphantes: belli mora concidit Hector. It is not simply “Hector has fallen.” It is “go on then, Greeks, sing your great paean, go in triumph: the delay of the war has fallen.” The line therefore begins by staging Greek victory as Greek noise. That matters for Speranza’s Augustan reading. Abronius does not begin with Hector; he begins with the Danai. He gives the Greeks their triumphal imperative, almost too generously: go, sing, triumph. But this generosity is dangerous, because the Roman hearer knows more than the Greeks inside the line are allowed to know. The Danai think they are celebrating Troy’s ruin; the Augustan hearer can hear that they are unwittingly preparing Rome’s origin. Their paean is, from their point of view, Greek victory-music; from the later Roman point of view, it is the overture to Aeneas, Ascanius-Iulus, Alba Longa, the gens Iulia, Caesar, and Augustus. The Greeks sing because Troy is about to fall. Rome listens because Rome is about to become possible. This is why the preface is rhetorically essential. Without Ite agite, Danai, magnum paeana canentes, ite triumphantes, the phrase belli mora concidit Hector is a compressed epic judgment. With the preface, it becomes dramatic irony. The Greeks are addressed in the moment of apparent success, but the line is preserved in Roman rhetorical memory, and therefore the triumph belongs to the wrong people in the long run. The Danai are permitted to celebrate only because they do not understand the future they have released. In a Gricean idiom, what is said is a Greek victory-call; what is implicated, for a Roman and especially Augustan audience, is that Greek victory is only the accidental instrument of Roman destiny. The repeated ite is also useful. It is a command, but also a release. “Go, go on.” Let the Greeks go forward into triumph, because the Roman plot requires them to do so. The line thus carries two temporalities. In the immediate epic scene, Hector’s fall opens the way to Troy’s destruction. In the retrospective Augustan scene, Troy’s destruction opens the way to Rome. The Greeks think they have shortened the war; the Roman reader understands that they have lengthened history into Roman history. The fall of Hector ends one delay and begins another, longer, more providential sequence. The word Danai is also not innocent. It is the epic Greek enemy-name, and in Roman reception it can easily carry the whole old hostility of Greek force, cunning, and anti-Trojan victory. Abronius does not say Graeci in a neutral ethnographic way. Danai belongs to the Trojan-war register. The vocative summons the enemy as enemy, but the Roman poet can afford to let them sing, because their triumph has been subordinated to a Roman teleology. This is the neat cruelty of the line. The Greeks may have the paean; the Romans will have the future. The paean itself sharpens the irony. A paean is a song of victory, thanksgiving, or deliverance, and here it is assigned to the Greeks at Hector’s fall. But in Roman-Augustan retrospect the greater deliverance is not Greek deliverance from Trojan resistance, but Trojan deliverance into exile, genealogy, and empire. The song is misdirected by its singers. They celebrate the disappearance of the belli mora, but they do not know that the removal of that obstacle sets in motion the very line of descent that will allow Rome, and then Augustus, to claim Trojan and divine ancestry. The paean is therefore an unwitting hymn to Rome. That is why Augustus would indeed have liked it, or why an Augustan culture could hardly fail to find it usable. It praises him without naming him. It flatters the Julian myth without laboring the point. It lets the Greeks do the singing, Hector do the dying, Aeneas do the escaping, Iulus do the genealogical founding, and Augustus receive the remote benefit. Very proper. Direct flattery is often aesthetically embarrassing; this line has the decency to let history perform the compliment. In the Grice/Speranza analysis, then, the fragment is not two separate bits but one rhetorical machine. The first movement supplies imperative, enemy, song, and triumph: Ite agite, Danai, magnum paeana canentes, ite triumphantes. The second supplies the ground: belli mora concidit Hector. The explicit relation is simple: Greeks, celebrate, because Hector has fallen. The implicated Augustan relation is deeper: Greeks, celebrate if you must, because your victory is the necessary error by which Rome’s destiny begins. The line’s force depends on a hearer capable of recovering that double perspective. This also improves the comparison with Blake and Donne. Blake’s line depends on lyric secrecy; Donne’s on metaphysical stretch and the intelligibility of what a literalist might find impossible. Abronius gives a third case: historical-dynastic irony. No rhyme is required. The structure is not sonic but pragmatic. The line means by address, timing, and retrospective audience-knowledge. It is a public, Roman, anti-lyrical implicature: the enemy’s triumph is made to carry the victor’s unintended future. Speranza might put it dryly enough: Abronius lets the Danai sing; Grice asks what they have thereby been made to mean. The answer is that they mean more than they know. They mean, in their own mouths, Greek triumph; in Roman memory, Trojan transmission; in Augustan ideology, Julian destiny. The Greeks do not cancel Hector merely as the delay of the war. They cancel the delay before Rome. And that, for Ottavio, is not a small matter.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La conversazione – i verbali: Abronio – Ossia: Grice ed Abronio -- A. Silo, son of the poet A. Silo, is likewise a poet, but Seneca reports that he writes for pantomimes, which are considered a form of low culture. Turning now to Abronio Jr Grice/Speranza's point is that Seneca Sr may criticise those because as a provincial as Seneca was, those pantomimes were not meant for him -- the intended addressee in Grice/Speranza --: they were 'elite' court entertainment that only a member of the elite can capture in its (each pantomime) full 'meaning' -- provide a Grice/Speranza background and analysis and why Abronio Jr. would have 'changed styles' -- from poetry to performance in full -- from his father? Thanks. Passage: Unfortunately, no specific titles or plot descriptions survive for the pantomime scripts (fabulae salticae) written by Abronius Silo's son. [1, 2] When Seneca the Elder levels his criticism in Suasoriae (2.19), he completely omits any details about the son's actual repertoire. Instead, his focus remains entirely on the generational and cultural disgrace of the act itself, famously writing that the younger Silo: [1, 2] "...qui pantomimis fabulas scripsit et ingenium grande non tantum deseruit sed polluit." "...who composed libretti for pantomime dancers, and not only abandoned his great talent but polluted it." [1] Why Seneca the Elder Censored the Details The "Anti-Theatrical" Aristocratic Bias: To an elite, old-school Roman conservative and provincial traditionalist like Seneca the Elder, pantomime was viewed as an effeminate, highly vulgar mass spectacle. Listing the specific titles of the younger Silo's scripts would be giving them a literary dignity they did not deserve in his eyes. [1, 2] The Nature of Pantomime Scripts: Ancient pantomime (fabula saltica) relied on a single, silent, masked male dancer who interpreted a story through highly expressive, rhythmic movements. The "script" written by poets like Silo Jr. was merely a vocal libretto sung by a backing chorus to narrate the action. Because the performance text was completely subordinate to the physical, visual spectacle of the dancer, these libretti were rarely preserved as serious reading material. [1, 2] What Those Pantomimes Likely Looked Like While we do not have Silo Jr.'s specific catalog, we know from contemporary sources (like Lucian's De Saltatione) exactly what kind of content court-elite pantomimes required during the Augustan and Julio-Claudian eras: Thematic Content: They were almost exclusively highly dramatic, emotionally intense adaptations of Greek mythology. Popular subjects included the tragic, scandalous, and passionate tales of Phaedra, Medea, Turnus, or the madness of Hercules. [1, 2] The Court Paradox: Seneca’s generation despised it because it "polluted" pure Latin poetry, yet it was the absolute height of high-society entertainment. Great emperors like Augustus and Nero passionately patronized these dancers, and elite Roman court circles frequently hired top-tier poets to ghostwrite the libretti for massive payouts. [1, 2, 3] If you want to look closer at this era, we can explore how Ovid similarly wrote pantomime libretti, or look at how Seneca the Elder's own son (Seneca the Younger) later integrated these same vivid pantomime aesthetics into his written tragedies. Which aspect of Roman performance culture interests you next? With Abronius the Younger, Speranza has one of those cases in which the absence of surviving material is not an embarrassment but almost the point of the exercise. Seneca the Elder gives us not the pantomimes, not their titles, not their plots, not even a sufficiently offensive specimen of their diction. He gives us a judgment: the younger Silo wrote fabulae for pantomimes and thereby not merely abandoned but polluted a great talent. That is all, and it is a very Senecan all. The censorious sentence does more social work than description would have done. It tells us what Seneca wishes to count as degradation, and therefore what kind of performance he does not wish to dignify by detailed memory. The Grice/Speranza point is that Seneca is not necessarily reporting a failure of meaning in the pantomimes. He may be reporting his own refusal, or incapacity, to be their intended addressee. This is where the distinction between actual hearer and intended addressee becomes decisive. A provincial, rhetorically trained, morally severe Seneca can see pantomime as corruption because he receives it under the wrong key: as debased poetry, theatrical vulgarity, effeminate spectacle, or wasted ingenium. But the courtly and elite spectator receives something else: a total performance in which music, gesture, costume, mythic allusion, dancerly convention, and social occasion combine into a meaning not reducible to the libretto. Seneca reads downward; the court reads across. That is already Gricean. Meaning is not merely what the text says; it is what an utterer or performer intends an appropriately placed audience to recognise. In pantomime the “utterance” is not a sentence alone, nor even a sung libretto alone, but a coordinated performance-event. The dancer is silent, the chorus supplies verbal narration, the body supplies selection, emphasis, sequencing, affect, and allusion. The spectator who knows the myth, the court code, the dancer’s repertoire, the conventions of gesture, and the political tact of performance can recover far more than the words explicitly deliver. That is why pantomime is not the abandonment of meaning but one of its most elaborate economies. It is implicature with ankles. Seneca’s complaint that the son polluted his talent therefore becomes philosophically useful. It is not merely a moral judgment on a genre; it is a testimony to a change in communicative medium. The father’s world is rhetorical-poetic: sententia, school, quotation, Latro, the memorable line. The son’s world is performative: myth staged through gesture, bodily timing, vocal accompaniment, elite recognisability, and courtly uptake. In the father, the line survives because it can be repeated. In the son, the meaning disappears because it required performance to exist at all. Seneca can preserve the stigma more easily than the art, because the art was not designed to survive as extractable verbal matter. This also helps explain why Abronius the Younger would have “changed styles.” It need not be read simply as decline from poetry to entertainment. It may be read as a move from poetry as recitable verbal artifact to poetry as embodied occasion. In an Augustan and Julio-Claudian court culture, pantomime offered something ordinary page-poetry could not: spectacular condensation, mythic recognisability, emotional immediacy, and social exclusiveness. A line like the elder Silo’s belli mora concidit Hector asks the hearer to recover a great historical-epic implication from verbal compression. A pantomime asks the spectator to recover the same kind of excess meaning from the convergence of body, music, myth, and convention. The son has not necessarily abandoned implicature; he has transferred it from the line to the scene. Speranza can therefore make the generational contrast sharper. Abronius Senior gives Grice a Roman alternative to Blake and Donne: no rhyme, no lyric inwardness, but sententia, apposition, and historical-dynastic uptake. Abronius Junior gives him something still more radical: meaning where saying has been subordinated to showing. The father’s poetry remains close to rhetoric; the son’s pantomime belongs to semiotic theatre. The father makes Hector be the delay of war; the son would make a dancer’s body become, for those who know how to see, Phaedra, Medea, Hercules, Turnus, or some other mythic crisis. The inference is no longer carried mainly by grammar. It is carried by choreographed recognisability. That is why the “elite” element matters. Pantomime may have been popular spectacle, but its fullest meaning could be courtly and coded. An untrained spectator might enjoy movement, music, beauty, scandal, and emotional excess. The intended courtly addressee could catch the mythic compression, the topical resonance, the political allusion, the knowing variation on a known role, perhaps even the dangerous compliment or warning left safely unsaid. Seneca, if he refuses that code or dislikes the social world that sustains it, will call the result pollution. Speranza need not call Seneca wrong; he need only say that Seneca’s description is pragmatically incomplete. He reports the uptake of an offended outsider, not necessarily the intended uptake of the performance. In Gricean terms, then, the younger Silo’s pantomime is a case where the vehicle of meaning becomes composite. The relevant “utterer” is not simply the poet, nor the dancer, nor the chorus, but the performance-system. The intended meaning is recoverable only by an addressee who possesses the right background assumptions: mythological competence, social placement, knowledge of courtly convention, and sensitivity to embodied signs. If that background is absent, the performance may seem like noise, luxury, or moral decay. If it is present, it may function as high art, political indirection, and elite conversation conducted through bodies. The charge of pollution is therefore almost comic in Speranza’s dry sense. Seneca thinks the son has polluted ingenium by writing for pantomimes. Grice asks whether the supposed pollution is not simply the migration of ingenium into a medium Seneca declines to understand. The younger Silo does not cease to be poetic; he ceases to be conveniently quotable. That is unforgivable to a rhetorician and fatal to the archive, but not necessarily fatal to meaning. Indeed, it may be the very point of the art: what mattered most existed only in performance and only for those who could take it up. So the background analysis might close like this. Abronius Senior shows how a line can mean more than it says by placing Hector at the hinge between Greek triumph and Roman futurity. Abronius Junior shows how a performance can mean more than it sings by making the body, under courtly convention, carry the unspoken surplus. Seneca preserves the father’s phrase and condemns the son’s medium. Speranza, more generous and more Gricean, preserves the contrast: in one generation, sententia; in the next, spectacle. The change of style is not merely decadence. It is a shift from verbal compression to embodied implicature, and if Seneca did not like it, that may tell us less about pantomime’s poverty than about the limits of Seneca’s intended audience membership. And on the base of the pantomimes that DO survive, can you provide a Grice/Speranza-style reconstructed dyad. Pantomime works better than William Blake or John Donne or Abronio Sr. for the matter of implicature: it's slapstick -- and it is interesting that Grice is NOT interested in the Donne line, but in Austin using Nowell-Smith as 'straight man' to a double act: "Can we think of an example of unintelligible English?" "Sure," said Nowell-Smith,"Donne's four-corner of the earth." "Perfectly intelligible to me -- next." "Next?" "Yes, here is the gloss: from what LESS educated people than me call the four corners of the earth." The Play Group at its best -- So provide a dyad in a reconstructed pantomime by Abronio jr with reaction by Ottavio (emperor) and wife discussing the intended implicature. Keep reconstruction in LATIN -- even OTTAVIO and wife dialogue -- with translations and implicatures. Thanks Speranza would make the reconstruction avowedly theatrical, since nothing by Abronius the Younger survives to protect us from imagination, or from Seneca. The point is not to forge a lost fabula saltica, but to reconstruct the kind of courtly dyad in which pantomime out-Grices the poets. Blake says too much by saying little; Donne lets Austin make Nowell-Smith the unwilling straight man; Abronius Senior compresses Troy into a sententia. But Abronius Junior, if he wrote for pantomime, belongs to the art in which the most important utterance is performed by someone who says nothing. That is not a defect. It is the genre. Reconstructed pantomime: Aeneas et umbra Hectoris, by Abronius Silo filius, as it might have been seen by Ottavio and Livia. Libellus chori, in scaena: Chorus: “Nocte alta Troiae ruina tacet; sed cinis ipse monet.” Translation: “In the deep night the ruin of Troy is silent; but the ash itself warns.” Gesture: The dancer, masked as Aeneas, sleeps beside a small image of the Penates. A second masked figure, Hector’s shade, does not speak. He points first to the burning city, then to the sleeping child Iulus, then to the sea. Aeneas reaches for a sword; Hector restrains the hand and turns it toward Anchises. Implicature: “Do not fight the old war. Carry the future.” This is not said by the chorus. It is meant by the sequence of gestures. The intended addressee recognises that heroism is being redefined from combat to transmission. Chorus: “Non hic mora belli: hic mora Romae fuit.” Translation: “Here was not the delay of war; here was the delay of Rome.” Gesture: Hector’s shade touches his own breast, then lets the hand fall, repeating Abronius Senior’s belli mora in bodily form. He then raises Aeneas by the arm and places Iulus between Aeneas and the exit toward the ships. Implicature: Hector’s death ended the delay before Troy’s fall; Aeneas’s refusal to die in Troy prevents the delay of Rome. The son’s pantomime has converted the father’s line into movement. The meaning is dynastic, not merely epic. Chorus: “Graii canant; Troes ferant.” Translation: “Let the Greeks sing; let the Trojans carry.” Gesture: Offstage, a faint Greek victory-song is heard. The dancer playing Aeneas does not answer it. He lifts Anchises, takes Iulus by the hand, and carries the Penates. Hector’s shade stands behind them, no longer blocking the Greeks but directing the Trojans outward. Implicature: Greek triumph is noise; Trojan defeat is transmission. The Greek paean is allowed its sound, but the Roman future is carried in silence. The intended courtly addressee hears the compliment to Augustus without the indecency of naming Augustus. Interlocutio post spectaculum, Latine: Ottavius: “Graeci cantaverunt; nos intelleximus.” Translation: “The Greeks sang; we understood.” Implicature: The apparent audience within the performance is Greek, but the real audience is Roman. The spectacle allows the defeated Trojans, not the victorious Greeks, to possess the higher meaning. Livia: “Nonne nimis aperte ad Iulium spectat?” Translation: “Does it not look too openly toward Iulus?” Implicature: Livia registers the danger of over-explicit dynastic flattery. The compliment works only if it remains recoverable rather than announced. Ottavius: “Aperte? puer manum tantum praebuit.” Translation: “Openly? The boy merely gave his hand.” Implicature: Augustus enjoys the Gricean defence. Nothing politically compromising was stated. The gesture was enough for those trained to see it. If the vulgar miss it, so much the better. Livia: “Et Anchises?” Translation: “And Anchises?” Ottavius: “Pietas ambulavit.” Translation: “Pietas walked.” Implicature: Aeneas is not merely escaping; he is performing pietas as visible action. The abstract Roman virtue becomes legible through movement. The pantomime has turned moral predicate into body. Livia: “Seneca hoc pollutum diceret.” Translation: “Seneca would call this polluted.” Ottavius: “Seneca verba amat. Hic silentium fecit officium.” Translation: “Seneca loves words. Here silence performed its duty.” Implicature: This is the Speranzian reversal. Seneca condemns the son for leaving verbal poetry for pantomime, but the emperor recognises that the medium permits a higher economy. Silence can be more dutiful, and more courtly, than speech. Livia: “Ergo ille saltator dixit quod poeta tacuisset?” Translation: “So the dancer said what the poet would have kept silent?” Ottavius: “Immo tacuit quod poeta nimis dixisset.” Translation: “Rather, he kept silent what a poet would have said too much.” Implicature: Pantomime is superior here because it controls explicitness. The dancer does not make the Augustan claim; he arranges it for recognition. This is implicature in its most elegant form: meant, recoverable, deniable. Grice/Speranza analysis: The dyad is not primarily Aeneas and Hector, nor even Augustus and Livia. It is performer and intended addressee. The silent dancer means; the courtly spectator recognises that he is meant to recognise; and the recognition itself is part of the pleasure. Seneca, as offended provincial moralist, sees pollution because he mistakes the libretto for the work. The court sees the performance-system. In Gricean terms, the utterer is composite: poet, chorus, dancer, mask, myth, court, and occasion. The addressee is not merely anyone present, but the elite spectator equipped with the right mythic, genealogical, and political competence. This is why pantomime is better for implicature than Blake, Donne, or Abronius Senior. Blake still gives Grice a line. Donne gives Austin a line and Nowell-Smith as the straight man. Abronius Senior gives a sententia. Abronius Junior gives a whole performed situation in which the “straight man” may be the uneducated spectator, the Senecan moralist, or the Greek within the fiction who thinks victory is victory. The courtly addressee sees that the apparent meaning is only the set-up. The real meaning is the uptake. The joke is almost Austinian. “Can we have an example of unintelligible English?” “Donne’s four corners.” “Perfectly intelligible to me.” In the reconstructed pantomime: “Can we have an example of silent meaning?” “The dancer said nothing.” “Perfectly intelligible to me,” says Ottavio; “next.” The gloss is: from what less Augustan people than myself call Troy’s defeat. That is the Play Group at its most Roman. Pantomime supplies the double act without needing dialogue. The body plays both assertion and cancellation. The Greeks sing triumph; the Romans infer destiny. The dancer points to Iulus; Augustus says, with perfect deniability, that the boy merely gave his hand. The implicated content is exactly what must not be asserted too plainly: the Julian line is not propaganda but fate; Augustus is not praised but made retrospectively inevitable. Thus Abronius Junior’s change of style from poetry to pantomime is not a fall from words into vulgar spectacle. It is a migration from verbal compression to embodied implicature. The father could write belli mora concidit Hector. The son could make that line walk, point, hesitate, refuse battle, lift Anchises, lead Iulus, and leave the Greeks singing to themselves. Seneca calls that pollution. Speranza, with better humour and better pragmatics, calls it the moment at which meaning learned to dance.Abronia Quinta, named in a first-century inscription from Dume in Hispania, along with A. Reburro. In both instances, the nomen is uncertain. A. Reburrus, named in an inscription from Dume, along with Abronia Quinta. In both instances, the nomen is uncertain. Gaius A. Car., a name of uncertain reading that occurs in two inscriptions from Vitudurum in Germania Superior, dating from around the reign of Claudio. See also List of Roman gentes. References: Seneca the Elder, Suasoriae, ed. Bipontina. Smith, William. A. Silo". Dictionary of Roman Biography. AE. Bibliography Anneo, Suasoriae (Rhetorical Exercises). Dictionary of Roman Biography, William Smith. René Cagnat et alii, L'Année épigraphique, Presses Universitaires de France. Category: Roman gentes

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La conversazione – i verbali: Abudio – Ossia: Grice ed Abudio -- Grex griceiana – verbalia: Abudio. The Abudii is a family at ancient Rome. This gens flourishes during imperial times. A. Ruso, aedile under Tiberio, is mentioned. Other A. are known from inscriptions.  The chief praenomina of the A. are Marco, Publio, and Tito, each of which is very common throughout Roman history. Epigraphy also supplies examples of Gneo, Lucio, and Quinto. This list includes abbreviated praenomina. A. Ruso, an aedile, commands a legion under Gnaeus CORNELIO Lentulus Gaetulicus in Germania Superior. A. is one of the delatores who accuses CORNELIO, but when the accusation fails, A. is instead condemned and exiled from Rome. A.'s motivation for denouncing CORNELIO may have been blackmail. The nature of his accusation is also unclear, but it might have been based on the betrothal of CORNELIO’s daughter to the son of Sejano. Grice and Speranza have this for Abudio, and their focus is on 'blackmail' -- how is that different from 'bribe' and what would the Latin for it. And what Cornelio is this -- and what A. U. C. ab urbe condita date in numerals? Can we reconstruct the 'blackmail' in terms of crucial dialogue in Latin -- do we need at least four conversational moves? with implicatures -- it cost him an exile from Rome -- Thanks. Passage as per below. Grice reports that Austin didn't have time to excuse his non-acceptance of bribes, unlike Nowell-Smith ("I don't accept bribes on principle" -- "What's wrong with 'No, thanks'?" -- Thanks. Passage: Blackmail and bribe are almost mirror-images, and the difference matters for Grice. A bribe is a proposed benefit offered to induce an action: do this, and I shall give you something. Blackmail is a threatened harm used to induce an action: do this, or I shall reveal, accuse, denounce, or otherwise damage you. The bribe tempts; the blackmail coerces. The bribe says, in effect, “you may profit by complying.” The blackmail says, “you will suffer if you do not.” Austin’s “I do not accept bribes on principle,” as against the more natural “No, thanks,” is funny because it gives excessive moral explicitness where a refusal would have done. Blackmail is different: “No, thanks” is not normally available, because the offer is not an offer but a trap. The Latin is not perfectly neat, since “blackmail” is a modern legal-moral category. For bribe, the obvious Latin is pretium, donum, munus, or more technically pecunia data or corruptela, depending on emphasis. Ambitus covers electoral bribery; largitio covers lavish distribution; munus can be ominously ambiguous, since a “gift” is often a little too helpful. For blackmail, one wants not a single classical label so much as a phrase: minis extorquere, to extort by threats; pecuniam minis exigere, to exact money by threats; metu cogere, to compel by fear; or, in the delator-world, accusatione imminente cogere, to coerce by an impending accusation. If one wants the driest Speranzian Latin, calumnia minax or accusatio venalis would do as a reconstruction, but the safer analytic phrase is minis extorquere. The Cornelius is Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus, usually called Lentulus Gaetulicus, consul in AD 26 and later commander in Upper Germany. He is the Cornelius whom Abudius Ruso denounced. The episode belongs to Tacitus, Annales 6.30, under Tiberius, in AD 34. In ab urbe condita numerals, using the usual formula AUC = AD + 753 for AD dates, AD 34 is DCCLXXXVII A. U. C. If one uses the conventional Varronian reckoning with Rome founded in 753 BC, the exile of Abudius Ruso falls in DCCLXXXVII ab urbe condita. The four-move dialogue is almost required, because blackmail is not one utterance but a sequence: hint, refusal or evasion, escalation, public accusation. A two-move exchange would be too innocent. Blackmail needs time enough for the coercive implicature to become recognisable while still remaining deniable. Reconstructed dialogue, Latin first, then translation and implicature: Abudius Ruso: “Nuptiae filiae tuae non omnibus silentium ferent.” Translation: “Your daughter’s betrothal will not bring silence to everyone.” Implicature: I know of the connection with Sejanus’s house, and I can make it dangerous. Ruso does not yet accuse. He merely makes silence a purchasable commodity. Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus: “Quod publicum est, publice audiatur; quod domesticum, domi maneat.” Translation: “What is public may be heard publicly; what is domestic should remain at home.” Implicature: I refuse to acknowledge the threat as a threat. Gaetulicus draws the line between public charge and private family matter, trying to prevent Ruso from controlling the frame. Abudius Ruso: “Roma nihil domesticum putat quod ad Seianum pertinet.” Translation: “Rome thinks nothing domestic when it touches Sejanus.” Implicature: I can convert family alliance into political suspicion. The name Sejanus turns the private into treason-adjacent material. This is the coercive escalation. Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus: “Ergo non pretium quaeris, sed causam.” Translation: “Then you are not seeking a price, but a case.” Implicature: I see the blackmail and name it indirectly. A price would make it bribery or hush-money; a case makes it delation. Gaetulicus refuses to pay and pushes Ruso toward the open accusation that will destroy him if it fails. Abudius Ruso: “Causam invenit qui periculum monet.” Translation: “He finds a case who gives warning of danger.” Implicature: I present threat as civic warning. This is the delator’s favourite camouflage: private pressure described as public vigilance. Cornelius Lentulus Gaetulicus: “Mone igitur principem; ego senatum audiam.” Translation: “Warn the prince, then; I shall hear the senate.” Implicature: The game is over. If Ruso wants accusation, he must leave the shadow-zone of blackmail and enter the public machinery of proof, reputation, and punishment. Grice/Speranza analysis: The bribe normally has the conversational form “if you accept, I benefit you.” Its implicature is corrupt but still transactionally soft: the addressee is invited to treat vice as opportunity. The blackmail has the form “if you refuse, I damage you.” Its implicature is coercive: the addressee is invited to treat compliance as the price of avoiding injury. Thus “I do not accept bribes on principle” is comically over-explicit because a bribe may be refused as an unwanted benefit. But to say “I do not accept blackmail on principle” is less comic than heroic or foolish, because blackmail is not waiting for acceptance in the same way. It is already an attack. In the Abudius case, the blackmail would not consist simply in money demanded, if money was demanded at all. It would consist in the threatened conversion of a socially compromising fact into a charge. The daughter’s betrothal to a son of Sejanus is the material. The delator’s art is to decide what the material is to mean. Under one description it is a family arrangement; under another it is political contamination; under a third it is evidence of dangerous intimacy with a disgraced house. Blackmail lies in keeping those descriptions suspended until the victim pays, submits, or yields. This is why Abudius is a good Gricean case. The crucial work is not in what is explicitly said but in what is made recoverable. “Your daughter’s betrothal will not bring silence to everyone” does not say “pay me” or “I shall accuse you.” It implicates both while preserving deniability. The threat is conversationally efficient because it lets the hearer do the incriminating completion. The blackmailer need not state the full conditional; he merely arranges the context in which the victim recognises it. Gaetulicus’s counter-move is equally Gricean. He refuses to complete the implicature in the preferred way. Instead of answering as a frightened private man, he answers as a public Roman: if there is a charge, make it a charge. That move destroys the blackmail structure. Blackmail thrives between private knowledge and public accusation; Gaetulicus forces it into the open, where Ruso must either prove or perish. Since the accusation fails, Ruso is condemned and exiled from Rome. Speranza’s dry moral would be that Abudius Ruso mistook a conversational implicature for an institution. He thought he could make “Sejanus” do all the work: say little, let fear supply the rest, and collect the result. But Roman politics, unlike an Oxford common-room joke about bribes, had a harsher cancellation procedure. Once the threatened implicature was pushed into accusation and the accusation failed, the delator became the defendant in effect, and the price of failed blackmail was exile.A., named in a first-century inscription from Virunum in Noricum. Lucius A. L. f., named in an inscription from Vasio in Gallia Narbonensis. Gnaeus A. Fortunatus, buried at Rome, in a family sepulchre dedicated by his wife, Octavia Faustilla. Marcus A. Luminaris, dedicated a tomb at Rome for his client and wife, Abudia Megiste, and their son, Marcus A. Saturninus. Abudia Maxima, dedicated a tomb for her son at Iader in Dalmatia. Abudia M. l. Megiste, a freedwoman, and the client and wife of Marcus A. Luminaris, perhaps her former master, who dedicated a tomb at Rome for Abudia and their son, Marcus A. Saturninus. Abudia Murinilla, dedicated a tomb at Carnuntum in Pannonia Superior for her husband, Crescens Licinianus, probably a tribune in the eighteenth cohort of volunteers from Mauretania. Abudia Phlegusa, dedicated a tomb at Nemausus in Gallia Narbonensis to her freedman, Gellius. Abudia Prima, buried at Rome, in a tomb dedicated by her husband, Epaphroditus. Abudia Prima, buried in a family sepulchre at Aquileia in Venetia and Histria, built by Titus Albius Rufus, a soldier in the Legio VIII Augusta, either her son or son-in-law, and dating to the late first century. Titus A. T. f. Priscus, a native of Aquileia, was a veteran of the Legio VII Claudia, and was buried at Scupi in Moesia Superior in a tomb dedicated by his wife, Felicula.[12] A. Priscus Cassidarius Demetrius, along with Cerlerinus Statienus Clementianus, one of the agents of the municipal decurions at Gabii in AD 220.[13] Abudia Q. f. Publia, buried in a third-century tomb at Pola in Venetia and Histria, dedicated by her parents, Quintus Postumius and Albudia Publia, and brother, Publius.[14] Marcus Abudius Seleucus, dedicated tombs at Rome for his brother, Gaius Attius Venustus, and sister, the freedwoman Attia Primigenia.[15] Abudia Satura, a woman buried at Ammaedara in Africa Proconsularis, aged eighty.[16] Marcus Abudius M. f. Saturninus, a boy buried at Rome, aged eight, along with his mother, Abudia Megiste, in a tomb dedicated by his father, Marcus Abudius Luminaris.[6] Quintus Abudius Theodotus, the freedman of Fronto, made an offering to the goddesses of Vasio.[17] Abudius Verus, dedicated a first-century monument at Parentium in Venetia and Histria in memory of his mother, Junia Varilla, and siblings, Publius Junius Severianus, Galeonia Larga, and Publius Junius Novatus, in accordance with his mother's will.[18] Publius Abudius Verus, made a first- or second-century offering at Parentium in memory of his son, also named Publius Abudius Verus.[19] Publius Abudius P. f. Verus, the son of Publius Abudius Verus, who made a first- or second-century offering in memory of his son at Parentium .[19] Titus Abudius Verus, an eques serving with the army at Ravenna during the first century, made an offering to Neptune.[20] Marcus Abudius Vitalis, dedicated a third-century family sepulchre at Aquileia for his wife and their household.[21] See also List of Roman gentes References  Tacitus, Annales, vi. 30.  Rutledge, Imperial Inquisitions, p. 185.  Gerstl, Supplementum Epigraphicum, 245.  CIL XII, 1388.  AE 2001, 272.  CIL VI, 9683.  CIL III, 2938.  AE 5, 240.  Espérandieu, Inscriptions Latines de Gaule, 438.  AE 2001, 273.  Brusin, Inscriptiones Aquileiae, ii. 2752.  AE 1975, 737.  CIL XIV, 2809.  CIL V, 216.  CIL VI, 12752, CIL VI, 12753.  Wilmanns, Inscriptiones Africae Latinae, 166,23.  CIL XII, 1303.  Opuscula Archaeologica, 2007-265.  CIL V, 329.  CIL V, 328.  CIL V, 8322. Bibliography Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Annales. Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Gustav Wilmanns, Inscriptiones Africae Latinae (Latin Inscriptions from Africa), Georg Reimer, Berlin (1881). René Cagnat et alii, L'Année épigraphique (The Year in Epigraphy, abbreviated AE), Presses Universitaires de France (1888–present). Emile Espérandieu, Inscriptions Latines de Gaule: Narbonnaise, Paris (1929). Swedish Institute in Rome, Opuscula Archaeologica (1935–present). Anna Gerstl, Supplementum Epigraphicum zu CIL III für Kärnten und Osttirol, 1902-1961 (Epigraphic Supplement to CIL III for Carinthia and East Tyrol), Vienna (1961). Giovanni Battista Brusin, Inscriptiones Aquileiae (Inscriptions of Aquileia), Udine (1991–1993). Steven H. Rutledge, Imperial Inquisitions: Prosecutors and Informants from Tiberius to Domitian, Routledge. Category: Roman gentes.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La conversazione – i verbali: Aburio – Ossia: Grice ed Aburio -- Grex griceiana: Aburio. The Aburii is a family at ancient Rome during the latter centuries of the Republic, and the first century of the Empire. The first member of this gens to achieve prominence was Marco A., praetor peregrinus. The A. are known to have used the praenomina Marco, Gaio, and Decimo. The first of the A. to appear in history bore no cognomen. The abbreviation Gem., probably for Geminus, a twin, appears on coins. In the first century, the surname Basso is found. Coins of the A. do not depict members of the family, but do portray the popular motif of Ercole wearing a lion's mask.  Marcus A., as tribune of the plebs, opposes Marcus FULVIO Nobilior's request for a triumph, but is persuaded to withdraw his objection by his colleague, Tiberius Sempronio Gracco. He was praetor peregrinus. Grice and Speranza find that while the principle of conversational helpfulness works best (and indeed only then) amongst peers, few cases exist in Ancient Rome, where conversationalists WERE NOT equal. But in this tryad, we may have such as case. Aburio says no (second conversational move) to FULVIO's request for a triumph. And he is persuaded to witdraw the objection by Gracco. Aburio then utters 'yes' -- provide sequence in Latin, with implicatures (the implicarures in English only). Speranza would think that FULVIO, being a more prestigious clan, would meet no objection -- never mind an Aburio. Aburio REFUSES the triumph as 'Hellenistic' -- 'The triumph is in the battle field -- we don't need theatre at the tax-payer's expense and to distract the attention from things that matter to things that do not (wat WAS your battle? are you donating some spoils to the city?). Gracco intervenes with counterargument -- SEMPRONIO was plebeian enough but his mother was CORNELIA, and he could understand the otioseness of such a thing as a 'triumph' -- and what would they have to lose anyway? Etc -- Thanks -- Passage: Yes. Aburius gives Speranza a better Roman case than many of the more flamboyant examples, precisely because the conversationalists are not obvious equals and yet the exchange is close enough to a peer-triad to make Gricean pressure visible. Fulvius Nobilior has the prestige, the name, and the victory-claim; Aburius has the tribunate and therefore the procedural right to say no; Gracchus supplies the mediating intelligence by which refusal is converted into withdrawal without making Aburius look merely defeated. That is not pure equality, but it is closer to conversation than command. A reconstructed sequence in Latin might run as follows. Fulvius Nobilior: “Patres conscripti, victor exercitum reduxi; triumphum peto, non mihi tantum, sed rei publicae.” Translation: “Conscript fathers, I have brought back the army victorious; I ask a triumph, not for myself only, but for the republic.” Implicature: My personal honour is being presented as public honour. To deny the triumph is to seem not merely anti-Fulvian but insufficiently grateful to victory itself. Marcus Aburius: “Nego. Victoria in campo spectatur, non in theatro populi sumptu parato.” Translation: “I say no. Victory is to be seen on the field, not in a theatre prepared at the people’s expense.” Implicature: The requested triumph is being redescribed as spectacle, not civic necessity. Aburius refuses Fulvius not by denying that a battle occurred, but by denying that the battle requires theatrical expenditure and public distraction. Fulvius Nobilior: “Ergo miles sine honore, spolia sine luce, imperator sine testimonio redibit?” Translation: “Then shall the soldier return without honour, the spoils without display, the commander without public witness?” Implicature: Fulvius shifts from personal vanity to collective injury. If the triumph is refused, it is not Fulvius alone who is slighted, but the soldiers, the spoils, and Rome’s own memory of success. Marcus Aburius: “Si spolia civitati dantur, civitas videat; si gloria privato quaeritur, privatus ferat impensam.” Translation: “If the spoils are given to the city, let the city see them; if glory is sought for a private man, let the private man bear the expense.” Implicature: Aburius demands the missing condition. A public triumph requires a public return. If Fulvius is asking the city to pay, Fulvius must show what the city receives. Otherwise the triumph is Hellenistic display under republican accounting. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus: “Aburi, cave ne, dum luxuriam reprimas, virtutem ipsam includas.” Translation: “Aburius, take care lest, while restraining luxury, you shut away virtue itself.” Implicature: Gracchus accepts Aburius’s moral concern but reframes the objection as too broad. The issue is not whether spectacle can be corrupting, but whether this particular public recognition may serve virtue rather than vanity. Marcus Aburius: “Virtus sibi satis testis est.” Translation: “Virtue is witness enough to itself.” Implicature: Aburius offers the austere republican line. True military excellence does not need procession, garlands, painted boards, musicians, captives, and public noise. This is the anti-Hellenistic thrust at its most severe. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus: “Sibi, fortasse; civitati autem memoria opus est.” Translation: “To itself, perhaps; but the city needs memory.” Implicature: Gracchus makes the decisive counterargument. The triumph is not only Fulvius’s self-advertisement; it is also public pedagogy. A republic preserves victories by staging them, and staging is not necessarily decadence if it disciplines memory. Fulvius Nobilior: “Spolia feram; deos, milites, urbem participes faciam.” Translation: “I shall bring the spoils; I shall make the gods, the soldiers, and the city sharers.” Implicature: Fulvius now offers the condition Aburius wanted. The triumph is no longer merely noble prestige. It is donation, thanksgiving, and civic distribution, or at least it is now being made to sound so. Marcus Aburius: “Si ita est, intercedere desinam; cave tamen ne pompa maior sit quam res gesta.” Translation: “If that is so, I shall cease to interpose; yet take care that the procession be not greater than the deed.” Implicature: Aburius withdraws without capitulating. His yes is conditional in spirit even if procedurally sufficient. He preserves the republican warning: theatrical form must remain answerable to actual achievement. Grice/Speranza analysis: the first important point is that Aburius’s no is not merely a veto but an attempt to alter the description under which Fulvius’s request is heard. Fulvius says triumphus; Aburius hears theatrum. Fulvius says res publica; Aburius hears sumptus populi. Fulvius says victoria; Aburius asks what battle, what spoils, what public return. That is why the case is good for Grice. The dispute concerns not only a proposal but the implicatures carried by rival descriptions. The second point is that clan-prestige is conversationally present without needing to be stated. Fulvius, as a more splendid name, expects less resistance; Aburius, as the less grand tribune, makes the no more philosophically interesting precisely because it is socially marked. He is not merely declining; he is refusing to let aristocratic prestige function as an unargued premise. Speranza would like that. In a properly unequal Roman conversation, one does not contradict the greater name unless one has a procedural office, a moral idiom, or a death-wish. Aburius has at least the first two. The third point is Gracchus’s role. He does not simply overrule Aburius. He provides a route by which Aburius may withdraw the objection without losing the point of it. His intervention is therefore conversationally helpful in the strong Gricean sense: it preserves the common purpose by distinguishing corrupt spectacle from civic memory. The triumph may be theatre, yes; but not all theatre is Hellenistic luxury. Some theatre is republican recollection. Gracchus makes that distinction available. The fourth point is that Aburius’s final yes is not the same speech-act as an original yes would have been. Had he said yes at once, Fulvius’s prestige would have done the work. After the no, the yes has been reconditioned. It now means: I withdraw because the triumph has been redescribed as public memory, spoil-bearing, soldierly recognition, and civic thanksgiving, not merely as Fulvian display. This is a very Gricean yes: what is said is permission; what is implicated is warning. So the triad gives Speranza a Roman miniature of conversational helpfulness under inequality. Fulvius begins from honour, Aburius from austerity, Gracchus from civic mediation. The outcome is not that Aburius was defeated, but that the triumph had to be made conversationally respectable before it could proceed. In that sense the exchange is almost ideal for Grice: the business of the conversation is not only to reach a decision, but to determine what the decision is to count as meaning.Gaius A., sent as an ambassador to Masinissa and Carthage. Gaius A. M. f. Geminus, triumvir monetalis. Marcus A. M. f. Geminus, triumvir monetalis. Decimus A. Basso, consul suffectus. See also List of Roman gentes References  Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. I, p. 4 ("Aburia Gens").  Livy, xli. 18, 19.  Babelon, Monnaies de La République Romaine, vol. I, pp. 93 ff.  Cook, "Animal Worship in the Mycenaean Age", p. 168.  Livy, xxxix. 4, 5, xli. 18, 19.  Livy, xlii. 35.  Fasti Ostienses, CIL XIV, 244. Bibliography Titus Livius (Livy), History of Rome. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, William Smith, ed., Little, Brown and Company, Boston (1849). Theodor Mommsen et alii, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (The Body of Latin Inscriptions, abbreviated CIL), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1853–present). Ernest Babelon, Description Historique et Chronologique des Monnaies de la République Romaine Vulgairement Appelées Monnaies Consulaires, Paris (1885). Arthur B. Cook, "Animal Worship in the Mycenaean Age", in Journal of Hellenic Studies, Macmillan and Company, London, vol. XIV, pp. 81–169 (1894). Category: Roman gentes