Diggle, James,Diggle, J. (Fellow of Queens' College and Reader in Greek and Latin, Fellow of Queens' College and Reader in Greek and Latin, University of Cambridge)
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James Diggle was the official Orator of the University of Cambridge from 1982 to 1993. This book presents a selection of fifty of the Latin speeches which he delivered during those years in praise of a variety of distinguished people on the occasion of their receiving Honorary Degrees. The graduands range from writers (Borges, Gordimer, Ted Hughes, Iris Murdoch) to scientists (Stephen Hawking, James Watson) to musicians (Janet Baker, Jessye Norman) to sculptors (Anthony Caro, Elisabeth Frink) to actors (Alec Guinness) and royalty (the King of Spain), to philosophers (Jacques Derrida) and many others. The speeches themselves, models of wit and verbal dexterity, demonstrating the adaptability of Latin to the expression of modern ideas, are accompanied by English versions of complementary skill. The volume opens with an essay on the history and nature of the office of Orator in Cambridge.
The Iohannis, an epic poem of the mid-sixth century, narrates the wars of a Roman general against Berber rebels in north Africa. The subject-matter is of considerable interest both for the history of the period and for what it reveals of the ethnography of north Africa in late antiquity. The poem is also of literary interest because of its numerous debts to earlier Latin poetry. It is in the establishment of a reliable text, however, in the field emendatio, that the importance of this 1970 edition lies. The editors have purged the text so far as possible from error; and in their numerous conjectures they have had to decide what abnormalities should be ascribed to the changed Latinity of the age, what to scribal error. The apparatus is thus full of imaginative and scholarly touches: it can be approached as a 'bank' of ideas and suggestions for scholars of late Latin. There are a short praefatio on the history of the text and the usual indexes.
