328 ilaria l. e. ramelli
found in Paul’s letters. They are not the result of a maladroit translation
of a “medieval barbarian,” but rather seem to be traces left in Latin letters
by a person who thought in greek. among the different lexical options
that such a person had at his disposal to render a concept into Latin, he
would have clearly chosen the one closest to the greek. Likewise, who-
ever speaks or writes in a language that he does not master perfectly well
will naturally reproduce syntactical constructs of his or her own mother
tongue, or the tongue that he best knows and in which he thinks, and will
transpose them into the language in which he must speak or write. This
seems to have happened in the letters of the seneca-Paul correspondence
ascribed to Paul. it is noteworthy that some syntactical graecisms have
been discovered in non-literary, “substandard” Latin letters by a contem-
porary of Paul and seneca: some sentence connections in the letters of
rustius barbarus, who lived in eastern egypt in the first century ce, may
reflect an influence from his first language, i.e., greek.29
a further observation strengthens this impression and contradicts
Pascal’s and harnack’s hypothesis of an original composition of the whole
correspondence in greek: the really obscure and awkward sentences,
which have perplexed translators and commentators, making some think
of a late and inept Latin translation, are all found, again, in Paul’s letters—
although these are much fewer and much shorter than seneca’s—just as
the lexical and syntactical graecisms are.
Let me offer at least some examples. in Letter Viii Paul writes: licet
non ignorem Caesarem nostrum rerum admirandarum, si quando deficiet,
amatorem esse, permittit tamen se non laedi, sed admoneri. in this short
passage, there are two obscure and controversial points. The first is the
meaning of si quando deficiet, which has been translated in a variety of
ways, for instance “nei momenti di rilassatezza” (Franceschini), “quando
è abbattuto” (erbetta), “quando manca” (moraldi), “se prima o poi non
ci verrà meno” (bocciolini Palagi, who proposes the textual integration
si quando deficiet), “wenn er ab und zu davon genug hat”
(Fürst, who follows bocciolini Palagi’s emendation).30 in this case, a very
29 hilla halla-aho, The Non-literary Latin Letters: A Study of Their Syntax and Pragmat-
ics (commentationes humanarum Litterarum 124; helsinki: societas scientiarum Fennica,
2009), 64–89.
30 ezio Franceschini, “È veramente apocrifo l’epistolario seneca-s. Paolo?” in Lettera-
ture comparate: Problemi e metodo. Studî in onore di E. Paratore (bologna: Pàtron, 1981),
827–41; erbetta, Gli apocrifi, 89; moraldi, Apocrifi, 2: 1752; Laura bocciolini Palagi, Il carteg-
gio apocrifo di Seneca e san Paolo (Florence: nardini, 1978), 144; Laura bocciolini Palagi,
Epistolario apocrifo di Seneca e san Paolo (Florence: nardini, 1985), 113; Fürst, Der apokryphe
Briefwechsel, 29.