Volume 152, Issue 2

This paper traces the history and meaning of the Greek proverb “Win but do not overwin”, first documented in Maurice′s Strategicon (590s) and cited thereafter in various contexts in Byzantine military and historical literature. The earliest manifestation of this proverb is identified as a verse of iambic trimeters preserved in the Γνῶμαι Μενάνδρου or Sententiae Menandri , witnessed in both the manuscript tradition and a fragmentary specimen inscribed on a fifth-/sixth-century ostracon. Older scholarship denied the antiquity of this monostichos on linguistic and metrical grounds, but it is shown that there is no impediment to a possible origin in Attic drama, even if date and authorship remain elusive. Recognition of an additional prose variant in Socrates′ Historia Ecclesiastica points to a wider proverbial currency by the beginning of the fifth century at the latest. The study concludes with the conjecture that St. Paul may have had this proverb in mind when he wrote Epistle to the Romans , adducing arguments based on eccentric vocabulary and evidence for Paul′s limited acquaintance with moralising pagan literature.

In the first half of Cat. 11 readers are indeed, as has been suggested, invited to recall Alexander the Great and his campaigns in the Far East upon reading monimenta magni , but also Rome′s official 'Magnus′ and Caesar′s rival: Pompey. For it is Pompey (and not Crassus, as is commonly believed) to whom the second stanza alludes, as all the people therein listed can be shown to point to his famous campaigns in the East during the third Mithridatic war, which, though almost a decade past by the time Catullus wrote, was brought back to the Romans′ attention when Pompey had his theatrum built from its revenues. The imaginary itinerary of the first three stanzas comprises the glorious sites of Alexander, Pompey, and Caesar – the latter now also a 'Magnus′.