[In the following essay, Meijer emends a corrupted passage of the Itinerarium Egeriae regarding the Lenten fast.]

In her report of the religious observances during Lent in Jerusalem Egeria rounds off her account of the fasting-rules with a final remark on the diet of the aputactitae: it consisted of only water and some flour-soup, bread, oil and fruit being forbidden, or in her own words, according to the only manuscript left containing this passage: esca autem eorum quadragesimarum diebus haec est, ut nec panem quid liberari non potest, nec oleum gustent, nec aliquid, quod de arboribus est, sed tantum aqua et sorbitione modica de farina. Now, it is rather evident, that some mistake(s) must have crept into the tradition: in the part nec … potest, liberari makes no sense¹ and quid, if correct, is very difficult to explain.

Many an attempt has been made to find a satisfactory correction. With one exception they all come down to creating a relative clause depending on panem: quod librari (Gamurrini, Geyer), quod liberari (Meister, Bludau), quo liberari (Franceschini, 1st ed.), qui liberari (Franceschini, 2nd ed.), qui deliberari (Mayr), qui deliquari (Bernard), qui delibari (Heraeus, Prinz²). This has the advantage of keeping a more or less harmonious syntactic structure, which is badly broken up by putting potest on one line with gustent, as is done by Weber² (quid libari), not to mention other irregularities like an indicative after a consecutive ut, an impersonal construction followed by a personal one, an accusative with a verb in the passive voice and a double pleonastic negation, found nowhere else in the Itinerary. So much, for the time being, about the syntactic consequences of the respective corrections.

As far as meaning is concerned, the most attractive of the proposed alterations of liberari is, in my view, that to libari,³ being perfectly suitable here. I would like to dedicate to the meaning of this verb a small excursus because of the many, not seldom diverging opinions expressed in this respect. Thanks to my employment at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, where I took care of the word-article libare, I am in the favourable position of having at my disposal all material available, and so being able to consider it as a whole. Here is a brief outline of my findings.

Latin libare originally was, so it seems, a religious term denoting a certain kind of sacrifice, not only of wine, as one would expect, cognate as it probably is with greek λείβω, but also of food, which was offered to the gods as their share, taken from what one was about to consume, e.g. Varro Ling. 5,106: libum, quod ut libaretur, priusquam essetur, erat coctum;⁴ 5,120: ut pusillas, quod his libarent cenam, patallas; 6,21: vinum novum et vetus libari et degustari medicamenti causa.⁵ So, the act of libare in its original use virtually was a twofold one: to take away a little (part) and sacrifice.⁶ In rather early texts we already find examples of libare used outside the religious sphere with the meaning: to take away a little (part).⁷ And it is exactly a notion like this, we would expect, and need, in the passage under discussion.⁸

One really serious objection could be made against the occurrence of this verb in the Itinerary: it looks surprising to find a somewhat literary, poetical verb—as libare is, to judge by the material available—, used by Egeria. Still, there is a possible explanation to be found. At the end of his study on the liturgical vocabulary in the Itinerary, A. A. R. Bastiaensen makes the following remark: “De temps à autre, elle fait usage d'un certain langage dévot, caractérisé par des expressions plus ou moins onctueuses, empruntées … aux textes rebattus de la Liturgie.”⁹ Also libare could very well belong to this category.¹⁰ So much for libari.

Let us turn our attention now to the much more difficult quid. By accepting the reading libari only two of the corrections mentioned above still deserve to be taken into consideration, viz., that of Prinz, who adopts Heraeus' correction nec panem, qui delibari non potest eqs., taking qui as a relative pronoun, and that of Weber, who reads nec panem quid libari non potest eqs., explaining quid as an indefinite adjective belonging to panem through a confusion of gender.

I agree with Weber in so far, that Heraeus' alteration does not exactly create a very relevant remark,¹¹ and this justifies, in my view, his sacrificing the syntactic harmony in favour of more sense. Now, his effort to adhere to the tradition is, of course, a commendable one. But if by doing so he introduces an additional irregularity into the sentence, which, moreover, is unparalleled in the Itinerary, it does not particularly increase its plausibility. Therefore, I would like to suggest a correction, which is no worse than that of Heraeus from a palaeographic point of view, and which reduces the number of irregularities, caused by Weber's interpretation, by one, by reading: nec panem quidem libari non potest eqs.

If one wants to defend this reading on rational grounds, viz., that this sentence shows a series of irregularities, which are due to Egeria's poor knowledge of the classical rules, it is possible: one could refer to other instances of an indicative used after a consecutive ut, of an accusative with a verb in the passive voice, and to the fact that pleonastic negations frequently occur in Late Latin (though not in the Itinerary), especially after nec and in combination with posse.¹²

However, one could consider as well an “irrational”, psychological explanation like, for instance, this: in the course of her catalogue of the ceremonies during Lent, arriving at the fasting rules Egeria simply wanted to state, that it was customary to taste neither bread, nor oil, nor fruit (ut nec panem nec oleum gustent, nec aliquid quod de arboribus est.), and so, she started this sentence, but reaching the bread, the exceptional circumstance of even this being forbidden¹³ suddenly came to her mind. Therefore, she breaks off her original train of thought to add a remark on this rarity, momentarily forgetting about the syntactic structure: … ut nec panem / quidem (emphasizing panem¹⁴) libari non potest. Then she picks up her original intention and carries on: nec oleum gustent eqs. To put it in English, more or less as “irregular” but as perfectly understandable as Egeria's Latin: “Their food during the days of Lent is as follows: neither bread, even this one is not allowed to take some from, nor oil they tasted,” and so on.

Notes

1. The efforts to keep it, made by Meister (liberare = french livrer) and Franceschini (liberari sc. a ieiunio) are hardly convincing.

2. His is the most recent edition of the Itinerary (Heidelberg 1960), together with that of Weber (Corp. Christ. CLXXV, Turnhout 1958). They both defend their readings: Weber in Vig.Christ. 12 (1958) 93-97, Prinz in ALMA [Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi] 30 (1960) 143-153, esp. 151ff.

3. From a palaeographic point of view there can be no objection whatsoever, since scribes prove to have been mixing up both verbs in quite a number of cases: e.g. Rhet. Her. 4,3,5; Cic. De orat. 1,159; Manil. 2,56; Val.Max. 8,15,7; Mart. Cap. 9,893; Ennod. Opusc. 3,13, p. 334,1; Arator Act. 2,350.

4. Cf. Ovid. Fast. 3,734: sacris pars datur inde (= de libis) focis.

5. So, unlike, for instance, H. Georges (Ausführliches Lateinisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch II, 8th ed., Hannover-Leipzig 1918), who regards libari and degustari as equivalent here, I take libari in its original sense (cf. Plut. Quaest. conv. 3,6,1: Καὶ πάλαι γ' ὡs ἔοικεν εὔχοντο, τοῦ οἴνου πρὶν e πιεῖν ἀποσπένδοντεs, ἀβλαβῆ καὶ σωτήριον αὐτοῖs τοῦ φαρμάκου τὴν χρῆσιν γενέσθαι).

6. The object is either that from which the part is taken, or the part (either the best or any) itself.

7. Some of the earliest examples: Rhet. Her. 4,3,5; qui tuo nomine(i) velis ex aliorum laboribus libare laudem; Cic. Inv. 2,4: ex variis ingeniis excelentissima quaeque libavimus (in variation with excerpsimus); De orat. 1,218: sit boni oratoris multa auribus accepisse … multa etiam legendo percucurisse neque ea ut sua possedisse, sed ut aliena libasse; Lucr. 3,11: ut apes in saltibus omnia libant, omnia nos itidem depascimur aurea dicta; 3,716: (anima) partibus amissis quoniam libata recessit (a corpore).

8. From Virgil onwards we very frequently find libare in its secondary use in connection with drink and food, e.g. Aen. 3,354: libant pocula Bacchi; 5,92: serpens libavit … dapes; Ecl. 5,26: nulla … amnem libavit quadrupes, nec graminis attigit herbam; Georg. 4,54: (apes) flumina libant summa.—It is, amongst others, examples like these, which have often lead to the conclusion, that one of the main meanings, or even the original one, of libare is “to touch lightly, superficially” (cf. Prinz, art.cit., 152f.). This is incorrect: in most cases it is only a circumstantial phenomenon, and even in the rare cases, where one could consider “to touch lightly” as a translation, there always is the idea of “while taking away a little (part)” in the background. Of course, where food is concerned, libare comes very close to gustare, but that does not automatically imply, that they are full synonyms (the aspect being different), as Weber (art.cit., 95) seems to treat them to judge by the fact that he translates both verbs identically.

9. Observations sur le vocabulaire liturgique dans l'Itinéraire d'Égérie, LCP 17 (Nijmegen-Utrecht 1962) 181f.

10. Cf. e.g. Sacr. Leon. 441: recreati sacri muneris gustu quaesumus, domine, non inde sumentibus nobis vertatur ad poenam, sed fideliter libantibus prosit ad veniam; 562: libantes, domine, dona caelestia praesidium nobis inesse gaudemus; 585: quaesumus, domine deus noster, ut mensae tuae sancta libantes, non ad iudicium nobis, sed ad praesidium sempiternum caelestia dona sumamus; 1202: libantes, domine, mensae tuae beata mysteria (= Sacr. Gelas. 2,12 p. 641; 2,23 p. 648; 2,63 p. 672). Other examples are to be found in M. P. Ellebracht, Remarks on the Vocabulary of the Ancient Orations in the Missale Romanum, LCP 18 (Nijmegen-Utrecht 1963) 140.

11. Art. cit., 95.

12. Cf. Hofmann-Szantyr, Lateinische Grammatik II (München 1965) 804.

13. It is known, that even in the most rigorous fasting practices bread was permitted.

14. Parallels of this are to be found in chapt. 2,5 and 43,1.