Micheal, I don't know whether or not what I have here is something that
really bears upon your point or not; I sort of THINK I've seen something
like your construction from Josephus in Ephesians or Hebrews, but I'd be
hard put to find it, and I'm not sure my memory is correct at that. What I
am very much inclined to think, however, is that this is an affectation of
LATIN style that may have been carried over into Josephus' Greek. I don't
read Latin prose very often, but I think I've seen this sort of thing in
Cicero not infrequently; I don't have anything of Latin with me at home but
the Oxford Book of Latin verse, but here are some instances from Propertius
and Ovid:
(1) From the so-called "regina elegiarum," Cornelia's address from the
grave to her husband who has survived her untimely death (Propertius 4.11):
EN, SUM QUOD DIGITIS QUINQUE LEGATUR ONUS.
"See! I am a weight that could be picked up with five fingers"
Here the relative clause QUOD ... ONUS, and indeed the relative pronoun
QUOD and its antecedent ONUS frame the relative clause so that the verb
precedes the noun; one might theoretically expect the structure, EN, SUM
ONUS QUOD QUINQUE DIGITIS LEGATUR.
(2) From Ovid, Amores 1.2, the final couplet (addressed to Cupid):
ADSPICE COGNATI FELICIA CAESARIS ARMA:
QUA VICIT, VICTOS PROTEGIT ILLE MANU.
"Consider the successful warfare of your kinsman Caesar: with that same
hand with which he has conquered he protects the conquered ones."
Here again we have framing, this time of the whole final line, by the
relative pronoun QUA and its antecedent MANU, with the verb PROTEGIT
enclosed within the frame thus constructed.
(3) One more example that is perhaps still bolder is the opening line of
the very next poem, Amores 1.3:
IUSTA PRECOR: QUAE ME NUPER PRAEDATA PUELLAST,
AUT AMET AUT FACIAT, CUR EGO SEMPER AMEM!
"I pray for fairness: may the girl who just made me her prey either love me
or give me reason to love her forever!"
Here we have the relative pronoun QUAE beginning the clause and the
antecedent PUELLA enclosed between the two parts of the compound verb
PRAEDATA EST. This is Ovid the clever rhetorician demonstrating the Roman
art of architecture by producing strangely interlocked word-order: the
elements PUELLA QUAE PRAEDATA EST (AabB) are arranged in his verse abAB.
Now consider the passage in Josephus:
> TELEUTHSANTOS DE TOU BASILEWS AGRIPPA, KAQWS EN *THi* PRO TAUTHS
> APHGGELKAMEN *BIBLIWi*...
My reading of this would see the THi here not as a simple definite article
but rather as a demonstrative pronoun incorporating the relative
pronoun--I'd hesitate to suggest it, but in fact hO, hH, TO was used in
older Ionic Greek as a relative pronoun. I'd say that what we have here has
to be understood as
KAQWS EN hHi PRO TAUTHS APHGGELKAMEN BIBLIWi
Thus understood it would be a pretty close analogue to the structure I've
shown in Propertius and Ovid in the Latin: relative pronoun (THi = EKEINHI
hHN) and the antecedent noun (BIBLIWi) frame the clause in which the verb
APHGGELKAMEN is enclosed. The structure we might have expected would of
course be EN THi BIBLIWi hHN PRO TAUTHS APHGGELKAMEN ...
This might be worth pursuing further. I've read very little Josephus, but I
don't think it would be surprising to find Latinisms in this "Flavian"
turncoat. Cedrtainly there are Latinisms in the NT and at some point I'd
really like to make a study of them; I know that BDF and BDR have a
catalogue listing some of them. I'm thinking of things like Lk 9:58 hO DE
hUIOS TOU ANQRWPOU OUK ECEI POU THN KEFALHN KLINHi = NON HABET FILIUS
HOMINIS UBI CAPUT DEPONAT.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/