ON THE PHILOLOGICAL CONJECTURES IN POETICS AND HERMENEUTICS: TOWARDS INTERPRETATION OF HOMERI ILIAD (1, 7; 1, 106) AND HORATI ODE III, 22

The paper discusses the phenomenon of philological conjectures observed beyond the borders of well-known textual criticism. It is shown that the term is appliable also to poetics and hermeneutics. The latter discipline is discussed, along with its actual tasks and perspectives. Some new conjectures for the texts of Homer and Horace are proposed. In particular, I propose to accept an assonance in [w] in Hom. A 7, which was lost after elimination of /w/ in Ionic Greek, but is preserved in Homer. In Hom. A 106 an alliteration is to be found, which was used as a poetic technique for revealing the character of Agamennon. It is notable that the alliteration was achieved due the elimination of labiovelars, which may give in Ionic dialects not only [p], but [k]. That was, probably, the reason, why the tradition didn’t see it in the text later. The most part of the paper discusses one of the most complicated odes of Horace (III, 22). Here I propose some arguments in favour of the statement that this ode contains a hint to several unknown details of Horace’s biography, which are also preserved as an intertextual sense in Ovid’s Amores (II, 13 and II, 14). Comparing these three texts, we can conclude that this ode was written of poet’s birthday and the funerary victim is an oblique indication of his mother’s death in childbirth.