Talk:Bibasis (dance)

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The epigram recorded by Pollux

I've made a change in the article to the translation of the epigram recorded by Pollux, because the translation by Sider did not correspond to the version of the Greek text printed above it. The text of the line as preserved in the manuscripts of Pollux is χίλια (or χείλια) ποκὰ βίβαντι, πλεῖστα δὴ τῶν πήποκα. (This is the reading of the standard edition by Bethe, which is linked in the article.) All editors agree that this text is corrupt and unmetrical, and in some manuscripts the entire second half of the line is missing. Various solutions have been proposed to heal the meter (either as a trochaic tetrameter or an iambic trimeter) and to restore the "original" Doric linguistic forms. The restored text printed in the article (χήλι' ἅδε ποκὰ βίβαντι, πλεῖστα δὴ τᾶν πήποκα) is that of Theodor Preger in Inscriptiones graecae metricae ex scriptoribus praeter Anthologiam collectae (Leipzig 1891), pp. 107–108, no. 134; it is basically the same as that of Heinrich Ahrens in De graecae linguae dialectis (Gottingen 1839–1843), vol. 2, p. 483, but with a couple of additional Doric spellings. Preger's text is reproduced in Reisch's short article in Pauly-Wissowa, which I suspect is how it found its way into this WP article. In his notes Preger records earlier proposals and discusses some of the linguistic problems, including the interpretation of the word βίβαντι, which is the crux of the matter here. In the text proposed by Ahrens and Preger, this word is construed as a Doric 3rd person singular indicative verb, with ἅδε ("this girl") as the subject: the Greek text printed in the WP article means "This girl once jumped [i.e., performed the bibasis] a thousand times, the most of [all] the girls ever."

David Sider in his article doesn't print Preger's restoration of the line; he prints the Greek text (including the obeli marking the corruption) as it appears in Bethe's edition of Pollux: (χίλια †ποκα† βίβαντι, πλεῖστα δὴ τῶν πήποκα). In this version of the text, there is no expressed subject, and to judge from Sider's translation ("jumping a thousand times, the most ever"), he interprets the form βίβαντι as a present participle. If that is true, it would have to agree with a noun or pronoun in the dative case, representing the girl, which appeared in some earlier line of the epigram, not recorded by Pollux. Such an interpretation is not impossible, but as far as I can tell no other scholar who has looked hard at this passage has understood it in this way. There is some uncertainty about whether the form βίβαντι can be singular (one would normally expect βίβατι as the Doric 3rd person singular, and some editors restore that form here; on this see Preger's note), but there seems to be general agreement that this is an indicative verb.

None of this is especially important for the WP article as a whole; I run through it all here just to explain why the English translation given in the article does not in fact correspond to the Greek text that it is supposedly translating. There are two ways to remedy this. One is to keep Sider's translation and change the Greek text to that of the manuscripts of Pollux, which is what Sider prints in the footnote that contains his translation. The other is to keep Preger's Greek text and change the translation to agree with it. That is what I have done, and I've expanded the note to explain that the text is a reconstruction. I think this is a better solution because, as noted above, Sider's treatment of βίβαντι as a participle is not in line with the general scholarly consensus about this passage. That doesn't mean that Preger's reconstruction of the line is correct in every detail, but even if it's not, most scholars agree that βίβαντι is probably an indicative verb form, and that the girl is the subject.

Other opinions welcome. Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 23:22, 17 April 2023 (UTC)