GRICE E GIULIO

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice e Giulio: la ragione conversazionale del principe filosofo -- Roma – filosofia italiana Polluce: la ragione conversazionale del principe filosofo -- Roma – filosofia italiana –  (Roma). Filosofo italiano. Giulio Polluce or Polideuce – Friend of Commodo to whom he dedicates a treatise entitled “Onomasticon,” a thematically arranged dictionary containing many excerpts from different authors, mainly and especially the Roman philosophers with which he was familiar and thought Commodo would find of slight interest.   GRICEVS: POLLE, audio te Onomasticon Commodo principi dicavisse: pulchrum munus—dictionarium enim est quasi convivium verborum, ubi princeps sine periculo sapientiam “gustat” et statim in alium ferculum transit. POLLVS: Ita est, Grice: Commodus philosophiam amat… dum brevis est. Ideo capita ordinavi per materias, ne cogatur legere quidquam quod non petierit. GRICEVS: Sed hoc est ipsa ratio conversazionalis: cum dicis “hoc parum tibi interest,” non tantum dicis modestiam; implicas etiam “si plus posuero, irasceris”—et ego malim te patronum quam leonem. POLLVS: Et tu, cum “implicas” dicis, implicas hoc: princeps philosophus fit non quia omnia legit, sed quia, lectis paucis, reliqua prudenter praeterit—quod est virtus rara, praesertim in amphitheatro. In Grice's and Speranza's logic, since Commodo, the emperor, called the dedicator, Giulio Polluce, the implicature is that he was of the gens Iulia, like Iulius Caesar, but whereas the more famous one had the cognomina 'caesar' attached to him -- because he or his ancestor had been born of a caesarean division, this one Grice or Speranza do not know. Input? What you are doing with Grice and Speranza is quite subtle, but in this case the implicature they draw is historically too strong. First, about Giulio Polluce himself. The figure you have in mind is indeed Julius Pollux, a Greek rhetorician from Naucratis in Egypt under Commodus, and the author of the Onomasticon, each book of which is dedicated to the emperor. [en.wikipedia.org] Now the crucial point is his name. In Greek he is Ἰούλιος Πολυδεύκης, rendered in Latin as Iulius Pollux. That first element, Iulius or Giulio, looks exactly like a Roman nomen, but by the second century of the empire it no longer functions as a reliable indicator of membership in the old patrician gens Iulia. The sources explicitly note that the nomen Julius had become extremely widespread in imperial times, because many people acquired Roman citizenship under emperors and adopted the emperor’s nomen as part of their new Roman name. [en.wikipedia.org] So the Gricean implicature “he is a Julian in the sense of belonging to Caesar’s family” is a classic case of over-enrichment. The linguistic form suggests gens-membership, but the historical usage has generalized. The implicature is defeasible, and here it is defeated by the sociohistorical context of the name system. In other words, with Julius Pollux the name is best understood as a marker of Romanization or citizenship, not lineage. He is a Greek intellectual in the imperial system who bears a Roman nomen, not a biological descendant of the Julii. Second, on the comparison with Caesar. You are right that Caesar is the cognomen in Gaius Julius Caesar. But the traditional explanation linking “Caesar” to a caesarean birth is already flagged by ancient and modern sources as uncertain or probably incorrect. It is one of several folk etymologies, alongside derivations from hair, eye colour, or the verb “to cut.” [journals.a...demicka.pl] So here again Grice and Speranza’s move is understandable but risky. They treat the cognomen as semantically transparent, when in fact even in antiquity its origin was opaque and disputed. If one reframes the whole thing in Gricean terms, both cases illustrate the same phenomenon. Names in Rome look compositional, as if they encode descriptive information about origin or traits, but in practice they are highly conventional signals whose conversational implicatures are often weak or cancellable. So the safe conclusion is this. Pollux’s “Julius” does not implicate descent from the gens Iulia, and “Caesar” does not securely encode a caesarean origin. In both cases the apparent semantic transparency invites an implicature that historical reality cancels.Giulio Polluce (XXX). Dicta.