63 Colloquial and Li.. - Ganino.com

The sources and language of Jordanes 365
Gaius Cesar, named Caligula, reigned for three years and ten months;
he forced Memmius Regulus to give him in marriage his wife in place of
his daughter and to sign the marriage documents as her father,
cf. Eutr. 7.12.1 successit...Gaius Caesar cognomento Caligula and Hier.
Chron. a.Abr. 2055 Gaius Memmii Reguli uxorem duxit impellens eum, ut
uxoris suae patrem esse se scriberet;
(10) Artaxerses, qui et Ochus, ann. xxvi. hicetenim Sidonem subvertit
Aegyptumque suo subegit imperio (Rom. 69)
Artaxerses, also known as Ochus, [reigned] for twenty-six years. He
overthrew Sidon and submitted Egypt to his power,
cf. Hier. Chron. a.Abr. 1652 Artaxerses, qui et Ochus, ann. xxv, and1670
Ochus Sidonem subvertit et Aegyptum suo iunxit imperio.
The repeated usage of copulative conjunctions in these and similar
passages does not seem accidental: probably the author felt that in
such contexts the narrative cohesion of his text was particularly compromised
and thus needed to be reinforced through the addition of textual
connectors.
3.2.2 Change of one or more words
In most instances of adaptation of the model Jordanes makes substitutions
and changes in the text. This can happen on different levels: it can involve
single words (as in the change mentioned above from the first to the third
person plural) or concern word order in the phrase or even deeply modify
the syntactic structure of the source. 20 This last type of change is probably
the most interesting for the linguist as it allows us to penetrate the deeper
structures of Jordanes’ style and to evaluate, to a certain extent, his linguistic
skills as well as his preferences and distinctive features.
In a diachronic perspective it is worth mentioning those passages
where the modification of the model reveals some colloquial features that
also occur in authors of the same period or in non-literary sources, for
example:
(11) Romani . . . [Domitianum] interficere statuerunt omniaque, quod
constituerat, inritum fore (Rom. 265)
the Romans decreed to kill Domitian and annul all his decisions,
20 This last, more radical, technique is characteristic of those paragraphs in the Romana that depend
on Rufius Festus. Here Jordanes modifies his model so extensively that Luiselli (1976: 95) supposed
that these passages had previously been adapted by Symmachus in his lost Historia Romana and
then copied by Jordanes. Unfortunately, we have no evidence to prove this hypothesis.