Friday, July 7, 2023

De vulture et aviculis (iterum!)

I promised Hector a prose version of the Vulture's Birthday Party, and here it is. Actually, here they are; two prose versions! First, Irenaeus's version from his wonderful Mithologia Sacro-profana... a hard-to-find 17th-century book, but it is at Google Books and at the Munich MDZ.

I haven't changed the word order, but I've put in some line breaks to help with the syntactical pauses:

15. De vulture et aviculis
Vultur,
volens laute prandere 
et ventrem suum delicatis cibis infercire, 
invitavit aviculas ad convivium, 
Natalem suum, 
ut dicebat, 
celebraturus. 
Haec fama exiit inter eas, 
et hoc aucupio incautas fefellit. 
Veniunt igitur undique, 
existimantes 
invenire mensas 
omnis generis deliciarum refertas, 
non de suo paraturas. 
Sed ubi 
adventatis ac coactis omnibus 
fores occlusae sunt, 
et Vultur rapere, 
et mactare, 
et occidere coepit. 
"O insanas nos, 
et vecordes," 
inquiunt, 
"quae Vulturi, inimico nostro, 
fidimus, 
et apud eum 
putantes 
reperfire escas, 
ipsae 
eius escae
factae sumus."

Here's an illustration from Salomon's 16th-century Aesop:


And for a simpler prose version, here's one from a 19th-century Latin schoolbook (hence the macrons), Jacobs' and Döring's Elementarbuch.

Vultur 
aliquando 
aviculās invītāvit ad convīvium, 
quod 
illīs datūrus esset 
diē nātālī suō. 
Quae cum ad tempus adessent, 
eās carpere et occīdere, 
epulāsque sibi dē invītātis 
īnstruere
coepit.




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