Textual difficulties as well as problems of content are sometimes prone to being overlooked in famous passages, because their very familiarity tends to stifle reflection on their actual meaning. orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano escaped detection as an interpolation until 1970. In di, coeptis | aspirate meis, the reading illas has held its place against the correct illa until 1976.

αΨδσαι λγεται καí τó φλυαρσαι, τò áπλς †λαβεíν κπ´ παγγεîλαι χωρíς †ργου τινός. This is how W. C. Greene prints the last sentence of the Schol. ad Ion 530a αψδν, which is repeated ad Rep. 373b and in Photius, Suda, Et. Magn., and Lex. Bekk. s.v.αφδοί.

The manuscripts attribute these lines with 1049–53 to Hecuba. This is accepted by all editors. But the fear of Polymestor as revealed in the sentence does not fit the death wishes Hecuba expresses e.g. in 167f., 231–3, 383–7, 391–3, 396; nor is it consistent with her scornful description of the blind king as in 1050.

ῥαΨῳδ⋯σαι λ⋯γεται καí τó φλυαρ⋯σαι, τò áπλ⋯ς †λαβεíν κπ´ παγγεîλαι χωρíς †ἒργου τινός. This is how W. C. Greene prints the last sentence of the Schol. ad Ion 530a ῥαψδν, which is repeated ad Rep. 373b and in Photius, Suda, Et. Magn., and Lex. Bekk. s.v.αφῳδοί.

The manuscripts attribute these lines with 1049–53 to Hecuba. This is accepted by all editors. But the fear of Polymestor as revealed in the sentence does not fit the death wishes Hecuba expresses e.g. in 167f., 231–3, 383–7, 391–3, 396; nor is it consistent with her scornful description of the blind king as in 1050.

The origins of demography as a scientific discipline are usually seen as intimately connected to the organisational and economic needs of the early modern state. This paper, by contrast, presents an early demographic enterprise that falls outside this framework. The calculations performed by the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli in an appendix to his Geographia et hydrographia reformata are the first systematic attempt presently known to arrive at an estimate of the entire world population. Yet they appear to have no (...) political purpose and rather belong to a learned, bookish tradition of demographical thinking that may be termed “humanist”. The article starts from a summary of Riccioli’s life, of the book wherein his demographic exercise is contained and of this exercise itself. Thereafter, Riccioli’s motives, sources, methodology and results are discussed. By way of conclusion, some preliminary reflections on the place of Riccioli and the humanist tradition in the early modern history of demography as a whole are offered. Two appendices present a translation of the Coniectura and tabulate its literary sources in order to provide some possible starting points for a study of the aforementioned tradition. (shrink)