16 The Rev. J. Hamilton on the Punic Passage in Plautus, 



the part of his representative, Agorastocles, we may expect the recurrence of 

 terms equivalent to house, dwelling, dwelling-house. Now amongst the Hebrew 

 synonymes for such ideas are the following : j^i^, heth, riniDOj mnuchth, 

 nmD)On*':35 ie^/t mnuchth, or nini nl!ls buth nuchth.* Accordingly, in the 

 fifth Punic line, for hospes mihifuit Antidamas, the first word which presents 

 itself is ie^A, which, connected with the word noctothi, (for notothi,) in the same 

 line, means that Hanno was granted hospitable accommodation in the house of 

 Antidamas ; or in the Latin phraseology of the ensuing scene, hospitium prcebe- 

 hatur, agreeing with the domum prcehente of Horace, Sat. v. lib. 1. And in 

 the last line, in which occwxiforas, rightly interpreted in the Delphin edition, 

 ex cedibus, we find the equivalent Hebrew phrase, nim^DD, m-mnuchth, from 

 the houses. And in the seventh verse, which, as we shall find, means, that the 

 adopted son Agorastocles had built or fixed his residence there ; the line runs — 

 uth ben ysd buth nuchtheno or beth fnnuchtheno — wdijicavit domum habitationis 

 hie. nmaa nn, a house of rest, a mansion, a house of residence, is a 

 phrase which occurs in the Hebrew Scripture, and frequently in the Chaldee 

 paraphrase. 



By this copious induction of words in duplicate, we have not only elicited so 

 many Punic vocables and their value, but have established the principle, and are 

 entitled to the benefit of it, that the language of the passage is Hebrew, or one 

 of its cognate dialects ; and that the ten Latin sentences correspond in sense, as 

 well as number, with the ten first Punic lines. We have therefore in the first 

 instance the Punic mass divided into ten integral portions, each of which will be 

 found to consist of two distinct parallel or correlative clauses. Several of these 

 clauses become still farther decomposed by the intervention of the duplicate 

 terms already discovered, or by the Hebrew equivalents, easily discoverable, of 

 expressions rendered literally in the Latin, or nearly so. And as to the re- 

 maining unknown Punic expressions, their value must be elicited by bringing 

 Into juxta-position with them such Hebrew expressions as have, whether as ac- 

 cessories or supplements, coherence with the Latin in sense, and with the Punic 

 In phonetic power. The accomplishment of this result, or approximation to it, 

 should be the solution, or the approximation to it, of this Interesting philological 

 problem. 



* See Plantevich's Thesaurus Synonimicus. 



