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coma Berenices

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The hair of Berenice; a constellation formed, according to myth, from a queen's sacrificed locks.

Detailed Definition
Coma Berenices refers to the myth of Queen Berenice II of Egypt, who sacrificed her hair for her husband's safe return from war, and whose offering was transformed into a constellation. Catullus translated the Greek poem on this subject, making it a touchstone of Latin love poetry. The myth combines love, sacrifice, transformation, and the immortalization of the personal through the cosmic. In poetry, it speaks to devotion, loss, and the star-like permanence of acts of love.
Example
Example in poetry:
Catullus's poem on the lock of Berenice's hair, adapted from Callimachus, is the source text for coma Berenices in the Latin tradition — the personal, erotic, and cosmic beautifully intertwined; Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" consciously echoes the coma Berenices myth — Belinda's stolen lock of hair transformed into a comic-heroic poem that becomes a constellation; A poet writing about a keepsake — a lock of hair, a photograph, a pressed flower — is working in the tradition of coma Berenices, the personal transformed into something almost celestial through the intensity of love; A student might write a modern coma Berenices — choosing an object of personal significance and tracing its transformation from the mundane to the mythological through the power of attention and feeling; W.B. Yeats's "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" has a coma Berenices quality — the beloved's hair spread across the sky, the personal gesture becoming cosmic
Additional Notes
Coma Berenices has a rich astronomical and literary history. The constellation Coma Berenices (Berenice's Hair) was catalogued by Ptolemy and remains one of the 88 modern constellations. The original Greek poem about the myth was written by Callimachus of Cyrene, and Catullus's Latin version (poem 66) is one of the most admired translations in classical literature. Students should note that the myth operates through a series of transformations: the queen's hair becomes a sacrifice, the sacrifice becomes a divine gift, and the divine gift becomes a constellation — a series of elevations from the personal to the cosmic that is itself a model of how the lyric poem works. Related concepts include apotheosis (transformation into a divine being), catasterism (transformation into a star), and the broader tradition of metamorphosis as a poetic subject.
Also Known As
hair of Berenice Berenice's hair Coma Berenices constellation Berenice's lock
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