bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Tolerance, Prohibition, And Protection
Authors: Clark Gillian
Published: November 2023

THE State had to be concerned with the transmission of property in marriage, and therefore with the ending of marriage in divorce. It was also concerned with other aspects of women’s experience. Women might produce children, outside or within marriage, whose claim to inherit was doubtful. They might be raped or seduced: this could wreck their chances of marriage or seriously reduce their fathers’ power to choose a husband, or, if they were married already, make people wonder whether any of their children was legitimate. They might refuse marriage or remarriage and opt for celibacy; and they might, even if married, try to avoid giving their husbands children. Once again, these are not simply questions of economics, or even of patriarchal attempts to maintain control over women and property. Late Roman law often expresses concern for the perceived weakness of women, and seeks to protect them from physical and financial exploitation.
Book 4
Authors: Paschalis Michael
Published: November 2023

Aeneid 4 opens with a description of Dido ‘s love wound and her conversation with Anna, who persuades the queen to yield to her love for Aeneas. Dido ‘s wound has been caused by Aeneas ‘ looks and words, which have lodged fast in Dido ‘s ‘pectus ‘ [Cavity]. Sight and Speech function as pointed weapons; and ‘haerentinfixi ‘ suggests that the ‘point ‘ has remained in the wound, which cannot heal (cf. 69ff.). Main features of Dido ‘s wound are Fire ( ‘igni ‘) and Blood ( ‘uenis ‘) which share the component of the Colour Red; Fire and \Vound combine in ‘sauciacura ‘, considering that ‘cura ‘ ,vas etymologized from ‘quod corurat ‘ (Var. LL 6. 46).1 The epithet 1caeco ‘ ( ‘unseen ‘) is a component of Cavity (in this case Wound-cavity) and contrasts with ‘uultus ‘ [Sight).
The Spartan Tradition in European Thought
Authors: Rawson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Ancient polemics on Sparta (by Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and others) have had a remarkable afterlife in the political and educational thought of Renaissance Italy, the France of the Philosophes, Whig England, and Nazi Germany. This book outlines the little we know of ancient Sparta, describes Greek reaction to the ambiguous institutions of the great rival to democratic Athens, makes a first attempt to follow the subsequent fortunes of the debate, and indicates Sparta's role over twenty-five centuries in the intellectual history of Europe.
Laconism in the Hellenistic Age
Authors: Rawson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

The great figures of the fourth century continued to a remarkable extent to dominate Greek intellectual history, whether in rhetoric, historiography, or political theory. One proof of this is the astonishing persistence of interest in Sparta; for the place itself, deprived of territory by Philip and defeated again under Alexander, was henceforth of no importance beyond the Peloponnese.
Under the Empire
Authors: Rawson Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Under the empire it became hard to suppose that Rome was exactly like Sparta only better, though it might still be said of the past, especially in a moral sense: the Spartans came closer than others to the gravitas of early Romans. Though at the start of the period we find one understandable regret that Roman generals have shown themselves less obedient to the civil authorities than Agesilaus did, and though Tacitus illustrates his argument that great oratory and political corruption go hand in hand by pointing out that Crete and Sparta had neither,3 interest in Sparta becomes generally less political.
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius a Study
Authors: Rutherford R B
Published: November 2023

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, is renowned for his just rule at home and for his long frontier wars. But his lasting claim to fame rests on the work known as the Meditations - a bedside book of reflections and self-admonitions composed in Greek (the language of philosophy) during his last years and partly while on campaign. These sparse notes, intended for the author's eyes alone, give unique access to the mind of an ancient ruler; they also contain many passages of pungent epigram and poetic imagery. In this study, Dr Rutherford seeks to make the Meditations more approachable to the modern reader by explaining the historical and philosophical background, charting the main themes and tendencies of Marcus' thought, and relating stylistic detail to the intellectual and moral outlook of the author.
Female Anatomy and Physiology
Authors: Jones Lesley Dean
Published: November 2023

In most cultures an individual is ascribed to one sex or another at birth on the evidence of external genitalia, and this categorization is taken to predict his or her physical and mental development and capabilities, which in turn support the differentiation between the sexes in the home, the workplace, religion, the law------even in hairstyles and dress. There is an obvious correlation between genitalia and an individual's role in the propagation of the species, but no culture considers this difference in external genitalia in and of itself sufficient to justify the complete separation of male and female roles in society. Rather, cultures support this division by claiming that there are other, less apparent, physical, mental, and emotional traits which naturally differentiate the sexes. The traits that a culture decides are typical of a male or a female form the construct of that sex in that society. These stereotypes are often contradicted by individuals. Taking our own culture as an example, a woman can be more muscular or more aggressive than many men, a man can be smaller and more gentle than many women.1 However, these challenges to the cultural constructs of male and female are neutralized by claiming that they are exceptions to a natural law
Female Pathology
Authors: Jones Lesley Dean
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of Book 3 of his Gynaecology, Soranus records a debate among physicians of antiquity as to whether or not women have conditions peculiarly their own. Soranus agrees with the view that, apart from the areas of the female reproductive system, pregnancy, parturition, and the care of the new-born child, women do not need a specialized branch of medicine; they otherwise suffer the same diseases as men and should be treated the same.1 This point of view appears unremarkable because it coincides with what we would consider the legitimate domain of gynaecology. There are indeed functions and diseases peculiar to women to which men are not subject because they do not possess the female reproductive organs; in other aspects of the body, however, we assume that men and women are alike and are subject to the same range of diseases. But we should not assume that this has always been the dominant view. The range of opinions recorded by Soran us shows that the issue was hotly debated in antiquity.
The Shape of Athenian Law
Authors: Todd S C
Published: November 2023

Unlike its predecessors, this systematic survey of the law of Athens is based on explicit discussion of how the subject might be studied; and it incorporates topics like the democratic political system and social structure, which are too often regarded as being outside the scope of law. At its heart lies an attempt to reshape our understanding of how the Athenian legal system operated; but it also deals extensively with subjects such as slavery, inheritance, maritime trade, and patterns of land-holding. The author draws primarily on the hundred or so surviving law-court speeches of the Attic orators, but also uses Athenian comedy, public inscriptions, and various historical and philosophical texts. Technical and legal terms, ancient and modern, are explained in a comprehensive glossary. This book should be accessible to those interested in social history and the anthropology of law, as well as to historians of the ancient world.
The Limits Of Empire
Authors: Isaac Benjamin
Published: November 2023

For more than seven centuries most of the Near East was part of the Roman empire. Yet no work exists which explores the means by which an ancient power originating in the western Mediterranean could control such a vast and distant region. What was the impact of the army presence on the population of the provinces? How did Rome respond to the challenge posed by the desert and its nomadic population? Professor Isaac here offers answers to these questions in the first comprehensive treatment of the Roman military presence in the Near East. Using both well-known and neglected sources, he reassesses the means by which Rome achieved and maintained her control over the region. He discusses the extent to which current vacillating views on imperialism can affect opinions concerning the character and mechanisms by which Rome ensured the integrity and expansion of her influence. Also considered here are problems of methodology, especially the use of archaeological remains for historical interpretation. Professor Isaac casts new light on an important issue which has far-reaching implications for the understanding of ancient and modern imperialism.
Frontier policy grand strategy?
Authors: Isaac Benjamin
Published: November 2023

In the first chapter it was argued that the frontier policy of Rome in the East intermittently but persistently aimed at expansion. This is clear from actual Roman behaviour at least till the age of Diocletian. The positions taken up by the Roman army in Syria and Cappadocia from the Flavian period onward are better explained in terms of offence than defence. What little can be learned about the Roman perception of Persia before the Byzantine period does not confirm the popular notion that Persia was conceived as a major threat which required an active policy of defence. In Chapters II-IV it was argued that in Arabia and Judaea there was hardly a ‘frontier question’ to cope with. The army was engaged in internal police duties of various kinds. As could be seen in Chapter VI, policing the towns, particularly the main cities, required the presence of considerable forces from Egypt to Syria. In the Byzantine period some of the police duties of the army in the East were taken ewer by Saracen allies. The relationship with Persia changed.
Antigone as Moral Agent
Authors: Foley Helene P
Published: November 2023

In the Poetics, Aristotle defines tragic character in relation to tragic choice. In drama, character, Aristotle argues, reveals a prohairesis or a process of undertaking moral commitment in which a person chooses to act or to abstain from action in circumstances where the choice is not obvious (Poetics 145Ob8—10). What I would like to begin to explore in this paper is the representation of the making and enacting of difficult moral choices—if not necessarily difficult choices in precisely the Aristotelian sense—by female characters in Greek tragedy, and to examine the complex interrelation between female moral capacity and female social role that conditions, and is articulated in, such choices.
Catharsis, Audience, and Closure in Greek Tragedy
Authors: Segal Charles
Published: November 2023

It is a deeply held assumption among the Greeks of the archaic and classical periods that the sharing of tears and suffering creates a bond of common humanity between mortals. This is the bond that the two bitter enemies Priam and Achilles discover at the end of the Iliad (24. 507 ff.). It is also the bond between the survivors and indirect victims of the Trojan war gathered in the house of Menelaus at the beginning of Odyssey 4. The bonding between the beggar (Odysseus in disguise) and the swineherd Eumaeus in Odyssey 14—15 operates in a lower register of style, class, and situation, but conduces to the same effect, as they share their tales of the misfortunes and vicissitudes of their lives.
Plato’s Repudiation of the Tragic
Authors: Halliwell Stephen
Published: November 2023

Theories of the tragic are only one species within the genus constituted by concepts of tragedy. The existence of such theories has become especially associated with a line of thought which goes back to German Idealism and Romanticism, and one commonly drawn corollary of this connection is the claim that while ancient Greece created the first and most intense tradition of dramatic tragedy, it lacked anything that can be classified as an explicit notion of the tragic. But distinctive as are the existential and spiritual accounts of the tragic produced by theorists from Schelling onwards, we run the risk of unduly constricting our reading of the history of ideas if we take these accounts as an exclusive paradigm of the concept. I propose in this essay to develop this consideration by arguing that there are important grounds for ascribing the first conscious delineation of the tragic, at any rate outside tragedy itself (a complex reservation), to Plato. To make good this thesis I shall work with a distinction between what can broadly be termed pragmatic theories of tragedy, and theories which, by contrast, contain a central emphasis that qualifies them for the category of the tragic. While pragmatic theories can incorporate generic characteristics of diverse kinds—formal, material, psychological, ethical—they remain separable from approaches which diagnose an essential and metaphysical significance at the core of tragedy.
Tragic Language: The Greek Tragedians and Shakespeare
Authors: Silk M S
Published: November 2023

Attempts to elucidate tragic language have been few and brief, and this despite the immense weight and variety of known discussions of tragedy, Greek and other. The claim may seem surprising, even astonishing. After all, the immense weight and variety of known discussions of Greek tragedy includes innumerable commentaries on, surveys of, and insights into, the linguistic usages of the tragedians; while comparable work on (say) Shakespeare, albeit crowded into fewer centuries, is hardly less extensive or less multifarious overall. From the wit of Aristophanes to the sophistications of post-structuralism, from ancient scholarship to modern scholarship, there is no shortage of secondary literature.
Ironies in Serious Drama
Authors: Rosenmeyer Thomas G
Published: November 2023

I want to talk about ironies in drama, rather than dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is an idea coined by Bishop Thirlwall, in response to his experience of reading Sophocles.1 Both his terminology and his perceptions, echoing directly the thinking of some of the German Romantics around the start of the nineteenth century, set a fashion and in the end blocked progress. For his focus on the large tensions and the calculated disharmonies which emerge from Oedipus Tyrannus must blind us to other, often less obvious strategies. The effect of the German Romantics upon modern and post-modern criticism remains overwhelming. The counter-classical notion that irony is a matter of total reverberation remains in force. From the New Critics to Northrop Frye to the latest deconstructionist, irony is a concept expanded rather than inspected. Frye, who comes from a study of romance, starts by defining irony as a way of looking, a species of cool appraisal. But as his argument continues, other qualities get mixed in, until the term becomes a pregnant catch-all for a vast array of things.
Daily Life
Authors: Mcdowell A G
Published: November 2023

In Deir el-Medina, as elsewhere in Egypt, health problems were treated by means of both medicine and magic, often in combination. Medical texts such as the famous Papyrus Ebers are introduced by magic spells to be recited during treatment; while magical remedies were sometimes accompanied by fumigations and ingestions resembling those in medical texts. Nevertheless, the two disciplines do appear to have been distinguished in that, for example, remedies which are primarily medical do not appear in compilations with those which are primarily magical. Furthermore, the community of workmen included both a doctor and a ‘scorpion charmer ‘, one of whom prepared prescriptions while the other specialized in magical cures for scorpion bites.
Titles for Royal Women
Authors: Brosius Maria
Published: November 2023

Monarchic rule by the Achaemenids was supported by an organized political structure, manifested by advisers and officials immediately surrounding the king at the court and by the organization of the empire through satraps. The reliefs displaying royal audience scenes at Persepolis or the relief above Darius’ tomb at NaqS-i Rustam vividly depict the interrelationship be tween the king and his immediate officials. Closest to the Great King was the heir to the throne, followed by the King’s Bow-bearer and the King’s Spear-bearer. At the court the King’s Relatives, the Persian nobles, and the King’s Friends acted as counsellors and advisers. Externally the organization of royal power was represented by the satraps whose own courts presumably were modelled on the royal court. The levels of political power and authority within the palace organization continued down to the palace ad ministration. Within such a carefully structured hierarchy of power it is difficult to imagine that the women at the royal court were an undifferentiated group lacking a similar order of status and rank in relation to the king as the centre of authority.
Fathers and Children
Authors: Arjava Antti
Published: November 2023

One of the most peculiar features of Roman law was the father’s dominant position. In theory, he exercised an almost absolute authority, patria potestas, over his descendants until his own death. This should not be confused with the power of the kin. In societies where central power is weak, kinship groups have often taken a key role in securing internal order and external security. It is true that the system of patria potestas fulfilled some of these functions, providing a means of social control within the family. There was thus less need for direct state involvement in many areas.’ The Roman republic did not have a particularly strong central government, and even in the imperial era the machinery of the state was only slowly developing. However, the clans (gentes) had already lost all practical importance in Roman law.
Married Women
Authors: Arjava Antti
Published: November 2023

There should be no doubt that marriage was a very important institution in Roman society. The state encouraged it because it produced new citizens. Individual people, too, had many reasons to crave for a family. In the lower classes it provided social security: it was not good to grow old without children. Well born people wanted legitimate offspring to inherit their property and to continue their line, that is, to ensure their immortality after death. Males did not usually need marriage for sex, although many females did. In Chapter 6 we will discuss other sexual relations, and the definition of marriage. The present chapter is devoted to the role of the housewife and to her economic independence.
The Emergence Of The Egyptian State (c.3200—2686 BC)
Authors: Bard Kathryn A
Published: November 2023

The Naqada III phase, c.3200–3000 BC, is the last phase of the Predynastic Period, according to Kaiser’s revision of Petrie’s sequence dates. It was during this period that Egypt was first unified into a large territorial state, and the political consolidation that laid the foundations for the Early Dynastic state of the 1st and 2nd Dynasties must also have occurred then. In the latter part of this phase there is evidence of kings preceding those of the 1st Dynasty, in what is now called ‘Dynasty o ’. They were buried at Abydos near the royal cemetery of the 1st Dynasty. On the Palermo Stone, a late 5th Dynasty king-list (see Chapter 1), the presence of names and figures of seated kings in compartments in the broken top part of the list suggests that the Egyptians believed that there had been rulers preceding those of the 1st Dynasty. There is considerable debate, however, regarding such factors as the precise nature of the process of unification, the date when it took place, and the question of the origins of Dynasty o.
The First Intermediate Period (c.2160—2055 BC)
Authors: Seidlmayer Stephan
Published: November 2023

The term ‘Old Kingdom’ was imposed on Egyptian chronology by nineteenthcentury historians and its connotations can be misleading. It reflects an approach to the periodicity of history about which we may now entertain serious reservations. The ancient Egyptians never used it and would have found the difference between the Early Dynastic Period (3000–2686 BC) and the Old Kingdom (2686–2160 BC) rather difficult to grasp. The last king of the Early Dynastic Period and the first rulers of the Old Kingdom were, it seems, all related to Queen Nimaathap, who was described as mother of the king’s children under Khasekhemwy and as ‘mother of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt’ under Djoser 2667–2648 BC. For the Egyptians even more important was the fact that the place of the royal residence did not change, but remained at White Wall (Ineb-hedj), on the west bank of the Nile south of modern Cairo.
The Second Intermediate Period [CT] (c.1650—1550 BC)
Authors: Bourriau Janine
Published: November 2023

The Second Intermediate Period is defined by the division of Egypt—the fragmentation of the Two Lands. ‘Why do I contemplate my strength while there is one Great Man in Avaris and another in Kush, sitting united with an Asiatic and a Nubian while each man possesses his slice of Egypt.’ This was the complaint of the Theban King Kamose (1555–1550 BC) at the end of the 17th Dynasty.
The Late Period (66–332 BC)
Authors: Lloyd Alan B
Published: November 2023

Egyptologists have generally been dismissive of the Late Period, regarding it all too often as the last gasp of a once great culture. Such views seriously devalue the historical achievement of these centuries as well as the remarkable vitality that pharaonic civilization continued to display. The student of this age has also a unique advantage. In earlier periods we have to rely largely or exclusively on Egyptian evidence, with all its inherent distortions, but the historian of the Late Period disposes of a much broader range of written evidence, which offers unparalleled potential for cross-reference and thereby provides insights into the workings of Egyptian political and military institutions stripped of the propagandist veneer invariably applied to historical narrative by native Egyptian scribes.
The Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BC)
Authors: Lloyd Alan B
Published: November 2023

Ptolemaic Egypt is a tale of two cultures. Differing in ethos, focus, and aspiration, these cultures initially maintained a wary coexistence, in which convenience and the balance of power generated a viable degree of cooperation usually sufficiently effective to mask their mutual distaste. From the end of the third century BC, even this collaboration was increasingly eroded by the divisive pressures exerted by dynastic schism, maladministration, economic crisis, and Egyptian resentments. Not the least fascinating aspect of this complex relationship is the fact that, despite all its inner tensions, Egypt of the Ptolemies was in many ways spectacularly successful, whether we consider the achievements of the Graeco-Macedonian élite or those of the Egyptian cultural milieu.
Artefact Distribution and Spatial Function in Pompeian Houses
Authors: Allison Penelope
Published: November 2023

Research into spatial function of Roman houses has recently become very active. In many studies, when an illustration is needed to validate a textual anecdote, the investigator, usually a historian, will search for an example from a site such as Pompeii. Conversely, other investigators, usually archaeologists, will often scan the texts for an anecdote which may help explain the arrangement of architectural features of an excavated site. It is often difficult to test the appropriateness of such approaches. However, given current wariness of generalizations based on the presumed existence of an example, be it textual or archaeological, such haphazard methodology not only seems unscholarly but can be shown to be a restricted use of the available sources.
The Army on Campaign
Authors: Goldsworthy Adrian Keith
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I shall examine the methods of operation of the Roman army on campaign. I shall look most of all at the strategy which it employed. For this study we shall define strategy as the means of attaining the army.s aims and objectives in any campaign. It is important to consider how much of the army.s behaviour was dictated by the local situation, and how much reflected standard practice applied in all situations. If we are to understand the strategy of these campaigns, we must first establish what each side needed to do in order to achieve victory. Would the enemy be forced to capitulate by the defeat of his main army, the capture of an important city, or attacks on his economic assets, such as crops and cattle? As the last chapter has shown, the political and social organization of a people determined not only the way in which its army fought, but also the event that caused it to acknowledge defeat in a conflict.
Reading Female Flesh: Ovid Amores 3.1
Authors: Wyke Maria
Published: November 2023

The Propertian lover-poet itemizes the physical attractions of his mistress in poem 2.3 at the same time as he declares that it was her skills in dancing, singing, and poetic composition that captivated him more:
Oriental Vamp: Cleopatra 1910s
Authors: Wyke Maria
Published: November 2023

no theme could better attract and move an artist than that which, through the figures of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, had so much weight over the destinies of the ancient world. It provided above all the opportunity to parade before the eyes of the spectator the most distinctive places of ancient Rome and ancient Egypt, which everyone has imprinted in their minds at their school-desks, but has never seen, nor would have any way of really seeing, not even if they spent the treasures of Croesus. Next it offered the possibility of reconstructing landings and battles which have remained among the most memorable of those times, and which will be seen reproduced on the cinema screen not without trembling emotion.
Writing down Rome
Authors: Henderson John
Published: November 2023

In a series of controversial essays, this book examines the Roman penchant for denigration, and in particular self-denigration, at the expense of Roman culture. Comedy in Republican Rome radically transformed both itself and the culture from which it sprang: in Poenulus, Plautus laughed at Roman depreciation of Carthage; in Adelphoe, Terence turned on his audience in provocation. The comic Roman poets played with self-mockery: in Eclogue III, Virgil tests his audience's security in judging peasant unpleasantness; in Odes III.22, Horace sends up his own pious rusticity down on the farm. In the second half of the book, Roman verse satire is the subject: the genre of male bragging mocks its own masculine aggression. The great Latin satirists make fun of making fun: Horace, Satires I.9, shows up the politics of humour, unmanned by his own good manners; Persius nails his own weaknesses in fortifying himself against the world; Juvenal, Satire 1, loathes the literary scene he bids to dominate. The book shows a vital ingredient of Roman poetry to be an energetic surge of urbane banter directed towards Roman culture.
Suck It and See: Horace, Epode 8
Authors: Henderson John
Published: November 2023

Three chapters of this book poke into crevices of post-Republican/pre-Imperial Rome—into ‘triumviral’ poetry. Chapter 5 fast forwards to 23 and Horace’s inauguration of the Augustan principate in his chef d’oeuvre, Odes I-III; leaving lyric for the hexameters that occupy the second half of the book, Chapter 6 re-winds to the publication in the early 30s of Virgil’s first collection, the bucolic poetry of the Eclogues. In Part III, we will plunge into the revolutionary period between the coup of Julius Caesar and the installation of Caesar Augustus (49−23) once more, via a poem from Horace’s first publication, Satires I (Chapter 8), from the mid-30s. Virgil and Horace left for Roman and Western posterity a paradigm for the poet’s career (§ 20).
Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica
Authors: Hershkowitz Debra
Published: November 2023

Valerius Flaccus' unfinished and unjustly neglected epic, recounting the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece and the early stages of the love affair of Jason and Medea, has been relegated to the outer fringes of classical scholarship for many years. No full-length study devoted to the Argonautica has been published in English for over 100 years. This book seeks to redress the balance. The author aims to provide readers who have not yet encountered Valerius Flaccus' work with a general introduction to this multi-faceted epic poem. At the same time Hershkowitz offers those already familiar with the Argonautica an in-depth re-evaluation of the work, contextualizing it within both an historical and a literary framework, and focusing in particular on its intertextual relationship with Apollonius' Argonautica and Virgil's Aeneid. Using Valerius' epic as a test-case, Dr. Hershkowitz hopes to challenge many of the critical assumptions about the nature of Silver Latin literature.
Golden Lamps In a Green Night
Authors: Reckert Stephen
Published: November 2023

The jangadeiros of Bahia—well named ‘Bay of All Saints’ —light votive fires on the beaches to Yemanjá, the Yoruba goddess of the sea, before they set sail for the night’s fishing on their fragile rafts. But pre-technological attitudes and practices are not peculiar to the Third World, as the Midsummer Night bonfires1 along the banks of the Galician rías and on the rocky hillsides of Trás-os-Montes bear witness; even in our own century a substantial part of the population of north-western Iberia has continued to inhabit in imagination ‘a region of fiery dragons and apples of gold’ (as a historian of Portuguese literature called it) hardly less syncretic, if more discreetly camouflaged, than anything in north-eastern Brazil. And the corresponding part of the population of Andalusia, with its Gypsy and Moorish leavening, shares the same mythic or symbolic mode of apprehending and interpreting the natural world.
Limits And Thresholds (Liminality In Some Modern Poets)
Authors: Reckert Stephen
Published: November 2023

As early as the reign of Augustus, popular etymology equated limes with līmen: ends with beginnings. The equation may have been prompted by cyclical ideas of Time; but it is a wise saying that there are no false etymologies, and in this case (on however shaky historical grounds), vox populi spoke with the intuitive authority of poetry.The poetic intuition that dead ends are potential thresholds is typically expressed in images of confinement or exclusion and of attempts to escape or transcend them.
Introduction: Fragments d’un Discours Furieux
Authors: Hershkowitz Debra
Published: November 2023

There is no one simple definition, as even those who have built their profession on its study are forced to admit. The fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) begins by noting that ‘Although this manual provides a classification of mental disorders, it must be admitted that no definition adequately specifies precise boundaries for the concept of “mental disorder” …’. Yet this difficulty in definitional precision has not, of course, prevented people (including the authors of DSM-IV) from attempting to pin down the meaning of madness. These attempts generally take an aetiological form, and can be divided broadly into three groups, although there is, of course, a good deal of overlap between them. First are the neurobiological models, which seek the roots of disorder of the mind in dysfunctional mechanics of the body. These models, based on ‘hard science’ rather than the more abstract the orizing which characterizes the other groups, are tempting because they seem to offer the stability of empiricism, but detractors-most notably and vociferously, Szasz-stress that they are, in fact, not based on empirical evidence at all, but rather on analogy: mental illness is like somatic illness, but it is not somatic illness, and to call it illness at all, according to Szasz, is to be using a metaphor.
Literacy and ancient Egyptian society
Authors: Baines John
Published: November 2023

Literacy is an important, if often tacit, criterion according to which fields of study are categorized, and this corresponds to an evident reality. Societies completely pervaded by writing, such as our own, are very different from non-literate societies. In between these extremes comes a range of possibilities, some of which were placed by Talcott Parsons (1964: 347; 1966: 26–7), to whose ideas later work has referred, in an evolutionary sequence with literacy as a significant element in classification. Against this background, a study of literacy should seek to cross boundaries between disciplines. General works in the Weld have not been based on detailed studies within the areas they compare, because such studies are mostly lacking.
Literacy, social organization, and the archaeological record: the case of early Egypt
Authors: Baines John
Published: November 2023

The use of writing in ancient civilizations poses problems for archaeology, whose most powerful models and methods of analysis are designed for unwritten materials. The separation of the written and the unwritten is felt to be profound. Elizabeth Carter and Matthew Stolper (1984: vii), an archaeologist and a historian of the ancient Near East, state that ‘The creation and preservation of ancient texts and of other artifacts result from—and therefore signify—diVerent intentions, behaviors and processes.’ For literate cultures, archaeology has until recently been seen as an adjunct, with social analysis being chiefly the domain of history.
Schäfer’s mottoes and the understanding of representation
Authors: Baines John
Published: November 2023

Heinrich Schäfer used as his principal motto (‘A’) for Von ägyptischer Kunst (Principles of Egyptian art) a sentence at the beginning of the 1764 edition of J. J. Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums:

The oldest sources show that the earliest pictures represented what a man is, not how he appears to be, his outline, not a view of him.

He gave as a successor to the same idea a rather tortuous statement of Goethe (motto ‘B’) in a commentary on an exhibition of reconstructions of paintings by Polygnotus (c.480 bce) held in Weimar in winter 1803–4:

To look back to the Wrst beginnings of painting from the pinnacles of achievement it has reached in modern times, to gain an awareness of the admirable qualities of the founders of that art, and to pay homage to the artists, who were ignorant of some methods of representation with which even novices are familiar today; all this demands firmness of purpose, calm detachment[Entäusserung], and an appreciation of the great value of the style which has with reason been termed ‘essential’[wesentlich], since it is concerned more with the essential character of objects than with their appearance.
Introduction: History and Literature
Authors: Rood Tim
Published: November 2023

The best historian is the one who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narrative like a painting. Thucydides is always striving in his writing for this vividness, since it is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to instil in readers the emotions of amazement and consternation felt by viewers. For Demosthenes drawing up the Athenians at the very edge of the breakwater at Pylos; and Brasidas urging on his pilot to beach the ship, advancing to the gangway, receiving wounds, fainting, and falling on to the bow; and the Spartans fighting a land battle from sea, the Athenians a sea battle from land; and again in the Sicilian narrative ‘the two armies on shore, with victory hanging in the balance, a prey to the most agonizing and conflicting emotions’ … and ‘as the strife is protracted without decision, reflecting in their swaying bodies the agitation of their minds’—all this has the mark of pictorial vividness in its composition and portrayal of events as they happen.
The Analysis of Narrative: Pylos
Authors: Rood Tim
Published: November 2023

Thucydides’ treatment of land battles ... is either unnecessarily extended or excessively condensed. His narrative of Athenian operations at Pylos and the island called Sphakteria where they blockaded the Spartans and carried their position by siege, is an example. ... he describes with accuracy and force all that both sides did in the fighting, deliberately devoting more than three hundred lines to these battles, although the numbers who died or who laid down their arms were not great. . . . But mentioning the campaign of Nikias, when ... he shut the Spartans up in their guard-posts, reduced to surrender the inhabitants of Kythera and the Aiginetan colonists on Thyrea, and ravaged wide areas of the Peloponnese, from where he sailed back to Athens with a large number of prisoners, Thucydides gave only a cursory account. (Dion. Hal. De Thue.
Temporal Manipulation
Authors: Rood Tim
Published: November 2023

In life many different actions are accomplished at the same time, but those who record them have to interrupt the narrative and to parcel out different times to simultaneous events. This is contrary to nature: the result is that while reality conveys the experience of events, the written record, deprived of such power, imitates events, but falls far short of the true arrangement. (Diod. xx. 43. 7)
Continuity: Book VIII
Authors: Rood Tim
Published: November 2023

‘Some say that the eighth book is spurious, and not by Thucydides’: so Marcellinus (43). He himself names, and rejects, three people who had been credited with its authorship: Thucydides’ daughter (‘it would not be womanly nature to imitate such skill and excellence’), Xenophon (on grounds of style), and The opompus (without comment). He continues: ‘to some (especially those of discernment), it seems to be by Thucydides, but unadorned, written in rough outline, with many of its events only summarized and allowing for adornment and expansion’ (44).
Words and the Poet
Authors: Lyne R O A M
Published: November 2023

Readers familiar with Dr Lyne's last book on Virgil will know what to expect. There is the same clarity of expression and layout, the same care to make his use of special terminology unambiguous, the same passionate belief, to use his own words, that "nothing in Vergil is without purpose of explanation". Dr Lyne undoubtedly makes the reader think and sharpens his perception of Virgil; he imparts much interesting, factual information in a clear, orderly style and his passion to know what can be found in Virgil's text is genuine and attractive.' Greece Rome To a surprising extent Vergil avoids artifices of poetic diction like archaism and grecism, preferring ordinary language: words that were the common stock of the Latin tongue or even (and this remarkably often) words that conventional poets generally avoided at all costs as too ordinary (prosaisms, colloquialisms). In this he shares the taste of his contemporary Horace. The present book identifies and categorizes such diction in vergil. But more importantly it shows how such comparatively unpromising material is converted by the poet's methods of `combination' (iunctura) into poetry. Parallels are drawn with Horace's procedures, and Vergil's boldness stressed. Horace combines words in such a way as to `make them new'; Vergil's combinations veritably extort unexpected and novel sense. Horace can put prosaic words to work in spite of their unpromising familiarity; Vergil more vigorously exploits them. The Vergilian techniques of extortion and exploitation are richly illustrated in this book. Not all Vergil's characteristic methods merit such violent descriptions. His use of the traditional simile ('narrative through imagery') is characterized by discretion and guile - but at key points links up with those more forceful methods. Guileful too is the way in which he may persuade some neutral word to acquire a specal sense over a stretch of text - or the way he may incite us to pursue a sequence of related effects. Vergilian narrative through imagery, and his techniques of incitement and acquisition, are also fully explained in this richly original and informative book.
Vergil’s Diction: Context and Definitions
Authors: Lyne R O A M
Published: November 2023

‘Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself as, a return to common speech’ (T. S. Eliot). Much, perhaps most, poetry delights in a poetic diction, language strange to ordinary speech and evocative of experience other than our own. Equally it will sense a need to retain contact with the real language of those with whom it wishes to communicate. This latter consideration, as Eliot says, periodically seems paramount, both to practitioners and to theorists. Then the problem presents itself, consciously or unconsciously: how is poetry substantially composed in the language of everyday men to be poetry? The problem presents itself, if less acutely, to those who champion the paramountcy of poetic diction. If I (no poet) string together words exclusively restricted to poetical usage, I will not produce everyday language; but neither will I produce the genuine article. But the problem is perhaps more acute and visible when ordinary language is the material favoured. In all cases, however, it is there: how to make the words poetry? Poets are practitioners of the answer. Critics must try to understand and analyse the process.
Exploitation: I
Authors: Lyne R O A M
Published: November 2023

Horace, I said above (1.2), is prepared to make use of prosaic diction, in spite of the fact that it will often appear unpromisingly familiar. For example, wishing to focus our attention on the dangers of ‘money’ or the pleasures of an ordinary ‘dinner’, he uses words that denote these everyday things directly, even in the Odes: ‘pecunia’, ‘cena’. Most poets, deeming such things to be more the province of prose, prefer to gloss and cover them with other and glamorous connotations: they use the words ‘aurum’, ‘opes’, ‘dapes’, and ‘epulae’-gold, wealth and feasts. But, Horace would say, if you are moralizing about real money, it is pointless to glamorize, camouflage or in any way to deflect attention from the real, everyday thing. Likewise if it is your attention to laud plain, old dinner. 1

Horace makes use of prosaic words; and, too, colloquialisms. Vergil I think more vigorously exploits such diction. This is what I shall begin to demonstrate now. But I should mention a preliminary point. I suggested in 1.3 a couple of factors which might induce a word to become generically prosaic, or colloquial. We should now note that, when a word has become prosaic or colloquial, it possesses another quality simply by virtue of that fact. In a poem it is ‘eye-catching’: it is unexpected. So a prosaic word catches the eye, and then directs the attention to an exact and limited meaning, or to an area of experience not normally associated with poetry; or it may do both of these things simultaneously. And colloquialism catches the eye, and directs the attention to one of its particular provinces of experience. In both cases Vergil then exploits this package of qualities.
Violence And The Law
Authors: Lintott Andrew
Published: November 2023

The processes of popular justice were in some forms(occentatio, capillum immittere)specifically declared illegal, in others tolerated and even encouraged(quiritare),and in one case at least-the arrest and punishment of certain types of thief-officially recognized. It is time therefore to examine more closely the position of the violent assertion by the individual of his genuine or supposed rights in relation to the law. For convenience I have termed this ‘self-help’, translating literally the GermanSelbsthilfe,for the actions in question do not all fall under the English term ‘selfdefence’.
The Violence Of The Late Republic
Authors: Lintott Andrew
Published: November 2023

AT the time when Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune, the majority of Romans would not have regarded political violence as mere primitive barbarism. Rather it was a recognized political weapon, which in recent years had been used rarely, but was nevertheless a necessary sanction, should law and its associated physical power prove inadequate. Violence had always played a considerable part in the settling of private disputes, where it had been ritualized into legal process but also remained in its natural form of extra-legal self-help. The outstanding feature of the domestic politics of the early Republic was the struggle of the orders, in which, according to tradition, violence and non-violent physical pressure had dictated the course of events, and the marks of the physical confrontation ofpatresandplebsremained fixed in the constitution. Stories of conflict between citizens stood out in the history books devoted to Roman law, custom, and virtue, which were essential reading matter for the young man aspiring to public life. In consequence it is not surprising that a man like Cicero, who possessed by temperament and education refined sensibilities and a horror of internecine strife, encouraged violence, if it was undertaken by theboniin defence of the established order against theaudacesandimprobiwho sought to disturb it.
Britain 1714-1815
Authors: Gee Austin
Published: November 2023

Baines, Paul. ‘Ossianic geographies: Fingalian figures on the Scottish tour, 1760-1830’, Scotlands 4:1 (1997), 44-61. Day, Roger William. Decline to glory: a reassessment of the life and times of Lady Hester Stanhope. (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1997), xiv, 416p. (Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Romantic Reassessment, 124.) Houfe, Simon. ‘A Northamptonshire lady in France: the travel diaries of Lady Pomfret, 1738 and 1749’, Northamptonshire Past and Present 51 (1998), 33-44.
Red Wine, Red Politics: The Wine Poems in Context
Authors: Burton Richard D E
Published: November 2023

In both the 1857 and 1861 editions of Les Fleurs du mat, Baudelaire gave a place apart in the overall ‘architecture’ of his work to five poems on the theme of wine which, it will be argued here, are the fullest—because most complex and contradictory—poetic expres¬ sion of his interrelated political, aesthetic, and ethical concerns during the period covered by the first four chapters of this book.
Metamorphoses of the Ragpicker: Interpreting ‘Le Vin des Chiffonniers’
Authors: Burton Richard D E
Published: November 2023

‘Le Vin des chiffonniers’ is without question the most interesting of the wine poems not only because of its amplification of the themes we have been discussing but also through its use of the ragpicker, a figure who is obsessively present in mid-nineteenth-century writings on Paris, both literary and non-literary. Furthermore, no other poem in Les Fleurs du mal appears to have been so frequently and so radically reworked by Baudelaire; no fewer than nine separate versions of the poem are known—ten if one includes the prose version in Du Vin et du haschisch. According to Prarond, this poem, like ‘L’Ame du vin’, was composed before 1843, and it is indeed probable that a version existed by that date.