bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Irigaray's Cave: Feminist Theory and the Politics of French Classicism
Authors: Leonard Miriam
Published: August 2016

Although there are countless feminist readings of Plato and readings of Platoas(a)feminist, the French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray's extended—nearly 200 page!—reading of the cave passage from Book 7 of Plato'sRepublicmay still come as something of a surprise to the classicist. In the recently published bookFeminist Interpretations of Plato, however, there is an essay by Irigaray on Plato'sSymposiumincluded as just another example of this now established genre. Just any other?—well not quite… As in its sister volumeFeminist Interpretations of Aristotle, the editors have decided that unlike any other article in the collection, Irigaray's contribution needs some further exegesis for the classical scholar. An essay on Irigaray reading Plato appears in tandem to her own article. Just like in the Aristotle volume, this essay presents itself as a guide to the perplexed, explaining to the ancient philosopher schooled in a more traditional idiom of Anglo-Saxon academic research some of the context for Irigaray's seemingly inappropriate style. Freeland writes of Irigaray's Aristotle piece: ‘Irigaray's essay will be astonishing to the Aristotle scholar who reads it unaware of Irigaray's earlier writings’; in fact, she continues, ‘…it may seem unclear whether one is reading Aristotle scholarship, a primitive biology text or an erotic novel ….Reading her then,’ she concludes, ‘is far different from reading the usual commentators on thePhysics. Clearly, style is paramount to Irigaray's method of reading.’
Gnawing at the End of the Rope: Poets on the Field in Two Vergilian Catalogues
Authors: Malamud Martha
Published: August 2016

(Iliad2.603-14)

They who held Arkadia under the sheer peak, Kyllene,

beside the tomb of Aipytos, where men fight at close quarters,

they who dwelt in Orchomenos of the flocks, and Pheneos,

about Rhipe and Stratia and windy Enispe;

they who held Tegea and Mantineia the lovely,

they who held Stymphalos, and dwelt about Parrhasia,

their leader was Angkaios' son, powerful Agapenor.

Sixty was the number of their ships, and in each ship

went many men of Arkadia, well skilled in battle.

Agamemnon the lord of men himself had given

these for the crossing of the wine-blue sea their strong-benched vessels,

Atreus' son, since the work of the sea was nothing to these men.

The Iliadic catalogue of ships stands as a monument to the victory of memory over time. Through the medium of hexameter verse, the names and deeds of the dead have been recalled and passed on to the living. The device of the catalogue, in fact, has the potential to stand as a pure model of epic recollection: the listing of names, places, and numbers of men, along with particular details, such as the Arkadians' ignorance of seafaring, provides the illusion that what is recalled is fact, that the poem is a screen on which the reality of the past is projected to the audience of the present for the purpose of commemoration, the safeguarding of communal memory.
I Am Dressed, Therefore I Am?: Vertumnus in Propertius 4.2 and in Metamorphoses 14.622-771
Authors: Lindheim Sara H.
Published: August 2016

Recent interpretations of Propertius 4.2 see in Vertumnus' shifting costumes a programmatic statement about the new poetics of Propertius' fourth book of elegy. The statue's ability to assume and shed identities with a simple wardrobe change mirrors the poet's desire to challenge the traditional generic boundaries of love elegy, dressing it up now in Roman themes, now in amatory ones. No doubt this is so. And yet, more generally, recent criticism finds elegy as a genre hospitable to interpretations that focus on issues of gender and identity. Indeed, as Marilyn Skinner has succinctly summarised, ‘texts of the late first century BCE are notorious for the phenomenon of “gender dissonance”…boundaries between ‘male’ and ‘female’ as essential categories of psychosexual identity fluctuate wildly and eventually break down.’ Propertius' fourth and final poetic collection provides fertile territory for an interrogation of gender, since it both highlights female voices—for example Arethusa, Cynthia or Cornelia—and explores moments of transvestism—for example Vertumnus and Hercules. I argue that when Propertius cloaks the speaking statue, Vertumnus, alternately in ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ attributes, he lays bare not simply poetics, but, further, he questions the very constitution of gender. In other words, Propertius probes the relationship between self-representation and identity and reveals that both are fluid and, more surprisingly perhaps, that the former gives rise to the latter.
Introduction
Authors: Walker Andrew D.
Published: August 2016

What Ovid endured as an ‘exile’ in Tomis is a great unknown—the stuff now of novels and ‘imaginary’ lives. If we take him at his word—the testimony of the exile poetry—literary isolation was the least of his worries. Bordering on the Black Sea, Ovid's frontier town was a place of life-threatening illness (Tr. 3.3.13, 3.8.23f.) and unbearable, limb-numbing cold (Ex Pont. 1.7.11f., 4.12.33f.), a place where inhabitants pass an existence at war, warding off frequent invasions by savage barbarians—so frequent, in fact, that the aged poet is himself conscripted into military service (Ex Pont. 18.7). In many respects, Tomis is constructed in the exile poetry as the antithetical opposite of the world of Rome; for the urbane ‘urban’ persona of the Ars Amatoria, life in Tomis rates as a fate worse than death, and often the poet describes his existence there as death-like (e.g. Tr. 5.9.19, Ex Pont. 1.8.27), his surroundings like the underworld (cf. Tr. 5.7.43f.), and his daily rituals as practice for dying. And although he outlived Augustus—the princeps who exiled the poet to the Black Sea in 7 CE—Ovid would indeed die in Tomis, far from family and home, out ‘on the furthermost limits of the unknown world’ (in extremis ignoti partibus orbis, Tr. 3.3.3).
Male Victimology in Juvenal 6
Authors: Johnson W.R.
Published: August 2016

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything anymore, teach me others, or let me be silent.

Beckett, Endgame

terra malos homines nunc educat atque pusillos.Today the earth breeds a race of degenerate weaklings.Juvenal 15.70

nee galeam quassas, nee terram cuspide pulsas.You do not shake your helmet, nor beat the ground with your spear.Juvenal 2.130

My intention here is to describe what seems to me an aspect of this superb and notorious poem that has been insufficiently examined, a major disruption in the sign-systems it makes use of and is used by. In order to do that I will be, as best I can, setting aside questions about the poem as a product (its meaning, how its form and content fuse to effect that meaning) and about the intentions its producer (the poet or his persona) had when he went about producing that product; whether the meaning and the intention are recoverable or not, whether they are decidable or not, is a moot question, and to try to answer it here would obscure my project (and doubtless waste our time). ‘To interpret a text,’ says Barthes, ‘is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it.’ To have some access to the portion of that plural that concerns me, I have to be arbitrary (and fictive) with the question of the poet's meaning/intention and to set aside as well questions of his poem's aesthetic charms.
Europe's Malleable Topos: Mythologising Ancient Greece
Authors: Fitzgerald Gerald
Published: August 2016

The primacy of the Greeks in the canon of Western literature is neither an accident nor the result of a decision imposed by a higher authority; it is simply a reflection of the intrinsic worth of the material, its sheer originality and brilliance.

Bernard Knox, The Oldest Dead White European Males

To see the Acropolis is a dream one treasures without even dreaming to realize it. I don't know why this hill harbours the essence of artistic thought. I can appreciate the perfection of these temples and realize that nowhere else are they so extraordinary; and a long time ago I accepted the fact that this place should be like a repository of a sacred standard…

Le Corbusier, Journey to the East

By recalling the beginnings of history when Being unveiled itself in the thinking of the Greeks, it can be shown that the Greeks from the very beginning experienced the Being of beings as the presence of the present.

Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being

Greece has played many roles in Europe's story. For a country that, unlike Rome, had very little geopolitical influence on Europe, these roles are neither, in their extent, expectable, nor, in their variety, consistent. Why Greece? As for territory, Egypt and Asia seem to have been more colonisable projects for the Greeks. The texts of Herodotus, Thucydides (Book VIII), Xenophon (ubiquitously) suggest a continuing engagement with Eastern cultures.
The World of Hesiod
Authors: Clay Diskin
Published: August 2016

Toute pensée de l'origine des choses n'est jamais qu'une revérie de leur disposition actuelle, une manière de dégénérescence du réel, une variation sur ce qui est.Paul Valéry in his Preface to Poe'sEureka.

The World of Hesiodis familiar as a title, but the world of Hesiod is difficult to locate in a single place. Indeed, it is a number of places. It seems to have its centre in Askra in Boiotia and to extend out in space as far as the high slopes of Mount Helikon. It is a land-locked world and its severe limitations are apparent from what the poet says about the sea and the short sea passage from the mainland at Aulis to Chalkis on Euboia. Even as he offers his advice to the seafarer, he admits that he has no experience in seafaring or ships himself (W&D649). He had only made the trip across to the island of Euboia once to compete as a poet at the funeral games of Amphidamas (W&D646-60). Hesiodic poetry, when it centres on Hesiod's home, seems to crowd into a very small and disagreeable patch of typical Greek countryside. But his Muses enlarge this world. They provide him with a knowledge that he cannot gain himself—both of seafaring and of the vast expanse of the physical world whose origins go beyond the very beginnings of human time. Hesiod's local Muses transport him from the springs of Permessos to the deep currents of Ocean and they disclose to him a universe vaster in its extent and deeper in time than that of the Homeric poems. A sign of these enlarged horizons is the fact that in theTheogonyHesiod begins to sing of the Muses of Helikon (1-4), but then shifts attention to the Muses of Olympos (36-80).
Discourse and Conflict in Hesiod: Eris and the Erides
Authors: Nagler Michael N.
Published: August 2016

One approaches Hesiod's discourse on the twoerides—or, if I am correct, the duplicitous nature oferis—with some trepidation, since the scholarship on this passage has been voluminous and rewarding. But the passage, which Hesiod launches into immediately after the formal prologue of theWorks and Days(11-26), may yet have more to teach us. It is, as Richard Hamilton has recently shown, programmatic for the entire poem; it may also be a definitive statement on the archaic construction of competition and conflict. In it Hesiod urges his brother explicitly (as he does implicitly throughout the poem) to stop coming after him for their father's patrimony and do some productive work; however this simple message is embedded in traditional allusions, poised between intense ambiguities and (like all good archaic poetry) fraught with the resonance of larger issues. All this has made it difficult to achieve scholarly consensus about the meaning of the passage. A close and helpful parallel is provided in theWorks and Daysitself by the brief discussion of the two functions ofaidōs(317-19), helpful primarily because it is in fact one principle with two functions that Hesiod describes there; but to put into relief more of the complexity of 11-16 we need to look at two other archaic passages that offer some perspective on the application of dualistic logic to conflict and related issues.
Re-Viewing Pygmalion
Authors: Eisner John , Sharrock Alison
Published: August 2016

On 5th February 1989, the review section ofThe Observercarried a full-page article on a film about Camille Claudel, the sculptress who was Rodin's mistress and who spent the last thirty years of her life in a mental asylum. The iconography of this page, supposedly concerned with the film and the woman, was telling. A large central image of Rodin, arms crossed and staring masterfully forward, is ringed by three, small, peripheral images of Claudel. Each is (of course) a photograph: one of the woman herself, one of the statue of her by her lover Rodin, and one of the actress who represents her in the film. The images display the slippage between women and artistic representations or creations (of women)—a slippage which is at the heart of the Pygmalion story. The title of the article isLove that turned to stone.

InMetamorphoses10.148-739, Ovid has the master-poet, Orpheus, react to the double loss of his wife, Eurydice, by singing to surrounding nature a set of tales, including that of Pygmalion (245-97). Pygmalion, it will be remembered, created a beautiful statue, with which he fell in love. With the help of Venus and in response to the artist's erotic attentions, the statue came to life.
Narrators and Narrative in the Philoctetes of Sophocles
Authors: O'Higgins Dolores
Published: August 2016

According to Proclus, the story of the bowman Philoctetes' return to Troy from his solitude on Lemnos appeared in the Little Iliad. In terms of the overall history of the war, the event occurs relatively late—shortly before the destruction of the city; indeed, according to the oracle of Helenus which inspired the recovery expedition to Lemnos, it seems to have been necessary to the success of the Greek war-effort. In terms of the epic tradition, it can be seen as something of a watershed, standing between a glorious, but unsuccessful, past and a successful, but somewhat ambivalent, future, recorded in the Iliou Persis.

Sophocles' play looks both forward to and back at the war in which it is situated. Neoptolemus and Odysseus, the men chosen to retrieve the great bow of Heracles and its current owner, Philoctetes, anticipate the glory that will belong to the destroyers of Troy. They also together concoct a manipulative account of the recent past—a version clearly at odds with familiar epics. The purpose of this account—narrated by Neoptolemus— appears to have been to win Philoctetes' trust and sympathy, and so to induce him to hand over the bow of his own accord. At first this bow seems to be the primary focus of the conspirators' designs, although eventually it becomes clear that Philoctetes himself also will be needed at Troy. Philoctetes hands Neoptolemus the bow when he falls ill, but shortly afterwards Neoptolemus explains the true reason for his arrival on Lemnos, and later returns the bow to Philoctetes. Neoptolemus' gradually emerging scruples are the obvious cause of this breakdown in the plot. He reclaims the heroic tradition of his father, Achilles, and rejects Odysseus' trickery.
Poetic Values and Poetic Technique in Aristophanes
Authors: Edwards Leslie Collins
Published: August 2016

AtWasps57-66, Aristophanes distinguishes his comedy from humor of the vulgar (phortikē) Megarian sort. Elsewhere he boasts that his comedy is more intellectual, for it is clever and wise (Clouds548, 522); and alleges that his rivals write comedy which aims only at laughs and relies for this purpose on vulgar props and language, while his comedy is primarily verbal (epea, Clouds544), conceptual (ideai, dianoiai, Clouds547;Peace750; etc.), innovative (kainon ti, Wasps1044, 1053;Clouds547), and infused with modesty (sōphrosunē, Knights545,Clouds537; etc.). It goes without saying that any and all of these claims, made within a comedy, ought not to be taken entirely innocently. Nor, however, ought they to be dismissed as mere nonsense, for they contain what is an important contradiction within the logic of the dialectic between old and new so fundamental to comedy; it is a contradiction which runs throughout Aristophanes' discussion of his comedy, yet which is encapsulated in the first parabasis ofClouds. Here the poet identifies with the avant-garde; yet his poetry is modest (sōphron) and he scorns the manners — the hairstyle, to be exact (ou komō, 545) — of the affected or decadent young of his day, although a sign of being refined (kompsos). Aristophanes in his posture of innovator shows impatience with the traditional inasmuch as it is repetitive; yet he also claims a position of priority and moral sensibility incompatible with the posture of innovator within the terms of his own comedy. Moreover, Aristophanes situates the antithesis between old and new within an overt hierarchy in which the old, although preferred for its moral authority, is continually being usurped by the new: sophistic rhetoric has appropriated the vocabulary which both sides of the opposition must employ and has, by controlling the terms and context, informed the debate between them.
Textual Geography in Sallust's the War with Jugurtha
Authors: Scanlon Thomas F.
Published: August 2016

The apparent geographical inaccuracies in Sallust's account of the war with Jugurtha have attracted the attention of many scholars. Several years ago Etienne Tiffou devoted a study to the fact that Sallust's three historical works show a progressively greater interest in geography, but many topographical difficulties inThe War with Jugurtharemain unexplained. Others see the geographical excursuses inThe War with Jugurthaas simply traditional devices or perhaps structural fillers whose content is purely derivative and whose contribution to the themes of the work is minimal or nil: Sallust does not contribute much more than ‘Greek erudition and fancies’. Yet many of the supposed inaccuracies and thematically empty excursuses can be better understood and appreciated as part of a consistent Sallustian technique of internal allusion. A careful reading of Sallust's references to places inThe War with Jugurthareveals the author's sophisticated use of a ‘textual geography’, i.e. the deliberate selection and arrangement of places in the text to allude to and support his central ideas. Most significantly he compares Rome to Carthage in their origins, growth and decline, he describes the reactions of the Roman people to the course of the war, and he characterizes Roman leaders in their conduct of the war against Jugurtha by using this device.
War, Death and Savagery in Lucretius: The Beasts of Battle in 5.1308-49
Authors: Segal Charles
Published: August 2016

‘Perhaps the most astonishing paragraph in the poem’ is Bailey's often quoted comment on 5.1308-49, the account of how men of the past tried to use wild beasts in war. ‘Fantastic’, ‘strange’, ‘bizarre’, ‘astonishing’, the product of ‘an intelligence fevered, perverted and cancerous’, a display of ‘obsessive exaltation’—such are the puzzled reactions of scholars to these disturbing lines.

The most recent commentator finds it full of ‘macabre and gory detail’ and ‘not integrated properly into its context’. And his reviewer's approval threatens to undo forty years' work on the patterns of thought, symbol and image in Lucretius: Bailey's biographical explanation, the poet's subjection to hallucination and even mental derangement, it is observed, ‘has never been satisfactorily refuted’. Even scholars who have sought to explain the passage rather than delete it as an interpolation or an aberration wonder whether the poet ‘has triumphed over the philosopher’ and therefore is called back to a more sober reality by the ‘recantation’ of 1341-49 (such things probably did not happen but might have, given the infinity of possible worlds).
Apollo in the Ion
Authors: Gellie George
Published: August 2016

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the Ion of Euripides was read and discussed with an unwavering solemnity. The serious approach commended itself for a number of reasons. Common decency and good taste made it difficult to talk lightly about rape and attempted murder. Whether the Apollo of the play was respected or despised, the judgement of him was seen as a ‘religious’ and therefore a straight-faced judgement. Those who wanted to use the play as a document of the times may have feared that a light-hearted play would be suspect as a source of historical record. Most potent of all, there was the long tradition of reverential handling of anything called ‘tragedy’. A play so called was expected to display the preoccupations of an Aeschylus or a Sophocles: the steady look at human pain, the moral search, the cosmic connection, the pursuit of value, the sober criticism of life. It was not always easy to find these things in the Ion, but they could be assumed in a ‘tragedy’ and therefore read into the play. In the two most widely-used translations of the play into English, Vellacott's in the Penguin series and Willetts' in the Chicago series, the translator has added stage-directions to suggest an unexpressed dissatisfaction in Ion which reverses the apparently warm and happy tenor of the text Both scholars have made a case for their ironic reading of the play's ending in subsequent critical writing.
Nihil Iam Ivra Natvrae Valent: Incest and Fratricide in Seneca's Phoenissae
Authors: Fantham Elaine
Published: August 2016

Almost every aspect of the Senecan text known as Phoenissae has been disputed except its authorship. The title, Phoenissae in the Etruscus, Thebais in the A-tradition of Mss, seems in each case to have been imposed for extraneous reasons, the former because of the close relationship between the text's second Jocasta-based phase and the opening episodes of Euripides' Phoenissae, the latter under the influence of Statius' epic poem of the Seven against Thebes. Euripides' chorus of Phoenician captives is not tightly integrated with his play, but there is no reason other than convention to assume that Seneca had intended to compose choral material for these scenes, still less to identify the chorus as Phoenician women. Do these scenes represent a complete dramatic action? Hardly, since the long opening dialogue lacks the characteristic expository material of a prologue and the extended last scene reaches a stalemate with no indication of either a moral resolution or a physical exodos. Indeed the crucial deaths of the brothers in mutual slaughter and of their mother from grief must surely have been the climax of any drama projected by Seneca as they were for Euripides. Do these scenes represent a continuous action in the Senecan sense, which need not entail continuity of both place and time? So most scholars in recent years have argued.
Revenge or Resignation: Seneca's Agamemnon
Authors: Shelton Jo-Ann
Published: August 2016

Seneca's Agamemnon is a revenge-drama; there is little scholarly dispute about this point. Agamemnon takes revenge on Troy, and then returns home to fall victim to Clytemnestra's desire for revenge. However the connection, if indeed one exists, between these two acts of vengeance has been a point of considerable scholarly disagreement. The issue of revenge is, of course, not limited to Agamemnon and Clytemnestra because many acts of vengeance are mentioned in this play. Agamemnon's murder, in fact, may be seen as the intersection of two tracks of avenging actions: those involving the house of Tantalus in particular, and those involving the Trojans and the Greeks. In addition, each deed of vengeance by one party may also be perceived from a different perspective as an expiatory action by another party. For example, Aegisthus' stabbing of Agamemnon can be viewed either as Aegisthus' revenge or as Agamemnon's expiation for depriving his cousin of a royal home and power (as well as Agamemnon's expiation for the cruelty of his father to Thyestes). The siege of Troy can be viewed either as the Greeks' revenge or as the Trojans' expiation for Paris' rape of Helen (as well as the Trojans' expiation for the perfidy of Laomedon). I said that there are two tracks of avenging actions, but more precisely there are three, because Clytemnestra's desire for revenge on Agamemnon can be separated from Aegisthus' desire; Clytemnestra's feelings of injury arose only after Agamemnon assumed leadership of the Greek expedition against Troy.
Secreti Loqvimur: An Interpretation of Seneca's Thyestes
Authors: Calder William M.
Published: August 2016

Athenian tragedies are dated by didascaliae that commemorate public performance, less satisfactorily by historical allusion or parody in dated comedy. Because Seneca's were never publicly performed and, therefore, lack didascaliae, and because precise historical allusions and comic parodies do not exist, we have no absolute date for Thyestes. Traditionally the tragedies are assigned to the eight year exile in Corsica (41-49). There the busy statesman enjoyed the leisure necessary for composition. But Quintus Cicero (Ep.Quint. 3.5.7) wrote four tragedies in sixteen days. The speed of Pliny's composition is attested. There is a further objection. Seneca did not write tragedies because he was bored. He had something compelling to say. More easily the fifties. Neronian classicism and the youth's histrionic enthusiasm stimulated the playwright, a view not inconsistent with Tacitus Ann. 14.52. Relative chronology, argued from the texts themselves on stylistic grounds, is another matter. Thyestes precedes Agamemnon.
Characters and Character Change in Aeschylus: Klytaimestra and the Furies
Authors: Michelini Ann N.
Published: August 2016

While it is widely agreed that psychological realism is not a primary objective of Aeschylean dramaturgy, it remains somewhat uncertain whether any psychological interpretation can be valid for this sort of drama. Do Aeschylean stage figures possess ‘dramatic character’ at all? The answer probably depends upon a definition of ‘character’. Even in recent years, some critics have continued to assume that psychological analysis will not work at all unless at least the primary dramatic figures have been given a consistent and self-aware personality, whose motivations will bear rationalist scrutiny to the last detail. It was this notion of character that T. Wilamowitz used as a lever to overthrow traditional psychological interpretations of Sophoclean drama. But T. Wilamowitz's own touchstone of ‘dramatische Wirkung’ is so broad — and can be attached to such trivial matters — that it is virtually worthless as a tool of criticism. Use of such a vague criterion can lead, for example, to the assumption that anything anomalous or unexpected must somehow be ‘effective’.
Catullus 9 and 31: The Simple Pleasure
Authors: Nielsen Rosemary M.
Published: August 2016

Verani, omnibus e meis amicis

antistans mihi milibus trecentis,

uenistine domum ad tuos penates

fratresque unanimos anumque matrem?

uenisti. o mihi nuntii beati! 5

uisam te incolumem audiamque Hiberum

narrantem loca, facta, nationes,

ut mos est tuus, applicansque collum

iucundum os oculosque suauiabor?

o quantum est hominum beatiorum, 10

quid me Iaetius est beatiusue!

(Catullus 9)

Veranius, whose friendship means more

To me than all the rest —

Can it be true that you've come home?

Home to your aged mother, to the brothers

Who stand as one with you?

You've come! What wonderful news for me!

Will I see you soon, safe and sound?

Will I hear you chatter (for that's your way)

Tales from Spain: its land, exploits and peoples?

When can I hug you, kiss your mouth and eyes?

What man is more blessed or happier than I?
Letting Go: Imagery and Symbolic Naming in Plato's Lysis
Authors: Wender Dorothea
Published: August 2016

At the beginning of the Lysis, Socrates is walking from the Academy to the Lyceum (a good route for any Western philosopher), when he meets some young men who lure him into a new palaestra with the promise of logoi and kaloi. The dialogue which follows has been fairly generally felt to be charming, early, and not very well unified. Most scholars would call the subject of the discussion ‘Friendship’, but the inconclusive discussion of friendship does not apparently begin until the dialogue is almost half completed.

I believe that the Lysis is unified, and that this unity can be most readily seen in two areas: (1) the role and character of the boy Lysis and (2) the simple and consistent use of repeated images or references drawn from three areas of life. These three categories of images, I think, are all related to each other and to the eponymous ‘hero’ of the dialogue, and an understanding of their use can help us to see that the subject of the dialogue is more complicated than ‘what is friendship?’, and that Plato's position is a good deal less inconclusive than the ending of the dialogue would lead us to believe.
Characterization and the Ideal of Innocence in Theocritus' Idylls
Authors: Miles Gary B.
Published: August 2016

Theocritus rarely speaks in his own person. As an impersonal narrator he is concerned primarily with dramatic situations, each of which focuses upon the personalities of a few actors. Often, moreover, even as a narrator, Theocritus offers little more than brief introductions to set the scene for dramatic monologues or dialogues between the fictional characters of his poems. Sometimes his characters present themselves without any explicit commentary. As a consequence our assessment of Theocritus' own values and views is bound up with our sense of his relation to the characters whom he portrays. In many cases there is an implicit but nonetheless forceful contrast between the author and his characters, so that there is no question of taking their views as the author's or of taking the characters themselves as embodiments of the author's own values.

Rather, the reverse is true. The characterization of Gorgo and Praxinoa, for example, the two housewives who are childishly awed by the splendor and bustle of Alexandria on a holiday, suggests the poet's own confident urbanity. Similarly, the characterization of the two drinking companions in Idyll 14 who exchange accounts of misadventure in love and the virtues of service in Ptolemy's mercenary army, implies the poet's commitment to the values of refinement and restraint. Contrast between Theocritus and his characters in those poems is self-evident if for no other reason than the contrast between the refinement, self-consciousness, and obvious artificiality of Theocritus' style and the spontaneity and coarseness of the characters whom he portrays.
Alcestis: A Paradox in Dying
Authors: Nielsen Rosemary M.
Published: August 2016

Euripides' Alcestis presents its audience with a curious problem. Why is a blatant coward rewarded? The answer has usually been discovered in Admetus' scrupulous observance of the law of hospitality (10), that is, in a personal trait. The significance of this solution is important because the ostensible morality of the play, one characterized by its peculiar blend of fairy-tale and harsh reality, is now dependent upon the single redeeming quality of one individual. Conversely, the less attractive features of Admetus, and they exist in varying degrees of unpleasantness, become defensible solely as progressive steps in the testing of his mettle. Impropriety, therefore, functions as the necessary adjunct of anagnorisis and reparation. By contrast, the sacrifice of Alcestis assumes an even more notable proportion; her rescue from the dead appears more an absolute act of justice than a miracle. Nonetheless, by the end of the play doubt still persists concerning the extent to which Admetus has revised his perception of right and wrong, his virtue notwithstanding.

Verrall, at the turn of the century, protested vigorously against just such a pragmatic acceptance of Admetus' philoxenia as a facile explanation. Ironically enough, he inadvertently predicted a trend which was not only to grow, but to become more entrenched. Admetus' saving grace has indeed carried the day. A husband's untoward submission to a wife's substitution; a son's disgraceful argument with his father before the rites of interment; a host's inner crisis as he juggles the respective merits of hospitality versus bereavement; a man's shallow repentance for living at another's expense — in short, each vital turning point in Admetus' private dilemma has received thorough and shrewd analysis, but always through the special refraction of the host motif.
Propertius' Vein of Humour: In Which Some Discrimination is Proposed
Authors: Connor P. J.
Published: August 2016

There is a general acceptance now that Propertius was able to mingle the humorous with the passionate and almost manic earnestness. Disagreement, of course, still flourishes about whether this or that poem can be said to be in whole or in part humorous, but by and large each of the four books contributes some poems describable under this head. Within each book, moreover — and here we have to take account of the general opinion that Propertius' work is often experimental, patchy, of uneven quality — some of the best poems are serious and some are humorous.

A further aspect of the common view is that as his writing progresses, Propertius turns more and more to humour, inventing the comic lover as L. P. Wilkinson claims, until by a steady progress he comes to the great humorous poems of Book Four. Again, there is no agreement on the humorous quality of some of the poems of this book (e.g. poem 7 and poem 6), though none would now, I think, opt for seriousness of intent in poems 8 and 9.
The Epic Journey of Achilles
Authors: Nethercut William R.
Published: August 2016

Folk sagas, and epics, develop around a common sequence. A hero is isolated from his society, he enters a land of mystery, is tested by a confrontation with some dread power, he undergoes a symbolic death, and experiences a life-enhancing return to those he left behind. At the end, he is reinstated into the world of men. Joseph Campbell documents the ubiquity of this progression in Asia, Africa, North America, and Europe.

The most prominent fact which seems to contradict the above order in the Iliad is the absence of any land of fantasy into which Achilles travels, and, along with this omission, the absence too of any weird or supernatural being against whom the hero must contend. We may even say that their is no real journey that the hero undertakes, for the action of the story lies consistently around Troy. Achilles appears static: he sits in a perfectly ordinary tent. However, this turn of the usual plot achieves something new: it allows Homer to suggest Achilles as an inwardly existing personality, whose mental estrangement is all the more clearly defined by the physical continuities about him. Unlike Odysseus and the many wandering heroes who get blown off course, lose their way in the woods, or who are kidnapped on their wedding nights, Achilles is within reach. Yet he remains apart.
Catullus in the Odes of Horace
Authors: Lee M. Owen
Published: August 2016

As Catullus and Horace are invariably thought to be Rome's two supreme lyric poets, it is cause for some comment that, in all his writings, Horace mentions his predecessor only once, and then in an indirect and, to all appearances, uncomplimentary aside. In the tenth satire in the first book, recommending that those who would write well first immerse themselves in the literature of the past, Horace refers with plain contempt to a contemporary litterateur as ‘that ape who was clever at reciting nothing but Calvus and Catullus’:

simius iste

nil praeter Calvum et doctus cantare Catullum.

(Satires I.10.18-19)

How are we to explain this startling passage? We can say, with some older writers, that Horace is singling out for criticism only insensitive imitators of Catullus and Calvus; about Catullus himself he says nothing and, in the context, need say nothing. But more recent writers on the passage feel that it bears an at least implied criticism of Catullus and Calvus and the rest of the neoterics. Reasons why Horace need not have liked them are not hard to seek. The earlier poets paraded their learning (while Horace, in the ninth satire, tries to avoid a bore who is similarly doctus). They were ready to improvise in any meter (while Horace, in the Ars Poetica, insists the meter must fit the theme). They were handy with purple patches (and the two panni Horace objects to — Diana's altar smoking and a rainbow on the Rhine — sound like references to poems by neoterics Valerius Cato and Furius Bibaculus). Above all, they chose for lyric models the blasé Alexandrians (when they might have striven, as Horace did, to equal the much older, fresher, and more accomplished Aeolians, most especially Alcaeus and Sappho).
Desire with Hope: Aristophanes and the Comic Catharsis
Authors: Reckford Kenneth J.
Published: August 2016

Like the previous speakers of Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes describes Eros in terms of his own profession, even endowing it with his personal image. His hiccups are programmatic, creating laughter; they are strategic too, enabling him to speak after Doctor Eryximachus, whose pretensions to scientific mastery of the various ‘erotic sciences’ he is bound to undercut. Indeed, just before he speaks, he states his purpose. It is to ‘make laughter’. He is not afraid of saying something comical, ‘for that would be clear gain, the native business of our Muse’, but of saying something ridiculous, of being laughed at, not with. The preliminary skirmish, so like a comic proagon, shows confidence and skill; a major competitor, and a dangerous one, has entered on the scene.
Misconception, Hypocrisy, and the Structure of Euripides' Hippolytus
Authors: Fitzgerald G. J.
Published: August 2016

It is essential to observe that Euripides' dramatization of the tragedy of Hippolytus is such as to reveal a striking disparity between word and action, between the values or motives professed by the leading characters and their actual behaviour, between the secondary characters' assessment of the events of the drama and the events themselves. At the basis of such an observation is the noticeable emphasis which Euripides accords to the fact that all the participants in the drama, including the chorus, are most concerned to proffer explanations of the situations and behaviour which confront them. Yet it becomes most apparent that all of these explanations fall far short of a proper assessment of the circumstances with which the play is concerned and the conclusions to which a responsive audience is directed by Euripides' particular organization of the constituents of the traditional story. The following paper is concerned with an examination of the nature and extent of this disparity between statement and performance, and with a determination of its function.
Corydon Revisited: An Interpretation of the Political Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus
Authors: Leach Eleanor Winsor
Published: August 2016

The first thing that the student of Vergilian pastoral may notice in turning to the pastoral Eclogues of Calpurnius Siculus is the obvious symmetrical arrangement of the poems in the later book. While the multitudinous inter-lacings of theme and subject in Vergil's ten poems continue to tease and baffle investigations of the larger organizational pattern, the principles of Calpurnius' design are simple and clear. Instead of ten poems, an even number that causes Vergil's centrally oriented balancing of similar pieces to remain ambiguously off-centre, Calpurnius has seven, clearly divided by subject into two kinds: four rustic poems and three that critics have called court poems, allegorical poems, or, more rightly, political poems whose chief topic is the benefits of the Neronian golden age. The uneven number allows for a precise balancing of similar poems in the two halves of the book. A political poem, a contest poem and a rustic dialogue in the first half have their counterparts in a rustic monologue, a contest poem and a political poem in the latter half. The central poem is political. In devising this order, Calpurnius may well have aimed to remedy what to him seemed defective in Vergil's uncertain symmetry, but the pattern is also well adapted to his own themes.
The Meaning of the Aeneid: A Critical Inquiry Part II Homo Immemor: Book VI and Its Thematic Ramifications
Authors: Boyle A. J.
Published: August 2016

The Sixth Aeneid is the noetic core of the poem. It is the centre of the Aeneid, and the centre not only of the narrative movement of the poem but also (and more significantly) of the poem's thematic movement, of its exploration, development and analysis of the ideas and issues experientially presented in the narrative. It is what one might call a ‘meta-book’, that is to say, a book which provides a commentary upon other books and which, in so doing, furnishes the reader with a framework of judgment and evaluation with which to interpret and to understand the noetic content of the poem. It is important therefore that the analysis advanced in Part I of this study be conjoined with a relatively detailed consideration of the Sixth Aeneid and an examination of some of its more significant thematic ramifications.
An Anthropology of Euripides' Cyclops
Authors: Konstan David
Published: August 2016

The story of Euripides' Cyclops resembles the corresponding episode in the Odyssey, except that in Euripides' version Polyphemus, at the time of Odysseus' landing, is master of Silenus and a band of satyrs who tend his flocks. This circumstance is loosely connected with the tale of Dionysus' abduction by pirates, which is related in one of the Homeric hymns: the satyrs had put to sea in search of the god, and were blown ashore, much like Odysseus, at the Cyclopes' island, which by the time of Euripides had come to be specified as Sicily. A role for the satyrs was, of course, required by the genre of the satyr play — if there were exceptions, they were few — and their captivity in a remote and savage place seems to have been a common theme, especially in Euripides' contributions. Considerations such as these have depressed the interpretation of the Cyclops, which is the only complete specimen of the genre. Homer's narrative looks like the perfect stock upon which to graft the typical satyr-motifs, and criticism may rest content with revealing the few places where structural changes in the narrative are demanded by the working in of the new material. Apart from that, one need remark only upon differences of tone, for the satyr drama was by nature playful, a mood that was carried especially by the chorus and Silenus, no doubt, but which left its mark as well upon the treatment of the myth as a whole.
Failure to Thrive: The Theme of Parents and Children in the Aeneid, and its Iliadic Models
Authors: Block Elizabeth
Published: August 2016

My argument in this paper assumes that most if not all readers of Vergil'sAeneidfind Turnus' death and the death of young men such as Lausus and Pallas a disturbing accompaniment to the poem's laudatory aspects. Critical approaches to the resultant interpretive difficulties have traditionally focused on philosophical, historical, or cultural explication in an effort to resolve or dispel the reader's questions about the poem's purpose and success. I propose here that the poem's tensions engender an uncertainty in the reader which is itself an inevitable and intentional result of Vergil's narrative, and that this response to the poem is a process deliberately set in motion by the poet. Vergil's intent is to implant in his reader a sense of conflict, not only objective (centered in Aeneas'laboresand their goal), but subjective, in that the reader recognizes tension or contradiction in his own response: he knows that Rome did emerge from Aeneas' struggles, and became, in many of the senses foreshadowed by the poem, great, but his reactions to the development of that greatness are negative. Many of the seeming contradictions in theAeneidmake sense if interpreted as efforts on the part of the poet to lead the reader to question both the claims of the narrative and eventually his own responses which once seemed certain and clear. The present essay explores one aspect of theAeneidwhich produces conflict in the reader's response, the ways Vergil constructs a tension between the future as subject of the poem and the future within the poem, a tension rooted in the fact that the future within the poem dies, while the reader himself lives in the future to which the poem refers.
Hospital Costs of Nosocomial Infections: A Prospective Three-Month Study In a Community Hospital
Authors: Scheckler William E.
Published: August 2016

A prospective three-month study of the hospital costs associated with nosocomial infections was done in a 390-bed, 30-bassinet community-teaching hospital early in 1978. All hospital charges for diagnostic and therapeutic services required by nosocomial infections, and added length of stay due to the infections, were recorded. During the study period 123 infections occurred in 104 patients (a 2.7% incidence, considering the 4,485 patients discharged during this time). The average length of stay was prolonged 3.0 days for all nosocomial infections; this accounted for about half of the $636 average hospital charges for each nosocomial infection. The 65 nosocomial urinary tract infections prolonged the length of stay an average of 0.6 days and the total hospital charges were $146 for each infection, leading us to believe that the proportion of nosocomial infections at any given site may greatly alter the “average” cost of nosocomial infections. Our data from a community hospital show a shorter prolongation of length of stay and lower hospital costs when compared with the few other studies in the literature.
Susceptibility of Nosocomial Urinary Tract Infections Caused by Multiply Resistant Gram-Negative Bacilli Potential Use of Antimicrobials “Resistant” by Disc-Diffusion Testing for Controlling Epidemics
Authors: Stamm Walter E. , Arbaczawski Joseph , Mackel Donald C. , Anderson Roger L.
Published: August 2016

Protracted hospital-based epidemics of urinary tract infection and bacteremia due to multiply resistant gram-negative bacilli have become an increasingly common and serious problem. Failure to control such outbreaks stems partly from inability to eradicate a key reservoir, the catheterized bladder. Since eradication of bacteriuria in noncatheterized patients can be achieved with single doses of antimicrobials and correlates with urinary rather than with serum antibiotic concentrations, drugs to which an organism appears resistant by discdiffusion testing, if excreted in the urine in high concentrations, might also prove useful in eliminating catheter-associated bacteriuria. Alternatively, urinary antiseptics, for which antimicrobial sensitivity testing is not usually done, might be effective. To test this hypothesis we determined the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) of 45 multiply resistant Proteus, Serratia, Klebsiella, and Pseudomonas strains isolated in 13 recent epidemics of nosocomial urinary tract infections against 10 selected antimicrobials and urinary antiseptics, and compared these MICs with expected urinary concentrations of each drug. For each genus tested, MICs for at least two antimicrobials or urinary antiseptics were well below easily achievable urinary drug concentrations. Zone size criteria often predicted which drugs had MICs below achievable urinary levels. Little difference was found between MICs determined in Mueller-Hinton broth and in urine. During an epidemic, simultaneous treatment of all patients with bacteriuria by administration of a urinary antiseptic or an antibiotic that achieves high concentrations in urine, in conjunction with brief catheter removal, might prove useful in controlling any further infection.
Techniques Known to Prevent Post-Operative Wound Infection
Authors: Nichols Ronald Lee
Published: August 2016

The most important factors in controlling postsurgical sepsis are appropriate surgical judgment and technique. Efficacious prophylactic antibiotics, when indicated, also significantly reduce the postoperative infection rate. Among the other techniques often heralded as important adjunctive measures, only duration of preoperative hospitalization, preoperative bathing, use of electrocautery, preoperative hair removal, use of prophylactic drains, and duration of operation are of proven significance.