bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Etruria: The Archaeological Evidence
Authors: Smith Christopher John
Published: November 2023

Some aspects of the archaeological evidence for Etruria are given here as a counterpoint to the more detailed presentation of evidence from Rome and Latium. In general, the Etruscan evidence shows more variety of local exotic ware, and more imported material in terms of types and quantity. The funerary evidence from Etruria is considerably greater and more elaborate than that from Latium, and only Rome is on a scale comparable with the great Etruscan centres. By the end of the seventh century the major Etruscan settlements were fairly advanced; they were developing orthogonal planning and there are other suggestions of a unified approach to the layout and organization of the community, through religion, fortifications, and clearly demarcated trading areas. Orthogonal planning was probably connected with augural practices, though there was a spectio along the Via Sacra in Rome, a city notorious for its lack of orthogonality.
Rome: The Archaeological Evidence
Authors: Smith Christopher John
Published: November 2023

This chapter is a brief account of the archaeological evidence from Rome from the early sixth to the early fifth centuries. The evidence is arranged in four sections. The first attempts to show the evidence for Rome’s settlement pattern. The second is concerned with the religious buildings and sites in Rome; the social and political implications of religion are the subject of a later chapter. The third section focuses on the Forum area, and then on the Via Sacra leading out of the Forum, and the other roads in Rome. The final section is an account of the Forum Boarium. A concluding section summarizes the evidence for the unity of Rome, the main focus and purpose of the building activity, and the extent of non-Latin influence on the settlement.
A Provisional Translation of the Derveni Papyrus
Authors: Laks André , Most Glenn W
Published: November 2023

This translation cannot claim to be definitive; it merely represents our best understanding of the text as it is currently available. Our views do not necessarily coincide with those of the other authors in the present volume, and we have not modified their translations to agree with our own. We have added as little as possible in the way of explanatory material in parentheses; in the footnotes we have suggested a few further possibilities.K. Tsantsanoglou very kindly agreed to check the first version of our translation and also communicated to us per litt. a number of suggestions based upon his own supplements to the papyrus (indicated in the notes with the abbreviation Ts.); we have benefited greatly from his generosity and gratefully acknowledge his help.
Was Euthyphro the Author of the Derveni Papyrus?
Authors: Kahn Charles H
Published: November 2023

In an article published more than twenty years ago I raised this question in a rather light-hearted way. Of course we cannot answer such a question with a categorical ‘Yes ‘ or ‘No ‘. The papyrus text is unsigned; and we know nothing about Euthyphro beyond what Plato tells us in two dialogues, the Euthyphro and the Cratylus. If the connection seems nevertheless worth pursuing, that is for two reasons. On the one hand, the philosophical allegories of the papyrus are of considerable importance for understanding one kind of doctrine that Plato is reacting against in the Cratylus, and which is attributed there to the inspiration of Euthyphro. And on the other hand, even if Euthyphro and the Derveni author are not the same person, they represent much the same religious and intellectual milieu. Or so I will argue.
Hocus-Pocus in East and West: Theogony, Ritual, and the Tradition of Esoteric Commentary
Authors: West Mar Tin L
Published: November 2023

The Derveni text is often described as a commentary on an Orphic theogony. This is a correct description as regards the greater part of it. From column VII to the end, there are constant references to and quotations of Orphic verses, and they are the subject of philosophical, allegorical exegesis. The exegesis seems to be systematic, in the sense that the verses appear to be quoted in more or less the proper sequence. When we put them together, we get, not indeed a continuous piece of poetry, but a series of fragments in which we can clearly see the outlines of a coherent narrative. In my book The Orphic Poems I was able to compose a continuous text out of them by supplementing a line here, a part of a line there, and sometimes an Orphic fragment known from elsewhere. There is no such clear development in the commentator ‘s thought from column to column.
Heraclitus in the Derveni Papyrus
Authors: Sider David
Published: November 2023

He may well of course have named one or two other sources in passages now lost; he clearly, whether or not he named him, quotes Homer in col. xxvi. He also quotes several other prose passages in addition to that of Heraclitus, as can be determined by the scribe’s use of paragraphoi before and and after direct quotations. But, to return to our starting point, given that only Orpheus and Heraclitus are named, it is understandable that the quotation of the latter has received a good deal of attention since its first appearance in print in the early 1980s, in articles written by Mouraviev, Burkert, Lebedev, Tsantsanoglou and Parassoglou, myself, and Schoenbeck.
The Gigantomachy
Authors: Carpenter Thomas H
Published: November 2023

The Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens, more than any other monument, embodies the meaning of the word ‘classical’, and as such, its sculpture is an appropriate place to begin a consideration of Dionysian imagery in fifth-century Athens. Images of Dionysos appeared three times on the east end of the building above the entrance to the cella that housed the chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos. He may also have appeared in the Gigantomachy painted or engraved inside Athena’s shield and at the birth of Pandora on the statue’s base. In the pediment he was a beardless youth of athletic build reclining on a leopard skin with his back to the marvellous happenings in the centre of the scene. In the frieze, again a beard less youth if Carrey’s drawings are to be believed, he sat on a stool with a himation about his waist and rested his right arm on Hermes’ shoulder. In the second metope from the left he fought a giant.
Dionysian Women
Authors: Carpenter Thomas H
Published: November 2023

In most depictions of Dionysos mainomenos and in many depictions of the Return of Hephaistos, women accompany the god. In the preceding pages I have used the term ‘nymph’ rather than the more common ‘maenad’ when discussing these women, and this distinction is more than a matter of conventions. The term ‘maenad’, which on the most basic level simply means ‘madwoman’, is used in fifth-century literature principally for mortals. The term ‘nymph’, on the other hand, implies a divine or semi-divine status. I believe that during the first half of the fifth century Athenians would probably have understood most of the women with the god on vases to be nymphs connected with him directly or indirectly through narratives about his infancy and youth. Though this narrative connection is less clear during the second half of the century, and the women are often assigned symbolic names, there is still no reason to think of them as mortals.
Worship?
Authors: Carpenter Thomas H
Published: November 2023

Where in the previous chapter I suggested that the female companions of Dionysos on Attic vases would have been understood by Athenians as nymphs rather than as maenads, here I tum to some scenes said to show mortals (presumably Athenians) participating in worship of Dionysos, scenes which raise important questions about the value vase paintings can have as evidence for Attic worship of any sort. I start with a depiction of orgiastic worship on a krater in Ferrara, then tum to the so-called ‘Lenaia vases’, which seem quite clearly to be connected with some sort of worship of the god, and conclude with some observations on vase paintings often cited as evidence for Athenians’ familiarity with ecstatic cult practices connected with Dionysos. The central question here is, on the basis of these images can we draw any firm conclusions about the nature of worship of Dionysos in fifth-century Athens?
Beards
Authors: Carpenter Thomas H
Published: November 2023

Most of the surviving narratives about Dionysos (written or visual) tell of events that took place during his childhood or youth, but prior to the middle of the fifth century the Dionysos who appeared in Greek art was almost always a bearded adult, even when he was shown in episodes that must have taken place during his youth. Then, in the 430s Pheidias put a beardless Dionysos in the east pediment of the Parthenon and probably in the east frieze. By the last quarter of the century this beardless Dionysos appeared on pots by the Dinos Painter, and almost immediately the new form became the dominant one on vases. In sculpture the two forms continued to appear side by side on into Roman times.
Ancient Literatures of Western Asia
Authors: West M L
Published: November 2023

In this chapter a further part of the groundwork will be laid for the comparisons that form the main substance of the book. The attempt will be made to give the reader some idea of the history and the nature of those oriental poetic and mythical traditions from which the evidence will mainly be drawn, and to introduce the specific texts to which reference will most frequently be made. We shall look in tum at the literatures of Mesopotamia, Ugarit, the Hebrews, 1the Phoenicians, and the Hurrians and Hittites. The poetic traditions of Mesopotamia claim our attention first and will hold it longest, on several grounds: their antiquity and continuity, the quantity of the surviving material, and the prominence that it will enjoy in the following chapters.
The Odyssey
Authors: West M L
Published: November 2023

At the end of the last chapter I spoke of different strands in the fabric of the Iliad, and of the association of Near Eastern themes and motifs with particular ones among them. In the Odyssey the diversity of strands is more conspicuous. There is the so-called Telemachy, the story of Telemachus’ journey to Pylos and Sparta, which serves largely to set Odysseus’ return more clearly in the context of the other heroes’ returns; there is the tale of Odysseus’ wanderings, mainly presented in the form of a first-person narrative; there is the story of his homecoming and killing of the suitors; and over all, though rather intermittently, the divine machinery is in evidence. We shall find material for oriental comparisons in all of these, but above all in Odysseus’ wanderings.
Myths and Legends of Heroes
Authors: West M L
Published: November 2023

By the late sixth century there existed a body of written epic containing within it one or more versions of most of the stories that made up what we think of as Classical mythology. Besides the Cyclic epics dealing with the Trojan War and its aftermath, there were the Oidipodeia, Thebais, and Epigonoi, concerned with the saga of the Labdacids at Thebes; the Danais and Phoronis, treating of Argive legends; the Corinthiaca ascribed to Eumelus, which focussed on Corinth; the Naupactia, that included the story of the Argo’s voyage; the ‘Hesiodic’ Melampodia, that contained stories of famous seers; Pisander of Rhodes’ epic about the deeds of Heracles, and other poems on individual exploits of his; and more. Towards the end of the period an Attic poet (as I believe) took the various genealogies current in different mythological traditions and worked them into a single comprehensive system which he expounded in a five-book continuation of Hesiod’s Theogony, the so¬ called Catalogue of Women or Ehoiai. Here most of the myths were at least alluded to, and set in a context. Epic poetry, of course, was not the only vehicle for mythical narrative. It often found a place in lyric, above all in the extended cantatas of Stesichorus. Around the end of the sixth century the first of the logographers appeared, Hecataeus of Miletus.
The Odrysian Kingdom Of Thrace
Authors: Archibald Z H
Published: November 2023

Spectacular archaeological discoveries were made during the 1970s and 1980s in Bulgaria and North Aegean Greece which sparked international interest in the forgotten Odrysian kingdom of Thrace. Here, for the first time, these and earlier discoveries are presented in their archaeological and historical context. The Thracians were the fabulously wealthy and populous neighbours of the ancient Greeks, whose golden age began in the fifth century BC when an inter-tribal state was created by the ruling dynasty of the tribe - the Odrysians. A vogue in the Greek world for Orpheus the Thracian coincided with the period of the Odrysians's greatest prominence. Not only does this book analyse the fascinating cultural amalgam of native, Persian, and Greek elements by the Odrysian governing elite, it also provides new data on the external relations of Athens, Thasos, and Macedon in the classical and early Hellenistic periods.
Introduction
Authors: Archibald Z H
Published: November 2023

The East Balkan Peninsula Is Still Among the least explored and least known parts of Europe. Modern political divisions, geographical and ideological, have almost to the present day conspired to prolong the isolation imposed by five centuries of Ottoman rule. But this isolation is of more recent origin than at first appears. Throughout prehistory and down to the final centuries of the Byzantine empire, these regions were closely linked to the eastern Mediterranean through the periodic movement of people and through networks of friendship, alliance, and exchange. This book is concerned with one phase of this phenomenon.
Problems Of Chronology and Methodology
Authors: Archibald Z H
Published: November 2023

Historical Sources Provide No Information about the origins of the Odrysians and the period immediately preceding their rise to prominence is not yet very well defined archaeologically. This phase, which marks the transition from a tribal to a state society and broadly corresponds with the sixth century BC, has so far aroused very little professional interest in its own right. In order to understand where the Odrysians came from and how they related to and differed from their neighbors, a longer perspective must be taken into account.
The Odrysian Kingdom Before Alexander the Great
Authors: Archibald Z H
Published: November 2023

At The Beginning Of The Fourth Century the Odrysian kingdom was articulated by a net work of regional centres. Some are documented archaeologically (Vetren, Vasil Levsky, Brezovo, Asara, Mezek; Seuthopolis region; Hisarlik, Kabyle?), others can be inferred from the location of contemporary high-status burials (Duvanli, Pastousha, Dulboki, Tatarevo; and in the north-east, Kapinovo, Rouets, Svetlen). Burials containing Greek bronzes are located at intervals between these first-order interments, confirming the general pat tern of regular, dispersed settlement throughout the Central Plain (figs. 9.1, 9.2).
Tomb Architecture And Decoration
Authors: Archibald Z H
Published: November 2023

The Remarkable Corbel-Vaulted Tomb Near Brestovitsa, south-west of Plovdiv, is a rare witness to the structural sophistication of native architectural techniques before the advent of ashlar masonry. The ruling elite among the Odrysians soon began commissioning masonry tombs. These in part reflect a desire to build traditional mortuary structures in more durable materials, just as the Royal Skythians were doing. Con temporary architectural fashions also played a significant part.
Programmatic Narrative: Degrees of Relevance
Authors: Lowrie Michéle
Published: November 2023

With this chapter begins the close reading of Horace’s narratives, but we will hardly leave poetics behind. This is not because all of Horace’s poetry is metapoetry, though that may be true. The poems with extended mythological narratives in the Odes opening sweep are paradigmatic for the narratives in the rest of the collection. C. 1. 7 in particular offers itself as the solution to the questions it raises.
Personal Narrative and the Fantastic, or, the Poet Out of Bounds
Authors: Lowrie Michéle
Published: November 2023

Mostly, the stories Horace tells about himself engage poetics, no matter the genre. A cavalier blend of the mundane with the fantastic characterizes the lyric stories. The poet averts a wolf’s attack by singing; he misplaces his shield (like a good lyrist), and Mercury air-lifts him from battle; his near death by a falling tree (almost) causes an underworld vision of Sappho and Alcaeus; he witnesses Bacchus teaching nymphs and satyrs their lessons; he turns into a swan; doves ward off vipers and bears from the infant Horace with a tent of symbolic herbs. Poetics binds these stories, even beyond shared motifs. Horace constructs a personal history for himself not as Q. Horatius Flaccus, but as lyrist — that is, ‘personal’ has to do with persona, and, as will become clear, is hardly antithetical to ‘political’. Historical author and literary persona can and do overlap, but the grounding of the lyric poet in a Personal Myth looks to the historical author’s personal story only as fodder for translation into a poetic mythology. The disparity between l’effet du reel and the marvellous forces us to recognize the importance of these events in what the poet makes of them rather than for any intrinsic significance: seeing a wolf is certainly something to tell the neighbours, even if a relatively ordinary occurrence, but only becomes the ground for a poetic manifesto through an act of imagination.
Praising Caesar
Authors: Lowrie Michéle
Published: November 2023

Although I would have liked to end this book with the questions posed of narrative interpretability in C. 3. 27, Horace will not let us do so. Odes 4 breaks the seal of the closure set on Odes 1 – 3, with much fanfare attending the return to lyric (Putnam 1986: 30 and passim). The circularity of lyric time always allows for return, but linear history imposes difference. The primary difference for the topic of narrative is that narration in Odes 4 attends only epic, high-style poems of praise, of man or god-. Horace comes closer and closer to retailing Augustus’ res gestae. The apparently clear alignment of narrative with praise in Odes 4 stands with (against?) the last poem in Horace’s unfolding personal narrative in the first collection, where inspiration sweeps aside the poet’s remaining lyric reservations about praising Caesar. Only in retrospect does C. 3. 25 point forward to Odes 4; its role in the first collection is to reinterpret, in a final revision of the poet’s story, what he has already done in the Roman Odes. The different solutions to lyric praise in this poem and in Odes 4 measure the distance between the two collections. Let us step backward — the discussion of C. 3. 2 5 finishes the story told in Chapter 6 — before stepping forward.
Sociolinguistics and Written Texts
Authors: Dickey Eleanor
Published: November 2023

A recent book on address usage points out that, ‘Address research based on literary sources, to the extent that it aspires to portray language practice and/or the social structure of a period in history, cannot really escape being confronted by the question of whether this task is at all feasible’ (Kiełkiewicz-Janowiak 1992: 40). Although this argument applies to many other aspects of sociolinguistic research as well, the point will be discussed here specifically with reference to address theory, and the term ‘sociolinguistics’ will be used to refer primarily to research on address usage. In fact, addresses in many languages which exist only in written form have been studied by socio linguists without any discussion of this question (e.g. Östör 1982, Phillipps 1984) though it is certainly worthy of consideration.
Forms of Address
Authors: Dickey Eleanor
Published: November 2023

In the following chapters the addresses will be examined in groups arranged according to lexical meaning. The classification used here is based on that developed by Braun (1988: 9–u) for modem languages, but her categories had to be modified to fit the Greek system. Previous discussions of Greek addresses (e.g. Wendel 1929; Kambylis 1g64: 109) have often tried to arrange the terms by grammatical categories or to divide them into simple and complex addresses on the basis of the number of words in the address, but these classifications cause great difficulties for the reader, who may have to locate three separate dis cussions in order to find the meaning of one word (e.g. ϕíλϵ as a noun, ϕíλϵ as an adjective, and ϕíλϵ as part of complex addresses). More over, since this study has excluded from consideration personal pronouns and verb forms, the remaining grammatical categories rarely seem to make any difference to the meaning or function of the vocatives. Lexical meaning, which does make a significant difference, is a much more useful basis of classification.
Plutarch, Plato, Athens, and Rome
Authors: Swain* Simon
Published: November 2023

In the period of the High Roman Empire it is Plutarch of Chaeroneia who is most often held to exemplify the close co operation and mutual admiration of the Greek and Roman elites. A Roman citizen himself, his Parallel Lives are emblematic of an essential harmony between East and \Vest and support the suggestion that Greeks were fully integrated into the Empire. Plutarch’s intellectual and emotional attitudes seem to be a perfect reflection of the age when Greeks were beginning to enter the Roman Senate in significant numbers. This is the familiar and easy reading of the genial sage and his works.
Celsus’ Attack on the Christians
Authors: Frede* Hchael
Published: November 2023

The expansion of Roman power in the East and the subsequent constitution of the Roman Empire did have a considerable impact on Greek philosophy, and on how Greek philosophy was conceived of even by philosophers. From the early fourth century BC almost everything which happened in philosophy happened in Athens. This began to change at the turn of the first century.
Introduction
Authors: Duff Tim
Published: November 2023

Much is known about Plutarch's own life from his writings. He was born sometime between ad 40 and 50 to a wealthy family in the small city of Chaironeia in central Greece. An inscription tells us that he gained Roman citizenship through his friend the consular Mestrius Florus, whose name he took. He travelled widely: certainly to Asia Minor, to Rome and Italy, and to Alexandria. He mentions many important figures, both Greek and Roman, as personally acquainted with him. But most of his life was spent in or near his home town of Chaironeia. He held several municipal offices there; he was also a priest at Delphoi, which was not far distant. He died early in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian, who acceded in AD 117.
Moralism in Plutarch’s Lives
Authors: Duff Tim
Published: November 2023

In the programmatic statements which we have examined, Plutarch seems to claim that the subjects of his Lives could be understood, taking their careers as a whole, as paradigms of either virtue or vice, and that, at the level of detail, individual actions could be understood as either virtuous or the reverse. For this reason the Lives would lend themselves to the extraction of practical moral lessons for the reader’s own implementation and edification. In this chapter I attempt to assess whether these claims are substantiated in the Lives themselves and how Plutarch’s original readers might have reacted to his works. The next chapter will examine the moral value-system which informs the Lives. Part II will constitute a series of case studies of the moral texturing of a number of different pairs of Lives.
The Politics of Parallelism
Authors: Duff Tim
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I shall attempt to analyse the way in which Plutarch constructs Greek and Roman identities in the Parallel Lives. Central to this construction is his use of synkrisis, one of his most original contributions to the writing of the past. Much of this study has been concerned with the literary effects of synkrisis. As we have seen, Plutarch uses the two parallel Lives of a pair, with their prologue and synkrisis, to explore a set of moral themes which run across the whole Plutarchan ‘ book’ . By putting together two figures from two different backgrounds and two different periods, Plutarch is able to focus attention on the moral issues which their Lives raise rather than simply on the historical details of each Life. Furthermore, synkrisis contributes to Plutarch’s moral programme not simply by the similarities between two Lives of a pair, but by the differences: a moral issue is often explored in one Life, then complicated or approached in a different way in the second. The destabilizing effect of synkrisis is most striking in the formal synkriseis themselves, which, as the last chapter argued, sometimes break away from the moral pattern established in the preceding Lives and suggest a new way of looking at the actions narrated.
The Vases of Sotades
Authors: Hoffmann Herbert
Published: November 2023

The name Sotades is one of the most famous in the history of Greek painting. Its appearance in inscriptions followed by the verb epoiesen or epoeie (‘made’) on nine Athenian pottery vessels dating from the years immediately before and after the middle of the fifth century BC has led experts to conclude that Sotades must have been a kerameus (potter) and probably the owner of a workshop. The draughtsman who collaborated with him has been designated the Sotades Painter, and a large scholarly edifice of attributions has been constructed around both figures.
Dionysos and Hades are One
Authors: Hoffmann Herbert
Published: November 2023

Five form-identical vases, each decorated with a different picture, will be examined in this chapter. As in Chapter 1, the aim is to see how the three-dimensional sculpture-a bearded pygmy lumbering along under the weight of a dead crane (Figs. 13-14, Cat. G1-6) is related in sense to each of the painted representations, and how each is related to the other.
The Comedy of Innocence
Authors: Hoffmann Herbert
Published: November 2023

The Naples Museum owns an intriguing work by the Sotades Painter (Figs. 55-6, Cat. B2). It is a cup of the stemless type developed by Athenian potters in order to maximize stacking capacity and minimize breakage in transport. The shape implies a metal original, and in the interior there is a large impressed rosette which simulates a kind of ornament popular during the fifth century for the decoration of silverware. It is an ancient oriental device which in fifth-century Athens would have loosely connoted ‘sacred flower’, or simply ‘sacred’.
Death and False Noses
Authors: Hoffmann Herbert
Published: November 2023

Aunique and little-known Sotadean head-vase in Ferrara (Figs. 57-8, Cat. Sr), found in an Etruscan tomb at Spina, features the bald head of an emaciated man with a jutting nose, a drooping moustache, and a pointed beard. The man’s domed fore head is deeply furrowed and he has marked naso-labial folds which contribute substantially to his grim and haggard appearance. His piercing eyes, asymmetrically set and oddly drop-shaped, were painted bright vermilion, and traces of the original colourremam.
City and Society in Ancient Mesopotamia
Authors: Mieroop Marc Van De
Published: November 2023

These words by Austen Henry Layard standing on Tell Afar in northern Iraq announced the birth of modern Western exploration in ancient Mesopotamia, and identify what is most striking about this region. The innumerable mounds scattered throughout the countryside of modern-day Iraq and northern Syria cover the remains of myriad ancient cities and towns, many of which survived for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Mesopotamia was not only the oldest urban civilization, but also the most urbanized society of antiquity. From the mid-fourth millennium BC onwards, cities were in existence in Babylonia (southern Mesopotamia), and despite many vicissitudes they never disappeared entirely from the land-scape. Urbanism may have emerged only later in Assyria (northern Mesopotamia), but soon some Assyrian cities became gigantic in extent. At their most flourishing, the most important Mesopotamian cities dwarfed their contemporaries in the rest of the ancient world, to the amazement of Greeks, such as Aristotle, who could not consider Babylon to be a city, but only as the equivalent of a nation because of its enormous dimensions. The dense concentration of Mesopotamian cities was also unparalleled; large urban centres lay within sight of one another.
City and Countryside: The Mesopotamian View
Authors: Mieroop Marc Van De
Published: November 2023

To an ancient Mesopotamian, city life was civilized life. The city was the seat of culture, and non-urban life was uncultured. The Mesopotamian visualized his or her city as being located at the centre of a world that could not exist without it, both in mundane and cosmic terms. The centrality of the city in the Mesopotamians’ own concept of their culture was a constant theme throughout their literature.
Social Organization
Authors: Mieroop Marc Van De
Published: November 2023

The social structure of the Mesopotamian city cannot be easily studied even in its most basic outlines. The absence of census lists, or even a relatively complete set of family names from any city, prevents us from recognizing even the familial ties of the inhabitants beyond their closest relatives. For most of Mesopotamian history, and with few exceptions, individuals were identified by their name, and, when further specification was needed, this was done by profession or by the name of the father: for instance, NūrShamash, the shepherd, or the son of Ahi-shāgish. Rarely, an ethnic designation, such as the Amorite, Turukkean, or the like, was included. It was only in first millennium Babylonia that a more complete genealogy was consistently used. Before that date we are thus usually unable to establish family ties between individuals further removed than siblings.
Urban Government: King, Citizens, and Officials
Authors: Mieroop Marc Van De
Published: November 2023

Every community requires a governmental organization, a means by which social interactions can be regulated. The complexity of such an organization greatly depends on the size and diversity of the community, and the city by definition shows a high degree of both: of necessity, then, there existed a structure within the Mesopotamian city with governmental powers. We can recognize two poles in the power relations in the Mesopotamian city: on the one side were the king and the public institutions that supported his rule, on the other the citizenry who held certain ill-described powers. Arranging contact between the two poles was a group of officials. These three elements, crown, citizenry, and officialdom, all played a role in the urban government. The relationship between crown and citizenry varied over time, and depended on the general political situation. It is my contention that the powers and independence of the citizenry increased over time in Mesopotamian history, rather than the other way around as has been commonly suggested.
Family Ties
Authors: Anderson Michael J
Published: November 2023

Among the many forces of cohesion uniting the Ilioupersis episodes, one of the simplest and strongest is the theme of family and family dissolution. The fall of Troy is in essence the fall of its ruling family. While early poets and artists did not ignore the widespread suffering of all the Trojans at the capture of their city (as exemplified on the Mykonos Ilioupersis pithos, discussed in Ch. 11 below), the microcosmic city-family consisting of Priam, his wife, daughters and daughters-in-law, and his remaining sons and sons-in-law, lies at the heart of the myth. It is their stories, their suffering at the hands of their enemies, that the artistic and poetic traditions chose to canonize. Priam, the sources tell us, king of Troy and patriarch of the family, is slain in the palace at the altar of Zeus Herkeios.
Introduction
Authors: Anderson Michael J
Published: November 2023

In this section we turn from the verbal to the visual manifestations of the Ilioupersis. While the poets were drawing upon the vast corpus of heroic myth to produce epic, lyric, and tragic verse, contemporary artists and artisans were employing the same body of material in a variety of plastic and painted forms. Although the beginning stages of mythological representation in Greek art are obscured by the paucity of surviving evidence, the Ilioupersis seems to have been an early favourite.
The Mykonos Ilioupersis Pithos
Authors: Anderson Michael J
Published: November 2023

One of the earliest surviving examples of Ilioupersis scenes in combination is also one of the most spectacular: a large terracotta pithos found on the island of Mykonos and dated to the second quarter of the seventh century BC (Cat. no. 2*-Figs. 2(a) and (b) ). This vessel, one of a family of large python manufactured in the seventh century and decorated in relief with mythological subjects, stands out among its siblings, indeed among all contemporary Greek representations of myth, for the scope and elaborate detail with which it relates the story of Troy’s fall. The neck of one side of the pithos is occupied by the wooden horse, filled with seven warriors and surrounded by seven more. Below the horse three horizontal rows of panels spanning the vessel’s upper body feature the enslavement of Trojan women and the murder of their children. The two sections, neck and body, together comprise a sequential narrative couplet. The upper panel narrates an early stage of the attack, while the lower group follows with later chapters of the same story. This progression may be de scribed with more precision as preparation and execution. the ruse of the horse above forming a prelude to the murder and enslavement below.
Iconography of the Ilioupersis in Attic Vase-Painting
Authors: Anderson Michael J
Published: November 2023

After the Mykonos pithos a hundred years passes before a recognizable tradition of Ilioupersis iconography develops and we again witness an interest in the juxtaposition of Ilioupersis scenes. In the first half of the sixth century BC-among the now greater quantities of surviving pictorial evidence, particularly the extensive corpus of Attic painted vases-we see the emergence of several Ilioupersis scenes among the most popular mythological icons. In addition to Helen’s reunion with Menelaos, witnessed previously on the Mykonos pithos, the murder of Priam and the attack on Kassandra now acquire standard, easily recognizable iconographies, and each maintains its popularity in the record of Athenian painted vases from the mid-sixth to the mid-fifth century.
Ilioupersis Combinations in Attic Vase-Painting
Authors: Anderson Michael J
Published: November 2023

While the great majority of black- and red-figure Ilioupersis representations are not found in combination with other Ilioupersis scenes, examples survive in sufficient numbers to indicate that combination was practised with relative frequency. In the following pages I survey the known examples, and although the small pool of data makes the search for trends and development precarious, I attempt some categorization of the vases in terms of date, shape, and manner of combination.
Narrative
Authors: Hutchinson G O
Published: November 2023

The letters contain many arresting examples of narrative. These narrative letters and parts of letters effectively raise, and help to answer, questions about the nature of the letters, and their relation to other literature. They cut across the categories of narrative most considered by modern discussions. Ricreur’s monumental treatment, for example, principally considers novelistic fiction and modern historiography. From such a perspective the narratives that we find in the letters look a peculiar mixture. Here we find accounts of actual events, but narrated from shortly after them, and often by a first person identified both with a principal character in the action and with the writer. Even autobiography presents something different, with its greater distance in time, and its greater temporal range; and, like novels and history but unlike letters, it is not aimed at a specific reader or readers. But one should resist concluding that the narratives in the letters lack art and artifice.
Dialogue
Authors: Hutchinson G O
Published: November 2023

We turn now to a particular aspect of narrative, the direct rendition of dialogue. The subject is, in my view, both appealing and significant. The letters in which dialogue occurs are particularly memorable. It might seem that what makes these letters notable is not the form but the historical content: quoting conversation is an obvious thing for Cicero to do, it might be held, but it allows modern readers the good fortune to eavesdrop directly on history. We can overhear important private discussion on Roman politics, and (still more enticing, perhaps) charged exchanges within Roman families. These historical elements are indeed of great value; but the matter may prove more complicated. The subject, it will be perceived, poses sharply the question of how important to the letters is Cicero’s art, and how it is related to reality; by understanding more fully the role of art, we shall come to a fuller understanding of the historical material too.
Introduction
Authors: Lintott Andrew
Published: November 2023

Polybius’ association of Rome’ s phenomenal military success with the excellence of her constitution may surprise twentieth-century readers, but it was almost self-evident for a Greek intellectual from within the governing class in his period. It was Herodotus who first made the connection between political systems and their military capacities. In his view an important result of the reforms (eunomia) of Lycurgus was the victory of the Spartans over their neighbours; again, when the Athenians acquired democracy (isēgoria) through Cleisthenes, the immediate consequence was their victory over the Boeotians and Chalcidians.
The Higher Magistrates and the Pro-Magistrates
Authors: Lintott Andrew
Published: November 2023

Rome’ s wars were won and Rome’ s provinces governed by magistrates who, though they might receive special instructions and were subject in the later Republic to rules defined in law or senatus consultum, had full discretion to take major decisions without consultation of the senate or people-’ as they judge to be in accordance with the public interest and their own good faith’ , to use a standard phrase found in legal texts. They were expected to do their best for the res publica and, if this was afterwards considered inadequate, they were liable to prosecution on their return to Rome.
Andocides
Authors: Usher Stephen
Published: November 2023

Second in the canon of ten Attic orators, Andocides was probably the least esteemed. He was not a professional writer of speeches for others: all of his surviving orations were spoken by him on his own behalf, and he does not seem to have been a regular public speaker. But a deliberative speech by him has survived, and it is the earliest surviving example of this genre of oratory.
Isaeus
Authors: Usher Stephen
Published: November 2023

Innovation in forensic oratory was difficult after Lysias. In adapting and standardizing the array of topics, formulae, and rhetorical devices which he inherited from Antiphon and the early tradition, he found effective and economical expression for them. After Lysias, the recurrence of so much material, together with a common dialect and, to a large extent, common vocabulary, tended to confer on much Attic Oratory a certain uniformity, some degree of which Isaeus could not avoid. Again, the fact that his career seems to have begun as that of Lysias was nearing its end, in the same city and among the same clientele, guaranteed Lysianic influence. Yet shrewd observers could discern that in Isaeus’ hands the genre responded to changing times. The precise forms which this response took will be the subject of this chapter; but the search for them must be preceded by some essential facts about the orator.
Criticism in Plato’s Republic: Writing the Just City/Just Writing the City
Authors: Too Yun Lee
Published: November 2023

George Grube has characterized Plato as the first writer ‘to develop a theory of literature and of its place in society’. If this is so, it is a theory of literature which must raise some anxieties. In the Republic, one of the traditionally privileged texts in the history of criticism, if not the most privileged, Plato would appear to banish poetry from the ideal state, and accordingly, to propose that (literary) art and philosophy are distinct categories of discourse and practice. Scholars draw attention to the discussion of art and mimēsis in Book io, where the philosopher rejects imitation for the reason that it is an ontologically and epistemologically deficient copy of the object that it attempts to represent. Despite apparently contradicting the stance of books 2 and 3, where the work’s interlocutors admit the role of poetry in the education of the young citizen, the final book of the Republic has become the authorized and privileged Platonic position on literary art.
Augustine on Reinventing the Discourse of Community
Authors: Too Yun Lee
Published: November 2023

In earlier chapters I have considered both how critical activities became and might have become institutionalized and how the statements produced about literature in various institutional contexts serve to authorize a cultural tradition for a set of different communities, both textual and, less frequently, historical. In Chapters 4 and 6 in particular, l suggested that criticism involves more than the exclusion of texts which challenge the hegemonic discourse but may also require the scrupulously discriminated dis∼ placement of one set of hegemonic discourses by another one. The present chapter now examines the way in which the apparently contradictory institutionalizing and dislocating aspects of criticism come together at the end of the classical era.
Conclusion The Function of Criticism in Times Past and Present
Authors: Too Yun Lee
Published: November 2023

The writing of any history of criticism such as the present one can only reveal the discourse under consideration to be one of several possible created and contentiously authorized languages. But such a narrative will at the same time not be entirely arbitrary, inasmuch as any number of ideologies, assumptions, and prior histories of literary criticism will be its subtexts, whether taken up more explicitly or not. My subtexts have been the idea of ancient criticism as constituted in part by material from antiquity and in part by the scholarship which has characterized it as ‘ancient literary criticism’. The project has not been to abandon altogether the body of writing we conventionally recognize as ‘ancient literary criticism’ nor the body of commentary on this material; furthermore, my intention has not been to suggest that we abandon the phrase ‘ancient literary criticism’ as a description of the discourses that ancient authors set out regarding the production and reception of literary texts. Yet by beginning from an understanding of criticism as a socio-political process, this study has offered a somewhat different discourse regarding the production and reception of literary texts in Greek and Roman antiquity.
Agamemnon’s Empire
Authors: Lendon J E
Published: November 2023

According to Synesius, the peasants of North Africa thought that Agamemnon ruled the Roman empire. This was a strangely wise mistake. For just as the values of Greeks and Romans of the empire recalled in many ways the values of the warlike aristocracies from which they arose, so too did rulership always have a Homeric strain to it. Honour defined the Homeric king’s position: a king might say, ‘Be king equally with me, take half my honour.’The king was distinguished by his right to receive the greatest honour.And of mortal men he had the greatest power over the distribution of honours and disgraces. When Achilles withdraws from the fighting, he cries out to the High King Agamemnon, ‘You will tear apart your heart in self-reproach, that you did no honour to the best of the Achaeans.’In Caesar Augustus there was a great deal of Mussolini, but there was something of Agamemnon as well.
Homer on Poetry and the Poetry of Homer
Authors: Macleod Colin
Published: November 2023

‘We pedants know better. ‘ These leaden and ironic words form part of E. Housman ‘s attempt to show that textual scholarship and literary criticism are two very different, or even incompatible, skills. The immediate issue was Matthew Arnold ‘s translation of Iliad 24, line 506. As it happens, Housman was wrong on that point, and Arnold right; and this should give us pause over the larger question. In fact the spring of scholarship cannot and has not run on uncontaminated by the scum and garbage of criticism. So in 1981 we can expect more and more scholars, for good or ill, to consider Homer as a poet rather than a corpus vile of lays or motifs or formulae. Now it would not be surprising if, as a serious poet, Homer reflected on the nature and purpose of his work; and such reflections have indeed left their mark upon it. They make too a proper basis for the study of his poetry; for just as scholars have, as best they can, to learn to be critics, so critics have to learn what the poets they read can teach them about poetry. There have been good discussions of Homer ‘s poetics in recent years; and what I have to say owes much to them. If I venture to return to the topic, it is because I believe that there are still worthwhile conclusions to be drawn from it about Homer ‘s poetry. In particular, I shall consider one question which is a challenge to any who think of the Iliad as a significant whole, that is whether Book 24 is its true ending and a fitting conclusion.
Two Comparisons in Sappho
Authors: Macleod Colin
Published: November 2023

This note seeks to illustrate an aspect of Sappho ‘s poetic technique, her use of comparisons; to that end it considers a myth, that of Helen in fr. 16 L.-P., and a simile, that of the moon in fr. 96. One principle which underlies what follows here had better be clearly stated at the outset: I assume that such comparisons may have more than one aspect and may be an oblique way of putting divergent thoughts and feelings. For the simpler a comparison is, the less it can express; and if Sappho deserves her reputation we should not expect her to indulge in mere superfluities.
Politics And The Oresteia
Authors: Macleod Colin
Published: November 2023

As a drama and a poem the Eumenides is often regarded with unease. It brings the Oresteia to a conclusion; but its account of Athens and the Areopagus seems to many readers inspired more by patriotism (of whatever partisan tinge) than a sense of dramatic unity. Hence much attention has been devoted to Aeschylus ‘ supposed political message in the play; as a result, the question of its fitness to crown the trilogy recedes into the background or even vanishes. On the other hand, those whose concern is with Aeschylus ‘ poetry tend to ignore his ‘politics ‘. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to vindicate Aeschylus the artist: to show, that is, how the founding of the homicide court and the cult of the Semnai on the Areopagus in Athens properly marks the end of the troubles of the Argive Atridae, and how the sufferings and guilt of individual men and women are resolved in a city ‘s institutions. In pursuing this aim, it also has to consider, and try to define, the relation of the tragedian to his audience and to contemporary society. My concern, then, is with the individual and the community, both within the play and behind it.