bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Lessons of Life: Wittgenstein, Religion and Analytic Philosophy
Authors: Cottingham John
Published: November 2023

Philosophy is as fashion-prone as any other human enterprise, and it is perhaps no surprise that Wittgenstein ‘s influence has recently suffered something of an eclipse in the anglophone philosophical world. This may well be a natural ‘rebound ‘ reaction against the climate of that substantial chunk of the twentieth century when much of philosophy was dominated by his approach to the subject. It may also be a result of a certain cautious, academic tidy-mindedness, which is wary of work that is sweeping enough to resist neat dissection within the burgeoning technical specialisms of current ‘mainstream ‘ philosophy. Or, thirdly, it may be due to the rise of a scientistic vision of philosophy — the view that philosophers should ‘either adopt and emulate the method of successful sciences, or operate in tandem with the sciences, as their abstract and reflective branch ‘. Sigmund Freud, who has a good claim to rank alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein as the most original philosophical (in the broad sense) thinker of the twentieth century, certainly seems to have suffered as much as Wittgenstein from all three of the damaging trends just noted: his methods are not such as to appeal to the devotees of modern experimental science as the model for human cognitive endeav-our; his insights are wide enough in scope to resist narrow disciplinary boundaries; and his ideas have succeeded in infusing our intellectual culture for long enough to make many people want to turn the page and move on.
Introduction
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F
Published: November 2023

Among the Anglophone philosophers whose work helped to set and decisively shaped the philosophical agenda in the English-speaking world during the second half of the twentieth century, Wilfrid Sellars bids fair to leave the deepest and most lasting impact. The central theses of his acknowledged masterwork, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, published fifty years ago and now engaging the attention of a third generation of readers, are still very much the focus of spirited debate.
Still Mythic After All Those Years: On Alston’s Latest Defense of the Given
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F
Published: November 2023

It was almost fifty years ago, in his modern classic Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (EPM), that Wilfrid Sellars declared the Given a Myth and proposed definitively to exorcise “the entire framework of givenness”. As is typically the case in philosophy, there is no consensus as to whether he succeeded, but, surprisingly, the alleged mythic status of the Given is still being actively disputed. One of the reasons, as it has become almost mandatory to remark, is that, as William Alston puts it, “it is not easy to pin down the target to which Sellars applies that title” (SMG, 69).
The Rhetoric of ‘Empire’ in the Classical Era in China
Authors: Nylan Michael
Published: November 2023

Empire exists because it can; it will find justifications for itself when they are needed. This paper focuses on materials drawn from three discrete eras in the ‘classical period’ of China—roughly 323 bc to ad 316—whose reflections upon the closest equivalents to ‘empire’ do not precisely correspond to one another, let alone to the imperium under Rome. Works of the late third and early second century, anticipating the benefits of unified rule in the Central States (Zhongguo)—standardization and coordination of vast public systems and enforcement of a lasting peace—seek mainly to strengthen the arguments for unitary rule under a wise leader whom the people regard as ‘father and mother’. Works composed c.100 bc, a century after unification by Qin in 221 bc, take for granted the superiority of unified rule over all rival forms of government, even as they describe the catastrophic consequences of rulers’ despotic acts on an ever-grander scale. By contrast, the classicizing constructs from the closing decades of Western Han and the opening decades of Eastern Han (ad 25–220) focus on suprahuman precedents and ‘proofs’ for the legitimacy of the Han ruling house as serious questions are asked in the court and in the outlying provinces about the benefits of unified rule.
Introduction
Authors: Fordham Finn
Published: November 2023

Finnegans Wake has been described and describes itself in many ways. Since it fell easily into making lists, here is an easily extendable reel of descriptions. It is a sleep-story; the dreamlike saga of guilt-stained, evolving humanity; a protracted nightmare; a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind; a gigantic epiphany of mankind; an ark to contain all human myths and types; a chaosmos of Alle; a polyhedron of scripture; a meanderthalltale; this non-day diary, this all night’s newseryreel; one of the boldest books ever written; one of the most entertaining books ever written; one of the greatest works of twentieth-century architecture; nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can be worth all [its] circumambient peripherization; enormous, mad, unreadable; a cold pudding of a book; a Wholesale Safety Pun factory; a dull mass of phony folklore; a divertissement philologique; literatured with once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage; an Irish word ballet; like a little Negro dance; music; a collideorscape; a macroscope;
Cognitive adaptations of social bonding in birds
Authors: Emery Nathan J , Seed Amanda M , Bayern Auguste M P von , Clayton Nicola S
Published: November 2023

The ‘social intelligence hypothesis’ was originally conceived to explain how primates may have evolved their superior intellect and large brains when compared with other animals. Although some birds such as corvids may be intellectually comparable to apes, the same relationship between sociality and brain size seen in primates has not been found for birds, possibly suggesting a role for other non-social factors. But bird sociality is different from primate sociality. Most monkeys and apes form stable groups, whereas most birds are monogamous, and only form large flocks outside of the breeding season. Some birds form lifelong pair bonds and these species tend to have the largest brains relative to body size.
Social cognition by food-caching corvids. The western scrub-jay as a natural psychologist
Authors: Clayton Nicola S , Dally Joanna M , Emery Nathan J
Published: November 2023

Food-caching corvids hide food, but such caches are susceptible to pilfering by other individuals. Consequently, the birds use several counter strategies to protect their caches from theft, e.g. hiding most of them out of sight. When observed by potential pilferers at the time of caching, experienced jays that have been thieves themselves, take further protective action. Once the potential pilferers have left, they move caches those birds have seen, re-hiding them in new places. Naive birds that had no thieving experience do not do so. By focusing on the counter strategies of the cacher when previously observed by a potential pilferer, these results raise the intriguing possibility that re-caching is based on a form of mental attribution, namely the simulation of another bird’s view-point.
Social intelligence in the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta)
Authors: Holekamp Kay E , Sakai Sharleen T , Lundrigan Barbara L
Published: November 2023

If the large brains and great intelligence characteristic of primates were favoured by selection pressures associated with life in complex societies, then cognitive abilities and nervous systems with primate-like attributes should have evolved convergently in non-primate mammals living in large, elaborate societies in which social dexterity enhances individual fitness. The societies of spotted hyenas are remarkably like those of cercopithecine primates with respect to size, structure and patterns of competition and cooperation. These similarities set an ideal stage for comparative analysis of social intelligence and nervous system organization. As in cercopithecine primates, spotted hyenas use multiple sensory modalities to recognize their kin and other conspecifics as individuals, they recognize third-party kin and rank relationships among their clan mates, and they use this knowledge adaptively during social decision making.
The adaptive value of sociality in mammalian groups
Authors: Silk Joan B
Published: November 2023

According to behavioural ecology theory, sociality evolves when the net benefits of close association with conspecifics exceed the costs. The nature and relative magnitude of the benefits and costs of sociality are expected to vary across species and habitats. When sociality is favoured, animals may form groups that range from small pair-bonded units to huge aggregations. The size and composition of social groups have diverse effects on morphology and behaviour, ranging from the extent of sexual dimorphism to brain size, and the structure of social relationships. This general argument implies that sociality has fitness consequences for individuals. However, for most mammalian species, especially long-lived animals like primates, there are sizable gaps in the chain of evidence that links sociality and social bonds to fitness outcomes.
Culture in great apes: using intricate complexity in feeding skills to trace the evolutionary origin of human technical prowess
Authors: Byrne Richard W
Published: November 2023

Geographical cataloguing of traits, as used in human ethnography, has led to the description of ‘culture’ in some non-human great apes. Culture, in these terms, is detected as a pattern of local ignorance resulting from environmental constraints on knowledge transmission. However, in many cases, the geographical variations may alternatively be explained by ecology. Social transmission of information can reliably be identified in many other animal species, by experiment or distinctive patterns in distribution; but the excitement of detecting culture in great apes derives from the possibility of understanding the evolution of cumulative technological culture in humans. Given this interest, I argue that great ape research should concentrate on technically complex behaviour patterns that are ubiquitous within a local population; in these cases, a wholly non-social ontogeny is highly unlikely.
Getting back to the rough ground: deception and ‘social living’
Authors: Reddy Vasudevi
Published: November 2023

At the heart of the social intelligence hypothesis is the central role of ‘social living’. But living is messy and psychologists generally seek to avoid this mess in the interests of getting clean data and cleaner logical explanations. The study of deception as intelligent action is a good example of the dangers of such avoidance. We still do not have a full picture of the development of deceptive actions in human infants and toddlers or an explanation of why it emerges. This paper applies Byrne & Whiten’s functional taxonomy of tactical deception to the social behaviour of human infants and toddlers using data from three previous studies. The data include a variety of acts, such as teasing, pretending, distracting and concealing, which are not typically considered in relation to human deception. This functional analysis shows the onset of non-verbal deceptive acts to be surprisingly early.
Cooperation and human cognition: the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis
Authors: Moll Henrike , Tomasello Michael
Published: November 2023

Nicholas Humphrey’s social intelligence hypothesis proposed that the major engine of primate cognitive evolution was social competition. Lev Vygotsky also emphasized the social dimension of intelligence, but he focused on human primates and cultural things such as collaboration, communication and teaching. A reasonable proposal is that primate cognition in general was driven mainly by social competition, but beyond that the unique aspects of human cognition were driven by, or even constituted by, social cooperation. In the present paper, we provide evidence for this Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis by comparing the social-cognitive skills of great apes with those of young human children in several domains of activity involving cooperation and communication with others. We argue, finally, that regular participation in cooperative, cultural interactions during ontogeny leads children to construct uniquely powerful forms of perspectival cognitive representation.
Understanding primate brain evolution
Authors: Dunbar R I M , Shultz Susanne
Published: November 2023

We present a detailed reanalysis of the comparative brain data for primates, and develop a model using path analysis that seeks to present the coevolution of primate brain (neocortex) and sociality within a broader ecological and life-history framework. We show that body size, basal metabolic rate and life history act as constraints on brain evolution and through this influence the coevolution of neocortex size and group size. However, they do not determine either of these variables, which appear to be locked in a tight coevolutionary system. We show that, within primates, this relationship is specific to the neocortex. Nonetheless, there are important constraints on brain evolution; we use path analysis to show that, in order to evolve a large neocortex, a species must first evolve a large brain to support that neocortex and this in turn requires adjustments in diet (to provide the energy needed) and life history (to allow sufficient time both for brain growth and for ‘software’ programming).
The society of selves
Authors: Humphrey Nicholas
Published: November 2023

Human beings are not only the most sociable animals on Earth, but also the only animals that have to ponder the separateness that comes with having a conscious self. The philosophical problem of ‘other minds’ nags away at people’s sense of who—and why—they are. But the privacy of consciousness has an evolutionary history—and maybe even an evolutionary function. While recognizing the importance to humans of mind-reading and psychic transparency, we should consider the consequences and possible benefits of being—ultimately—psychically opaque.
Esther’s Revenge at Susa
Authors: Dalley Stephanie
Published: November 2023

Why are the names of the chief characters in the biblical Book of Esther those of Mesopotamian deities? Stephanie Dalley argues that the narrative reflects real happenings in seventh-century Assyria, where the widespread belief that revenge belongs to the gods explains why Assyrian kings described punitive campaigns as divine acts, leading to the mythologizing of certain historical events. Ashurbanipal’s sack of Susa, led by the deities Ishtar and Marduk, underlies the Hebrew story of Esther, and that story contains traces of the cultic calendar of Ishtar-of-Nineveh. Dalley traces the way in which the long-term settlement of ‘lost tribes ’ in Assyria, revealed by the fruits of excavation in Iraq and Syria, inspired a blend of pagan and Jewish traditions.
Emendation and Modernization
Authors: Jowett John
Published: November 2023

Though it has been subject to few recent studies, textual emendation is common to critical editions of all kinds of text, and indeed can scarcely be avoided in any practice that aims to go further than reproduce a source text exactly as it stands. According to Greg’s formulation, in one of the few discussions that attempt to rise above the particulars of individual readings, ‘criticism must always proceed in relation to what we know, or what we surmise, respecting the history of the text’. In other words, it will proceed by taking into account what is known in classical and biblical textual criticism as recensio or recension, the analysis of texts to establish how they relate to each other. Identification of error and proposals to emendation cannot, then, be based on critical judgement alone. Editing brings together a form of criticism and a form of more empirical scholarship. How one applies the correlation of criticism and textual study has always been subject to contention and debate, as is the breadth of scope that emendation can legitimately claim for itself, and as too is the weight of Greg’s phrase ‘what we surmise’.
War and regicide, 1648–1649
Authors: Morrill John
Published: November 2023

Between 11 November 1647 and 3 May 1648 Cromwell can be glimpsed sometimes in London, sometimes at army headquarters. There are extant only fragmentary parliamentary diaries from this time, but one of them offers a single glimpse of Cromwell’s unfolding views. Speaking in the Commons on 3 January 1648 (according to a much- repeated royalist canard rattling his sword in its scabbard as he spoke) he passionately demanded a suspension of all ‘addresses’ to the king for the foreseeable future. He asserted that they ‘shalt not suffer a hypocrite to reign’ and that they ‘should not any longer expect safety and government from an obstinate man whose heart God had hardened’.
Ordering three kingdoms, 1649–1651
Authors: Morrill John
Published: November 2023

Over the next four years Cromwell combined the demanding business of war with the demanding business of sustaining a fragile political system and of seeking to develop viable long-term political and institutional forms. He was away from London, campaigning in Ireland and in Scotland, from July 1649 to mid-September 1651. But he kept in close touch with events there during his absences, and after 12 September 1651 he never left the environs of the capital (except for two brief excursions into Kent in May 1652) for the rest of his life, moving first to the Cockpit and then, early in 1654, into the royal palaces at Whitehall and Hampton Court.
The pursuit of stability, 1651–1653
Authors: Morrill John
Published: November 2023

From the moment of Cromwell’s return in triumph from Worcester he and his close colleagues in the army sought to galvanize the Rump. He had four objectives. First, he sought to persuade members of the Rump to set a time to dissolve itself and to hold new elections. Second, he sought to achieve a greater acquiescence from the large number of former royalists by a broad and generous amnesty. Third (and this was a change of heart), he supported the settlement that united the three former kingdoms into a single polity.
Posthumous reputation
Authors: Morrill John
Published: November 2023

Cromwell’s reputation has ebbed and flowed. Since the death of the generation that knew him as their head of state more than 160 full-length biographies have appeared, and more than 1000 separate publications bear his name. In 1929 Wilbur Cortez Abbott, limbering up to produce his four-volume, 3400-page, 2-million-word edition and com- mentary, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, produced a bibliography of 3520 pamphlets, books, and essays in which Cromwell makes a prominent appearance. An updated list would probably be in excess of 6000 items. There was a crescendo of interest in the later nineteenth century, triggered by the appearance of Thomas Carlyle’s edition of Cromwell’s letters and speeches in December 1845.
The realm reshaped
Authors: Ives Eric
Published: November 2023

Henry VIII owed the successful assertion of his royal supremacy to the political skills of Thomas Cromwell. It is, however, more diﬃcult to separate king and minister in the secular affairs of the 1530s. One of the most important developments concerned parliament. In the first place it was called more frequently. From 1509 to 1531 there were eleven sessions; from 1532 to 1540 there were ten. More than that, the legislation after 1532 asserted the novel competence of statute to enforce the religious authority of the supreme head of the church and the ability of parliament to override property rights, most notably in the dissolution of the monasteries.
Trust From The Barrel Of A Gun
Authors: Kohn Marek
Published: November 2023

An animal will often pursue its interests, as Richard Dawkins and John Krebs note in their text ‘Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation?’, by manipulating objects in its environment. If the object is inanimate, the animal must apply physical force to make it move. If it is animate, the animal may be able to induce it to make the desired movements itself, by sending it signals. This form of manipulation is called communication.
Locating Privacy in Tudor London
Authors: Orlin Lena Cowen
Published: November 2023

Locating Privacy in Tudor London asks new questions about where private life was lived in the early modern period, about where evidence of it has been preserved, and about how progressive and coherent its history can be said to have been. The Renaissance and the Reformation are generally taken to have produced significant advances in individuality, subjectivity, and interiority, especially among the elite, but this study of middling-sort culture shows privacy to have been an object of suspicion, of competing priorities, and of compulsory betrayals. The institutional archives of civic governance, livery companies, parish churches, and ecclesiastical courts reveal the degree to which society organized itself around principles of preventing privacy, as a condition of order. Also represented in the discussion are such material artefacts as domestic buildings and household furnishings, which were routinely experienced as collective and monitory agents rather than spheres of exclusivity and self-expression. In ‘everyday’ life, it is argued, economic motivations were of more urgent concern than the political paradigms that have usually informed our understanding of the Renaissance. Locating Privacy pursues the case study of Alice Barnham (1523-1604), a previously unknown merchant-class woman, subject of one of the earliest family group paintings from England. Her story is touched by many of the changes-in social structure, religion, the built environment, the spread of literacy, and the history of privacy-that define the sixteenth century. The book is of interest to literary, social, cultural, and architectural historians, to historians of the Reformation and of London, and to historians of gender and women’s studies.
Introduction: Doors
Authors: Orlin Lena Cowen
Published: November 2023

Like all historical projects, this is an attempt to reopen a door that time has closed. Some of the simplest of things, things so long held trivial that only in the last few decades have they come to the scholarly forefront, are those that seem most securely locked away from us. These are quotidian matters of work and leisure, production and consumption, community and controversy, horizons and boundaries. How can we recover the manner in which the peoples of the past apprehended not only epochal moments but also their ongoing daily existences? Is it possible for us to register some of the many differences occasioned by their ages and genders, stations and locations, backgrounds and aspirations, beliefs and personalities? What can we know of the ways in which they related to their built environments and personal possessions, when they felt comfort and where they exercised control? Do there remain points of access to the events they would have kept hidden from their contemporaries and which history has so far worked to conceal from us, too? Every question I want to ask has to do with how those long gone lived their private lives.
Mathematics Emerging
Authors: Stedall Jacqueline
Published: November 2023

Aimed at students and researchers in Mathematics, History of Mathematics and Science, this book examines the development of mathematics from the late 16th Century to the end of the 19th Century. Mathematics has an amazingly long and rich history, it has been practised in every society and culture, with written records reaching back in some cases as far as four thousand years. This book will focus on just a small part of the story, in a sense the most recent chapter of it: the mathematics of western Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Each chapter will focus on a particular topic and outline its history with the provision of facsimiles of primary source material along with explanatory notes and modern interpretations. Almost every source is given in its original form, not just in the language in which it was first written, but as far as practicable in the layout and typeface in which it was read by contemporaries.This book is designed to provide mathematics undergraduates with some historical background to the material that is now taught universally to students in their final years at school and the first years at college or university: the core subjects of calculus, analysis, and abstract algebra, along with others such as mechanics, probability, and number theory. All of these evolved into their present form in a relatively limited area of western Europe from the mid sixteenth century onwards, and it is there that we find the major writings that relate in a recognizable way to contemporary mathematics.
The Calculus Of Newton And Of Leibniz
Authors: Stedall Jacqueline
Published: November 2023

We have seen in Chapter 3that many of the methods and ideas that were eventually absorbed into the differential and integral calculus were already emerging from the late 1620s onwards. Only with the work of Newton in the 1660s and Leibniz in the 1670s, however, did the pieces come together in a recognizable whole. Both Newton and Leibniz, working independently and from different starting points, discovered systematic rules for finding tangents and areas, and both observed what on the face of it is quite unexpected: that the two kinds of problem are intimately related. Differentiation and integration turn out to be inverse processes. This discovery is now known as the Fundamental Theorem of the Calculus, but in the seventeenth century it was not yet a theorem.
The Mathematics Of Nature: Newton’s Principia
Authors: Nature: Newton’S Principia The Mathematics Of
Published: November 2023

Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (The mathematical principles of natural philosophy) was published in 1687, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that it revolutionized the role of mathematics in our understanding of the physical world. Its main aim was a mathematical explanation of the motion of the planets, but it also touches on fluid flow, wave motion, the ebb and flow of tides, and paths of comets. Not all Newton’s ideas stood the test of time, but his theory of gravity and planetary motion laid the foundations for what became the accepted view of the universe until the twentieth century.
Power Series
Authors: Stedall Jacqueline
Published: November 2023

This and Mercator’s related work on the quadrature of the hyperbola (see 3.2.4) prompted Newton to disclose similar results and several further series obtained by him during the winter of 1664 to 1665, in a treatise entitled ‘De analysi’. Newton sent ‘De analysi’ to Barrow in Cambridge and John Collins in London, and in 1670 Collins sent extracts to James Gregory in Edinburgh, who replied that he himself had also found several series. Assuming that Newton had priority, Gregory waited for him to publish first, but died in 1673 long before Newton did so. Consequently we have some idea of Gregory’s achievements but very little insight into his methods.
Groups, Fields, Ideals, And Rings
Authors: Stedall Jacqueline
Published: November 2023

One of the most fundamental changes in mathematics from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth was the emergence of abstract algebra: the study of structures such as groups, fields, or vector spaces. The initial ideas almost always arose in the context of specific problems so that, to begin with, the elements of a group, for example, were always permutations, and the elements of vector spaces were directed quantities. Gradually it came to be understood that the underlying structures were relevant in many other situations, and could be studied in their own right. By the end of the nineteenth century, the process of abstraction had reached its culmination in the axiomatization of the essential properties, which is how such concepts are generally introduced today. This Chapter traces some of the early history of groups, fields, and ideals, while vector spaces are dealt with in Chapter17.
Convergence And Completeness
Authors: Stedall Jacqueline
Published: November 2023

We have already noted some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of convergence (or the lack of them) in 8.3, and in this Chapter we take up the nineteenth-century continuation of the same story. One of the most powerful tools available to early nineteenth-century mathematicians investigating convergence turned out to be Cauchy sequences, and so that is where we shall begin.
Introduction: Voyaging Through the Pacific
Authors: Keown Michelle
Published: November 2023

An identity that is grounded in something as vast as the sea should exercise our minds and rekindle in us the spirit that sent our ancestors to explore the oceanic unknown and make it their home, our home.
Living myths
Authors: Drangsholt Janne Stigen
Published: November 2023

One of the first things to strike a reader of Ted Hughes is that he is a mythic poet. This is particularly true of the poetic sequences he wrote in the late Sixties and Seventies, where myths such as Hercules, Oedipus, the Grail legend, and Genesis underpin the poetic discourse. Even though there are elements pointing in the same direction in Hawk in the Rain (1957) and Lupercal (1960), wodwo (1967) marks a clear change in Hughes’s oeuvre. Wodwo is moulded in a universe where ‘Nothing lets up or develops’, where the cycles of nature are perceived as purposeless, isolated re-enactments.
Classics Reanimated: Ted Hughes And Reffexive Translation
Authors: Brown Sarah Annes
Published: November 2023

Over the last few decades we have seen something of a return to the practices of the eighteenth century in that leading poets have chosen to display their art through the medium of translation, particularly translation of classical texts. Many of these translations are consciously updated, bearing clear traces of their creators’ cultural context and political position. Thus Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act (1985), a version of Antigone, is set in the early days of the Troubles in Northen Ireland and Tony Harrison’s adaptation of Lysistrata, The Common Chorus (1992), is a response to the Greenham Common protests.
Horace’s Ars Poetica and the Marvellous
Authors: Citroni Mario
Published: November 2023

In the Ars Poetica, the only text expressly dedicated to the literary theory elaborated by the Augustan poets, the marvellous, as a problem of aesthetics, is only occasionally mentioned, and every time to limit its admissibility or even to exclude it completely. The scanty presence of the theme in the poem contrasts with the striking visibility that Horace chooses to give, at the very beginning of his text (1–4), to a surrealistic figure, the aim of which is to deter poets from venturing into portrayals in contrast with natural reality.
The Question of the Marvellous in the Georgics of Virgil
Authors: Deremetz Alain
Published: November 2023

In his epigrams Martial repeatedly passes judgement on the failings of the grand genres of epic and tragedy. In 10.4 he rebukes tragedy for its stubborn insistence on producing nothing but monstra, uana . . . miserae ludibria chartae ‘monstrosities, empty sports of a miserable sheet of paper’ (cf. Hor. Ars Poet. 7–8 aegri somnia ‘the dreams of a sick man’, uanae . . . species ‘empty shapes’).
In Search of the Lost Hercules: Strategies of the Fantastic in the Aeneid
Authors: Labate Mario
Published: November 2023

The language of the ancient epos develops in conformity with co- ordinates that are largely fixed by the Homeric-Virgilian tradition, but at the same time, it has at its disposal a vast hinterland which has only partly been explored: figures of heroes that are different from Achilles or Aeneas, heroes of a more ancient and fantastic standing, whose deeds offer an occasion to investigate wider horizons and to describe strange creatures, formidable dangers, and astonishing, spectacular feats.
Generic Boundaries in Late Fifth-Century Athens
Authors: Foley Helene P
Published: November 2023

Oliver Taplin has argued that during the fifth-century heyday of Attic tragedy and Old Comedy, the period from around 440 to 415 bce, the two genres ‘to a considerable degree’ helped ‘to define each other by their opposition and their reluctance to overlap.’ Tragedy from the beginning contained comic elements that often served to enhance tragic tension, and comedy parodied and borrowed from serious literature, including tragedy. But comedy more persistently invited laughter and tragedy, pity for suffering. Most importantly, Taplin argues, the two genres maintained a different relation to the world of the audience. Tragedy eschewed metatheatre and direct address to the audience, while comedy revelled in it. The comic parabasis even allowed a poet to illuminate and defend his own art. Tragedy largely avoided topical allusions after Aeschylus’ Persians and Eumenides, whereas comedy pointed repeatedly to contemporary social and political reality. Tragedy could use disguise, but did not flaunt its duplicity and transparency. It (though not the satyr plays performed with it) maintained a high level of decorum and refused to display physical violence.
Performance and Rivalry: Homer, Odysseus, and Hesiod*
Authors: Kelly Adrian
Published: November 2023

Among the several episodes at the end of the Odyssey to arouse the suspicious notice of scholarship, the ‘recapitulation’ (23.310–43) has attracted its fair share of criticism. Odysseus’ précis of his adventures to Penelope has been deemed (inter alia) unnecessary, cursory, selective, and even unique in summarizing his wanderings in oratio obliqua, for everywhere else those narratives are put into the mouth of the poem’s main character. Of these objections, the last is at least interesting, because it focuses on the poet’s decision to narrate Odysseus’ précis not in direct speech, but in his own, third-person voice. This article will argue that his decision should be understood within the broader context of the relationship between the poet and Odysseus. Seen in this light, the recapitulation can reveal much about Homer’s conception of his craft, and his attitude towards other (competing) aoidoi.
Theatrical Furies: Thoughts on Eumenides
Authors: Easterling Pat
Published: November 2023

This paper is about Furies as stage presences in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, which may have been the first play to introduce them to the Greek theatre and certainly gave Greek literature some of its most influential images. I use ‘Furies’ as a convenient shorthand for Erinyes/Eumenides/Semnai Theai, without wishing to imply that their complex identity can be captured in a single English word. In concentrating on theatrical performance I am deeply indebted to Oliver Taplin’s inspiring work, and I want to use an approach akin to his in addressing a question central to interpretation of the Oresteia, namely how we are to understand Athena’s persuasion of the Furies and their ultimate acceptance of honours at Athens. Are they ‘transformed’? Are they ‘subordinated’? Are they ‘converted’? . . . and more importantly, what might this mean? Since the Furies are going to be associated for the future with the Areopagus, the question has some bearing on this institution, too.
The Last Word: Ritual, Power, and Performance in Euripides’ Hiketides
Authors: Kavoulaki Athena
Published: November 2023

This context and background for the events of the play seem to defy attempts to interpret the action from a purely Athenocentric perspective. As will be argued below, the critical situation that is explored in the play does not affect the integrity of a single civic community but puts to test the relation between communities and the way in which relations are formed. Forging relations––within a wider or narrower context ––would (in the ancient Greek world) normally require the contribution of ritual, and the Hiketides attests to this tendency. The ritual axis of the play seems to be particularly stressed: on the one hand, there is the religious centre in which the action is located; its significance runs as an undercurrent throughout the play On the other hand, the events of the play are framed by ritual action.
Character and Characterization in Greek Tragedy
Authors: Seidensticker Bernd
Published: November 2023

Over the last three decades there has been a lively and controversial discussion –– mainly among anglophone scholars–– about the importance of character and characterization in Greek tragedy. Since it seems that a kind of communi opinio has been reached according to which character and characterization are of little, if any, importance for Greek tragedy, it may be the time to put together and review the arguments, which have been brought forward against a character-oriented interpretation.
The Poetics of the Mask in Old Comedy
Authors: Brown Peter
Published: November 2023

In Brown (2000) I examined doorknocking and related scenes in fifth-century Greek tragedy, and I ended with a brief discussion of three Aristophanic door scenes with tragic colouring (Acharnians 1071–2, 1174–89, Peace 179–84, all discussed again below). It has long been recognized that such scenes (with or without tragic colouring) are particularly at home in comedy, often coming early in the play, and Revermann rightly observes that ‘the motif called for variation’: only thus could it be kept alive as a source of entertainment for the audience. This variation has not been studied in detail (as far as I am aware), and I hope it will be found helpful if I discuss each surviving Aristophanic example in turn. In many cases this will call for discussion of related issues such as what we are to envisage happening on the stage, whether doorknocking in fact takes place, and who answers the door. One element that sometimes contributes to the comedy is the rudeness of the character who answers, but there are other sources of entertainment and surprise as well. For comparison, I shall include discussion of some scenes where a character approaches a door, or summons another character to appear, without knocking; but I shall not discuss every scene that makes use of a door. As far as possible, I shall be scrutinizing the text for evidence of the actions on stage. Oliver Taplin has set us high standards for doing this without indulging in wild flights of fancy, and I hope I shall not fall too far short. Some general points will be made as we go along, but, since my main purpose is to advertise the variety of Aristophanes’ techniques, I shall conclude without a conclusion.
The Greek Gem: A Token of Recognition
Authors: Moreno Alfonso
Published: November 2023

Recognition through tokens, according to Aristotle in the Poetics, is the most artless kind of anagnôrisis. Reliance on a birth mark, a scar, or a necklace as a device to trigger recognition usually reflects an uninventive author, incapable of creating a more artful dramatic narrative. For Aristotle this is not only an aesthetic judgement, but also a matter of technical classification. Artless tokens are to be understood as his poetic equivalents of the inartificial proofs (π?τε?< αΛ τεχνοι) described in the Rhetoric, i.e. ‘proofs which have not been furnished by ourselves but were already in existence’, of which Aristotle gives the three ancient courtroom examples of witnesses, tortures, and contracts. It is perhaps paradoxical, therefore, that the conjunction of anagnôrisis and tokens in the classical period produced masterpieces of τEχ?η fully equal to our honorand. These tokens of Greek glyptics may fall outside Aristotle’s remit, but they are (as I hope to show here) certainly artful and poetic, and (in particular) dramatic.
An Oedipus for our Times? Yeats’s Version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus
Authors: Macintosh Fiona
Published: November 2023

Between 2000 and 2003 numerous stories ran in The New York Times promising a rare theatrical gem ––Al Pacino as Oedipus. We learned that the acclaimed actress, Estelle Parsons, then working as director of the Actors’ Studio, was to direct a star-studded cast. Public readings took place in 2001 but there was in the end no full performance. This, however, was never interpreted as any kind of failure, nor indeed with much disappointment, because we always heard how it was the experience of working on the project that mattered more than any commercial realization: developing this Oedipus was valued ‘for the fun of it, like working out in a gymnasium.’
Engaging with Pygmies: Thomas Browne and John Milton
Authors: Edwards Karen L
Published: November 2023

A historiated capital W, 23 inches square, ornaments the first page of Thomas Browne’s address to readers of Pseudodoxia Epidemica: or, Enquiries into Very many received Tenents, and commonly presumed Truths (see Fig. 1).1 The woodcut is badly worn and damaged, but near the top, visible between the limbs of the two large Vs that comprise the capital W, a reader can see a long-necked bird against the clouds, flying with open beak and raised wings. The head of another bird is just discernible below the extended neck of the first.
The Politics of Painting: Pseudodoxia Epidemica and Iconoclasm
Authors: Killeen Kevin
Published: November 2023

William Dowsing, commissioned by Parliament as the ‘Iconoclast General’ for East Anglia in 1643–4, was impressively assiduous in the records he kept of the thousands of images that he and his deputies managed to destroy. His journal is thorough, orderly, and, in its sheer scope, remains shocking. For all that contemporary royalist accounts may have reported the iconoclasts as consumed with rage, there is little frantic about his operations; indeed, they show a certain patience with local obstructions and refusals of help from antagonistic clergy and parishioners.
Identifying the Language of the Individual in the Zenon Archive
Authors: Evans T V
Published: November 2023

An ancient Greek or Latin letter on a papyrus, ostracon, or tablet potentially offers a remarkably direct connection with its author. We are not separated from that author by a long manuscript tradition, as with most literary texts, but can work from an autograph. Where we have several letters from a particular author, we have the opportunity to study personal written style in a manner unique for these languages. Such non-literary letters raise questions of the greatest interest from a linguistic and stylistic perspective. Complications, however, instantly arise. By what process, it ought to be asked, does the named author ‘s message reach the writing surface? It is frequently assumed by scholars (as in several places elsewhere in this volume) that that named author is directly responsible for the content, and even for wielding the pen. In some cases this assumption is no doubt accurate, but it would be cavalier to generalize. Where we have groups of documents sent in the name of a particular individual, they are very often written in a range of different hands.
Do Mothers Matter? The Emergence of Metronymics in Early Roman Egypt*
Authors: Depauw Mark
Published: November 2023

The addition of the mother ‘s name in personal identification in Greek has hitherto received relatively little attention.1 The traditional interpretation (of the few people who bothered to comment on it) was that it appeared in the late Ptolemaic period and was the ‘Nachklang eines fru¨heren ‘ ‘mutterrechtlichen ‘ ‘ Zustandes ‘. In her dissertation of 1939 Lea Bringmann argued against this hypothesis by pointing out that mothers ‘ names only appear in Egyptian texts from the Persian period onwards, which is somehow too late to explain the phenomenon as an atavistic matriarchal remnant. Instead she concurred with Griffith, who thought that in Demotic the addition of the mother ‘s name served the purely practical purpose of distinguishing homonymic individuals. As I have shown elsewhere, however, this addition to Greek personal identifications is in fact a very rare phenomenon during the Ptolemaic period, when the exceptional examples can in all likelihood be adequately I should like to thank Willy Clarysse, Dorothy Thompson, and Katelijn Vandorpe for advice and suggestions.
Linguistic Varieties and Language Level in Latin Non-Literary Letters*
Authors: Halla-aho Hilla
Published: November 2023

The Latin letters on papyri, ostraca, and wooden tablets offer many interesting aspects for the study of variation and change in the Latin language. However, it is not always clear how this evidence should be interpreted. For any kind of linguistic research on these letters it is reasonable to assume that every writer of these texts tried to write as well as he or she possibly could, and hence that deviations from the standard are unintentional, i.e. that being aware of two variants the writer would not have deliberately chosen the substandard one.1 For the most part the writers will have been trying to adhere to a standard of letterwriting, to produce language which they knew to be appropriate for the situation, aiming at a very specific goal, viz. intending to be (a) understood and (b) given the correct answer (without causing annoyance, etc.).2 Letters as a text type typically make use of stock I should like to thank J. N. Adams, Peter Kruschwitz, Martti Leiwo, and Marja Vierros for comments on an earlier version of this essay, as well as all those who commented on my paper (partly on the same subject) at the ‘Buried Linguistic Treasure ‘ conference, especially Eleanor Dickey.
Aelian
Authors: Costa C D N
Published: November 2023

My hives are deserted by the bees: they have left hearth and home, though they weren't runaways before. In fact they used to remain loyal and lived in their hives as their very own homes. They had a dewy meadow too, one that was rich in flowers, and we used to feast them on the richest of banquets. They, in turn, with excessive industry would feed us on lots of lovely honey, and never failed to produce this sweet fruit of their labours. But now they have gone off and away, though we did nothing to annoy them: I swear it by Arista eus and by Apollo himself. So they have fled, and their home is bereft, and the meadow flowers are deserted and wasting away.
Euripides
Authors: Costa C D N
Published: November 2023

From that time we have felt, and shall continue to feel, affection for each other. And I have outwitted those people who have often stirred up suspicions between us so that they can win some advantage out of our enmity by cultivating one or other of us. Even now, my good Cephisophon, I know that these are the people who are spreading the rumours about me among the public. But just as their wicked tongues have never got them anywhere, and won them nothing but derision and hatred, you can be sure that now too they will not only get nowhere but actually come to grief themselves. Still, you do well in writing to me about these things, as you think they matter to me. But though you do well in so writing, I must say that you are doing me an injury in offering a reply to people who don ‘t deserve it.
Hippocrates
Authors: Costa C D N
Published: November 2023

Don’t envy Aristides his malice, Callias; for he said he did not greatly envy you your wealth. And yet, by Zeus, it would be much better for him to welcome what all men want for them-selves and their families than for you to imitate what all men hate and consider accursed. 2. So you must in no way rebuke or chastise the Athenians for voting rashly and choosing leaders from among the unworthy-hinting at me. 3. But first consider this, that you are reproving those who have voted for leaders who have won victories. 4. Then bear in mind who you are to talk such rubbish, and that you have not succeeded in being appointed general even after many other Themistocleses.