bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Prolegomena
Authors: Pulleyn Simon
Published: November 2023

This is a book about Greek prayer as part of Greek life. No attempt is made to use Greek evidence to produce a definition of prayer valid for all religions. It is far from clear that the search for universal definitions of cultural phenomena is the highest goal of study.1 However similar any two cultures may be, those similarities ought not to be emphasized to the exclusion of all else. Too much schematization leads to distortion. If two societies share the same practice or institution, then, to use a mathematical analogy, that factor may eventually, after due consideration of its intrinsic interest, be discounted as a lowest common denominator. The societal remainder, the set of practices that distinguish cultures from each other, often turns out to be the most revealing.
Thanks and Praise
Authors: Pulleyn Simon
Published: November 2023

In the previous two chapters, we examined the importance of reciprocity in petitionary prayers. We saw that one ideally needed to be able to offer a god some sort of recompense in return for his help. Under some circumstances, it was possible to remind them of one's past services. In this chapter, we shall look at some of the ways in which humans thanked the gods when their prayers were answered. It has been said that prayers of gratitude are not very frequent in archaic and classical Greece and that when one does find them, they are not particularly effusive.1 The corpus of Greek drama furnishes some representative examples.
Curses and Justice
Authors: Pulleyn Simon
Published: November 2023

Was there a difference between prayer and curse in ancient Greece? A modern Christian is apt to think that a prayer is a good and pious thing proffered before God in church or on one‘s knees by the bedside whereas a curse is some sort of leftover from the dark days of medieval witchcraft. Such a view is, however, simplistic. The Book of Common Prayer actually contains an elaborate litany of curses against the ungodly in the ceremony known as ‘Commination, or Denouncing of God‘s Anger and Judgements Against Sinners‘. There is a place in orthodox Christianity for cursing just as there is for blessing. At the same time, there is, of course, a class of curses recognized as belonging within the sphere of black magic. Such things are still known today.1 In this chapter, we shall examine whether and how far the Greeks recognized cursing as a category of action separate from prayer. We shall also be looking at the difference between various types of curse.
Magic and Names
Authors: Pulleyn Simon
Published: November 2023

In the last chapter, we saw that defixiones had little to do with xdpi,. We also said that activities which deny xdpi, might have a claim to be called ‘magical‘. One of the pieces of received wisdom about ancient religion is that one needed to know the name of a god in order to get him to do what one wanted. Does this represent a kind of coercion inimical to the spirit of xdpi,? This chapter1 will be devoted to an examination of how important the Greeks thought it was to know the name of a god and what they thought one gained thereby.
Sitz zm Leben
Authors: Pulleyn Simon
Published: November 2023

Some religious groups recognize certain occasions as particularly appropriate for prayer. The Koran, for example, enjoins Muslims to face Mecca and pray twice a day, at sunrise and sunset. This sacred duty, called Salat, is considered to be one of the Five Pillars of Islamic faith.1 Christian worshippers are enjoined to attend Matins and Evensong, whilst those in monastic orders observe seven daily periods of prayer. Such prayers as these might be called ‘hourglass prayers‘. In addition to regularly recurrent prayers, there are other, rarer, occasions when prayer is thought proper. The Book of Common Prayer sets forth prayers which may be used in times of famine, drought, or other times of need. Such prayers, whilst not likely to recur frequently, are none the less provided for in the overall liturgical sheme of things, and we might call them ‘situational‘. In addition to these, any Christian, Muslim, or Jew may pray to God on sundry occasions as necessary, for example for the health of a sick relative. Such prayers obviously differ from those already mentioned in that they are unpredictable and form no part of an accepted syllabus. These we might call ‘adventitious‘ prayers. In this section, we shall consider whether Greek prayer falls into such categories or not.
Poetry Among Other Activities of Homeric Man
Authors: Finkelberg Margalit
Published: November 2023

If we assemble all the manifestations of Homeric man -from physiological instincts to the higher forms of intellectual activity and take them, provisionally at least, as a corpus representative of the entire spectrum of Homeric man’s functioning, we shall see that the way in which poetry is treated in Homer is far from being peculiar to this activity alone. Thus, Homer’s poets sing either when ‘incited’ by the Muse, ‘moved’ by a god, or ‘stirred’ by their tliumos (‘spirit’) or noos (‘mind’), and Hesiod says about himself that the Muses ‘ordered’ him to sing1-but ‘to incite’, ‘to move’, ‘to stir’, ‘to order’ can motivate many other actions of Homeric man. Helen’s elopement with Paris, Patroclus’ fatal onslaught on Troy, Telemachus’ decision to call the assembly and lo go to Pylos are explained exactly like Demodocus’ starting of his performances,’ not to mention the stereotyped acts of fighting, speaking, or even eating and drinking that are regularly the result of being ‘stirred’, ‘incited’, ‘moved’, or ‘ordered’. Again, Hesiod says about himself that the Muses ‘breathed’ into him ‘divine song’’-but communication o[ martial valour and strength (menos, tharsos, alkē, sthenos) by one of the gods, sudden surges of anger of anger (kotos) and infatuation (atē) are also quite often explained by Homer as either ‘put’ or ‘thrown’ into someone’s heart, either ‘sent’ or ‘breathed’ into man by the gods; and the same is true of fortunate or ill-fated ideas, of desires, oracles, and so on.
Conclusion
Authors: Gardner Jane F
Published: November 2023

Since the intention was to explore the relationship between familia and family, to a great extent this book has been concerned with Roman family law—or at least, with certain aspects of it. Attention has been focused primarily upon property, its ownership and transmission, and upon property rights, in so far as these depend upon membership of a familia, or upon ‘family’ relationship. This is not only a matter of the availability of evidence (although much, or rather most, of surviving legal writings concern property), but also of its nature. Provision for economic welfare, whether one’s own, or that of one’s dependants and kin, is a necessary practical concern for most people. Roman legal writings on the topic are not only a source of information on the legal rules and mechanisms involved, but are also uniquely revelatory of social mores and social values—i.e. not only of how people actually behaved, but how they were expected to behave towards ‘family’—and, most importantly, they reveal how Roman society was prepared to modify the legal rules of the familia in response to changes in the needs of society.
Introduction
Authors: Whitehead David
Published: November 2023

What we know of H’s client therefore derives entirely from Lyk. itself. An Athenian of indeterminable deme, even tribe, this Lykophron was seemingly born in the first half of the 380s. (He protests in §15, in reply to allegations of seduction probably com-mitted before 336 (see (iii) below), that a seducer’s career cannot begin after fifty.)
Commentary
Authors: Whitehead David
Published: November 2023

Before the continuous section (§ §1–20) of Lyk.begins must be placed three groups of fragments: those of the Harris papyrus (cols. 41–8); those of col. 1 of the Arden papyrus (before col. 2 ushers in the continuous section); and the three fragments independently preserved by Pollux (2. 152, 9. 137, 9. 156) the second and third of which, as will be seen, float free of any determinable context.
Introduction
Authors: Whitehead David
Published: November 2023

To the best of my knowledge it has never been doubted that the speech which so appealed to [Longinus] is indeed the first, not the second, speech Against Athenogenes. There is in fact no basis upon which either to raise or (beyond the intrinsic quality of the material: see (v) below) to silence any such doubts.
Translation
Authors: Whitehead David
Published: November 2023

Athenogenes was being with me, unwilling to come to a reasonable agreement, she claimed that he was always like that. She urged me to keep cheerful, because she herself would be on my side in every struggle.
Commentary
Authors: Whitehead David
Published: November 2023

These words do not form part of the Harris fragments of Dem. published as (the principal substance of) the editio princeps by Babington.
Empire as Interaction
Authors: Ma John
Published: November 2023

A sense of empire as a process of exchange can be gained even from documents which at first sight express the full weight of royal power, such as Zeuxis’ letter to Amyzon, written immediately after taking the city over.1 The particular case of Amyzon is framed in the wider context of ‘all those who have trusted and handed themselves over to us’, in the rhetoric of extension and totality essential to representations of imperial power; Zeuxis’ professed solicitude speaks of the asymmetry between the royal state and the local community; the letter ends by notifying the Amyzonians that Zeuxis has ordered his subordinates to take care of them and refrain from abuses. The structures of control are already in place; local status quo depends on the performative utterance of the imperial state.
‘Myth into Logos’: The Case of Croesus, or the Historian at Work
Authors: Hartog Francois
Published: November 2023

As we all know, the word muthos is very seldom used by Herodotus (twice only). To characterize a logos (narrative) as muthos is for him a clear way of rejecting it as unreliable and unconvincing. When the term muthos does appear, it is surrounded by a very specific vocabulary: what the Greeks claim concerning the coming of Heracles to Egypt (2. 45) is said anepiskeptos (‘without due consideration’) and is euethes (‘foolish’). On what grounds? Because what they say contradicts the Egyptian phusis (‘nature’) and nomoi (‘customs’). The second occurrence of muthos, still more famous, deals with the vexed problem of the Ocean. Herodotus is quick to dismiss Hecataeus’ statement, because ‘it is grounded in obscurity and needs no disproof (es aphanes ton muthon aneneikas ouk echei elegchon, 2. 23). Located somewhere beyond what is visible, a muthos cannot be proved. With muthos one enters the realm of poetry (‘Homer, I think, or one of the preceding poets has found [heurein] this name: Ocean’). The very choice of the word is intended to be a signal to the listener or the reader.How does one recognize and set something apart as muthos? By using the notion of eikos (‘plausible, probable’) as a critical tool; more broadly, the term eikos helps to make a choice among different versions proposed, and provides a way of organizing the logic of the narrative.
Pre-Roman Algeria
Authors: Cherry David
Published: November 2023

The Roman conquest of north Africa proceeded intermittently, in fits and starts, over the period from about 146 BC until the age of the Severan emperors (AD 197-235), when Roman power in the region achieved its fullest expression. It will be argued later (Chapter 2) that, because Roman military operations from the second half of the second century AD involved, for the most part, the construction of forts on the edge of the Sahara, and because, as has recently been demonstrated, the Romans had little real interest in the desert,1 it may reasonably be said that the Roman conquest was in fact largely complete (at least from the Roman point of view) before the death of Hadrian.
Transformation of Greek Literary Culture under the Influence of Christianity
Authors: Liebeschuetz J H W G
Published: November 2023

So far the book has been concerned with the transformation of the government of the classical city. This was a secular process, largely governed by worldly factors, above all the impact on cities of the Empire. But even so the process was not entirely secular: Christianization played a significant part. The office of bishop was as we have seen a quite unclassical phenomenon, and the rise of the bishop to pre-eminence in his city was part of the profound transformation not only in the administrative structure of the city, but in the way people looked upon their institutions and the duties to their fellow townsmen, that had been brought about by deepening Christianization. It is to exaggerate only a little to suggest that the Greco-Roman world abandoned the model of the citizen-state as presented in Aristotle’s Politics or in Plato’s Laws, to replace it by that of the people oflsrael with its monarch and prophets and God-given laws.
Summary and Conclusions
Authors: Liebeschuetz J H W G
Published: November 2023

The city is an aspect of Greco-Roman civilization about which we have an abundance of information. But the nature of the evidence changes over the years in step with the transformation of the cities, and the changing character of the evidence itself throws light on the changing character and ethos of the cities. This is particularly true of the epigraphic evidence since the evolution of the epigraphic habit closely reflects both the depoliticization and the Christianization of the city. This is the subject of the first chapter.
The Language of Foreigners m Greek Literature
Authors: Colvin Stephen
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we shall consider the literary precedents that were available to Aristophanes for representing the speech of foreigners (both Greeks and barbarians). It would be hard to make judgements about his portrayal of foreign Greeks—and the differences between this and his portrayal of barbarians—without knowing what the norms were in other types of literature. For we are not conducting an investigation simply into the literary style of Aristophanes; we are hoping to use information from comic drama to illuminate a particular area of Greek social thought, namely thought about language and language variation. We should therefore try to explore and account for the differences between the linguistic habits of Aristophanes and those of other Greek authors.
Old Comedy: Shorter Passages and Fragments
Authors: Colvin Stephen
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we shall look at at three related areas of language variation which can usefully be compared: Isolated instances of non-Attic dialect in the surviving plays and in fragments (Aristophanic and non-Aristophanic). This is in a sense a continuation of the last chapter, which looked at the three major sources of non-Attic dialect in the extant plays. The shorter passages are slightly different in nature, however, and cannot be treated in exactly the same way. Furthermore, in the case of the fragments we cannot tell how important a role the dialect passage played in context, or how extended the passage was. This is a familiar problem, outlined by Lobel in the introduction to his edition of Sappho:
Dialect m Old Comedy: Recapitulation
Authors: Colvin Stephen
Published: November 2023

In the analysis of dialect forms in Chapter 4 the phonology sections were set out in such a way as to allow the reader to see what choices the playwright made in the replacement of Attic phonemes. In most cases each Attic phoneme corresponded to two or three different phonemes in each foreign dialect. There is little evidence that Aristophanes created dialect-coloured forms by a mechanical substitution of Attic phonemes on the basis of replacement rules. On the whole his method seems to have been a word-by-word, or lexically-based approach, though this was no doubt underpinned by (perhaps subconscious) generalizations about the phonology.
Homer ‘s Typical Scenes: Homeric Theme and Cognitive Script
Authors: Minchin Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Vithin the Homeric epics it is possible to identify a number of ‘typical scenes ‘: action sequences such as contests, meals, journeys, visits, and funeral rites; procedures such as dressing, or harnessing horses; and, although they were not considered by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, various speech acts, such as rebukes, challenges, exhortations, prayers, and boasts. Parry and Lord referred to such stereotyped episodes as themes. In each of these repeated scenes we notice recurrent ideas or events, some or all of which are expressed each time Homer refers to that scene. Indeed, in the case of routines which describe social situations and mechanical operations, the language in which they are expressed is generally, and not surprisingly, the same as well. In the case of speech acts it is less often the case that lexical similarity is thoroughgoing; for this reason their predictable organization was initially overlooked. Nevertheless, it is possible to observe repeated patterns of discourse in a wide range of individual speech acts; Richard l ‘vlartin, for example, refers to the poet ‘s conventional modes of expression as rhetorical ‘genres ‘
The Story Format and the Generation of ‘Rings ‘
Authors: Minchin Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

This chapter returns to a topic raised in my Introduction and developed in Chapter 3: the topic of memory expertise. There I discussed how we acquire expertise in routine tasks, ho ‘A ‘ we store information about those tasks in memory, and how we access it. As we have already observed, expertise of this kind is retained in procedural or implicit memory as a ‘table ‘ or a ‘format ‘: the format will provide a series of cues to action. This is so even in the case of verbal tasks, such as trying to persuade someone to undertake a particular course of action; rebuking someone for something he or she has done (or failed to do); refusing an invitation; giving a description of a personal possession; or telling a story. The format will not prompt words or phrases; it prompts a sequence of actions. In this chapter the presentation of stories in Homer will be under consideration once again: in particular, the format which underpins the telling of a story, some aspects of which We considered in Chapter 5. I shall use the results of research in the fields of linguistics and cognitive psychology to re-examine the story format which we all use both in casual conversation and on more formal occasions; and to propose a way by which we might understand a particular surface pattern in narrative texts from the ancient world which has caught the interest of classicists.
The Preface to the Annals: More Sallust?
Authors: Woodman A J
Published: November 2023

Commentators on the Annals naturally observe that the famous first sentence of Tacitus’ preface (‘Urbem Romam a principio reges habuere’) alludes to the preface of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae (6. 1 ‘Urbem Romam, sicuti ego accepi, condidere atque habuere initio Troiani’). But it seems that none of them has observed a further allusion to Sallust’s preface in the last sentence of Tacitus’, which is almost equally famous (1. 1. 3): inde consilium mihi pauca de Augusto et extrema tradere, mox Tiberii principatum et cetera, sine ira et studio, quorum causas procul habeo.
Nero’s Alien Capital: Tacitus as Paradoxographer (Annals 15. 36-7)
Authors: Woodman A J
Published: November 2023

According to Tacitus’ narrative of AD 64, the centrepiece of which will be the Great Fire of Rome (38-41), Nero began the year with a keen desire to go on a concert tour of Greece (33. 2).1 Feeling that he needed some preliminary experience, however, the emperor decided to give a practice performance in Naples, because of its resemblance to a genuinely Greek city. The Neapolitan theatre was packed (33. 3), and Suetonius tells us that Nero was captivated by the rhythmic applause of some visitors from Alexandria, whose techniques were subsequently taught to equites and others on the emperor’s insistence (Nero 20. 3).
Epilogue: Lectorum Incuria?
Authors: Woodman A J
Published: November 2023

In AD 14 Germanicus, weeping for a second time during Tacitus’ narrative of that year (1. 49. 2, cf. 40. 3), contemplates the disastrous effects of a second letter of his that has gone wrong (1. 48. 1-49. 1, cf. 36. 3-37. 1): in a scene worse than any civil war, his own troops have turned on one another, wreaking a terrible slaughter. For the commander it is a tragic moment of truth; but, even after such carnage, the hearts of his men are still hardened and their desire is to attack the enemy as an atonement for their madness (1. 49. 3).
Homeric Words and Homeric Ideas
Authors: Clarke Michael
Published: November 2023

John Donne writes as if it were self-evident that man 1s a combination of two things, first the ‘elements’ of the physical body and then the soul hidden inside it. In that belief he shows that he is steeped in Christian and classical tradition; and to this day in Europe and America the conventions of language, thought, and what remains of religion are shot through with this same twofold structure of body and soul, brain and self, flesh and spirit. My aim is to gain an inkling of the earliest knowable ancestor of this idea of the ‘little world’ of man, by asking how the Greeks of the early first millennium BC conceived of human identity in relation to the visible substance of the body. Facing the remnants of their culture we must put aside dualistic assumptions and pose the question on a more basic level. Where is the seat of man’s sense of himself, as it were his ‘I’? Is there a spiritual being hidden inside what others can see and touch, or are his meat and blood somehow identical with his thinking self? Above all, what is thought to happen when he dies: does one part of him go to the afterlife and another remain on the earth? If so, how are the two parts separated — and hasthe survivor in the afterlife also been a distinct component in his make-up during mortal life? If instead there is no such separation, how does the myth of an afterlife square with the fact that the corpse has been burnt or been put in the ground to rot? Such are the questions we will try to answer.
The Corpse and the Afterlife
Authors: Clarke Michael
Published: November 2023

The prospect of an afterlife poses the problem of human identity anew. When darkness has fallen on a man’s sight, how does he continue to exist? What has happened to his identity, to his T, and how does that T transfer itself to the undiscovered country beyond death? We have seen much evidence that in the mortal world Homeric man is an undivided unity for whom the loss of the last breath is merely one of the visible signals of death; and I have argued that the image of the flight of the to Hades is rare and esoteric and emerges only in special circumstances from the abiding sense of human unity. With this in mind we turn to the corpse. In a sense a corpse is mere clay, but only vaguely and rarely is it so identified. My argument suggests that after losing the last
Introduction
Authors: Gribble David
Published: November 2023

The response of Aristophanes’ Aeschylus to the burning question, ‘What is to be done about Alcibiades?’ defines a problem faced not only by Athens in the years between 416 and 404 Be, but, in various forms, by Greeks throughout the history of the city-state. It is the problem of the great individual, who, for reasons which I will consider in more detail later in this Introduction, cannot be accom­modated within the city in the normal way. Aeschylus sees Alcibiades as a lion, a fiercely proud and powerful creature arous­ing admiration, but also a savage figure of nature rather than culture, unacceptable and dangerous when released ‘in the city’ Nevertheless, the lion does not come upon the city from outside: he is reared in the city, a civic phenomenon, nurtured on the honour accorded him by the citizens.
Rhetorical Works
Authors: Gribble David
Published: November 2023

Of the rhetorical works composed in the classical period on the sub­ject of Alcibiades, four survive: Isocrates, 16 Lysias, 14 and I 5; and [Andocides] 4. [And.] 4, an invective against Alcibiades set in the context of the last ostracism held in Athens, has long been suspected of being a later rhetorirnl exercise, and I believe that this view of the speech is correct, for the reasons set out in Appendix 2 to this chap­ter. The speech displays a rhetorical artificiality which suggests that it should be associated with the exercises based around the figure of Alcibiades that were a favourite theme of later declaimers. On the other hand, it also shows a good understanding of classical Athens, and is concerned, like the other speeches, with an attempt to read off Alcibiades’ significance for the city from his behaviour. These fac­tors suggest that the· speech may have. been composed as early as the mid- or late fourth century; they also make it appropriate to consider this speech in conjunction with the others.
Conclusion: Plutarch’s Alcibiades
Authors: Gribble David
Published: November 2023

There are already sensitive studies of Plutarch’s allusive and interpretative deployment of sources in the Life of Alcibiades: 1 it is enough here to concentrate on how the Life reflects and transforms the themes I have traced in this book, and, in turn, how the studies of the previous chapters can help us understand the Life.
Beyond Rome: ‘By Municipal Deification’
Authors: Gradel Ittai
Published: November 2023

The literary sources have little to say of the c1v1c worship accorded to Augustus and his successors in the towns of Italy.1 As usual, these sources concentrate almost exclusively on conditions in Rome, and even there overwhelmingly on the narrow sphere of the relationship between princesand senate. Our source material for civic emperor worship outside Rome is, however, comparatively rich, though it has not been given its due in scholarship. It consists mainly of inscriptions mentioning temples or priests dedicated to the emperor.
The Augustan Settlement
Authors: Gradel Ittai
Published: November 2023

At the end of his life, Caesar the dictator was appointed a god of the Roman state by the Senate. Whether or not he had in fact aimed for the title of king, this certainly entailed a formal monarchical position in the state (which should, one would think, have made any such title superfluous). In the short run, the scheme resulted in Caesar’s murder; in the long run, the effect was to demonstrate to his son and eventual successor how notto go about reforming the Roman constitution.
The Augustan Heritage and Mad Emperors
Authors: Gradel Ittai
Published: November 2023

The long reign of the conservative Tiberius has its main relevance in this context for adding a further twenty-three years to the final Augustan scheme of the participate, thereby establishing it as an institutional precedent beyond the lifetime and person of Augustus. Under another emperor, with ideas of his own, the participate might very well have continued to develop; but Tiberius’ faithful, even rigid, adherence to the Augustan scheme ensured that it did indeed turn into a system in its own right, with a precedent and life of its own beyond and apart from Augustus the individual.
A Parallel: C. Manlius, Caeretan ‘Caesar’
Authors: Gradel Ittai
Published: November 2023

The altar, crowned by two volutes and hence of the most common type of Roman altars,2 was unearthed in or by the theatre of Care together with other pieces of sculpture; an admirable recent publication of the finds with transcripts of the contemporary records makes it appear very likely that the altar was found in situ,centrally located in the orchestra of the theatre. 3 In this connection it should also be noted that a fragmentary building inscription suggests that Manlius may have had the theatre erected. 4 The technical quality of the altar reliefs is very fine indeed, and the monument was probably produced in an urban Roman workshop.
Speech and Symbolic Power: Discourse, Ideology, and Intertextuality
Authors: Laird Andrew
Published: November 2023

In the first book of Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope asks the bard Phemius not to sing about the Greeks’ return from Troy. She says the subject is too depressing for her because she misses her husband Odysseus.
Platonic Formalism: Socrates and the Narratologists
Authors: Laird Andrew
Published: November 2023

The story of Virgil’s Aeneid is well known. Ulysses’ stratagem of the wooden horse caused the city of Troy to fall to the Greeks, prompting Aeneas to flee from Troy with his son, his father Anchises, and his comrades. They travel to various places, including Carthage, where Aeneas has an ill-fated love affair with Dido. The Trojans then sail to Italy and, after Aeneas’ visit to the underworld, arrive in Latium. The pact made with the Latins is soon broken and a bitter war ensues. The outcome is determined by single combat between Aeneas and Turnus, the leader of the Rutuli. Turnus is defeated and killed.
Diomede: Debate in Para-Narrative
Authors: Alden Maureen
Published: November 2023

Many of those fighting at Troy are the sons of heroes who took part in the famous exploits of the previous generation, such as the Argonautica or the Calydonian boar hunt, or fought in its wars, such as the expedition of the Seven against Thebes or Heracles’ sack of Troy. Diomede’s father, Tydeus, fought and died in the expedition against Thebes, and his successes there are held up to Diomede as an example to follow. An exploit of Tydeus’ while fighting against the Thebans introduces a whole series of para-narratives clustered round the figure of Diomede. In these para-narratives the issue of divine patronage is a recurrent theme, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that they present an argument or debate on the merits of divine patronage. Only the audience is aware of all the stages of this debate. Agamemnon and Athene, who have their own reasons for wanting Diomede to fight, urge him to imitate his father’s triumphs, achieved with the help of Athene. They imply that Diomede should be confident of the goddess’s help, and count on her assistance. Once Achilles has withdrawn from the battle, Agamemnon must have a fighter to replace him, and Diomede fulfils that function in the first part of the Iliad: he must uphold the cause of Agamemnon and Menelaus against the Trojans. Athene encourages Diomede to regard himself as a divine favourite while she uses him as her instrument to settle scores of her own against her personal enemies, Ares and Aphrodite. The other side of the argument is presented through Sthenelus and Glaucus, who have no ulterior motives for manoeuvring Diomede into fighting.
Homeric Epic and the Tragic Moment
Authors: Gould John
Published: November 2023

My subject in this paper is the response of the tragic poets of fifth-century Athens to the Homeric epics, and beyond that, the meaning that the Homeric poems had for their audience in the fifth century. It is a subject which is going, inevitably, to raise a certain number of puzzles and paradoxes, one or two of which I shall try to throw some light on. But there is one, which must surely arise sooner or later, which I can deal with only by confessing at the outset that I have nothing as yet to say about itunless this whole paper can be taken as a comment upon it. Which is, no doubt, a confession of serious failure, since we are concerned, on the face of it, with one of the few pieces of contemporary evidence that we have, and it comes (or purports to come) from no less a witness than Aeschylus himself. Evidently these are words which must prove invaluable. But I do not know what they mean. They form a remark of Aeschylus alluded to in passing rather than quoted in the interminably allusive conversation that makes up Athenaeus’ Table-Talk (8. 347 E).
The Language of Oedipus
Authors: Gould John
Published: November 2023

About Sophocles’ King Oedipus, apart from a general acknowledgement that it is one of the masterworks of Greek tragedy, we are a long way from any sort of critical agreement. Some of the reasons at least for this state of affairs are not hard to find. Ever since Aristotle, the play has suffered from being treated as the paradigm case of a Greek tragedy, so that whatever qualities it was thought necessary that a Greek tragedy should have, all were of necessity found here. If tragedies were about tragic flaws, then Oedipus must have his flaw.
Oedipus and Antigone at Thebes
Authors: Gould John
Published: November 2023

Let us begin with one or two things that we all know (or think we know). Sophocles turned to the Theban legend of Oedipus and his children three times in his long career in the theatre. The traditional chronology places the three plays in the order Antigone, King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus and implies a relatively long passage of years between the first and second and an even longer lapse between the second and third. The order is probably better founded than the chronology.
The Idea of Society in the Iliad
Authors: Gould John
Published: November 2023

Ever since Moses Finley’s classic and pioneering World of Odysseus1 the topic of Homeric society has been under more or less continuous discussion. But we might be forgiven for feeling more bewildered than enlightened by the course of the debate. Much of the argument has been concerned with the issue of historical ‘reality’, that is, with the historicity or other wise of the social structures that can be discerned in the poem, and until comparatively recently the Odyssey played a larger part in it than the Iliad. There has been little agreement on the answers to the questions raised and the terms of the debate themselves have tended to shift somewhat alarmingly. This paper is only tangentially, if at all, a contribution to that debate, thought it will, by implication, take a position on some of the issues involved. It will be concerned almost exclusively with the Iliad and it will approach the world of that poem as a fictional world. By ‘fictional’ I do not mean at all what Professor Snodgrass and others mean by such terms as ‘composite’, that is, a world displaying.
Archaeology and History
Authors: Williams J H C
Published: November 2023

Traditionally the academic study of Celtic northern Italy has divided into two strands—Celtic prehistory and Roman history. The former has dealt principally with the evidence for the presence of the Celts in Italy. It has used this evidence to treat such questions as the explanation and dating of the original Celtic presence within Italy, the continuing relations between the Italian Celts and the Celts north of the Alps, and their progressive integration into the world of Italy. Celtic prehistorians have also addressed themselves to tracing Celtic survivals in the culture of northern Italy after the Roman conquest. The evidence employed in answering these questions is substantially archaeological in nature—the grave-assemblages from cemeteries ascribed to Celts have been crucial in discussions of chronology and in identifying the changing cultural affinities of the Celts of the north, sandwiched between the twin influences of transalpine Celtic Europe and Mediterranean Italy. Philological evidence, in the form of a handful of inscriptions in Celtic, has also played an important part in identifying the presence of Celts throughout the period. The framework within which the questions posed by the material evidence for Celtic prehistory have been asked has, primarily, been that provided by the literary record.
Postmodernism, Romantic Irony, and Classical Closure
Authors: Fowler Don
Published: November 2023

‘CLOSURE’ in all its senses has often been seen as a distinguishing characteristic of classicism. The classic work is a rounded organic whole, simplex et unum: it ends in resolution, ‘all passion spent’. Antiquity is a closed system, providing a canon of texts whose perfection is beyond time: criticism of those texts is an eternal return, the rediscovery of the timeless verities that they contain. The Classical Tradition is a golden chain which enables us to ‘take our journey back’, as Edwin Muir puts it. And at the end of all our journeying are those same everlasting Forms of Beauty that have always been there and always will be.
Translation or Transformation? The Relation of Literature and Science
Authors: Beer Gillian
Published: November 2023

The theme of this chapter, ‘the presentation of science through literature’, might suggest a one-way traffic, as though literature acted as a mediator for a topic (science) that precedes it and that remains intact after its re-presentation. That is not how I understand the relations between the two.
Eliding the Interpreter: John Wyclif and Scriptural Truth
Authors: Ghosh Kantik
Published: November 2023

In a key passage in his extended treatment of scriptural hermeneutics, De veritate sacrae scripturae, John Wyclif has a revealing image for the relationship of text and interpreter: The passage highlights an important problem at the heart of Wyclif’s philosophy of scriptural interpretation.
Susanna in Excelsis
Authors: Boitani Piero
Published: November 2023

The story of Susanna and the elders is in every sense the most ‘suggestive’ in the Bible. A short story, taking up just one chapter in the Book of Daniel, it is extant not in Hebrew but in two different Greek versions, that of the Septuagint and that of Theodotion, and thus apocryphal. Right up until the Reformation, however, Christians considered it inspired, despite the polemics as to its authenticity among the Fathers themselves, and despite its shifting collocation: at the beginning of Daniel in the Greek Bible, and as an appendix in Jerome’s Latin text.
Why Should Moses Go Down?
Authors: Boitani Piero
Published: November 2023

Go Down, Moses is one of Faulkner’s most fascinating works: one of those books that coil round the reader and then suddenly strike him with oblique and unexpected revelations. A collection of seven stories, published in one volume in 1942, it acquires fictional unity by tracing the events of one family, the McCaslins, in the American South. Faulkner ‘goes down’ three generations in direct descent (from the plantation founder, Carothers, to his grandson Isaac, who rejects plantation property and the whole idea of slavery), four generations in indirect descent (the Edmonds, who inherit the plantation after Isaac), and five of the black descendants, the slaves and progeny of the plantation owners, who continued to live and work on the same land.
To Recognize Is a God Helen, Mary Magdalene, Marina-Menuchim
Authors: Boitani Piero
Published: November 2023

Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium, never went to Troy. Paris never swept her into his chamber. It wasn’t Helen the city leaders contemplated on the walls. Furious at her defeat in the most fatal beauty contest of all time, Hera fobbed Paris off with a phantom, an image made out of air: a quasi-living-and breathing, identical copy: Helen’s double. The flesh-and blood Helen had been carried off by Hermes and hidden in a cloud in some fold in the ether, then removed safely to Egypt, to the house of the chaste Proteus, to preserve Menelaus’ bed inviolate. The first ever East-West clash, the First World War-the Trojan War-was fought for an illusion. Zeus simply wanted to ease the earth of some of its burden by thinning out the human population, and at the same time give the most heroic of heroes, Achilles, the chance to shine.
Waking Up in Ireland: ‘Nausicaa’
Authors: Gibson Andrew
Published: November 2023

In The Lady’s Own Novelette for 24 June 1903, there is a story entitled ‘An English Usurper’. It is set in Ireland. The O’Donovans, grandfather and granddaughter, are being pursued by ‘moneylending Jews’ and their English creditors, the France family of Birmingham. In a climate of political unrest, they cannot raise loans, and must abandon their ancestral estate at Rossmore. Young Harry France travels to Ireland to occupy the property. He arrives at the village, where he encounters dreary landscapes and depressing scenes.
To Arbuthnot and Sober Advice: Textual Variation, Sexuality, and the Public Sphere
Authors: McLaverty James
Published: November 2023

An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot and Sober Advice from Horace were designed as twin publications, contrasting and complementary, responding in different ways to that most vital of all attacks on Pope, Verses to the Imitator of Horace.’ Pope hoped to publish them both in late December 1734. As it turned out, Sober Advice, which had passed out of his own control, appeared successfully on 21 December 1734, but To Arbuthnot, whose disturbed lineation suggests Pope’s own late interference, was published late, on 2January 1735. Both poems were published in the knowledge that the second volume of Pope’s works was soon to appear (23 April 1735). But whereas Sober Advice was scurrilous and anonymous and did not appear in a volume of works until 1738, the first edition of To Arbuthnot provided a censored text, acknowledged its authorship in its full title, An Epistle from Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot, and presented itself as a ‘House of Pope’ publication, ‘Printed by J. Wright for Lawton Gilliver’.
Nancy’s Truth: Oliver Twist and the ‘Stray Chapters’
Authors: Bowen John
Published: November 2023

THE PREFACE TO Oliver Twist, Dickens’s longest, is one of the most interesting documents of nineteenth-century fiction, although most critics pass it by or find it absurd.1 Nancy’s love for Sikes, it says, is ‘a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility, but it is a truth’.2 It is an interesting assertion, this binding together of anomaly, contradiction, and truth. Like the unconscious, it appears, the truth embraces contradiction. As the second passage implies, it is not that truth can be found anywhere, or that bad things can be made good and true, but that truth and anomaly, impossibility and contradiction are of necessity linked, and in this case through the question of Nancy’s desire or (perhaps better and more disturbingly for us) love for Sikes.
History’s Grip: Barnaby Rudge
Authors: Bowen John
Published: November 2023

in march 1841, Dickens was having some problems. He had recently become a father for the fourth time, and was also deeply troubled by his own father, who was once more borrowing money on his name. He did however find time from some of the difficulties he was having with his current novel, which was not going well, to read an unpublished manuscript, lent to him by his friend, Basil Hall.
The Girlhood of Mary Arnold: 1851-1860
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

It’s a vivid glimpse of the author’s inner mind. Mary Ward’s father, Thomas Arnold, had been dead almost two years. She herself was 51 years old, and embarked on a furiously active career in public life—something that would make her, once an eminent Victorian, a pre-eminent Edwardian.
Oxford: 1867-1871
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

IN July 1867 Mary Arnold was finally united with her parents and seven siblings.1 (Two of them—Willie and Theodore—would go back to boarding school in September). It was her first experience of permanent family resi¬dence. Tom had evidently had a subscription mounted for him by friends and relatives. The Arnolds now occupied a large, sprawling house in the Banbury Road which Tom had had built and called Laleham after the Doctor’s house where he was born. Tom Arnold had come home.
Marriage: 1870-1872
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

HUMPHRY WARD has a walk-on part in literary history as owner of the name that his wife, rather quaintly, took as her own. Even during his life gleeful jokes about his nonentity were current. (The best known goes roughly thus: an old friend meets Humphry in the street after many years in darkest Africa: ‘ You must come and dine with me—and do bring Mrs HW, if there is a Mrs HW.’) Humphry is never given credit as the formative influence on his wife’s intellect, which in fact he was, particularly during the early years of their marriage when she was still a girl-wife. Had Mary Arnold married one of the other eligible young dons in her circle—say Mandell Creighton or John Wordsworth—her later development would have been quite other, in tune with their very different ideals and ambitions.
London: 1881-1886
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

MARY had hoped that the Ward family might be united in London as early as 29 September 1881. But, in the event, reunion was delayed until November by necessary work on the new house. It was frustrating, but exciting as well. Since the Wards were going up in the world and intended to entertain grandly (at least by their Oxford standards) Russell Square was fitted out as expensively as Humphry’s new salary and credit would stand.
Homes: 1888-1900
Authors: Sutherland John
Published: November 2023

MUCH of the Wards’ energy was devoted in the 1890s to finding appropriate places to live—accommodations, that is, which were appropriate to their raised and ever-rising status, to the different needs of their children, to the complexly divided lives which the two parents led. More than with most fami¬lies, the Wards’ homes defined them and articulated their ambitions.
‘The Irish for No’
Authors: Stafford Fiona
Published: November 2023

Scott's rhetorical question seems to be addressed by the patriotic poem that unfolds beneath it, while Shelley's eloquent musing on death finds an appropriate counterpart in the words of Mangan's Enthusiast. That the relationship between these poems and their borrowed lines turns out to be rather less smooth than is apparent initially should by now be evident, but in each case the possibility of simply reading a straightforward text, complete with title and epigraph, remains. Very different, then, is the signal sent out to readers by Ciaran Carson's ‘The Irish for No’, a poem which also begins with another poem, but which from the first exudes irony, discord, and conflict.
Seamus Heaney and the Caught Line
Authors: Stafford Fiona
Published: November 2023

In r 9 8 5 the pupils of Wesley College, Dublin, were so moved by the images of famine-stricken children in Ethiopia that they decided to join in the money-raising efforts by writing to a number of well-known people and asking them to name a favourite poem. The response was rapid and rewarding, and so a series of poetry collections was put together, whose proceeds went towards famine relief in the Third World. Some years later when Penguin Books agreed to publish a selection of the poems and letters, Seamus Heaney was asked to contribute a Fore­word.
Science, Interpretation, and Criticism
Authors: Cooper David E
Published: November 2023

Reflecting on the ‘two cultures’ debate of the 1960s Patricia Waugh notes that C. P. Snow’s image of science was, even then, a fading one. Nor, she observes, was this seized upon by Snow’s arch-critic F. R. Leavis who, indeed, subscribed to the same image of science, taking issue only over the relevance of science, so pictured, to the ‘judgements about life’ which define a civilized culture and which, in his view, are the domain, principally, of literary criticism.
Alexander’S Feast; Or The Power Of Musique: The Poem And Its Readers
Authors: Mason Tom , Rounce Adam
Published: November 2023

Alexander’s Feast, not long after its appearance, being the theme of every Critick, young Marley, among others, took an opportunity of paying his court to the author; and happening to sit next him, congratulated him on having produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any language. ‘You are right, young gentleman, (replied Dryden,) a nobler Ode never was produced, nor ever will.’ It appears to have happened to Dryden (as does not always happen to poets) that the poem he valued most was most enjoyed both by its immediate audience and by succeeding generations.