bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dancing the Virtues, Becoming Virtuous: Procedural Memory and Ethical Presence
Authors: Collins James Henderson
Published: August 2016

This paper is an exploration of the performance of Greek drama from the perspective of the performers, more specifically, of the chorus-in-training. The notion that khoreia constitutes an essential part of paideia and ethical instruction is an ancient one. And the notion persists, though in different forms, among scholars of the social and political context of these dramatic performances that to have participated in a chorus was in particular ways to have received training in essential perspectives and experiences of citizens: ‘the events and characters portrayed in tragedy are meant to be contemplated as lessons by young citizens.’ And yet what the members of a chorus were expected to learn, did learn, and, moreover, how they learned, have remained largely unexplored topics.

I will suggest ways that we might begin to piece together a baseline of experiences and impressions that come through learning to sing, dance and compete in dramatic festivals. Most of the experiences that I will describe are partly functions of universal properties of the human mind; of course, culture and thoughts and other aspects of shared and individual experience are highly variable. Indeed, the contents of thought are unrestricted. But there are regular, even fixed, ways in which the mind and brain appear to work. I propose to describe an approach to the ways in which the words and movements and environment of dramatic competition are universally present to and apprehended by the senses and minds and bodies of a chorus-in-training. I am not suggesting that there are not other aspects of experience that are important to the performance and appreciation of drama. Rather, I hope to establish at the very least those aspects of training and performance that are necessary and perhaps even sufficient to bring a drama (and I take the chorus to be the most important part of drama) to the arena of competition. I will consider some of the lasting effects of dramatic training and performance on the life of the performer, i.e., how every performer may be changed by his experience.
Blame the Boletus? Demystifying Mushrooms in Latin Literature
Authors: Jaeger Mary
Published: August 2016

Keeping in mind Emily Gowers's dictum that ‘food, for the Roman writer who chose to discuss it, was simultaneously important and trivial’, let us go on a mushroom hunt through the fragmented habitat of Latin literature, with some preliminary nosing about in the Greek. We are looking for μύκαι and μύκητες in Greek, and fungi in Latin, and we are keeping an eye open for one kind in particular, the boletus, although we also will stumble upon the occasional interesting fungus suillus (‘pig fungus’). We are not truffle hunting: tubera (Greek ὕδνα) are a topic for another day. Although no survey, however comprehensive, of the appearances of one foodstuff in Latin literature can do full justice to the individual sources, we can still gain something from an overview of the tradition; and although what we learn may be trivial, even the trivial can make its own small contribution to our understanding of a larger matter, in this case the representation of time and change in the Roman world.

Ahead of us with knife and collecting basket roams the ghost of the Reverend William Houghton M.A., F.L.S., Victorian parson, Rector of Wellington parish in Preston township, Shropshire, a man with time on his hands—and at least two cats—who in 1885 compiled a list titled, ‘Notices of Fungi in Greek and Latin Authors’. Dr Denis Benjamin, author of Mushrooms: Poisons and Panaceas, says that ‘it would take the persistence of another classical scholar to discover if he [Houghton] missed or misrepresented anything’. Persistence, in the form of the TLL—in its infancy when Houghton was doing his research—the RE entry ‘Pilze’, Maggiulli's Nomenclatura Micologica Latina, and the PHI database, has indeed added to the good Rector's basket a few more specimens on the Latin side, some of which are useful for our inquiry.
The Sophist and The Swarm: Feminism, Platonism and Ancient Philosophy in Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon
Authors: Dressler Alex
Published: August 2016

Achilles Tatius' novelLeucippe and Clitophonis widely recognised by critics as generally ‘philosophical’, even ‘Platonic’, but critics also agree that the meaning of this philosophy and Platonism–whether it is serious or satiric, semantic or aesthetic–is unclear. As a result of this ambivalence, a perplexity confronts the reader who wants to understand the particularlypoliticalphilosophical meaning of Achilles' novel, especially through its depiction of gender norms and hierarchies. The purpose of this article is to revisit the philosophical possibilities of Achilles' novel in view of its various literary and social-historical contexts. To do this, I work through rather than against the perplexity that confronts the reader ofL&C, proposing a relational, reflexive mode of reading that attends to the interplay of Platonism, Stoicism and the social-historical associations that Achilles' mobilisation of each imparts. Such a mode of reading suggests, against numerous critical interpretations, thatL&Cmay actually relate the feminine to the world in a progressive way. In addition, the development of this mode of reading in response toL&Cpotentially undermines, not only the masculinist gender norms that the novel seems to reinforce, but also the very subject-object dualism that underpins mainstream historicist modes of relating to ancient texts as something out there in the walled-off universe of competing textualities that is ‘the past’.
The Metamorphoses of Seneca's Medea
Authors: Walsh Lisl
Published: August 2016

Seneca's Medea is not a rewriting of Euripides' character. At least, Seneca's Medea shares more similarities with Ovidian Medeas (the extant ones, at any rate) than the Euripidean Medea. Rather than focusing on Seneca's departures from the tragic legacy of Euripides (however important they are for an informed reading of the play), I would like to focus on Seneca's Medea as a potentially Ovidian character. Specifically, I would like to posit that the Senecan Medea reads more like a dramatisation of Medea's experience within the ellipsed Corinthian episode of Ovid's Metamorphoses (7.394-97). Seneca's Medea (more so than Euripides' Medea) identifies with a specifically transformative project, and, one might initially suspect, supplies a neat explication of the transformation missing from Medea's narrative in the Metamorphoses. What we find, however, is that, in dramatising her process of metamorphosis, Seneca irreparably alters our relationship with the transformed Medea.

In the Metamorphoses, ‘Ovid does not explain the reason for Medea's transformation into a sorceress and semidivine, evil being…’, but it is clear in the narration that a metamorphosis does occur: ‘Ovid passes abruptly from a sympathetic portrayal of Medea as love-sick maiden to a tragi-comic account of her career as accomplished pharmaceutria (witch) and murderess.’ But the metamorphosis of Medea's character is signalled just as much by her own retreat into silence. The ‘love-sick maiden’, who lays her thoughts out in the open, gives way to the ‘semidivine, evil being’, who speaks only pragmatically (in incantatory language or to the daughters of Pelias) or not at all (e.g., while flying, in Corinth, and in Athens). The loss of Medea's perspective is much of the reason why Ovid's ‘transformed’ Medea seems so unsympathetic. Seneca provides this missing perspective, and in doing so creates a uniquely sympathetic and inhuman result: Seneca's Medea leaves the stage as abruptly as Ovid's Medea leaves Iolcos and Athens (Met. 7.350 and 7.424, respectively), having committed the same crimes as Ovid's Medea, and as ‘supernatural’ as Ovid's Medea (if not more so), yet her newfound system of values is completely comprehensible. In creating a comprehensible account of her motives for transformation, Seneca's Medea, even as the semidivine ‘pharmaceutria’, seems more sympathetic even as she maintains similarities to Ovid's character.
Epilogue: The Multiple Medeas of the Middle Ages
Authors: McElduff Siobhán
Published: August 2016

Insofar as we can know, Medea has always been multiple, existing in many different versions simultaneously. She is never simply a literary construction, a stratified intertextual ensemble made up of all the other literary Medeas that came before her, but a product of the values and fears of each culture that imagines her, recreates her, and uses her to represent meaning. The Middle Ages were no different: Medea could figure as an alchemist's guide, as in the Pretiosa Margarita Novella (the New Pearl of Great Price); as an allegory of God fighting the Antichrist in the Ovide Moralisé; as wronged wife in Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women; or as a nightmare figure that appears like Grendel in Beowulf to destroy Jason's wedding feast in Raoul Lefèvre's History of Jason. The flexibility of the medieval myth of Medea is staggering—even more staggering than that of the Roman period—stretched as it was across a continent of warring kingdoms, with different authors and audiences pressing classical texts to generate new and culturally relevant and acceptable meanings. However, appropriately enough for a volume titled ‘Roman Medea’, there is one multiple of Medea that drops out of the equation as a direct influence: the Greek Medea, the Medea of Euripides and Apollonius. The loss of the Greek tradition did not impede medieval authors, who found more than enough in Latin texts to inspire them. The basic Latin materials upon which the Middle Ages built their Medeas were Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides, along with scattered references in other popular authors like Statius, presentations of irrational women in love like Dido in Virgil, descriptions of child murderers such as Procne also taken from the Metamorphoses, and terrifying witches such as Lucan's Erictho. However, some Latin texts which we might have expected to be influential, such as Seneca's Medea, were marginal to the medieval tradition.
Signatures Events Contexts: Copyright at the End of the First Principate
Authors: Martelli Francesco
Published: August 2016

Can a proper name be translated? Or a signature?

J. Derrida, ‘Limited Inc. a b c’,Glyph2 (1977), 167

The essential fact to keep in mind when dealing with these problems is that we have the institution of proper names to perform the speech act of identifying reference.

J. Searle,Speech Acts(Cambridge 1969), 174

Two sets of ‘autobiographical’ text that span the transition from the first principate into the second—theRes Gestae Diui Augustiand the poetry of Ovid's exile—offer a rare opportunity to compare the contemporaneous self-portraits of the politician and poet whose careers have evolved in tandem up until this point. Yet where scholars have studied the interactions between these texts, they have tended to overlook the parallels between the self-fashioning strategies deployed by their respective authors in favour of a hunt for corroborating historical data.

A recent book by Michele Lowrie challenges us to treat as part of the same problematic the authorising claims made in texts as ostensibly disparate as these. In this study, Lowrie balances her exploration of how the literary productions of the Augustan era responded to its social and political upheavals, reflecting and refracting the performative powers that were being used to effect political transformation at this time, against the efforts made by Augustus to appropriate the self-fashioning strategies exemplified by the poets. Her focus on how Augustus' own manipulation of the media replicates the modes of authorship practised by his literary contemporaries thus makes the social energies circulating across cultural boundaries in Rome at this time appear as traffic in a two-way street. With this work, then, we have been given a new incentive to treat the authorial names and authorising claims of Augustus and of the ‘Augustan’ poets as a package-a prompt to which I will respond in this article by unpacking the signatures of ‘Naso’ and ‘Augustus’ as a twin pair. I will therefore be looking to theRes Gestaeand to the poetry of Ovid's exile in order to see how the authorial signatures of poet andprincepsfare alongside each other at this defining moment of the Augustan principate; and will attempt to refine the theoretical framework required in order to plot the ways in which these different types of signature play off one another.
Testing Virginity in Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus
Authors: Ormand Kirk
Published: August 2016

Towards the end of the life of Aesop, probably written in the first century CE, a surprising, bawdy tale appears. I give here the version preserved in Vita W chapter 131, also collected asfabula386.

(Vit. Aesop. 131W)
Introduction
Authors: Goldhill Simon , Morales Helen
Published: August 2016

Josephus, cultural critic and chronicler of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-73/4 CE), is one of the most polemical and compelling writers of the Roman Empire. He writes in Greek, as a Jewish leader of a revolt against Rome, who came over to the Romans. His extraordinary prose combines an extended self-justification, an explanation of Jewish culture to the Romans, through the medium of a culturally privileged Greek, and the riveting story of a failed rebellion against the dominant Empire of the Mediterranean, written now as an awkward insider of the corridors of power, recalling his own opposition to that power. Josephus, that is, writes on and through the boundaries of culture; if all history is written by victors, he writes as a defeated leader now with the triumphant new emperor: he crosses the boundary between victor and victim, insider and outsider. For the scholar interested in post-colonial writing, in cultural identity, in the rhetoric of self-fashioning, Josephus is a remarkable gift. What is more, the history he tells has powerful resonances today in the Middle East: it is he who gives us the authoritative account of Masada, the rocky desert fortress destroyed by the Romans and now a central icon of the state of Israel. The destruction of the Temple is a founding moment in the Jewish imagination, still rehearsed in ritual and political rhetoric. What more could one want from an ancient source? In 2003, Mary Beard invited us to imagine the euphoric reception classicists would give his work were it to be newly discovered today:

This is the kind of text that ancient historians and literary critics would die for. It is the kind of text that makes the study of Greco-Roman antiquity so much richer than that of almost any other ancient society. The kind of text we just can't get enough of.
Staging a Mutiny: Competitive Roleplaying on the Rhine (Annals 1.31-51)
Authors: Fulkerson Laurel
Published: August 2016

Discussions of Tacitus' use of theatricality or dramatic episodes are nothing new, but these studies have primarily focused on the Neronian books, where they are seen as particularly appropriate. The notions of performativity and pageantry, however, pervade all of Tacitus' historical writing, even in places where they have not previously been sought. I focus in this article on how Germanicus' conduct while quelling the Rhine mutiny of 14 CE dangerously assimilates him to the German soldiers insofar as both treat the uprising as an opportunity to display their most flamboyant behaviours in an attempt to frame the mutiny in their own terms. I see each party as staging performances designed to carry weight with their audience and so render the actors' claims to truth more persuasive.

But first a distinction must be drawn between acts that are merely extravagant (e.g. the ‘dramatic gesture’) and those which, whether extravagant or not, happen in front of a group that is thereby constituted as the audience to a performance; only the latter will be of interest here. Nearly all forms of public discourse in Roman society aim at persuasion, and the scholarship on the subject often encourages slippage between dramatic, theatrical and performative acts: not everything that happens on a stage is performative, and not everything done with an eye to effect is theatrical. I therefore, with some hesitation, use throughout this piece the designation ‘performative’ to indicate those behaviours reminiscent of things that happen on stage (or, sometimes, in oratorical contexts), and which,becauseof their already familiar nature, seek to construct the audience to them specifically as a passive audience, i.e. to create a ‘script’ for the situation that requires a certain kind of response. So, to take an example from Old Comedy, the use in Aristophanes'Thesmophoriazousaeby the character Euripides of scenes taken from his own tragic plots seeks to persuade the audience-within-the-play that his relative must be rescued; it is thus both performative and persuasive.
The Plot Thickens: Hidden Outlines in Terence's Prologues
Authors: Gowers Emily
Published: August 2016

The Vita Terenti, Suetonius' biography, presents Terence as the classic Republican self-made man. Born in Carthage on the margins of the empire, he is said to have been brought to Italy as part of the spoils of conquest (the very word for ‘spoils’, praeda, is used to describe him in the epigram or epitaph devoted to his memory in the Latin Anthology). Here is a rags to riches to rags again story: the Cinderella figure reading out his first play on a humble bench, then invited to join Caecilius, the comic toast of the town, at his high table; the pretty boy-slave who mingled suspiciously closely with Scipio and Laelius. Six perfect plays later, and varying degrees of success, at the age of twenty-five Terence was pitched into decline: he withdrew, he retired, he went into voluntary exile to Asia or to darkest Greece, he drowned at sea, in the middle of a valiant last attempt to bring a suitcase of Menander's plays to Italy, or else he died of grief at the loss of his baggage. The details vary, but the stories always return him to the margins he emerged from, leaving behind his exemplary dramatic products and his solid influence on the school curriculum for centuries to come. Of course this narrative has its improbable side (Suetonius himself is sceptical about the various reports): the name Afer does not necessarily mean that Terence was African; Caecilius had died two years before Terence's first play was performed; the rumours about men in high places ghost-writing for him have been lifted straight from one of the prologues. But take it on its own terms and it is a tale based on the fluid opportunities of the expanding Roman world, a tale of suspicion, integration and then rejection. Terence begins and ends as part of the flotsam of empire.
The Body is Not Painted On: Ekphrasis and Exegesis in Prudentius Peristephanon 9
Authors: Kässer Christian
Published: August 2016

Simonides once called painting silent poetry and poetry articulate painting. Comparing the two ‘sister arts’ in the sixth or fifth century BCE, he wrote the first chapter of a story which, even if one thinks only of antiquity, is a rather long one, and in which many of the issues raised seem tremendously complex. In addition, many ancient authors wanted to add their own passages to this story, and quite naturally different writers arrived at very different conclusions about the two arts' respective relationships. Yet however different these conclusions were, no writer, as a writer, could avoid agreeing with Simonides on a basic thing: any statement about the visual arts is inevitably a hermeneutical effort to make the visual speak, and in doing so it equally inevitably implies a deficit of the visual arts: namely, that art cannot speak and needs some form of ‘translation’ to be communicated. Discussing art in written texts, then, cannot but entail implicitly a statement about writing's hermeneutical superiority; this is the case even if the statement may explicitly deny any such superiority. It has been argued that this deficit in art is real and that there does exist a ‘Hermeneutic Gap’ in painting; whereas verbal discourse, so the argument goes, operates with a ‘hermeneutic of understanding’, painting, by contrast, is bound to a ‘hermeneutic of calculated misunderstanding’. Certainly there are paintings for which such a statement is correct—but there may be as many cases in which a text only construes such a gap and uses it as a good opportunity to establish its own hermeneutic superiority by contrasting itself with an image which is supposedly less precise in communicating meaning.
Kicking the Habit: The Significance of Consuetudo in Interpreting the Fable of Cupid and Psyche
Authors: James Paula
Published: August 2016

The lively debate about the function of the fable of Cupid and Psyche in theMetamorphosesof Apuleius is continually expanding. On the narrative level, they act like pairs of star-crossed lovers in the Greek Romance tradition, but by designating them ‘Love’ and ‘Soul’ Apuleius has invited philosophical, religious and loosely symbolic interpretations of this inset story. The ambiguity surrounding Cupid and Psyche (characters or concepts) is complicated and enriched by the storyline which concerns the falling in love of Love and the falling in love with Love by Soul (the respective states.of the hero and heroine). By making the Love God suffer the passion he inflicts upon other gods and upon mortals, Apuleius fulfils the sometimes heartfelt but more usually tongue-in-cheek desire of the elegiac poets to punish their tormentor. At the same time, Psyche (Soul) becoming besotted with Love has more serious implications in Platonist doctrine and her actions throughout the story and her ultimate fate have been read both positively and negatively by Apuleian scholars.
Revaluating Epigrammatic Cycles in Martial Book 2
Authors: Garthwaite John
Published: August 2016

The structural formation of Martial's books of epigrams, especially what has been termed the intratextuality of the poems in each volume, has received considerable attention in recent studies of the author. Both Scherf and Merli, for example, in the latest collection of essays on Martial, not only provide useful critical surveys of past scholarship on the issue but propose their own, occasionally more detailed, schemes. The result is a growing recognition of the intricate designs Martial created out of his varied themes and of their importance in helping us to understand the literary purpose of the books.
On Pliny on Martial on Pliny on Anon… (Epistles 3.21/Epigrams 10.19)
Authors: Henderson John
Published: August 2016

For the most part, editors and teachers have conspired to ignore the book gatherings in administering their dosage of Pliny (as of Cicero's, or of Seneca'sLetters). ButEpistles3.21 is a striking tailpiece which pricks the reader to reflect back over all the book they have been reading. A resounding sequence of letters through the book has been writing up writers when we reach the finale's valediction to Martial. Each time writer and subject of writing share the trait of beingwriters, this entices readers to play at joining them, and so entertain the experience of reading throughtheirminds' eyes. Attuned empathy is the challenge, though not necessarily in a spirit of congeniality or collegiality; and the cumulative project is to lever us into sharing and appreciating Pliny's ability to represent the fraternity to others, and thereby to communicate his own self, as writer and subject of writing. No half measures: letters mediate, immediate.
What we must Believe in Greek Tragedy
Authors: Konstan David
Published: August 2016

All drama, indeed all literature, shows people acting on the basis of beliefs and values. We take those values for granted when we watch a play, and observe how the characters negotiate their way within the world as it appears to them. I wish to call attention to some underlying moral and psychological assumptions to which we implicitly assent as a condition for appreciating the story in a couple of Greek tragedies. For sometimes those assumptions are just what the play is really getting across.
The Epicurean Parasite: Horace, Satires 1.1-3
Authors: Turpin William
Published: August 2016

We have learned a great deal in recent years about reading Horace's satires; there is now widespread agreement that the speaker of the satires is himself a character within them, a persona. Such a persona may be most effective when it has obvious connections with its creator, but that fact does not preclude the exaggeration of reality, or even its complete inversion. For Horace the implications of this approach are exciting: instead of a poet discoursing with cheerful earnestness on morality, on poetry and on his daily life, we have a fictional character, whom we do not have to take seriously at all.

The three diatribe satires present us with a character so absurd that they have been taken, I think rightly, as parodies. Although the poems were once appreciated as effective moralising sermons, even their admirers found it hard to justify the lack of intellectual coherence, to say nothing of the astonishing vulgarity of the second satire. As parodies, however, the poems are wonderfully successful. The speaker trots out a series of banalities: ‘people should be content with who they are’; ‘people should not go to extremes’; ‘people should be consistent’. But he invariably gets distracted, goes off on tangential rants, and makes a fool of himself. The moralist of the first three satires is, to put it bluntly, a jerk.
Plato Avant la Lettre: Authenticity in Plato's Epistles
Authors: Wohl Victoria
Published: August 2016

Plato'sEpistlesare among the most disputed texts of antiquity. Were they written by Plato? Some of them? all? none? Answers have varied wildly: at times all thirteen have been declared forgeries, alien to the thought and character of the Plato we know from the dialogues; at other times, the whole set has been accepted as a genuine, if unexpected, revelation of the life and preoccupations of Plato as a man. Since this debate has so far proved intractable, I would like to take a different approach to the question. TheEpistlesthemselves raise obsessively the question of authenticity. If, laying aside all issues of provenance for the time being, we read the thirteen letters as a corpus (whether by Plato or someone else), what emerges from this philosophical ‘text’ is the impossibility of an authentic written philosophy and of an authoritative self-present philosopher.
Not Wavering but Frowning: Ovid as Isopleth (Tristia 1 Through 10)
Authors: Hendersin John
Published: August 2016

For poetry, read poverty,passim.Martin Parker

This poetry-stricken essay on onomastication finds inTristia1.10 a polynymous atoll inTristia1's ocean of anonymy, allonymy, anomie, anatomi.

Sail away sail away sail away.Enya

All aboard! The first book of theTristiais an emotion-ocean autoportrait, where elegiac couplets and compositions mime troughs of helpless misery and swells of resentment at reality:

There are times when we seem to hear them ‘like Ocean on a western beach’. Every successive billow gathers in the first four feet of the hexameter, curls over in the dactylic fifth and breaks on the final spondee, to ebb again with the backwash of the pentameter.
Martial and the Book
Authors: Fowler D.P.
Published: August 2016

Alongside Catullus and Ovid, Martial is the Latin writer who tells us most about the ancient book, and he receives detailed treatment in most histories of ancient book production: he has a chapter to himself, for instance, in Roberts and Skeats'The Birth of the Codex. Books and reading are a central concern of his poetry from his very first publications: around 10-15% of the epigrams deal with this theme. The topic has received, however, much less attention from literary critics than from scholars interested in theRealienof ancient book production, and those who have paid attention to it have tended to play down the importance of the published books compared to the ‘occasional’ reception of the epigrams either through recitation or through informal pamphlets (the so-called ‘libelli’ prominent in the important work of Peter White). Even John Sullivan, who was more aware than many of the importance of the book in Martial, sees the published books as ‘open-ended collections, to which material could be added as it became available or necessary’ and declares that ‘Martial is less careful about the endings of his books…than about their beginnings and general structure’. I have suggested elsewhere that, on the contrary, the endings of Martial's books may be seen as possessing particularly ingenious effects of closure, and in general it seems to me that the engagement with reception in book-form shown by Martial's epigrams is extremely sophisticated.
Taking the Woman's Part: Engendering Roman Love Elegy
Authors: Wyke Maria
Published: August 2016

When a woman writes herself into the genre of Roman love elegy she appears to break the recognised conventions for its production, according to which woman is the passive object of erotic desire not its active subject, the written not the writer. In discussing the elegiac poetry composed by Sulpicia, one means by which critics have expressed her extraordinary achievement has been to engender Roman love elegy. For Nick Lowe, Sulpicia's unique intervention was to compose poetry on the subject of her own erotic experience in ‘an obstinately male genre’. For Amy Richlin, Sulpicia breached a double barrier, both the ‘male job’ of writing and the ‘male genre’ of elegy. With reference to Sulpicia, I also labelled Augustan elegy as ‘male-oriented verse’ that constructs a ‘male narrative perspective’. While it is evidently the case that, with the notable exception of Sulpicia, the biological sex of all the authors of Roman elegy is male, I would now argue that the genre of elegy itself is not unequivocally ‘masculine’ and that to engender elegy unproblematically as ‘male’ fails to do justice to the genre's crucial play with Roman categories of gender.
Introduction
Authors: Athanassakis Apostolos N.
Published: August 2016

This second volume of essays on Hesiod published under the auspices of Ramus is a supplement to Ramus Essays on Hesiod I. Neither this volume by itself nor for that matter both volumes taken together aspire, in the opinion of the editor, to more than addressing some of the key issues of Hesiodic research from a contemporary perspective. To the extent that all contributors are professors at American universities, the effort is limited in compass. Strictures imposed by a very tight publication schedule and a very trim budget made it quite clear from the beginning that a truly comprehensive and, therefore, international effort could not be initiated by the editor and his collaborators at this time. It is sincerely hoped that our successes will spur others on to better ways of interpreting Hesiodic poetry and archaic Greek poetics in general. Perhaps even our mistakes will be of the kind that will provoke ‘the good Eris’.
Hesiod's Metanastic Poetics
Authors: Martin Richard P.
Published: August 2016

The received wisdom about Hesiod's poetics is simple: he is no Homer. His poetry is supposedly rough, awkward, unsophisticated, repetitive, disjointed, a second-best versifier's striving after effect. Too often the rhetoric even of those who respect Hesiodic poetry damns it with faint praise. Readers of thePrinceton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—to take just one easily available reference that students might consult—learn that Hesiod's ‘didactic epics’ were meant for

the peasant of Boeotia rather than the Ionian aristocrat, being concerned with the morality and beliefs of the small farmer toughly confronting a life of ceaseless labor and few rewards. While they cannot be compared to Homer's works in scope or genius, they often display much poetic power.
Ambages Reciprocae: Reviewing Apuleius' Metamorphoses
Authors: Penwill J. L.
Published: August 2016

Any critical investigation of Apuleius'Metamorphosesneeds to come to terms with the basic problem of structural and thematic design. If there is any consensus among modern scholars it is that this is no easy task: ‘[It] is so varied a work that it resists an easy reading’; ‘we are still none the wiser as to why [Apuleius] should have written theMetamorphosesas he did’; ‘there is … little agreement as to whether theGolden Assis “a collection of breezy tales” or a moral fable’. While few now would opt for an unqualified version of the former of these last-mentioned alternatives, the difficulty of reconciling comic and serious, entertaining and instructive, profane and sacred remains. For some it is a ‘deeply religious work’; others see it more as a Platonist fable; others again have sought to identify unifying themes such ascuriositas(‘curiosity’) or metamorphosis. The very nature of this critical endeavour indicates the prevailing perception: theMetamorphosesis a collection of tales and incidents so diverse in nature that their presence in the same book gives it the appearance of a mismatched patchwork quilt, and yet somewhere beneath it all there is a key whose discovery will enable the discerning reader to achieve a vision of its overall unity.
Power and Impotence in Horace's Epodes
Authors: Fitzgerald William
Published: August 2016

Horace's Epodes are seldom considered as a whole. On the face of it, there would seem to be good reason for this fact. It is generally agreed that the poems were written over a period of ten years (from after Philippi to after Actium), during which time there was a great deal of change in the Roman world and in Horace's circumstances. Furthermore, the collection contains a considerable diversity of themes, genres and what, for lack of a better expression, one must call levels of reality. The Archilochean persona maintained in several of the poems is a unifying factor, of course, but it has not seemed pervasive enough to have allowed a systematic interpretation of the whole collection, and even within the Archilochean group scholars have tended to separate the political poems from the invective poems.3 Attempts to find some principle of arrangement for the collection have not been very enlightening, since they have rarely amounted to more than classifying each of the poems by type or theme (usually a completely unsystematic mixture of both), and then putting them into groups, which reveals structural patterns that have a no more than decorative function, or else simply displays Horace's penchant for variatio.
Elektra: Sophokles, Von Hofmannsthal, Strauss
Authors: Ewans Michael
Published: August 2016

The Romantics usually placed originality at a high premium, downplaying or disguising wherever possible their debts of theme and form to previous literature. But in other periods the ideal of imitation, of re-creating for the new poet's own generation the essence of a great drama from the past, has been more highly regarded; and where the Greek tragedians are the source on which the more modern playwright draws, the results are always of interest, whether they be a deliberate narrowing from the scope of the original to a precise contemporary purpose such as Anouilh'sAntigone, or a complex reshaping like Racine'sPhèdre, which places the values of Louis XIV's France in a stimulating dialogue with the tragic vision of the Greeks.

In this essay on the relationship between theElektraof Richard Strauss and that of Sophokles, the idea of dialogue is central. The relationship of Hofmannsthal'sElektrato Sophokles' has been treated by only a handful of writers; only one of these (Hans-Joachim Newiger) exhibits a knowledge of Greek and a familiarity with the range of twentieth century Sophoklean scholarship; and the relationship with Sophokles discussed in these works is always that of Hofmannsthal's play, never that of Strauss's opera.
Vergil's Georgics and the Pastoral Ideal
Authors: Davis P. J.
Published: August 2016

The concept of otium (peace) is central to Vergil's pastoral vision in the Eclogues. Not only is it a necessary condition for the well-being of the shepherd poets but also an ideal whose realisation would transform the world into a more joyous, more peaceful and less deceitful place. As well as pastoral, otium has philosophical associations for it is a key concept in the philosophy of Epicurus. It is not in the Eclogues, however, but in the Georgics that Vergil's most mature examination of otium is to be found.

Having depicted in the first book the farmer's life of unrelenting toil and the horrors of Rome's civil wars, Vergil turns in the second book of the Georgics to a world in which the necessity for work is balanced by the land's natural fertility, and the martial quality of the Italian peoples by their land's potentiality for peace. Whereas in Book I the farmer is represented as a military figure, in Book II he is presented under two aspects: as the embodiment of both military and pastoral ideals. Since it is with the farmer as the expression of pastoral ideals that we are primarily concerned let us turn to the classic description of the life of otium, the conclusion of the second Georgic.
Euripides' Bacchae: Conflict and Mediation
Authors: Segal Charles
Published: August 2016

For theBacchaeLévi-Strauss' view of myth as concerned with the mediation of fundamental polarities is both fruitful and fruitfully inadequate. The conflicts between Pentheus and Dionysus clearly involve an opposition of city and wild, culture and nature, rationality and emotion, male and female. Further in the background stands another series of antitheses: mortal and immortal, man and beast, Greek and barbarian, heavens and earth, fire and water. Like much of Greek literature, theBacchaeis founded on the proportion, mortal: immortal :: beast : man. That proportion, in turn, is part of an encompassing cosmic order which distinguishes the three basic categories of animate beings: god, man, and beast. What is unique and disturbing about this play is the thoroughness and violence of the reversals which take place in a situation in which god fuses with beast and beast with man.
Catullus 45 and Horace Odes 3.9: The Glass House
Authors: Nielsen Rosemary M.
Published: August 2016

Late in the fifties Munro's long-standing and influential verdict on the Acme and Septimius poem (‘the most charming picture in any language of a light and happy love’) suddenly came under fire. A flurry of scholarly reaction arose, and strangely enough, almost as quickly subsided, to support, then condemn, and finally to modify beyond recognition S. Baker's proposition that Catullus ‘never wrote about love without some irony’. A rehearsal of the various responses to Baker's assessment is especially illustrative both of the particular difficulties in this poem and, more importantly, of the misconceptions which have for years plagued interpretations of the love poetry of Horace as well as Catullus. Indeed, it is fortunate that the frequently observed relationship between Odes 3.9 and its predecessor enables us to examine comprehensively what is symptomatic of general critical approaches to both poets.

Baker's doubt of the idyllic proportions of the love portrait presented in Carmen 45 is certainly not unfounded. However, his arguments in favor of an overriding ironic tension result, if correctly understood, from his conviction that, since elsewhere Catullus cannot ‘speak of love directly and simply for many lines running’, the lovers' bliss is therefore immediately suspect. The poems used in corroboration of this view are nearly all drawn from the so-called Lesbia cycle (2, 5, 7, 51, together with the two epithalamia, 61-62). While in a very restricted sense Catullus' ofttimes exaggerated declaration of passionate love for Lesbia may seem a unifying feature of these pieces, it is incorrect to assume that any single modulation of the love experience is an automatic cipher for all others.
Prometheus Bound
Authors: Ewans Michael
Published: August 2016

In this paper I shall outline a possible new interpretation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. I find that despite universal agreement that this drama has immediate and deep relevance to our lives, there is no available reading which comes closely to grips with the rich, specific details of the play as well as its broad outline. Prometheus Bound is neither a symbolist drama nor an allegory, since the Olympian gods and their predecessors were immediate, shared reality for the Greeks of the early fifth century. So we should begin by asking what Aeschylus meant by his choice of scene and subject, and in particular what issues would have been evoked for the Athenian audience by the confrontation between Prometheus and Zeus.

The manuscripts place before this drama an excerpt from the History of Poetry attributed to Dionysius the younger. Singling out Aeschylus' Prometheus plays for special praise, the author comments that ‘the dramas are filled with the most senior of the gods, and all the masks, both on the stage and in the orchêstra, are divine’.
Obscenity in Catullus
Authors: Lateiner Donald
Published: August 2016

For the artist, obscenity is an aesthetic, not a legal, problem. I wish to analyze the uses to which Catullus puts obscenity and comment on the nature of obscenity in poetry. Catullus comments on his obscene subject matter in three poems. These furnish a starting point for an anatomy of the obscenity of Catullus. Poem 50 describes an afternoon of light verse composition (versiculi) with a friend. ‘We played around a lot, each toying in verse’ (lusimus, ludebat) suggests competition, also banter and ridicule (cf.Cic.de Orat.1.12.50).Leporin speech is wit more than charm or pleasantness (Cic.Brut.38. 143; also,iocumandfacetiae). No doubt, then as today, a fine insult or obscenity was more immediately appreciated than a magnificent simile or compliment. No mention is made of versifying obscenity in 50, but we learn of Catullus' attitude towards writing light, and probably passionate, poetry. It is fun (lusimus), it is metrically exciting (numero modo hoc modo illoc, ‘now in this metre, now in that’), it is competitive (tuo lepore/incensus, ‘aroused by your charm’), it encourages audacity (audax), and it can leave one physically aroused.

In poem 104, Catullus claims to have been unable to insult (maledicere) his love. To ensure that no one might think him unable to write nasty, obscene poems, the fourth line insults the unknown addressee:Sed tu cum Tappone omnia monstra facis(‘But you perform every monstrosity with Bozo’).
Introduction
Authors: Boyle A. J.
Published: August 2016

The Poet deuised the Eglogue long after the other dramatick poems, not of purpose to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loues and communication, but vnder the vaile of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, and such as perchance had not bene safe to haue beene disclosed in any other sort, which may be perceiued by the Eglogues of Virgill, in which are treated by figure matters of greater importance than the loues of Titirus and Corydon. These Eglogues came after to containe and enforme morall discipline, for the amendment of mans behauiour, as be those of Mantuan and other moderne Poets.

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589)

The modern attitude to ancient pastoral — that is to say, the attitude of the contemporary reader of ancient poetry, in which I naturally include the contemporary teacher of ancient poetry — is in need of reformation. Misformed by the preciosity of eighteenth century bucolic and the reductive strictures of Johnsonian rationalism, misshaped by the nineteenth century's post-Romantic aversion to ‘imitation” and ‘artifice” (the aberrations of Conington and Page — ‘The Eclogues idealise reality and render it artificial” — are still in evidence) and by its limited conceptions — ‘misconceptions” would be more accurate — of ‘originality’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘sincerity’, ‘reality” and ‘truth’, misfashioned by the hierarchical imperatives of the theory of literary kinds, the prevalent contemporary attitude (there are distinguished exceptions) to ancient pastoral poetry is distancing, trivialising, condescending and cosy — ‘cosy” because unaffected by the spiritual life of the poems themselves, their intellectual, moral and aesthetic stringency, determination, significance.
Myth and Mediation in the Attis Poem of Catullus
Authors: Rubino Carl A.
Published: August 2016

Il y a plus affairs à interpréter les interprétations qu'à interpréter les choses.

Montaigne

The ninety-three line galliambic narrative of the story of Attis and his encounter with Cybele occupies an important position in theoeuvreof Catullus, yet it has received relatively little attention from Catullan scholars and critics. One reason for this inattention may be traced to the fact that Poem 63, one of thecarmina maiora, seems to contain little or no biographical information; thus it has been passed over by critics and scholars of the biographical persuasion and by those who tend in that direction, in favor of the shorter poems which are more closely connected to Catullus' personal life and experience. The old but tenacious belief in the ‘spontaneous Catullus’ has also served to divert attention from thecarmina maioraas a group, since these poems are such obvious products of adoctus poetawriting in the neoteric and Alexandrian fashion. Critics like Elder and Quinn have done well to demonstrate that the so-called ‘spontaneous’ poems are often full of the same carefully calculated artistic effects and subtledoctrinawhich characterize the long poems, and such efforts have led to renewed consideration of thecarmina maiora, especially of Poem 64. Moreover, the demonstration of stylistic connections between the long poems and the rest of the Catullanoeuvrehas provided the impetus for Ross's recent study, which argues that there are closer links between thecarmina maioraand the polymetrics than between the polymetrics and the epigrams which make up the last part of theliber Catulli. Despite all this, however, I would maintain that serious critical discussion of Poem 63 still lags behind some of the work being done on other poems of Catullus, that consideration of the Attis is still hampered by its distance from the poet's ‘experience’ or by misguided and forced attempts to make it somehow connect with that experience.
Catullus 11: The Ironies of Integrity
Authors: Putnam Michael C. J.
Published: August 2016

Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli,sive in extremos penetrabit Indos,litus ut longe resonante Eoa tunditur unda,sive in Hyrcanos Arabasve molles,seu Sagas sagittiferosve Parthos,sive quae septemgeminus colorat aequora Nilus,sive trans altas gradietur Alpes,Caesaris visens monimenta magni,Gallicum Rhenum horribile aequor ultimosque Britannos,omnia haec, quaecumque feret voluntascaelitum, temptare simul parati,pauca nuntiate meae puellae non bona dicta.cum suis vivat valeatque moechis,quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium ilia rumpens;nee meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,qui illius culpa cecidit velut pratiultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est.

(Furius and Aurelius, companions of Catullus, whether he will make his way into the farthest Indi, where the shore is beaten by the far-resounding eastern wave, or into the Hyrcani or the soft Arabians, whether to the Sagae or arrow-bearing Parthians, whether into the waters which sevenfold Nile dyes, whether he will cross over the lofty Alps, viewing the memorials of mighty Caesar, the Gallic Rhine, bristling water and remotest Britons — all these things, prepared to test together whatever the will of the gods shall bring: announce a few words to my girl, words not pleasant. Let her live and flourish with her adulterers, whom three hundred at once she holds in her embrace, loving no one of them truly, but again and again breaking the strength of all. And let her not look for my love, as before, which by her fault has fallen like a flower of the remotest meadow after it has been touched by a passing plough.)