bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Terence and the Familiarisation of Comedy
Authors: Fantham Elaine
Published: August 2016

Let me start by quoting a paragraph from a century old edition of Terence, which will serve as a reminder of changes in our background knowledge of both comedy and this particular comic playwright:

Of the six extant Terentian comedies the Andria is the most pathetic, the Adelphoe in general more true to human nature than the rest, the Eunuchus the most varied and lively, with the largest number of interesting characters, and the Hecyra the one of least merit. All six are remarkable for the art with which the plot is unfolded through the natural sequence of incidents and play of motives. Striking effects, sharp contrasts and incongruities, which meet us in many plays of Plautus, are almost wholly absent. All is smooth, consistent and moderate, without any of the extravagance of exuberant humour or even creative fancy which characterizes the writing of the older poet. But Terence was essentially an imitative artist and his distinguishing feature was his artistic finish, a fact fully recognized by Horace (Epistle 2.1.59).

There is plenty here to question, if not correct. What does it mean to call Adelphoe more true to human nature? What defines an ‘interesting character’? And do present day readers still find Hecyra the play of least merit? As for the art with which Terence’s plots are unfolded, we still cannot guess how much of this is his own contribution rather than derived from Menander (whose plays were still unknown when this edition was written). However, scholars have used both the evidence given by Terence in the prologues and his commentator Donatus to identify where he has himself innovated in his plots—removing the expository prologues to replace irony with suspense, introducing a second lover and slave into Andria, working a braggart soldier and his parasite into Eunuchus and inserting an abduction scene into the second act of Adelphoe. And yet it was Terence’s immediate predecessor Caecilius whom Varro, most learned of ancient critics, praised for his superior plots. Certainly Terence does not indulge in the extravagance of Plautus, but is this because he is ‘essentially an imitative artist’? On the other hand I would not challenge the editor’s evaluation of his scripts as ‘smooth, consistent and moderate’ or his praise for the playwright’s ‘artistic finish’. Instead I would ask if this is what we want, or ought to want from comedy.
‘A Conjugal Lesson’: Robert Brough's Medea and the Discourses of Mid-Victorian Britain
Authors: Richardson Edmund
Published: August 2016

The Athenian Captive (1838) was to constitute the last significant use of Greek tragedy on the professional stage in Britain for a radical political purpose until Gilbert Murray's stagings of Euripides in the Edwardian era.

Edith Hall

I believe in the Revolution.

Robert Brough, 1855

The fiercest political debates in 1850s Britain were inextricably bound up with the Classical past. Traditionalists and eulogists, priests and pamphleteers, doctors and revolutionaries all set their arguments and their ideals within a Classical framework. Amongst those who sought to use the ancient for decidedly contemporary purposes, Robert Brough was one of the most passionate. He was a revolutionary, a playwright, and a Classicist—though up until the performance of his burlesque Medea (on July 14th 1856), he had never been all three at once. This article will explore how, at the time, the myth of Medea was the perfect vehicle for radical politics—and how Brough exploited its potential to the full. It will frame his play within some of the most controversial debates of the period. It will explore Brough's (on the face of it, startling) claim that his burlesque would give the audience more to think about than any play they had seen before, that it would be ‘a conjugal lesson, surpassing in intensity anything ever before presented’. Brough wrote his Medea believing in ‘the Revolution’. And, as I hope to show, he wanted his audiences to leave the theatre believing in it too.
Gods and Painters: Philostratus the Elder, Stoic Phantasia and the Strategy of Describing
Authors: Thein Karel
Published: August 2016

I shall comment upon the way the elder Philostratus, author of Imagines, inscribes both the art of painting and his own interpretation of 65 particular paintings within a larger framework, which is composed of nature on the one hand, and the human perception of nature on the other. To get to this framework in a slightly oblique way, I will start with a brief reminder of Philostratus' often neglected classification of the arts.

In his Life of Apollonius of Tyana 8.7, Philostratus takes notice of the established opposition between the mechanic and the liberal arts (τέχναι βάναυσοι and τέχναι σοϕαί), but then proceeds to further divide the liberal arts into three groups: some are simply σοϕαί (poetry, music, astronomy, the art of sophist and orator); others are only seemingly liberal, ψευδόσοϕοι (the art of wizards or jugglers); between these two groups are situated the ‘less liberal arts’ or ὑπόσοϕοι τέχναι, namely painting, plastic art, sculpture, navigation and agriculture.
Vegetable Love: Virgil, Columella, and Garden Poetry
Authors: Gowers Emily
Published: August 2016

In 65 CE, a Spanish writer appointed himself Virgil's heir and stepped into a breach that did not really exist. L. Iunius Moderatus Columella chose to attach to his self-styled prose ‘monument’ of agricultural instruction an ornamental didactic poem on gardening, to fill the gap apparently left by Virgil at the start of Georgic 4. The result has been regarded for the most part as a misguided experiment, an uninspired pastiche of clippings and half-lines from a greater poet. Yet in recent years, as part of the wholescale rehabilitation of ‘second-rate’ Latin literature, it has begun to be considered in its own right. Why is this forgettable poem worth another look? Partly because it exists and is average: it tells us how Virgil himself was read in antiquity, and how one middling writer responded to a particular task with its own set of rules. But it is also a surprisingly ambitious poem, a showpiece in which Columella concentrates all his resources, to give his immediate readers Silvinus and Gallio a ‘taste’, in his own words, of his poetic gifts. He takes an unpromising subject and overcompensates by making something new and monstrous out of it. It is not often that artichokes and cucumbers are forced into such lurid focus.
Parens Patriae And Livy's Camillus
Authors: Stevenson T.R.
Published: August 2016

The titlesParens PatriaeandPater Patriaeseem to have been employed controversially in ideological battles of the late Republic, especially from the consulship of Cicero onwards. It seems clear that, among other ideas, these polyvalent titles were capable of evoking the traditional Greek antithesis between the good king (who behaves as a gentle father to his people) and the tyrant, but whereas it is the tyrant who kills citizens in Greek thought, at Rome there was an understanding that the father could execute grown-up dependants who were threatening the state. This ambiguity both complicated and energised debates about the autocratic behaviour of the leading men of the late Republic. In other words, the father analogy was intended as a positive characterisation of the warlords and other leaders but its prominence in the first century BCE shows how anxious the Romans were about limiting and justifying the killing of citizens only as a last resort for the good of the state. Noticeably, Julius Caesar advertises the titleParens Patriaeon his coins, and he was evidently invoked asParensin the Forum cult which flourished for a time after his death. When Cicero speaks of his behaviour in 63 BCE and the positive interpretations put upon it by his friends, he tends to use the termsparensandpatersynonymously. We ought to follow this cue and think that there is a fair degree to which the two can be synonymous. On the other hand, Caesar's supporters might have intended a contrast with his ideological rival Cicero, who had executed the Catilinarian conspirators without a trial. Their aim might have been to emphasise connotations of state benefactor and saviour rather than coercive aspects to do withpatria potestasand theius uitae necisque. The formParens Patriaeappears on the face of it to be less potentially threatening thanPater Patriaeand more inclined to stress ideas of lifegiving, nurturing, and the like.
Thebaid's Feminine Ending
Authors: Dietrich Jessica S.
Published: August 2016

‘Closure: Get Over It’Miss Manners 12/6/98‘I know, it probably doesn't have the sense of closure that you want, but it has more than some of our other cases.’Agent Dana Scully on ‘The X-Files’

Thebaid12 is a problematic ending to a disturbing poem. Part of the problem is the unsatisfactory nature of the final book. Book 12 is itself concerned with the processes of ending and its problems. The main narrative of theThebaidis the story of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, and their battle over the throne at Thebes. Their final confrontation occurs in Book 11. This ending is full of closural allusions and very closely linked to the ending of theAeneidand its final battle between Aeneas and Turnus. If the poem is ‘over’ after Book 11, why does Statius write the final book? It's not enough to say—as critics have—that it's just badly structured poetry.
Return to Sender: The Rhetoric of Nomina in Ovid's Tristia
Authors: Oliensis Ellen
Published: August 2016

As Betty Rose Nagle has remarked, Ovid's exile poetry deploys proper names within a kind of economy: ‘Ovid immortalises his own name by publicising it and exhorting his friends and readers to keep it alive, and he rewards his friends for actively remembering him by immortalising them, i.e. by putting their names in his poetry.’ What interests me here is the shortcircuiting of this system of exchange within the Tristia. For one of the most striking features of Ovid's first run of exilic elegies is precisely the omission of the names of Ovid's addressees. As Ovid will claim in the poem that opens the Epistulae ex Ponto, it is this omission (along with a change of title) that differentiates the Tristia poems from their successors:
inuenies, quamuis non est miserabilis index,non minus hoc illo triste, quod ante dedi.rebus idem, titulo differt; et epistula cui sitnon occultato nomine missa docet.(Ex Pont. 1.1.15-18)
Callimachus Swings (FRR. 178 and 43 PF.)
Authors: Hunter Richard
Published: August 2016

Callimachus fr. 178 Pf. (= 89 Massimilla) tells how the Athenian Pollis—the name is known from a citation in Athenaeus—continued to celebrate Attic festivals in the Alexandria of the poet's own day. At Pollis' party to commemorate the Attic festival in honour of Erigone, the αἰώρα, the poet met Theogenes, a visitor from the Aegean island of Ikos (modern Alonnisos):
Image, Ideology and Action in Cicero and Lucretius
Authors: Penwill J.L.
Published: August 2016

nam saepe ego audiui Q. Maxumum, P. Scipionem, praeterea ciuitatis nostrae praeclaros uiros solitos ita dicere, cum maiorum imagines intuerentur, uehementissume sibi animum ad uirtutem accendi. scilicet non ceram illam neque figuram tantam uim in sese habere, sed memoria rerum gestarum earn flammam egregiis uiris in pectore crescere neque prius sedari, quam uirtus eorum famam atque gloriam adaequauerit.

For I frequently heard that Quintus Maximus and Publius Scipio, along with other famous men of our state, were in the habit of saying that when they looked upon the images of their ancestors, their minds were most powerfully kindled towards virtue. Clearly they were not saying that the wax likeness of itself has so much power, but that through the memory of past achievements a flame grows in the breast of outstanding men of a kind that is not put down until their own virtue has won an equal fame and glory.
Political Declensions in Latin Grammar and Oratory 55 BCE - CE 39
Authors: Sinclair Patrick
Published: August 2016

In a discussion of the rhetorical styles of Caesar and the early principes, Fronto formulates the maxim thatimperium…non potestatis tantummodo uocabulum, sed etiam orationis(‘’command’…is a word connoting not only power, but also oratory’ [p.123.16-17 van den Hout]). This essay will explore the political background and implications of trends and shifts in Roman ways of thinking about language and oratory in the transition from Republic to Principate. The word declension in my title functions in two senses: literally, in the case of Caesar's discussion of the nature of the Latin language (inDe Analogia) and his rivalry with Cicero's views on oratorical style; and figuratively, in the perception of decline in oratory expressed by the elder Seneca and other writers of the early Principate. I hope to be able to present a new approach to, and understanding of, both these aspects.
The Ending of Ovid's Fasti
Authors: Newlands Carole
Published: August 2016

When applied to the Augustan age, the term ‘ideology’ has frequently carried the same negative associations that it often bears in general use. Sir Ronald Syme was influential in creating a picture of Augustus as the deliberate founder of a monarchy who manipulated traditional sources of power for his personal ends. In his chapter ‘The Organisation of Opinion’ inThe Roman Revolution, Syme argued that Augustus appropriated literature, coinage, festivals and monuments in a calculated attempt to create an impregnable system of autocracy. Although Paul Zanker in hisThe Power of Images in the Age of Augustusprovided a more positive view of Augustus as an astute and benevolent monarch, the instigator of a great flowering of the arts, he followed Syme in seeing Augustus as the mastermind of a system of ideas and imagery specifically calculated to promote his personal power and ideals.
With Friends Like These: Understanding the Mythic Background of Homer's Phaiakians
Authors: Carries Jeffrey S.
Published: August 2016

The Phaiakians' reception of Odysseus has long puzzled readers of the Odyssey; so, too, has the nature of life on Skheria. The view of Skheria as an untroubled, remote paradise has attracted many modern critics, yet recent scholarship has noted the Phaiakians' unfriendliness and the potential threat they pose to Odysseus. It seems, in fact, that Homer's narrative contains elements which are overtly contradictory: the Phaiakians are simultaneously friendly and hostile; they are able to traverse the sea without effort, while yet living in a hermetically closed society. These narrative contradictions are not mere illusions, the result of scholarly difference of opinion, but instead reflect a genuinely divided mythic reality. To understand the Phaiakians we should continue along the path marked out by Vidal-Naquet, Clay and Most, and examine not only the narrative but also the mythic elements of the Phaiakis.
Tragedy and Comedy in the Frogs of Aristophanes
Authors: Heiden Bruce
Published: August 2016

Whenever we discuss the Frogs of Aristophanes we find ourselves discussing Athenian tragedy in the Frogs, because Frogs is the play that sends Dionysos down to Hades to recall the tragedian Euripides to Athens, the play that pits Aeschylus and Euripides against one another in a contest that provides one of the earliest specimens of Western literary criticism, and the play in which Aeschylus is finally resurrected to bring the Athenians the teaching that will save the city in its hour of distress. Athenian comedy in Frogs, in contrast, is a much less urgent topic, for while Frogs is a comedy, it does not seem to be about comedy in the same way that it is about tragedy. It includes no comic poets among its characters, it makes no mention whatsoever of comedy in the agōn of the tragic poets, and it even lacks the section of the parabasis praising Aristophanes' art, so familiar from the plays of the 420s. The few references to comedy that do appear in Frogs all occur in the first third of the play; after the parodos, there is silence.
Ratis Avdax: Valerius Flaccus' Bold Ship
Authors: Davis Martha A.
Published: August 2016

Surprises await the reader who approaches the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus expecting to find a pleasant but unchallenging version of the content of Apollonius Rhodius' epic retold in Vergilian style. The poem is much more than ‘a thrilling tale that has absorbed and delighted readers and hearers’ and much more than an imitation of the work of two great predecessors. If we consider the matter of story line alone, Valerius differs from Apollonius. He included the rescue of Hesione by Hercules, which was part of the myth of Argo but not used by Apollonius, and he created an entire book (Book 6) full of new material by recounting how Jason and the Argonauts joined Aeetes in a civil war at Colchis. The syntax, long supposed to be Vergilian, on closer examination appears to have departed from Vergil's ways.

Valerius made his individuality clear from the beginning of his epic:

prima deum magnis canimus freta peruia natis fatidicamque ratem, Scythici quae Phasidis oras ausa sequi mediosque inter iuga concita cursus rumpere flammifero tandem consedit Olympo.(Arg. 1.1-4)I sing the straits first navigable for great sons of gods and the prophetic ship that dared to seek the shores of Scythian Phasis, that dared to burst a course between clashing rocks, that settled down at last on fiery Olympus.
Silius Italicus as ‘Doctvs Poeta’
Authors: Pomeroy Arthur J.
Published: August 2016

The second half of the first century A.D. is the age of the senatorial poet at Rome. While previously Rome's poets frequently were outsiders adopted into the system (Vergil and Horace in particular come to mind in this connection), now members of the inner circles of government could actively display their literary talents and preferences. There can be little doubt that the reign of Nero is mainly responsible for this state of affairs — there is a revival of Roman poetry such as has not been seen since the age of Augustus, evidenced by the diverse works of Lucan, Persius, and even the emperor himself. Previous emperors had dabbled in poetry, but as hardly anything more than a hobby. Now the most important personages in the Roman state could openly engage in creative writing. This trend, beginning under Nero, continues in the Flavian Age, many of whose most prominent members, including the founder of the dynasty himself, originally came to the forefront under the last of the Julio-Claudians. The poetic capabilities of the emperor Domitian are praised by Quintilian (10.1.91) and by Valerius Flaccus (1.12-14); the latter seems at least to have begun his epic with its Greek mythological theme under Vespasian. An author who is often less well regarded had first come to public attention under Nero and remained prominent under the Flavians — Silius Italicus.
The Book of Good Love? Design Versus Desire in Metamorphoses 10
Authors: Janan Micaela
Published: August 2016

Much attention has been paid recently to the role of individual narrators within the Metamorphoses. Whereas it was once considered adequate to attribute the characteristics of the poem solely to Ovid as narrator, a number of critics have now drawn correlations between the development of certain tales and the character of the narrators to whom they are attributed within the poem.

Book 10 calls particular attention to itself in this regard. Orpheus is its primary narrator: after losing Eurydice to death for the second and final time, he composes a song that recalls ‘boys beloved by the gods and young girls struck by unsanctioned passion’ (10.152-54) which occupies the major portion of the book. However, the marked dissonance between Orpheus' announced program and what actually unfolds pricks the reader's curiosity. The bard's initial criteria for choosing material implicitly condemn female passion and celebrate pederasty — an understandable, if extreme, reaction on the part of a man who has just been badly hurt by his passion for a woman. But of the seven stories that follow, only two concern divine pederasty; one of these ends unhappily. The subject of a third tale (Venus' love for Adonis) radically stretches the sense of ‘boy-love’. A fourth tale — of Pygmalion and his statue — does not fit either category of love.
The Last Scene of the Oedipus Tyrannus
Authors: Gellie George
Published: August 2016

When Oedipus rushes into the palace at line 1185 of theOedipus Tyrannuswe have a sense of dramatic fulfilment which, most people would say, is about as much as one play can offer. The process of getting us to this moment of climax has been so satisfyingly managed and our emotions kept at such tension before the instant of release that it is hard not to feel overwhelmed when the resolution of so much theatrical energy takes effect. We are tempted to ask no more of the dramatist: he can do what he likes with us, provided that he does it gently and recognises that our resources of pity and fear have been drained by what we have been through.

So it has been customary to regard the part of the play that follows 1185 as a leisurely declension from the high point of the discovery to the flat land of acquiescence: no new material but an absorption of the old, a gradual accommodation to the horror of the revelation. In keeping with this view the critical literature has often found very little to say about this closing scene. Yet there is evidence enough that the scene is something more than a winding-down. Its very dimensions should set us wondering. That Sophocles should use almost a quarter of his playing-time, not to clinch something in his final scene, but to offer unproductive and undemanding comment on a now played-out play, looks like dramatic and poetic waste. In fact the material of the scene takes us not down but up. There is a design at work that lets the play grow again. Oedipus finds his way back into the world and it is not hard to chart his progress through a number of stages that are separable and display a distinct identity, each of them contributing a little more to the cumulative effect. The play is really doing another kind of building towards another kind of climax. Immediately after the discovery there is a flatness of exhaustion, but from that low point the dramatist works to generate new tensions and excitements around the figure of Oedipus. When he and his daughters meet the play is back on high ground. To change the image, the progress of Oedipus could be compared with the return of a deep-sea diver from the ocean bed; he pauses at one pressure-level after another, getting used to the new conditions, and then proceeds to the next holding-station on the way to the surface.
Poetic Technique and Rhetorical Amplification: Seneca Medea 579-669
Authors: Henderson John
Published: August 2016

Medea has dwarfed her ‘human fly’ of a husband. She plans poisoned gifts of Colchian gold for Jason's bride, inaugurates murderous rites (568-78). Despair and alarm for Jason's safety stir in the men of Corinth at the spectre: ‘Ode 3 is at the bridge between Medea the wife of Jason, Medea the human being, and Medea the manifestation of Hecate’, Bishop observes. The moment at the close of Medea's exchange with Jason is clearly critical, as she sees in a flash of certainty her route to revenge: sic natos amat? / bene est, tenetur, uulneri patuit locus (‘Does he love his sons so? / Splendid, he's mine, his weak spot exposed for my strike!’, 549f.). And we are caught still in the dramatic suspense demonstrated by Pratt which keeps spoken certainty of revenge specifically through infanticide back within the text until 924f., liberi quondam mei, / uos pro paternis sceleribus poenas date (“Children, once my children, / you pay the price of your father's wickednesses!). But already we must hesitate: did Seneca's Medea really start out in the play as a ‘human being’? Herington's phrase ‘Cloud of Evil’ is surely nearer the mark: ‘the raging sorceress Medea will shake the light from heaven as easily as she will shake the marriage torches from the hands of her enemies’ — and this is to translate lines 27f. from the play's prologue, manibus excutiam faces / caeloque lucem …
Introduction
Authors: Boyle A. J.
Published: August 2016

But chiefly dear for his gift to understand Earth's intricate, ordered heart, and for a vision That saw beyond an imperial day the hand Of man no longer armed against his fellow But all for vine and cattle, fruit and fallow, Subduing with love's positive force the land.

C. Day Lewis, The Georgics, ‘Dedicatory Stanzas to Stephen Spender’ (1940)

A collection of critical essays on Virgil's Georgics needs no defence. A great, a magnificent poem, widely read, if not universally applauded, the Georgics has received far less critical attention than either the Eclogues or the Aeneid. Index in part of the apparently uncongenial nature of ‘didactic’ verse, the relative dearth of critical activity on the poem is particularly to be regretted in view of the Georgics' chronologically central position in Virgil's poetic career, its crucial role in the development of his style and thought. Indeed, given the peculiar and self-conscious unity of Virgil's poetic oeuvre, its complex system of evolving themes, images, structures, its bonding, meditated network of inter-poem reference, the critical neglect which the Georgics has received — there are brilliant, recent exceptions — seems less omission, more outrage. Even the Georgics' influence on later European poetry — one thinks, for example, of the Italian humanists, Politian and Alamanni, the eighteenth century English poets, especially Thomson and Cowper, and that remarkable twentieth century English georgic, The Land, by Virginia Sackville-West — while not of the magnitude of that of either the Eclogues or the Aeneid, ought to have elicited a more substantial investigation of the poem than has transpired. No boast, Wilkinson's claim that his 1969 book on the Georgics was the first to appear in English was sad affirmation of this major critical gap.
Poetic Self-Consciousness in Georgics II
Authors: Muecke Frances
Published: August 2016

In contrast to heroic epic and Homer's silence about himself, didactic epos was self-conscious right from the beginning, for Hesiod named himself and described his poetic consecration by the Muses in the proem to theTheogony(22-34). It was not usual for Greek poets to dwell upon their role as poets, and Pindar's attention to this theme makes him a notable exception. With Roman poets things were different, since the conditions under which Latin literature came into being forced upon its exponents an awareness of creating in a context, as part of a tradition in which much had already been accomplished. Accordingly, Ennius did not preserve Homeric anonymity, but actually claimed to be Homer reborn, and possibly added, as well, a ‘Hesiodic’ meeting with the Muses. Moreover, he did not hesitate to criticize his Latin predecessors and to point out how he differed from them. In turn, his successor in the hexameter, Lucretius, felt the need to situate himself in the tradition by acknowledging poetic descent from Ennius, as well as originality in his own enterprise (I.117-9, I.921-30;cf.IV. 1-5). The stance that combined homage of theinuentorof a genre with specific criticism of him became the framework for showing what was special about one's own handling of a genre. We see this in Horace's discussion of his relation to Lucilius inSatiresI.4 and I.10.
Vergil, Horace, Tibullus: Three Collections of Ten
Authors: Leach Eleanor Winsor
Published: August 2016

As examples of the Roman poetry book composed of ten poems, Vergil'sEclogues, Horace'sSermones1 and Tibullus' first book ofElegiesare conspicuous for their similarity of form, all three containing poems of uniform metre and comparable length. Although we cannot be certain that these were the first or only ten poem books in the history of Latin poetry, we cannot help but notice the circumstances that draw them together: their close succession within the space of a decade, their identical positions as the first major publication of each author's career and the well-documented personal association between Horace as central figure of the succession and his two fellow poets, especially his close friendship with Vergil at the time he was composing the Satire Book. While inconclusive in themselves, these circumstances are an inducement to look closely at such similarities of compositional design as the books themselves may show.
Plautus' Captivi and the Ideology of the Ancient City-State
Authors: Konstan David
Published: August 2016

Plautus' Captivi is a play of discovery rather than of action. Its plot is not so much a story as a situation, which is misperceived at first but gradually revealed to the characters in the drama. The chief complications of the plot are all given as part of the initial conditions, which are described in the prologue as having occurred prior to the time of the dramatic action. There had been a war between two Greek communities, Elis and Aetolia. The event itself is strictly and explicitly banished from the stage as befitting tragedy, not comedy (58-62). The prisoners taken on either side in the war were sold as slaves, as commonly happened. Among these was a young Aetolian named Philopolemus, son of Hegio, who fell into the possession of a doctor in Elis called Menarchus. As a result, Hegio, though a man of excellent character, has begun to purchase slaves on the slave market, not with an eye to profit, however, but in order to acquire an Elean captive whom he may exchange for his own son. On the day before the date on which the play is imagined to take place, Hegio has succeeded in buying, at considerable cost, a distinguished citizen of Elis named Philocrates, along with his personal slave, Tyndarus.
The Green Cabinet and the Pastoral Design: Theocritus, Euripides, and Tibullus
Authors: Lawall Gilbert
Published: August 2016

The title of Thomas Rosenmeyer's book, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric, points to a conception of the pastoral as a closed world, set off from the real world outside, despite the author's disclaimer that the title is a misnomer.

… the clarity with which the landscape is articulated suggests the limited confines of an interior, (vii) … the freedom of the herdsman is incorruptible; sealed in the bower … it survives and flourishes … (109)

In seeking to define the essence of pastoral, Rosenmeyer strips off later accretions and sets the pastoral in sharp contrast to Hesiodic peasant poetry, drama, lyric, romance, and the poetry of Horace and Tibullus. He concentrates on a small number of passages from a limited number of texts to show what he regards as central in Theocritean pastoral: a restricted world of simplicity, freedom, and leisure (otium) that finds its closest corollary in the garden of Epicurus.

Yet, even in Rosenmeyer's view, the pastoral ‘pleasance’ is not entirely isolated from the real world. There are, he admits, ‘intimations of a sterner and more hurtful life ostensibly excluded from the arbor’. (23)
‘Nature to Advantage Dressed’: Propertius 1.2
Authors: Curran Leo C.
Published: August 2016

On the surface, Propertius 1.2 seems to propound a traditional thesis, the superiority of unadorned beauty to artifice, and to scold Cynthia for not living up to this ideal of the natural. I believe that the ideal actually asserted is more complex than mere natural beauty and in fact paradoxically entails a large measure of artifice. Artifice itself becomes the central theme of the poem as its value is radically reinterpreted.

Part of the complexity comes from the fact that the ideal embraces more than physical appearance, whether adorned or not. A Catullan Parallel will illustrate. Propertius is here building upon and rivalling a Catullan poem, in a manner which has the effect of emphasizing the non-physical elements in his definition of ideal beauty. A poem on the nature of true female beauty in which the beloved is contrasted with other women and which attempts to define what is truly formosus (‘beautiful’ or ‘lovely’; cf. the insistent repetition of: forma 8 and 24, formosa 9, formosius 11) would immediately be recognized by the Roman reader as a challenge to Catullus 86, which centers on the word formosa.
Agamemnon at Aulis: A Study in the Oresteia
Authors: Ewans Michael
Published: August 2016

Aischylos wrote Agamemnon for exhibition in a theatre. A theatre whose conditions of production almost defy our imagining — how, in particular, were the chorus able to convey the verbal richness and complexity of their lyrics, while at the same time singing and dancing? To a music and choreography of which we know little and nothing respectively, but which yet, however stylized, however unobtrusive, added something to the complexity of the drama. We are left with a mere script. But a stage script, designed to be heard, performed with the phrases emerging in a prescribed order. The audience cannot refer back or leaf forward as in a book. They are — as the parodos is performed — witnesses of a lyric narrative. At any one point, they can only know what they remember of what has been heard already. About what is going to happen, immediately or later, they have only conjecture. We presume the majority to have been acquainted with some or many versions of the history of the house of Atreus; they are, then, aware of a range of possibilities. Aischylos can use any or none of the traditional versions, move from one aspect of the story as he imagines it to another as his purpose demands. And so, as the drama unfolds, the audience's range of expectations can be narrowed, or widened, at will by the emphases given to what they are hearing, the ways in which it adds to what they have heard already.
The Hunter and Hunting in the Aeneid
Authors: Dunkle J. Roger
Published: August 2016

Hunting is a frequent and thematically important activity in the Aeneid. Aeneas hunts in book one then meets his mother who is dressed like a huntress. He hunts along with Dido and Ascanius in book four and the latter precipitates a war by hunting in book seven. Similes in books two and twelve present Aeneas in the guise of a hunter. Similes in books one and four compare Dido and Aeneas respectively to the huntress Diana and the hunter Apollo. Aeneas is compared to a hunting dog in book twelve. There has been no lack of scholarship on the problem of the hunting motif in the Aeneid. In this criticism there seems to be general agreement that Vergil intended the hunting motif to be symbolic. The repeated use of this motif urges the reader to look for a significance beyond the literal and for crossreference among the occurrences of the motif. As Hornsby has written citing the motif of hunting as an example: ‘We have come to see that motifs, themes and ideas are repeated in a variety of ways and in each repetition a new aspect of the motif, theme or idea is illuminated. But, further, each occurrence reflects on the previous ones, so that we have a series of crosscurrents created in the work, which … reveal not only how the Aeneid is organized but what it signifies.’ However, despite previous scholarship's recognition that hunting in the Aeneid is symbolic, there has not been an attempt to analyze the meaning of the symbol itself.
Prolog and Epilog: Mythical History in Herodotus
Authors: Ayo Nicholas
Published: August 2016

The debate about how unified and consistent are the epic-like Histories of Herodotus is reminiscent of the form and redaction criticism developed around the Bible. The evangelical author, whose purpose is not to address posterity for a statement purely of the historical record, but rather to solicit his contemporaries in a catechetical fashion, shapes the historical deeds of the life and times of the Hebrews to suit a purpose, which includes history but is finally beyond mere history. The prophets, and their sources, are didactic; similarly Herodotus arranged his material for the purpose of highlighting the conflict of tyranny and freedom, of despotic empire and more democratic coalition. Books VII, VIII, and IX are the most elaborate and tight-woven of all the Herodotean logoi, just as the passion narratives that conclude the Gospels are the most factual and sustained narrative. The episodes prior to the climax life-death events in both the Histories and the Gospels compose a melange of fact and story, anecdote and reminiscence, pithy statement and imagined speeches, and colourful, fabulous deeds and wonders. Characters are introduced and biographies sketched: mini-dramas and conflicts among various interest groups build — all contributing to the climax and the great passion struggle. By way of introduction to these awesome events yet in the remembrances of living men, Matthew and Luke give the marvellous infancy narratives, and Herodotus presents the mythological rape stories of his prolog. And, just as the whole Bible begins with a marvellous blend of myth and history that is Genesis and ends with the epilog that is Apocalypse, so the Histories begin with the almost-out-of-memory stories of the kings’ daughters kidnapped, and end with the epilog where the ‘ghost’ of Cyrus appears and there discloses the final revelation of the inner impoverished core of Xerxes’ imperial court government.
Ovid's Medea and the Magic of Language
Authors: Wise Valerie
Published: August 2016

In the Metamorphoses, Ovid suppresses certain elements of the myth of Medea and supplements others. The focus of his alterations, it seems, is on language itself, and particularly on the relation of language to metamorphosis. He returns again and again to Medea's use of incantation. Whether in the story of Jason and the golden fleece or of Aeson's rejuvenation, Ovid emphasizes the efficacy of language. He suggests the relationship of words to transformation through Medea's exercise of magic, indeed literalizes the connection between ritual language and transformed phenomena in the metamorphoses that follow her magic rites. But magic functions also as a metaphor for imaginative power, since it possesses the capacity shared by poet and magician to transform. In the several depictions of Medea's magic art — and one can perceive the episodes of the myth structured around their connections with magic — Ovid develops an image for imagination itself. Jason's labors, for example, are affected by Medea's expertise in magic; they are also a vehicle for a self-conscious display of poetic power. Ovid asserts his imaginative superiority more clearly in the case of Medea, whose relation even to her own power is ambiguous. But let us first consider the portrayal of Medea as a teller of her own tale and the poet's nod in the direction of his predecessors.
Post-Promethean Man and the Justice of Zeus
Authors: Waerdt P. A. Vander
Published: August 2016

After Athena announces his acquittal in the trial of theEumenides, Orestes offers thanks to the three gods who have driven him from the house into the city to restore him once again to his house — Pallas, Loxias, and the Third Savior who accomplishes all things, Zeus Sōtēr (757-760). In the plot of theOresteia, this triad has made Orestes the third savior for whom the Chorus of theChoephoroipray (1073); he comes in the third generation, after Atreus and Agamemnon, to save his line from the extinction threatened by theatēworking its way through the generational cycles of the House of Atreus. His trial, which establishes in thepolisthe precedent of Ixion (cf.441, 717-718), brings it an unbeatable grip of salvation and victory against its opponents (776-777). The evolution he thus effects in the human ethical order is an unwitting imitation, with Orestes as a human counterpart to Zeus, of the evolution in the divine ethical order effected by the young Olympian gods in thePrometheia, for only in the third generation, after Ouranos and Kronos, does Zeus halt the lawless cycle of divine usurpation. Zeus provestriaktēr, victor in the third bout, in the struggle for control of thekosmos(cf.Ag.168-172); likewise, Orestes overcomes theatēwhich Elektra describes asatriaktos(Cho.339), and, having offered Aegisthus as a third libation (Cho.577-578), he provestriaktērin his agōn against the Erinyes, although they claim to have tripped him in the first of three bouts (Eum.589). Human history is an imitation of divine history, accomplished under Zeus' command by the Olympian gods, who seek to bring man's ethical order into line with the new order of thekosmos; only by thus reconciling the Chthonic gods to the new order can the Olympians establish theharmonianecessary if Zeus' regime is to stop permanently the cycle of crime and counter-crime.
Menaechmi: A Serious Comedy
Authors: Haberman Donald
Published: August 2016

It is not at all unusual for even the staunchest admirers of Plautus to feel that his plays lack genuine seriousness. His skill, his wit, his robust gaiety, above all his showmanship are recognized for their excellence. They always hit the mark. And yet he is characterized as an entertainer only, a classical George S. Kaufman.

Even Erich Segal in his illuminating study, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, for all his enthusiastic admiration of Plautus, seems uneasy about judging his achievement as anything more than masterful popular entertainment. Plautus deserves our attention, he writes, because he ‘was the most successful comic poet in the ancient world …. And yet few scholars of the last century have been willing to examine Plautus for what he undeniably was — a theatrical phenomenon’; and he concludes, ‘His art does not give rise to “thoughtful laughter” …. For True Comedy should banish all thought — of mortality and morality’. Segal willingly compares Plautus with Aristophanes and Molière (he mentions Shakespeare only to dismiss the possibility of comparison as unreasonable), and surely no one would write of either as only theatrical phenomena, banishing all thought.
‘The Single Supplie’: Some Observations on Zeugma with Particular Reference to Vergil
Authors: Mack Sara
Published: August 2016

Writers from Homer to O. Henry have used it. Critics from Servius to Bömer have commented on it. Students of rhetoric from Quintilian to Laussberg have analysed it. Yet there is very little agreement about what zeugma is and what it does. Some editors note its existence and leave it at that. Others distinguish (sometimes passionately) between zeugma and syllepsis, zeugma and equivoque, zeugma and attelage, zeugma and plokē, zeugma and amphibole. Therefore I shall do well to clarify at the start my own use of the term.

It is probably best to begin by distinguishing between a group of figures (most commonly called zeugma or syllepsis) which link several notions into one, and another group (hendiadys and related figures) which expand one concept by expressing it in two ways or from two points of view. Zeugma implies yoking (zeugnumi), two or more elements joined so as to make a team. The yoked words are in some way incongruous — perhaps abstract linked with concrete, animate with inanimate, or physical with mental — and the resulting team is, accordingly, both surprising and noteworthy, rather as if a horse were yoked with an ox.
Authors: Strausbaugh Larry J. , Pinner Robert W. , Rosen Hugo R.
Published: August 2016

First identified in the late 1980s as the main causative agent of non-A, non-B hepatitis, hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is now the most common chronic bloodborne infection in the United States. It is likely that the number of deaths attributable to HCV-related chronic liver disease will increase substantially during the next 2 decades, and the potential economic and clinical burden related to HCV is staggering. Accordingly, it is essential to identify risk factors for transmission of HCV and implement appropriate precautions to decrease the prevalence of this emerging infection. The relative importance of the two most common types of exposures associated with transmission of HCV, ie, blood transfusion and injection drug use, has evolved over time. Strict blood-donor selection and the use of reliable serological tests have led to a significant reduction in transfusion-associated risk. Injection drug use is currently the single most important risk factor for HCV infection in the United States.

Transmission of HCV poses a serious threat to healthcare workers and patients if infection control techniques or disinfection procedures are inadequate. Potential exposures include contact of the eyes, mucous membranes, broken skin, or needlestick injury. Hospitalized patients may serve as a reservoir for transmission, and the prevalence of anti-HCV seropositivity among such patients can be as high as 20%.

The infected healthcare worker is a potential source of transmission. A recent molecular phylogenetic analysis demonstrated that a cardiac surgeon likely transmitted HCV to five of his patients during open heart surgery. In summary, nosocomial transmission has been unequivocally confirmed and underscores the need for strict infection control practices.
Nosocomial Viral Infections: I. Epidemiology and Significance
Authors: Valenti William M. , Hall Caroline Breese , Douglas R. Gordon , Menegus Marilyn A. , Pincus Patricia H.
Published: August 2016

Viral illnesses in Strong Memorial Hospital were monitored over a 17-month period. Using criteria based primarily on the incubation periods for a number of common virus infections, the infections we found were classified as hospital- or community-acquired. Hospital-acquired viral infections occurred on most hospital services; the majority of infections occurred on the pediatric and psychiatric services. Infections due to herpesviruses were seen more frequently in a group of patients aged 14 years or older, while infections in patients aged three years or younger were more likely to be due to respiratory syncytial virus, influenzavirus, adenovirus, or parainfluenza virus. Patients with nosocomial infections due to viruses were hospitalized an average of 9.3 days longer than uninfected controls; thus nosocomial viral infections result in increased costs of hospitalization.
Nosocomial Viral Infections: II. Guidelines for Prevention and Control of Respiratory Viruses, Herpesviruses, and Hepatitis Viruses
Authors: Valenti William M. , Betts Robert F. , Hall Caroline Breese , Hruska Jerome F. , Douglas R. Gordon
Published: August 2016

This article reviews the most likely mechanisms of transmission of the commonly encountered respiratory viruses (influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza, rhinovirus), herpesviruses, and hepatitis viruses, and presents the guidelines used currently for prevention and control that are in use at Strong Memorial Hospital.
An Outbreak of Nosocomial Salmonella typhimurium Infection Linked to Environmental Reservoir
Authors: Aber Robert C. , Banks William V.
Published: August 2016

Between May 16 and July 1,1973, four definite cases and one possible case of clinical salmonellosis occurred in a 175-bed community hospital; there were no deaths. Three of the four patients with definite salmonellosis had had cholecystectomies done by the same general surgeon (A); the fourth was an intensive care unit nurse who cared for one of the ill patients during the diarrheal phase of illness before salmonellosis was diagnosed. Epidemiologic investigation implicated the plastic tubing of an intermittent-suction machine located in the recovery room as the environmental reservoir of the organism, and having a nasogastric tube in place postoperatively was the critical host factor related to illness. The salmonella organisms isolated from the suction machine tubing were identical in serologic reaction, biochemical test results, and bacteriophage susceptibility pattern to those recovered from the four patients with confirmed salmonellosis. Antimicrobial susceptibility patterns were similar but not identical.