bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Invention of Sosia for Terence's First Comedy, The Andria
Authors: Anderson William S.
Published: August 2016

In connection with the beginnings of the Andria, there have been anecdotes and scholarly theories ever since the time of Suetonius and his sources for the Life of Terence, and they intrigued Donatus in his commentary. Naturally, then, they have developed their own influence in the scholarly tradition. An anecdote recounted by Suetonius, who does not name his source, reports that when Terence delivered his play to the aediles of 166 BCE (who would be producing the comedy at the Megalensian Games), he was ordered (or invited, iussus) to read it first to Caecilius Statius (the current grand old man of Latin Comedy). It happened that Caecilius was dining when Terence appeared, dressed with no distinction and therefore earning the coolness of Caecilius. The old man treated him like a servant and had him seat himself on a stool next to his couch and start reading, so as to disturb his dining as little as possible. However, once Terence began reading his play, after only a few verses, he was invited up to Caecilius' couch and proceeded to read through the remainder of the play to the considerable admiration of his host. Now, scholars have had several things to say about this story. First and most commonly, they have pointed out that good evidence fixes the death of Caecilius in 168, roughly two years before the performance of the Andria; and accordingly this story has no factual substance. Good, there is no reason to try to combat facts: this interesting meeting of Caecilius and Terence never happened. However, we do not need to throw away the Suetonian story as useless trivia. The reason someone devised the story was evidently to bring the older generation of comic poetry into contact with the new and to voice its strong approval of its successor's first product, the Andria. Although Caecilius himself may never have known Terence, the plays of the two were linked by a common impresario, Lucius Ambivius Turpio. The didascaliae to all six plays of Terence credit him with being the producer, and in the so-called second prologue of the Hecyra Ambivius reports that he had troubles producing the plays of Caecilius, as he had recently had with Terence's.
Terence's Selbstaussöhnung: Payback Time for the Self (Hautontimorumenus)
Authors: Henderson John
Published: August 2016

There is no such thing as society.ThatchFriends and neighbours, that's where it's atfriends and neighbours, that's a fact.Ornette Coleman (1970)

All Terence's ½-doz. plays come complete with instructions on how to read them. They give you a fair idea, for a start, of what you're going to get yourself involved in. They always did, delivering audiences to the exponentially expanding Roman culture of the 160s BCE, delivering drama, and theatre culture, from that critical world-beating juncture in the history of the West to a constantly self-renewing, and ultimately perpetual, Graeco-Roman education, through language + learning: Prologue (§1).

Before all, this is the play with the unpronounceable Greek handle. Just about its only Hellenism to survive processing into Terence's expertly screened Latinity. A word-and-a-half set to catch any lover of language—it made Baudelaire write a poem, just so he could list Hautontimoroumenos as a title in Fleurs du Mal: Je te frapperai sans colèrelet sans haine comme un boucher.… (For us, his line-and-a-half must be: Je suis de mon coeur le vampire.) The word-title is a paradigmatic slogan that roars—fortissimo—that complex internal relations between the person and the self feature as the semiotic-cum-problematic of this play. L'innommable—beyond Latinity to put into words, hence the compulsion to dramatise: Title (§2).
Buy Young, Sell Old: Playing the Market Economies of Phormio and Terence
Authors: Smith Joseph A.
Published: August 2016

…mihi prospiciam et Phaedriae.Phormio 1036…I'd better look ahead for my own interest, and Phaedria's.

If the anecdotal material from Terence's biography can be trusted, 161 BCE was the playwright's breakthrough year in which he secured his position in Rome as the premier comedian of his generation. At the Ludi Megalenses in April Terence's Eunuch was such a popular success it earned a same-day repeat performance and the unprecedented payment of 8,000 sesterces for its author. In September of that same year Terence was hired by the curule aediles once again to bring another play, the fifth he would compose, to the stage at the Ludi Romani. On that occasion, far from opening his prologue with the vaunting self-promotion of a poet who had recently pleased his audience so thoroughly, Terence returned for the fourth time to his customary complaints against some unnamed old poet who had yet again levelled criticism at his young rival. And while it appears that Terence was simply sticking with a proven, successful formula, in other regards the young poet was in fact showing signs of a new confidence of privileged position by varying from another of his regular compositional practices: he had, he tells his audience, changed the name of the original Greek play by Apollodorus to one of his own choosing:
nunc quid uelim animum attendite: adporto nouamEpidicazomenon quam uocant comoediamGraeci, Latini Phormionem nominantquia primas partis qui aget is erit Phormioparasitus, per quem res geretur maxume,uoluntas uostra si ad poetam accesserit.(Phorm. 24-29)Now pay attention to what I want: I bring anew comedy which the Greeks call Epidikazomenos,and Latin speakers entitle Phormiobecause the man who’ll play the chief part will bethe parasite Phormio, on whom the plot will mostly dependif you’ll throw your favour to the poet.
The Joker in the Pack: Slaves in Terence
Authors: McCarthy Kathleen
Published: August 2016

Where social relations are concerned, the servile condition was the joker in the pack: the true slave could be given a different value or significance according to prevailing principles of social organization. The slave was an outsider without a past or a future, without separate interests or compromising associations. In principle the slave was a creature of his or her owner. If necessary, the slave could act as a surrogate. The slave condition cancelled out all prior belonging or autonomy and enabled the slaveowners to claim the slave's reproductive powers, productive energy, administrative or military capacity and personal initiative.

Blackburn (1996), 161

Boiled down to its essentials, domestic comedy is about the business of getting and begetting, about economics and reproduction. True, it might be more fair to say that it is about the sense individuals have about their own roles and actions in these enterprises—about love and fear and regret, for example—but the twin concerns of household wealth and the status of future generations provide the structure within which these emotions take on meaning. To be more precise, these concerns are not just twinned, but are part of a single process which we might call ‘familial reproduction’, i.e. the process of using material, cultural and biological resources to stabilise the family's identity and status in the present and to extend the family's identity and status into the future. One important resource that Roman families drew on was the rich and manifold resource of the slave members of the familia.
The Unlovely Lover of Terence's Hecyra
Authors: Penwill J.L.
Published: August 2016

The traditional ordering of Terence's plays in editions and translations obscures an important fact: the Hecyra was Terence's second play, not the fifth. It has fifth place in the collection because, as the second prologue narrates in some detail, the first two productions were failures, and the order is based on the date of the first successful production rather than on the order of composition. And there is no evidence that the author made any changes to the script; indeed, the prologues suggest quite the opposite. The first deliberately plays on the idea of ‘newness’: when it was given as a nouafabula (‘new play’, If.) it encountered a nouom uitium (‘new/novel disaster’, 2) and is now presented pro noua (‘as if new’, 5). When it was really new it met with a correspondingly new disaster: the tight-rope walker distracted everyone's attention so that no-one saw enough to make any sense of it (neque spectari neque cognosci potuerit, 3), and so we can reasonably assert that it is still new even though technically it isn't. The parallel with Turpio's account in the second prologue of what he did in the case of unsuccessful productions of Caecilius makes this clear: when he first put on new plays by this author he was sometimes driven out of the theatre and at others could scarcely hold his ground (15-17). But as he says he persevered: easdem agere coepi…perfeci ut spectarentur: ubi sunt cognitae,/placitae sunt (‘I undertook to put the same plays on again; I managed to get people to see them, and when they had worked out what was going on, they were a success’, 18, 20f.). The purpose was not to get Caecilius to rewrite the flops but to encourage him to write other new plays; by making successes of what had been flops in the original performance, the producer demonstrates to his scriptwriter that he really has talent after all. It worked for Caecilius and it has worked for Terence, too; now that he has forged a reputation with three more successes in the interim (alias cognostis eius, ‘you’ve understood his other stuff, 8), it is time to give this play the hearing and the appreciation that it has always deserved. (The emphasis on the intelligence required to be an audience member—cognosci, 3; cognostis, 8; cognitae, 20; uostra intelligentia, 31—is of course highly pertinent; this is not a play for populus stupidus, ‘stupid yobs’, 4.)
The Life of Objects: Bounds of Creativity in Theocritus' First Idyll
Authors: Purchase Philip
Published: August 2016

A moment in Tom Stoppard's post-pastoralArcadiasuggests a way into the pre-pastoral scene of Theocritus' firstIdyll.Stoppard's play generates two narratives that are divided by almost two hundred years, yet linked by identity of location. The estate of Sidley Park, soon to be ‘gothicised’, houses overlaid stories from past and present that separately inhabit the same room until they finally achieve simultaneous existence on stage. In this exchange from 1809, Lady Croom is looking over the plan to transform her gardens; Thomasina is her ‘pert’ daughter:

LADY CROOM: But Sidley Park is already a picture, and a most amiable picture too. The slopes are green and gentle. The trees are companionably grouped at intervals that show them to advantage. The rill is a serpentine ribbon unwound from the lake peaceably contained by meadows on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged—in short, it is as God intended, and I can say with the painter, ‘Et in Arcadia ego!’

‘Here I am in Arcadia,’ Thomasina.THOMASINA: Yes, mama, if you would have it so.LADY CROOM: Is she correcting my taste or my translation?THOMASINA: Neither are beyond correction, mama, but it was your geography caused the doubt.
What's Hecuba to Him…? Reflections on Poetry and Politics in Tacitus' Dialogue on Orators
Authors: Penwill J.L.
Published: August 2016

The quotation in the title comes from one of Hamlet's famous soliloquies (‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I…’); it expresses his reaction to the fact that the Player reciting Aeneas' tale of the sack of Troy has broken down in tears as he describes the fate of this classicalmater dolorosa:Is it not monstrous that this Player here,But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,Could force his soul so to his whole conceit,That from her working, all his visage wann'd,Tears in his eyes, distraction in 's aspect,A broken voice, and his whole function suitingWith forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!For Hecuba!What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,That he should weep for her?
Triumph Songs, Reversal and Plautus' Amphitruo
Authors: Peter O'Neill
Published: August 2016

Partout dans la pièce on sent frémir la vie romaine.

(Henri Janne)

This paper aims to read Plautus'Amphitruoin the light of the Roman triumph. Local references and allusions to the triumph in theAmphitruohave often been pointed out, but only rarely has the play as a whole, with its story of the arrival home and treatment of a returning victorious general, been seen as reflecting the triumph. However, Mary Beard, in the recent collectionRome the Cosmopolis, has made this connection, seeing in theAmphitruoa theatrical and metatheatrical parody of thetriumphator. For Beard, the triumph is a ceremony which problematises issues of mimesis and representation. Thetriumphator, dressed and painted to imitate perhaps Jupiter himself, perhaps a statue of Jupiter, or perhaps the Etruscan Kings, exemplifies this problem. As Beard says, just as thetableaux vivants, carried at triumphs, with their depictions of thetriumphator's various achievements, can be seen as replications of reality, as artifice, or as pure and simple sham, so the general can be seen as Jupiter's double, as a living statue, or as an actor making a fool of himself at a costume party. According to Beard, what is at stake in thetriumphator's performance is the hermeneutic question of how can one tell the difference between ‘being’, ‘playing’ or ‘acting’ god. It is in this light that Beard locates theAmphitruo, reading the play as a parody of triumphal mimesis. Whereas thetriumphatorusually imitates Jupiter at the triumph, here Jupiter imitates thetriumphator.
Collapsing Authority and ‘Arachnean’ Gods in Ovid's Baucis and Philemon (Met. 8.611-724)
Authors: Green Steven J.
Published: August 2016

Among the many delightful stories woven into Ovid'sMetamorphoses, the tale of Baucis and Philemon in Book 8—not found before Ovid—has long proven a favourite with many readers. Narrated by the elderly Lelex, the story goes that Jupiter and Mercury are wandering on earth from door to door in need of shelter; they are received by a pious old couple, Baucis and Philemon, who entertain them with their utmost hospitality; the gods later reveal themselves, punish the inhospitable neighbourhood and reward the pious couple with everlasting life by turning them into sacred trees. This popular story has been the subject of at least two lighthearted operas, by Joseph Haydn (18th century) and Charles-François Gounod (19th century); both Rubens (c.1620) and Rembrandt (1658) have depicted scenes from the story on canvas; elegant poetic translations have been written by John Dryden (1693) and Jonathan Swift (1709). It is not difficult to understand why this story has provided particular enjoyment for the reader. In a poem which too often presents the gods as indifferent to justice and indulgent in their basest desires, here is a story which celebrates the proper relationship between divine and mortal, and pulls on moral, almost Christian heart-strings. Many might agree with G. Karl Galinsky's observation that the story has the effect of ‘radiating so obviously the sort of kindly warmth which some of Ovid's readers would like to find in more of [Ovid's] myths and, one suspects, in their daily lives.’
Written on the Body: Ekphrasis, Perception and Deception in Heliodorus' Aethiopica
Authors: Whitmarsh Tim
Published: August 2016

Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their physical form suggests. From earliest times since, the genre has dealt, centrally, with themes of metamorphosis, transubstantiation, the fundamentally permeable nature of the self. The solid material aspect of the novel often masks a central preoccupation with the fluidity of identity.

In the compass of this article, I want to explore the central role accorded by Heliodorus, arguably the greatest of ancient novelists, to questions of perceptual deception, to seeing and seeming; and in particular, I want to explore the role of artworks within Heliodorus' narrative economy. The narrative turns, as is well known, on the amazing paradox of an Ethiopian girl born white. Charicleia's skin colour is a visual trap, an illusion. Given that her freakish pigmentation is the result of her mother's glancing at an art-work at the moment of conception, Charicleia can almost be said to be a walking ekphrasis, an embodiment of the illusory traps of the unreal.
The Fabrication of Tradition: Horace, Augustus and the Secular Games
Authors: Davis P.J.
Published: August 2016

Now, at this season when selected girlsAnd the boys who are about to venture upon them,Though still in bud, sing what will please London…

(C.H. Sisson, 1974)

Rome's first emperor proved remarkably successful in shaping a positive image for himself in his own and subsequent eras. Here was a man who came to power through that most criminal of means, through victory in civil war, and yet managed to persuade his own and succeeding generations of his right to rule. How did the enthusiastic proscriber of the innocent and the brutal destroyer of Perusia transform himself into the sublime Augustus? Here was one of Rome's great militarists, a man who, by one reckoning, doubled the size of the Roman empire. How could this warlord be perceived as a ‘prince of peace’? One answer to these questions is that this transformation of perception, both ancient and modern, was achieved through die emperor's promotion of a complex of ideas designed to accomplish precisely this perceptual shift, a complex of ideas which we variously call ‘Augustan ideology’, ‘Augustan discourse’ or even ‘Augustan cultural thematics’.
The Character and Content of Water in Nonnus and Claudian
Authors: Newbold R.
Published: August 2016

While it is the common nature of water to mirror the exact image of the body, it alone boasts the strange power that it mimics not human forms but human character (mores).

Claudian

As Claudian observes, water can display some very human moods and emotions, such as anger or calm. It can be quite anthropomorphic. Rivers, springs, the sea are readily personified. But, further than that, when water is imagined, it can also reveal many of the fantasies, wishes, fears and preoccupations of the person who does the imagining. The rich symbolism of water comes about, at least in part, because of the readiness of people to project on to it, as if on to a screen, the contents of their psyche, the character of their inner lives. Sadistic or lustful drives, nostalgic longings and much more may emerge in dreams, fantasies and images associated with water. Even when an author's work teems with traditional aquatic imagery, such images have to be selected from the larger cultural storehouse and the consequent array and treatment of these has a particular cumulative effect. Certain attitudes may reveal themselves. Imagined water that is particularly turbulent, for example,mayreflect the turbulence of an author's psyche. Through an author's treatment of water one can often gain some idea of how changeable, comforting and threatening the world appears to him or her.
The History of Mind and the Philosophy of History in Sallust's Bellum Catilinae
Authors: Gunderson Erik
Published: August 2016

With the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BCE, the political fortunes of one of Caesar's lesser political partisans began to wane. Gaius Sallustius Crispus, a minor political figure, formerly involved in scandal and now left without a backer, retired from politics and began to write history. His first project was an account of a failedcoup d'étatfrom some decades before. Sallust recorded the efforts of a thwarted candidate for Rome's highest office named Lucius Sergius Catilina to raise an army of disaffected Romans and foreigners and to install himself and his partisans at Rome. In the end, though, nothing much came of the plot: some were arrested and killed; some fought and died; others who had not been caught in too manifest support of Catiline were suddenly expressing their enmity for the monster.
Literary and Filial Modesty in Silvae 5.3
Authors: Nagel Rebecca
Published: August 2016

The occasional poems of Statius are an enticing field for critics interested in topics like the interaction of Greek and Roman culture or the relationship between public activities like government and private activities like writing poetry. Most recently John Henderson has explored these issues in Statius' poem for the consular Rutilius Gallicus (Siluae1.4). In this paper I will discussSiluae5.3, an epicedion for Statius' own father. Statius uses the occasion of writing the epicedion to celebrate his father's life as a teacher, writer and performer and, by extension, his own life too. In his poem Statius develops a portrait of himself and his father as Greeks in close sympathy with Roman values. Against a backdrop of teaching and performing Greek literature they value above all filial duty and the skills of Roman government. Yet literature does not remain consistently in the background. Because Statius' father was also his teacher and model in literature, Statius as the dutiful son celebrates his father's literary skill and defers to it. By extension, Statius defers also to the subjects of his father's teaching, the famous masters of Greek and Latin literature.
The Ties that Bind: Transformations of Costume and Connection in Euripides' Heracles
Authors: Worman Nancy
Published: August 2016

Cependant, elle, qui croyait bien connaître Jacques, s'étonnait. Il avait sa tête ronde de beau garçon, ses cheveux frisés, ses moustaches très noires, ses yeux bruns diamantés d'or, mais sa mâchoire inférieure avançait tellement, dans une sôrte de coup de geule, qu'il s'en trouvait défiguré.Zola, LaBête Humaine

It may seem banal to note that in its original conception Greek tragedy depended for much of its force on costume and visual effect. The dramas themselves often make clear, however, that costume, as a central feature of a character's visible type, communicates essential aspects of how she is situated both literally and figuratively. Not only do characters often enter in heroic or royal regalia, but the more elaborate or bedraggled one's appearance, the more likely it is that other characters comment upon it and thereby give it some overarching significance. As historians of Athenian drama have noted, the plays themselves do not provide very detailed evidence about the actual costumes that actors wore. Nor do vase paintings of particular stories always supplement the dramas with sufficiently detailed images of characters; and die written sources are too late to be definitive. I would nevertheless suggest that in Sophocles and especially in Euripides the plays draw attention to differentiations among the appearances of characters when the character's visible type contributes importantly to understanding her place in the social and symbolic structure of the play.
Nossis, Sappho and Hellenistic Poetry
Authors: Bowman Laurel
Published: August 2016

Nossis 11 (AP7.718)

Stranger, if you're sailing towards Mitylene of the beautiful dances

to draw inspiration from the flower of the graces of Sappho,

say that I was dear to the Muses, and that the Locrian land bore me, and once you know that my name was Nossis, go.

Reading is a difficult art. We read best, that is, not only with most sensitivity but with greatest pleasure, those texts which we have been taught to read well. Learning to read a new author, or in a new genre, is a great effort, the more difficult if it must be self-taught. Few readers are equipped to make the attempt wholly unaided. A new poet who wishes to become well-known does well to attempt visibly to attach her work to that of a canonical predecessor, to indicate how she wants her work to be read, and that it can be read with the critical tools already in the reader's possession.
Ovid's Heroides and Tristia: Voices from Exile
Authors: Rosenmeyer P.A.
Published: August 2016

exulis haec uox est: praebet mihi littera linguam,et si non liceat scribere, rautus ero.Epist. ex Pont.2.6.3f.This is the exile's voice; the written word gives me a tongue,and if writing is forbidden, I shall be dumb.

Ovid's exilic persona reveals itself over the course of his correspondence as a literary pastiche of other texts and identities. We hear the narrator's voice in theTristiaandEpistulae ex Pontoechoing that of Horace and Propertius, Homer's Odysseus and Vergil's Aeneas. These allusions to canonical works are widely recognised and catalogued. But equally crucial to Ovid's self-presentation are allusions to his own previous masterpieces. I interpret his choice of the letter form for the exile poems as not only an allusion to, but also an authorial statement of identification—on some level—with his earlier epistolary work, theHeroides. TheHeroidesmay be read as letters from exile,epistulae ex exilioin which Ovid pursues his fascination with the genre of letters and the subject of abandonment through literary characters; theTristiatake that fascination one step further as the author himself, in letters to loved ones, writes from the position of an abandoned hero of sorts.
The Role of the Book in Tristia 3.1
Authors: Newlands Carole
Published: August 2016

The third book of the Tristia is the first to have been written in Tomis, Ovid's place of exile. The long journey from Rome, the subject of the first book of the Tristia, is over. The distractions of the journey can no longer sustain him, and his only pleasure is to weep, in other words to write the elegy of lament:
dum tamen et uentis dubius iactabar et undis,fallebat curas aegraque corda labor:ut uia finita est, et opus requieuit eundi,et poenae tellus est mini tacta meae,nil nisi flere libet…(Tr. 3.2.15-19)

But while in turmoil I was being tossed around by winds and waves, my worries and sad heart were distracted by the battle for survival. Now that the journey is over, the effort involved in travel is spent, and the land of my punishment has been reached, weeping is my only pleasure.
The Ending of Sense: Death as Closure in Lucretius Book 6
Authors: Penwill J.L.
Published: August 2016

Dis Manibus Peter James Connor

Of the things that wisdom provides for blessedness throughout life, by far the greatest is the possession of friendship.

Epicurus,Principal Doctrines27

No man is anIland, intire of it selfe…any mansdeathdiminishesme, because I am involved inMankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom thebelltolls; It tolls forthee.

John Donne,Devotions17

That Lucretius should choose to end his Epicurean representation of the world with a long and harrowing account of the plague that struck Athens in 430 BCE is certainly one of the more remarkable facts in classical Roman poetry. More remarkable still is the suddenness of the ending. The poem simply breaks off as one critic says ‘almost in mid-sentence’; and even if we follow this same critic in tidying up the end by transferring 6.1247-51 to follow 1286 we are still left very muchin mediis rebus, with the plague at its height and death and misery all around. Our initial response is one of surprise and puzzlement as we feel cheated of a sense of an ending; this in turn leads to questions about overall design and authorial intent. Why does the poem end this way? Indeed, has it ended at all?
Alogia and Emphasis in Juvenal's Fourth Satire
Authors: Winkler Martin M.
Published: August 2016

D M

J. P. Sullivan

In chapters 24 and 25 of thePoeticsAristotle discusses an aspect of poetry which is important even for satire. Aristotle states thatto thaumaston, the element of ‘the wondrous’ necessary for tragedy, depends on what he termsto alogon, ‘the irrational’ (Poet.1460a11-14). He continues to explain that ‘once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity’ inherent in it (an de thēi kai phainētai eulogōterōs, endekhesthai kai atopon). Accordingly, Aristotle postulates that the poet should prefer ‘likely impossibilities to unlikely possibilities’ (adunata eikota mallon ē dunata apithana). Aristotle stresses the importance of this demand by repeating it later (Poet.1461b11f.). The poet's justification for proceeding along such lines rests on the effect he achieves: his composition becomes ‘more striking’ (ekplēktikōteron, Poet.1460b24-27). The irrational does not necessarily violate reason, ‘for it is likely that something may happen contrary to likelihood’ (eikos gar kai para to eikos ginesthai;Poet.1461b15). Although not real, the irrational is ‘better’ (beltion); it is not that which is, but that which ‘ought to be’ (hōs dei). S.H. Butcher summarises the subject by observing: ‘These so-calledadunataare the verydunataof art, the stuff and substance of which poetry is made …. Theadunata, things impossible in fact, becomepithana[likely].’
Martialis Redivivus: Evaluating the Unexpected Classic The First J.P. Sullivan Annual Lecture in Classics, UCSB March 10, 1994
Authors: Boyle A.J.
Published: August 2016

Pignus Amoris

I begin with apre-text. It is a short poem about intellectual hypocrisy which might have been written by Martial had he lived in southern California in the 1990's. Its author is in fact John Sullivan. The title of the poem is ‘Pop Sociologist’.
Introduction
Authors: Boyle A. J.
Published: August 2016

Martial offers not only an anatomy of Roman sexuality but an ideology of it.

J. P. Sullivan,Martial: The Unexpected Classic

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology.

T. Eagleton,Ideology: An Introduction

John Sullivan's last public engagement was to deliver a paper at the third USC-UCLA Seminar in Roman Studies on St. Patrick's day 1993. The subject of the seminar was ‘Literature and Ideology’, and featured Tom Habinek (USC), Carole Newlands (UCLA), myself as moderator, and John himself, who was to speak on ‘Martial and Flavian Ideology’. John's deteriorating condition prevented him from attending the seminar and a timely replacement was found in the person of a fellow ‘Patrician’, Patrick Sinclair of UC Irvine. The seminar was crowded with John's southern Californian friends and colleagues, and the three and a half hours of lively, rigorous, intellectually tough but friendly discourse were very much in the spirit of the missing speaker, whose absence was incontrovertibly the defining presence. I approached the speakers later with the idea of aFestschriftfor John, built upon the theme of the seminar and containing revised versions of their own papers. They warmly agreed. Such is the germination of this volume. To those initial three papers have been added two papers (those of Malamud and Winkler) from the Pacific Rim Roman Literature seminar organised by Frederick Ahl in honour of John at Cornell in August 1993, five specially commissioned pieces from other friends and literary colleagues, and the text of the first J.P. Sullivan Annual Lecture in Classics held at UCSB in March 1994. The aim has been to treat a topic which was becoming central to John Sullivan's own inquiries and to produce a volume with more intellectual and critical cohesion than is often the case with honorific collections. I wanted the result to be as worthy as is possible of the man and the values he embodied in work and life.
John Patrick Sullivan
Authors: Boyle A.J.
Published: August 2016

The other day, I heard that an old friend from Cambridge was gravely ill. Thinking of him, I became aware, belatedly, that he was remarkable in never having expected anything of me, except friendliness. He combines scholarship with tolerance. It is impossible to quarrel with him, though easy to diasagree; rigorous with himself, he is easy with others. He inscribed his books to me, ‘amicitiae causa’. Such men are rare, in anyone's life, and even more rarely deserved.

Frederic Raphael, The Independent Magazine (April 1993)
Hanno's Punic Heirs: Der Poenulusneid des Plautus
Authors: Henderson John
Published: August 2016

I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me.

If you like a right mess, then Plautus' Poenulus (‘The Little Carthaginian’) is the play for you. When it is not being slatered, it is konstanly passed by, rarely translated [& then only for completeness' sake: one series or another] and left out of the chiefest recuperations of the oeuvre, of the chicest innovations of the genre (viz. Konstan, 1983; Slater, 1985: but do see Endnote). Poen. gets written off as ‘One of the least successful…’. [Only successful, it may be, in getting waves of Orientalist experts to brush up our Mediterranean languages. If that counts: little Latine, lesse Greek—and now beginners' Punic.] Otherwise, study of Poenulus has centred on two projects: ‘logical’ analysis of the unacceptabihty of the structuring of the plot and ‘archaeological’ dialysis of the text as botched, contaminated, interpolated miscegenation. That is, in both cases, everything that can hardly be dumped on the Greek dramatist Alexis, if it was his lost ‘Karkhēdónios' play that first Plautus mauled and meshed, then in succession his theatre-companies thrashed and threaded and through time his scribes sliced and stitched. Even its warmest admirers must hack Poenulus to bits, for a start, in order to suture some sort of text to admire (Maurach 1975, Zwierlein 1990). And the finicky pundits of this play impugn away with impunity, their fun the display of pungent finesse. Try reading them for laughs—and smile through the Poen.
Ideology for an Empire in the Prefaces to Cicero's Dialogues
Authors: Habinek Thomas N.
Published: August 2016

Ideology is a process as well as a product. To extract a set of political principles or mystificatory arguments from a text and call them ‘ideology’ is to overlook the fact that a text is ideological only insofar as it seeks to affect an audience. As J.B. Thompson has written, in a passage cited with approval by Terry Eagleton, ‘to study ideology…is to study the ways in which meaning (or signification) serves to sustain relations of domination.’ The ideology of a text, such as a dialogue of Cicero, cannot therefore be understood except in strategic relationship to a particular context. And the question that allows us to explore that relationship and thereby to begin to reconstruct the ‘relations of domination’ underwritten by the text iscui bono: to whose advantage is this text constructed and situated as it is?
Vandalising Epic
Authors: Malamud Martha
Published: August 2016

William Levitan concluded a study of the fourth century poet Optatian with the sentence, ‘The marble bones of Rome itself were chopped for a thousand years to raise the buildings of Europe.’ The theatres, baths and other edifices constructed by the Romans never wholly perished; they served the local populations for centuries as quarries for building materials. The writers of late antiquity treated the Latin literary tradition the same way that later inhabitants treated the ruins of Roman buildings, as a source for appropriate building blocks. The dismemberment of magnificent structures, whether architectural or literary is, to be sure, a kind of vandalism, but perhaps in the post-modern, resource-hungry world of the mid-1990's we can bring ourselves to think of it as something more positive, as an attempt to salvage and recycle valuable material.
On the Two Voices of the Birds in Birds
Authors: Perkell Christine
Published: August 2016

In his 1980 article ‘Aristophanes as a Lyric Poet’, Michael Silk argued that Aristophanes' lyrics, widely admired as jewels of Greek poetry, were overrated. He faulted them above all for lack of intellectual point and profundity, for a generic, timeless lyricism that lacked a genuine metaphysical dimension. To the hoopoe's song inBirds, for example, he juxtaposed Pindar's famous—

(Pythian8.95-97)

Creatures of a day!

What is someone?

What is no one?

Man: a shadow's dream.

But when god-given glory comes a bright light shines upon us and our life is sweet.

(tr. Frank J. Nisetich)
Games People Play: Metatheatre as Performance Criticism in Plautus' Casina
Authors: Williams Bronwyn
Published: August 2016

Casina is one of Plautus' most metatheatrical comedies. Self-reflexive role-play, plays within plays, explicit references to theatrical context or convention are usual in Plautine drama. In Casina they constitute much or most of the dramatic action. During the prologue the audience is encouraged to sit back and enjoy the games (23ff.); whereas by Act 5 it is the play's women who have come out ‘to watch the wedding games out here on the street’ (Judos visere hue in viam nuptialis, 856). The stage-set, which the audience accepts implicitly as ‘a street’, has been turned back into a stage-set. The women converse like a regular audience: Myrrhina in particular has ‘never laughed so much in one day’ (numquam … ullo die risi adaeque, 857) and thinks theirs the equal of any play ever written (860f.). Moreover, when Olympio enters, he acknowledges the ‘real’ audience with his narrative of events inside Alcesimus' house, but seems oblivious of the on-stage audience—which is dependent for its early information concerning Olympio's wedding night on his relations to the former, real audience. What is involved here is a complete reversal of the conventions of illusionistic theatre, in which the audience finds out about off-stage action from the conversation of characters inside the drama. Pardalisca's interruption restores the conventional order: the remainder of Olympio's narrative is told, ostensibly, to her; the audience is returned to the condition of unseen eavesdroppers.
Rescuing Horace, Pyrrha and Aphra Behn: A Directive
Authors: Nielsen Rosemary M. , Solomon Robert H.
Published: August 2016

The question before us at the turn of both century and millennium is how one determines whether Horace is a dangerous love-poet (unrecognised because we read badly). Or a panderer, playing to our delight in the comedy of manners. Or a serious analyst of communication between the sexes—even a prophet for our time. The choice varies from villain to vates, the extremes reminding us how certainly the past exists, as Robert Frost laments in ‘Directive’: ‘Back in a time made simple by the loss/Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off,/Like a graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.’

Recently, a Classical scholar, writing about what she termed ‘Horace's detachment as a love poet’, asserted that his readers ‘remain trapped, perhaps by necessity, in male assumptions about desire that they are unable to question.’ She believes that there is a ‘disturbing picture of love and desire’ which critics have missed because we read, almost all of us, with half-closed eyes, ignoring ‘erotic subterfuge’ in the love-odes. We overlook, she insists, ‘the overpowering desire’ of the male ‘poet/lover’ because, in ‘unacknowledged identification’ with Horace, we put on Horatian eyes. This charge raises disquieting questions about distinctions between speaker and poet, persona and historical figure, art and life.
Intellectual Pluralism and the Common Pursuit Ramus Twenty Years
Authors: Boyle A.J.
Published: August 2016

Criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences. Here, one would suppose, was a place for quiet co-operative labour. The critic, one would suppose, if he is to justify his existence, should endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks—tares to which we are all subject—and compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit of true judgment. When we find that quite the contrary prevails, we begin to suspect that the critic owes his livelihood to the violence and extremity of his opposition to other critics, or else to some trifling oddities of his own with which he contrives to season the opinions which men already hold, and which out of vanity or sloth they prefer to maintain. We are tempted to expel the lot.

T.S. Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’ (1923)

legere enim et non intellegereneglegere est.(To read and to misread is to miss a reading of one's world.)Prologue to Dicta Catonis 1 (3rd Cent. CE)
The Endless End of the Oedipus Rex
Authors: Pucci Pietro
Published: August 2016

In a recent paper I have studied the power play of notions such as tukhē (‘chance’) and telos (‘finality’) in the Oedipus Tyrannus, and in particular I have tried to show how these two principles are responsible for shaping different and overlapping narratives in the text. While the narrative of telos corresponds broadly speaking to the voice of Apollo the Father, the narrative of tukhē accommodates itself in the void and absence of the Father's voice. The encroachment of these two narratives upon one another not only outlines different visions of paternity—which is the central theme in the play—but also creates suspense and imprints an indecisive direction into the action of the play. In particular the narratives spun around tukhē, i.e. those that emphasize the mere accidentality of events, their mere human causation without any ultimate goal, resist the teleological thrust of the play, its divine finality—the necessary accomplishment of the oracles and of the prophecies— and accordingly also the ‘closure’ of the play. By closure of the play I understand the end of the play in accordance with the teleological premises that have been created during the action.
Voice and Sign in Pindar
Authors: Dickson Keith M.
Published: August 2016

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

M. Merleau-Ponty,The Prose of the World

In a study published some years ago, J.-P. Vernant drew attention to the fundamental distinction Greek thought makes between spoken and all other modes of divination. It is a difference that reflects certain givens of ancient social and political structure, and that has its roots in the marked orientation of Greek society towards open discourse. What he has in mind as a paradigm of oral divination is the question-and-answer format of many ancient oracles. He argues that this provides far more direct and more ‘democratic’ access to the will of deity or the way of things than do styles of consultation dependent on interpretative schemes which, because of their indirect nature, are accessible only to a small and privileged group. The fine art of pyromancy, for instance, deploys a framework of transformational rules and techniques whose complexity removes the interpretation of ‘fire signs’ (empura sēmata) from the realm of ordinary skills and makes it instead the special province of a priestly caste, such as that of the Iamidai at Olympia.
The Battle of the Sexes in Euripides' Ion
Authors: Dunn Francis M.
Published: August 2016

Euripides'Ionhas suffered from the attempt to find in the play an overriding message or moral. Verrall and his successors saw theIonas an attack against Apollo and organized religion; Wassermann and Burnett argue that it defends orthodox piety; Grégoire and Loraux view it as a hymn or lament on Athenian national pride; and Knox and Gellie respond that theIonis pure comedy with no deeper meaning. There is of course some truth to each of these interpretations, but it does not follow that the play's ‘real meaning’ lies somewhere in between them. I suggest that we read theIonnot as an abstract argument but as drama, and in particular as a social comedy whose ‘meaning’ lies not in an underlying message but in the action itself and in the conflicts among the play's characters, human and divine, male and female, foreign and Athenian.

Such conflicts, in this play at least, focus attention upon the role of the gods, the place of foreigners in Athens, and relations between men and women. Of these three subjects, the first two have dominated discussion of theIon, both by those who find them central to the play's religious or nationalistic theme, and by those who consider them incidental to the play as comedy. I shall first show that the third area of conflict — relations between men and women — is equally important in theIonand reflects an important issue in contemporary Athens. Second, I shall argue that the gender issues raised somewhat provocatively in the first half of the play are upstaged by the melodramatic excitement of the second half. And I shall suggest, in conclusion, that although it is only one of many social and family conflicts in the drama, the battle between the sexes shows how theIonraises important and difficult questions without becoming an ‘issue play’.
Ausonius' ‘Late-Antique’ Poetics and ‘Post-Modern’ Literary Theory
Authors: Nugent S. Georgia
Published: August 2016

The fourth-century Latin poet, Ausonius, enjoyed in his own time considerable prestige and success. Our witnesses for this reputation are by no means inconsiderable figures. In a letter, the emperor Theodosius proclaims that his admiration for the poet could not be greater. He equates Ausonius with the poets of the Augustan golden age and concludes that, although Augustusmighthave esteemed these authors as highly as Theodosius does Ausonius, he could not possibly have loved them more. In another fascinating document, Symmachus, one of the most influential and learned men of the age, playfully castigates Ausonius for the fact that, despite their friendship, he hasn't received a copy of the poet's latest best seller. The work in question is Ausonius' poem in praise of the Moselle river; copies of it, Symmachus punningly protests, are circulating everywhere, but they have glided right past him. Still, he has managed to obtain a copy to read, and the praise he lavishes on the work is boundless; he proclaims that the Moselle has become more famous than the Tiber and does not blush to conclude by holding up Ausonius to the master himself, Vergil:ego hoc tuum carmen libris Maronis adiungo(‘I class your poetry with Vergil's’).
Authoritarianism, Autonomy and Ammianus Marcellinus
Authors: Newbold R F.
Published: August 2016

According to Ammianus, it was envy of the exploits of Gratian and anxiety to equal them that drove Valens to engage the Goths at Adrianople in 378 before Gratian could arrive. The quality of the intelligence Valens received about the numbers of the Gothic forces was poor but he was inclined to believe it because it suited his wish. At a meeting with senior officers he sided with those who argued against waiting for Gratian's army, encouraged, it is said, by courtiers who pandered to his desire to monopolise ttye glory of victory. Weakened by hunger, fatigue and heat, and incompetentfy led, the Roman soldiers mostly fought with courage and tenacity until overwhelmed and massacred by the barbarians. They were victims, apparently, of their leader's irrationality, vanity and insecurity.

Norman Dixon has adduced authoritarianism as a major factor in military incompetence. Ammianus, product of an overwhelmingly authoritarian society, provides a detailed record of Roman history in the third quarter of the fourth century. Understanding of Rome's civil and military performance in that age and of the author could be enhanced by examination of the authoritarian syndrome.