bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Notes on the Old Assyrian Sargon legend
Authors: Westenholz Joan Goodnick
Published: August 2016

I would like to express my thanks to Bendt Alster and Takayoshi Oshima for giving me the opportunity to add a few comments on their article. Within the limits of these pages, I will restrict myself to certain general subjects and one theme in the Old Assyrian Sargon Legend.

As Alster and Oshima suggest above, the Old Assyrian Sargon Legend is obviously a written improvisation. However, improvisation has little to do with whether the text is to be taken in a serious (Hecker, Dercksen) or trivial (“humorous”) manner (Van De Mieroop, Foster, Cavigneaux, Alster and Oshima) nor does it relate to accuracy (see Alster and Oshima, fn. 17). Rather, it relates to the mode of composition: whether or not a fixed text was followed, whether or not there was a written model (see Alster and Oshima, fn. 17). In my opinion, this text is a written “improvised” composition based on oral traditions (see also Alster and Oshima, pp. 2 and fn. 8, 6 and 8, Cavigneaux 2005: 596). In this period, orality and literacy existed alongside each other. This written composition may have developed from an oral set of thematic scenes, the building blocks of traditional oral literature. The episodic structure of the narrative reflects such a concatenation of scenes. These oral building blocks could be varied at will according to the needs of the moment, modified to suit the new purposes and new places. It can be deduced that such legends were known orally from internal evidence — the words placed in the mouth of Sargon in this Old Assyrian composition, “Why should I enlarge (upon this theme) in an inscription? Where do (peoples) noi know me (a-«a»)-nu-um lá i-tí-a-ni, suggested reading of Aage Westenholz), that I am the King, that I conquered the Upper and Lower Lands?” (ll. 63–5). In this writer's opinion, these lines indicate that the author implies that Sargon's fame is so well known that it does not need to be written down.
Witchcraft and war: The ritual fragment Ki 1904-10-9, 18 (BM 98989)
Authors: Schwemer Daniel
Published: August 2016

War, and imminent battle in particular, put any Babylonian or Assyrian king, whose rule and security very much depended on successful campaigns, in a precarious situation. While careful military planning certainly helped to defeat one's enemies, victory in the end was determined by the gods. Before entering battle, oracles were consulted to make certain that the king's decisions had the gods' favour, and a number of other rituals could be performed to ensure that the gods supported the king's cause. These rituals — dubbed “war rituals” by modern scholarship — are not very well known, and the texts attributed to this group are a rather mixed set of royal rituals related to the king's campaign and to potential aggression by enemies. They include traditional Babylonian rituals to be performed before setting off on a military campaign or immediately before a major battle, as well as specifically Assyrian rituals for the same purpose. It is not suprising that two of these texts include the performance of divination rituals, while others focus on the binding of substitute figurines representing the enemies and also use figurines representing the king himself. In line with the general ideology of war, the rubrics of the rituals clearly indicate that the reason for the king's military action is the enemy's aggression against his land, and that the king himself only acts in defence of his own land's borders. It seems that all these texts, apart from the Assyrian rituals in the narrow sense, were assembled in a “series ‘battle’” (iškar tāḫāzi) that is mentioned in the famous letter of an Assyrian king demanding the collection of various scholarly texts from the Ezida and scholars' houses in Borsippa. The same text refers to rituals (or a ritual) “So that in Battle Arrows do not Come Near a Man” that are also known from the catalogue of exorcistic texts (KAR44 //). Apparently they were not thought to be part of theiškar tāḫāzi; but in the letter the two text groups are named together within a longer list and they were certainly closely associated with each other. Specialnamburbirituals could be performed on campaign to avert evil indicated by accidents of the king's chariot, but there is no reason to assume that they belonged to theiškar tāḫāzitoo. Othernamburbirituals were used to protect the land's borders when an earthquake had signalled an imminent invasion of the enemy.
The Broken Obelisk
Authors: Curtis John
Published: August 2016

The purpose of the present note is to alert scholars to the fact that following a cleaning programme undertaken in the late 1960s certain iconographic details apparently visible on the decorated face of the monument known as the Broken Obelisk should be treated with caution.

As recounted by C. J. Gadd, the Broken Obelisk was found by Hormuzd Rassam in August 1853 at Nineveh, about halfway between Sennacherib's Palace and Ashurbanipal's Palace (Gadd 1936: 123; Rassam 1897: 9). It was probably in or near the Ishtar Temple (ibid.; Reade 2005: 373). The Obelisk was drawn on site (Fig. 1), either by Charles Hodder (Gadd 1936: 123) or by William Boucher, who arrived at Nineveh in March 1854 in order to help Rassam record some of the important sculptures he had found at Kouyunyik (Barnett 1975: 22; Rassam 1897: 37). Gadd describes how the obelisk was shipped with other sculptures from Basra to Bombay in the steam-frigate Acbar in March 1854, and from Bombay to London in the ship Merchantman, arriving in February 1855 (Gadd 1936: 123). It now has the British Museum number 118898 (56-9-9, 59).

It is known as the Broken Obelisk because it is the upper part only of an obelisk with a stepped top. At the bottom it measures 65 × 41 cm, and it has an overall surviving height of 63 cm. There is a lengthy cuneiform inscription on three of the four sides (the short left side is blank) and on one of the long sides there is, in addition to the cuneiform inscription, a panel of carved decoration showing a king holding a rod and ring or (more likely) a mace and a coil of rope. In front of the king are two pairs of prisoners roped together. In the field above the prisoners, and in front of the king, are five divine symbols, comprising a horned cap, a crescent, a winged disc from which emerge two hands, one of them holding a bow, a bolt of lightning, and a rosette. The text (Grayson 1991: 99–105) recounts the achievements of a king who is thought to be Ashur-bel-kala (1073–1056 BC). It is usually inferred from the text that the obelisk was originally set up at Ashur.
Who is holding the lead rope? The relief of the Broken Obelisk
Authors: Ornan Tallay
Published: August 2016

The step-topped, free-standing square monument called in modern literature the Broken Obelisk was found by Hormuzd Rassam at Nineveh, near the Ishtar temple on the mound of Kuyunjik. It is the earliest monument of this kind, and it differs in its pictorial rendering from the later, so-called Assyrian obelisks. Whereas the succeeding examples display reliefs on their four sides, creating consecutive narratives, the Broken Obelisk exhibits a single, motionless relief on its front, the subject of the present paper (Börker-Klähn 1982, Nos. 132, 138–45, 152; Bär 1996, 57-68, 88–99, 101–5, 148–65).

My aim here is to shed light on the motif of the king holding prisoners of war by means of lead ropes and to examine the bearing of this motif on the status of the royal image in pictorial renderings. According to different interpretations of the scene, the king holds a ring and rod (Börker-Klähn 1982, 178, No. 131 with earlier bibliography), or a ceremonial mace (Russell 2003, 4) as well as lead rope(s) with which he binds prisoners of war standing in front of him (e.g. Pritchard 1969, 300, No. 440; Strommenger 1964, 437, PI. 188, bottom; Börker-Klähn 1982, 178; Collon 1995, 117; Russell 2003, 4). My initial interest in the iconography of the Broken Obelisk was aroused by the fact that on it the so-called ring and rod symbols of kingship granted by the gods, are held by the king, whereas usually they are held by a deity in compositions conveying the very act of the divine giving (Hallo 2005, 150–1, 161; Suter 2000, 6–7; Ornan 2005, 12).
Esarhaddon's glazed bricks from Nimrud: The Egyptian campaign depicted
Authors: Nadali Davide
Published: August 2016

During his excavations “in the south-east corner of the mound” at Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, A. H. Layard discovered some fragments of painted bricks (1853b: 164–7; 1867: 52–7). These can be dated to Esarhaddon on the basis of both iconographic style and subject matter. Thanks to the name “Tell of Athur” reported in Layard's accounts, we can plausibly identify the location as the site of Fort Shalmaneser; unfortunately, Layard does not give a more precise location. Although we can assert that the fragments belong to Fort Shalmaneser at the time of its renovation by Esarhaddon in the seventh century BC, we are not able to define exactly the rooms or outer façade that these fragments originally decorated.

Some hypotheses have been suggested as to the original location of the glazed bricks, either in the south-east corner of the inner south-east courtyard (Oates 1959: 111, fn. 20; Nunn 1988: 183) or in Courtyard T (Postgate and Reade 1976–80: 317; Oates and Oates 2001: 183–4) (Fig. 1), where they seem to have adorned an outer façade, either the façade of Throne Room T1 or that of Courtyard T, where Shalmaneser's glazed-brick panel was found lying in front of the doorway of ante-chamber T3 (Reade 1963: 38–47; Dayton 1978: PL 24,1).
The authenticity of the Arslan Tash Amulets
Authors: van Dijk Jacobus
Published: August 2016

The pair of amulets which form the subject of this brief contribution were bought in October 1933 by R. du Mesnil du Buisson from a local peasant while visiting the site of Arslan Tash, a town in northern Syria, some 160 km north-east of Aleppo, near the present-day border with Turkey. The site, which is the location of the ancient Assyrian colony Hadattu, had been excavated a few years earlier, and it is not impossible that the objects had in fact been stolen from the excavation. Both amulets are now preserved in the National Museum in Aleppo.

The purchase of the amulets was announced by du Mesnil in a meeting of the Société nationale des Antiquitaires de France in 1937 and this was soon followed by the editio princeps of the first amulet. His article, often justly praised as a remarkable achievement, is accompanied by a set of very reasonable photographs, but, owing to the rounded edges of the tablet and the use of light coming from one direction only, a number of signs cannot actually be seen on them. To supplement the photographs, the editor provided handcopies of the inscriptions; these naturally reflect his own readings of the often problematical text, rather than being an accurate facsimile of each individual sign. With few exceptions most of the subsequent students of the amulet have inevitably had to base themselves on du Mesnil's photographs, and this has not always led to readings better than his. It was not until 1970 that a new impulse was given to the study of the first amulet by the publication of an article by F. M. Cross and R. Saley. These authors were able to use two new sets of photographs (each using light coming from opposite directions) provided by the Museum in Aleppo, and presented several new readings based on these photographs. It is much to be regretted that of this double set of photographs only a single one was published in their article, so that most of their readings cannot be checked. This oversight is only partly compensated by the subsequent publication of a few more of Cross and Saley's photographs by W. Röllig. The next major step forward was a short but very informative article by A. Caquot, who was able to use a cast of the amulet in the possession of R. du Mesnil du Buisson which had been made at the time of its discovery. Caquot's new readings confirm most but not all of those proposed by Cross and Saley, and subsequent treatments of the text usually follow either or both of these authorities.
Third millennium oasis towns and environmental constraints on settlement in the Al-Hajar region: Part II: Environmental Factors Affecting Early Settlement South of the Jabal Al-Akhḍar, Oman
Authors: Stanger Gordon
Published: August 2016

Environmental factors within the southward draining basins of the Jabal al-Akhḍar, in the Oman mountains, are described and considered in terms of the constraints which they impose upon early agricultural settlement. There is some conflict between the palaeoclimatic deductions from the South Akhḍar sedimentary record, and the generally accepted regional view of late Holocene climatic deterioration.
Tablets from the Sippar library IV. Lugale
Authors: Al-Rawi F. N. H.
Published: August 2016

To the memory of the library's excavator,my good friend Walid al-Jadir

As reported in Iraq 49, four tablets of the bilingual version of Lugale, the myth of Ninurta, were excavated in the library of Šamaš's temple at Sippar: complete manuscripts of Tablets I, III and IX, and a fragment of Tablet XIII. All the tablets have brief colophons, three of which identify the owner of the tablet as Nabû-ēṭir-napšāti, a member of the Potter family (Paḫāru), who is known from other colophons as the son of one Marduk-šuma-uṣur. They all come from niche 3 A.

The tablets are given here in copy, photograph and transliteration. The transliterations are based on a first draft made directly from the original tablets in 1986, the year that they were discovered. The copies are provisional, having been traced from the photographs, which, with the transliterations, must be regarded as the primary witnesses to the cuneiform. Collations were made from a different set of photographs, not published here, which became available after the copies were made. Such collations are marked in the text with an asterisk.

Since the text of the Tablets given here was already fundamentally complete in the Old Babylonian version when the myth as a whole was last edited, there is no call for a fresh translation. Where the new sources add significantly to our knowledge is in filling out the often extensive lacunae of the bilingual version, especially in Tablets III and IX. The changes in the Sumerian text that seem to have been engendered by the exercise of furnishing it with an Akkadian translation are a matter which needs to be tackled with reference to the whole text, and a topic which cannot be addressed at length here. Nevertheless, some commentary on these and other points has been provided by A. R. George and follows the transliterated text as an appendix.
The Early Dynastic-Akkadian transition, Part 2. The authors' response
Authors: Gibson McGuire , McMahon Augusta
Published: August 2016

Dr Matthews was kind enough to show us a draft of the preceding article before publication so that we could reply, for which we thank him. Our original article was intended as a review of the problem of the Early Dynastic to Akkadian transition and as a quick general overview of the WF excavation at Nippur, rather than the final statement on either. The point of the article was not to define the Akkadian Period but to make steps towards the identification of an assemblage of material culture (pottery, tablets, objects, and seals) found in levels which are dated to the historical Akkadian Period. That assemblage included pottery types, but we did not suggest that a single pottery type or a few types alone should be the basis for dating; nor would we prefer, as is implied by Matthews, to define a period by pottery as opposed to other objects. What the Nippur WF excavation gave us was a well-stratified sequence of artifacts; and we were careful when suggesting the level at which we might have entered the Akkadian (historical) period not to be adamant about the date of the pertinent level and to precede it with a “transitional” level (Level XVII) which might have been either Early Dynastic or Akkadian. Perhaps we should have been more cautious and extended that transitional label to cover Level XVI as well.
II. Threshing Implements in Ancient Mesopotamia: Cuneiform sources
Authors: Steinkeller P.
Published: August 2016

This note examines the textual evidence bearing on Mesopotamian threshing implements, in the hope of throwing some light on the Uruk representations of sledges discussed in the first part of this article. The relevant terminology is limited to four words: giš-bad(-rá),kissappu, anddajaštu, and ḪAR-ḫa-da. “Of these, giš-bad(-rá),kissappu, anddajaštuhave previously been recognized as denoting threshing implements; the suggestion that another such term is ḪAR-ḫa-da is new.
Gertrude Bell—The Last Years in Iraq
Authors: Mallowan Max
Published: August 2016

Gertrude Bell died peacefully in the morning hours of Monday 12th July 1926, two days before her 58th birthday. Fifty years later we recall her devotion to a country in which she had dedicated the last years of her life. Her bones rest where she had wished them to rest, in the soil of Iraq.

I saw her for the last time, three months before she died, together with A. H. Whitburn, the architect at Ur, towards the end of March 1926, in her little house behind what was then named New Street Baghdad. We reached, as Victoria Sackville West has described it, “a door in the blank wall, … a creaking of hinges, a broadly smiling servant, a rush of dogs, a vista of garden-path edged with carnations in pots, a little veranda and a little low house at the end of the garden path, an English voice—Gertrude Bell”. She received us courteously—“Ah you two”, she said, “I am glad you have come”, for she was tired and dispirited, long overdue for the leave that she never took, and now that she had discarded her activities in politics, archaeology had become the ruling passion of what was left of her life.
The Excavations at Tell Al Rimah, 1964
Authors: Oates David
Published: August 2016

The first season of excavations at Tell al Rimah was undertaken from March 1st to May 13th, 1964, by a joint expedition of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and the University Museum, Philadelphia. My thanks are due to my colleagues on the staff for hard work in the difficult circumstances of makeshift accommodation and a new site. Mrs. T. H. Carter of the University Museum was Assistant Director and took charge of Area C of the excavations. Miss Barbara Parker was epigraphist and photographer, assisted in the latter task by Mr. Nicholas Kindersley, who also undertook a part of the surveying. Mr. Julian Reade supervised the excavation of Area A, the temple, and Mr. David Crownover of the University Museum joined us in the second half of the season to give valuable assistance with the supervision of the dig and the cleaning and recording of finds. Many visitors gave us generous help; Mr. David French in the survey of other sites in the area, Mr. Jeffrey Orchard with the catalogue of finds, Professor Jørgen Laessøe with the epigraphy, and Miss Ann Searight and Miss Nan Shaw with the cleaning and conservation of finds. Sayyid Tariq al Na‘imi was the representative of the Directorate-General of Antiquities, and his energy and local knowledge were invaluable to us. We owe a great debt to the officials of the Government of Iraq for their hospitable assistance, to H. E. the Mutasarrif of Mosul Liwa and to Sayyid Ahmed al Mufti, Qaimaqam of Tell Afar. In Mosul Sayyid Selim al Jelili, Inspector of Antiquities for Mosul Liwa, was always ready to help with our problems. And, as always, the success of our work was largely due to the aid and advice, both practical and scholarly, of Dr. Faisal al Wailly, Director-General of Antiquities, and Sayyid Fuad Safar, Inspector-General of Excavations, and their staff.
Introduction
Authors: Rader Richard , Collins James
Published: August 2016

In 1990 Jack Winkler and Froma Zeitlin dropped a bomb on the study of Greek drama with the publication of Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Taking their departure from the narrow formalist historicism of prior scholarship, with its interest in properly historical persons, events and trends, Winkler and Zeitlin shifted their attention toward ‘the entire social context of the [dramatic] festival’ (3). Greek drama would now be a window into the sociocultural pulse of fifth-century Athens. This new praxis came to be known as ‘cultural poetics’, and its practitioners viewed Greek drama as an embedded and constitutive element of a society in constant negotiation with itself. Drama now reflected or symptomatised historical, religious and political context. As Simon Goldhill put it in the introduction to his study of the Oresteia:

Tragedy takes place…at the moment of maximal unresolved tension between…systems of ideas… It explores the different and competing ideals, different and competing obligations, different and competing sense of words in the developing polis, different and competing ideas of glory and success… It discovers tensions and ambiguities with the very civic ideology of democracy that is the context of tragedy's performance… Tragedy takes the developing notions, vocabulary, commitments of democracy and places them under rigorous, polemical, violent and public scrutiny.

The impact and aftershock of Nothing to Do with Dionysos? can still be felt today. In one way or another, we might say, we are all the children (and grandchildren) of Winkler and Zeitlin. The question remains, however, what type of children we have been in the time since (kaloi men k'agathoi, kakoi de k'aischroi?) and how we will honour their legacy as we move forward with the study of Greek drama.
Resonance: Aeschylus' Persae and the Poetics of Sound
Authors: Gurd Sean
Published: August 2016

Scholars tend to agree that Aeschylus' choice of material for the Persae was overdetermined: the battle at Salamis and its lead-up constituted a moment of the highest trauma and pride for the Athenian demos, one that could be accommodated to a well-known narrative framework (that of great pride followed by a great fall) and exploited as an exploration of the relations between (Athenian) Greek and Persian other. But in this essay I propose to set aside the tragedy's ethical or ethno-political engagements. I want to focus instead on its auditory aesthetics—what it says about sound, and how it works with it. I think that the Persae is intensely and persistently engaged with sound; so much so, in fact, that at moments it comes closer than any other Athenian drama to a kind of ‘absolute’ music. In the final 40 lines of the play, for example, when extralinguistic cries increasingly predominate, the ‘script’ starts to read more like a score, prescribing the timbral and rhythmic part of a music whose pitches have been lost. Though I will not treat its engagements with the Persian ‘other’ directly, I do think that the Persae's interest in sound is related to its choice of setting and theme. Locating the action in Persia allowed Aeschylus to explore a poetic diction that could flirt with the thick edge of signification by invoking linguistic otherness; this facilitated a way of writing in which the materiality of language, that is, its status as sound, could become more palpable. In choosing to depict the Persian court as it learns the news of the defeat at Salamis, Aeschylus had the opportunity to represent an extreme form of lamentation, and by ideologically jacking up the stakes and transforming one military defeat into the fall of an empire, Aeschylus could go to the limits of language and beyond: the play ends with an extraordinary near-abandonment of signifying language in favour of non-verbal cries. Finally, Aeschylus' version of the battle of Salamis included the Greeks using sound as a psychological tactic; the story of the battle that is the kernel around which the play crystallised was itself a story of sound and its effects.
The King's Daughter: Medea in Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica
Authors: Zissos Andrew
Published: August 2016

Medea's awakening love for Jason is the great theme of the third book of Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica. At the opening of that book—that is to say, at the very centre of the four-book epic—the Hellenistic poet signals a programmatic redirection, invoking the Muse Erato to inspire his tale of Jason's winning of the golden fleece, aided by the love of the Colchian princess (Мηδείηϛ ὑπ' ἔϱωτι, Ap. Rhod. 3.3). This is the first mention of Medea in the poem. Writing a few centuries later, the Flavian poet Valerius Flaccus for the most part adheres closely to Apollonius' narrative outline. As we shall see, however, he manifests comparatively little interest in the love story between Jason and Medea, and takes a different approach to the problem of integrating Medea into the plot. Though, as with the earlier epic, she will not appear as a dramatis persona until the second half of the epic, she is mentioned at the very outset of the narrative (1.61-63), and a number of times thereafter in the early books. Thus by the time the Argonauts reach Colchis and Medea enters the narrative proper, she has already been presented to the reader in a number of ‘previews’.
Unfinished Business: Re-viewing Medea in Roman Painting
Authors: Vout Caroline
Published: August 2016

This chapter examines the Medea of Roman painting. In some senses, this constitutes a crazy editorial decision: gems and sculpture, sarcophagi in particular, are a crucial part of the visual culture that pulls and pushes against text and theatre. But in other senses, a two-dimensional focus offers peculiar challenges that situate Medea firmly within the domestic sphere, in cubicula and peristyles; and yet also beyond this sphere. Unlike freestanding sculpture, which actively intervenes in the viewer's space, painting affords access to a parallel universe. Its figures are not cold to the touch like Pygmalion's statue. They are intangible, exciting different desires from those elicited by stone, desires which invite viewers to leave their world behind them; or at least to pause and take stock. In these ways, painting provides a commentary on everyday life—closer to performances on stage than to installation.

Ancient writers, Ovid included, recognised this analogy between painting and theatre. In defending his work against charges of immorality, the exiled poet cites the genre of the mime, asking whether it is the stage that makes its adulterous content permissible and reminding Augustus that his poems had often ‘detained his eyes’, accompanied by dancing. He continues:

scilicet in domibus nostris ut prisca uirorum

artificis fulgent corpora picta manu,

sic quae concubitus uarios uenerisque figuras

exprimat, est aliquo parua tabella loco,

utque sedet uultu fassus Telamonius iram,

inque oculis facinus barbara mater habet,

sic madidos siccat digitis Venus uda capillos,

et modo maternis tecta uidetur aquis.
Reading a View: Poem and Picture in the Greek Anthology
Authors: Squire Michael
Published: August 2016

‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a speaking picture’ (attr. Simonides)

‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a blind picture’ (Leonardo da Vinci)

How do words represent images? In what ways do visual signs function like (and unlike) verbal ones? And which medium better captures its represented subjects—pictures that are seen, or poems that are heard, written and read?

These questions stretch the length and breadth of western literary criticism. Already in the Homeric description of Achilles' shield (Il.18.478-608), we find the respective resources of pictures and poetry pitched against one other, in a passage that plays with the respective visibility of words and the audibility of images. By the late sixth century BCE, the relationship between poetry and painting seems to have been theorised explicitly. Whatever the origins of the maxim attributed to Simonides—‘frequently repeated’, as Plutarch elsewhere describes it—a related sentiment was evidently widespread by the fourth century BCE. When Plato came to theorise the relationship in hisPhaedrus, he has Socrates define words and paintings in closely related terms: ‘the creatures that painting begets stand in front of us as though they were living entities,’ Socrates concludes; ‘ask them a question, however, and they maintain a majestic silence’ (ϰαὶ γὰϱ τὰ ἐϰείνης ἔϰγονα ἕστηϰε μὲν ὡς ζῶντα, ἐὰν δ' ἀνέϱῃ τι, σεμνῶς πάνυ σιγᾷ, Pl.Phdr.275d).Vt pictura poesis—as is painting, so is poetry’: that was how Horace famously summed up the analogy some four centuries later, giving rise to the so-called ‘sister arts’ tradition of conceptualising painting and poetry.
Death Becomes Her: Female Suicide in Flavian Epic
Authors: Dietrich Jessica
Published: August 2016

ecce inter medios caedum Tiburna furoresfulgenti dextram mucrone armata maritiet laeua infelix ardentem lampada quassanssqualentemque erecta comam ac liuentia planctupectora nudatis ostendens saeua lacertisad tumulum Murri super ipsa cadauera fertur.(Punica2.665-70)

Look! Tiburna, into the middle of the raging of slaughter, having armed her right hand with the shining sword of her husband and, unhappy, shaking a burning torch with her left, filthy hair standing up and ferociously baring her arms to reveal breasts bruised from beating, she forces her way over the corpses themselves to the tomb of Murrus.

So Silius reintroduces the figure of Tiburna into the mass suicide at Saguntum inPunica2 before concluding with a description of her suicide. The fury that surrounds Tiburna is not surprising of a female figure in Latin epic, yet her suicide in this context is perhaps at odds with the literary tradition in that it is not the result of erotic passion but political despair. The suicide of female figures has a long literary tradition going back to Greek tragedy (Antigone, Deianira, Phaedra) as well as the Roman paradigms, Lucretia and Dido. In the epics of the Flavian period, Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Silius Italicus all offer up their own depiction of female characters who take their own lives. But unlike their literary sisters, whose suicides are an aspect of or the result of their gender, the Flavian epic heroines commit suicidedespitetheir gender, a phenomenon that demands explanation.
Seneca on Comets and Ancient Cometary Theory in Natural Questions 7
Authors: Williams Gareth
Published: August 2016

Seneca's focus on comets inNatural Questions7 concentrates our attention on a phenomenon that is in a sense familiar but so distant, known but so unknown; they are obscurities that ‘both fill and escape our eyes’ (7.30.4), and which challenge us to project the mind's eye beyond the limits of our ordinary vision as we seek insight into nature's mysteries. The broad aim of this paper is to argue that Seneca's treatment of comets shapes, and actively applies in inventive ways within the text, a mindset that moves restlessly from narrow, more ‘terrestrial’ ways of reflecting upon the universe towards an unfettered mode of investigation that looks daringly beyond the limits of the visible and known to speculate on what lies beyond. This mindset proceeds by conjecture and ‘neither with any assurance of finding [the truth] nor without hope’ (7.29.3), but it nevertheless follows the ‘right’ (Senecan) path even in possible error: it reaches dynamically beyond conventional confines—in this case, the zodiac—to engage with the universal immensity in ways that aspire to that main Senecan goal in theNatural Questionsas whole, ‘to see the all with the mind’ (cf.animo omne uidisse, 3 pref. 10).
Slaves to Rome: The Rhetoric of Mastery in Titus' Speech to the Jews (Bellum Judaicum 6.328-50)
Authors: Lavan Myles
Published: August 2016

(BJ6.350)

Those who discard their weapons and surrender their persons, I will let live. Like a lenient master in a household, I will punish the incorrigible but preserve the rest for myself.

So ends Titus' address to the embattled defenders of Jerusalem in the sixth book of Josephus'Jewish War(6.328-50). It is the most substantial instance of communication between Romans and Jews in the work. Titus compares himself to the master of a household and the Jewish rebels to his slaves. Is this how we expect a Roman to describe empire? If not, what does it mean for our understanding of the politics of Josephus' history? The question is particularly acute given that this is not just any Roman but Titus himself: heir apparent and, if we believe Josephus, the man who read and approved this historical account. It is thus surprising that, while the speeches of Jewish advocates of submission to Rome such as Agrippa II (2.345-401) and Josephus himself (5.362-419) have long fascinated readers, Titus' speech has received little or no attention. Remarkably, it is not mentioned in any of three recent collections of essays on Josephus. This paper aims to highlight the rhetorical choices that Josephus has made in constructing this voice for Titus—particularly his self-presentation as master—and the interpretive questions these raise for his readers. It should go without saying that the relationship of this text to anything that Titus may have said during the siege is highly problematic. (Potentially more significant, but unfortunately no less speculative, is the question of how it might relate to any speech recorded in the commentaries of Vespasian and Titus that Josephus appears to have used as a source.) What we have is a Josephan composition that is embedded in the broader narrative of theJewish War.
Who's the Toughest of them All? Jews, Spartans and Roman Torturers in Josephus' Against Apion
Authors: Barclay John M.G.
Published: August 2016

Josephus, the Judean general, Roman captive and Flavian protégé, devoted the last twenty-five years of his life, as a privileged resident in Rome, to the redescription of Jewish identity and to the strategic placement of his cultural tradition on the controverted map of the late first-century empire. After writing his delicately poised account of theJudean War, and the large-scale ‘autoethnography’ known as theJewish Antiquities, his final and most intricate literary endeavour is his apologetic work,Against Apion. Here Jewishness is constructed and positioned in carefully nuanced dialectic with images of ‘Egyptian’, ‘Chaldean’, ‘Greek’ and (to some degree) ‘Roman’ cultural tradition. The rhetorical flamboyance of this piece and its predominantly polemical tone give Josephus considerable licence to manipulate the tropes that suit his argumentative needs. His eye-catching exordium and the opening vilification of ‘Greek’ historiography (1.1-56) start this treatise with a familiar antithesis between Eastern antiquity and the comparative youth and fickleness of the Greeks. But as the discourse develops we find Josephus deploying his considerable knowledge of the Greek literary and historical tradition to place his Jewish tradition both outside and inside ‘Greekness’, indeed also above (superior to) and behind (historically earlier than) what may be variously labelled ‘Greek’. What gives this manipulation of Greek historical and literary tropes particular interest is not only that Josephus writes explicitly as a Jew, and in defence of his own Jewish tradition, but that he does so in Rome, aware of how ‘Greekness’ may be variously bought and sold in the Roman market-place, ‘displayed or excoriated for its decadence’. It is within this triangulation of Jewish, Greek and Roman—the last always implicit if not explicit in Josephus' text—that the subject of Sparta becomes a particularly interesting topic of discussion.
Josephus, Joseph and the Greek Novel
Authors: Whitmarsh Tim
Published: August 2016

The challenge to classicists to read Josephus ‘as literature’ is an awkward one, because it throws into relief the crooked, appropriative practices we undertake in the name of literary criticism. If Josephus' works are to be seen as ‘literature’—a category closely associated with specifically Hellenic literary ideals, in much of the ancient world as well as the modern academy—then we are also avoiding looking at them as documents of early Jewish cultural history or belief. ‘Literature’ is far from a neutral category.

Josephus would, however, have probably approved, at any rate up to a point. In the proem to theJewish Archaeology—on which this article will focus—he promises a work of ‘universal usefulness’ (κοινή ὠϕέλειαν, 1.3), which will appear ‘worthy of study to the whole Greek world’ (ἅπασι…τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ἀξίαν σπουδῆς, 1.5). UnlikeAgainst Apion, which denigrates Greek historiography in relation to Jewish and other near-eastern narrative traditions (see esp. 1.6-56), theArchaeologyseeks to translate biblical discourse into a Greek-friendly register. In terms of communication, ‘universal’ necessarily means ‘Greek’, a point of which the translators of the Septuagint were aware (as much as Cicero and Paul). Moreover, the tralatitious language (Thucydidean ὠϕέλεια, Dionysian σπουδή) coupled with the direct allusion in the work's title to Dionysius'Roman Archaeologyreinforce the already clear impression that Josephus is inscribing his project into the Greek cultural tradition, marking its intelligibility within the conceptual framework that we would call ‘literature’, and Josephus and his contemporaries calledpaideia. TheArchaeologyconverts the fragmented and at times self-contradictory narrative of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) into a coherent chronological narrative, seeking to confer on it the legitimacy (as gentile Greeks would see it) of historical narrative.
Marrying Mesopotamia: Female Sexuality and Cultural Resistance in Iamblichus' Babylonian Tales
Authors: Morales Helen
Published: August 2016

Iamblichus'Babylonian Tales, whose extravagant adventures of female homoeroticism, extreme violence and mistaken identity sit uneasily alongside those told in the so-called ‘ideal’ Greek novels, is a work largely ignored by scholars of the ancient novel, or relegated to discussions of ‘fringe literature’ We are not helped by the fact that the novel survives only in fragments and through the critical summary by the Byzantine scholar Photius, in his collection of epitomes calledBibliotheca. This article attempts a fresh analysis ofBabylonian Tales, taking as its starting point the sexual relationship between two of its female characters and moving on to discuss the politics of the novel and its self-positioning in relation to Rome and Roman conquest. It argues thatBabylonian Taleschallenges some of the rather neat stories that are currently told about the Greek novels, and that moving it from the ‘fringe’ to the centre might radically alter how we think about the genre.
Life and Death in Nonnus' Dionysiaca: Filling the Void and Bridging the Gap
Authors: Newbold R.
Published: August 2016

A time to weep, and a time to laugh/A time to mourn, and a time to dance.

(Ecclesiastes3.4)

[Nonnus] encrusted his poetry with voluptuous idylls and cosmological secrets.

(R. Calasso)

The thesis of this paper is that the void, the sense of emptiness, created by some form of loss, is, to a considerable extent, filled and bridged by a number of activities and motifs that pervade theDionysiaca. Nonnus projects a vision of life so resonant, full and fertile that it mostly overwhelms forces and behaviour that make for sterility and emptiness. However, constant effort is needed by various individual entities to harmonise polarities, and to keep the cosmos orderly and busy spinning cycles of germination, growth, death and reseeding/rebirth. Immortals, especially deities, have a greater capacity to relieve their own bereavements, separations and loss, including the gaining of forms of immortality for favoured individuals. For most mortals, reminders of the nature and power of life's eternal flow is no guarantee of individual post-mortem survival or of the healing of wounds incurred by the loss of someone or something precious. But the intimations of immortality and the resources for solace and recovery are persistent and insistent in Nonnus' narrative.
Imaging the Cosmos: Astronomical Ekphraseis in Euripides
Authors: Hannah Robert
Published: August 2016

Ekphraseis of works of art exist at several levels. There is the physical, observable reality of an object or objects, or the potential for such. That (potential) reality may then be depicted within a work of art. A literary artist imaginatively (re-)presents that depiction, in the ekphrasis itself, and may further imbue the resultant description with a symbolic value for the story in which it is set. Not all of these layers need exist, nor need the correspondence between them be precise or even real. An ekphrasis, for example, may describe a completely fictitious object, which itself, however, reflects a possible actuality in the physical world of the senses. Or the question of symbolic value may appear irrelevant, if the purpose of the ekphrasis is instead to provide relief from the temporal drive of the narrative.

This paper seeks to elucidate the two surviving ekphraseis with astronomical content from Euripides, one from his Elektra describing a shield of Akhilleus, and the other from his Ion describing a ceiling tapestry. I take the view that if we can discern and then understand a potential reality described in an ekphrasis, then it is worth asking whether this reality helps us to understand better the literary image and hence its possible symbolism too. The need to answer such a question is the greater with regard to texts involving astronomical material, as this tends to lie outside modern readers' experience or knowledge, but lay well within the day-to-day experience of people in antiquity.
Philostratus, Histoi, Imagines 2.28: Ekphrasis and the Web of Illusion
Authors: McCombie Duncan
Published: August 2016

J'ai voulu te dire simplement que je venais de jeter le plan de mon œuvre entier, après avoir trouvé la clef de moi-même, clef de voûte, ou centre de moi-même, où je me tiens comme une araignée sacrée, sur les principaux fils déjà sortis de mon esprit, et à l'aide desquels je tisserai aux points de rencontre de merveilleuses dentelles, que je devine, et qui existent déjà dans le sein de la Beauté.

This paper will examine the central image of Ἱστοί (‘Looms’ or ‘Webs’), that of the web woven by the spider, as a Callimachean expression, or objectification, of the highly self-conscious treatment of art and play with illusion in the Imagines, that is, its play with the interaction of vision and text. In so doing, it will attempt to show in what ways Ἱστοί might be said to describe the artistic process of the work of which it forms a part, and to illuminate, from its context of painting and its ekphrastic oratory, something of the function and structure of ekphrasis itself. It will not be long enough to deal with the wider questions, about mimesis and the definition of ekphrasis, that it will perhaps have invited.
Finding Facts in Pliny's Encyclopaedia: The Summarivm of the Natural History
Authors: Doody Aude
Published: August 2016

Pliny's encyclopaedia demands a very particular approach from its readers. The key paradox of the genre is that, having gone to the immense effort of gathering together information covering all the branches of human knowledge, it expects its readers not to read it all. The tension between the unifying discourse of complete knowledge and its practical segmentation into digestible chunks requires a certain amount of conceptual shimmying on the part of the reader. How relevant is the surrounding information to the single fact retrieved? In the case of Pliny, the possibility of understanding disembodied sections and facts in isolation is a promise held out to the reader by the book itself: Pliny explicitly gives his blessing in the preface and provides a summarium to aid in the process. This summarium takes up all of Book One of the Natural History, listing the contents of other 36 books, together with the sources Pliny consulted. But although the paratext promotes one model of how to read the Natural History, the text itself is ambivalent; the insistency of linear narrative never quite surrenders to the allure of complete segmentation. There is a logic to the Natural History that only reveals itself to the reader who follows the stream of information from fact to fact, section to section, book to book, subject to subject.
That's Entertainment! Dining with Domitian in Statius' Silvae
Authors: Malamud Martha
Published: August 2016

Dining with Domitian could be a trying experience. Dio describes one memorable meal with the emperor:

He prepared a room that was pitch black on every side—ceiling, walls and floor—and had made ready uncovered couches of the same colour resting on the bare floor. He then invited in his guests alone at night without their servants. First he set a slab shaped like a gravestone engraved with each guest's name next to them, together with a small lamp like the ones that hang in tombs. Next […] naked boys, also painted black, entered like ghosts…and all the things that are commonly offered at sacrifices to the souls of the dead were placed in front of the guests; all of the offerings were black and all in dishes of the same colour. And so every single one of the guests was terrified and trembling, in constant expectation of having his throat cut the next moment: all the more so because everyone except for Domitian was dead silent, as if they were already in the land of the dead. The emperor himself held forth only on topics relating to death and slaughter.

(Dio 67.9)
Quintilian, Statius and the Lost Epic of Domitian
Authors: Penwill J. L.
Published: August 2016

‘sophos’ uniuersi clamamus et sublatis manibus ad cameram iuramus Hipparchum Aratumque comparandos illi homines non fuisse…(‘Fantastic!’ we all cry, and raising our hands to the ceiling we swear that not even Hipparchus and Aratus could have been put on a par withhim.)PetroniusSatyriconThis then is thevisiblework of Menard, in chronological order….I turn now to his other work: the subterranean, the interminably heroic, the peerless.Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of theQuixote’

The Flavians needed a poet. When Octavian established the Julio-Claudian dynasty he had in his hands a usefully exploitable victory over the forces of chaos and oriental despotism, a spin on Actium and its aftermath that was given full epic representation in theAeneid'sdescription of Aeneas' shield (Aen.8.671-713); Antony was compromised by Cleopatra and years of propaganda, and it all took place far enough away for the final act in what everyone knew was a civil war to be portrayed as defeat of a foreign power and celebrated as such in the traditional manner (Caesar triplici inuectus Rotnana triumpholmoenia…, ‘Caesar, borne within the walls of Rome in triple triumph’,Aen.8.714f.). By contrast the Flavian ascendancy was achieved through assault on these selfsame walls, and involved the desecration and burning of the Capitol (Tac.Hist.3.69-74, who remarksid facinus post conditam urbem luctuosissimum foedissimumque rei publicae populi Romani accidit, ‘this was the most deplorable and outrageous crime to befall the republic of the Roman people since the foundation of the city’).
Sacrificial Bodies and the Body of the Text in Aristophanes' Lysistrata
Authors: Fletcher Judith
Published: August 2016

‘Why is inert Matter female and the animating Nous male, please?’‘Because earth is the Mother, because all beautiful things spring from her, trees and flowers and creatures.’A.S. Byatt Angels and Insects

Byart's characters, the Victorian gentlewoman who asks the question and the poet who answers, articulate an enduring notion of Western popular and intellectual culture. The association of women with matter and the body, men with form and the soul, is the legacy of ancient Greek thought which gendered the physical universe according to social convention: women were considered to be passive and therefore acted upon by the formative male principle. Examples of this bilateral symmetry include preformation theories of conception which suggest that a mother only provides the fetus with its raw material, while the father's seed organises that undeveloped material into its human form. This is a value-laden distinction, as we see from ancient philosophy which privileges the masculine soul over the feminine body and aligns men with the intellect but women with the baser corporeal passions.