bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
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 uirorumartificis fulgent corpora picta manu,sic quae concubitus uarios uenerisque figurasexprimat, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 InsectsByart'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.
Reading Cynthia and Sexual Difference in the Poems of Propertius
Authors: McCoskey Denise E. 
Published: August 2016

‘she is always and never the same’(advertising slogan for ‘Contradiction’, a ‘fragrance for women’ by Calvin Klein, 1999)In the first poem of his second book, Propertius presents an emphatic declaration of his status as a love poet, slyly incorporating a detailedrecusatioto Maecenas, who he claims has requested that he compose epic instead. Later in the poem, Propertius' preference for elegy over epic seems to be echoed by the predilections of his lover Cynthia, who, as Propertius insists, finds the entireIliaddistasteful. According to Propertius, Cynthia's aversion to the poem emerges from a very specific source: the epic's primary female protagonist, Helen. For, as Propertius recalls it, Cynthia disapproves of the whole epic precisely because she finds fault with its ‘leuis’ heroine:si memini, solet ilia leuis culpare puellas,/et totam ex Helena non probat Iliada(‘If I remember, she is accustomed to castigate mutable women and does not approve of the wholeIliadbecause of Helen’, 2.1.49f.).
Textual Strategies and Political Suicide in Flavian Epic
Authors: McGuire Donald T. 
Published: August 2016

When one tries to characterize the Flavian epics as a group, one encounters a series of chronological and historical problems not faced in many earlier eras of Latin literature. For example, though we know the rough outline of literary history from the death of Nero to the accession of Trajan, precise details regarding the lives of Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus elude us — we know most about the career of Silius, thanks in large part to Pliny the Younger's letter noting his death, charting his career, and to a large degree dooming his reputation for posterity.Despite Pliny's letter, and despite several references in Martial to Silius, the exact chronology of the Punka's publication is impossible to reconstruct. Martial's poems suggest that Silius was at least reading from his work during the early 90's AD, and a publication date from the mid-90's to around 100 seems probable; that is as far as we can go. The same problems face us with the works and careers of Statius and Valerius. Regarding Statius, we know that the Thebaid was published in the early 90's AD, before Statius moved on to his Sitvae and unfinished Achilleid. For Valerius' Argonautka there is even less evidence; arguments for the date of his epic's composition span two decades, between AD 70 and 92.
Monarchal Power and Imperial Politics in Statius' Thebaid
Authors: Dominik William J. 
Published: August 2016

Power, like the diamond, dazzles the beholder, and also the wearer, it dignifies meanness; it magnifies littleness; to what is contemptible, it gives authority; to what is low, exaltation. Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, no man good enough, to be trusted with unlimited power.Charles Colton,LaconThebaidis about power. On this cardinal themeThebaidreflects, its focus emphatic, its message incisive. (Virtually) every event is related in some way to the unfavourable aspects of the exercise of power. Prominent is the issue of its pursuit and abuse, the consequent suffering and impotence of its victims. As Statius observes of monarchal power in connexion with Adrastus, the least objectionable regent inThebaid, agit miseranda potestas inuigihre malis(‘distressing power compels him to be vigilant against ill fortune’, 8.262f.).
Dissonant Sympathy: Song, Orpheus, and the Golden Age in Seneca's Tragedies
Authors: Segal Charles 
Published: August 2016

Orpheus has a prominent place in the choral odes of Seneca's Medea, Hercules Furens, and Hercules Oetaeus (the last, even if not by Seneca, may be considered within the context of Senecan drama). Outside of the tragedies, Seneca has only a passing reference to Orpheus as the figure with whom poetry begins (Ep. 88.39). In the tragedies he treats Orpheus as a magical poet-savior and a civilizing hero. In contrast to Virgil and Ovid, to whose versions of the Orpheus myth he clearly alludes, he deliberately de-emphasizes the brutal death at the hands of the Thracian maenads.Seneca draws on the double focus of the myth in the earlier tradition. On the one hand Orpheus is the consummate poet who knows the mysteries of nature and through his art stands in special sympathy to it. On the other hand as a victim of love and the furor it may bring, he is also a tragic figure who through passion experiences loss, mourning, and death. In this latter aspect the Hercules Oetaeus contrasts his end unfavorably with the future apotheosis of its hero (H.O. 1035); but, as we shall see, Seneca elsewhere takes a more favorable attitude to the poet-hero.
The Georgics as Description: Aspects and Qualifications
Authors: Connor Peter 
Published: August 2016

Within the structural economy of the Georgics there are a number of short sections or episodes. One of the most surprisingly abrupt, for example, is those few lines that are Virgil's equivalent of Hesiod's Days:Ipsa dies alios alio dedit ordine Luna felicis operum. quintam fuge: pallidus Orcus Eumenidesque satae; tum partu Terra nefando Coeumque Iapetumque creat saevumque Typhoea et coniuratos caelum rescindere fratres. ter sunt conati imponere Pelio Ossam scilicet, atque Ossae frondosum involvere Olympum; ter pater extructos disiecit fulmine montis. septima post decimam felix et ponere vitem et prensos domitare boves et licia telae addere. nona fugae melior, contraria furtis. (G.1.276-286)
From Hesiod to Homer by Way of Rome
Authors: Wender Dorothea 
Published: August 2016

I have several times in the past given my students the following oversimplified scheme. Each of Virgil's three works was based on a Greek original: the Eclogues on the Idylls of Theocritus, the Georgics on Hesiod's Works and Days, the Aeneid on Homer's two epics. The difference among these Greek poets (I used to say in my opinionated way) is that while Theocritus was a very fine poet, and Homer of course a genius, Hesiod was only mediocre; therefore Virgil depended on him less and was able to be freer and more genuine in the Georgics than in the Eclogues or the Aeneid. And that, I used to conclude, is why only the Georgics surpasses its model, and justifies Dryden's description of it as the most perfect poem by the most perfect poet.After spending some time working with the literary sources of the Georgics, I am still inclined to the same final conclusion, that the Georgics is Virgil's masterpiece. I have, however, come to some new observations about the relation of the Georgics to its literary predecessors, which may help in a small way to illuminate the poem.