bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
On the Pressure of Circumstance in Greek Tragedy
Authors: Ley Graham 
Published: August 2016

It is an unfortunate weakness of most of the standard textbooks on Greek tragedy that they fail to communicate the immediacy of pressure that is of its essence. This particular inadequacy has hardly been corrected by the recent spate of books on either staging or the visual presentation of plays, which suggest themselves now as the standard adjustment to existing handbooks for students with or without the language.One of the few certainties we have, in beginning the argument, is that tragedy is, if anything, about decisions and their consequences. This much is implied in Aristotle's intuition abouthamartia, which if it means ‘mistake’ can be taken to direct attention to the circumstances which dictate a decision. Indeed, decisions are far more prominent in Attic tragedy than mistakes as such: to take two examples from theOresteia, which as an Aeschylean trilogy should not seem so exceptional as people are inclined to make it, both Agamemnon and Orestes take decisions of terrifying consequence that can hardly be classed as ‘mistakes’ (namely to kill a daughter and to kill a mother, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra inAgamemnonandLibation Bearersrespectively). In this respect, Aristotle might be taken as considering more closely the sentimental drama that flourished in his day, and in this, if we judge by his perceptions, it may well be thatOedipus the Kingof Sophocles in fact marks a turning-point—in the desperate futility of Oedipus' errors—which is more readily, and perhaps with less justice, ascribed to Euripides.
HIC Epvlis Locvs: The Tragic Worlds of Seneca's Agamemnon and Thyestes
Authors: Boyle A. J. 
Published: August 2016

History … is a looking both before and after; as, indeed, the coming Time already waits, unseen, yet definitely shaped, predetermined and inevitable, in the Time come; and only by the combination of both is the meaning of either completed.Carlyle, On HistoryWhen Numantia was captured by Scipio, they found mothers holding in their arms the half-eaten bodies of their own children.Petronius, SatyriconTantalus as paradigm disturbs. The cooking and serving of one's children's flesh to test the omniscience of gods seems gruesome index of perverse ambition, a hunger for knowledge, superiority, power, for which the everlasting frustration of corresponding bodily appetites seems not only fitting punishment but emblem — emblem of man's status as appetite, his natural affinity with the beast. To the saga of the Tantalidae Seneca devotes two plays: Agamemnon and Thyestes. Dramaturgically and stylistically they differ. Verse-dialogue, lyric metre, prologue integration, interrelation between chorus and act, the choral persona, the structuring and unfolding of dramatic language and imagery, the messenger's speech, dramatic structure, movement, tempo are handled very differently in each play. Even the number of actors and choruses differs. Formal similarities of course abound: the ghost-prologue, the protagonist-attendant scene, the thematic employment of imagery (and similar imagery at that), chorus-act ‘joins’, the spectacular and thematic use of ‘theatre’, the use of postclassical dramatic conventions — the five-act structure, entrance monologue-asides, choral exit and re-entry. But these only underscore the marked dramaturgical differences between the two plays, their distinguishing characteristics and defining style.
The Closet of Masks: Role-Playing and Myth-Making in the Orestes of Euripides
Authors: Zeitlin Froma I. 
Published: August 2016

Of what interest would an Oedipus be who fell victim to the fate of marrying, say, his aunt?Bert States,Irony and DramaTheOrestesis the most Euripidean of all Euripidean plays, reflecting his typical techniques, emphases, interests, and outlook. All the familiar signs are present and perceptible: for example, novelty of plot, rapidity and multiplicity of action, sensationalism and theatrical virtuosity, lyrical experimentation, increase in the cast of characters on stage, comic and melodramatic elements, the illusion-reality game, the ergon-logos paradox, the use of cliché and rhetoric, a focus on the phenomenon of alienation, on the psychopathology of characters, their natural victimage and their subsequent retaliatory reflex, the secularization of myth, the questioning of inherited values, and compensatory themes ofphiliaandsōtēria, etc. etc.What marks the difference in this play is the extent to which these implications are carried out, the outer limits to which these techniques are pushed; it is a question of intensification, escalation, a question of a relentless drive towards the achievement of a theatrical ‘style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its possibilities and borders on its own caricature,’ to quote Borges' definition of his own baroque technique. Yet the aesthetic boldness of the play's excesses moves it out beyond any formal definitions and limitations, beyond parody, beyond outrage into another mode, one might say, to a new level of self-consciousness and authorial extravagance that does not seem to have existed before. And it is a play whose surface of seeming incoherence, instability and chaos is, in reality, under that kind of artistic control that brings about that fusion of form and content we call art, even as it always seems to be trying to escape from it.
In Medio Caesar: Paradox and Politics in Virgil's Georgics
Authors: Boyle A. J. 
Published: August 2016

The pessimism of the Eclogues is pronounced. Often denied, that of the Georgics is yet evident.sic omnia fatis in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri, non aliter quam qui aduerso uix flumine lembum remigiis subigit, sic bracchia forte remisit, atque illum in praeceps prono rapit alueus amni. (G.I. 199-203)So all things by law of fate Speed towards the worst, slip back, are swept away; Just as an oarsman struggling to drive his skiff Against the opposing stream needs but chance to drop his arms And the current whirls him away headlong down the river.
Retreat from the Male: Catullus 62 and Sappho's Erotic Flowers
Authors: Stigers Eva Stehle 
Published: August 2016

Catullus described a full emotional circle in his short life from delight in unconstrained aesthetic sensuality free of socially-defined patterns (cc. 5, 6, 13 for example) to longing for a stable bond in the relationship of man to woman. He pictured such a bond as placed within the traditional Roman frame of marriage and home, but cast in a personal mold; he wanted to preserve his aesthetic and sensual response to a woman while combining it somehow with the stability and intimacy appropriate to friendship (amare and bene velle). Poems 72 and 87, for instance, directly express the ideal in acknowledging its absence from Catullus' relations with Lesbia.Catullus liked to feel that the possibility of complete union was what he offered Lesbia. Perhaps it was his inability to fashion a compelling synthesis of sexual intimacy and friendship with her that led him to write a series of poems exploring attempts, mainly failures, at full reciprocal love. The successful attempts are idyllic or mythic (Septimius and Acme, Peleus and Thetis, neither unambiguously positive). The failures come, in Catullus' portrayal, when union founders on the obstacle of the narcissistic personality, the man or woman unable to forfeit autonomy, desirous of holding others in thrall without being himself held. Catullus' highly developed sensitivity to narcissism must be a reaction to its prominence in the character of a certain kind of sexually attractive individual, the one who is alluring but uncapturable, the kind of woman, like Lesbia, with whom Catullus sought union. Catullus conveys the quality of narcissism in such a character in part through the image of the flower (appropriately, considering the source of the modern name for it).
A Lucretian Version of Pastoral
Authors: Betensky Aya 
Published: August 2016

On the infrequent occasions when De Rerum Natura is discussed in terms of pastoral, it is assumed that Lucretius describes the typical locus amoenus familiar since Plato's Phaedrus, and critics concentrate either on tracing his Hellenistic sources or on the basic contrast between luxury and simplicity. But there is more to Lucretian pastoral, just as there is more to Lucretius' atomic universe, than meets the eye. The essence of his pastoral is original, centered around animals rather than shepherds, and his use of pastoral pervades the poem and is integral to its design.The most inclusive definition of pastoral possible is Empson's, the expression of the complex through the simple. It is more useful, however, to think of pastoral as the expression of an unfulfillable longing for a simpler and happier life, which may include a return from the city to the country, from politics to the land, from the Iron Age to the Golden Age, from war to peace, from vice to virtue, or from adulthood to childhood. Traditional pastoral is usually set in the country among shepherds and flocks, and man and nature interact harmoniously according to what has been called since Ruskin the ‘pathetic fallacy’. Plato ‘creates’ pastoral by contrasting city and country in the Phaedrus. Roman poetry uses elements of the urban-rural contrast not only in pastoral poetry as such but in satire, elegy and epic as well. The varied directions in which individual poets take the generic pastoral form are as interesting as the persistence of the form itself, and Lucretius' version, occurring as it does in a didactic epic, is extremely individual when viewed both from within and without the classical tradition of pastoral.
Landscape into Myth: Theocritus' Bucolic Poetry
Authors: Segal Charles 
Published: August 2016

‘I no longer look upon Theocritus as a romantic writer,’ wrote Lady Montagu to Alexander Pope; ‘he has only given a plain image of the way of life amongst the peasants of his country … I don't doubt, had he been born a Briton, but his Idylliums had been filled with descriptions of thrashing and churning.’ Thanks to greater sophistication about the nature of pastoral and a better knowledge of Hellenistic poetry we have probably left behind forever the notion of Theocritus as the conveyor of a ‘plain image’ of rustic life. The alternative is not, of course, the ‘romantic’ Theocritus, but a poet of consummate literary artistry, wit, and irony.Besides the critical commonplace of rustic realism the other stumbling block to a satisfactory appreciation of Theocritus has been the inevitable comparison with Virgil. Critics who have viewed Theocritus through lenses adjusted to Virgil have tended to emphasize the emotional complexity, inwardness, and seriousness of the Latin poet over against the outward-facing playfulness and lightness of the Greek. Theocritus certainly lacks the tension between historical reality and poetry which gives the Eclogues their special depth and poignancy; but he has a seriousness of a different sort. The simplicity and trivial realism which are sometimes attributed to the bucolic Idylls are in fact themselves part of the poetic fiction and often stand in deliberate self-contradiction with mythical elements in the form and structure of the work.
Male and Female in the Homeric Poems
Authors: Beye Charles Rowan 
Published: August 2016

The following is an investigation of the nature of women in the Homeric poems. It is generally accepted that epic figures are typical rather than individual, idiosyncratic personalities. So it is reasonable to assume that the women of the two poems represent the general conception of female behaviour held by Homer's audience. Even if the poems represent a tradition which was a long time in the making, it remains true that what appears within the poems must have made sense somehow to Homer's contemporary audience. And that is the sense we must seek.There has been very little said about the role of women in the Homeric epics. Discussion is bound to be uneven; women are glimpsed infrequently in the Iliad, whereas they are everywhere in the Odyssey. But this in itself perhaps offers insights into the nature of the difference between the two poems. In addition an analysis of the part women play in these poems helps to explain the continual appeal of the Iliad and the Odyssey. For the poems, like all truly great pieces of literature, say things that we humans need and want to hear. As is true of other facets of the poems the female characters are extraordinarily authentic. They manifest moods and psychological states which are true to women, at least in the Western world. Moreover the poems, especially the Odyssey, show with great profundity some important truths of male-female relationships. Whether these are inherent and never-changing or it is because women's situation has not much changed through the millenia is hard to say.
In Defence of Persius
Authors: Sullivan J. P. 
Published: August 2016

In the darkness of these times, it may well prove that we are the last generation to pursue the study of classics at all seriously, whether we are hewing squarely to the philological, or more modern, approaches to classical literature. The rights and wrongs of this particular ideological struggle will be settled, I suspect, by time and our students. One may, however, take for granted the perceptible erosion of anything like a real inwardness with Latin as a language among the protevangelists of either school. The gentlemanly dilettante stuck to his familiar authors, such as Virgil and Horace, ignoring their Alexandrian complexities for their human values; the supposedly serious scholar adopted such a scientific attitude to Latin that it would sometimes seem that his main pleasure consisted in correcting Lewis and Short, while putting together prose and verse compositions for his peers or pupils.Certainly ignorance on the one hand and pedantry on the other are logical culprits, along with time, for this loss of inwardness with Latin as a language. One would like to think that Dr. Johnson (and some of his contemporaries) had something close to the careless familiarity with Latin displayed by Dante or Poggio: unfortunately a glance at the frigid exercises to Ms Thrale or to his Highland hosts, written during his tour of the Hebrides, quickly dispels this illusion.
Mythic and Non-Mythic Artists in Ovid's Metamorphoses
Authors: Lateiner Donald 
Published: August 2016

The interpretation of Ovid's epic that is argued here has three related parts that have not been drawn together before:I. Ovid's panoramic presentation of myth, theMetamorphoses, presents provocative reflections in dramatic guise concerning human psychology, society, and art. Ovid is an engaged poet as well as an amusing one.II. TheMetamorphosesinclude, under the mantle of myth, pointed criticisms of the Emperor Augustus and his program of social, spiritual, and religious reform.III. Stories about artists in theMetamorphoseswere invented or elaborated by Ovid in order to illustrate the primacy of art and its spiritual value. Respect for love, truth, and human wisdom counts for more than fealty to the artifice of the new Rome.The relevance of these parts to each other and their consequences will be made clear in the Conclusion (IV), which examines the function of art in life for Ovid and his hopes for permanence in a world of transitions.
The Dramatic Structure of Agamemnon
Authors: Ewans Michael 
Published: August 2016

In later antiquity it was universally held that Aeschylus was the most given, of the three fifth century Athenian tragic poets, to lavish spectacular display. This view rested on three foundations: first, consistent misinterpretation of the many jokes which Aristophanes makes in The Frogs about the archaic grandeur of Aeschylean drama — jokes which on close examination revolve almost entirely around the style of Aeschylus' language; second, the practice of importing scenes of spectacle and crowds of extras into Hellenistic and Roman productions of classical Greek tragedy; and, third, the ascription to this author of the play, Prometheus Bound, which undoubtedly calls for elaborate scenic requirements. The authenticity of Prometheus Bound has been increasingly called in question during the twentieth century: and no scholar who is prepared to accept the arguments and comparisons to be found in Mark Griffith's recent study would now care to place the composition of Prometheus Bound less than twenty years after the death of Aeschylus.If Prometheus Bound is not to be ascribed to Aeschylus, six of his plays survive. They are distinguished by their extreme theatrical economy; no device is used in them unless it bears close relevance to the playwright's purpose and theme. In his pioneering study, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, Oliver Taplin has drawn attention to a number of ways in which this feature is to be observed in the surviving plays; and his penetrating observations are by no means confined to the main subject of the book, which is the dramatic use made in Greek tragedy of the entrances and exits of the characters and of the chorus. But much remains to be done, before we can seriously claim to understand the genius of Aeschylus and his successors as theatre craftsmen. I want now to introduce and open up an area of debate which I find to have been seriously neglected in the work on Aeschylus which I have read.
The “Hospital Epidemiologist” in U.S. Hospitals, 1976-1977: A Description of the Head of the Infection Surveillance and Control Program Report from the SENIC Project
Authors: Haley Robert W. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractAs part of the first two phases of the SENIC Project (Study on the Efficacy of Nosocomial Infection Control), information was collected from the heads of the infection surveillance and control programs (ISCPs) in U.S. hospitals. The data were analyzed to describe these respondents and to determine whether differences among them were related to their areas of professional training or to characteristics of the hospitals where they were located. The findings indicate that the ISCP heads constitute a very heterogeneous group, with substantial differences in age, professional training (40% are pathologists), characteristics of their medical practices, memberships in professional organizations related to infection control, time spent in ISCP activities, approach to epidemiologic problems, and opinions on the preventability of nosocomial infections and the seriousness of infection problems in their hospitals. These differences are related strongly to the ISCP heads' professional training, size of hospital, and, to a lesser extent, medical school affiliation, but there is little evidence that the differences are related to regional or urban-rural location or type of ownership of the hospitals. The average ISCP head estimates that about half of all nosocomial infections are preventable, but these estimates vary inversely with tenure in the position and the tendency to approach a clinical problem epidemiologically.
Comparison of the Activities and Stabilities of Alkaline Glutaraldehyde Sterilizing Solutions
Authors: Pepper Rollin E. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThe sporicidal activities and shelf life stabilities of three alkaline glutaraldehyde-containing sterilizing solutions were evaluated. The time required to reduce a population of spores by one log is the D-value. The test methods employed were the D-value and survival rates. Sporicidin, a new preparation containing a phenolic buffer, was both more stable and more active against test spores than two other test agents, Cidex and Cidex-7.
Prophylactic Antibiotic Therapy with Cefamandole and Tobramycin for Patients Undergoing Renal Transplantation
Authors: Townsend Timothy R. , Rudolf Leslie E. , Westervelt Frederic B. , Mandeli Gerald L. , Wenzel Richard P. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractThe incidence of infections among patients undergoing renal transplantation has been reported as high as 83% during the first post-transplant year. In an effort to reduce the occurrence of such infections, we evaluated the role of perioperative prophylactic antibiotics in these patients. Thirty-seven patients undergoing transplantation were assigned randomly to treatment groups (N=20, cefamandole, 1 gm IM every 6 hrs for 8 doses/tobramycin 1 mg/kg IM for 1 dose, starting 2 hrs prior to surgery) and control groups (N=17, no antibiotics). A uniform infection surveillance system was used. Eighty-one percent (30/37) of patients became infected; 70% (14/20) of treated patients and 94% (16/17) of controls (p=0.14). Since antibiotic prophylaxis might be expected to exert the greatest influence in the immediate postoperative period, we examined patient outcome data for both the first seven post-transplant days and for the entire hospitalization. Of the 38% (14/37) of patients who developed infections during the first posttransplant week, a statistically greater proportion came from the control group than from the treated group (10/17 vs. 4/20, p=0.04). These data suggest that this regimen is effective in reducing the occurrence of infections during the first week following renal transplantation.
Topical Antibiotic Ointments for Staphylococcal Nasal Carriers: Survey of Current Practices and Comparison of Bacitracin and Vancomycin Ointments
Authors: Bryan Charles S. , Wilson Rachel S. , Meade Patsy , Sill Louise G. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractOne measure used in the management of staphylococcal disease outbreaks in newborn nurseries is to obtain nasal cultures from nursery personnel and then treat nasal carriers with topical antibiotic ointments. Because recent infection control guidelines often omit reference to this measure, we surveyed current practices in larger hospitals in the U.S.A. Seventy-one percent of respondents indicated that they would obtain nasal cultures from personnel during a staphylococcal disease outbreak, and 40% indicated that they would prescribe topical antibiotic ointments for personnel with positive nasal cultures before the results of bacteriophage typing became known. Because little has been written about the efficacy of topical intranasal antibiotics within the past decade, we compared bacitracin ointment with a vancomycin ointment for treatment of the staphylococcal nasal carrier state. Both ointments reduced nasal carriage in the majority of instances. However, similar reduction was also observed in an untreated control group. The need for different approaches to the problem of nasal carriers is discussed.
Recommendations for the Control of Yersinia pestis Infections
Authors: White Mark E. , Gordon Diane , Poland Jack D. , Barnes Allan M. 
Published: August 2016

AbstractYersinia pestis, the etiologic agent of plague, is endemic in the western United States; 105 cases were reported between 1970 and 1979. Plague may manifest in one of three clinical forms: bubonic, septicemic, or pneumonic. Bubonic and septicemic plague represent relatively little risk for human-to-human transmission to contacts, although heavily infected secretions, such as drainage from a bubo, pose a theoretical risk, especially if they are aerosolized from a syringe during diagnostic aspirations. Pneumonic plague may be highly contagious to contacts and poses a greater risk. The Plague Branch, Center for Disease Control recommends that all patients with plague be placed in strict isolation for the first 48 hours of treatment because of the possibility that pneumonia may supervene. If it does not, wound and skin precautions are adequate for the duration of hospitalization. Untreated plague pneumonia is an epidemiologic emergency. All contacts must be identified promptly and those with face-to-face exposure should receive abortive antibiotic therapy. All contacts should be under surveillance, with twice-daily temperature checks, for seven days.