bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Silius' Rome: The Rewriting of Vergil's Vision
Authors: Pomeroy Arthur J. 
Published: August 2016

A recent English-language textbook on Greek and Roman historical epic begins its account of Silius Italicus by describing the author of thePunicaas ‘not a literary person. Most of his long life was spent in the Roman civil service’. Then, after suggesting that the poet was seeking to make up for earlier missed opportunities by writing what is the longest surviving Latin epic, the potted biography concludes by declaring that his actual demise was in line with Stoic theory: ‘Silius met a bookish end…he starved himself to death.’While these remarks will not be left unchallenged, the very venom of the reaction to them is instructive. Scandalised, a reader of an earlier version of this paper thought that they should never be mentioned or at best buried in a footnote. After all, Wallace Stevens worked for a living too. No, show us that Silius is agoodpoet.
Oedipal Narratives and the Exilic Ovid
Authors: Walker Andrew D. 
Published: August 2016

‘…we think [for example] of the wordwriting(schreiben) and immediately before us we have the image of two men, one man carrying the other on his back…’So wrote G. Schubert in his study of dream symbolism (Die Symbolik des Traumes) published in 1814—one of many works of dream theory that served as a resource for Freud, whosemagnum opus—The Interpretation of Dreams—would appear at the turn of the century. Schubert offers the example of the nonsensical association of theword‘writing’ with theimageof two men (‘one carrying the other on his back’) in an effort to argue a thesis later challenged by the work of Freud: that a ‘daytime language of words’ exists independent of, and unaffected by, a ‘nighttime language of dreams’. Read nearly a century after Freud, the passage is ironic, as Neil Hertz has observed, largely because Schubert's exemplary ‘nonsensical’ combination of word and image is richly suggestive of one of the principal concerns of poststructuralist psychoanalysis: how writing is a process of bearing the burden of the past and shouldering the father, an (oedipal) narrative of the son coming to terms with paternal authority: ‘The weight of the older man's body, the pressure of his will give substance to the voiced word…[w]riting, Freud would have us say, is Oedipal, a coming to terms with the Father, a shouldering of the burden of the past.’
Horace, Odes 3.22, and the Life of Meaning: Stumbling and Stampeding Out of the Woods, Blinking and Screaming into the Light, Snorting and Gorging at the Trough, Slashing and Gouging at the Death
Authors: Henderson John 
Published: August 2016

Now scientists in Cambridge are developing pigs with human genes which could provide a limitless supply of organs for transplant.(Radio Times, 1st March 1995)Latin scholarship through the years did not exactly splash out on this pig's whisper of acarmen, 3.22. Stunted notices regularly saw it off as ‘a traditional invocation’—just a coda and confirmation for 3.21—and it is securely penned into the Hellenistic dedicatory ‘Epigrammstypus’. Yet the poet has indeed set t/his tree off against the poetic wood that lines thecontinui montesofOdes I-III. In that company, the poem primes a cultural reading by framing theinterpretivityof its performance against all the other scenarios. As arecurrent eventin Roman pedagogy and classical reading-culture to this very moment (these very moments), it pushes us to enactreligioas a modality of agent self, mobilised within the social imaginary of formative environment and temporality, and modelling a contribution to the formation of that sociality. The challenge to Horace, as to other ancient magi and musers such as Cicero, Varro and Augustine, is notnotthe same that faces modern gurus and pundits writing Roman religion: butpoetryconscripts its readers for its project, animating the Roman religion it re-invents and activates, obliges the doing and the showing and the telling to fuse in the enthusing, three-in-one.
The Drooping Rose: Elegiac Failure in Amores 3.7
Authors: Sharrock A.R. 
Published: August 2016

nos quoque delectant, quamuis nocuere, libelli,quodque mihi telum uulnera fecit, amo.(Tr.4.1.35f.)My books delight me, even though they have harmed me,and I love the weapon which caused my wound.InAmores3.7, Ovid sings, hymns, celebrates his own impotence. Why?In stark contrast with its nearest Latin relative, Horace's most grotesque, violent and abusive impotence poem (Epode12, to be discussed later),Am.3.7 is an erotic poem, and could even be considered a gentle one, perhaps excepting the couplet 67f. which is the emphatic opposite of the rest of the poem.
Introduction
Authors: Athanassakis Apostolos N. 
Published: August 2016

What we know of this poetry is woefully inadequate; nor can we ascribe this condition to the paucity of our texts; were a hundred odes to be unearthed tomorrow, we should proceed to assign their contents to the same complacent categories that are the badges of our present ignorance. In dealing with Pindar, misconceptions are the rule: the odes do not have a linear unity; the transitions are abrupt; the poet devotes much time to his personal preoccupations, triumphs and embarrassments, as well as to irrelevancies of other kinds. These myths have arisen from a failure to understand the conventional aspects of choral communication.(Elroy L. Bundy on Pindar, Studio Pindarica I)
Claudian: Court Poet as Artist
Authors: Gruzelier C. E. 
Published: August 2016

Claudian was the last important poet of Rome, the more striking in his talent because of the lack of competitors in the age in which he lived. It is interesting to note that of the people who have actually read his works, most can find in them something attractive or entertaining enough to justify the effort. One example is the opinion of Gibbon:If we fairly balance his merits and his defects, we shall acknowledge that Claudian does not either satisfy or silence our reason. It would not be easy to produce a passage that deserves the epithet of sublime or pathetic; to select a verse that melts the heart or enlarges the imagination … [but] he was endowed with the rare and precious talent of raising the meanest, of adorning the most barren, and of diversifying the most similar topics; his colouring, more especially in descriptive poetry, is soft and splendid; and he seldom fails to display, and even to abuse, the advantages of a cultivated understanding, a copious fancy, an easy and sometimes forcible expression, and a perpetual flow of harmonious versification.
Reading Tacitus' Tiberian Annals
Authors: Williams Bronwyn 
Published: August 2016

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.Henry James, Life of Nathaniel HawthorneHistory is not what you thought. It is what you can remember.W.C. Sellar & R.G. Yeatman, 1066 And All ThatAs history Tacitus' Annals pose problems. On the one hand meticulously researched — on the other obfuscatory; self-avowedly unprejudiced and conspicuously prejudicial; evocative more than discursive; necessarily reliant upon the flawed historical tradition which they set out to correct. As historical epic they evidence rhetorical mastery and greatness of vision; a sense of dramatic moment and vivid rendering of character; a sense of history as dramatic process, seen through the eyes of contemporary and later observers. Moreover they engage the reader narratologically; point the distinction between Tacitus' insights and those of his occasionally self-deceived, subjective persona, ‘the historian’; signal a mechanism for interpreting the seeming distortions and inconsistencies of the text. This essay looks at six interrelated apsects of the Tiberian Annals, which elucidate Tacitus' purpose and vision as historical epicist, and which fix the rules by which the whole of the Annals are to be read and understood.
Love Plots in Menander and his Roman Adapters
Authors: Anderson William S. 
Published: August 2016

It is a well known fact and problem for students of Plautus and Terence that the lack of corresponding Menandrian originals for the comedies known to have been adapted into Latin has forced us to operate with various conjectural theories about the amount and method of change introduced in their adapted plots by the Roman playwrights. We might have expected Donatus to have provided some help here, since he frequently cites the Greek lines that Terence altered in his own way, but Donatus proves remarkably disappointing when it comes to details of plot. There is, however, one passage in Menander's great admirer, Plutarch, which I suggest might be pressed somewhat into service, though cautiously, and it is my purpose here to discuss this passage and its potential utility.Among the questions debated at banquets, Plutarch introduces one which, reviewing what drama and poetry best suit a dinner party, singles out Menander for special praise. His speaker, Diogenianus by name, expresses total admiration for Menander's style, for his excellent mixture of playful and serious, and his appropriate handling of the erotic material of his comedies. I am interested in the last point and the way Diogenianus elaborates upon it. For him, the important point is that, after a reading of Menander at a symposium, male banqueters are put in the right mood to go home to their own wives. I do not wish to pursue that chauvinistic topic, but rather to examine the scheme of Menandrian love plots which Diogenianus develops by way of explaining his thesis that Greek New Comedy possesses a special propriety for the average male banqueter.
Aristotle's Poetics and the Problem of Tragic Conflict
Authors: Gellrich M.W. 
Published: August 2016

Despite the broad diversity in our century of views about tragedy, most critics show remarkable agreement about one point: that ‘conflict’ is a central defining characteristic of the form. Tragedy has repeatedly been discussed in terms of a struggle, which involves competing demands or forces that press in on man and shape his conduct. Although the structure of such a conflict has been variously formulated, in general it has been conceived in one of three ways: 1) as a psychological dilemma of inner decision-making, in which the hero must choose between opposing claims that he cannot mediate; 2) as a social collision between agents who hold to different but often equally valid ethical claims; 3) as a religious struggle implicating man in resistance against a force of divine necessity, such as fate, oracles, or the gods.A wide host of influences could be marshalled to explain the development of popularity of these modern conceptions. Existentialism has had a hand in forming theories of tragedy that concentrate on crises of decision-making. Hegel's critical views of drama in theVorlesungen ueber die Aesthetikhave had an impact on the idea that tragic struggle emerges within the state and the potential competition between civic and familial obligations. And German Romantic critics, for example, Schiller and Schlegel, have made their mark on the notion that the tragic hero asserts his dignity against an external force of necessity threatening personal autonomy. But it has often been argued that these relatively modern influences are themselves derivative. According to many critics, theories of tragic conflict are ultimately indebted to Aristotle's Poetics. The Greek treatise is seen as the primary source for an idea that has by now become commonplace.
The Magic of Orpheus and the Ambiguities of Language
Authors: Segal Charles 
Published: August 2016

Language is among the most mysterious of man's attributes. Its power not only to communicate truths about reality, but also to compel assent in the face of reality has often appeared miraculous, magical, and also dangerous. The marvel that mere words could impel men to the most momentous actions, and the admiration or fear that this fact inspires, are recurrent themes in classical literature. To express and understand this power Greek myth early framed the figure of Orpheus, a magical singer, half-man, half-god, able to move all of nature by his song. How that myth shifts in meaning and emphasis in representing that power is the subject of this essay. Though primarily concerned with classical writers, I shall also consider how a few modern poets used and transmuted this mythic material. My reading of the myth is both diachronic and synchronic. I attempt to study some aspects of its historical development and also to interpret it (especially in part I) as if all of its versions, taken together, form a contemporary statement about the relation of art and life.Orpheus is a complex, multifaceted figure. For the ancients he is not only the archetypal poet, but also the founder of a mystical religion known as Orphism, with a well-developed theology, cosmogony, and eschatology of which much survives in hymns and short epics, mostly of late date. The ‘poetic’ Orpheus inevitably overlaps with the founder of Orphism, but it is the Orpheus of the poetic tradition that this essay discusses.
Virgil's Pastoral Echo
Authors: Boyle A. J. 
Published: August 2016

The opening lines of the Eclogues are justly famous:
Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagisiluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena.(E. 1.1-2)Tityrus, you lie beneath spread of sheltering beechStudying the woodland Muse on a thin oat-straw.Their rich, inviting allusiveness is well known. The sonal echo of Theocritus Idylls 1.1, the Callimachean canon (tenui, ‘thin’; cf. tēn Mousan leptaleēn, ‘the thin Muse’, Aetia fr.1.24 Pf.), the Lucretian siluestrem Musam (‘woodland Muse’) provoke the imagination, goad the intellect. Virgil's reference to his Roman predecessor especially intrigues. The context alluded to — Lucretius' ascription (DRN 4.577-89) of the fiction of satyrs, nymphs and the siluestris Musa of Pan to the echo-producing properties of rocky, solitary places — contains embryonically a theory of poetics, an evaluation of pastoral song, which, quickened into life in the Eclogues' initial statement, appears to be of programmatic significance. The theory — the viewing of pastoral poetry as essentially (to use Marie Desport's compelling phrase) ‘une poésie à écho’ — may be termed the echoic theory of pastoral song. Its main import is — as I take it — reductive: pastoral song is to be construed as the internal resonance of the singer's fictive world, condemned to triviality by its inability to reach beyond the boundaries of private experience or private vision so as to affect the world of action, events, history.
Virgil's First Eclogue: Poetics of Enclosure
Authors: Putnam Michael C. J. 
Published: August 2016

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena; nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva. nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.Tityrus, you reclining under the protection of a spreading beech, you ponder the sylvan muse on slender reed. We are leaving the bounds of our fatherland and our sweet fields, we are in flight from our fatherland. You, Tityrus, at ease in the shade, teach the woods to resound ‘beautiful Amaryllis’.The literary historian must value the opening lines of the first eclogue for many reasons but their role in the development of the rhetoric of pastoralism is especially significant. For the first time in ancient pastoral poetry two intellectual worlds are in collision, seen in the characterizations of two shepherds only one of whom is finally settled in a landscape of permanence and continuity. Tityrus remains and Meliboeus is forced to depart. It is the elaboration and significance of Tityrus' setting that I wish to consider here. In a few deft strokes Virgil's Meliboeus creates a landscape of the mind, intellectualizing what Theocritus had left as enticing framework for song and establishing a stylistic principle that proves a powerful influence on all the poet's subsequent creative efforts.
Tacitus and Poetic History: The End of Annals XIII
Authors: Segal Charles 
Published: August 2016

For classical antiquity the division between history and poetry is often arbitrary and misleading. The history-writing of antiquity not only subsumes what we would call political science, sociology, and psychology, but is also linked to epic poetry and to moral speculation on the good life and the good community. Just as Herodotus is not fully intelligible without Homer nor Thucydides without the tragedians, so not only Livy, but also Tacitus cannot fully be understood without reference to Virgil.Like Gorgias or Apuleius, Tacitus also reminds us that the division between poetry and prose is more fluid in ancient than in modern literature. Scholars have long recognized Tacitus' debt to Virgil, especially in vocabulary and expression. Yet there is another, more elusive quality in Tacitus which is ultimately traceable to the influence of the great epic poet. This is the creation of an atmosphere around events which confers on them a weight, penetration, and richness of suggestion which the bare facts could not possibly convey.
Horace C. 3. 30: The Lyricist as Hero
Authors: Putnam Michael C. J. 
Published: August 2016

Exegi monumentum aere perenniusregalique situ pyramidum altius,quod non imber edax, non aquilo impotenspossit diruere aut innumerabilisannorum series et fuga temporum. 5non omnis moriar multaque pars meivitabit Libitinam: usque ego poster acrescam laude recens, dum Capitoliumscandet cum tacita virgine pontifex:dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus 10et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestiumregnavit populorum, ex humili potensprinceps Aeolium carmen ad Italosdeduxisse modos. sume superbiamquaesitam meritis et mihi Delphica 15lauro cinge volens, Melpomene, comam.(I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the pyramids' royal pile, one that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy, or the countless chain of years and the ages' flight. I shall not altogether die, but a mighty part of me shall escape the death-goddess. On and on shall I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time: so long as the pontiff climbs the Capitol with the silent Vestal, I, risen high from low estate, where wild Aufidus thunders and where Daunus in a parched land once ruled o'er a peasant folk, shall be famed for having been the first to adapt Aeolian song to Italian verse. Accept the proud honour won by thy merits, Melpomene, and graciously crown my locks with Delphic bays.) (Bennett)
Making Sense of Roman Poetry
Authors: Quinn Kenneth 
Published: August 2016

Those of us whose subject is Roman poetry can feel there is life in the old dog yet. We need only point to the books which have appeared since the industry tooled up afresh after the second world war, just over a quarter of a century ago. I don't mean so much the new texts and commentaries, which after all cater for and circulate chiefly among those with a vested interest in the subject: their proliferation often seems to me a symptom of an Alexandrian age in classical studies more than a true renaissance. Or for that matter the host of new translations —a phenomenon more difficult to assess because of the way in which it is bound up with the economics of publishing. I mean the books which have been written to extend and renew our understanding of Roman literature. Their number is impressive, and each year there seem to be more of them. Many are good, and some have in fact renewed and extended our understanding. I make these my starting point since it is a reasonable assumption that the men who wrote these books had in mind an audience that wanted to understand Roman literature, an audience for whom the task of re-interpretation seemed worth while.For it is generally agreed that interpretations of the classics, like translations, are short-lived. They last in fact about a generation. Then a style of writing dies, a shift in our capacity to respond dims old responses, brings new awarenesses, while the work we translate or interpret—I am speaking how of course only of the acknowledged masterpieces of Roman literature—remains infinitely meaningful. To each generation the major work appears to speak in a new language and to say new things, so that the translator has to say afresh what it said, and the interpreter to explain afresh what it meant. At the same time our understanding of the literary tradition, in which the individual major works form the high points, also changes.
Soracte Encore
Authors: Connor Peter 
Published: August 2016

In a recent discussion of the Soracte Ode (Horace C. I, 9) Charles W. Lockyer insists on certain characteristics of the poem which he describes as follows: ‘Keeping in mind, then, the importance of the metaphor, I should like to approach the scene with a certain amount of dramatic emphasis. For Horace has really written a miniature scene, even though he casts it in the form of a monologue–a fact which is itself significant, as will be seen. … Rather we must pay close attention to the fact that the poem presents two real persons and not mere abstract sentiments decked out in elaborate imagery. … The dramatic quality of the poem should not be overlooked as it has in the past.’ (305). ‘Nothing better points up the difference between youth and age than the two people in this little play.’ (308).There is a growing awareness that this poem does not present its true self if seen as a symbolic vehicle of philosophical maxims. In one way or another, we find the insistence that we are confronted by real people. Kenneth Quinn, without further discussion, had suggested inLatin Explorations(1963), 108-09, thatvides ut altais properly seen as a dramatic monologue. Lockyer, 305 n. 11, claims that the chief contribution of J. W. Rettig, ‘Dissolve Frigus: HoraceCarm. I, 9’,CB42 (1965) 19-23, was perceiving that two real persons are presented. David West,Reading Horace, taking up Quinn's suggestion placed an uneven stress on the setting (6, 10). Viktor Pöschl pays constant close attention to the speaker. Lockyer uses the termsdramaticandmonologue, but it is the former that he really finds in the poem, leading him to think of the poem as a play.
Talking About Greek Tragedy
Authors: McCaughey James 
Published: August 2016

Greek plays were made in the theatre. We must watch our language when we talk about them, for we too are in the theatre. Most of us receive our critical training with works of art that are constructed and exist on the written page. We study word generating word, images interacting. And when we apply these techniques to plays we learn much; the way a playwright uses language, all the hidden things that make a play what it is. And some plays, an Ajax, or a Trojan Women, read so well that we are tempted to forget, or at least disregard that they were not in the first place made for reading. Not that the words are unimportant, but they point beyond themselves to realization in performance. They are as blueprints to a finished building.This does not mean that the critic must spend his time filling the gap between text and production. He will too soon find himself lost in speculation or tangled in archaeological problems. Rather, whatever we say of the words of a play must be conditioned by the fact that they are words for the theatre. A play cannot be something that it could not be on the stage. A sense of what it was in performance is at the same time the starting point and the final criterion of our criticism.