bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Dilemmas of the Diaspora: The Esther Narrative in Josephus Antiquities 11.184-296
Authors: Kneebone Emily 
Published: August 2016

Esther is the only book of the Hebrew Old Testament never to allude to God, and to refer to neither the Covenant, the sacred institutions of Israel, nor to Jewish religious practice. The book has long engendered a fascinated revulsion in many of its readers, not only for its notable lack (or writing-out?) of God, but also for its overt celebration of genocide and the dubious moral qualities of its protagonists. Luther famously wanted the book excised from the Christian canon altogether, and the nineteenth-century biblical scholar Heinrich Ewald declared that the story of Esther ‘knows nothing of high and pure truths’, and that on coming to it from the rest of the Old Testament ‘we fall, as it were, from heaven to earth’. Humphreys terms Esther one of the ‘most exclusive and nationalistic units within the Bible’, and for Anderson, writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, the tale resonates horribly with twentieth-century history and ‘unveils the dark passions of the human heart: envy, hatred, fear, anger, vindictiveness, pride, all of which are fused into an intense nationalism’.Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish, on the other hand, placed the Book of Esther on a par even with the Torah, a sentiment echoed, centuries later, by Maimonides, who famously declared that when the Prophets and Hagiographa pass away, only Esther and the Law would remain. And this triumphant assertion of the scroll's worth is reminiscent of the attitude of Josephus, who specifically includes Esther in his list of the twenty-two Jewish records, and who devotes the extensive central section ofAJ11 to the Esther pericope. The dating, both relative and absolute, of the texts of Esther has been fiercely disputed, and need not concern us here; it should suffice to note that two extant Greek translations, or rather adaptations, of the Book of Esther—the Septuagint (LXX) and the highly variant Alpha Text (AT)—offer countless minor variations on the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT), and insert six extended passages into the narrative.
Allusion to Ovid and others in Statius' Achilleid
Authors: Davis P.J. 
Published: August 2016

It has become a commonplace of Statian criticism that, if Thebaid invokes Virgil as model, then Achilleid sees Statius using Ovid. Important work has been done in this field, most notably by Rosati and Hinds: Rosati has explored the relationships between Achilleid and several Ovidian texts, while Hinds has insisted on the centrality of Metamorphoses to understanding Achilleid: ‘it is an epic: a markedly Ovidian, markedly metamorphic epic’. This essay aims to extend that discussion through consideration of the differences between Statius and his Ovidian models in his handling of a number of key episodes.The most obvious connection between Ovid's works and Statius' Achilleid is the story of Achilles' rape of Deidamia, for these are the only extant classical poets to narrate the story at any length. That Statius' account actually alludes to Ovid's account in Art of Love is clear. For example, both poets use marked alliteration when describing Achilles' violence:uiribus ilia quidem uicta est, ita credere oportet:sed uoluit uinci uiribus ilia tamen.(Ars 1.699f.)
Terence and the Familiarisation of Comedy
Authors: Fantham Elaine 
Published: August 2016

Let me start by quoting a paragraph from a century old edition of Terence, which will serve as a reminder of changes in our background knowledge of both comedy and this particular comic playwright:
Of the six extant Terentian comedies the Andria is the most pathetic, the Adelphoe in general more true to human nature than the rest, the Eunuchus the most varied and lively, with the largest number of interesting characters, and the Hecyra the one of least merit. All six are remarkable for the art with which the plot is unfolded through the natural sequence of incidents and play of motives. Striking effects, sharp contrasts and incongruities, which meet us in many plays of Plautus, are almost wholly absent. All is smooth, consistent and moderate, without any of the extravagance of exuberant humour or even creative fancy which characterizes the writing of the older poet. But Terence was essentially an imitative artist and his distinguishing feature was his artistic finish, a fact fully recognized by Horace (Epistle 2.1.59).There is plenty here to question, if not correct. What does it mean to call Adelphoe more true to human nature? What defines an ‘interesting character’? And do present day readers still find Hecyra the play of least merit? As for the art with which Terence’s plots are unfolded, we still cannot guess how much of this is his own contribution rather than derived from Menander (whose plays were still unknown when this edition was written). However, scholars have used both the evidence given by Terence in the prologues and his commentator Donatus to identify where he has himself innovated in his plots—removing the expository prologues to replace irony with suspense, introducing a second lover and slave into Andria, working a braggart soldier and his parasite into Eunuchus and inserting an abduction scene into the second act of Adelphoe. And yet it was Terence’s immediate predecessor Caecilius whom Varro, most learned of ancient critics, praised for his superior plots. Certainly Terence does not indulge in the extravagance of Plautus, but is this because he is ‘essentially an imitative artist’? On the other hand I would not challenge the editor’s evaluation of his scripts as ‘smooth, consistent and moderate’ or his praise for the playwright’s ‘artistic finish’. Instead I would ask if this is what we want, or ought to want from comedy.
‘A Conjugal Lesson’: Robert Brough's Medea and the Discourses of Mid-Victorian Britain
Authors: Richardson Edmund 
Published: August 2016

The Athenian Captive (1838) was to constitute the last significant use of Greek tragedy on the professional stage in Britain for a radical political purpose until Gilbert Murray's stagings of Euripides in the Edwardian era.Edith HallI believe in the Revolution.Robert Brough, 1855The fiercest political debates in 1850s Britain were inextricably bound up with the Classical past. Traditionalists and eulogists, priests and pamphleteers, doctors and revolutionaries all set their arguments and their ideals within a Classical framework. Amongst those who sought to use the ancient for decidedly contemporary purposes, Robert Brough was one of the most passionate. He was a revolutionary, a playwright, and a Classicist—though up until the performance of his burlesque Medea (on July 14th 1856), he had never been all three at once. This article will explore how, at the time, the myth of Medea was the perfect vehicle for radical politics—and how Brough exploited its potential to the full. It will frame his play within some of the most controversial debates of the period. It will explore Brough's (on the face of it, startling) claim that his burlesque would give the audience more to think about than any play they had seen before, that it would be ‘a conjugal lesson, surpassing in intensity anything ever before presented’. Brough wrote his Medea believing in ‘the Revolution’. And, as I hope to show, he wanted his audiences to leave the theatre believing in it too.
Gods and Painters: Philostratus the Elder, Stoic Phantasia and the Strategy of Describing
Authors: Thein Karel 
Published: August 2016

I shall comment upon the way the elder Philostratus, author of Imagines, inscribes both the art of painting and his own interpretation of 65 particular paintings within a larger framework, which is composed of nature on the one hand, and the human perception of nature on the other. To get to this framework in a slightly oblique way, I will start with a brief reminder of Philostratus' often neglected classification of the arts.In his Life of Apollonius of Tyana 8.7, Philostratus takes notice of the established opposition between the mechanic and the liberal arts (τέχναι βάναυσοι and τέχναι σοϕαί), but then proceeds to further divide the liberal arts into three groups: some are simply σοϕαί (poetry, music, astronomy, the art of sophist and orator); others are only seemingly liberal, ψευδόσοϕοι (the art of wizards or jugglers); between these two groups are situated the ‘less liberal arts’ or ὑπόσοϕοι τέχναι, namely painting, plastic art, sculpture, navigation and agriculture.
Thebaid's Feminine Ending
Authors: Dietrich Jessica S. 
Published: August 2016

‘Closure: Get Over It’Miss Manners 12/6/98‘I know, it probably doesn't have the sense of closure that you want, but it has more than some of our other cases.’Agent Dana Scully on ‘The X-Files’Thebaid12 is a problematic ending to a disturbing poem. Part of the problem is the unsatisfactory nature of the final book. Book 12 is itself concerned with the processes of ending and its problems. The main narrative of theThebaidis the story of the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, and their battle over the throne at Thebes. Their final confrontation occurs in Book 11. This ending is full of closural allusions and very closely linked to the ending of theAeneidand its final battle between Aeneas and Turnus. If the poem is ‘over’ after Book 11, why does Statius write the final book? It's not enough to say—as critics have—that it's just badly structured poetry.
Image, Ideology and Action in Cicero and Lucretius
Authors: Penwill J.L. 
Published: August 2016

nam saepe ego audiui Q. Maxumum, P. Scipionem, praeterea ciuitatis nostrae praeclaros uiros solitos ita dicere, cum maiorum imagines intuerentur, uehementissume sibi animum ad uirtutem accendi. scilicet non ceram illam neque figuram tantam uim in sese habere, sed memoria rerum gestarum earn flammam egregiis uiris in pectore crescere neque prius sedari, quam uirtus eorum famam atque gloriam adaequauerit.For I frequently heard that Quintus Maximus and Publius Scipio, along with other famous men of our state, were in the habit of saying that when they looked upon the images of their ancestors, their minds were most powerfully kindled towards virtue. Clearly they were not saying that the wax likeness of itself has so much power, but that through the memory of past achievements a flame grows in the breast of outstanding men of a kind that is not put down until their own virtue has won an equal fame and glory.
Ratis Avdax: Valerius Flaccus' Bold Ship
Authors: Davis Martha A. 
Published: August 2016

Surprises await the reader who approaches the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus expecting to find a pleasant but unchallenging version of the content of Apollonius Rhodius' epic retold in Vergilian style. The poem is much more than ‘a thrilling tale that has absorbed and delighted readers and hearers’ and much more than an imitation of the work of two great predecessors. If we consider the matter of story line alone, Valerius differs from Apollonius. He included the rescue of Hesione by Hercules, which was part of the myth of Argo but not used by Apollonius, and he created an entire book (Book 6) full of new material by recounting how Jason and the Argonauts joined Aeetes in a civil war at Colchis. The syntax, long supposed to be Vergilian, on closer examination appears to have departed from Vergil's ways.Valerius made his individuality clear from the beginning of his epic:prima deum magnis canimus freta peruia natis fatidicamque ratem, Scythici quae Phasidis oras ausa sequi mediosque inter iuga concita cursus rumpere flammifero tandem consedit Olympo.(Arg. 1.1-4)I sing the straits first navigable for great sons of gods and the prophetic ship that dared to seek the shores of Scythian Phasis, that dared to burst a course between clashing rocks, that settled down at last on fiery Olympus.
The Book of Good Love? Design Versus Desire in Metamorphoses 10
Authors: Janan Micaela 
Published: August 2016

Much attention has been paid recently to the role of individual narrators within the Metamorphoses. Whereas it was once considered adequate to attribute the characteristics of the poem solely to Ovid as narrator, a number of critics have now drawn correlations between the development of certain tales and the character of the narrators to whom they are attributed within the poem.Book 10 calls particular attention to itself in this regard. Orpheus is its primary narrator: after losing Eurydice to death for the second and final time, he composes a song that recalls ‘boys beloved by the gods and young girls struck by unsanctioned passion’ (10.152-54) which occupies the major portion of the book. However, the marked dissonance between Orpheus' announced program and what actually unfolds pricks the reader's curiosity. The bard's initial criteria for choosing material implicitly condemn female passion and celebrate pederasty — an understandable, if extreme, reaction on the part of a man who has just been badly hurt by his passion for a woman. But of the seven stories that follow, only two concern divine pederasty; one of these ends unhappily. The subject of a third tale (Venus' love for Adonis) radically stretches the sense of ‘boy-love’. A fourth tale — of Pygmalion and his statue — does not fit either category of love.
The Last Scene of the Oedipus Tyrannus
Authors: Gellie George 
Published: August 2016

When Oedipus rushes into the palace at line 1185 of theOedipus Tyrannuswe have a sense of dramatic fulfilment which, most people would say, is about as much as one play can offer. The process of getting us to this moment of climax has been so satisfyingly managed and our emotions kept at such tension before the instant of release that it is hard not to feel overwhelmed when the resolution of so much theatrical energy takes effect. We are tempted to ask no more of the dramatist: he can do what he likes with us, provided that he does it gently and recognises that our resources of pity and fear have been drained by what we have been through.So it has been customary to regard the part of the play that follows 1185 as a leisurely declension from the high point of the discovery to the flat land of acquiescence: no new material but an absorption of the old, a gradual accommodation to the horror of the revelation. In keeping with this view the critical literature has often found very little to say about this closing scene. Yet there is evidence enough that the scene is something more than a winding-down. Its very dimensions should set us wondering. That Sophocles should use almost a quarter of his playing-time, not to clinch something in his final scene, but to offer unproductive and undemanding comment on a now played-out play, looks like dramatic and poetic waste. In fact the material of the scene takes us not down but up. There is a design at work that lets the play grow again. Oedipus finds his way back into the world and it is not hard to chart his progress through a number of stages that are separable and display a distinct identity, each of them contributing a little more to the cumulative effect. The play is really doing another kind of building towards another kind of climax. Immediately after the discovery there is a flatness of exhaustion, but from that low point the dramatist works to generate new tensions and excitements around the figure of Oedipus. When he and his daughters meet the play is back on high ground. To change the image, the progress of Oedipus could be compared with the return of a deep-sea diver from the ocean bed; he pauses at one pressure-level after another, getting used to the new conditions, and then proceeds to the next holding-station on the way to the surface.
Introduction
Authors: Boyle A. J. 
Published: August 2016

But chiefly dear for his gift to understand Earth's intricate, ordered heart, and for a vision That saw beyond an imperial day the hand Of man no longer armed against his fellow But all for vine and cattle, fruit and fallow, Subduing with love's positive force the land.C. Day Lewis, The Georgics, ‘Dedicatory Stanzas to Stephen Spender’ (1940)A collection of critical essays on Virgil's Georgics needs no defence. A great, a magnificent poem, widely read, if not universally applauded, the Georgics has received far less critical attention than either the Eclogues or the Aeneid. Index in part of the apparently uncongenial nature of ‘didactic’ verse, the relative dearth of critical activity on the poem is particularly to be regretted in view of the Georgics' chronologically central position in Virgil's poetic career, its crucial role in the development of his style and thought. Indeed, given the peculiar and self-conscious unity of Virgil's poetic oeuvre, its complex system of evolving themes, images, structures, its bonding, meditated network of inter-poem reference, the critical neglect which the Georgics has received — there are brilliant, recent exceptions — seems less omission, more outrage. Even the Georgics' influence on later European poetry — one thinks, for example, of the Italian humanists, Politian and Alamanni, the eighteenth century English poets, especially Thomson and Cowper, and that remarkable twentieth century English georgic, The Land, by Virginia Sackville-West — while not of the magnitude of that of either the Eclogues or the Aeneid, ought to have elicited a more substantial investigation of the poem than has transpired. No boast, Wilkinson's claim that his 1969 book on the Georgics was the first to appear in English was sad affirmation of this major critical gap.
The Green Cabinet and the Pastoral Design: Theocritus, Euripides, and Tibullus
Authors: Lawall Gilbert 
Published: August 2016

The title of Thomas Rosenmeyer's book, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric, points to a conception of the pastoral as a closed world, set off from the real world outside, despite the author's disclaimer that the title is a misnomer.… the clarity with which the landscape is articulated suggests the limited confines of an interior, (vii) … the freedom of the herdsman is incorruptible; sealed in the bower … it survives and flourishes … (109)In seeking to define the essence of pastoral, Rosenmeyer strips off later accretions and sets the pastoral in sharp contrast to Hesiodic peasant poetry, drama, lyric, romance, and the poetry of Horace and Tibullus. He concentrates on a small number of passages from a limited number of texts to show what he regards as central in Theocritean pastoral: a restricted world of simplicity, freedom, and leisure (otium) that finds its closest corollary in the garden of Epicurus.Yet, even in Rosenmeyer's view, the pastoral ‘pleasance’ is not entirely isolated from the real world. There are, he admits, ‘intimations of a sterner and more hurtful life ostensibly excluded from the arbor’. (23)
‘Nature to Advantage Dressed’: Propertius 1.2
Authors: Curran Leo C. 
Published: August 2016

On the surface, Propertius 1.2 seems to propound a traditional thesis, the superiority of unadorned beauty to artifice, and to scold Cynthia for not living up to this ideal of the natural. I believe that the ideal actually asserted is more complex than mere natural beauty and in fact paradoxically entails a large measure of artifice. Artifice itself becomes the central theme of the poem as its value is radically reinterpreted.Part of the complexity comes from the fact that the ideal embraces more than physical appearance, whether adorned or not. A Catullan Parallel will illustrate. Propertius is here building upon and rivalling a Catullan poem, in a manner which has the effect of emphasizing the non-physical elements in his definition of ideal beauty. A poem on the nature of true female beauty in which the beloved is contrasted with other women and which attempts to define what is truly formosus (‘beautiful’ or ‘lovely’; cf. the insistent repetition of: forma 8 and 24, formosa 9, formosius 11) would immediately be recognized by the Roman reader as a challenge to Catullus 86, which centers on the word formosa.
Menaechmi: A Serious Comedy
Authors: Haberman Donald 
Published: August 2016

It is not at all unusual for even the staunchest admirers of Plautus to feel that his plays lack genuine seriousness. His skill, his wit, his robust gaiety, above all his showmanship are recognized for their excellence. They always hit the mark. And yet he is characterized as an entertainer only, a classical George S. Kaufman.Even Erich Segal in his illuminating study, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus, for all his enthusiastic admiration of Plautus, seems uneasy about judging his achievement as anything more than masterful popular entertainment. Plautus deserves our attention, he writes, because he ‘was the most successful comic poet in the ancient world …. And yet few scholars of the last century have been willing to examine Plautus for what he undeniably was — a theatrical phenomenon’; and he concludes, ‘His art does not give rise to “thoughtful laughter” …. For True Comedy should banish all thought — of mortality and morality’. Segal willingly compares Plautus with Aristophanes and Molière (he mentions Shakespeare only to dismiss the possibility of comparison as unreasonable), and surely no one would write of either as only theatrical phenomena, banishing all thought.
‘The Single Supplie’: Some Observations on Zeugma with Particular Reference to Vergil
Authors: Mack Sara 
Published: August 2016

Writers from Homer to O. Henry have used it. Critics from Servius to Bömer have commented on it. Students of rhetoric from Quintilian to Laussberg have analysed it. Yet there is very little agreement about what zeugma is and what it does. Some editors note its existence and leave it at that. Others distinguish (sometimes passionately) between zeugma and syllepsis, zeugma and equivoque, zeugma and attelage, zeugma and plokē, zeugma and amphibole. Therefore I shall do well to clarify at the start my own use of the term.It is probably best to begin by distinguishing between a group of figures (most commonly called zeugma or syllepsis) which link several notions into one, and another group (hendiadys and related figures) which expand one concept by expressing it in two ways or from two points of view. Zeugma implies yoking (zeugnumi), two or more elements joined so as to make a team. The yoked words are in some way incongruous — perhaps abstract linked with concrete, animate with inanimate, or physical with mental — and the resulting team is, accordingly, both surprising and noteworthy, rather as if a horse were yoked with an ox.