I. The American Philological Association Presidential Address
- Emily Vermeule, "Archaeology and Philology: The Dirt and the Word," p. 1.
II. Homeric Questions
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John Miles Foley, "Guslar and Aoidos: Traditional Register in South Slavic and Homeric Epic," p. 11
Scholars have long debated the usefulness of the analogy between Homer and South Slavic oral epic tradition. This article strives to avoid the "all or nothing" assumption of unqualified congruency or incongruency, proposing instead a measured, nuanced comparison that pays attention to differences as well as similarities. In that spirit I pose a simple question--"Is South Slavic epic a useful, apposite comparison for Homeric epic?"--and provide both "yes" and "no" answers for four much-discussed features of the two traditions: (1) formulaic phraseology, (2) enjambement, (3) metrical irregularities, and (4) "artificial language" or register (in terms of dialect and archaism).
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Therese de Vet, "The Joint Role of Orality and Literacy in the Composition, Transmission, and Performance of the Homeric Texts: AComparative View, " p. 43
This study re-examines the Parry/Lord "Oral Theory" on the genesis of the Homeric poems, which posits the advent of literacy as the cause of textual fixity and the end of improvised performance. Here an interactive process between oral and written versions is proposed, ending ca. 150 B.C.E. The ability of oral performances to influence and significantlychange written poems is illustrated and supported by findings from theauthor's fieldwork in Bali, as well as by other recent works on SoutheastAsia. The Kunstsprache, whose survival is insured by writing, isfound to play a crucial role in the preservation of oral features inwritten form, and to facilitate continued (oral) improvisation.
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Jonathan S. Burgess, "The Non-Homeric Cypria," p. 77
It is often assumed that the Cypria was designed to introduce the Iliad, but the original Cypria may have been composedindependently of the Iliad. The ending of the Cypria does not really prepare for the Iliad well. In addition, it apparently duplicates material also found in the Iliad, which contradicts itssupposed supporting role. The poem could have originally exceeded theboundary indicated by Proclus and actually narrated the complete Trojanwar saga, including a traditional version of the wrath of Achilles.Aristotle's description of the Cypria in the Poetics may support this interpretation.
III. History and Drama in Classical Athens
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Clara Shaw Hardy, "Nomos and Replaceability in the Story ofIntaphrenes and His Wife," p. 101
The speech of Intaphrenes' wife, justifying her choice of brother overhusband or child on the grounds of replaceability, should be read in conjuction with the crime of her husband. Both constitute a violation of nomos in that they confuse private and public contexts. Intaphrenes attempts to bring public affairs into the king's bedroom while his wife uses a public perspective to articulate the reasoning behind what Darius expects to be a personal decision. Herodotus associates this type of boundary-violation with autocratic rule.
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Ruth Scodel: Domon agalma: Virgin Sacrifice and Aesthetic Object: p. 111
For the Athenian elite, unmarried daughters were like luxury possessions, agalmata. Wealth in Greek culture demanded display, but virgins could only be displayed in public in ritual contexts, particularly in their role as basket-carriers for sacrifice. At sacrifice, the display is sanctioned, but still potentially dangerous. Aeschylus in Agamemnon and Euripides in Hecuba exploit this tension in representing virgin sacrifice, by combining the suggestion that the sacrifice is a wrongful waste of a precious and beautiful object with emphasis on the overexposure of the virgin's body. These themes are not compatible with patriotic self-sacrifice (Polyxena dies willingly, but not on behalf of her killers), and so are absent from other Euripidean treatments of human sacrifice.
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S. Douglas Olson, "Politics and Poetry in Aristophanes' Wasps," p. 129
In an important recent article, David Konstan has argued that Aristophanes' Wasps turns on an elaborate dramatic and intellectual sleight of hand. Philokleon is wealthy, whereas the Chorus are impoverished, and the fact that the old man is presented as their peer when he retires from the courts reveals the drama's ideological machinery at work: despite appearances, Wasps valorizes a fundamentally aristocratic view of the world. I argue that Aristophanes' is both less"anti-democratic" and more coherent and dramatically sophisticated thaneither Konstan's analysis or those of earlier critics have suggested.
IV. History and Elegy in Hellenistic Greece
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D. Brendan Nagle, "The Cultural Context of Alexander's Speech at Opis," p. 151
The article attempts to demonstrate that: 1) there is good reason to believe that the substance of the speech was spoken by Alexander at Opis; 2) that the passage in Arrian regarding Philip (An. 7.9.2 5, but mainly 2 3) reflects an attempt to do two things: a) counteract negative Images of Philip's state-building activity generated by his enemies in the Greek world; b) justify this activity to a Greek audience by the appropriation of the traditional language and imagery of Greek Kulturgeschichte.
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James J. O'Hara, "Sostratus Suppl. Hell. 733: A Lost, Possibly Catullan-Era Elegy on the Six Sex Changes of Tiresias," p. 173
Suppl. Hell. 733 is Eustathius' prose summary of Sostratus' elegy "Tiresias," in which Tiresias changes sex six times, then finally becomes a mouse. This paper offers text, English translation, and analysis; interesting features include learned borrowings from earlier myths, and a female Tiresias killing an attempted rapist. The paper discusses candidates for authorship, including the possibility that Ptolemy Chennus invented the "poem." But it suggests that Sostratus wrote with a Roman named Strabo in mind, that he might have been Sostratus of Nysa, whose brother and cousin taught Pompey and his sons, and that his poem might have influenced Catullus.
VI. Paragraphoi
Marilyn B. Skinner: Retrospective: p. 307
V. Didactic Poetry, Drama and History in Classical Rome
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C. M. C. Green, "Terms of Venery: Ars Amatoria I," p. 221
Ovid's AA I belongs to the well-established philosophical genre of the erotike techne, conceived here in terms of a hunt for the beloved. This hunting techne may also be a metaphor for civilizing the wild, creating great art, or training men in true civic virtue, and thus producing fides between them. Pursuit of women, whose element of wildness incites destructive reactions in men, subverts these high ideals: in Augustan Rome, Ovid implies, the hunt for the beloved destroys fides, and, ultimately, the hunter. His light tone masks an unexpectedly bitter conclusion.
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Sander M. Goldberg, "The Fall and Rise of Roman Tragedy," p. 265
This article examines the history of Roman tragedy from the late Republic through the time of Domitian, seeking the causes of the genre's decline as a literary form and its eventual return to respectability under the Principate. Declamatory rhetoric is shown to have been a beneficial influence because it countered tragedy's tendency--most pronounced in Cicero's day--toward spectacle by reasserting the primacy of language. A scene from Seneca's Thyestes illustrates this phenomenon and its sources.
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Marleen B. Flory, "Dynastic Ideology, the Domus Augusta, and Imperial Women: A Lost Statuary Group in the Circus Flaminius," p. 287
The tabula Siarensis, a senatorial decree of honors for Germanicus in 19 C.E., records the dedication in 15 C.E. of a statuary group to unnamed members of the domus Augusta in the Circus Flaminius in Rome. Evidence from Ovid's poetry concerning the domus Augusta, a phrase first used by Ovid, suggests that the people commemorated were Tiberius, Livia, Drusus the Younger and Germanicus. This article explores the propaganda implications of the idea of a domus Augusta and the influence of Livia's representation in a dynastic statuary group on public commemorations of Imperial women in the Tiberian period.