CASA Essay competition: THE EXPRESSION OF GRIEF IN THE APOLLO AND HYACINTHUS EPISODE IN OVID’S METAMORPHOSES AND IN FANFICTION

Мета статті – дослідження впливу культурно-психологічної мотивації на формування етичних цінностей в Римської імперії. У статті визначено основні чинники впливу внутрішнього та зовнішнього середовища Римської імперії на формування етичних цінностей римського імператора. Актуальним є формування комплексу ідей, уявлень та цінностей суспільства давнього Риму на основі синтезу різних культур, пропаганди, створення іміджу та реформи моралі. Методологія дослідження полягає у вивченні процесів розвитку античної традиції з позиції аналізу морально-психологічних мотивів. У дослідженні також були застосовані методи історизму, аналізу, синтезу, структурний та проблемно-хронологічний для вивчення механізмів формування римського менталітету доби правління Августа. Наукова новизна. З’ясовано еволюцію формування етичних цінностей та реконструйовано систему цінностей, якими керувалася римська еліта. Висновки. Вважаємо, що уявлення про римлян як військових стратегів в сучасному сенсі, які керувалися при прийнятті рішень оцінкою військової, політичної і економічної інформації, є ілюзією, створеною римською пропагандою. Тому основним чинником, що дозволяє з’ясувати еволюцію механізмів функціонування зовнішньої політики імперії, є вивчення проблем формування римського менталітету доби правління Августа. Доведено, що впродовж І–ІІ ст. н. е. відбувся синтез елліністичної та римської літературної традиції, основними етичними рисами якої стала грецька «універсальність» та римська «стабільність». Відкритість для культурних контактів римських інтелектуалів сприяла формуванню таких етичних цінностей, як: гідність, скромність, постійність, схильність до самозречення. Наголошено, що на засадах змішаного устрою основними світоглядними позиціями стають «велика рівність» та реформа моралі, яка може бути проведена тільки керівником (імператором), здатним відновити державу в умовах кризи, внаслідок власних громадянських та моральних чеснот. В її основі лежала турбота про статус та «гідність» імперії. Тому, дії римлян потрібно трактувати з позиції «великої стратегії», яка являє собою комплекс політичних ідей, уявлень та цінностей.

With the entrance of the modern world into economic and political difficulties, the question of the financial support to population and business by the state is much more acute. A major financial source for states, taxes in turn have a strong influence on the behavior of citizens and companies, which are generally opposed to their increase. What is the historical attempt to resolve this contradiction? The history of taxes in Ancient Rome, the progenitor of modern European and Western civilization, shows us that taxes are not just a source of financing, but also a basic structural element of the state and society. Their significant growth led in antiquity not only to riots, riots and bloodshed, but also to serious changes in the construction of the Roman economy and society. At the same time, the observance of the principles of fairness of taxes and the control of their collection prove to be key for their functioning within the economy and society. The ultimate rise in taxes led to a stateregulated economy in Rome, i.e. to the prototype of real socialism, and the end of the Roman Empire. This is the end of the road for state support. Will the modern world catch up with it again?

Reviewed by: A Global History of Child Death: Mortality, Burial, and Parental Attitudes by Amy J. Catalano Lydia Murdoch A Global History of Child Death: Mortality, Burial, and Parental Attitudes. By Amy J. Catalano. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. xi + 175 pp. Cloth $81.95. In the past decade, historians have published important—often lengthy—new books on death, several of which extend beyond individual national contexts: Peter Stearns’s Revolutions in Sorrow: The American Experience of Death in Global Perspective (2007); Erik Seeman’s Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800 (2010); and Thomas Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015). These and other national histories by Drew Gilpin Faust, Pat Jalland, and Julie-Marie Strange, among others, mark a renewed interest in death studies, but, like Philippe Ariès’s classic The Hour of Our Death (1981), tend not to concentrate primarily on the particular issues related to child mortality. Catalano’s Global History of Child Death addresses this gap in the literature, taking the broadest possible coverage from prehistoric to modern times, extending from the cremated body of a three-year-old child buried some 11,500 years ago in the North American Arctic to the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings. Catalano’s survey draws upon research in archeology, history, anthropology, psychology, literary studies, and art history. The book is divided into two main sections, the first on “Mortality and Burial Practices through History,” and the second on “Indicators of Parental Attitudes toward Child Death.” Specific topics cover the causes of child mortality, funeral and burial practices, gravestones and other monuments, social directives for grieving parents, parental expressions of grief, and mourning practices. Both sections also include significant, arguably disproportionate, material on child sacrifice and infanticide. Given the far-reaching scope of A Global History of Child Death, there are understandable limitations on what it can accomplish. Yet, for a number of topics the literature review is dated and, at least from a historian’s view, often idiosyncratic. There is an entire chapter on “America and England in the 17th to 20th Centuries,” for instance, but Catalano, an expert in children’s literature, does not include books by Faust, Jalland, or Strange in the bibliography. A conclusion and more overall historical contextualization of case studies would help readers [End Page 123] navigate the quick transitions between different times and places. The lack of contextualization leads to some surprising statements, including the idea that ancient Romans “thought that the regular practice of killing abnormal children removed a defective gene from the evolutionary process” (40). The scholar with whom Catalano engages most directly is Ariès, but even in this case readers would benefit from more direction in terms of the author’s position on key debates. While A Global History of Child Death includes case studies from across the world, the greater emphasis is on Europe and America. At times, the portrayal of non-Western histories lapses into a kind of Orientalist narrative. For example, Catalano blithely recounts, “One of the first efforts in the Eastern hemisphere to put an end to female infanticide was in 1789 by the British government” (47). Along with this wholesale treatment of “the Eastern hemisphere,” there is no mention of the extensive work by scholars, such as Padma Anagol, Satadru Sen, Daniel Grey, Lata Mani, and Antoinette Burton, explaining how British campaigns against infanticide, like the debates over sati, age of consent legislation, and widow remarriage, cannot simply be described as humanitarian efforts without understanding the colonial projects that such reforms sought to advance. In other examples, readers learn that “the Papuans practice cannibalism” (note the present tense) and that the Japanese routinely ate child victims of the 1783 famine, only to discover, through the footnotes, that the sources for these statements were published in 1912 and 1916 respectively (98, 135). The strength of A Global History of Child Death is the way in which it models, in an accessible format, the myriad of sources and methodologies scholars use to understand social and individual responses to the death of a child. Catalano prompts readers to ponder the limitations as well...

Beowulf ’s Poetics of Absorption: Narrative Syntax and the Illusion of Stability in the Fight with Grendel’s Mother Evelyn Reynolds In Beowulf, the last survivor stands before the barrow in which he has just interred his kin (lines 2236–2246).1 Absorbed in grief, he then speaks his famous lament for his lost people. The poem allows us partly to imagine the survivor and his world as his lament unfolds, but it also bars us from becoming fully affectively engaged with him by positioning him as alone (he has no audience, and he does not address us; we only overhear him) and by setting his elegy in syntactically negative, imagistically sketchy forms (lines 2247–2254). “Heald þū nū, hrūse, nū hæleð ne m(ō)stan, / eorla ǣhte” [Earth, hold now the possessions of earls, what heroes cannot] (lines 2247–2248), the survivor opens, but in this sentence he gives no more precise direct object than “eorla ǣhte” [possessions of earls]. Instead of describing his people’s treasure, he says that “hyt ǣr . . . / gōde begēaton” [good men earlier obtained it] (lines 2248–2249). Beowulf does not allow its audience to picture the treasures or the survivor or his people, and by preventing a full mental picturing, it lessens affective engagement.2 We are thus barred from sympathy with the survivor’s grief at the same time as we hear his expression of grief. The poem focuses the audience’s attention on the survivor, yet denies them their full ability to sympathize with him. This state of imaginative and affective suspension I call the absorption-denial dynamic.3 The absorption-denial dynamic exemplified by the lay of the last survivor characterizes several passages in Beowulf and provides a useful means of understanding how Beowulf ’s formal elements operate on the imaginative and affective states of the poem’s audience.4 As I define it, the absorption-denial dynamic is the way in which a poem immerses its audience while at the same time distancing that audience. We are familiar with the sense of being absorbed in a text—that sense of having our imaginations filled with imagery and emotion. Yet the absorption-denial dynamic makes explicit the paradoxical fact that the artwork also forces its audience [End Page 43] to realize that they are outside its world, ultimately not able to sympathize with or picture its characters fully. One effect of the absorption-denial dynamic is a stilling of time: the audience finds itself suspended between immersion in and separation from the artwork. Often, absorptive pieces represent moments in which something is about to change but has not yet done so—the survivor is about to die from heartbreak; Heorot is about to burn—to enhance the audience’s sense of imaginative or affective suspension with a sense of temporal suspension. In this article, I will focus on a passage in Beowulf that embodies this liminal temporality in a surprising way. This passage is Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother, which runs from line 1399 to line 1569. Depicting Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel’s mother in her underwater cave, the fight scene is an example of an epic set piece. It is an unusual example of an absorptive scene since it is not contemplative or explicitly affective, as is the lay of the last survivor or the poem’s concluding depiction of Beowulf’s funeral pyre. Beowulf and the monster are absorbed in fighting each other; the audience expects a dynamic, quickly moving battle narrative, a narrative that invites complete imaginative immersion in the action. Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother contains syntactic structures that are not present during Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, syntactic structures that might seem aesthetically counterintuitive to a modern audience. Indeed, whereas Beowulf’s fight with Grendel often receives scholarly attention because the poet renders the fight in gripping synesthetic detail, his fight with Grendel’s mother has seldom been discussed in aesthetic terms.5 However, the poem’s linguistic structures here actually slow the narrative’s pace and prevent audience immersion. A reexamination of Beowulf ’s formal elements in light of the way they position the poem’s audience, particularly...

Western civilization is in many ways an outgrowth of the Roman Empire. The Classical Roman Reader, which contains a collection of some of the finest and most important writing of the Roman period, brings the modern reader into direct contact with the literature, political thought, science, art and architecture, and psychology of classical Rome. Here are the wonders of the Roman world presented in a modern, accessible manner. Each selection is preceded by an introduction that identifies the author and provides information that allows modern readers to consider these texts in a new light. What we discover might be surprising. For instance, in Cicero's orations and Marcus Aurelius' meditations, we hear echoes of todays political forums and popular-psychology talk-show hosts. Virgil's ironic dramatization of the founding myth in the Aeneid prepared the way for America's deeply embedded ambivalence toward the presidency. The Roman preference for practicality over philosophy, leading to a network of superhighways that joined Europe, Asia, Asia Minor, and Africa, literally paved the way for the global village of the contemporary world. From Plautus' wildly comic plays to Cato's instructions on farming, and from Catullus' erotic poems to Petronius' descriptions of the decadent splendor of the declining empire, The Classical Roman Reader provides access to the literary, artistic, social, religious, political, scientific, and philosophical texts that shaped Roman thinking and helped form the backbone of Western culture.

Juvenal in his First Satire (vv. 115, 116) remarks on the curious fact that Pecunia, though so devoutly worshipped, yet has no temple of her ownut colitur Pax atque Fides, Victoria, Virtus, quaeque salutato crepitat Concordia nido.She is not actually like them an object of cult. The modern reader, while relishing the bitterness of the gibe, is left vaguely wondering how the Romans could seriously worship such ‘personifications’ as Pax or Fides, and his wonder will only increase, if he follows up the subject and traces the cult of the ‘Virtues’ in literature, in inscriptions and, above all, in the imperial coinage. When we talk of ‘personifications,’ we feel ourselves at once in the realm of poetic or artistic imagery and fancy; the ancient Roman, when he spoke of similar figures, felt himself in the realm of religious fact.

Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames: Representation, Play, Transmedia

Bigger Than “Ben-Hur”: The Book, Its Adaptations, and Their Audiences

Thomas Hendrickson's The De Bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius is a scholarly introduction, translation, and commentary on the noted and influential history of ancient libraries by Justus Lipsius (1546–1607). Going beyond the story of mainly Egyptian, Greek, and Roman libraries, Lipsius also used his book to promote the need for general, nonsectarian research libraries and institutions, all the more necessary in the intensely competitive religious arena of the time. De bibliothecis (maybe more commonly known as De bibliothecis syntagnma) first appeared in 1602 and had some twenty-four editions—many of which, we are told, are now available online—but previously there were no studies of how the publication changed over time nor any adequate critical translation. Hendrickson gives both the original text and a new translation on the facing page, while his introduction and extensive commentaries flesh out the meanings of the Lipsius text and offer a more current but nonnarrative understanding of these libraries. In focusing on an individual if important manuscript, his bibliography presents a wealth of specialized textual studies. Readers wanting more on ancient libraries themselves might read Olof Pedersen, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press, 1998), Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 2001), or Yun Lee Too, The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 2010).Lipsius was a noted Humanist scholar of somewhat flexible religious principles able to move professionally across the all-important Catholic–Lutheran–Calvinist divides of the day, not unlike some other historians and librarians like Peter Lambeck or for that matter Lipsius's successor at the University of Leiden, the great Joseph Scaliger, neither of whom figures in Hendrickson's story, but he does conclude that Lipsius “was a Stoic whose homeland was ancient Rome” (4).The only previous English translation was by the American public librarian John Cotton Dana, whose access to sources and Latin were both severely limited, relying more on a French translation that used a different version of the text, so this Hendrickson work is doubly welcome. De bibliothecis is itself sometimes more quotations or lists from classical sources than a strict recounting of libraries and librarians as identification of texts was the main interest of bibliophiles and librarians at the time. Hendrickson received his Ph.D. in classics at UC Berkeley and appears very informed on the sources and subsequent works. He points out that writings about libraries in the ancient world should be seen as contemporary metaphors “for ambition, political power, military dominance, and religious authority” (12).De bibliothecis was both a historical survey of non-Christian ancient libraries and a plea for princely funding of research libraries that had little result in the Netherlands but did influence the creation of the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana in Milan in 1609. “There is,” Hendrickson comments, “an irony in that Lipsius's goal in writing the DB seems not so much to have been the creation of a major work of scholarship as the inducement of a wealthy donor to fund a library” (165). The book was published by the famous Plantin house, a point explored at least briefly by Hendrickson. He presents an ingenious chart of the relationships among the various authorized and unauthorized editions, which gives useful insights to publishing in the early seventeenth century. Hendrickson's main purpose is to bring scholarly edition of De bibliothecis to a modern audience. Despite the cost, this book is worthy of consideration at all major historical collections and graduate library schools.

In 2015, Inquiry@Queen’s opened with Classics students performing Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, a 2500-year-old play illuminating themes of gender inequality and the victims of war which resound as strongly with modern audiences as they did with the ancient Greeks. Classical drama’s continuing ability to resonate with contemporary audiences is one of reasons it has long been viewed as a foundational component of a Humanities education. As a project for Queen’s 175th anniversary, the presenter investigated how Classics and other units have incorporated classical drama into Queen’s classes and post-curricular activities since the 1840s. In addition to ancient Greek and Roman plays, the study included plays with classical themes, and post-Classical plays staged by Classics students and professors. The methodology involved data collection from Queen’s Archives, scholarly publications, and other relevant sources.
 In this poster, I will provide examples to show how classical drama has been used at Queen's in relation to four main goals: its capacity in sustainability ‘and’ inclusivity; its value as a model for development of future cultures; its function as an active learning experience fostered by concentrated and contextualized classical study; and its ability to provide a cultural ‘safe’ space for participants with diverse needs to engage in examination of complex human problems. It is salient that classical drama has continued to be able to adapt to the changing needs of students and educators at Queen’s for at least 172 years.

An unstudied manuscript in Princeton contains lectures delivered by the youthful Jacques Sirmond at the Jesuit college of Pont-a-Mousson. In contrast to the received picture of Jesuit pedagogues as devoted rhetoricians, Sirmond explained Aeneid books 3 and 12 in a self-consciously historical way, concentrating especially on Roman law and religion and their interaction. His concerns are discussed in light of sixteenth-century scholarship on ancient Rome, contemporary Vergil commentary, humanist interest in the history of culture as a hermeneutic tool, and Sirmond's own later career as a philologist and ecclesiastical historian. Sirmond's comments on Aeneid 12 in particular show how he used religious and legal information in an unusual ethical reading of Vergil's text. Like some other early modern readers, Simond read Vergil's poem, other ancient literary texts, and Roman historical texts and documents as equivalent and interchangeable sources of information.

Aulus Gellius, author of the Noctes Atticae , had a fondness for the antique. His collection of nearly 400 essays on antiquities has long been valued by modern readers for its own overt valuing of Roman antiquity. The Noctes is about valuing the antique, but even more so is it about valuing those who mediate and communicate antiquity. This chapter offers a few glimpses of the narrative and rhetorical techniques by which Gellius represents antiquity as inherently mediated, and explores the choices every valuer of antiquity makes, knowingly or not, about which mediators he or she will trust to provide reliable access to the antique. Gellius shares with Pausanias an interest in adding, to a tour of antiquities in the present, an aura of uncertainty about their meaning. But he unpacks and analyzes the processes that cause that uncertainty, demonstrating how to navigate and master it. Keywords: Aulus Gellius; Gellius; Noctes Atticae ; Pausanias; rhetorical techniques; Roman antiquity

In American drama of the first half of the twentieth century, three names stand out among playwrights whose work was greatly influenced by Classical Greek and Roman literature and thought. These are Eugene O'Neill, Maxwell Anderson, and Robert E. Sherwood. Many of O'Neill's plays continue to be performed today. However, An derson's and Sherwood's works have unfortunately fallen out of favor with modern audiences. Both are important for an understanding of the Classical tradition in the twentieth century. In this paper, I provide the first extended literary analysis of Sher wood's The Road to Rome, which was a hit on the Broadway stage in 1927.1 illustrate how the major characters of the play embody social and ethical conflicts being played out in New York in the 1920s. I then demonstrate that the play is constructed in ac cordance with the major principles of Aristotelian dramaturgy, laid out in Aristotle's Poetics. Finally, I show how the play exemplifies what Maxwell Anderson, beginning from Aristotle's idea of tragic recognition, called "discovery."

Reviewed by: Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire by Malachi Haim Hacohen Michael Brenner Malachi Haim Hacohen. Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 752 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000306 This book is special in many ways, not the least of it being that readers get two books for the price of one. The first book is a learned and detailed longue-durée historical exegesis of the Jacob and Esau story. The second book is, on its surface, an outline of the relationship between nation and empire in modern Europe, but more concretely a modern reading of Jewish existence in the Habsburg Empire and twentieth-century Austria. To be sure, both themes overlap at times, but often they take their own course, and might have better fit between two different book covers. Let us begin with the first thread of his complex narrative. It is a quite original reading of the Jacob and Esau story from Roman times until the twenty-first century. Hacohen argues "that the Roman Empire and not Christianity was crucial to rabbinic Edom" and "that European Christendom's formation in confrontation with Islam first fixed the Jewish gaze on the Roman Empire's religious character [End Page 448] and triggered the Christianization of Edom and Esau" (79). In this equation of Esau (a.k.a. Edom) with the notion of empire we see the connection between the two threads of the book. Hacohen continues to weave this intricate net for most of his medieval topics. Esau, he argues, "became Christian when Jews recognized, belatedly, that what they dismissed as another minut became the driving force of empire" (92). As we proceed to the later periods, this intriguing connection between the Esau and Jacob story on the one hand and the nation/empire narrative is not always present. When Hacohen discusses modern Jacob and Esau interpretations, his account is based mainly on rabbinic sermons of a very broad spectrum: the traditionalist Ḥatam Sofer likening Esau with Reform Jews and placing them outside the community; the Hamburg Reform preacher Eduard Kley using Jacob to promote "a Jewish-inflected liberal Protestantism as authentic Judaism"; the Vienna preacher Isaac Noah Mannheimer calling on German Jews to acculturate before being granted emancipation; the founder of Neo-Orthodoxy Samson Raphael Hirsch turning Jacob's struggle with the angel into the saga of Jewish exile and emancipation. Hacohen's sympathies clearly lie with the more traditional rabbis and their efforts to preserve tradition within modernity, as opposed to Reform rabbis who, like Hamburg preacher Eduard Kley, were offering, in Hacohen's words, "a Jewishinflected liberal Protestantism as authentic Judaism, and preaching misogyny and intolerance under the guise of enlightened liberalism" (232). These chapters of the book may not be tied strongly into the discourse on nation and empire, but they are the real core of the book, a true treasure for historians. Hacohen uses original material to read modern Jewish history against the grain. It is not the usual intellectuals or the political spokespeople of nineteenth-century central European Jewry he is interested in, but rather their often-overlooked religious leaders. By analyzing their sermons through the perspective of Jacob and Esau, Hacohen delivers an innovative view of modern German and Austrian Jewish history. This alone would be sufficient reason to read the book. But then there is still the other book. Much of its second half provides an account of Austrian Jewish intellectuals in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century. We read about Jewish imperial politics and socialist federalism; Adolf Fischhof's and Nathan Birnbaum's Diaspora politics; Karl Popper's Open Society; Red Vienna of the 1920s; concepts of Jewish cosmopolitanism; Erich Auerbach and concepts of Judeo-Christian Europe; and, in the final chapter, about postwar remigrés to Austria, such as the writer Friedrich Torberg, a brilliant intellectual and a Cold War warrior. It is not always clear what all this material, plus much more, has to do with the Jacob and Esau narrative, but we find here undoubtedly the most interesting account to date on modern intellectual Austrian Jewish history, which makes the book worth...

Medicine, astronomy, dealing with numbers - even the cultures of the pre-modern world offer a rich spectrum of scientific texts. But how are they best translated? Is it sufficient to translate the sources into modern scientific language, and thereby, above all, to identify their deficits? Or would it be better to adopt the perspective of the sources themselves, strange as they are, only for them not to be properly understood by modern readers? Renowned representatives of various disciplines and traditions present a controversial and constructive discussion of these problems.