Elegiac Couplets Research Articles

A Learned Dog: Roman Elegy and the Epitaph for Margarita

Abstract: The epitaph for Margarita ( CIL 6.29896) consists of six elegiac couplets in Latin engraved on a small marble plaque in commemoration of a domestic dog. It was discovered in Rome and likely made in the second century CE. In this paper I examine its allusions to Augustan elegy and verse epitaphs for humans, arguing that it humorously applies eroticizing and literary language to a dog. I then consider Margarita’s status as an import from Gaul, arguing that the epitaph fits into a broader tendency of Augustan elegy to use foreign luxuries to eroticize and naturalize Roman imperialism.

Inferring China’s excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic using online mourning and funeral search volume

We construct a mourning and funeral index, using online search volume for “wreath and elegiac couplet”, “obituary”, “mortuary house”, “cinerary casket”, “cremation” and “pass away”, to infer excess cases of mortality in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the 3-month period (December 2022–February 2023) after China ended its Zero-COVID policy, there were around 712 thousand excess cases of mortality. These excess cases of mortality, bench marked against the 2-year period preceding the pandemic, could be directly or indirectly related to COVID-19. During the 35-month Zero-COVID regime (January 2020–November 2022), the excess death toll was a negative 1480 thousand. Overall, by delaying the surge in infections, China might have saved 767 thousand lives. While these estimates are based on various assumptions and can be imprecise, China’s COVID-19 experience could reasonably be characterized by a sharp surge in deaths after its departure from Zero-COVID and a steady pattern of lives saved during the Zero-COVID regime.

‘Etsi peccaui, sum tamen ipse tuus’. O elegii pokutnej Drakoncjusza (i słówko o pojęciu: barokowa ‘elegia’ pokutna)

Dracontius’s Satisfactio, though undoubtedly a prime example of a very complex literary work, is not really a work that cannot be properly described in generic terms. Upon consideration, the label ‘penitential elegy’ appears to be the most appropriate one, as it clearly indicates the major theme of the poem (the contrition of the sinner who acknowledges his sin above all before the God and, in the second place, before the Vandal king Gunthamund, to whom he pleads guilty to some not fully specified misdeed) as well as its metrical form. As for the latter, what is of particular relevance is not merely the fact that the piece is composed in elegiac couplets, but also that it is clearly written with an eye on Ovid the elegist. It is above all Ovid’s exilic motifs that Dracontius reuses throughout his poem, with special focus on Tristia II, imitated not so much through explicit verbal echoes, but rather through the general analogy of poetic situations in which the punished poet openly addresses his punisher, the princeps (Dracontius ostentatiously cites this ‘Ovidian’ word). At times, Dracontius happens to be no less provocative than Ovid was in apostrophizing his powerful addressee, although adopting a protreptic tone (which naturally implies some sort of superiority to the literary ‘you’), he does not pose as an expert in poetry with blemish life, despite his musa iococa (as Ovid did), but as a ‘fellow-Christian’ (suppressing all doctrinal discrepancies between his own Catholicism and Gunthamund’s Arianism) and indeed: a ‘fellow-sinner’ who forgives his (royal) ‘brother’ and asks for forgiveness in return. Moreover, the penitential tone of the poem is also stressed by several references to the Psalms and in particular to the figure of King David doing penance, exactly as in the Polish Baroque penitential elegy. The generic label I have advocated throughout my article is, in fact, ‘borrowed from’ the students of Old-Polish poetry, who are virtually unanimous in recognizing Baroque penitential elegy as a separate literary subgenre. It is not my intention to argue against such conclusions, as the generic features indicated by those specialist are quite convincing (I myself have found them very helpful for my own research), yet what I do emphasize is the very fact that the term ‘elegy’ when referred to vernacular poetry is applied not strictly (it is not related to any specific meter) but rather metaphorically, as if merely pointing to a general ‘mood’ of a poem. In Latin poetry, however, ‘elegy’, meaning ‘automatically’ the elegiac distich, means also concrete intertextual associations, primarily with Ovid (precisely like in Dracontius’s Satisfactio). Hence, when used to describe Dracontius’s text, the label ‘penitential elegy’ reveals its full hermeneutic potential.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Jeremy Adler

Reviewed by: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Jeremy Adler David E. Wellbery Jeremy Adler. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. London: Reaktion, 2020. 256 pp. This presentation of Goethe's life and work in the Critical Lives series is just the book every scholar of Goethe has been looking for, and this not merely because it is deeply informed, original in its judgments, and keenly insightful, but also because it is the book to recommend to students and nonspecialists who, after having read, say, Werther or Faust, seek a picture of the overall achievement. The book's virtues are legion. Perhaps foremost among them is that it calls attention to Goethe's contemporary significance while firmly situating his work within the context of European literary and cultural history. Goethe's work comes into view here as both remarkably relevant to the concerns of our moment and as a nodal point in a webwork of cultural traditions extending as far back as the biblical and Greco-Roman interventions. Thankfully, Adler's interrogation of Goethe's life and work sloughs off the carapace of disciplinary obsession and gives us a Goethe who deserves to be a topic of urbane and literate conversation. Indeed, the book is a demonstration of the indispensability of appreciation and discernment—the aims of "criticism" as it emerged in the Enlightenment—to a free and flourishing cultural life. Every knowledgeable reader will find in Adler's book moments that illuminate their own particular zones of interest. Among the segments I found especially salient was the account of Goethe's Italian sojourn and, in particular, the account of his deep engagement with Palladio. Brief but nonetheless sharply focused observations on Palladio's masterful treatise The Four Books of Architecture (1570), a copy of which Goethe, inspired by his autoptic inspection of several buildings, intensely studied, lead into an explanation of neoclassical form as remarkably supple and multivalent. The significance of Palladio's art for Goethe can, in fact, be studied in the latter's own drawings and commentaries on particular polyfunctional moments of architectural composition. Adler employs the insights gained from his consideration of the Palladio material in an account of the controlled fluidity that characterizes the verse version of Iphigenie auf Tauris, an account that, despite its brevity, is fresh and richly suggestive. I add to this Adler's important thought—one I share—that Iphigenie is best viewed together with the major dramatic works that chronologically frame it: Lessing's Nathan der Weise and Mozart and Schikaneder's Die Zauberflöte. The same (slightly dilated) decade that produced Kant's three critiques is likewise the epochal home of the three masterpieces of German-language Enlightenment drama. Add to this the link that Adler draws between Goethe's play and Mary [End Page 179] Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and you have material for a rewarding exploration of Goethe's play. The same chapter that contains the discussion of Iphigenie concludes with a demonstration of abundance in brevity: a survey of Goethe's studies in plant morphology, his hypothesis of the Urpflanze, the famous debate with Schiller, the elegiac couplets of "Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen," and the afterlife of Goethe's theory in the work of Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and D'Arcy Thompson. I also want to call attention to the six rich pages Adler devotes to Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Of course, there is no more knowledgeable expert than Adler on the "chemical simile" that gives the novel its title and, to a degree, models the movements of its characters. Accordingly, the reader learns that the term comes from the Swedish chemist Bergman, that it charts the "chiastic" process of double exchange of bonded substances (not elements!), and that chemists today call the process "double decomposition." Adler does not dwell on the ambiguities of the figure but moves quickly and helpfully to its significance as a model of social and psychological cohesion and dissolution. It adds to our appreciation of the novel to learn that Max Weber, who often employed literary references to lend intellectual zest to his analyses, employed the concept of elective affinities in two of his most famous works. In criticism, choice of the...

ПОЛЮВАННЯ НА «ЗУБРА»

The article highlights the creative heritage of Neo-Latin poets who belonged to Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusan (Litvin) and Lithuanian literature, in particular the works of a priest, secretary of the Grand Duchy Chancellery and Bishop of Polotsk, public notary of the Apostolic Chancellery for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, representative of the Renaissance Mykola Husovskyi (Latin – Nicolaus Hussovianus about 1470 –– after 1533) — Master of Rhetoric, later Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Bologna, primarily his epic poem «The Song of the Bison» or «The Song of the Appearance, Fury of the Bison and the Hunt for It» («Carmen de statura feritate ac venatione bisontis») commissioned by the Pope of the Roman Leo X Medici, traces the history of its writing in the context of contemporary literature, the appearance of a Latin-language monument in St. Petersburg (1853) and Krakow (1894; with a foreword and comments by J. Pelchar) and later receptions and translations (V. Maslyuk, A. Sodomora etc.). The subject of analysis was the re-singing of this work by A. Kychynskyi, the motives that motivated the poet to such a work, the history of the writing of this re-singing. He used a modernized modernized elegiac couplet with a dactylic foot (a type of hexameter with a pentamnet), which in European poetry changed its structure to a five-six-foot dactyl with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables while preserving ascending and descending melody, intonation and syntactic completeness. In the interpretation of Mykola Husovskyi, the bull appeared as the embodiment of courage, a symbol of hard work and a powerful welcoming force, conveyed in a monumental portrait of a proud animal, in his innate character, which corresponds to the mentality of the Polish pike: «The bison, although a beast, is a warrior in his zeal, / Because he recognizes only a fair victory». A. Kychynskyi in his retelling of «The Song of the Bison» preserved the compositional and semantic features of the arbitrary author’s version of the sample while preserving the Renaissance flavor, the principles of the natural (forest) man, the heroic rank and the state beliefs of the time of Prince Vytautas (1392–1430), who represented a charismatic statesman , the defender of Christianity, capable of resisting the Horde and Muscovy. The author of the re-singing achieved the semantic adequacy of Mykola Husovskyi’s work.

Enjambement am Pentameterende

Abstract This paper traces the enjambment techniques employed by Hellenistic and Latin authors at the end of the elegiac couplet. While the Alexandrians make deliberate use of enjambment at the end of the pentameter, in later Hellenistic and in Latin epigram there is a discernible movement toward a unity of syntax and metre, as testified by the poets’ tendency to avoid enjambment between distichs. The earliest Latin epigrammatists loyally render their Greek contemporaries’ aesthetics. Catullus, in his turn to Callimachean poetics, at times employs enjambment in this position, especially in elegy (as opposed to epigram). These techniques are largely abandoned by the Augustan poets, who rigidly introduce epigrammatic avoidance of enjambment into longer elegiac poems; among them, only Propertius in his fourth book rarely uses it as a stylistic means.

TEXTS RELATING TO THE DEATH OF MATILDA DE BAILLEUL, ABBESS OF WHERWELL: ST. PETERSBURG, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF RUSSIA, MS LAT.Q.V.I.62, FOL. 12V

This article offers the first full edition, translation, and commentary for three Latin texts relating to the death of Matilda de Bailleul (d. 1212), a Flemish abbess of Wherwell, a Benedictine abbey in Hampshire, England. Wherwell was relatively prosperous throughout its history and was probably founded in the tenth century by Queen Ælfthryth, wife of King Edgar. All three texts appear on the final verso (fol. 12v) of St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, MS Lat.Q.v.I.62. The manuscript comprises two quires: the first contains a liturgical calendar; the second contains computistic and musical material, followed by the texts relating to Matilda's death. The calendar was made at St. Albans in the middle of the twelfth century and had reached Wherwell by 1189 or soon afterwards. The second quire could have been added at either St. Albans or Wherwell. The first two texts are short poems which commemorate Matilda in elegiac couplets. The third text is a letter of consolation on the death of Matilda, from Guy, prior of Southwick, to Euphemia de Walliers (or Wallers), prioress of Wherwell, who was Matilda's niece and successor as abbess of Wherwell. For the first time, evidence is identified which indicates that the two poems were written by different authors. Errors in previous editions of the poems and letter are corrected. Explanations are offered for numerous passages that are difficult to interpret, many of which have hitherto received no comment. Parallels are frequently cited for passages in Guy of Southwick's letter, thereby showing his influences and the extent to which his letter stitches together and reworks quotations from both the Bible and other sources.

De recentioris aetatis epigrammate Coi asservato

The article examines an unpublished inscription conserved in the Nerantzia Castle of Kos (Greece). It consists of four elegiac couplets that Coan scholar Stamatios K. Pantelidis (Παντελίδης) composed some time before 1879. It was supposed to be located in the facade of the school founded the year indicated in the inscription. Seemingly, after the earthquake which devastated Kos in the year 1933, it was relocated in the warehouse of the Nerantzia Castle in northern Kos along with many other inscriptions. On the one hand, it provides the possibility of knowing how stonegravers work, to what extent Greeks knew their very own language in its ancient form and the way they dealt when it came to use (then and now) unusual forms of the language. On the other hand, the inscription is relevant to the cultural history of Greece in the last years of Ottoman rule and in the years after it, as Kos was part of the Ottoman Empire until 1912, date in which it passed under Italian rule until 1947, when the isle was incorporated into the Hellenic Republic. Therefore the purpose is to clarify the historical and real circumstances of the inscription, as well as to analyze the compositional process of this dedicatory epigram from the metrical point of view (it contains many deviations from to the classical precepts), style and classical tradition. The inscription has not been previously studied due to its peculiar characteristics. Indeed, it is an epigram written in modern times but in an archaizing Greek (i. e. roughly respecting the rules of classical grammar), so it is not studied by neohellenists given the ancient character of its language, nor by classicists because it was composed in recent times.

Denique Onirocrites, sic erit Hippocrates:Dreams as a Diagnostic Tool in Early Modern British Medicine

On 7 July 1663, a young Edward Browne, who later will become a famous ethnographer and court physician, presented his two theses for a baccalaureate degree at Cambridge University. The title of the first thesis was entitled Judicium de somniis est medico utile (A Determination [of Illness] Based on Dreams Is Useful for the Physician). In a long series of Latin elegiac couplets infused with language and imagery drawn from classical Roman poets like Virgil, Ovid, and Persius, Browne argues that the contents of a dream directly relate to the conditions of a patient’s humors and that a wise person can diagnose the current state of an ailment on the basis of the dream’s imagery. Browne relies on three main classical and Hellenistic Greek sources: Aristotle’s works on dreams, Hippocrates’ Regimen 4 (On Dreams), and Galen’s On Diagnosis from Dreams. In this paper I discuss how Browne’s theories derive from these ancient sources, especially Galen’s text, which had appeared only two centuries earlier in the West in a Latin translation. More importantly I demonstrate how Browne’s views were consistent with current medical theory prevalent throughout England and across Europe among physicians, philosophers, and laypeople. Keywords: dreams, medicine in England, Galen, Edward Browne, Cambridge University, Artemidorus

The Greek “Epigram” by the Leichoudes Brothers to Peter I

The article provides a transcription, translation, context, and commentary on two versions of a Greek “Epigram” to Peter the Great by the Leichoudes brothers, Ioannikios (1633–1717) and Sophronios (1653–1730), Greeks from Kephallenia who were outstanding religious writers and enlighteners. The poem called “An Epigram to our quietest and crowned by God Tsar Peter Alexeevich, autocrat of Moscow and all of Great, Small and White Rus” was preserved as an example of elegiac couplets in the manuscripts of their textbook “Poetics” (“Περὶ τῆς ποιητικῆς εἴτε μετρικῆς τέχνης”), which they composed for the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy — the first higher education establishment in Russia set up by the Leichoudes brothers in 1865 in Moscow. The textbook “Poetics” was written in ancient Greek without any Slavic translation. It was taught in the upper classes (suprema). In fact, it appears that this was a textbook on Greek versification. In 1855, the version of the “Epigram” kept in the manuscript of the Russian State Library in Moscow (F. 173 (MTA), № 331), dated to 1687, was published by Sergey Smirnov, but unfortunately this publication was not free from errors. The Greek version of the “Epigram” and its translation into Old Church Slavonic which had been kept in the manuscripts of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kiev (F. 306 (Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra) № 337), seems to have never been transcribed and published before. After having compared both versions, the author concludes that the Moscow version has a more elaborate rhetorical style. The “Epigram” was written on the occasion of Peter I’s first visit to the Greek-Slavic school of the Leichoudes brothers at the Epiphany monastery (1685–1687), the predecessor of the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy.

De rebus Siculis Carmen

Publisher: BUP – Basilicata University Press Series: Digital Humanities Pages: 224 Language: Latin, Italian NBN: http://nbn.depositolegale.it/resolver.pl?nbn=urn:nbn:it:unina-27435 Abstract: The De rebus Siculis carmen or Carmen de motibus Siculis or Liber ad honorem Augusti, transmitted by the sole ms. Bern Burgerbibliothek, Codex 120 II (B), is one of the three works attributed to Petrus de Ebulo and can be dated to 1194 -1197. It tells in elegiac couplets the conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily by the Emperor Henry VI of Hohenstaufen. The ms. is illuminated: unlike the other mss. of that time, where miniatures are used to decorate the text, here they help understanding, supporting the narration and sometimes completing its gaps. Tei-xml coded edition that makes use of EVT - Edition Visualization Technology. The work is carried out in the context of the PRIN 2015 A.L.I.M. (Archivio digitale della Latinita Italiana del Medioevo) by the Research Unit of the University of Basilicata, under the direction of prof. Fulvio Delle Donne.

Epitaph for Deinias

The funerary epigram, engraved on a base of white limestone that was found by E. Kirsten in Palairos in 1939, is the oldest from Hellenistic Akarnania. The text, composed of two elegiac couplets, commemorates the warrior Deinias, son of Learchos, who died young fighting against the Aetolians. The palaeographic characteristics of the letters of the inscription allow us to place it at the end of the 4th century BC: this dating seems to be confirmed by elements inside the text and by some historical sources (in particular Diodorus Siculus). The epitaph is an important testimony to local epigrammatic poetry: in fact, although it was made by an anonymous versifier, it appears remarkable both from a poetic (given the presence of formulas and topoi well attested in literature, such as the mourning for the immature mors of the warrior) as well as a linguistic point of view (in fact, forms taken from the Ionic dialect and from the epic can be found).

Uma nova tradução para Ovídio, Amores 1.8

A presente tradução é parte uma primeira revisão do trabalho tradutório apresentado em dissertação de mestrado (SOUZA, 2016). A proposta foi traduzir os dísticos elegíacos de Ovídio em uma forma que ecoasse o ritmo original do poema latino. Para isso, partiu-se da proposta de Carlos Alberto Nunes, a substituição de longas em posição princeps por tônicas. Porém, nesta tradução, ao contrário da de Nunes, permitiu-se também o seguimento desta tônica por apenas uma átona, formando troqueu que pode ser executado em performance como espondeu. Dessa maneira, a possibilidade de variação no metro foi mantida, mas os dátilos foram mantidos fixos no quinto pé do hexâmetro e segundo hemistíquio do pentâmetro. A cesura obrigatória do pentâmetro datílico foi executada com a aproximação de duas tônicas e enfatizada com espaçamento obrigatório, que induz o leitor ao reinício do ritmo. Para manter o andamento do metro, foram utilizados recursos como deslocamento de tônica, elisão entre o fim do hexâmetro e início do pentâmetro, elisões em geral. A presente revisão apresenta alterações no hexâmetro, que procura executar as suas cesuras, porém com o resultado de várias cesuras femininas. Além disso, o tom do poema procurou maior leveza e fluidez, com a eliminação de hipérbatos radicais e o rearranjo de informações dentro do dístico, que é a unidade dentro do poema. O poema traduzido, oitavo do livro 1, apresenta a figura da alcoviteira, personagem comum na comédia nova latina, que aqui é a presentada como uma bruxa que influencia a amada a extorquir os seus amantes e a desprezar o eu-poético, que sendo poeta, não tem como dar presentes valiosos além dos próprios poemas.

O dístico vernáculo português na tradução poética da carta de Fílis a Demofonte, das Heroides de Ovídio

Para verter a parelha elegíaca latina, algumas traduções poéticas metrificadas de obras ovidianas em língua portuguesa têm demonstrado certa preferência pelo dístico vernáculo, engendrado por Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos (1964), composto por verso alexandrino sucedido de decassílabo. Seguindo este modelo, apresentamos nossa proposta de transposição criativa para a carta de Fílis a Demofonte (Her. 2), elaborada com base nas considerações de alguns tradutores-poetas que se serviram deste mesmo arranjo e nos pressupostos teórico-metodológicos norteadores da prática da tradução poética, segundo Roman Jakobson (1969), Samuel Levin (1978) e José Paulo Paes (2008).

Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece: Reflections on Literature, Society and Religion by Marta González González

396 PHOENIX of style—have a different status in relation to the inconspicuous and often probably unconsciously used metaphors discussed by Lakoff and Johnson. The appendix on the semantics of Änyow and únyŽv (249–255) is indicative of the book’s methodological soundness: Brockliss argues on the basis of etymology as well as occurrences in Homeric epic that the root únyo/e- originally referred to “flowers” (rather than “surface” or “bursting forth” in general) and that the use of these terms consequently constitutes vegetal imagery. Yet the instances covered here all refer to actual flowers in the narrative, and this section also does not include and discuss metaphorical applications. Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversitÈ at MÈ unchen Fabian Horn Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece: Reflections on Literature, Society and Religion. By Marta Gonz alez Gonz alez. London and New York: Bloomsbury. 2019. Pp. ix, 213, 11 figs. This monograph offers a fresh introduction to private funerary verse inscriptions from archaic and classical Greece, making Hansen’s corpus accessible to a wider public.1 The book consists of an introduction and eight chapters, with notes placed after the conclusion, followed by a bibliography and two indices (the first lists the 161 inscriptions quoted and gives a table of concordances between IG or GVI and CEG, while the second is a five-page general index). Chapter One offers a chronological survey of the typologies of funerary monuments. González follows Clairmont’s method of studying gravestone and epigram together, which suits the material perfectly.2 Chapter Two in turn deals with literary aspects of verse inscriptions. Here González’s analysis of the origin of the elegiac couplet not only omits the longest archaic epigrams, but also ignores some important studies on the subject;3 as a result one should not accept without question her observations on the alleged evolution of their length. González also posits a gap in private epigrams between 510 and 440 b.c. due to the preponderance of public monuments commemorating the Persian Wars. This conclusion, however, presupposes that all epigrams for fallen warriors are public and, vice versa, that all public epigrams are for fallen warriors. Yet in that period war seems to be the predominant subject even in private epigrams, while only four, all public, refer to the Persian Wars.4 1 P. A. Hansen, Carmina Epigraphica Graeca (2 vols.; Berlin and New York 1983–89). 2 C. W. Clairmont, Gravestone and Epigram: Greek Memorials from the Archaic and Classical Period (Mainz 1970). 3 Cf. SEG 41.540 (Ambrakia, 530–500 b.c.) and BÉ 2015, n. 306 (Thebes, 530–500 b.c.), respectively five and four elegiac couplets. Recently, another long epigram in distichs, SEG 64.851 (Kaulonia, 480–470 b.c.), was discovered. González does not quote A. Aloni and A. Iannucci, L’elegia greca e l’epigramma: dalle origini al V sec. Con un’appendice sul nuovo Archiloco (Florence 2007). For further bibliography, see M. Tentori Montalto, “Some Notes on Croesus’ Dedication to Amphiaraos at Thebes (BÉ, 2015, n. 306),” ZPE 204 (2017) 1–9, at 2, n. 7. 4 See M. Tentori Montalto, Essere primi per il valore: Gli epigrammi funerari greci su pietra per i caduti in guerra (VII–V sec. a.C.) (Pisa and Rome 2017) for the following epigrams: CEG 79, 107, 112, 114, 118, 142, 170, 637 = 118a (private epigrams); CEG 2, 3, 131 and SEG 56.430 (epigrams on the Persian Wars). GVI 33 may have been composed later. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 397 Chapter Three starts by considering two epigrams and their statues. While the connection between statue and base is certain in the case of Phrasikleia’s epigram (CEG 24), the same is not true for the epigram on Kroisos (CEG 27), and yet González accepts it as a given throughout the book.5 She compares Phrasikleia’s epigram with SEG 57.799 (Kos, late sixth century b.c.), which offers the oldest testimony for the expression “bride of Hades.” González prudently rejects the idea that Kroisos belongs to the Alcmaeonid family. Her characterization of the epigram for Kroisos as a “dialogue” with the passerby , is, however, inaccurate, since the latter does...

The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

Reviewed by: The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus by Patricia A. Rosenmeyer Carolyn Higbie Patricia A. Rosenmeyer. The Language of Ruins: Greek and Latin Inscriptions on the Memnon Colossus. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 265. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-062631-0. Rosenmeyer focuses on the statue in Egyptian Thebes identified as the colossus of Memnon and surveys ancient visitors' reactions to it, in particular the call that it often made to its mother Eos (Dawn) in the morning. Her book falls into three sections. Chapters 1-3 give background, and discuss the identities of the visitors and inscriptions that they leave on the colossus. Chapters 4-5 focus on two subsets of the inscriptions: those that reflect the Homeric Memnon and those linked to Sappho. In chapter 6 reactions of German and English Romantic poets to Memnon and to the statue known as Ozymandias are surveyed. The book concludes with three appendices: diagrams of the inscriptions on the colossus; the text and translation of the inscriptions; and an index of the relevant names. Bibliography and an index follow. Chapter 1 opens with Richard Pococke's description of the two colossi at Thebes, then quotes the earliest and latest datable ancient inscriptions on Memnon—by Servius Clemens, who wrote in Latin c. 20 ce, and Falernus, who composed elegiac couplets in Greek c. 205 ce. Within this 200-year span, 108 inscriptions recorded visits of over 90 visitors—centurions, prefects, strategoi; prefects' wives, women in Hadrian's circle (including his wife); sophists and poets. The nature of these visits to the colossus is the subject of chapter 2, in which Rosenmeyer joins the debate about travel to sanctuaries in the Roman empire: was it primarily religious, for sightseeing, or scholarly? After she summarizes the scholarship, she examines the language that the inscribers use to record their reactions to hearing Memnon's cry. She concludes that their motivations [End Page 113] are "mixed: those of both a tourist and a worshipper, both an intellectual curiosity-seeker and someone eager to hear the voice of the divine" (75). Chapter 3 studies two rhetorical devices found in the inscriptions: apostrophe and prosopopeia. Both reflect visitors' desire to present their experience of hearing the noise made by the colossus as a conversation. Sometimes they hear Memnon's cry to his mother, then they address the statue. Sometimes they tell Memnon that they have come to hear him call to Eos, although it has required repeated visits. In chapter 4 Rosenmeyer summarizes much of the recent interest in the afterlife of the Troy tale and shows how many of these inscriptions fit the patterns that others have recently analyzed. Although visitors to the colossus accepted the identification as Memnon, they don't seem to have done anything new in their poetry—they use Homeric language, sometimes compose in dactylic hexameter, and demonstrate their knowledge of Memnon's fate. Chapter 5, on poetesses, particularly Balbilla, and their poems that reflect Sappho, has a similar starting point, Greek and Roman interest in an earlier poet. Because there has been much less work done on ancient fascination with Sappho, Rosenmeyer has more of her own to contribute. She distinguishes between responses to Sappho as a poetess and Sappho as a lesbian, and after examining what could be identified as archaizing and/or Aeolic about Balbilla's verses, concludes that the latter wishes to be regarded as a poet in the tradition of Sappho. Chapter 6 begins with the silencing of Memnon, then examines a selection of Romantic poetry devoted to the colossus, linked to the classical inscriptions through their use of prosopopeia. Rosenmeyer describes the rediscovery of the statue and provides glimpses of western European reactions of poets who did not—unlike their ancient counterparts—visit Thebes: Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Klingemann, Mayrhofer. Shelley's Ozymandias concludes the modern survey. Rosenmeyer shows us another manifestation of ancient fascination with the Homeric past and demonstrates how broadly across society and time that interest spread. Her quick glance at the nineteenth century reveals more recent uses of the Homeric world. I would have enjoyed more discussion about the seemingly unquestioned...

L’ostracismo di Santippo, figlio di Arrifrone, «il più colpevole tra i pritani sacrileghi». Alcune riflessioni alla luce di recenti scoperte archeologiche

The institution of ostracism has been considered a central practice of the Athenian democracy during the fifth century B.C.: the purpose of its establishment was to prevent tyranny. Anyway, according to Athenaion Politeia (22, 6), from Xanthippos’ ostracism (484) Athenians started to use the practice to remove from Athens any person who seemed to be too great, even if unconnected with tyranny. Among the ostraka against Xanthippos found during the Agora Excavations, one seems to be remarkable because it contains an elegiac couplet which stated why the father of Perikles should be ostracized. Interpretations of the text differ in details, but the general sense is that Xanthippos should be condemned because he did most wrong of all the leaders. Analyzing the inscription and the events of the Aeginetan War (Her. VI 88-93), this paper supposes that the ostracism of Xanthippos could have been caused by the rising figure of Themistokles, who condemned the Alkmeonid associate for his failed attack against Aegina. In fact, this defeat elicited a sacrilege against one of Nikodromos’ supporter. As the word ἀλeιτeρο῀ ν, inscribed on the ostrakon, seems to suggest, this event could have been related to the Cylonian curse.

Spectacle in the Eleven Elegies of Sulpicia: To Marcus Colyer, M.D., and Joseph Pasternak, M.D.

Spectacle in the Eleven Elegies of SulpiciaTo Marcus Colyer, M.D., and Joseph Pasternak, M.D. Judith P. Hallett (bio) My paper closely examines the text of Tibullus Book 3, poems 8–13, the eleven elegies about, and to my mind by, the Augustan poet Sulpicia, through the lens of "the visual."1 It concludes by reflecting on what I would regard as an Ovidian echo of one particularly memorable visual detail in these elegies. Like Tibullus—whose death in 19 BCE Ovid laments, and whose poetry he evokes both reverentially and playfully in Amores 3.9—Ovid testifies that he benefited from the literary patronage of Sulpicia's maternal uncle, the influential general and statesman Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus.2 For that reason alone, Ovid was likely to have been acquainted with Sulpicia and her writing. And although Ovid never mentions Sulpicia by name as he does Tibullus in his poetry, he often appears to evoke her poetry as well, although never in a reverential or playful way.3 I will argue that in her eleven elegies Sulpicia depicts herself as a dynamic, self-actualizing visual spectacle. Then, more briefly, I will maintain that Sulpicia's mode of self-representation contrasts with the tendency of Ovid and the other male elegists to portray their female inamoratae as immobile, passive art objects. In this context, I will contend that in the first book of the Ars amatoria Ovid evokes the opening two lines of the first Sulpicia elegy, 3.8, so as to recall, much as he does in both the Amores and Metamorphoses, Sulpicia's elegies. I will claim as well that he does so to critique Sulpicia's verses, unfavorably commenting upon the dynamic, self-actualizing, physically appealing, expensively adorned, and erotically successful female persona central to the visual spectacle these verses create. An attention-arresting elegiac couplet begins the first of the eleven Sulpicia elegies: Sulpicia est tibi culta tuis, Mars magne, kalendis / spectatum e caelo, si sapis, ipse veni (Great god Mars, Sulpicia is arrayed for you on your Kalends. If you have any discernment, come down from heaven to look at her yourself).4 Summoning the god Mars on the first day of 'his' own month, the poem commences with the poet's own name in the [End Page 195] nominative case, Sulpicia, immediately establishing her as the sentence's subject. The second line opens with the rare (and, not insignificantly, metrically elided) supine spectatum (in order to look at), immediately characterizing her as engaged in public performance. The eleven elegies that these two lines introduce represent Sulpicia in performance, as a physically attractive visual spectacle. Lines 5 and 6 of elegy 8 initially foreground her eyes themselves as firepower for the god Amor: "From her eyes [illius ex oculis], when he wishes to set the gods on fire, fierce Love lights his twin torches." The rest of the elegy, describing Sulpicia in the third person and thereby underscoring her qualities as a visualized object, emphasizes Sulpicia's active physical movements and changes of appearance while viewed, indeed gazed upon, by Mars.5 Its next eight lines call special attention to her physical attractiveness through an etymological figure incorporating a personified noun, impersonal verb, and adverb which derive from the stem dec- (to be attractive, look good).6 Lines 7 and 8 note that "attractiveness [Decor] stealthily grooms and follows behind her whatever she performs [agit], wherever she wends her way [quoquo vestigia movit]." Lines 9 and 10 assert "if she loosens her hair, it is attractive [decet] for her to wear flowing tresses; if she arranges it, she must be revered." Lines 11 and 12 claim that "she sets hearts aflame, if she has wished to go out [procedere] in a Tyrian gown; she sets hearts aflame, if she comes out [venit] gleaming white in a snowy robe." Lines 13 and 14 then liken the physical appeal bestowed on Sulpicia by her varied wardrobe to that of the Olympian deity Vertumnus, "who wears a thousand modes of dress, and wears a thousand attractively [decenter]." The next six lines describe the expensive Tyrian wools, Arabian fragrances, and Indian gems that adorn Sulpicia. Finally, four...

Das Gymnasium Francofurtanum – Kein Ort für Kunstbanausen

In 1542, Frankfurt schoolmaster Jacobus Micyllus (1503–1558) composed an epigram in four elegiac couplets, entitled Inscriptio scholae Francofortensis. It pretends to be an inscription on the recently restored Barfüßerkloster, which was to house the school for the next three centuries. In the epigram, the school is depicted as a tranquil place of reflection and learning, in contrast to the wars raging outside the cloister walls. In this paper, the author will show how Micyllus places the Gymnasium Francofurtanum in the tradition of Plato’s Academy by alluding to the legendary inscription excluding all those ignorant of geometry from that institution. Micyllus modifies this idea by welcoming only those who worship the Greek and Latin muses. The Latin school thus becomes a retreat for those who wish to dedicate themselves fully to humanist education in Latin and Greek, sheltered from the turbulence and hostilities of the time.

Οι "Caesares" του Αυσονίου. Παρατηρήσεις και επισημάνσεις

Ausonius was a latin poet, born in Burdigala (Bordeaux), who, <em>inter alios</em>, composed the poetic work entitled "Caesares" between 379-383 A.D. This collection is an exposition of the lives of Roman emperors in verse (in hexameter and elegiac couplets). The collection is not complete. The work stops suddenly at the incomplete quatrain of Elagabalus. In this paper the author deals with the literary genre of the collection, the style of the poem, while he also attempts to trace the texts the poet used (Suetonius, Tacitus, the so[called <em>Kaisergeschichte</em>, Marius Maximus etc.). Finally he refers to the proposals concerning the missing part of the collection as put forth by various scholars in recent years.