Greco-Roman Models Research Articles

La farce rétrospective – revoir la farce au xvie siècle

The consideration for farce during the Renaissance appears deeply ambiguous. Although the humanists tend to disapprove the farce as a medieval leftover, some of them do write farces; most of the preserved farces date from the 16th century and several farces are still published at the beginning of the 17th century; also, at the time, the representation of a tragedy is usually followed by a farce. The theoretical rejection of this genre for its lack of Greco-Roman models is counterbalanced by the fascination for its indigenous origins, as farce is considered an eminently French tradition. Nevertheless, some authors (such as Amyot) seem to implicitly legitimate farce inscribing it within the universalia of theatrical history.

Diversidad en la distancia. Imágenes romanas de divinidades en el Occidente Hispano

The compilation of the images of the native-influenced gods of the Hispanic West leads to a heterogeneous picture. Besides the images that are clearly based on Greco-Roman models such as the Endovellicus or the demons from Rio Tinto there are others that stand in the Celtic-Roman tradition such as the blacksmith-god of Vilar de Perdizes or autochthonous creations such as the so-called Vestius Aloniecus . Thus, the Mediterranean impetus for the creation of divine images was adopted in different ways and led to different solutions. Their distance to the Roman model is evident. Nevertheless, the studied monuments do indeed document the beginnings of an independent development in Hispania, which in a long-term perspective did not prevail against the background of the Roman models, however, and consequently did not lead to a common canon of divine imagery in the Indo-European West of Hispania. The example of Aelius Fronto in Munigua shows clearly that the initiative for the installation of indigenous gods came only by order of the private sphere. Also for this reason it proves to be quite heterogeneous by nature due to the respective social position, level of education and origin - from the provincial capital Augusta Emerita or from the hinterland.

El imperio de la virtud by Jorge L. Terukina Yamauchi

Reviewed by: El imperio de la virtud by Jorge L. Terukina Yamauchi Charles B. Moore Terukina Yamauchi, Jorge L. El imperio de la virtud. Tamesis, 2017. 418 pp. Yamauchi's El imperio de la virtud is a welcome and much-needed critical tour de force in colonial Spanish American criticism. It not only takes a fresh look at Bernardo de Balbuena's often misunderstood and overly-simplified, if not ignored, Grandeza mexicana of 1604, but finally puts the work into the extremely complex literary and cultural context of its day. To this end, the author masterfully lays out in dense yet very readable and understandable language the personal and cultural baggage with which Balbuena pleads his case for continued peninsular hegemony of New Spain. Yamauchi's frequent summaries of the material guide the reader through what could have been an unforgiving quicksand of theories, quotations, and ancient debates on race, economy, religion, and ethnicity. His carefully chosen close readings from not only Grandeza mexicana but from an almost overwhelming plethora of other ancient and early modern works which influenced or challenged the poem's intent clarify and illuminate the book's thesis. He weaves his thesis concerning the cultural superiority of the Spanish into what is a true encyclopedic compendium covering ancient through sixteenth-century culture. The book is divided into two parts. Part I is then subdivided into a must-read "Introducción" and two sections, while Part II includes four sections. There are twenty-three supporting figures which illustrate tools used by Spaniards (i.e. portraits, coats of arm, maps) to support their claim of superiority over criollos in Mexico. The twenty-page bibliography is essential reading for any colonialist. Part [End Page 420] I, "Hacia Grandeza mexicana: una epistomología del 'centro,'" sets the stage for Balbuena's use of Greco-Roman praise of cities and theory of the five zones to support Spain's right to govern New Spain. According to these concepts, only Europeans from the Mediterranean temperate zone had the appropriate skill set (or "virtue" per the book's title) to govern, guide, and direct the progress of the colonies. These theories dismissed their criollo rivals as entitled inferiors who were opposed to real work and desired to live off the heroic exploits of their conquering ancestors. Peninsulars like Balbuena who lacked direct blood lines to power had to look for other reasons to substantiate their desire for control of the encomienda plantation system, its Indian free labor pool, and all the high-ranking (and paying) positions in the colonial bureaucracy. Spain's virtuous and intelligent temperament based on classical Greco-Roman determinist theories was the perfect answer to this dilemma. In Part II, "Grandeza mexicana y la polémica por la posesión de la Nueva España," I found Yamauchi's discussion of Balbuena's rhetoric on work and art particularly fascinating. He shows how, in Grandeza mexicana, Balbuena legitimizes the newly-established Spanish professional and artisanal labor force in New Spain. It is a generator of wealth and the Aristotelian "good life," as opposed to the landed aristocratic criollo mentality which drains the economy and sees "work" as only a corrupt accumulation of greed. Work shows the superior peninsular ability to govern and enables the polis to live in order and justice. The Spanish have worked to build a beautiful, albeit artificial, paradise out of the barbaric desert of Mexico. The marvels of this city now match the Greco-Roman model of the theory of the five (acceptable) inhabitable zones of Mediterranean stock. The "value added" price and speculation of any goods the Spanish are now selling here is a positive development in the early-modern capitalist economy which Balbuena glorifies in his long enumerations of professional jobs and architectural marvels the Spanish have brought to Mexico. Balbuena sees this commerce as an example of Spanish justice and virtue. The medieval criollo mentality considered profits on investment as evil, deceptive magic. Yamauchi clearly guides the reader to understand how Balbuena uses the vague term interés to legitimize the new art and act of making money. The poet inverts the Universidad de Salamanca's misreading of Aristotelian-Thomist economic theory by...

Transculturation in Art: Sculpture in the Posa Chapels at the Monastery of Calpan, Mexico

Transculturation in Art: Sculpture in the Posa Chapels at the Monastery of Calpan, Mexico

Server and Served at the Seder

Server and Served at the Seder Earl Schwartz (bio) The tradition is clear: it was the servers who were liberated on Pesaḥ. Nevertheless, the seder has proven conducive, over time, to identification with both servers and those they serve. This incongruence is commonly associated with the seder’s commemoration of both slavery and liberation,1 but a closer look at several long-standing practices points to a deeper, persistent tension. Recent scholarship has begun to deal more forthrightly with this tension, but its structural characteristics remain to be identified and analyzed. An Ethos of Server and Served In the imperial societies of the ancient Mediterranean, virtually all females to some degree, and a sizable proportion of males, lived their lives as “ensouled devices,”2 producing for others, through servitude, the leisure that was a precondition of a fully realized life.3 In these societies, the economic dimension of slavery was bolstered by the assumption that the social power of free people was most fully manifested in their exercise of authority over others. Slavery existed, to a great extent, to provide opportunities to demonstrate this authority.4 Orlando Patterson has noted that “It may, indeed, be illogical and immoral to desire for oneself the absence of obstacles, only to be able to restrain others, but . . . it is a sociohistorical fact that human beings have always sought to do just that, and have frequently succeeded in doing so. What is more, they have, until quite recently, found no problem calling such constraint on others ‘freedom.’” Patterson calls this “experience of freedom as the exercise of power” sovereignal freedom.5 [End Page 3] Biblical sources tend to stand at a critical distance from such behavior. A positive attitude toward work and workers was a logical extension of the biblical vision of a covenant that included the entire people of Israel: officers and elders, woodcutters and water-drawers, males and females. However, one also finds in the Tanakh an entwining of service to God with subordination of other human beings,6 and rabbinic sources, born in the shadow of successive imperial cultures, followed this precedent of legitimizing servitude alongside freedom. The resulting presence of slaves and servants in more prosperous Jewish households, along with servile roles for female family members, has left its contradictory mark on the seder. The stubborn truth is that in every generation there have been “ensouled devices” cutting and cleaning so that others might recline.7 The Pedagogical Problem Exodus 12, the earliest biblical text to associate Passover with the exodus from Egypt, describes a spare occasion focused on eating the Pesaḥ sacrifice with matzah and bitter herbs (m’rorim), in haste, a vigil (leil shimmurim) fraught with expectation and danger. Elsewhere, the Tanakh describes Israelites eating formal meals seated around a shared table, but the Pesaḥ was to be eaten “belted, shoes on, and with your walking sticks in your hands.”8 Deuteronomy 16 adds that the sacrifice is to take place in the course of a pilgrimage. Following the destruction of the Second Temple, sources repeatedly allude to the difficulty of making Passover engaging and accessible, absent the drama of pilgrimage and sacrifice. Thus, in a version of the midrash of the four children found in the Yerushalmi, the rasha (i.e., the offender) asks: “What does all this work mean to you—what is all this bother (toraḥ) you put us through year after year?!”9 The Yerushalmi’s rasha, far from removing himself from the community, claims to represent it. Here it is the seder leader rather than the rasha who appears to be out of touch. In this version the question isn’t focused on a self-excluding “mean to you?” but rather on the emptiness of the Passover service. Given the cogency of the rasha’s frustration, it is not surprising that various techniques, including novelties based on Persian and Greco-Roman models, would be enlisted to sustain interest.10 What perhaps is surprising is the degree to which [End Page 4] the particular practices adopted would teach the experience of liberation via the trappings of social advantage—that is, surprising unless the celebration of advantage was implicit in the rabbinic understanding of how...

L'Écriture du spectacle. Les didascalies dans le théâtre européen aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (review)

Reviewed by: L'Écriture du spectacle. Les didascalies dans le théâtre européen aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles Perry Gethner Véronique Lochert , L'Écriture du spectacle. Les didascalies dans le théâtre européen aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Geneva: Droz, 2009. 712 pp. This remarkable study traces the history of stage directions and other dramatic marginalia through the seventeenth century, and Véronique Lochert takes on the even more formidable task of covering not one country but four (England, France, Italy and Spain), to examine both the parallels and contrasts of their various theatrical traditions. It is by far the most complete treatment of the subject to date and should prove definitive for a long time to come. To my knowledge, this is the first-ever general study of the subject for France, and it is definitely the most comprehensive comparative study ever undertaken. Lochert, who provides a history of the terminology, prefers the increasingly standard French term didascalie (derived from Greek), which has a more extensive range than the most common English term, "stage direction," in that it applies to all portions of a dramatic text not pronounced by the actors on the stage. She refutes the common belief that these paratextual elements are merely directions for people involved in the performance of a play, showing that in many cases they are specifically intended for readers of printed texts. This view is buttressed by her examination of didascalies intended to assist the reader but that are not stage directions, including explanatory notes, indications of sources, polemical declarations, authorial self-justifications, [End Page 269] internal headings signaling rhetorical or poetic set pieces, and special typography to point out succinct moral lessons. In her study of how didascalies changed over time, Lochert departs from previous schemes of periodization, which have tended to ignore or undervalue both the medieval and early modern eras. She shows that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries play an unexpectedly pivotal role in that evolution owing to multiple developments that occurred simultaneously in all four countries, such as the formation of professional acting companies, the rethinking of dramatic practice and theory thanks to the rediscovery of texts from antiquity, and the new prestige of drama as a literary form. She links the increase of notations specifying emotional states to a refining of acting technique and to greater audience interest in psychological action. Lochert, who begins with a detailed prehistory of didascalies going back to the Hellenistic period, proposes an intriguing theory for how they arose in the European Middle Ages: they derived from notations in liturgical books, where their role was to signal the replaying of a timeless event or ritual, rather than serving as a mimetic code. Later, as performances of religious plays were increasingly confided to amateurs, authors had to provide more specific instructions to help them. During the Renaissance pedagogical editions of Latin drama made abundant use of a wide variety of annotations designed to aid comprehension. Yet playwrights consciously following Greco-Roman models tended to be very sparing with annotations, insisting on the primacy of the text, especially in Italy and France. The comparative study of didascalies in the four European countries reveals far more common ground between them than might have been expected. While in general England and Spain underwent a gradual transition between medieval and Renaissance genres and practices, whereas in France and Italy authors openly broke with the past and far more attention was paid to dramatic theory, events within each country were far from uniform. There were splits, especially noticeable in France, between baroque and classicizing tendencies, between genres more closely tied to antiquity and those that privileged spectacle, between writers who viewed rules and regularity as indispensable and those who questioned their legitimacy and effectiveness. Variation in the number and length of stage directions was often linked to how much violent action was shown on the stage, as opposed to being narrated. [End Page 270] Stage directions likewise reveal the aesthetic values involved in adaptations of earlier plays, whether from one's own country or from abroad, reflecting how much spectacle was added, eliminated or altered. The fact that over half the didascalies in...

The Case History in Medieval Islamic Medical Literature: Tajārib and Mujarrabāt as Source

Knowledge of medieval Islamic medical practice has traditionally been based on the analysis of learned treatises. However, a comparison of the therapeutic advice advocated in formal treatises with treatments prescribed to patients has shown that the appeal to theory was to a large extent neglected in practice and, therefore, that theoretical works are not a reliable account of reality.1 From this perspective, case histories may prove to be an invaluable source for medical historians studying medical practice in medieval Islam. Yet, case histories—as well as prescriptions for actual patients, clinical observations, and medical anecdotes—are, none the less, literary sources, and we may well stumble on the same stone twice as we did when studying theoretical treatises regardless of literary and social contexts. The purpose of this paper is mainly to question whether the varying categories of clinical accounts can be treated as reliable guides to medieval Islamic clinical practice. The question of whether medieval Islamic medical authors deliberately followed a particular style of clinical account common among ancient Greco-Roman patterns, and whether they deployed case histories to illustrate the practice of medicine or to build up their reputation in the medical market-place, has been addressed elsewhere.2 A comparison of case histories by Abū Bakr Muammad b. Zakarīyā’ al-Rāzī (d. 313/925) with Greco-Roman models showed that this particular Islamic physician used the case history as a tool for medical instruction rather than for self-promotion. However, the question of whether al-Rāzī’s clinical accounts were representative within medieval Islamic medical literature remains open. As demonstrated below, an analysis of a wider range of sources shows that medieval Islamic medical writers certainly used scientific rhetoric for self-representation as well as persuasive strategies for self-promotion like those found in Galen’s case histories. Consequently, the use of literary devices to stress features other than the interpretation of symptoms, prognosis and therapy raises the issue mentioned above: do medieval Islamic case histories serve as documentary evidence of actual medical practice? With the aid of a wider scope of materials than those by al-Rāzī, I shall attempt to draw attention to the dangers of reading case histories—like theoretical treatises—too literally, and to explore the historical value of clinical records in assessing a particular physician’s everyday practice. In order to provide as broad a picture as possible of the clinical account in medieval Islamic medical literature, I have divided this paper into three parts. The first section provides an overview of collections of case histories and medical experiences as a literary genre. In the second, case histories taken from different medieval Islamic authors will show the various purposes of clinical accounts. As far as the details of practice are concerned, I will let case histories speak for themselves, focusing instead on their wording and style, and their literary or social contexts so as to ascertain the author’s agenda. In the third section, I shall analyse case histories attributed to the well-known Islamic physician Ibn Sīnā, known in the western medical tradition as Avicenna (d. 428/1037). A study of his recorded clinical experience will show that his medical theory and practice operated in different spheres, suggesting that our present consideration of his excellence as a clinician is supported by historical assumptions rather than by a critical analysis of sources.

The Man with the Flow of Power: Porous Bodies in Mark 5:25–34

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) In the history of scholarship, the story of the healing of the woman with the flow of blood has been treated as just one of many miracle stories that amplify the mysterious powers of the Markan protagonist and underscore the importance of faithfulness. Whether Jesus is viewed as a Hellenistic divine man (...), a prophet styled in the fashion of Elisha, or some combination of the two, this passage- like so many other healing stories-serves to demonstrate his ....1 Scholarly interpretations of the passage have therefore focused on fleshing out the specific details of the woman's ailment, magical or prophetic parallels to the account, and the relationship of this story to the surrounding narrative concerning Jairus's daughter. This article takes its rise from the intriguing suggestion in Mark 5:28-30 that the touch of the woman instigates an unconscious flow of power from the body of Jesus. I will argue that the bodies of the woman and Jesus parallel each other in the sense that both are porous and leak uncontrollably. When viewed in the context of Greco-Roman models of the body, both the woman and Jesus appear weak, sickly, feminine, and porous. In the case of Jesus, this presentation subverts the dominant medical practices that have failed the woman with the flow of blood. Furthermore, it reverses the traditional association of porosity and weakness, both because Jesus leaks a positive, healing power and because this leakage of power points toward his concealed identity. I. Scholarly Interpretations of Mark 5:25-34 In Mark 5:25-34, a woman who has suffered from a flow of blood for twelve years comes to Jesus in the crowd. Traditional medical solutions have failed, leading her only to grow worse.2 Being unable to reach Jesus she clutches the hem of his garment. Power flows out from Jesus and she is healed. In the history of scholarship, this pericope has attracted the attention particularly of scholars interested in the woman's gynecological ailment and its relationship to purity.3 These interpretations have centered on the woman's femininity, anonymity, and ritual impurity to fascinating effect. The placement of the narrative at the center of the story of Jairus's daughter (5:21-24, 35-43), in which a young woman twelve years old-the age of childbearing-is raised from the dead, only reinforces the theme of female reproductive abilities. But the specifically gynecological nature of her medical condition and the contrast with Jairus's daughter have led scholars to focus on her identity as a woman to the neglect of her disability.4We have received this account as a story about women but have allowed her femininity to wash over her infirmity. Her condition is specifically gynecological, but the focus on the flow of blood causes us to overlook the broader perception of bodies in the ancient world.5 Other interpretations of this pericope have focused on analogous practices in Hellenistic magic.6 The practice of healing via physical touch is not unprecedented. Gerd Theissen draws attention to an anecdote in Plutarch's Life of Sulla in which a woman, Velaria Mesalla, extracts a thread from Sulla's garment in the hope of securing a portion of his luck (35.4).7 David E. Aune likewise notes that, in the ancient world, healings could take place by coming into contact with the clothing of a charismatic healer or magician.8 He cites examples in which the sick are healed of disease by touching the possessions or garments of powerful magicians and healers. The statue of a hero, for example, was believed to have the same healing powers as the person it represented. In the canonical NT the closest unrelated analogy for this kind of magical healing via osmosis is found in the summary of Paul's healings in Acts 19:11-12: God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them. …

Missionary Linguistics / Lingüística misionera: Selected Papers from the First International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13-16 March 2003 (review)

Reviewed by: Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística Misionera: Selected papers from the first International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13–16 March 2003 ed. by Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen Peter T. Daniels Missionary Linguistics/Lingüística Misionera: Selected papers from the first International Conference on Missionary Linguistics, Oslo, 13–16 March 2003. Ed. by Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen. (Studies in the history of the language sciences 106.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. vi, 288. ISBN 158811581X. $138 (Hb). This commendably prompt publication comprises seven articles in Spanish with English summary and five in English without Spanish summaries, grouped areally. The editors’ introduction (1–5) lists over a dozen recent volumes and collections on missionary linguistics, without noting that every one of them deals only with missionaries to America. Klaus Zimmermann, in ‘La construcción del objeto de la historiografía de la lingüística misionera’ (7–32), offers detailed prolegomena to the study of this field. Nicholas Ostler’s ‘The social roots of missionary linguistics’ (33–46) ranges the world to discover why, of the four waves of missionary activity in human history (Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, and Christian again), only the last resulted in the linguistic description of proselytes’ languages. His answer: only with printed books did the clergy become accustomed to learning a language from a book, and ‘the administrative mechanism of the religious orders … could see the benefit in investing in the publication of language text books for the future training needs of their ministry’ (45). E. F. K. Koerner’s ‘Notes on missionary linguistics in North America’ (47–80) is, as the headnote admits, a disjointed selection from the history of Americanist linguistics; poorly proofread and not well edited, it deals with the French orders in Canada (including a three-page history of the Jesuit order) and the English Puritans farther south, then strays from the topic to talk about the linguistic work of Thomas Jefferson and his circle and their successors, leaving the impression that there was little evangelization of Native Americans beyond New England. He ignores nineteenth-century American missionary linguistics in the Near East and Oceania, claiming that ‘in terms of organized effort, … it began in earnest’ (72) with the Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1936. Hans-Josef Niederehe, in ‘Los misioneros españoles y el estudio de las lenguas mayas’ (81–91), lays the foundation for the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century grammars of Huastec, Quiché, Cakchikel, and Yucatec. Julio Calvo Pérez, in ‘Las perífrasis verbales en la gramática quechua de Diego González Holguín (1607)’ (93–111), describes the tension between the Latin paradigmatic model available to González Holguín and the periphrastic construction of verbal voice in Quechua, concluding that he did quite well notwithstanding. Rachael Gilmour’s ‘Colonization and linguistic representation: British Methodist grammarians’ approaches to Xhosa (1834–1850)’ (113–40) details the Methodist impulse to evangelization and historical, social, and political relations between the English and the Xhosa, followed by a discussion of the grammars of William B. Boyce and John W. Appleyard. Gilmour claims that they both follow ‘the Greco-Roman model’ (120) and describe the language in its own terms, Boyce having been the first to accurately describe the noun-class system of any Bantu language (he called it ‘euphonic or alliteral concord’ (127)). Gilmour does not say how they handled clicks. Toru Maruyama, in ‘Linguistic studies by Portuguese Jesuits in sixteenth and seventeenth century Japan’ (141–60), describes the thirty works produced between 1591 and 1620, contrasting the contemporaneous Jesuit output on languages of Africa, Brazil, and India, finding that the Japanese works are superior because interpreters did not exist. Eun Mi Bae (writing from Oslo in Spanish on Japanese) considers the category of ‘pronominal adverb’ in a 1738 grammar (161–77). Emilio Ridruejo (179–200) and Joaquín García Medall (201–32) discuss Philippine topics in Spanish, respectively early work on Kapampangan (based on a prior study of Tagalog), and Visayan lexicography (1637). Mara Fuertes Gutiérrez (233–52) considers the methods...

Man the Hunter? Hunting, Ecology, and Gender in Judaism

This paper asks whether religious tradition can offer alternative models to ‘man the hunter,’ and what such models might imply for environmental sensibility. We examine these questions specifically in the context of Judaism. Biblical, Talmudic, and rabbinic texts are reviewed and are found to belie the common belief that Judaism forbids hunting. Hunting was permitted under some circumstances and biblical sources indicate its occurrence in patriarchal and monarchical times. However, it was strictly limited by religious law about permitted foods and treatment of animals. Judaism’s preferred food system for meat was the flock rather than the hunt. In marked distinction to the classical Greco-Roman model, in which hunting was the mark of the true man, Judaism’s ideal for manhood became the scholar. An environmental ethic of stewardship, a middle ground between hunting as a central cultural attribute and total abstinence from using animals, is implied even if not fully put into practice.

Mentorship separation tension in the accounting profession: the consequences of delayed structural separation

This study inquires whether public accounting mentoring relationships conform to the classical Greco-Roman model (where mentors guide protégés and eventually release them to pursue an autonomous life) or a modern form (where mentoring continues indefinitely and serves as an organizational control mechanism). Data was obtained from 630 professionals in the accounting profession who reported having a mentor. Participants who considered the mentoring relationship to be in the past, yet remained working in close physical proximity of their mentor, reported the highest levels of mentorship tension. For these participants ( n=100), mentorship tension was associated with negative job outcomes. These results extend research by [Covaleski, M.A., Dirsmith, M.W., Heian, J.B., & Samuel, S. (1998). Administrative Science Quarterly 43, 293–327] identifying the use of mentoring as an organizational control mechanism in the public accounting profession.

A BLEMMYA IN INDIA

It is an important maxim, in religion as in literature or art, that Whatever is received is received according to the manner and intention of the recipient. Yet Einflussforschung cherishes instances of exact equivalence between the allegedly text and its influencing source. While the controversy persists (now 150 years old), whether Buddhist scriptures influenced the gospels or vice versa,1 one treasures every scrap of information, literary, architectural, sculptural, or numismatic, suggesting that Greco-Roman models were adopted into the Indian Kulturbesitz. India for this purpose includes modem Afghanistan. Since Indian texts seldom are securely dated, a Western parallel is of value which can be dated (within limits). By contrast, it may always be impossible to date the use of Homer in imagining the birth of the Buddha;2 or, by an author of the SaddharmapundarTka (the widespread Lotus Stitra), of an Ovid-style tradition of the Phoenix.3 Wherever a datable parallel can be proved one is well-placed to ask: how was the model obtained; what was its suitability or attraction; what effect was it intended to have; and why were related items4 not adopted at the same time?

Friendship, Tradition, Democracy: Two Readings of Aristotle

In a short speech published in 1988 entitled "The Politics of Friendship," Jacques Derrida concluded with a distinction between two models of friendship, exemplified by Aristotle and Cicero on one hand and Montaigne on the other, and suggested that these two models lead toward different notions of politics: The Greco-Roman model [of friendship] appears to be marked by the value of reciprocity, by a homological, immanentist, finitist, and politicist concord. Montaigne (whom we are reading here as the example of a paradigm) doubtless inherits the majority of these traits. But he breaks the reciprocity therein and discreetly introduces, so it seems to me, heterology, asymmetry, and infinity . . . . Shall one say that this fracture is Judaeo-Christian? Shall one say that it depoliticizes the Greek model or that it displaces the nature of the political? (Derrida 1988: 643-4) Thus, if hesitantly and only in the form of a rhetorical question, Derrida seemed to oppose the Greek model of love between finite men with another model, foreign to the humanism of the Greeks: the Judaeo-Christian model of love of an infinite God.

L'écriture de l'histoire grecque en France au XIXe siècle : temporalités historiques et enjeux politiques

Is it pertinent to study the tales of ancient Greece in light of the historic temporalities that govern their narratives ? This author believes that it is, and this article is an attempt to map out the political stakes that, in the 19th century, marked the historical discourse about Athenian democracy. The first of two parts examines Volney and Benjamin Constant's critique of the way in which the Greco-Roman model evoked revolution and assesses the significance of their analysis. The second part analyses the Greek tales written by Victor Duruy and Louis Menard and looks at how the work of George Grote was received in France. At the time of the Revolution, references to the Greco-Roman world drew on a conception of time based on the immutability of nature and a historicity that beat to the rhythm of progress. The ancient world thus emerges both as a role model and as a witness to the distance that separates antiquity from modem times. It is the paradigmatic reference to antiquity that became marginalized in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. It was denounced not only as an inopportune imitation but, even worse, as being devoid of any historic meaning or, in other words, deeply «anti-historic». How, then, has the writing of history, been affected by the dissolution of the historia magistra vitae and by the Greek world's subsequent introduction into the historical process of the rise of western civilisation ?