Hellenistic Alexandria Research Articles

NERO'S EXPERIMENTS WITH THE WATER-ORGAN

AbstractThis article examines a pair of anecdotes in the works of Suetonius and Cassius Dio, describing Nero's passionate late-career interest in the instrument known as the hydraulis or water-organ. The first half of the article contextualizes the water-organ episode in light of both the history of the instrument's reputation and the wider characterization of Nero in the literary sources. The rest of the article uses the episode to shed light on Nero's self-representation as princeps, focussing on the significance of the water-organ as both a musical instrument and a technological marvel. On the one hand, the organ's popularity with Roman audiences of the Early Imperial period made it a politically strategic choice for a music-loving emperor with strong populist leanings. On the other hand, the association of the organ with the intellectual world of Hellenistic Alexandria appealed to a certain group of Roman elites (including Nero himself), who shared a keen interest in technological innovation and technical knowledge more broadly. In the end, however, Nero's experiments with the water-organ were cleverly trivialized by hostile writers and redeployed as an illustration of the emperor's most appalling vices.

The Book of Obadiah in the Septuagint

The Book of Obadiah, although short (it has only 21 verses; the shortest in the Hebrew Bible), is at the same time very difficult. The difficulties are manifested in its linguistic and textual layers, but above all in what concerns its content, theology and interpretation. The Greek translation of Obad contained in the LXX is particularly important because it represents a way of understanding the Book going back to pre-Christian, Hellenistic times, which strongly emphasised the theme of threats to Israel from other nations. In the Greek translation (LXXObad), the cursing character of the Book is radicalised and the guilt of the enemies (Edomites – Idumeans) is highlighted. The article presents the Book of Obadiah in its historical context (both the Hebrew original and the Greek version), and presents its text, content and character in the Septuagint version. It compares it with LXXJer 29 (LXX numbering) and shows how the challenging theology of the Book was understood among the Jews of Hellenistic Alexandria. The universalisation of the message of the Book by the LXX translation was later continued in its patristic and rabbinic interpretations.

Seeing is Believing

Using Daniel Barbu’s article ‘Aristeas the Tourist’ as a starting point, this essay focuses on the Letter of Aristeas’s ‘travelogue’ in order to show how it contributes to the construction of a Jewish identity in second century BCE Alexandria. I argue that the choice to tell the story of the translation of the Septuagint through the eyes of the fictional Gentile narrator ‘Aristeas’ and to report the sights and events in the voice of an ‘outsider’ works to create a sense of cultural morale in Alexandrian Jews that enables them to participate in the cultural world of Hellenistic Alexandria as Jews.

Bodies Out of Time: Sculpting Queer Poetics and Queering Classical Sculpture in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

Two major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.

Insults in Classical Athens by Deborah Kamen

148 PHOENIX bolster her case for wide-spread literacy, including prose, which went well beyond the book on salt Hadjimichael mentions. There was also a readership for Polyclitus’ Canon, Hippodamus’ political works, Sophocles’ Chorus, Agatharchus’ Scene Painting, and the architect Ictinus’ work on the Parthenon. These were not how-to books, but if there was an audience for just these few known titles, this would attest to an Athenian appetite for reading. The book culminates in its very rich Chapter Six on the establishment of the lyric canon in Hellenistic Alexandria, which contextualizes this evanescent event within a detailed consideration of this city’s valuation of all books. Hadjimichael’s command of the relevant literature, ancient and modern, is near complete. I myself would argue that the different arrangements of Pindar’s, Bacchylides’, and Simonides’ epinicians strongly suggest that Alexandrian editions depended on original (fifth-century) editions. But this is disagreement, not criticism. Chapter Seven tries to answer the “paradox” or “enigma” of Bacchylides, who was read, if not loved, in the classical period, but whose presence among the canonical nine raises the question of why he never appears in any of the earlier proto-canons. Why, furthermore, does he go unmentioned in the fourth century, when the Peripatos produced treatises on all the others but Ibycus? Hadjimichael does not claim to have the answer, but in the course of examining Bacchylides’ fate, she covers much interesting ground, including some possible points of contact with Callimachus. At the end, among other factors, she briefly mentions his perceived “poetic value” without further discussion. Some of us, however, might wonder whether he initially dropped from sight primarily because of a lack of appreciation for him as a poet. Can we imagine a heated discussion among the canon makers as to who would be the ninth (a canon of eight being unthinkable), as they are forced to choose from lesser lights such as Lasus, Philoxenus, and Bacchylides? New York University David Sider Insults in Classical Athens. By Deborah Kamen. Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press. 2020. Pp. xv, 258. Kamen introduces her monograph on this dark, understudied corner of Athenian social and anti-social history with a flourish. She assembles contemporary cross-cultural anthropological and sociological approaches to insults before addressing ancient Attic comments and acts that denigrate others. Such discourse helps to negotiate status, especially in an agonistic society—one in which competitive values outweigh cooperative ones. Five chapters treat the creative varieties of doing down others—intimidating equals, inferiors, and superiors—in classical Athens. Kamen discusses the regulation of insults, especially the extreme level, hybris. Public and private, informal and legal means of preserving honor and blocking or redressing objectionable behaviors receive attention. The chapters advance from playful banter to more seriously offensive, active and passive, forms of one- or two-upmanship and literal smack-downs. First come three categories of socially acceptable “benign insults”: skômmata and aischrologia; mockery in comedy, komoidein and skôptein;1 and, third, diabolê and loidoria. She then turns to 1 Skômmata and skôptein derive from one root, so Kamen’s distinction requires reconsideration. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 149 forbidden insults, that is, hurtful words that a victim could litigate. These form Kamen’s fourth category of kakêgoria and aporrhêta, what one today might label “slander” and “libel.” Finally, she addresses hybris of the legal kind, with all its conceptual pitfalls, knots of intentionality, and attitude. Mockery (Chapter One) featured prominently at Demeter festivals inter alia. Rituals included visual obscenities, originating according to myth in Iambê’s playful joshing of the deprived and miserable goddess. Humans too suffered “hazing” (22) in Eleusinian initiation. “Playful whipping” (24) seems a more problematic category of festive mockery . How does one measure the degree of humiliation involved in the “pervasiveness of mockery in many different Greek rituals” (28)? Notoriously, the fun of the symposium, when not Platonic, included barbed remarks, gestures, and rejoinders, although some scholars posit unwritten limits (cf. 31 on Wasps 1222–49). Kamen alleges that insults at these parties “could aid in the cohesion of the group’s members through laughter” (33). Shaming insults often cross the invisible line from piquant...

Herodotus in The Theatre at Alexandria? On Athenaeus 14.620D

AbstractThis article discusses a passage in Athenaeus (14.620d) that refers to the performance of Herodotus’ work in a theatre in Hellenistic Alexandria. In his edition of Athenaeus, highly valued and still influential, August Meineke replaces Herodotus’ name (unanimously transmitted in Athenaeus’ manuscripts) with Hesiod’s. In this article I set out to overturn a widespread tendency to accept Meineke’s emendation of Athenaeus 14.620d, reconsidering the possibility that Athenaeus did in fact name Herodotus in the light of (a) the difficulty of explaining the origin of the alleged mistake in Athenaeus’ manuscript tradition and (b) the ancients’ tendency to draw parallels between Herodotus’ style and language and Homeric poetry. The fact that Athenaeus refers to theatrical performances of both Herodotus’ work and the Homeric poems will be shown to be very much in line with the ancient rhetorical, historiographical and biographical tradition which regarded Herodotus as the most Homeric of all prose writers.

A group of painted funerary monuments from Hellenistic Alexandria in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Examination and scientific analysis have elucidated the well-preserved figural painting on a collection of limestone funerary stelai and loculus slabs from Alexandria, Egypt, dating from the late 4th to 3rd centuries B.C. This paper presents new information about the preparation, design, and technique of these paintings, which display a lead white ground preparation, both incised and black preliminary drawing, and a masterful elaborate multi-layered painting process to build up color. The paintings’ generally bright colorful palette employs a wide range of pigments attested elsewhere in the classical Greek palette, and features, notably, the extensive use of mimetite, a geologically rare yellow lead arsenate mineral, uncommon in Greek and Roman painting and unknown in earlier Pharaonic painting traditions.

Medische innovatie in de Grieks-Romeinse wereld

Summary In this paper I discuss the introduction of the systematic dissection of human corpses for scientific (medical) purposes in Hellenistic Alexandria. This innovation – associated with the names of Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Keos (third century BCE) in particular – led to significant advances in anatomical and physiological knowledge such as the discovery of the nervous system. Surprisingly, it fell into disuse again very soon after its successful introduction. Why did human anatomy emerge in this particular place in this particular period? Why was it abandoned again so soon? In this paper I will argue that we are dealing with a case of innovation that failed due to inadequate anchoring. In so doing I will take a closer look at the circumstances prevailing in early Hellenistic Alexandria but also put these into perspective by pointing to developments in first and second century CE medicine when a group of physicians, especially Galen of Pergamum, succeeded in putting back anatomy, largely based on animal material, on the agenda of medical research. Two decisive factors and their interplay seem to have been central to the developments we describe, viz. societal (moral, religious) values and norms and developments within ancient medicine itself.

THE REFLECTION OF TRANSITIONAL SOCIETY OF MYTILENE AT THE END OF THE ARCHAIC PERIOD (8TH – 5TH CENTURY B.C.) A STUDY ON SAPPHO’S “ODE TO ANAKTORIA”

This article discusses Sappho’s “Ode to Anaktoria” (fragment 16) poem as a ‘marginal’ product of an aristocratic intellectual in the transitional society of Mytilene at the end of the Archaic Period (8th-5th century B.C.). The research method is a kind of media analysis. The mean of “media” in this paper related to “A means by which something is communicated or expressed” It is laso relate to the intervening substance through which sensory impressions are conveyed or physical forces are transmitted. Media also means as a substance in which an organism lives or is cultured. On the other hand, media is a material or form used by an artist, composer, or writer; We interpreted Ode to Anaktoria in the means as the terms of media above. Sappho (born 610, died 570 B.C.) is a renowned Greek lyric poetess and musician and is greatly admired in all ages for the beauty of her writing style. Plato’s 16th epigram dedicated to her reads “Some say there are nine Muses; but they should stop to think. Look at Sappho of Lesbos; she makes a tenth”. Sappho is additionally ranked among the Nine Lyric Poets esteemed by the scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria as worthy of critical study. “Ode to Anaktoria” is read through the historic-political concept of hegemony as suggested by Gramsci. In this view, the moment of “hegemony” or of cultural leadership is systematically upgraded precisely in opposition to the mechanistic and fatalistic concepts of economism. Sappho’s fragment 16 does not only indicate defiance to androcentric (epic) categories; she suggests nonnormative, thus new, ways of contemplating life (lyric).

TWISTING IN THE WIND: MONUMENTAL WEATHERVANES IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Monumental weathervanes have been overlooked as a tiny but important genre of ancient bronze sculpture. This is the first collective study of all three definite examples: the so-called ‘triton’ on the Tower of the Winds in Athens, a copy of this somewhere in Rome and the winged female ‘Anemodoulion’ on the Bronze Tetrapylon in Constantinople. I propose to identify the intended subjects of these sculptures as the weather-deities Aiolos and Iris, thereby restoring a part of each monument's original meaning that was unknown to the authors of our ancient written accounts. I also suggest that monumental weathervanes were first invented in Hellenistic Alexandria, which may explain why the Tower of the Winds shared the octagonal design of the Pharos, and why the Anemodoulion was mounted upon a bronze pyramidion.

The Memory Library: How the Library in Hellenistic Alexandria Worked

For millennia the famous library in Hellenistic Alexandria has been praised as an epicenter of enlightenment and wisdom. And yet, a question still seems unanswered: how was its literature classified and retrieved? It is a subject that has been given surprisingly little attention by the field of library-and-information science―indeed, by scholarship in general. Furthermore, a certain way of thinking has influenced the few answers that have so far been attempted. It is as if the scholars of our era have tried to identify the modern, physical library in the Hellenistic library in Alexandria. But such an approach is biased in a basic way: It simply does not consider the impact of the cultural and intellectual context of the library. This article differs fundamentally, because I reject the notion that the library was like those of today. Accordingly, an entirely new way of understanding how the library actually worked, in terms of classification and retrieval processes is presented. The key element is to understand the library both as a physical structure and as a struc- ture in the memory of the Alexandrian scholars. In this article, these structures are put together so as to propose a new interpretation of the library.

The flame of Miletus: the birth of science in ancient Greece (and how it changed the world)

Miletus: one of the wealthiest and most important towns in ancient Greece. It was here, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, in the 6th century BC, that the great traditions of Greek science and philosophy sparked into life, setting in motion a chain of knowledge that would change the world, forever. This is the extraordinary story of Greek science from its earliest beginnings through its development in classical Athens and Hellenistic Alexandria and its subsequent diffusion to the wider world. Most histories of Greek science end with the collapse of the Graeco-Roman world in late antiquity and the closing of all classical schools of 'pagan' philosophy in A.D. 529. But acclaimed historian John Freely here continues the story to tell of how the elements of Greek scientific and philosophical learning were adopted by the Islamic world and the transmission of Graeco-Islamic science to western Europe, as well as the preservation of Hellenic culture in Byzantium and its profound influence on the European renaissance and our modern world.

Ecology, Literature and Environmental Education

The first part of this article refers to the initial attempt to relate Nature to Literature since the age of Hellenistic Alexandria in Egypt. Alexandria was a metropolis of its time with a quite lively character of urban life. Influenced by that character Theocritus was the first to lay the foundations of what is defined as pastoral poetry. In the course of this article and after the significance of contemporary Literature of Ecology is appraised, the results of a research - with regard to the excerpts of both prose and poetry cited in the primary school textbooks in Greece - will be presented. Finally, an educational method is proposed which, we premise, would attribute a more experiential character to Literature for Instruction purposes.

Herophilus of Chalcedon and the practice of dissection in Hellenistic Alexandria.

The dissection of human cadavers is a complex topic that can be comprehended only if a number of factors are taken into account, as illustrated by the example of Herophilus of Chalcedon, who was the first dissector in the Western medical tradition.

Beau Monde and Demi-Monde in Alexandria, 323-116 BC

Paul McKechnie (Auckland), Beau monde and Demi-monde in Alexandria, 323-116 BC. In this article debate is continued about hetaerae in Hellenistic Alexandria, engaging with points made by Alan Cameron in Callimachus and his Critics (1995). Evidence from the works of Asclepiades, Posidippus and Hedylus is examined. It is proposed that love epigrams should be viewed in the context of how men behaved at a symposium, and that they reflect interaction between men of an educated, literary-minded upper class and a wide range of women who (whether hetaerae or not) had the chance to indulge in love affairs. The life of this trend-setting minority is reflected also in Sirach 32, where the sage instructs Jewish readers on how to behave at a symposium ; Sirach 9, concomitantly, commends morally correct behaviour towards women, in a social context where temptation can be expected.

Sennacherib, Archimedes, and the Water Screw: The Context of Invention in the Ancient World

Invention of the water screw is traditionally credited to the third-century B.C. Greek scientist-engineer Archimedes, on the basis of numerous Greek and Latin texts and the technological context of Hellenistic Alexandria. An Assyrian text from the seventh century B.C. may be interpreted to show that king Sennacherib cast such a device in bronze at Nineveh, for use in his palace garden. Such an argument may be strengthened by comparison with details of Assyrian technical capabilities in large-scale casting and in making bearings, and with later Greek texts referring to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The method for casting a bronze screw implied in the Assyrian text and instructions for building a wooden water screw provided by Vitruvius were reproduced for a television program. Arguments are presented for and against the invention of the device centuries before Archimedes, together with a discussion of the social context in which such inventions took place in antiquity.

Is There an Indian Connection toSefer yesirah?

David Shulman Is There an Indian Connection to Sefer yesirah? Was the linguistic theology of Sefer yesirah (SY) influenced by theories of language formalized in northwest India in the last centuries before the Common Era? Yehuda Liebes advances such a hypothesis, cautiously worded and graced by question marks, at several points in his magisterial study of SY. He even includes, among the factors influencing his suggestion, the idea that the text may have been composed in northern Mesopotamia and the possible existence there of channels of cultural transmission from India (with Greek mediation): "This eastern region was a logical place for a meeting with Indian thought, such as that which influenced SY."1 We know, in fact, of such channels in a later period (early Islamic Baghdad), when Sanskrit grammatical and poetic materials began to filter into Arabic.2 But it is also well known that Hellenistic Alexandria, among other centers, had some familiarity with certain Indian philosophical notions, which are reported (second- or third-hand) in sources from the first and second 1 2 Y. Liebes, Tarai ha-yesirah sel Seferyesirah (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2000), p. 239. See I. Yu. Krachkovsky, "Fragment indiiskoi retoriki ? arabskoi peredache," Izbraniye sochineniya (Moscow, 1956), 2: 309-316. Aleph 2 (2002)191 centuries CE.3 It is at least possible that Indian ideas circulated in adapted forms in northern Mesopotamia, too, during this period. I can express no opinion about the date of SY or the meaning of its metaphysical system. Whatever little I know about the text comes directly from Liebes himself or from Moshe Idei, with whom I taught a course, some years ago, on linguistic mysticism. But I may be able to point to certain elements in Sanskrit linguistic thought that run parallel to passages in SYand could conceivably indicate a historical connection. At the same time, there are critical distinctions to be made. The mere existence of strong resemblances is not, in itself, an argument for direct influence. I focus on four related issues: (1) the primary metaphysical frame of creation as a linguistic act or process; (2) the specific question of scientific phonetic analysis and its traces in SY; (3) problems relating to semanticity and to the powers and function of individual phonemes; (4) and a more general observation on the notion of belimah and its derivatives in relation to Saiva themes. 1. That creation is a matter of sound and vibration and hence of language, broadly conceived, is axiomatic already in the Rg Veda (e.g., hymn 10.70). Three-quarters of language is hidden and potentially generative of reality; only the final quarter is manifest in human speech (1.164.45). Throughout the first millennium BCE, we find elaborations of the basic idea of creation as an intra-linguistic process, with precise cosmological and epistemic correlations, along with the beginnings of scientific linguistics. The latter includes a highly developed phonology (siksä), etymology (nirukta), morphology and syntax (vyakarana), and metrics (chandas). Päninian grammar, one of the great achievements of ancient India, offers a comprehensive and sophisticated empirical analysis of Sanskrit as spoken in approximately the fifth century BCE (also of the Vedic dialect); but this rich analytical corpus eventually culminated in a linguistic metaphysics in which subtle, inaudible sounds emerge from a divine substratum as audible words (pada), which, in 192 David Shulman turn, generate the external "objects" (padârtha) that these words "mean." Language, in short, is primarily neither representational nor symbolic. It is the very fabric of reality and, as such, the deepest level of godhead (iabda-brahman) unfolding as cosmos and as self or mind. This metaphysical aspect of the tradition reaches its height in Bhartrhari, in the mid-fifth century CE, but Bhartrhari clearly drew upon much earlier speculative materials. In any case, the grammarians themselves claim that they stumbled upon God while sifting through the arid matters of grammar, like someone who happens upon a diamond while searching through a stack of husks. A vast extension of this vision of the cosmos as vibrating with linguistic energies embodied in the phonemes, motivated by God's inner reflection (vimarsa) upon his own luminous existence, eventually crystallized in the northern Saiva systems...

Anatomy in Alexandria in the third century B.C.

The most striking advances in the knowledge of human anatomy and physiology that the world had ever known—or was to know until the seventeenth century A.D.—took place in Hellenistic Alexandria. The city was founded in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great. After the tatter's death in 323 B.C. and the subsequent dissolution of his empire, it became the capital of one of his generals, Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who established the Ptolemaic dynasty there. The first Ptolemy, subsequently named Soter (the Saviour), and his son Ptolemy Philadelphus (who succeeded him in 285 B.C.), became immensely enriched by their exploitation of Egypt and raised the city to a position of great wealth and magnificence. Anxious to enhance both their own reputation and the prestige of the kingdom, they sought to rival the cultural and scientific achievements not only of other Hellenistic rulers but even of Athens herself. Their patronage of the arts and sciences, coupled with their establishment of the Museum (an institute for literary studies and scientific research as well as a temple of the Muses), together with the Library, made the city the centre of Hellenistic culture. Philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, artists, poets and physicians were all encouraged to come and work there.

A History of Thoracic Surgery

At the present time there is an urgent need for medical scholars and medical historians. In this field, Dr. Richard Meade has crowned a distinguished career in thoracic surgery with this equally distinguished and thoroughly scholarly work on the history of the specialty to which he has devoted his life. It is a prototype of what should and must be done for every branch of medicine. There is no longer any danger that knowledge of or reverence for the past will stay progress as it did in Hellenistic Alexandria and Medieval Europe. The philosophy of science and the nature of truth are now too well understood. Scholarship and history, therefore, are purely valuable. As science moves farther from its sources and becomes increasingly complex, and as its literature grows more and more voluminous, the need for medical scholars has become urgent. The value of works of this kind is more