Hellenistic Models Research Articles

“Romans Divers”: The Novel, Its Earliest Classifications, and the Early Modern Peripheries of the Genre

The first classifications of the novel date back to the early 18th century. Then, the novel was still a new genre and was defined in relation to ancient Latin or Hellenistic models and to their narrative variations from the 17th century. By analyzing the first works that try to trace a history of the new genre and a taxonomy of the various types of novels, penned by authors such as Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy, James Beattie and Clara Reeve, this paper argues that the works seen as peripheral in relation to a canonical, archetypal narration, which is typical of the novel, are in themselves illustrative of a wider phenomenon – the marginalization of those narratives which do not fit a current and implicit definition of a genre. Using Corin Braga’s concept of “anarchetypal narrative”, this paper discusses the works to be found at the peripheries of the novel in the 18th century and the explicit and implicit reasons for their theoretical dismissal.

Villaggi, fortezze, ‘città’: vivere in Armenia e dintorni nell’Età del Bronzo e del Ferro

This article aims to provide a general overview of settlement patterns in Armenia and neighbouring areas from the Early Bronze Age to Early Hellenistic times. The southern Caucasus presents unique features. For those approaching the subject for the first time, this paper aims to summarise the primary evidence for the development and transformation of the human landscape. Starting from the 4th millennium BC, it is possible to trace the outlines of a general process of sedentarisation of communities on the highlands, which took different forms and characteristics. Mobile villages dominated the Bronze Age settlement structure. By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, the highlands were characterised by a general development of fortified settlements, generally referred to as ‘cyclopean fortresses’, which will also be one of the main features of the later Kingdom of Urartu. Following the two centuries of Achaemenid rule, with its elusive settlement pattern, the last centuries of the 1st millennium saw the spread of Greek culture following the conquests of Alexander the Great and his successors. With the creation of large urban sites based on Hellenistic models, the concept and structure of the Mediterranean city spread across Armenia and adjacent areas.

Villaggi, fortezze, ‘città’: vivere in Armenia e dintorni nell’Età del Bronzo e del Ferro

This article aims to provide a general overview of settlement patterns in Armenia and neighbouring areas from the Early Bronze Age to Early Hellenistic times. The southern Caucasus presents unique features. For those approaching the subject for the first time, this paper aims to summarise the primary evidence for the development and transformation of the human landscape. Starting from the 4th millennium BC, it is possible to trace the outlines of a general process of sedentarisation of communities on the highlands, which took different forms and characteristics. Mobile villages dominated the Bronze Age settlement structure. By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, the highlands were characterised by a general development of fortified settlements, generally referred to as ‘cyclopean fortresses’, which will also be one of the main features of the later Kingdom of Urartu. Following the two centuries of Achaemenid rule, with its elusive settlement pattern, the last centuries of the 1st millennium saw the spread of Greek culture following the conquests of Alexander the Great and his successors. With the creation of large urban sites based on Hellenistic models, the concept and structure of the Mediterranean city spread across Armenia and adjacent areas.

Correlation between military and domestic architecture: A tribune's house in Aquincum and its place in Roman architecture

Abstract The House of the Tribunus Laticlavius, a large building in the legionary fortress of Aquincum, has only been partially excavated, and this was in the 1970s. This short paper makes an attempt to understand its function and find its place in Roman architecture through a reconstruction of its floor plan and comparison with other prominent residential buildings of the period which share similar features. It appears very likely that the house is based on a loose adaptation of a Hellenistic model, tailored to the needs of high-ranking officers of the Roman army.

Государство Хасмонеев в современной российской историографии (1991-2020 гг.)

The paper aims to reveal views of the Russian historians of 1991-2020 on the Hasmonean state. Scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that the author for the first time provides a historiographical analysis of the problem. The researcher’s attention is focused on the following issues: causes of the Maccabean Revolt and influence of the Hellenistic tradition on the Hasmonean state. In fact, most scientists agree on the following points: the Maccabean Revolt was provoked by the harsh anti-Jewish policy of Antiochus IV Epiphanes; the Jewish statehood was based on the Hellenistic model with influence of the local tradition. The researcher concludes on the necessity to create a fundamental work on the history of Judea of the II-I centuries B.C.

The Destruction of the Serapeum in 391

This article reconsiders the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria by Christian militants in 391 within the context of Christianization in the late fourth century. The attack on the Serapeum was a deliberately staged, high-profile act of religious violence designed to demonstrate to the wider imperial community that the Roman state was no longer interested in protecting targeted cult sites from Christian militants, and that the perpetrators of such violence would suffer no negative consequences for their actions. The Serapeum, dedicated to the worship of the gods Serapis and Isis, was traditionally associated with the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt and with the pharaonic and later Roman Imperial cult. The destruction of this religious and cultural complex by a Christian mob, acting under the direction of the local bishop Theophilus, was a deliberate act of vandalism intended to demonstrate the greater power of the Christian God over his spiritual competitors. In addition, the destruction of this famous sanctuary was undertaken with the approval of the reigning emperor, signaling a change in the locus of sacral authority in the Roman world as Roman emperors were now abandoning traditional pharaonic and Hellenistic models of divine kingship by ceding spiritual authority to Christian bishops.

Drie broers en een schipbreukeling

Summary In this article I will apply an intertextual perspective to a selection of epigrams from the Greek Anthology in order to assess the role of variation within these epigrams. Within the tradition of the literary epigram, the element of variation had always been important, yet some Hellenistic and Imperial epigrammatists, such as Archias and Zosimus, took this dimension of the genre to extremes, in creating strings of epigrams which intentionally vary on their Imperial models and on their Imperial models´ Hellenistic models. This article charts some of these epigrammatic ‘chain reactions’: the poems on the three hunting brothers Damis, Clitor and Pigres, the birthday epigrams of Leonides of Alexandria, the epigrams on the shipwrecked Antheus, and several epigrams on ships that were destroyed prematurely. All serve to assess the way in which intertextual processes develop within the epigrammatic tradition, and to show that such a perspective is essential to their appreciation.

Oinophora reflected in the production of Geto-Dacian pottery workshops during the 1st century AD

The form and stylistic details of some vessels discovered in Brad and Răcătău settlements dated in 1st century BC – 1st century AD, known in Romanian archaeological literature as ritual vessels with zoomorphic protomes or parallelepipedic vessels with zoomorphic protomes, have none analogies in the indigenous repertory of vessels. The Hellenistic plastic vessels or, more specific, ram-shaped Knidian reliefs have been identified as source of inspiration. Another vessel discovered in Răcătău, known as the ritual barrel-shaped vessel or the rider-shaped vessel, is also suspected to have Hellenistic models as source of inspiration. The research of Hellenistic and Roman pottery that circulated north of the Danube during the period between the 2nd century BC and the beginning of the 2nd century AD allows me to make certain observations on the presence of oinophora on Geto-Dacian sites and on their possible impact on local production.

NEOLIBERAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE TRUTH IN FAKE NEWS (SELF-WRITING/SELF-ENTERPRISE/SELF-CONTROL)

Taking cues from Michel Foucault’s late work on ancient cultures of self-care, this article argues that the success of neoliberalism is bound up with an epistemological critique of modernity forged by the movement’s founding theorists. This critique takes aim at three distinct intellectual currents – the socialist, the rationalist, and the pastoral – and thus marks a tripartite break from modern techniques of power and subjectivation. I contend that a Hellenistic model of self-cultivation – exemplified especially in Epicurean, Cynic, and Stoic discourses and scrutinized meticulously by Foucault in his late lectures – becomes reactivated in late twentieth-century American economic and social thought. The second half of the article considers modes of digital writing as “technologies of the self.” Taking the case of “fake news” as my central reference point, I argue that common practices of social media “sharing” constitute an emerging practice of curatorial self-writing that makes one an especially favorable target for neoliberal strategies of social control.

The Didactic Aesthetics of Marcellus' De piscibus (GDRK 63)

This article aims to demonstrate that the extant fragment from De piscibus (101 hexameters, Heitsch, Griechischen Dichterfragmente der römischen Kaiserzeit 63), which was part of the medical corpus of the Greek physician Marcellus of Side (second century c.e.), should not be considered merely pedagogical, as has been the prevailing view so far. In his approach, structure, lexical originality and style Marcellus strives to be a true didactic epicist, in the vein of his Hellenistic model Nicander of Colophon, and in acknowledgement of Hesiod, the fountainhead of didactic epic. The view that Marcellus should be considered an artful poet, concerned with literary aesthetics, is corroborated by an allusion to Hes. Op. 519, which has thus far gone unnoticed.

Contaminaciones paganas en la imagen de los primeros emperadores cristianos en la Nueva Roma: el caso de Constantino = Pagan Influences in the Image of the First Christian Emperors in the New Rome: the Case of Constantine

The emperor Constantine designed a new model of the imperial image based upon the incorporation of Christian symbolism and the reusal of traditional Roman and Hellenistic models. This sort of ideological syncretism so characteristic of Late Antiquity —we understand here ‘ideology’ following G. Dumezil— is adopted by the emperor for his own image, as we can see especially in some buildings and monuments of his new capital, Constantinople. In this contribution we aim to review some literary and iconographic sources on this issue, in the particular case of Constantine.

Liebesschwüre mit und ohne Hesiod

Since the 19^th c. it has been taken for granted that Apollodorus’ version of the story about the love of Zeus and Io and the killing of Argus, in which Zeus is said to have denied his love by swearing a false oath, must be traced back to Hesiod. This paper tries to show (1) that the reasons given for this assumption are not valid. They are based on a clear misunderstanding of Apollodorus’ words. In addition, the evidence adduced for it from literature and early vase painting does not stand close examination. It will be argued instead (2) that Apollodorus’ version is based rather on a hellenistic model and that in it Zeus actually does not commit a perjury, but tries to save Io from Hera’s revenge.

Arab-Islamic Reception and Development of Hellenistic Science

This article is an overview of the Arab-Islamic reception and development of Hellenistic science. It particularly refers to mathematics, physics and astronomy. It focuses on the following topics: 1) Two interpretative models of this reception in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century scholarship: the “Indo-European model” (which supposes a cultural heterogeneity between Greece and Islam) and the “cosmopolitan Hellenistic model” (which supposes homogeneity between the two). 2) The channels through which Hellenistic science was transmitted to the Islamic world: the philological channel, and the oral channel which implies the pre-existence of a common Greek-Semitic cultural ground that made this transmission possible. 3) Three features of the Arab-Islamic sciences that highlight their essential contribution to the emergence of modern science in 16th and 17th century Europe: 3.1. The “democratising” character of the Arab-Islamic sciences resulting from a larger diffusion of literacy. 3.2. The higher precision of measurements and calculations. 3.3. The experimental approach of Muslim scientists. A positive role in the accomplishment of these advances has been played by the non-metaphysical character of orthodox Islamic monotheism. According to Muslim orthodoxy, there are no Neo-Platonic intermediaries between the almighty God and his creation. The whole universe is submitted to the same physical laws. I argue that today it is important to open an interdisciplinary debate on the Arab-Islamic sciences. It would certainly lead to a better appreciation of their historical contribution. It could also suggest answers to contemporary epistemological impasses deriving from the growing gap between the humanities and the sciences.

GREEK TYRANNY AND ROMAN EMPERORS DURING THE SEVERAN PERIOD: A CASE STUDY OF P. COL. 123 AND SEG XVII 759

Abstract Greek and Hellenistic models were central to the formulation of the position and capabilities in law of the Roman Emperor during the Principate. The purpose of this article is to argue that the ideological response to Greek tyranny by Roman authors and the impact of the narrative tradition on tyrants both influenced what the Emperors could do and what was expected of them. Through the narrative tradition which existed on tyranny in the ancient world, Roman Emperors were presented with modes of behaviour on how the interplay and the relationship between the ruler and the ruled took place. Through the examples of the Columbia papyrus and the Goharian inscription, I will argue that the Roman situation was quite unique in the combination of approachability and the practical administration of justice. These examples show how the Emperor was not simply a benevolent monarch but also, if necessary, a strict magistrate.

Latin Poets and Italian Gods (review)

Reviewed by: Latin Poets and Italian Gods Darja Šterbenc Erker Elaine Fantham. Latin Poets and Italian Gods. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. xii + 229 pp. Cloth, $55. Which kind of gods and religious experience does Elaine Fantham study in her book on Latin poets and Italian gods? Instead of a fruitless quest for the origins of religion, Fantham examines minor gods in Latin literature. The idea for writing a book on “Italian” gods stems from the laudes Italiae in Augustan literature and the range of the discussed passages on gods of Rome and Latium is impressive, from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Fasti and Metamorphoses to Statius’ Silvae and Carmina Priapeia. This study of religious beliefs and literary representations of the gods reveals a vivid picture of ancient worship of the minor gods, especially as portrayed in Latin literature. In addition, Fantham pays attention to earlier Greek and Hellenistic models of the poetic representations of the gods in her discussions of different kinds of texts (elegies, epics, epigrams, inscriptions). My review will concentrate on the notion of religion and gods presented in this book. The first part of the book (“Honouring the Italian Gods”) consists of three chapters (“Rustica Numina: Country Gods of Italy and Their Reception in Roman Poetry,” “Virgil’s Gods of the Land,” and “Ovid’s Fasti and the Local Gods of the City”), which originally comprised a series of public lectures for a general audience. The second part, entitled “Counter-Examples, and the Triumph of Artistry over Fading Devotion,” consists of three further chapters (“Ovidian Variations: From Friendly Flora to Lewd Salmacis and Angry Acheloüs,” “Gods in a Man-made Landscape: Priapus,” and “Gods in Statian Settings”). Whereas the literary evidence presented in the first part concerns the worship of these gods, the second part with its “Counter-Examples” discusses poetic representations of the gods which according to the author do not have a direct connection to the religious life and worship of the gods; therefore, Fantham speaks of “fading devotion.” In her preface Fantham describes Ovid’s Fasti as “replete with echoes and reconstructions of primitive Roman worship” (ix). Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Fasti depict “the devotion and will to believe,” but non-Roman myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in the second part, stand for “detached fantasy” (ix). Fantham’s stated purpose is to provide “a better sense of what was gained and lost when Rome’s increasingly cosmopolitan culture moved beyond Augustus’ renewal or re-creation of Italian religion to replace piety with fantasy and emotional detachment from Italy’s countryside and its gods” (xi). The underlying idea of the book is that the worship of the agricultural gods, nymphs, and forest-gods was a real, authentic religion of the Latins. But, Fantham’s is a modern conception of what real, authentic religion in ancient Italy was supposed to be. Unfortunately, this notion of religion does not take into account the recent research on Roman religion which concentrates on the epigraphic evidence (as well as many other kinds of textual evidence, including literary) and stresses the dominance of orthopraxy (correct ritual performance) over a close, emotional relationship between the god and the worshipper. Such work, acting as a corrective to the assumption of an [End Page 693] ancient, authentic, emotional relationship with the gods in supposed agricultural rituals as imagined by James Frazer at the end of the nineteenth century, could have been usefully incorporated (e.g., J. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion [Bloomington 2003] and M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome [Cambridge 1998]). In the first chapter Fantham outlines the evidence for the survival of cults of rustic demigods and stresses the fact that rivers and springs were conceived by the ancients as gods and nymphs and were worshipped in various cults. Thus, each river or spring was worshipped individually, and the traces of many different local spring nymphs or river gods remain in numerous inscriptions. The inscriptions dedicated to the nymphs presiding over healing springs range from fulfillment of vows to nymphs who healed a person to the defixiones in which the petitioner asks the nymphs to curse a rival. Fantham also presents various...

Adrift toward Empire

In seeking the origins of the celebrated portico-framed fora of Imperial Rome, John R. Senseney explores the earliest recognizable example of this architectural type, a lost porticus of the 160s BCE built by the victorious commander Gnaeus Octavius. Adrift toward Empire: The Lost Porticus Octavia in Rome and the Origins of the Imperial Fora adduces ancient testimony to aid our understanding of the purposes and formal appearance of this pivotal monument. While the author suggests that Octavius emulated a Hellenistic model, he does not posit that the patron necessarily sought to associate his triumph with those of his Greek forebears. Those meanings did, however, become attached to the building type by later viewers and the architects who created the Imperial fora. In order to appreciate this phenomenon, the author questions the usefulness of fixed categories like "Hellenistic" and "Roman" and argues for a history sensitive to the fluidic intentions and changing meanings of architecture.

Classical elements in the endowments of Serbian XIII century donors

Classical elements in the endowments of Serbian XIII century donors

The Shadow of Callimachus: Studies in the Reception of Hellenistic Poetry at Rome (review)

Reviewed by: The Shadow of Callimachus: Studies in the Reception of Hellenistic Poetry at Rome Peter E. Knox Richard Hunter. The Shadow of Callimachus: Studies in the Reception of Hellenistic Poetry at Rome. Roman Literature in Its Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 162. $85.00 (hb.). ISBN 0-521-87118-2; $29.99 (pb.). ISBN 0-521-69179-6. The publication of Rudolf Pfeiffer’s magisterial edition of the fragments of Callimachus’ poetry in 1949–1953 led to a general reassessment of the relationship between Roman poets and their Hellenistic models, best exemplified perhaps by Walter Wimmel’s Kallimachos in Rom (1960), “a book,” as Hunter notes, “increasingly cited rather than read” (2). With the publication of this modest volume, Wimmel is now sure to be cited a good deal less. Developments over the course of the generation after Wimmel’s work make the time ripe to revisit the influence of Callimachus on Roman poetry, and not least among those developments is the reappraisal of Hellenistic poetry to which Hunter has himself contributed, most notably in his recent (with M. Fantuzzi) Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry (Cambridge 2004). In much of his critical work on Hellenistic poetry Hunter has moderated the former orthodoxy that these poets represented a break with the past, a view [End Page 564] that underlies his reading of the Roman poets here. In Hunter’s interpretations (4), “Hellenistic poetry attempts recuperation at least as much as it glories in difference.” This makes a suitable starting point for the four case studies in this volume, exploring the ways in which some of the Roman poets sought not only to appropriate the Greek literary tradition, but also to incorporate themselves into it. The first chapter, “In the Grove,” most closely tracks the subject matter of Wimmel’s earlier work without aiming at an exhaustive treatment of the programmatic passages in which Roman writers depict scenes of initiation into the traditions of Greek poetry. Hunter focuses on three texts, Propertius 3.1, Vergil’s Sixth Eclogue, and Ovid, Amores 3.1, to illustrate the principle that the Romans saw their Hellenistic models as part of a longer and deeper strain of tradition that stretched back to include classical and archaic works: not just Philitas, but Mimnermus as well. Not just Callimachus, but Hesiod too: “the Roman engagement with Callimachus is always part of a complex engagement with Greek literary and intellectual culture in a much wider sense” (41). The ramifications of this analysis are explored in subsequent chapters that take in much broader territory than was ever conceived of by Wimmel. In the second chapter Hunter pursues this expanded analysis of the cultural intersection of Greek and Roman through an examination of the role of Dionysus in poems of Horace (Carm. 1.37), Tibullus (1.7), and Propertius (3.17). The most interesting part of this discussion is perhaps Hunter’s brief investigation of Isiac hymns as part of the literary and cultural heritage exploited by Tibullus (57–61). In the third chapter, “Nothing Like This Before,” Hunter develops his theme through an exploration of Catullus’ adaptations of Callimachean similes. The final chapter is a revised version of his contribution to Fantuzzi and Papanghelis’ splendid Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Pastoral. Here Hunter reprises in a pastoral key many of the themes already developed earlier in the book in a compact and learned survey of Virgil’s use of the bucolic tradition. The shadow of Callimachus is long enough to take in Theocritus as well as many other strands of Hellenistic poetry: as Hunter later notes (146), “Callimachus’ name has always been made to stand, almost by metonymy, for things beyond his own poetry.” This point is taken from the brief afterword, which concludes the volume, but it is a leitmotiv running throughout the book. As we learn more about Greek literature from the third to first centuries b.c.e., and continue to recontextualize what we already think we know, Callimachus remains as a dominant presence, a shadow, to use Hunter’s metaphor, that sometimes seems to overwhelm other presences whose importance we are now better positioned to gauge than was Wimmel...

L'hellénisme dans le royaume numide au IIe siècle av. J.-C

The reigns of Massinissa and his sons were remarkable by the opening of Numidia to Greek world. This hellenization results from the political willingness of numidian sovereigns to refer to hellenistic model as many others non Greeks states did. The interpretation of litterarian, archaeological, and epigraphic sources allows indeed to reduce the importance of commercial exchanges between Numidia and the Greek world, and to emphazise the political and cultural dimension of such documents.

Mars as hellenistic lover: Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.29–40 and its subtexts

The passage discussed in this article has two kinds of Hellenistic subtext, one pictorial and the other poetic. The pictorial is represented by the fresco in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii depicting Bacchus reclining on the bosom of a woman. The peotic subtext is the kind of Hellenistic epigram that describes the male lover as lying in the lap or on the bosom of the female beloved. Meleager and Philodemus provide examples. These, with the fresco, show that a Hellenistic model for the erotic schema of Mars and Venus was available to Lucretius. On this understanding, it becomes easier to explain the phrase tereti cervice (35), borrowed from Cicero's translation of the Phaenomena of Aratus. The conclusions to be drawn from this passage go counter to the prevailing view of a “sublime” Empedoclean Lucretius who had nothing in common with Hellenistic poetry.