Hexameter Poem Research Articles

A New Latin Poem by Joseph Addison

Abstract Known almost exclusively now as the author of The Spectator and Cato, Joseph Addison was also highly regarded throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a Latin poet. This article presents a new addition to the canon of Addison’s Latin verse: a 57-line hexameter poem entitled Arcus Triumphalis which survives in a unique manuscript copy recently acquired by Addison’s alma mater Magdalen College, Oxford. The article begins by describing the manuscript (scans of the leaves containing Addison’s poem are included), detailing its likely genesis and confirming its attribution of the poem to Addison. Then it reconstructs the contexts of the poem, which describes a firework display put on in St James’s Square on the evening of 2 December 1697 to celebrate William III’s triumphal return to London after concluding the Peace of Ryswick. A third section provides a critical reading of the poem, concentrating on its surprising presentation of William III and its bold use of ekphrasis. The article concludes by assessing the place of Arcus Triumphalis in Addison’s career, in relation to the early development of his Whiggism and as a forerunner of several of his definitive concerns in The Spectator: privacy and the public sphere, urban spectacle, and the aesthetics of looking. An edited text of the poem and an English translation are provided in an appendix.

THE MANY FACES OF DIONYSUS IN THE HEXAMETERS OF THE SINAI PALIMPSEST (SIN. AR. NF 66)

AbstractThe fragments of a hexameter poem about Dionysus recently discovered in a palimpsest (Sin. Ar. NF 66) reveal some different faces of Dionysus, including an Adonis-figure at the heart of a dispute between two goddesses (Persephone and Aphrodite), and a personified wine-god, Oinos, threatened by the machinations of his enemies in the court of Zeus. These palimpsest texts help to illuminate some of the allusions to the early life of the god that have long puzzled scholars, especially in some of the early Christian apologists and the collection of OrphicHymns.

The creation performance of Tang Ong Song Pok

The study of the creation of performance, costume and accessories has the objective to create the performance conveying Nora’s dressing of Nora Yai’s dressing style (Nora is called for the Classical Thai Tune of Southern of Thailand), posture, style of dance and patterns of dressing from documents, observations, interviews from the Nora’s artists as well as experiences of creators being analyzed into the knowledge based on the concept of creative theory in 7 steps of Emeritus Prof. Dr. Surapon Wirunrak and being presented in the form of creative dance art adapted from traditional dance with the creative dance moves created from 20 prototypical dance moves of Nora, 6 dance moves imitating from the nature and 23 new creative dance moves. The pattern of performance is divided into 3 parts as follows;
 The first part is the Mantra character. 3 male performers gradually release in the rhythm of the drum and spin one round and then dance to Pleng Patcha with the first performer writing the character “นะ” (na), “มะ” (ma). The second performer writes the character “อะ” (Ah) and the third performer writes “อุ” (au). After that they dance to summon the holy thing.
 The second part is the dressing grace. The performers make the dance moves with singing Thai octameter poem of Nora in the melody of drum known as Tub and in the melody of hexameter poem transmitting the importance and costume of Nora’s dressing.
 The third part is the delicate worship to teachers. The performers make the dance moves in the song of worship teacher with 3 dance moves representing the delicacy, stability and expertise and dance of Pleng Krai throughout Pleng Ched to get back the stage.
 The creation, the dressing style of the traditional Nora costume as Nora’s dressing, the singing in a southern accent and the traditional and recreated melody of southern folk music.

Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion

AbstractThe mythical singer Orpheus was credited as the proto-founder of private Dionysiac initiations in Classical Greece, and written hexameter poems attributed to his authorship played an important role in these cults. Since at least the nineteenth century, classical scholars have identified this “bookish” orientation as a defining feature of Orphism. This article approaches Orphic texts using the analytical tools of “material religion” and argues that Orphic textuality is best understood as a medial extension of poetic performance. Like musical-poetic performers, ritual experts drew authority in part frommimêsisof legendary archetypes (Orpheus, Musaeus, Melampus, etc.), and part of the physical text’s function was to make this identification believable for performers in Orphic cults and other low-level genres. In the Derveni Papyrus, however, the book enables a rejection of performance-based expertise in favor of an authority based on textual exegesis.

Six Faces of Odysseus: Genre and Characterization Strategies in Four Late Antique Greek “Epyllia”

In the first line of the new Odyssey translation (2017) by Emily Wilson “Ἄνδρα […] πολύτροπον” is translated as “a complicated man”, and, for sure, Odysseus is one of the most fascinating, multifarious and complicated characters of Greek literature. This contribution traces different forms of engagement with the figure of Odysseus in the way the male protagonists of four late antique poems are characterized. As shorter narrative hexameter poems, Triphiodorus' Sack of Troy, Musaeus’ Hero and Leander and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen are sometimes called “epyllia”. The (slightly longer) anonymous Orphic Argonautica is generally not. The engagement with the Homeric (and post-Homeric) character of Odysseus, as will be argued, can tell us more about these poems’ position within and vis-à-vis the epic tradition than any modern generic label ever could.

Review: Juvencus’ Four Books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor, by Scott McGill

Book Review| December 01 2017 Review: Juvencus’ Four Books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor, by Scott McGill Scott McGill, Juvencus’ Four Books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor. New York: Routledge, 2016. 308 pp. ISBN 9780415635837. $125.00. Blossom Stefaniw Blossom Stefaniw University of Halle Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Studies in Late Antiquity (2017) 1 (4): 407–409. https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2017.1.4.407 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Blossom Stefaniw; Review: Juvencus’ Four Books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor, by Scott McGill. Studies in Late Antiquity 1 December 2017; 1 (4): 407–409. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2017.1.4.407 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentStudies in Late Antiquity Search Scott McGill has made available in English translation the first of the Latin biblical epics and the first known hexameter poem dedicated to Christian subject matter. With the publication of this volume, the entire poem is accessible in a modern European language for the first time. This is a great feat for the integration of a significant text to the teaching and study of early Christianity, quite apart from the linguistic heroism required to translate more than 3000 lines of dactylic hexameter into very respectable English verse. The book itself is straightforward, consisting of a roughly 20-page introduction and very copious and valuable notes that give details of intertextual allusions, clarifications of references to the gospel stories, and literary commentary. The text of the poem is correlated in the right hand margin with the passages from the canonical gospels to which it refers. The poem itself takes up 78 print... You do not currently have access to this content.

Quinto Orazio Flacco. Annali delle edizioni a stampa (secoli XV–XVIII) by Antonio Iurilli

Reviewed by: Quinto Orazio Flacco. Annali delle edizioni a stampa (secoli XV–XVIII) by Antonio Iurilli Frances Muecke Iurilli, Antonio, Quinto Orazio Flacco. Annali delle edizioni a stampa (secoli XV–XVIII) (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 574), 2 vols, Geneva, Droz, 2017; paperback; pp. 1540; 89 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. CHF148; ISBN 9782600047302. More than ten years ago I reviewed Antonio Iurilli's fascinating Orazio nella letteratura italiana. Commentatori, traduttori, editori italiani di Quinto Orazio Flacco dal XV al XVIII secolo (Vecchiarelli Editore, 2004) in this journal (Parergon, 22.2, 2005). This new work, in which the subject has been expanded to a global scale, follows a similar pattern. Volume 1 contains a rich interpretative 'Introduction' and the bibliographical 'Annali', that is, a registry of 2372 items (see the 'Criteri di registrazione bibliografica', p. 307). This is divided into [End Page 218] the four centuries covered, each further subdivided by year, the last being 1800, with a final list of uncertain or not securely dated editions. Volume 2 contains the bibliography and indexes. It is worth listing some of these last as they give a glimpse of the book's scope: 'Indice biografico degli autori secondari'; 'Indice biografico degli editori, dei librai, dei tipografi'; 'Indice dei luoghi di stampa'; 'Indice per autore delle imitazioni, delle parafrasi, delle parodie, delle traduzioni'; 'Indice per lingua nazionale delle traduzioni'; 'Indice per autore delle edizioni musicali'; 'Indice cronologico delle edizioni musicali'. There is also a general index of names of persons and places and a list of illustrations. Some of the indexes provide summary results of the research. For example, the 'Indice cronologico delle edizioni musicali' interestingly shows at a glance that the two most fecund periods for musical settings of Horace were the sixteenth century and the second half of the eighteenth century, there being none between 1607 and 1757 (for a comment see i, 141). It takes a bit longer to peruse the 'Indice dei luoghi di stampa' but that too generates insights into the spread of publishing (from Aboa, the old name for Turku, to Zwolle) and the dominance of some centres (London, Paris and Venice). The heart of the book is in Volume 1. 'Introduction' is a bit of a misnomer for the nearly 300 pages, a book in itself, in which are discussed important aspects of the printing and reception history of Horace's works over four centuries. Iurilli's method is to follow the book: that is, he selects significant books from his chronological list, the 'Annali', and discusses whatever it is that makes them important and interesting, weaving them together into themes. Each book so selected opens a window onto its intellectual and cultural context. Part 1, on the fifteenth century, deals mainly with Italy; the first complete edition of Horace north of the Alps did not appear until 1492(p. 55) or 1498 (p. 79). Even so, of the fifty-four items that precede the 1492 edition in the combined list, about twenty come from northern Europe. A theme that unifies the sections on 'protoeditoria' in Italy and north of the Alps is the return of Horace as a favoured lyric poet after the medieval preference for moralizing/didactic hexameter poems. Before this comes the fascinating treatment of 'Horatian "ghosts"', suitably starting the book with a look at the beginnings of the whole bibliographical enterprise. With the sixteenth century other themes come to the fore: critical editions, commentaries other than Italian, translations (in Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Spain) and the French hegemony (Lambinus, Muret, and the Estienne family). Christophe Plantin took his Horatian interests to Antwerp, where he produced a number of editions in collaboration with noted scholars in the second half of the century. A substantial sub-section is devoted to the separate story of the Ars poetica, editions, versions and interpretations of which burgeoned from the beginning of the century. Lastly, the absence of literary translations in Germany finds [End Page 219] compensation in the number of musical versions there. Horace held his own in a different way with the advent of the Baroque and anti-classicism in the seventeenth century, particularly through lyric poetry. A new fashion for...

Aetna and Aetnaism: Schiller, Vibrant Matter, and the Phenomenal Regimes of Ancient Poetry

The past decade or so has seen a transformation of landscape of speculative theory by various forms of new materialism which have sought to overturn object relations of Kantian correlationism, according to which we know neither things nor thinking in themselves, but only relation between them. (1) Among cognitive projects of speculative realism, object oriented ontology, and vibrant materialism, it is latter that, in its advocacy of a fine grained attention to agency of objects with which human beings share their life world, would seem to afford a new opportunity for practice of literary scholarship. One may cleave closely to a Kantian epistemology or be indifferent to it one way or another, and yet be willing to admit that objects of ancient poetry are livelier than we have been accustomed to acknowledge, and that there has been insufficient attention to ways in which they constitute field of agency in poems in which they appear. Alex Purves (2015) takes vibrant materialism of Jane Bennett and Sara Ahmed as her point of departure for a reexamination of Ajax and his weapons, and ways in which they constitute a single field of activity and resistance in Iliad which is not yet constituted as soul, body, and its prostheses, but is still an aggregate of separate, self-moving parts actuated by their participation in material assemblages: hand in action is one with shield, for example, and does not belong more primordially to a body that is, as yet, still notional. Indeed, as Purves argues, new materialism might even be understood as a rediscovery of pre-human being in world of Homeric hero, as it was controversially characterized by Bruno Snell--a project for investigation in present that awaits its own chronicles of thick description. (2) One way in which we have never been modern is that we have not separated ourselves any more decisively than Homeric heroes from array of material presences among which we find ourselves. In this paper I respond to possibility of a renewed attention to material regimes of ancient poetry in three ways. First, I show how Snell's characterization of object world of Homeric poetry has its roots in Schiller's account of modalities of subjectification in his Letters on Aesthetic Education. Second, I demonstrate how a material regime with abortive subjectivity as its outcome, which Schiller calls the empire of Titans, is continuously, if intermittently, explored in tradition of classical poetry devoted to representation of Etna and culminating in first century Latin hexameter poem Aetna. And third, I suggest that failure of a human observer to reduce its phenomenal experience to terms of its own knowledge--the signature experience of Etna tradition that I here call phenomenalization--exceeds possibility of its recuperation by vibrant materialism, or other contemporary ontologies, precisely because it so dramatically privileges phenomenalization over ontology. The very vibrancy of object world in this tradition points to a crucial weakness of new materialism in its project of recuperating phenomenal experience for theoretical understanding; indeed, it is impossibility of any such project that animates material regime of poetry in Etna tradition. I In The Discovery of Mind, Bruno Snell claimed that work of objectification, fundamental to self-understanding of human being as subject, could be observed in Homeric poems as an activity of human being in distantiating itself from its surroundings which is still in progress. For example, in Homer's comparison of front rank of an army to a rock that endures winds and waves, he suggests that it is not quite correct to say that rock is viewed anthropomorphically, unless we add that our understanding of rock is anthropomorphic for same reason that we are able to look at ourselves petromorphically, since the act of regarding rock in human terms furnishes us with a means of apprehending and defining our own behavior. …

Ramus poeticus. Zu den lateinischen Grabgedichten auf dem Sarkophag von Thomas Ramm in der Tallinner Domkirche

Ramus poeticus. The Latin Sepulchral Epigram on the Sarcophagus of Thomas Ramm in St Mary’s Cathedral in TallinnAmong the versified sepulchral epigrams in Estonian churches, the six elegiac distichs on the side slabs and the seven hexameter lines of verses on the cover of the sarcophagus of Thomas Ramm (1564–1631), a grave monument built in 1634 in the Tallinn Cathedral, have not been identified as the poems until now. The main reasons are that the verses are written in continuo, not in the traditional manner, and are difficult to read. Therefore, the other poetical features were also overlooked. In our article we edit the poems as a facsimile and in a modernized way, translate them into German and Estonian, and comment on the impact of other well-known texts from European culture on this sepulchral epigram. Although the main sources for the composition of early modern sepulchral epigrams are here the name and profession of the deceased (locus notationis and locus generis), the anonymous author of the poem in elegiac distich follows a very contemporary poem In idem sacrum canticum (Epigr. 39) written and published by Mathias Casimirus Sarbiewski 1632, the famous Jesuit poet from Vilna. The use of a Jesuit’s poem in memorial culture in Protestant Tallinn seems unexpected, but it is a creative and contrastive way of imitating Christian and Classical culture that lies behind it. The hexameter poem on the cover of the sarcophagus has no such direct contemporary models and, with its memento mori topic and rhetorical question about the future at the end of the poem, is a rather traditional Neo-Latin epicedium.

Poet, Scholar, Trickster: Israel the Grammarian and his “Versus de arte metrica”

Israel the Grammarian was a tenth-century scholar and poet of presumably Breton origin, who played an influential role in King AEthelstan’s court before becoming tutor to Bruno, the future archbishop of Cologne. This article focuses on his hexameter poem “Versus Israhelis de arte metrica super nomen et uerbum,” a discussion of the prosody of final syllables, addressed to Bishop Robert of Trier, Israel’s patron. While on the surface the “Versus de arte metrica” appear to be a didactic poem, it has, in reality, probably been intended as an academic parlour game that tests the reader’s command of Latin grammar and grammatical literature. At the same time, it reflects the central role of inflectional paradigms and the emergence of inflection tables in medieval Latin instruction.

THE ANTI-BUCOLIC WORLD OF NICANDER'STHERIACA

The last decades have shown that Nicander'sTheriaca(second centuryb.c.e.), a didactic hexameter poem of 958 lines on snakes, scorpions, spiders, and the proper treatment of the wounds they inflict, is a markedly more playful work than most readers thought. Rather than considering the poem as a vehicle of authentic learning, literary approaches to the nature of Nicander's strange poetic world have focussed on his eye for Alexandrian aesthetics, intertextuality, linguistic innovation, and awareness of the didactic tradition that started with Hesiod'sWorks and Days, but also on his predilection for horror, voyeuristic sensationalism, and gory details. Although literary-minded readers have found it hard to disprove convincingly that Nicander may have hadsomeprofessional knowledge of his subject matter, a glance at his arcane language is enough to convince any reader that theTheriacacannot be concernedsolelywith its explicit subject. In this article I will make some additional observations on the way in which Nicander has turned theTheriacainto a work of literature, focussing on some of the choices that he has made with regard to his less than veracious depiction of snakes and animals. While Spatafora rightly points to Nicander's eye for detail when portraying floral beauty, I will argue that the poet's play with thetoposof thelocus amoenushas a darker side. Rather than creating an epic world of beauty, Nicander shows his talent for taking the reader along an unpleasant path of apprehension and negative feelings, portraying a choice selection of afflictions. Not only does he have many ways of giving his quasi-scientific account a markedly negative atmosphere, but his world may well be a deliberate reversal of that other well-known Hellenistic portrayal of the natural world, Theocritus' bucolics.

Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism . by Ian S. Moyer (review)

Reviewed by: Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism. by Ian S. Moyer Susan A. Stephens Ian S. Moyer. Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 357 Pp. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-521-76551-0. Ian Moyer’s study begins by observing that Egypt occupies a position that “is ‘other’ twice over: Other not only to ancient Greeks, but also to modern historians, classicists and other students of Hellenism” (2). His introduction provides ample evidence of the ways in which modern scholars from Gustav Droysen to Arnaldo Momigliano have positioned Egypt as unworthy of serious attention either because it was unknowable, in decline, developmentally separate during periods of contact, or no more than a projection of Greek ideas about the “other.” Arguing that this is a kind of “intellectual apartheid” that traces its roots to colonialism, Moyer prefers a dialogic and transactional model of agency. Beginning with Herodotus, Moyer argues that, by privileging “Herodotus’ text as the only producer of significant meaning,” scholars have reduced Egypt to a “passive object, a flat screen for Greek projections.” He offers by way of contrast a reading of Herodotus’ encounter with the Theban priests (2.142–144) with its embedded story of Hecataeus of Miletus. When Hecataeus claimed an ancestry sixteen generations removed from a god, these priests countered with the antiquity of their own culture, demonstrated by carefully kept human genealogies that reached back three hundred generations. Moyer demonstrates the existence of such detailed priestly and kingly genealogies, and the particular historical circumstances in which they were produced. They constituted, he suggests, a “fundamental and novel orientation to the human past” that could have served as a stimulus for what is taken to be a significant innovation of Herodotus’ writing—to think of causalities in human terms, not divinely directed. In his second chapter Moyer turns to Manetho’s history of Egypt, written under the first Ptolemies. Although this history now survives only in quotations [End Page 709] and epitomes, Moyer makes the case that this was not (as usually presented) an Egyptian enabled to write the history of his own country for the first time thanks to earlier Greek models so much as a response to Herodotus that asserts the primacy and value of authentically Egyptian modes of representing its own past by means of the king list. Manetho annotates his basic chronology with events that illustrate the king acting to uphold the cosmic order, thus modeling good kingship, or failing to do so with the attendant consequences—thus it is a template set out for the Ptolemies themselves to imitate. In his third chapter, Moyer focuses on the establishment of a temple of Serapis on Delos in the late third or early second century b.c.e., an event for which we have an inscription that consists of a Serapis aretalogy with details of a law suit over the temple’s establishment; it is followed by a hexameter poem by Maiistas that fleshes out the earlier narrative (Both are provided in appendices). Moyer argues that the lawsuit was an intra-Egyptian dispute brought by priests of other Serapeia, not (as is generally thought) by Greeks trying to exclude Egyptian gods from the island. A compelling part of his argument is the way in which the aretalogy positions the opponents as Sethian (the god of chaos), evoking Osirian myths of legitimate succession to authenticate the rights of one line of Egyptian priests over another. Although Maiistas’ hymn has been criticized as hackneyed and derivative, Moyer points out that a series of allusions to Odysseus, particularly his speech to the Achaeans to stay the course at Troy, provides a recognizable Homeric precedent for the struggles of the Egyptian priests to establish their shrine in the face of local opposition, thus less a case of colonial mimicry than self-conscious deployment of alien tropes to persuade Greek audiences. The final chapter jumps forward six centuries. Thessalus is the Greek author of a fourth-century c.e. pharmacological treatise (a translation is provided in an appendix) offered to a Roman emperor that claims to have compelled an Egyptian priest to reveal his secret learning. In doing so, Thessalus constructs his...

I The Poems

The early Greek hexameter poems that survive intact are the two Homeric epics; the Hesiodic Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield; thirty-one Homeric Hymns; and about two hundred short inscriptions. Homer comprises 27,803 lines of verse; the other poems comprise another 5,000 lines or so. But we can safely infer that there was once much more. For one thing, we are lucky to have what we do: as a general principle, the texts we have inherited through mediaeval manuscripts represent only a sample of what was available in ancient libraries. For another, in ancient authors who do survive we find references to over a hundred other poems or poets that were available to them but are now lost. In several cases we have indications of considerable length.

Les images dans les Alexipharmaques de Nicandre

In this article I show how Nicander, in his Alexipharmaca, reappropriates a standard epic practice, the use of similes, and how he uses these for ends that are not purely ornamental, but which answer as much to the construction of his hexameter poem as to the mythological or metapoetic discourse into a technical one. But the similes are not only a window open on another discursive type: they are also at times fully operative in the technical discourse and so take full part in medical description.

Avit de Vienne: Eloge consolatoire de la chastete (Sur la virginite). Introduction, critical text, translation, and notes by NICOLE HECQUET-NOTI.

I wrote complimentary reviews of Nicole Hecquet-Noti’s two-volume edition of Avitus’ De Spiritalis Historiae Gestis (SC 444 and 492) in JTS, ns 51 (2000), pp. 744–5 and 57 (2006), pp. 331–3. Her edition of the same author’s De Consolatoria Laude Castitatis shows the same qualities of professional competence and acute judgement, and is thoroughly to be recommended. This 666-line hexameter poem (written after 507) is made out by the manuscripts to be the sixth book of the Spiritual History, but it is something quite different. Its mysterious title hints at the genres it crosses: ‘il est aussi bien éloge poétique de la virginité consacrée que consolation adressée à la vierge qui a abandonné le monde, ou épithalame célébrant les noces spirituelles de la moniale et du Christ’ (p. 9). The editor teases out these strands in her excellent introduction, providing (p. 52) a helpful diagram of the interplay of precept and exemplum. She comments interestingly on the realism that Avitus brought to the old topic of the troubles of marriage, and on the way in which he saw dedication to virginity as a kind of emancipation and a means of putting women on the same level as men. At the same time, she puts the poem into its context of works (normally in prose) on virginity. The volume is rounded off with new editions of Avitus’ prologue to the Spiritual History, where the reader badly needs the help he is given, and of the non-Avitan Vita Sanctae Fuscinulae, which adds valuably to our knowledge of the shadowy Fuscina (Avitus’ sister) who is the addressee of the poem.

Lament. Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond (review)

Reviewed by: Lament. Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond Christos Tsagalis Ann Suter (ed.). Lament. Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xi, 288. $74.00 (pb.). ISBN 978-0-19-533692-4. Lament constitutes one of the most universal aspects of ancient societies and as such enjoys an extremely prolific representation in various forms of art (literature, vase-painting, sculpture, etc.). Despite the fact that the study of lament (as well as mourning and death) in Ancient Greece has received considerable scholarly attention during the last thirty-five years, we are short of comparative studies examining lament within the wider perspective of cross-cultural material. Seen in this light, this collection of essays constitutes a timely contribution to the study of this complex phenomenon, which is now expanded to other literary genres, cultures, and periods of the ancient mediterranean world. In her introduction Suter gives a brief overview of the significant progress made in this field, mainly on the basis of the seminal book of Margaret Alexiou (The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, Cambridge, Mass., 2002]), and summarizes the principal findings of up-to-date scholarship on lament: a female-gendered (but not exclusive) activity marking women as powerful figures who control a special social domain, pose a threat to male public sphere, and have consequently activated reactions, legal but also philosophical, aiming at restraining, downgrading, and even forbidding this perilous outburst of feminine authority. The book can be divided into three parts spanning time (more ancient to more recent) and space (from east to west) in the ancient Mediterranean: (a) Near-Eastern (Sumerian and Hittite) material; (b) Greek culture (Bronze Age iconography, Iliadic laments, classical iconography, tragedy, comedy, Hellenistic poetr); (c) Roman lament (Lucan and Roman funerary ritual). What follows is only a selection from this rich volume. The second and largest part is concentrated on Ancient Greece. B. Burke studies the Cycladic folded-arm figurines from the Early Bronze Age, the Tanagra larnakes from Boeotia, the painted sarcophagus from Ayia Triada in Crete, and the Warrior Vase from Mycenae. Burke's interpretations are thought-provoking and challenging, especially the last one which takes account of the place where the vase was found. C. Perkell's chapter is a welcoming contribution to a much discussed topic: she rightly emphasizes the importance of placing the formal laments for Hector in the Iliad at the epic's closure and argues that the content of the utterances is at odds with the kind of memorialization Hector himself had wanted. R. Martin embarks on a detailed analysis of Helen's diction that is replete with features and strategies mainly attested in the Iliadic gooi and argues that she emblematizes the subgenre of lament. K. Stears offers a very convincing presentation of the mourning role of women within their oikos and the polis. Suter tackles the highly interesting and rather neglected topic of male lament in Greek tragedy. Building on the foundations of solid metrical analyses and stylistic features of tragic lamentation, she argues that male lament had always been an integral part of Greek tragedy and that the negative [End Page 545] flagging of male expression of grief may have been a fifth-century construct, heavily influenced by the introduction of the institutionalized epitaphioi logoi. A. Karanika examines the use of lament as parody in fifth-century comedy and shows how lament is employed in the Thesmophoriazusae as a form of political commentary, fostering restoration and healing in a city wreacked by troubles. The Greek section of Lament ends with O. Levaniouk's stimulating study of the interrelation between wedding and lamentation features in a puzzling fourth-century b.c. hexameter poem, Erinna's Distaff. The third part of the collection is devoted to Roman culture. A. Keith explores how Lucan uses the theme of lament in his Bellum Civile. She convincingly argues that the poet deliberately blurs the boundaries between male and female, when both Cordus and Cornelia lament Pompey in a rather spontaneous manner, and proceeds with a full-scale exploitation of Cornelia's private pleas for public vengeance. Dutsch studies the function of the nenia, the female chant representing a kind...

Becoming Being: On Parmenides' Transformative Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming Being: On Parmenides' Transformative Philosophy Patricia Curd Chiara Robbiano . Becoming Being: On Parmenides' Transformative Philosophy. International Pre-Platonic Studies, 5. Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2006. Pp. 240. €59.00. ISBN 978-3-89665-383-3. Robbiano explores what she terms the "transformative" aspects of Parmenides' hexameter poem about what-is. Her claim is twofold. First, she argues that Parmenides uses epic language and literary strategies to transform the reader into the thinker who ultimately knows all things. Second, she maintains that the "becoming being" of her title is literal: the thinker who knows Being finally becomes Being (her upper case). The two parts of her project do not always ride easily with one another (and Robbiano hints in her preface that the second aspect was a later addition to a project that began as a dissertation), and the first is, I think, more successful than the second. A virtue of the book is Robbiano's attention to the Proem (DK 28B1). She returns to it several times, adding layers to her interpretation as she works through its thirty-two lines (using the text of Diels-Kranz). In this, her own strategy mirrors the one that she attributes to Parmenides and his goddess-narrator: the point of the poem "unfolds" as a reader works through the poem, catching the references and similarities to other ancient works, as well as the internal points of contact among the fragments and their arguments. Her analysis of the narrative "I" of B1.1–23 and the "you" to whom the goddess speaks (from B1.24 to the end of the poem) is persuasive: the reader is brought into the presence of the goddess, and the commands to listen, carry away the story, judge by reasoning, and so on are addressed to the reader as well as to the kouros. Not only must he cease to be a passive hearer and become an active thinker, so must we, who stand with him. Robbiano stresses the importance of the routes of inquiry, which ties in with her view that we are to give up a mortal perspective and take on the goddess' view of Being. This, too, seems correct, and part of Parmenides' revolutionary thought. In doing this we will adopt a certain kind of monism: The goddess advises the 'you' to look at what is the same in everything. Therefore monism is not incompatible with dialogical situation, nor with the existence of people, . . . nor finally with the usefulness of another perspective that recognizes differences. Parmenides is a monist: noein is the same as einai—if and when one manages to focus with one's nous on Being, to understand it and to become one with it. (129) The problem is to understand what this means. Robbiano has lovely arguments linking the signs at the beginning of B8 with Parmenides' rejection of earlier Presocratic cosmologies, and I think her view that Parmenides finds genuine change in fundamental entities impossible (and thus rejects earlier cosmologies) is correct. But when she tries to explain what Being is, and how we become one with it through changing our lives and following a way of inquiry, things become unclear. (It is here that the two parts of the project seem to clash with one another.) She links an understanding of Being with the "fullness of what-is" at B8.24 (130–33) and refers to B16. Yet B16 is a physical description of the limbs of a mortal and the changes in mortal thought caused by changes in physical composition, and part of the Doxai. How does that connect with Parmenides' claim that what-is is full of what-is? What is it to become one with Being? Robbiano accepts A. A. Long's view of the identity of thought and Being, and is attracted to Peter Kingsley's mystical Parmenides, but she has trouble [End Page 268] linking these with her analyses of rhetorical strategy and Parmenides' arguments. She seems eager to accommodate many views on Parmenides (and is refreshingly undogmatic), but not all of these can ride easily with one another. She avoids taking a stand on the "two routes or three?" question, but then has to...

Stephen Cheeke. Byron & Place – History, Translation, Nostalgia

William Hazlitt repeatedly suggested that Byron's poetry consisted of fine-sounding commonplaces and observed that the author of Childe Harold described the “stately cypress, or the fallen column, with the feeling that every schoolboy has about them”. This pretty damning judgement, shared by Arthur Hugh Clough (in his hexameter poem Amours de Voyage), may account both for the popularity of Byron's verse during his life-time and for the kind of posthumous fragmentation of the work into the “ma...

J. M. FEATHERSTONE, Theodore Metochites's poems ‘To Himself’. Introduction, text and translation

Abstract The hexameter poems of Theodore Metochites are perhaps the most determinedly baroque of all Byzantine literary productions to have survived. The tortuous constructions of Metochites' prose rhetoric are transmuted into his rather imprecise concept of the hexameter, with a vocabulary that is ostensibly Homeric but in fact ranges over the whole spectrum of Greek literature, with not a few coinages of his own. The twenty poems, in just over 9,000 lines, were written probably towards the end of his period in high office; several clearly date from the period immediately before his fall from power in 1328, with others written in the years between his return from exile to his beloved monastery of the Chora and his death in 1332. The topics treated by Metochites range from solipsistic musings on his youth and the troubles that afflicted his old age to bombastic funerary memorials. Although the poems are preserved in several manuscripts, it has been demonstrated (by Ihor Ševčenko) that Par.Gr. 1776 stands at the head of the tradition. It is in a format similar to that, for example, of another luxury copy of Metochites' own works, Vindob. Phil. Gr. 95, while the corrections to the verses have been shown to be in the hand of Metochites himself.

Encyclopedia of Arms Control and Disarmament

Euryplus and Inachus; Euripides, Alexander and Cretans; and many more. Euripides, mMelanippe the Wise, an Olympian beauty who gave twin sons to Poseidon, has the heroine relate her story. No, I must recall my tale to the point where I began?to my own name. They call me Melanippe (14). second major section, Old Comedy, fifth century B.C., gives fragments of Cratinus, Plutuses; Eupolis, Demes; Aristophanes, Fragments; Plato, Fragment; and others. Plato advises: It is better to keep a wife at home, than antidotes bought from Eudemus (43). Other marvelous sections deal with the Middle Comedy and New Comedy, fourth and third centuries B.C., Mime, Lyric Poems, Elegiac and Iambic Poems, and Hexameter Poems. Sappho, the Tenth Muse, sings: The holy temple, where is a pleasant grove of apple trees, and altars fragrant with frankincense. And there cold water sounds through the apple branches, and all the place is shadowy with roses, and from the whispering leaves comes slumber down. And there a lovely meadow blooms with flowers of springtime, and to ...breathe the sweet scent.... There, Aphrodite takes up wreaths and pours nectar gracefully in golden cups, mingled with the festive joy35 (81). No wonder Sappho was known as the Tenth Muse!