Latin Literature Research Articles

Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome by Neil Coffee

Reviewed by: Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome by Neil Coffee Marta García Morcillo Neil Coffee Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xiii + 296 pp. 7 black-and-white figs., 5 blackand-white tables. Cloth, $75. Marcel Mauss' Essai sur le don (1923–4) grounded the foundations of an inextinguishable and fascinating debate about the functions of gift giving across cultures and its importance as a regulator of human interactions. Mauss' proposed famous triple obligation—giving, receiving, repaying—still fuels prolific discussions around the principle of gratuity, and the mechanisms of reciprocity and obligation created between giver and receiver. Authors like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Alvin Gouldner and Alain Caillé, among others, have discussed the fundamental question of the unconditional or instrumental nature of gift giving. These considerations have also invigorated new debates on Graeco-Roman gift exchange (e.g., Michael Satlow, ed., The Gift in Antiquity, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2013; Filippo Carlà and Maja Gori, eds., Gift Giving and the "Embedded" Economy in the Ancient World, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2014), to which the present monograph is an additional contribution. Coffee's work is an ambitious attempt to analyse the development of gift giving from early Rome to the early Principate. The author's thought-provoking thesis is that gift giving experienced a substantial transformation from a traditional, archaic form of altruistic generosity to a practice led by commodity exchange and self-profit. In the author's view, this transformation began to impact Roman society by the middle Republic, when Rome experienced a progressive growth of wealth, and accelerated towards the late Republic. In this process, members of the elite increasingly engaged in money lending and became growingly dissociated from traditional values of reciprocity. The book is divided into six parts that break into fourteen chapters. The structure follows a diachronic order that meets the author's thesis. Part I situates the reader within the theoretical framework of "gift studies" and summarises some important anthropological and sociological contributions to the topic. Coffee favours Max Weber's theory of four possible motivations for social action, which he also applies for gift giving: instrumental rationality directed at advantage, value rationality directed at affecting our principles, adherence to tradition, and emotion. In the same section, the author looks at relevant terminology attached to this practice as evidence to detect changes of value. The following parts of the book meet the author's proposed periodization of the Roman culture of gift exchange: (II) an archaic foundation period, (III) a middle Republican adaptation period, (IV) an exploitation period of the late Republic, and a (V) separation period of the early Empire. This division supports Coffee's hypothesis of the progressive mercantilization of gift giving. Part II focuses on the early origins of patronage and of institutions like the depositum, based on fides, as well as on the impact of early coinage. Part III discusses the introduction of gratuitous contracts as a consequence of the growth of wealth and commodity culture. In this regard, regulations such as the Plebiscitum Claudianum (219–218 b.c.e.) and the Lex Cincia (204 b.c.e.) are interpreted as elite reactions against the increase of trade [End Page 525] and economic interest in gift relationships. The author presents Cato's attachment to frugality and his lack of interest in gift giving as a transitional moment in which greed and generosity were still flexible concepts not yet completely separated. Coffee discusses also the evolution of the concept of liberality (liberalitas, liberaliter) in Latin literature (fig. 5.1). Chapter 6, which ends the section, interprets the failed reforms of the Gracchi as an attempt to introduce private generosity as a collective virtue in public life. Part IV expands the terminological analysis and looks at the increasing literary use of words like avaritia, liberalitas, pecunia and aes alienum in line with a progressive generalisation of moneylending among members of the elite towards the end of the Republic. The section is centred on Cicero's and Sallust's critical views of the degradation of generosity and the decline of reciprocity among peers. Caesar's extensive use of liberalitas...

An Agenda for the Study of Intertextuality

The study of intertextuality has been a central pursuit of scholars of Greek and especially Latin literature. It promises to reveal the meaning of texts for original audiences, trace authorial influence, and illuminate an aspect of literary artistry. Yet inconsistent standards and the scattering of insights across publications have hindered progress. This article proposes restoring momentum toward the goals of intertextual study through an agenda of representing intertexts in a standard digital form susceptible to complex and systematic analysis.

The History of the ‘Slave of Christ’: From Jewish Child to Christian Martyr by Aaron Michael Butts, Simcha Gross

Reviewed by: The History of the ‘Slave of Christ’: From Jewish Child to Christian Martyr by Aaron Michael Butts, Simcha Gross Kyle Smith Aaron Michael Butts and Simcha Gross The History of the ‘Slave of Christ’: From Jewish Child to Christian Martyr Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2016 Pp. xii + 255. $60.00. A story about a boy who barges in on his father’s dinner party wearing a new golden earring sounds more like the plot of an after school special than a sophisticated literary text. But saints’ lives are weird, and it is the odd details that distinguish one hagiography from the next. In this case, it is the boy’s piercing—not an anointed forehead or a white alb—that visibly manifests his baptism and conversion to Christianity. The emphasis on the earring turns what would otherwise be a generic and forgettable story into the memorable account of a Jewish shepherd boy who becomes the “Slave of Christ.” The tale, impeccably translated from the original Syriac by Aaron Butts and Simcha Gross, unfolds in the late fourth century in the northern Mesopotamian city of Shigar, “while Magianism was still flourishing in the land of the Persians” (88). Eleven-year-old Asher ben Levi is the caretaker of one of his father’s flocks. Every day, he encounters a number of other boys at the local watering hole who are similarly tasked with their own fathers’ animals. While the beasts drink, the boys eat. Christians break bread with Christians, Magians with Magians, but [End Page 149] Asher—the only Jew—eats alone. He tries to join the Christians, but they push him away, claiming that Christians are not permitted to eat with Jews. One day, tired of being excluded, Asher points to the spring from which the animals are drinking and demands to be baptized in it. Of course, the boys demur, insisting that both a priest and a church are necessary, but Asher wins them over with a heartfelt speech. As he emerges from the waters smelling sweetly of holiness, the boys welcome him into their fold with kisses and honors “as a groom on the day of his wedding feast” (96). They rename him ʿAb̠da da-Mšiḥā, the “Slave of Christ.” To seal the irregular baptism (and to prevent the new convert from backsliding into Judaism), one of the boys removes his golden earring and proposes that it serve as a sign upon ʿAb̠da da-Mšiḥā. As the reader soon understands, when the now Christian shepherd boy returns home, all involved seemingly interpret the Mosaic law as prohibiting the piercing of ears, except among slaves—which is what ʿAb̠da da-Mšiḥā has just become. Despite this martyrdom narrative existing in two printed Syriac editions (both from the late nineteenth century) and multiple Syriac, Arabic (Garshuni), Armenian, and Georgian manuscripts, it is virtually unknown among historians of early Christianity. No doubt this is because the only other published study of it is a single article by J.-M. Fiey from the early 1960s. Butts and Gross have now substantively redressed this scholarly oversight and offered what will be a lasting contribution. In addition to an exhaustively footnoted critical edition and translation of the two streams of the Syriac text—both the early version and a later, but regrettably fragmentary, literary and theological elaboration—the authors provide the reader with an eighty-page introduction in which they discuss, among many other things, the development of the text, its literary devices and use of the Old Testament, and its connection to related literature in Greek and Latin, such as the legend of the Judenknaben recounted by Gregory of Tours, Evagrius Scholasticus, and others. In those legends, the “Jewish boy,” the son of a glass-blower, converts to Christianity and is nearly martyred in his father’s furnace. In the History of the “Slave of Christ,” the biblical inspiration is not Daniel 3 but Genesis 22. After ʿAb̠da da-Mšiḥā interrupts Shabbat dinner with the story of his conversion and piercing—a story that includes barbed criticism of all the Jews gathered there—his father unsheathes a knife, chases him to the spring...

The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier

The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier

Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith

Reviewed by: Walter Map and the Matter of Britain by Joshua Byron Smith Brooke Kennel Joshua Byron Smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2017) 174 pp. Joshua Byron Smith's book Walter Map and the Matter of Britain starts with a mystery: why would medieval audiences attribute one of the grandest and most sprawling works of Arthurian literature, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, to an author whom most modern scholars deem scatterbrained, flighty, and incapable of staying on topic? This author is, of course, Walter Map, whose splintered book De nugis curialium appears so disorganized and incoherent that it has been taken as evidence of his supposedly cluttered and chaotic mind. Smith, however, seeks to restore some dignity to the much-maligned cleric and argues that it was not so unreasonable for medieval readers to think that Map had been involved in the creation of one of the most celebrated works of their day. In doing so, he also makes bold claims about the way in which the Matter of Britain was transmitted from its original Welsh milieu to English and French audiences. Smith begins his project by situating Walter Map within the context of twelfth-century geopolitics. He believes that Map's presumed Welsh identity has been overemphasized in the past and instead argues for an English Map who hailed from the Welsh Marches, where English and Welsh culture met and overlapped. This backdrop of cultural liminality gave Map the authority he needed to present himself as an expert on the Welsh to the Anglo-Norman court of Henry II. Most of the middle chapters of the book are dedicated to rescuing [End Page 277] Map's reputation by arguing that the De nugis curialium was never intended to be a single harmonious work. Rather, it consists of rough drafts for several different works in various stages of completion and revision. Smith makes a thorough analysis of the individual distinctiones, demonstrating how Map was in the process of revising his works stylistically while also "Britonicizing" (to use a word Smith coins himself) them to create a more fashionable ancient setting. Much of this analysis is rather technical and intended primarily for specialists, but Smith's discussion of the expansion of the Herlething story to the longer Herla version should be fascinating to anyone interested in the otherworldly in medieval literature. The remaining chapters tie the discussion of Walter Map's interest in the Matter of Britain to the larger question of how such literature was transmitted from Welsh audiences to the wider medieval world. Smith points out that the role of Latin literature and clerical networks has too often been ignored in favor of more fanciful notions of traveling Breton minstrels transmitting stories orally. He also notes that by placing the primary emphasis on the figure of Arthur himself, scholars have ignored the general interest in ancient Britain, which provides the context for the king's introduction into English and French literature. Smith ends with a clarion call for scholars to engage in more interdisciplinary work and treat medieval Britain as a complex, multilingual, and multicultural landscape deserving of a wider perspective. While some of Smith's claims may be controversial, his careful analysis of the De nugis curialium is quite convincing and does much to explain why an author whose work was highly regarded by medieval readers seems so slipshod to scholars today. Moreover, as Smith himself points out, it appeals to the common experience of all writers, who rarely complete a work from beginning to end in an orderly fashion and almost never without needing to edit and revise through several drafts. He also makes a convincing case for the need for more communication between Celticists and medievalists at large. Implicit in his work is the cogent suggestion that Welsh—like French, Middle English, and Latin—should be considered a relevant language of study for scholars of medieval Britain. There were some issues with Smith's presentation, though not with his arguments. For a book with such high ambitions, both the introduction and conclusion felt rather short and rushed. Moreover, a subject such as Walter Map really deserves an engaging introduction...

Introduction

Introduction Judith P. Hallett (bio) and Jacqueline Fabre-Serris (bio) The erotic gaze plays a crucial role in Latin literary representations of desire: desire itself arises from the gaze. For the most part, this gaze is portrayed as male, with a woman as its immobile object. Critics, moreover, often consider the gaze merely a mode of control that the male lover employs over the female beloved. Yet Roman poets represent situations that defy simple categorization. As Patricia Salzman-Mitchell (2005, 163–164) has observed, elegiac poetry depicts the puella as an object of the male gaze; yet by being stared at for a long time, as Andromeda is by Perseus, she can be viewed as exerting dominance over the male lover, who is both stupefied by her beauty and paralyzed by his passion. The first couplet of Propertius 1.1—Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis / contactum nullis ante cupidinibus—suggests that not only is Cynthia the passive object of the burning male gaze, but she has also provoked his desire through eye contact. ________ Following the seminal essay of Judith P. Hallett, "The Role of Women in Roman Elegy: Counter-Cultural Feminism" (1973), critics tend to emphasize that the imaginary scenario in which elegiac lover and beloved are situated, the former in the position of a servus and the latter as a domina, is a way of representing love as an area of power relations reversing Roman cultural and ideological norms. Roman tradition expected women to behave chastely, exhibiting erotic reserve. But in the genre of elegy, the poet-speaker, concerned with the possible infidelity of his powerful domina, frequently questions female behavior and feeling alike. In 1.2, for example, Propertius suspects that Cynthia's expensive attire betokens her eagerness to appeal to other men, implying that she looks at them and regards them as objects of her own desire. Propertius tries to reassert his dominance over her potential exploitation of her costly cultus in a prescriptive manner, by arguing that she should seek to remain the object of his gaze and desire alone. By alternating the positions of object and subject of desire in this way, relating both to changing gazes, elegiac poets therefore provide an extremely complex picture of amatory relations. This collection of essays developed from the presentations on a [End Page 105] panel—sponsored by EuGeStA, the international network bringing together European and North American researchers working on gender studies in different disciplinary fields of antiquity—given at "Visions: Feminism and Classics VII," at the University of Washington, Seattle, in May 2016. Entitled "Through Women's Eyes: Female Vision in Latin Elegiac and Epic Poetry," the five papers here examine several texts that openly depict women as "seeing subjects." Since all but one of these texts were written by male authors, we must consider these women as literary characters, interpreted, according to Maria Wyke (2002), as metaphors for both poetry and political order. As Alison Sharrock (1998, 36) has written, "Women are 'perceived'. We often speak not just of 'women', but of 'images', 'representations', 'reflections of women.'" The women depicted in Latin literature written by men lack the autonomy of thought and feeling that readers could grasp and analyze as if these were actual women. However, the focus on women as "seeing objects" signifies a questioning about women to be put in perspective with Roman social reality. These female portraits created from this unusual perspective need resituating in the framework of first-century BCE and CE Roman culture, in which traditional gender roles and moral codes are both challenged in practice and re-asserted by political power. The first two essays analyze texts representing morally troubling conduct. Florence Klein proposes to reread Catullus's c. 64 as commenting on one of its (underestimated) models: Moschus's poem on Europa. Breaking with the Greek poetic tradition that depicts women victims of rape as mere objects of male lust, Moschus narrates the story from Europa's point of view, and suggests that the maiden, whose name means "a young girl with wide/widely open eyes," consents to her abduction out of attraction to the bull. Klein looks closely at two passages where Catullus, like Moschus...

Latin and the American Civil War

By presenting examples of Latin literature pertaining to the American Civil War, this paper demonstrates that the phenomenon of Latine Americana, i.e. Latin works written in or about America, was not confined to the colonial period but rather extended into the latter part of the nineteenth century. The context of these writings reveals that the active use of Latin remained a cherished aspect of the rich classical culture of the era.

Az archaikus költészet szerepe Ioachimus Vadianus költészetelméletében

The aim of my study is the analysis of the views on the archaic Latin literature in the early modern works based on the theory and practice of poetry, especially in the Swiss humanist’s, Joachim von Watt’s work (De poetica et carminis ratione). The concepts of poeta vates, poeta theologus, and poeta eruditus are commonly used by the Italian authors – who knew the most important authors of the early Roman literature regarding this period ‒ in order to emphasize the moralistic and social morals of the archaic poetry’s lecture. Some of the authors – for example Pietro Crinito ‒ following Suetonius emphasized the historical analysis of the ancient literature in a particular way. The innovation of Joachim von Watt’s work was the adaptation of this view of the Italian authors, and it is not present in the works of other Viennese humanists on poetry in the first half of the 16th century.

METAPHOR OF FORM IN “LILY” (architectonics of Icelandic Fourteenth century Christian Drapa)

Aim of the study is explication of the narrative technique of the person who composed “Lily”; research demands attention to the following aspects of the drapa: 1) its architectonics, i.e. correlation between the form and the content including topoi, symbolism and narrative strands; 2) the language of “Lily” and forms of narration in the text; 3) correlation between language and meter in “Lily”. The first of the three mentioned aspects of the text constitutes the subject matter of the paper, attention is also given to the value of the text in skaldic poetics and verbal culture of Iceland. Materials and methods. The first section presents information on the surviving manuscripts and shows the value of “Lily” in the culture of Iceland; references to Icelandic folklore and modern recordings help realize importance of the text. In the second section technique of the author(s) is studied with regard to both, medieval Christian literature and verbal culture of medieval Iceland. The study is carried out on the basis of edition [8] and all available Russian translations of medieval Latin literature. Analysis of the latter enables to identify the literary topoi and corresponding archetypes of medieval consciousness reflected in “Lily”. The third section is devoted to semantics of the title and to other textual symbols. The fourth section considers the mode of text existence and addresses authorship. Results. Analysis shows that the content of “Lily” does not go beyond few archetypes of medieval Icelandic and European Christian consciousness. Specificity of “Lily” is described as metaphor of form; the collocation denotes all semantic processes entailed by the transfer of the form of drapa into the sphere of traditional Christian culture. Metaphor of form is treated as a natural consequence of the main achievement of Icelandic skalds - involution of poetic form and turning it into artistic device [5], - a prerequisite to versatility of poetic content. Conclusion. “Lily” is finally classified as a text which highlights semantic and functional potential of the skaldic form and on the whole complies with the canon of skaldic poetics. Assumption is made that the author of “Lily” did not realise himself as the author of the text, though the surviving text is, no doubt, result of his individual effort. Working with traditional material, the author of “Lily” most probably created his text in accordance with principles of Icelandic Oral Tradition.

FOREWORD

Abstract For we were wandering around and lost like visitors in our own city, and it was as if your books led us home, so that we could finally recognize who and where we were. You revealed the age of our homeland, the chronology of our history, you revealed the laws of the rites and the laws of the priests, you revealed our civic and military institutions, you revealed the topography of our districts and places, you revealed the names, kinds, functions, and origins of all things divine and human. Indeed you have shed a flood of light on our poets and in fact on the whole of Latin language and literature. (Cic. Acad. 1.9: editors' translation)

Reading Croatian Latin through Lucretius

To demonstrate and explore possibilities of large-scale searching in digital text collections of Latin literature, I query the Croatiae auctores Latini (CroALa) corpus, comprising a selection of Latin texts written by Croatian authors (or authors connected with Croatia) during the thousand years between 976 and 1984, for matches of clausulae from De rerum natura. A search for some 7,400 Lucretian clausulae over some 228,000 verses currently in CroALa results in 1,994 cases of at least one match, with 5,529 unique lines of Croatian Latin poetry matching the clausulae. A simple heuristic decision chain is used to concentrate on interesting matches; some of them are presented and interpreted as a brief introduction to Croatian Latin sub specie Lucretii.

Między Krzemieńcem a Warszawą. Związki Liceum Wołyńskiego Uniwersytetem Warszawskim 1816–1831

The Volhynian Gymnasium (and since 1818 Lyceum) in Kremenets was one of the most important Polish schools of the first half of the 19th century. Raising it to the rank of a lyceum coincided with the creation of the University of Warsaw. The new school on academic level operating in the city of the Society of Friends of Science (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk) aroused interest among students in Kremenets. More than a dozen of them entered the University. Moreover, teachers of the school were invited to collaborate with the University of Warsaw. In 1830 a doctor from Kremenets, Karol Kaczkowski, became university professor and head of the clinic of internal medicine. He left memoirs in which he colourfully described professors of the medical faculty. On the other hand, Alojzy Feliński, who was offered professorship at the University of Warsaw, preferred a job in Kremenets. Besides scientific contacts there were also social relationships and family ties. Alojzy Osiński, brother of a University of Warsaw professor, Ludwik Osiński, taught Polish and Latin literature in Kremenets.

Latin Literature

I still remember the thrill of reading for the first time, as an undergraduate, Frederick Ahl's seminal articles ‘The Art of Safe Criticism’ and the ‘Horse and the Rider’, and the ensuing sense that the doors of perception were opening to reveal for me the (alarming) secrets of Latin poetry. The collectionWordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetryis a tribute to Ahl, and all twenty-two articles take his scholarship as their inspiration. Fittingly, this book is often playful and great fun to read, and contains some beautiful writing from its contributors, but also reflects the darker side of Latin literature's entanglement with violence and oppression. For the latter, see especially Joy Connolly's sobering discussion of ‘A Theory of Violence’ in Lucan, which draws on Achille Mbembe's theory of the reiterative violence of everyday life that sustains postcolonial rule in Africa (273–97), which resonates bleakly beyond Classical scholarship to the present day. Elsewhere there is much emphasis (ha!) on the practice and effects of veiled speech, ambiguity, and hidden meanings. Pleasingly, Michael Fontaine identifies what he calls ‘Freudian Bullseyes’ in Virgil: a ‘correct word that hits the mark’ (141) that also reveals – simply and directly – the unspoken guilty preoccupations of the speaker: Dido's lust for Aeneas, Aeneas’ grief-stricken sense of responsibility for Pallas’ death. A citation from F. Scott Fitzgerald'sTender is the Nightprovides the chilling final line of Emily Gowers’ delicious article about what ripples out beyond the coincidence of sound of Dido/bubo. The volume explores subversive responses to power (for example, the articles of Erica Bexley and David Konstan), as well as the risk of powerful retaliation (Rhiannon Ash considers the political consequences of poetry as represented by Tacitus). There are also broader methodological reflections on interpretation, from musings on the reader's pleasure at decoding the hidden messages of wordplay such as puns, anagrams, and acrostics (as Fitch puts it, ‘the pleasure of wit, combined with the pleasure of active involvement’ [327]) to exploration of the anxiety of a reader who worries that they may be over-interpreting a text. Contributions variously address the ‘paranoia’ of literary criticism and the drive to try to ground meaning in the text and prove authorial intention: while John Fitch asks if the wordplay ‘really is there’ in the etymological names used by Seneca in his plays (314), Alex Dressler's article (37–68) helps frame the various modes of interpretation that we find in subsequent articles, by putting interpretation itself under scrutiny. His intriguing analysis introduces the helpful motif of espionage (interweaving Syme's possible post-war role in intelligence with Augustan conspiracy and conspiracy theories) and concludes that – like double agents – ‘secret meanings’ need a handler (53) and we readers need to take responsibility for our own partisan readings.

Take-Away Art: Ekphrasis and Appropriation in Martial's Apophoreta 170–82

This paper examines the cultural antagonisms of Martial's Apophoreta 170–82, a unique series of epigrammatic gift-tags for artworks to be given away during the Saturnalia. In these poems, I argue, Martial thematizes and enacts Rome's transformative appropriation of cultural capital from Greece and elsewhere. First, he adopts the Hellenistic trope of the ekphrastic gallery tour in order to evoke the “museum spaces” of the Flavian city, where artworks became testaments to the power and culture of Rome (Section 1). While evoking these masterpiece collections, however, the epigrams in fact describe miniatures changing hands at a banquet. Martial thus tropes a second Roman practice of appropriation, namely the widespread consumption of transmedial miniature copies (Section 2). Third and finally, the epigrams dramatize the vulnerability of plundered objects by reevaluating their significance within the Roman frameworks of Latin literature and the Saturnalia (Section 3). In this miniature ekphrastic series, then, Martial's apophoretic poetics converge with Roman forms of appropriation both imperial and domestic, concrete and conceptual.

Reid and McOmish (eds), Neo Latin Literature and Literary Culture in Early Modern Scotland

Reid and McOmish (eds), <i>Neo Latin Literature and Literary Culture in Early Modern Scotland</i>

Weaving a larger web: Cuban American writing in the Latin@ narrative

This essay explores the underrepresentation of Cuban American literature in Latin@ literary studies, probing into possible explanations for its marginalization in the field. I call attention to scholarship that has tended to portray Cuban American writing as fundamentally different from other Latin@ literatures with respect to politics, ideology, and historical trajectory. I then challenge such critical approaches by foregrounding the expansion and diversity of the Cuban American corpus, which can no longer be viewed as primarily exile-oriented, politically conservative, or racially homogeneous. I highlight the importance of scholarly work across latinidades that includes Cuban American writing in conversations about transnational and diasporic identity, the rewriting of American literary history, and intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. I propose that the study of postmemory and narrative inheritance in Cuban American and other Latin@ literatures offers compelling evidence of the significant interconnections that link these diverse works.

Bioinformatics and Classical Literary Study

This paper describes the Quantitative Criticism Lab, a collaborative initiative between classicists, quantitative biologists, and computer scientists to apply ideas and methods drawn from the sciences to the study of literature. A core goal of the project is the use of computational biology, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques to investigate authorial style, intertextuality, and related phenomena of literary significance. As a case study in our approach, here we review the use of sequence alignment, a common technique in genomics and computational linguistics, to detect intertextuality in Latin literature. Sequence alignment is distinguished by its ability to find inexact verbal similarities, which makes it ideal for identifying phonetic echoes in large corpora of Latin texts. Although especially suited to Latin, sequence alignment in principle can be extended to many other languages.

Jungfrauen in Waffen: Camilla Virgo, Iuturna Virago

The paper starts with the analysis of the ambiguous figure of the “Italic Amazon” Camilla in the Aeneis. Two main factors are analysed, the role of the spear in the life of this “armed virgin” and her relations with natural surroundings, especially with rivers like the Amasenus and with lakes and marshes generally. Both prove to be fateful. The second factor is also noticeable with the other armed virgin of the Aeneis, Iuturna, who emerges as an upgraded and contrasting parallel to Camilla. Iuturna virago shows similarities with another famous virago of Latin literature, the Paluda virago of Ennius, and this gives an opportunity to evoke other women of the Roman tradition in connection with rivers and marshes, a phenomenon which proves to be a suitable topic for future exanimation.

Realities of Graphic Novels: An Interview with Frederick Aldama

The trend about producing and reading graphic novels has grown since the late twentieth century. These books with comic backgrounds seem to have a miraculous energy. They have been even appealing to unenthusiastic readers. They tempt people of different age groups, races and genders. They are also used for teaching ESL courses, e-learning activities, designing reality games, and teaching creative writing. If you talk to its followers, you may get the feedback that graphic novels can fulfil your demands and dreams from writing your assignments to taking you to the moon. Although many researchers have investigated the benefits of graphic novels, many faculties and librarians are still reluctant to include graphic novels in their curricula. Perhaps it is simply the attitude of many teachers and librarians that graphic novels look like a comic book, and simply are not “real” books. They have too few words, too many pictures, and lack quality to be seriously considered as literature. In the following, I, Ruzbeh Babaee, did an interview with Distinguished Professor Frederick Luis Aldama on realities of graphic novels.Aldama is a distinguished scholar and Professor of English at The Ohio State University, United States. In the departments of English and Spanish &amp; Portuguese he is involved in teaching courses on US Latino and Latin American cultural phenomena, literature, film, music, video games, and comic books. He has founded and directed the White House Hispanic Bright Spot awarded LASER/Latino and Latin American Space for Enrichment Research. Professor Aldama won the Ohio Education Summit Award for Founding &amp; Directing LASER in 2016. In April 2017, Aldama was awarded OSU’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and inducted into the Academy of Teaching. He is the author, co-author, and editor of 30 books, including his first book of fiction/graphic fiction, Long Stories Cut Short: Fictions from the Borderlands.

Sabellic Textile Terminology

Despite numerous recent studies of Italic textiles and textile production etc., no systematic study has so far been attempted regarding the textile terminology of Italic languages besides Latin. The present study seeks to remedy this, making a first step into the textile terminology of Sabellic languages, predominantly Oscan and Umbrian. There are two types of sources for Sabellic textile terminology: inscriptions and glosses in Greek and Latin literature. Both are, however, fraught with uncertainties. The glosses, as for example seen in the case of Etruscan, may have been misunderstood or misinterpreted and should be treated with due caution, and there is considerable debate on many of the epigraphically attested terms and significant doubt about their precise interpretation. Glosses are especially problematic, since they have been transmitted to us through a succession of manuscripts. As noted by Clackson, it is only through epigraphy that we can access the texts, and therefore the terms themselves, directly. Sometimes, however, the glosses are indeed correct, making their investigation important. The extant Sabellic corpus, although minuscule compared to Latin, is nevertheless linguistically invaluable and offers complementary evidence of the Indo-European and Italic textile lexicon, although many aspects of the various Sabellic languages are notoriously difficult to interpret and remain a matter of debate. The present contribution does not claim to endorse the interpretation of the most doubtful cases, but includes them in order to provide an overview of Sabellic terms that have been suggested by scholars as belonging to the domain of textiles. (Less)