International Journal of the Classical Tradition最新文献

This paper analyses Andrea Camilleri’s use of poems allegedly written by the Greek poet Stesichorus, to develop a detective plot in the novel Noli me tangere. The figure of Stesichorus and his poems about Helen of Sparta serve the Italian writer, firstly, to justify, almost in autobiographical terms, the Greek poet’s first slanderous poem about Helen and the obligatory palinode to restore Helen’s honour. Secondly, it also serves to perpetuate the figure of Helen as an erotic myth in this detective story, starring a cohort of Helen’s suitors, a character who is barely visible in the story. Finally, the author hybridises the classical erotic myth with the Christian trope noli me tangere, with the surprising result that this idea softens the eroticism inherent in the myth of Helen, and the myth of Helen imbues the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene with intimate complicity.

The study retraces Nietzsche’s 1875 notes for the planned but never published Unfashionable Observation, We Philologists, through a specific focus on the topics of science, life and art in their close and seldom discussed interrelation. The questions that the investigation addresses are: what is the significance of Nietzsche’s problematisation of science in We Philologists for our interpretation of the topic in his later works? How should we interpret these notebooks in relation to his previous writings, on the one hand, and to his later treatment of themes like the deconstruction of Christianity, the critique of eudemonism or the historical genesis of the genius on the other? Framing the notebooks as unwittingly experimental precursors of Nietzsche’s aphoristic books, the article interprets the unique nuance of the notes as an opportunity to start shedding a different light on the discussion of these questions in Nietzsche’s later works. Science, life and art become thus the focal points of a more specific and circumscribed analysis of his early thought – reconnecting these topics to their tangible origins, and tracking their early development in the context of Nietzsche’s acclaimed switch from philology to philosophy and cultural criticism.

Near the end of his career, Dante wrote two eclogues, instigating a literary fashion which was to outlast the Renaissance. These poems—Dante's only known compositions in Latin verse—were prompted by a verse epistle from Giovanni ‘del Virgilio’, in which the humanist scholar goaded Dante to compose a martial epic in Latin celebrating contemporary Italian military victories, which would prove him a worthy successor to the author of the Aeneid. Dante’s response is an elaborate bucolic recusatio, which engages in a rich and intricate intertextual dialogue both with Virgil and with his correspondent. Through a pattern of allusions emphasizing the theme of land-confiscation and dispossession in Virgil’s Bucolica and his denunciation of the avarice and violence of contemporary Rome in the Georgics, Dante makes the case that his own career has fulfilled the noble aspirations which Virgil himself compromised, when he abandoned the idea of a cosmological epic, entertained in the second Georgic and chose instead to glorify war and the emperor in the Aeneid.

This article explores the use of Greek mythology in current ecological discourse. In Classical Studies, specifically in Classical Tradition studies, the ecocritical revision of Greco-Latin texts and their survival is still in its infancy. The ecological question is usually approached as a reconstruction of notions and uses of nature, with little reference to the contemporary philosophical and cultural discourse that revolves around the cultural causes of the climate crisis, its historical paradoxes, and its future projections. This has led to a situation in which ancient mythology, especially Greek mythology, is used by ecological discourse representatives for argumentative, explanatory, or informative purposes without the required textual criticism and scientific rigor. This paper insists on the need to critically review the ecological readings of Greek mythology to avoid contradictions, paradoxes, or biased interpretations that could weaken the ecocritical debate. Specifically, two predominant tendencies are analyzed: the argumentative use of myth (e.g., in the case of the adamantine chains of Prometheus or the use of Platonic myths) and its resemanticization for a specific discursive purpose (e.g., the reductionist interpretations of Gaia and Medusa) in authors such as Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Ursula Heise, or Donna Haraway. The results show that the treatment of Greek myths in the ecological discourse is often subordinated to argumentative needs, avoiding alternative mythographic sources that relativize what has been exposed or venturing into biased interpretations that can lead to undesired contradictions concerning the postulates of the ecological discourse itself.

Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book (2009) is a literary record of a period of self-experimentation Jung carried out between 1913 and 1916 by means of a technique he would later call ‘active imagination’: Jung would allow himself to ‘drop’ into a fantasizing state and then observe the images that emerged from the unconscious. If he happened to encounter a talking figure, he would try and interact with them. One of such figures was Philemon, an intriguing reinvention of the models from both Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Goethe’s Faust. Jung’s refiguration of Philemon illustrates Jung’s engagement not only with these two works, but also with late antique magical, alchemical and Hermetic writings, as well as classical scholarship dedicated to them. Even though it is widely recognized that Philemon played a central role in Jung’s psychological formulations after his break from Freud in 1912, this figure seems to have received no sustained attention in the scholarship on the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in depth psychology. This article offers an investigation of how Jung’s refiguration of Philemon relates both to Jung’s psychological research prior to his first encounter with this character and to the path it followed after this encounter took place with regard to the archetype of the ‘wise old man’.

This article puts on trial the assumed authorship of a sixteenth-century manuscript poem reminiscent of Ovid’s Heroides, currently ascribed to Lady Elizabeth Dacre. After establishing a revised edition of the text, it provides arguments based on historical, material, literary and textual analyses of the source, strongly indicating the unlikeliness of its supposed attribution to this English noblewoman. The arguments suggest that, while Dacre was probably the scribe of the manuscript, the author of the text was most likely her husband, Sir Thomas Dacre. This outcome is used as an example evincing the fundamental importance of usable and informative text editions for historians and literary scholars alike, increasingly calling for close collaboration across disciplines, as well as a renewed appreciation of textual editing.

The article focusses on two Renaissance reinterpretations of Catullus 63, one of his least imitated poems in Italy during that period. I deal with the poetic reinterpretation of Catullus’ lines and the reshaping of his choice of metre and genre. I start with a poem by Marullus that defined the way Catullus 63 was later imitated; I continue with the description of a unique reshaping of Catullus’ Attis by Giovambattista Pigna, in which I show some reminiscences from Ariosto’s Furioso. I add insights on Pigna’s blending of Catullus with other ancient and contemporary sources.