BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE OF CLASSICAL STUDIES最新文献

As Eleanor Winsor Leach and others have demonstrated, in the corpus of the Letters Pliny represents different aspects of his ideal self through the way he characterizes his relationships with his correspondents. This paper examines more closely the letters to and about Tacitus, disregarding intertextual references between the works of Tacitus and Pliny (a well-mined field), and shifting the focus to the friendly competition Pliny creates with Tacitus. In particular, Pliny arranges the ‘Tacitus cycle’ into three sections which highlight their roles as orators, patrons, and literary figures. In each of these, Pliny shows that he and his friend are similar in their goals, but unique in their styles and methods. Thus, Pliny creates a world where he is both inferior and superior to his former mentor, as in Laelius' paradox — ‘maximum est in amicitia parem esse inferiori’ (Cic. Amic. 19.69).

The introductory letter of Petrarch's collection of prose epistles (Epistolae Familiares) includes a number of traditional programmatic elements, including a dedication to his close friend Ludwig Van Kempen, a narrative describing the collection's genesis, and a defence of its style and contents, rooted in the example of Cicero's letters to Atticus, Quintus, and Brutus, which Petrarch had discovered some five years earlier. In other ways, Fam. 1.1 is an absolutely unprecedented introduction to an epistolary collection — ultimately staging within the letter a kind of ‘conversion narrative’ that transforms the yet-uncompleted collection into an instantiation of the spiritual journey of its author.

Although Cicero's letter collections were known and read throughout antiquity, traces of his influence on the style of later letter writers and on the organization of their epistolary collections seem to diminish steadily. What remains constant in the extant collections of Cicero, Pliny, Fronto, Symmachus, and Sidonius is the large number of correspondents represented, the preponderance of letters from the period of the writer's highest prestige, and the subject matter of the letters published, which highlights the familial and wider social connections of the writers and their political, financial, and literary interests. All five collections project the ethos and values of a senatorial class.

The idealized ‘viva vox’ of face-to-face instruction, expressed by Quintilian and Seneca, offers a thematic paradigm for examining Fronto's pedagogical ‘self-lettering’. Fronto's didactic letters facilitate the long-distance rhetorical education of Marcus Aurelius, but beyond their pragmatic role, they also function symbolically to promulgate Fronto's status and intimacy with the imperial court.

Symmachus opened his first book of letters by writing to his father Avianius, whom he depicted as a ‘new Varro’ writing learned epigrams on seven famous men in imitation of Varro's lost work, the Hebdomades. Symmachus was not alone in using Varro's work as an intertext. Based on my study of allusions to Varro and his works by late-fourth and fifth-century writers, I argue that Christian polemicists renewed their attacks on the Augustan scholar in the last decades of the fourth century. Consequently, Symmachus' choice of Varro was a forceful response in support of Roman religious as well as literary traditions in the late 380s or early 390s, the period in which I would date the dissemination of the first book of Symmachus' letters and the conceptualization of his seven-book letter collection.

While athletic competition relies on comparison (the necessary similarity of opponents, rules, conditions of victory), epinician poetry claims superlative fame and similarly singular victors. By addressing all explicit and implicit instances of losers and losing, and by paying close attention to epinician language (particularly boasts and litotes), this article deconstructs the naturalized binary of winner/loser in the poetry of Pindar and Bacchylides. Athletic competition, which is structured around similarity, problematizes the matchless fame of epinican and therefore epinician poetry, paradoxically, must work against the essential elements of the very action (i.e., sporting victory) that it purports to celebrate.

Three contest scenes in Homer reveal a thematic concern with class tension: the two contests with Epeius in Iliad 23, Odysseus's encounter with Euryalus in Odyssey 8, and Odysseus's boxing match with Iros in Odyssey 18. Epeius is a comic scapegoat who succeeds in challenging the elite Euryalus, boasts ineptly, and is later ridiculed. Odysseus in Odyssey 8 is also challenged by a (different) nobleman named Euryalus, whom Odysseus rebukes, saying that a man cannot be skilled in all things and that one ought not judge by appearances. The ‘skilled man’ phrase found both in the Epeius episode and in that with Odysseus (Il. 23.670–71; Od. 8. 59–60), highlights the intertextuality and focuses on the theme of merit over appearances. Finally the Iros–Odysseus boxing match parodies and parallels the above epic-challenge scenes. Each episode fosters consideration of the essential ambiguity of class relations in the period of transition to the polis c. 700 bce.

In his Apologia (98.7), written about ad 158, Apuleius laments the fact that his former ward, the noble young Sicinius Pudens, has been allowed to abandon his studies and is instead spending his time in taverns and with prostitutes and, worst of all, has become a frequent visitor at the local gladiatorial school. Pudens has come to know all the gladiators’ names, their ‘fights and wounds’, and has even started receiving instruction from the lanista himself. In this paper, I investigate the possible reasons why aristocratic Roman youth (iuvenes) might have sought weapons-training and the means by which these young men could have accessed such training in connection with a gladiatorial ludus. The investigation additionally considers the organization of gladiators and their trainers in the ludus.

Recent excavations in the site of Messene have unveiled numerous inscriptions from the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods that significantly increase our understanding of the agonistic life of the city. By utilizing this new set of evidence in this paper I examine patterns of athletic competition by Messenian athletes in panhellenic and local contests. Moreover, I explore victory commemoration practices in the urban landscape of Messene as a means to comprehend how the community acted out, in an institutionalized manner, its collective memory, identity, and historical consciousness.