The question of the foreigner, especially as elaborated by Jacques Derrida in the first of his two essays Of Hospitality, is at the heart of Aeschylus’ Suppliants, a play in which the fifty daughters of the Egyptian king Danaus appeal to the Argive king Pelasgus for asylum. Indeed, Aeschylus structures much of the initial encounter between the Danaids and Pelasgus in the interrogatory mode: as an exchange of questions to the foreigner, of the foreigner. Beginning with queries about identity, the play moves quickly to pose questions about authority, ultimately running aground upon Pelasgus’ inability to decide what to do about these Egyptian-Argive women whose demands for hospitality threaten his control over the city. Where previous scholarship on the play has focused on its representation of foreignness or its introduction of democratic rule, a close reading in light of Derrida’s work on hospitality elaborates the important relationship between hospitality and democratic sovereignty that the play develops. For the real question of the foreigner asks how the people can wield power in a city; in response, the play imagines the origins of democracy as an act of civic hospitality or metoikia.
{"title":"Questions of the Foreigner: Metoikia and Democracy in Aeschylus’ Suppliants","authors":"Carol Dougherty","doi":"10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.49","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.49","url":null,"abstract":"The question of the foreigner, especially as elaborated by Jacques Derrida in the first of his two essays Of Hospitality, is at the heart of Aeschylus’ Suppliants, a play in which the fifty daughters of the Egyptian king Danaus appeal to the Argive king Pelasgus for asylum. Indeed, Aeschylus structures much of the initial encounter between the Danaids and Pelasgus in the interrogatory mode: as an exchange of questions to the foreigner, of the foreigner. Beginning with queries about identity, the play moves quickly to pose questions about authority, ultimately running aground upon Pelasgus’ inability to decide what to do about these Egyptian-Argive women whose demands for hospitality threaten his control over the city. Where previous scholarship on the play has focused on its representation of foreignness or its introduction of democratic rule, a close reading in light of Derrida’s work on hospitality elaborates the important relationship between hospitality and democratic sovereignty that the play develops. For the real question of the foreigner asks how the people can wield power in a city; in response, the play imagines the origins of democracy as an act of civic hospitality or metoikia.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47494979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article offers a new perspective on the poetic concerns of the Eclogues by looking at goats as the programmatic poetic symbol of the collection. It shows how Virgil has adapted a new poetic identity for the goats of his pastoral world from the bucolic landscape of Theocritus’ Idylls by borrowing and transforming the established poetic identity of a different animal, the bee. In particular, it traces the significance and intricacies of etymological play and markers to deepen our understanding of the relationship Virgil creates between his work and that of Theocritus, and shows how this shift in poetic identity from bees to goats establishes a Virgilian conception of Roman pastoral. It gives especial consideration to Idyll 10 as a source text of inspiration for the Eclogues, with an eye to rehabilitating the importance of this poem to Virgil’s bucolic collection.
{"title":"The Land of Milk and Honey: Goats, Bees, and the Poetic Identity of Virgil’s Eclogues","authors":"C. Campbell","doi":"10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.19","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a new perspective on the poetic concerns of the Eclogues by looking at goats as the programmatic poetic symbol of the collection. It shows how Virgil has adapted a new poetic identity for the goats of his pastoral world from the bucolic landscape of Theocritus’ Idylls by borrowing and transforming the established poetic identity of a different animal, the bee. In particular, it traces the significance and intricacies of etymological play and markers to deepen our understanding of the relationship Virgil creates between his work and that of Theocritus, and shows how this shift in poetic identity from bees to goats establishes a Virgilian conception of Roman pastoral. It gives especial consideration to Idyll 10 as a source text of inspiration for the Eclogues, with an eye to rehabilitating the importance of this poem to Virgil’s bucolic collection.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42965690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.121
Mark F. McClay
This article argues that claims of divine kinship play a central role in the Bacchic gold tablets of the late classical period. While many scholars have interpreted these tablets in reference to the Orphic Zagreus myth, I contend that key details of their texts are better understood as assertions of a familial link with the gods that assured postmortem happiness. The tablets develop the Hesiodic idea of human-divine fellowship, expanding this theme to include claims of identity or kinship with the gods through a variety of narrative strategies. This aspect of the tablets finds a parallel in Empedocles, who (under Orphic-Pythagorean influence) elaborates traditional human-divine fellowship into a claim that humans are exiled gods who can hope to rejoin divine society. Following this interpretive approach, I suggest that the puzzling expression “I/you fell into milk” in some tablets expresses a symbolic relation to the gods via divine breast milk.
{"title":"“You Fell into Milk”: Symbols and Narratives of Kinship in Bacchic Mysteries","authors":"Mark F. McClay","doi":"10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2023.42.1.121","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that claims of divine kinship play a central role in the Bacchic gold tablets of the late classical period. While many scholars have interpreted these tablets in reference to the Orphic Zagreus myth, I contend that key details of their texts are better understood as assertions of a familial link with the gods that assured postmortem happiness. The tablets develop the Hesiodic idea of human-divine fellowship, expanding this theme to include claims of identity or kinship with the gods through a variety of narrative strategies. This aspect of the tablets finds a parallel in Empedocles, who (under Orphic-Pythagorean influence) elaborates traditional human-divine fellowship into a claim that humans are exiled gods who can hope to rejoin divine society. Following this interpretive approach, I suggest that the puzzling expression “I/you fell into milk” in some tablets expresses a symbolic relation to the gods via divine breast milk.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49062202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Glimpses of Gesture: Refusing and Recovering Loss in Honig and Euripides","authors":"A. Shirazi","doi":"10.1525/ca.2022.41.2.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2022.41.2.16","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44356385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Migrant Refusals: The Inoperativity of the Asian Bacchae in Euripides","authors":"L. Battezzato","doi":"10.1525/ca.2022.40.2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2022.40.2.4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48573168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Method in the Madness: After AFTR, in Grateful Reply","authors":"B. Honig","doi":"10.1525/ca.2022.41.2.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2022.41.2.34","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42790951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bonnie Honig’s A Feminist Theory of Refusal with Kehinde Wiley’s After John Raphael Smith’s “A Bacchante (after Sir Joshua Reynolds)”","authors":"H. Morales","doi":"10.1525/ca.2022.41.2.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2022.41.2.25","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46703438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Honig’s Bacchae / Euripides’ Theory of Refusal","authors":"C. Conybeare","doi":"10.1525/ca.2022.41.2.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2022.41.2.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46256227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
At a crucial moment in Euripides’ Andromache, the title character throws her hands (περὶ χεῖρε βαλοῦσα, 115) around a statue of the goddess Thetis and laments the losses that have brought her to a point of desperation and despair. When Thetis appears at the end of the play, she answers Andromache’s pleas and grants her a renewed life of marriage and motherhood. Yet in her embrace of the statue, Andromache momentarily embodies an alternative impulse: a longing to merge with the stony form of the goddess and to cease from the patterns of nuptial mobility and sexual reproduction that have defined her life thus far. In this article, I argue that we should understand this embrace as “queer”—as a moment of intimate contact between mortal woman and immortal goddess that deeply unsettles the models of sexual and reproductive order that dominate Greek art and literature. While the play ends by redirecting Andromache toward the propagation of the Trojan line, the queer potential of that crucial embrace is taken up by Thetis herself, who re-scripts her own marriage to Peleus in a way that both inverts gendered patterns of movement and rejects the valorization of female fertility. Euripides’ Andromache thus concludes with the restoration of mortal sexual and reproductive order, yet through Andromache’s encounter with Thetis, it also gestures to the queer and startling freedom of a barren future.
{"title":"Embracing Thetis in Euripides’ Andromache","authors":"Sarah Olsen","doi":"10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.67","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.67","url":null,"abstract":"At a crucial moment in Euripides’ Andromache, the title character throws her hands (περὶ χεῖρε βαλοῦσα, 115) around a statue of the goddess Thetis and laments the losses that have brought her to a point of desperation and despair. When Thetis appears at the end of the play, she answers Andromache’s pleas and grants her a renewed life of marriage and motherhood. Yet in her embrace of the statue, Andromache momentarily embodies an alternative impulse: a longing to merge with the stony form of the goddess and to cease from the patterns of nuptial mobility and sexual reproduction that have defined her life thus far. In this article, I argue that we should understand this embrace as “queer”—as a moment of intimate contact between mortal woman and immortal goddess that deeply unsettles the models of sexual and reproductive order that dominate Greek art and literature. While the play ends by redirecting Andromache toward the propagation of the Trojan line, the queer potential of that crucial embrace is taken up by Thetis herself, who re-scripts her own marriage to Peleus in a way that both inverts gendered patterns of movement and rejects the valorization of female fertility. Euripides’ Andromache thus concludes with the restoration of mortal sexual and reproductive order, yet through Andromache’s encounter with Thetis, it also gestures to the queer and startling freedom of a barren future.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41590808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.129
Johannes Wietzke
Archimedes’ Sand-Reckoner presents a system for naming extraordinarily large numbers, larger than the number of grains of sand that would fill the cosmos. Curiously, Archimedes addresses the treatise not to another specialist but to King Gelon II of Syracuse. While the treatise has thus been seen as evidence for the dynamics of patronage, difficulties in both Archimedes’ treatment of Gelon and his discussion of astronomical models make it fit incongruously within contemporary court and scientific contexts. This article offers a new reading of the Sand-Reckoner based on a reconsideration of the relationship between author and addressee: deferring assumptions about the historicity of that relationship, it analyzes Gelon’s role in the treatise with respect to both the stylistic features of Archimedes’ prose and a broader tradition of narratives about a variety of cultural actors who engage with kings, speaking not so much truth as wit to power. Such a reading resolves the social and scientific difficulties of the treatise, and develops the literary-experimental qualities of Hellenistic science. In turn, the article proposes a revised approach, sensitive to broader patterns of authorship, to understanding ancient scientific authors’ relationship to royal authority. It concludes, finally, that the royal patronage seemingly exemplified by the Sand-Reckoner had greater significance as a cultural trope than as a social institution.
{"title":"Speaking Wit to Power","authors":"Johannes Wietzke","doi":"10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.129","url":null,"abstract":"Archimedes’ Sand-Reckoner presents a system for naming extraordinarily large numbers, larger than the number of grains of sand that would fill the cosmos. Curiously, Archimedes addresses the treatise not to another specialist but to King Gelon II of Syracuse. While the treatise has thus been seen as evidence for the dynamics of patronage, difficulties in both Archimedes’ treatment of Gelon and his discussion of astronomical models make it fit incongruously within contemporary court and scientific contexts. This article offers a new reading of the Sand-Reckoner based on a reconsideration of the relationship between author and addressee: deferring assumptions about the historicity of that relationship, it analyzes Gelon’s role in the treatise with respect to both the stylistic features of Archimedes’ prose and a broader tradition of narratives about a variety of cultural actors who engage with kings, speaking not so much truth as wit to power. Such a reading resolves the social and scientific difficulties of the treatise, and develops the literary-experimental qualities of Hellenistic science. In turn, the article proposes a revised approach, sensitive to broader patterns of authorship, to understanding ancient scientific authors’ relationship to royal authority. It concludes, finally, that the royal patronage seemingly exemplified by the Sand-Reckoner had greater significance as a cultural trope than as a social institution.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46680397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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