This paper considers the nature of time and temporality in Homer. It argues that any exploration of narrative and time must, as its central tenet, take into account the irreducible plurality and interconnectedness of memory, the event, and experienced time. Drawing on notions of complexity, emergence, and stochastic behavior in science as well as phenomenological traditions in the discussion and analysis of time, temporality, and change, and offering extensive readings of Homer, of Homeric epithets and formulae, and of key passages in the Iliad and Odyssey, the paper argues against chronological notions of linear (“numbered”) time and progression and in favor of a complex, dynamic temporal “geometries” of Homeric temporality. The paper concludes by briefly extending the argument to the wider domain of ancient time in general. Homer is a fundamental point of reference in the ancient world. Thus, Homeric temporality—irreducibly complex—affects the cognition and perception of time throughout the whole of antiquity.
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The Timaeus is a muthos that attempts to imagine a logos of the cosmos. Like the demiurge, readers are to be mimetic artists, poets (Tim. 28c3), who move constantly between the intelligible essences and their likenesses in the world of appearance, experience, and becoming, occupying a third register that is neither and both (28a6–b2). The cosmology of the Timaeus is both a likely story and an allegory of its own failure. It takes place within the nonspace of the khōra, a realm accessible only through bastard reasoning that we can perceive only as if in a dream. The Timaeus is an unfinalizable logos in which each moment of positing is also a moment of irony and interrogation, of simultaneous acceptance and active separation, of choric space.
{"title":"Pardon the Interruption","authors":"P. Miller","doi":"10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.51","url":null,"abstract":"The Timaeus is a muthos that attempts to imagine a logos of the cosmos. Like the demiurge, readers are to be mimetic artists, poets (Tim. 28c3), who move constantly between the intelligible essences and their likenesses in the world of appearance, experience, and becoming, occupying a third register that is neither and both (28a6–b2). The cosmology of the Timaeus is both a likely story and an allegory of its own failure. It takes place within the nonspace of the khōra, a realm accessible only through bastard reasoning that we can perceive only as if in a dream. The Timaeus is an unfinalizable logos in which each moment of positing is also a moment of irony and interrogation, of simultaneous acceptance and active separation, of choric space.","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":"47784801","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 considers how mourning is configured as a site of political and aesthetic conflict in Aeschylus’ Persae. Aeschylus represents the Persian defeat at Salamis as a catastrophe that unsettles the Persians’ habitual modes of visualizing and quantifying the empire’s population as an ordered whole. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, I show how characters in Persae construct novel representations of the war dead as social collectivities that do not fit into the hierarchical structures of dynastic rule. I focus on two passages that stage this work in granular detail: the Messenger’s list of dead commanders recited soon after he reports the defeat (302–330) and a second list of the dead sung by the Chorus in dialogue with Xerxes (955–1001). Each passage advances a polemical recount of the dead, at once reevaluating the scale of the disaster and reframing how individuals and collectivities destroyed in the war should be mourned and memorialized. The Messenger and Chorus thereby contest the efforts of the royal family to count the losses at Salamis according to the circumscribed terms of imperial administration. By tracing how the memorialization of the dead galvanizes conflicting efforts to count (or miscount) the community as a whole, Persae raises larger questions about the political affordances of aesthetic form.
{"title":"(Mis)counting Catastrophe in Aeschylus’ Persae","authors":"Ben Radcliffe","doi":"10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.91","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2022.41.1.91","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers how mourning is configured as a site of political and aesthetic conflict in Aeschylus’ Persae. Aeschylus represents the Persian defeat at Salamis as a catastrophe that unsettles the Persians’ habitual modes of visualizing and quantifying the empire’s population as an ordered whole. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, I show how characters in Persae construct novel representations of the war dead as social collectivities that do not fit into the hierarchical structures of dynastic rule. I focus on two passages that stage this work in granular detail: the Messenger’s list of dead commanders recited soon after he reports the defeat (302–330) and a second list of the dead sung by the Chorus in dialogue with Xerxes (955–1001). Each passage advances a polemical recount of the dead, at once reevaluating the scale of the disaster and reframing how individuals and collectivities destroyed in the war should be mourned and memorialized. The Messenger and Chorus thereby contest the efforts of the royal family to count the losses at Salamis according to the circumscribed terms of imperial administration. By tracing how the memorialization of the dead galvanizes conflicting efforts to count (or miscount) the community as a whole, Persae raises larger questions about the political affordances of aesthetic form.","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":"49591593","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.2022.41.1.180
D. F. Elmer
Chariton’s novel, Chaereas and Callirhoe, is intensely interested not only in the emotional experience of the protagonists but also in the emotional effect the narrative has on readers. Among the many emotions depicted within the text, one stands out for its architectonic function: jealousy. Jealousy articulates the plot and propels it forward. Jealousy is also represented as a fundamentally “readerly” emotion: scenes of reading focus on the potential of written texts (letters) to stir jealous emotions. Similarly, scenes of embedded narration focus on the jealous reactions of narratees. The plot achieves closure when Chaereas learns to manage his jealousy as narratee and narrator. His experience, however, has implications also for Chariton and his readers. The text’s representation of jealousy as a narrative and textual force speaks both to the experience of writing in a culture that prizes the imitation of prestigious models and to the experience of reading a text that self-consciously hybridizes those models.
Chariton的小说《Chaereas and Callirhoe》不仅对主人公的情感体验感兴趣，而且对叙事对读者的情感影响感兴趣。在文本中描绘的许多情感中，有一种以其建筑功能而突出：嫉妒。嫉妒表达了情节并推动它向前发展。嫉妒也表现为一种基本的“阅读”情绪：阅读场景关注书面文本（信件）激发嫉妒情绪的潜力。类似地，嵌入叙事的场景集中在叙述者的嫉妒反应上。当Chaereas作为叙述者和叙述者学会控制自己的嫉妒时，情节就结束了。然而，他的经历对查里顿和他的读者也有影响。文本将嫉妒表现为一种叙事和文本力量，这既反映了在一种重视模仿著名模特的文化中写作的体验，也反映了阅读自觉地将这些模特混合在一起的文本的体验。
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2021.40.2.249
Jane Millar
This article examines the past and potential contributions of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (NH) on the subject of Roman perceptions and experiences of environmental change. It asks in particular how classicists, archaeologists, and environmental historians can responsibly use the NH as a source on ancient climate. First, it briefly reviews relevant topics in the paleoclimatology of the Roman world, a rapidly advancing discipline enabling the identification of ancient climate changes with increasing precision and confidence (I). The article then turns to the reliability of Pliny as an authority on ancient climate by examining his accuracy, objectivity, and use of source material in literary and historical context, including his rhetorical goals, which have gone understudied until quite recently (II). A close reading of passages on environmental and climate change follows, highlighting areas in which Pliny’s observations are at odds with his source material. The examples discussed demonstrate the importance of phenology (III) and meteorology (IV) in Pliny’s encyclopedic account of the natural world, one characterized by anthropocentrism, pragmatism, and an emphasis on local knowledge. The evidence for ancient climate change is plentiful but not conclusive on the details and timing, and further studies will continue to refine local records. Rather than presenting a synthetic reconstruction based on Pliny’s observations, I argue that his encyclopedia offers an untapped resource on ancient climate and weather, not only by providing evidence of climate change, but also by recommending increased attention to seasonality, agricultural communities, and the lived experience of agricultural labor in order to better understand the effects of climate change on ancient populations.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2021.40.2.195
Joshua Benjamins
Across his corpus, Augustine strikingly and recurrently deploys the three cognate metaphors of slavery to sin, redemption from sin, and slavery to God. I argue that Augustine’s use of these theological metaphors is thoroughly contoured by the legal and social strictures governing slavery and freedom in the later Roman empire. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the economic and legal connotations of some key terms in Augustine’s lexicon of salvation—like manumissio, redemptio, and libertas—and seek to tease out the social, legal, and economic logic they encapsulate. As I show, the concept of dominium underwrites Augustine’s description of the prelapsarian ordo naturalis as a chain of hierarchical relationships: between God and man, soul and body, male and female. The notion that human beings are enslaved to sin, subject to the condicio servitutis from birth, evokes the situation of laboring tenants (coloni) bound to the land through their origo. Moreover, the bishop of Hippo’s descriptions of captivity to the devil and liberation through the interpellation (interpellatio) of God the Redeemer are informed by the contemporary reality of barbarian captivity and liberales causae, so richly described in Augustine’s Letter 10*. Finally, Augustine’s characterization of Christian service in terms of a state of simultaneous freedom and servitude implicitly draws upon the legal norms governing the relationship of freed captives to their redeemers, as well as the obligations of obsequium and gratia which freedmen owed to their former masters.
{"title":"Slavery, Redemption, and Manumission as Structural Metaphors in Augustine’s Theology","authors":"Joshua Benjamins","doi":"10.1525/ca.2021.40.2.195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2021.40.2.195","url":null,"abstract":"Across his corpus, Augustine strikingly and recurrently deploys the three cognate metaphors of slavery to sin, redemption from sin, and slavery to God. I argue that Augustine’s use of these theological metaphors is thoroughly contoured by the legal and social strictures governing slavery and freedom in the later Roman empire. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the economic and legal connotations of some key terms in Augustine’s lexicon of salvation—like manumissio, redemptio, and libertas—and seek to tease out the social, legal, and economic logic they encapsulate. As I show, the concept of dominium underwrites Augustine’s description of the prelapsarian ordo naturalis as a chain of hierarchical relationships: between God and man, soul and body, male and female. The notion that human beings are enslaved to sin, subject to the condicio servitutis from birth, evokes the situation of laboring tenants (coloni) bound to the land through their origo. Moreover, the bishop of Hippo’s descriptions of captivity to the devil and liberation through the interpellation (interpellatio) of God the Redeemer are informed by the contemporary reality of barbarian captivity and liberales causae, so richly described in Augustine’s Letter 10*. Finally, Augustine’s characterization of Christian service in terms of a state of simultaneous freedom and servitude implicitly draws upon the legal norms governing the relationship of freed captives to their redeemers, as well as the obligations of obsequium and gratia which freedmen owed to their former masters.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44502421","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 : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2021.40.2.316
Elliott Piros
This paper examines representations of money in the epigrams of Martial. I argue that Martial’s poetics are deeply influenced by some of money’s economic functions, even if many of these functions are approached through networks of amicitia. By engaging with the indeterminacy of what can be called exchange value, Martial identifies an aesthetic dimension that becomes central to his humor. The form of value described by his paradoxical poetics of cash implies a category of matter that is at once sensuous and abstract, autonomous and dependent upon other modes of valuation. I focus on the sensuality of this abstract matter, its failure to become entirely impersonal, and on Martial’s habit of using deictic language to gesture to its presence. Such an aestheticization of monetary value differs from more familiar techniques of using vivid language to flesh out moral or satirical attitudes to wealth or the ways in which it is acquired. It instead approaches the instability of money as an object of inspiration in its own right, one that supports the epigrammatist’s habit of taking up postures throughout his corpus of poems, and of maintaining a degree of detachment between his voice and its pronouncements.
{"title":"The Materiality of Monetary Value in Martial’s Epigrams","authors":"Elliott Piros","doi":"10.1525/ca.2021.40.2.316","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2021.40.2.316","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines representations of money in the epigrams of Martial. I argue that Martial’s poetics are deeply influenced by some of money’s economic functions, even if many of these functions are approached through networks of amicitia. By engaging with the indeterminacy of what can be called exchange value, Martial identifies an aesthetic dimension that becomes central to his humor. The form of value described by his paradoxical poetics of cash implies a category of matter that is at once sensuous and abstract, autonomous and dependent upon other modes of valuation. I focus on the sensuality of this abstract matter, its failure to become entirely impersonal, and on Martial’s habit of using deictic language to gesture to its presence. Such an aestheticization of monetary value differs from more familiar techniques of using vivid language to flesh out moral or satirical attitudes to wealth or the ways in which it is acquired. It instead approaches the instability of money as an object of inspiration in its own right, one that supports the epigrammatist’s habit of taking up postures throughout his corpus of poems, and of maintaining a degree of detachment between his voice and its pronouncements.","PeriodicalId":45164,"journal":{"name":"CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42292047","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 : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2021.40.2.283
M. Park
This article argues for a new way of reading Hellenistic “literary” hymns, one that situates them in contemporary religious and cultural discourse through the notions of “textualization” and the “cultural archive.” I apply this framework to Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos and show how this hymn became an important part of the articulation of Ptolemaic religion in the context of ritual politics in the third-century Aegean, as well as how it had a lasting impact on the way that the ritual geography of the Cyclades was imagined. Specifically, the analysis spotlights how the hymn successfully links historical and contemporary theoric choral activity with the etymologization of the Cyclades; how it textualizes the island of Kos within the ritual nexus of Delos; and, finally, how it becomes an important part of Greek cultural memory about Delos.
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Pub Date : 2021-10-01DOI: 10.1525/ca.2021.40.2.221
Catharine Edwards
Although Seneca often expresses a disdain for the body, vividly detailed evocations of bodily experience feature frequently in his writing. In particular, he presents the repeated imagining of anticipated pain and suffering (praemeditatio futurorum malorum) as an important psychotherapeutic technique. This strategy should be seen in the context of Stoic theories of perception and the embodied nature of emotion (theories that resonate in significant respects with findings in cognitive neuroscience). Yet Seneca’s approach is also profoundly colored by a perception of the relationship between imagination and emotion which lies at the heart of ancient rhetorical theory. While anticipating future misfortunes is sometimes presented as a means to dull anxiety, a method of cultivating stereotypically Stoic impassivity by rooting out negative emotions, Seneca also highlights the power of the vividly imagined scene of suffering to stimulate an ardent love of virtue, a positive emotion which plays a crucial role in the moral progress of the Stoic student.
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This paper explores the aesthetics of miniaturization in Statius’ Silvae 2.7, in relation to Statius’ unexpected decision to write a tribute to the dead epic poet Lucan in hendecasyllables. The choice of a meter associated with irreverence, ephemerality, speed, and fun has been variously justified as expressing the poet’s ambivalent mood—mourning and celebration combined—or encapsulating his subject’s brief life. This paper builds on these explanations from a different angle. The epitome of miniature, playful poetry in the Silvae is the pseudo-Virgilian Culex (Gnat), mentioned first in Statius’ opening preface as a model for his collection and then in the tribute to Lucan as a yardstick for the young poet’s precocity. This is no casual coincidence. Statius’ résumé of baby Lucan’s future career uses techniques of retrospective prophecy similar to those with which the Culex-poet anticipates and absorbs Virgil’s entire oeuvre. Other clues suggest that Statius is engaging with the faked juvenile work more than sporadically, writing the equivalent for Lucan in the smallest meter imaginable while aiming to surpass both Virgil and Lucan as a poet of speed and synoptic vision.
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