AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY最新文献

Abstract:

In Plautus’ Mostellaria, the enslaved Tranio covers up the young Philolaches’ purchase of the meretrix Philematium’s freedom by telling Philolaches’ father Theopropides that his son blew a fortune on the house next door. Though Philematium is hidden out of sight for much of the play, her body materializes in the feminizing language through which Tranio, Theopropides, and the owner Simo describe this house. Their conversation at the threshold transforms Theopropides into the literary trope of the meretrix’s excluded lover and calls to mind both the disempowerment of meretrices through the process of aging and the power they wield through pregnancy.

Abstract:

This article examines the interplay between legal language and poetic discourse within Ovid’s Heroides 4. As a knowledgeable reader of previous authors, as well as an expert in love poetry and Roman and divine law, the Ovidian Phaedra combines literary tradition, elegiac patterns, and legal discourse to portray her adulterous and incestuous relationship with Hippolytus as legitimate. Phaedra’s ironical reinterpretation and manipulation of Roman legal concepts, along with her skillful use of sources and elegiac motifs, articulates Ovid’s attempt to uncover the intrinsic arbitrariness and unreliability of contemporary (Augustan) juridical constructs.

Abstract:

At the end of Punica 14, M. Claudius Marcellus transforms from a general famous for his military valor into a founder renowned for his clemency. This paper interprets his transformation in relation to the threat of civil war, which lurks throughout the Sicilian campaign. Earning glory through his commitment to external conquest and internal unity, Marcellus offers a resonant exemplum for a political community beset by fears of provincial unrest. When Silius invites his fellow governors to learn the lessons of the epyllion, he reveals his own awareness that the stability of the empire depends upon the conduct of those who conquer in its name.

Abstract:

In chapter 3.3 of Cyropaedia, Xenophon offers a wide-ranging meditation on the role of speech in arousing enthusiasm for battle. He emphasizes the uselessness of general exhortations, arguing that being prepared in body and mind is the crucial factor not only for being capable of fighting but also for stirring the right emotions. Although pre-battle exhortations have little utility, however, Cyrus does not condemn their use altogether: he only denies that they are a substitute for rigorous training. The very need for an exhortation implies a lack of readiness on the part of the soldiers and a lack of confidence in them by the leader, and therefore, aside from being superfluous, an exhortation may have a negative effect on the soldiers. The King of Assyria provides a caricature of a bad exhortation by threatening and scaring his soldiers with ill-conceived and inappropriate exhortatory tropes.

Abstract:

This article investigates the use of alogos aesthesis in the critical works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and aims to evaluate its role in Dionysius’ overall approach to aesthetic experience. Dionysius comments on alogos aesthesis in several of his essays, though the account given does not always appear to be coherent. Furthermore, his engagement with alogos aesthesis is often suggestive and does not amount to a comprehensive discussion of the phenomenon, let alone to a full theory of aesthetic taste. The different issues emerging from Dionysius’ discussion of alogos aesthesis in various essays will be analyzed and connections to some of his rough contemporaries (kritikoi, Cicero, Alexandrian grammarians) highlighted. Finally, it will be suggested that Dionysius’ discussion of alogos aesthesis emerges as one of the earliest surviving attempts to express the “sense of taste” in aesthetic theory.

Abstract:

The layering of classical and biblical language in the Story of Apollonius has fueled debate about the readership and religious contexts of the late Latin romance. This article analyzes the mixture of pagan and biblical elements in the central murder plot of Tarsia, for which two characters plead their innocence to an unnamed god. A reinterpretation of the intertexts in their parallel prayers reveals how the romance combines the formulae of judicial prayers and the Latin Vulgate to shape reader response to the episode. Apollonius 32 thereby accommodates readers from diverse religious traditions and foreshadows the story's final administration of justice.

Abstract:

This article enquires into the not-quite-thereness of Octavian in Horace's early poetry. It argues that Octavian's poetic peripherality leading up to Actium is not incidental, but the result of a persistent and careful process of removal. By placing Octavian just beyond the poem's reach, Horace dissociates Octavian from civil-war politics while emphasizing his extraordinary political status. This careful articulation of Octavian's removedness generates two effects. On the one hand, it absolves Octavian of his responsibility in plunging Rome into civil war. On the other hand, it directs the reader's gaze to his increasingly unreachable and indefinable political position.

Abstract:

Scholars hold that Xenophanes was a wandering rhapsode or a perpetually itinerant performer. This consensus depends on the combination of a misunderstanding of one testimonium (D.L. 9.18 = A1), a misapprehension of another testimonium as a fragment (B45), and a questionable interpretation of one genuine fragment (B8), which probably describes not Xenophanes' bodily travels but rather the travels of his disembodied thought through the panhellenic circulation of his poetry. Rather than being some sort of special itinerant figure, this essay argues, Xenophanes was a settled elite and a celebrated poet during his own lifetime whose movements reflected his participation in normal networks of xenia and patronage.

Abstract:

The Trikaranos, a work of Varro's preserved only by title in Appian's Bellum Civile, has usually been considered a satirical attack on the alliance of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus in 59 b.c.e. as a "three-headed monster." However, a re-examination of the evidence reveals that the Trikaranos was instead a pseudonymous satire directed not at the political alliance of the three men, but at Caesar alone, who was attacked as the single autocrat who spoke for all three members of the so-called "first triumvirate."

Abstract:

This paper considers how Cato's status as a "new man" in the competitive social and political arena he entered at Rome shaped his self-representation in the sphere of his historical writing. At the heart of the argument is the question of how Cato's insertion of his own speeches into the fabric of the Origines modulated the tenor of his self-commemoration in that work. After briefly considering how previous historiography may have helped determine Cato's choices, the argument looks to Roman discursive practices that appear to have taken shape around the 4th- and early 3rd-century rise of the nobilitas. Especially in focus are the functions of the ancestor mask and the use of voice in honorific epigraphy.