Transactions of the American Philological Association最新文献

abstract:

This article argues that the model of the Plautine seruus callidus underpins Seneca's Atreus, whose similarities to the clever slave include verbal mastery, metatheatrical plotting, eavesdropping, and cultivating a special relationship with the audience. Analysis of these parallels is situated in the broader frame of theater history to show how comedy can influence tragedy and how the Thyestes' blend of tragic and comic material makes Atreus Seneca's most distinctive and enduring character. The paper's final section addresses Atreus's afterlife, examining how Shakespeare reimagines the Senecan protagonist's tragicomic mix in the characters of Hamlet and Iago.

abstract:

Scholars agree that you need to know 95‒98% of the words in a text in order to understand it. Using a digital and statistical analysis of a four-million-word corpus, we quantify the challenge of reaching this threshold in classical Latin. The vocabulary distribution has a long tail: to read with fluency you'd have to learn a lot of uncommon words. Because of the nature of the extant classical Latin corpus, this is an almost impossible task today. But Latin learners shouldn't despair. Instead, we should adjust our expectations, our teaching, and our reading practices. We make suggestions for possible changes.

abstract:

This article argues that anecdotes about Roman generals plundering foreign libraries were a type of Roman origin story that gained traction among imperial authors writing about the republican past. Scholars have traditionally treated these anecdotes as historical sources that document not only the beginnings of Roman literary, scientific, and book history, but also Rome's ability to transform military victory into cultural and intellectual conquest. Adopting a different approach, I argue that anecdotes about plundered libraries were a means by which imperial authors contested the extent and nature of foreign cultural influence on Rome and hence the makeup of Romanness itself.

abstract:

Dido's gifts to the shipwrecked Trojans in book 1 of the Aeneid resemble suitors' gifts (ἕδνα) recorded in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Reading Dido against a Hesiodic rather than Homeric model casts her as a suitor of Aeneas, which in turn lends further coloring to the composition of Aeneas's reciprocating gifts of a palla ("dress"), uelamen ("veil"), corona ("crown"), and jewelry, gifts associated in Greek tragedy with the bridal trousseau (φερναί). The (imperfect) recasting of Dido and Aeneas as suitor and bride, respectively, only becomes legible when better attention is paid to the gendered dynamics of exchange and modes of female communication within the Aeneid.

• Editors' Note

for this issue's paragraphos, we commissioned a piece on "Race, Recovery, and Hope," jointly authored by Bridget Murnaghan (SCS President 2020) and Shelley Haley (SCS President 2021), to reflect on the two consecutive presidential panels, focused respectively on William Sanders Scarborough (SCS 2021) and Helen Maria Chesnutt (SCS 2022), dedicated to race and the discipline of Classics. The forthcoming special issue of TAPA, "Race and Racism: Beyond the Spectacular," edited by Sasha-Mae Eccleston and Patrice Rankine, will continue the work of interrogating racism and exclusion in the discipline and mapping both intellectual histories and future disciplinary outcomes.

At the same time as we draw attention to ongoing concerns of race in the discipline, we offer this issue of TAPA with significant concern surrounding gender. The recent pool of submissions has lacked the gender diversity we expect, and is far more skewed than the 60/40 split between men and women that has roughly characterized SCS annual meeting submissions and TAPA submissions and publications in the past. While this basic imbalance itself is problematic, what we have seen in recent submission pools is a cause for even greater alarm. We have initiated an internal review of our process, while recognizing that the principal source of the problem is not a mystery: the pandemic has exacerbated the challenges for caregivers in the labor force generally, and its disproportionate effect on women in academia—and especially women with children—has been widely observed. We do not cite this fact to evade responsibility, but to assume it: as a journal that aims to publish the best in Classics research, TAPA fails in its mission if it does not publish work by authors of all genders, races, and backgrounds.

We know there is more to do. We are eager to partner with SCS members and the broader TAPA readership to identify ways to support greater gender diversity in the journal. This includes improving our mechanisms for collecting anonymized data to ensure that trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary authors are adequately represented. We invite thoughts as to how to do this, and more broadly, how to contend with the extraordinary burdens—which the pandemic has only increased—on the time and energy of scholars with caregiving responsibilities. How can we recognize and encourage the contributions [End Page ix] of scholars of all genders in the journal? We will be holding open houses throughout the year to learn from authors, readers, and SCS members. We invite all to share feedback with us by email (tapa@princeton.edu). [End Page x]

summary:

This paper reexamines the known performance contexts of the skolion in light of recent advances in our understanding of sympotic demographics and Greek popular culture, providing a close reading of select songs. In showing that the genre was primarily associated with public festivals and non-elite symposia, I argue that the Attic skolia were originally composed, performed, and transmitted by middling citizens at common symposia. Thus, we may isolate within the extant corpus of Greek literature a rare example of popular poetry that expresses the genuine voice of non-elites who articulated egalitarian views based on isonomia independently of elite sources.