Volume 157, Issue 2

In her extant poetry, Sappho uses fourteen female personal names, four of which are not attested elsewhere. The essay is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis of all of them. The results challenge the opinion, still prevailing in scholarship today, that Sappho’s companions were adolescent girls forming an educational or initiatory group, led by the poetess, that prepared them for respectable marriages. As a matter of fact, the female proper names in Sappho belong to four categories: ethnics, abstract nouns, nicknames and mythological names. According to the onomastic conventions of ancient Greece, names of all these categories typically denote females as slaves and courtesans, at least until the Hellenistic period. Thus it is argued that Sappho’s nomenclature creates a ‘reality effect’, implying furthermore that her use of the term hetairai (‘companions’) - and likewise of kalai and philai - could also point to the status of courtesans in the technical sense. This best fits the emphasis put on female beauty, seductiveness and musical skills, but also on invective and rivalry. Under the auspices of Aphrodite and from a female perspective, Sappho’s poems feature erotic experiences with lovers of both sexes as well as the reflection of those loves’ vicissitudes. The world imagined and displayed in her songs would therefore be mainly related to the symposion as the dominating realm of archaic poetry. This is how Sappho’s work was actually received in antiquity.

In this essay, I argue that Antigone talks about the transgression of the edict and about her death as an issue within the politics of Thebes. As Antigone’s appropriation of key-words such as φίλος, έχθρός, φιλία, δίκη, ἄρχεΐν and νόμος shows, the heroine displays a political understanding of her own acts in several passages of the play (Ant. 7-10, 26-36, 86-87 and 93-94 in Antigone’s first verbal exchange with Ismene; Ant. 508-509 and 523 in the stichomythia between Creon and Antigone; Ant. 806-816, 842-849 and 937-943 in Antigone’s farewell speeches; Ant. 902-907 in Antigone’s defence speech). In my reading, Antigone’s political representation of her deeds is deeply rooted in her view of death as a free choice.

The aim of this article is both to make a contribution towards a fuller understanding of the use of the perfect in Classical Greek, and to show how this understanding can yield new insights into how a speaker uses language to adapt his presentation of past events to his present rhetorical concerns. First, the semantic value of the perfect and its different basic uses are described. Second, four principles that help accounting for the variation between the perfect and aorist are outlined. Third, a number of typical uses of the perfect in Attic forensic oratory are distinguished. Finally, a textual analysis of De Corona 57-60, 79-121 is given in order to show how Demosthenes uses the perfect to accomplish his rhetorical ends.

Generally categorised as pertaining to the genre of paradoxical eulogies, the Encomium on Hair by Dio Chrysostom was until recently considered an example of the author’s strictly sophistic works, which the author would have pursued prior to his conversion to philosophy. Rather, the markedly autobiographical nature of the text, with references to the author’s mop of hair and the extremely well groomed hair of the filoκomoi (most likely identifiable with the sophists of the era), allows the Encomium on Hair to be classified as one of the numerous prolaliai scattered throughout Dio’s corpus under fallacious titles. In these works the orator chose to speak about himself in order to claim, albeit in a Socratic style, his status as a philosopher of the most upright and uncompromising character. A comparison with the Encomium on Hair by Apollonius of Tyana also allows us to appreciate the rich symbolism inherent in Dio’s text. Despite its misleading title, the Encomium on Hair by Dio, therefore, should be considered less as a futile school exercise and more as a living document of the author’s personal life-story during the period of his so-called ‘exile’.

This essay analyzes two Menippean fragments, quotations of Varro by Seneca and Tertullian respectively (frr. 583 and 582 a-b B., original text incertae sedis ). The first of these describes the image of the Stoic god satirically as “round, without head, without prepuce.” This can be read as a caustic rebuttal of the main attributes of the god, such as are presented in fr. 583 B., there considered the rational origin of the whole. The latter fragment, fr. 582 a-b B. mentions a multitude of Ioves without heads and can be interpreted as an ironic reference to the Stoic view of the deity: the Stoic god is at the same time singular and multiple because it is the sole source of generation of the whole. The allusion to the acephalous character of the deities in both fragments suggests an attribution of the passages to the same, lost satire, where a discussion about the nature of the gods took place. In particular, the comparison with some passages of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum permits the identification of the speaker with an Epicurean philosopher who opposes the Stoic conception of the divine.

There have been many interpretations of Catullus’ poem 2 (on his girlfriend’s sparrow) and especially of verses 5-8. The first part of this study presents the status quaestionis , listing the main interpretations and conjectures (but omitting those which alter the transmitted text unnecessarily). In the second part two new interpretations of vv. 5-8 are advanced, without modifying the text of manuscripts OGR. According to the first, the words cum desiderio meo … lubet iocari are understood as a substantive clause dependent on the verb credo, which also governs et solaciolum as a predicative. Alternatively, solaciolum may be taken as predicative of an understood object te (also dependent on credo ) referring to passer in the first verse. In either case, ut cum (which occurs in Quintilian, but with the subjunctive and in a causal sense) with the transmitted future acquiescet can have temporal force, as recently argued by Paul Claes (see also Boeth. cons. 2, 2, 10: … ne uti cum ludicri mei ratio poscet descendere iniuriam putes )56.

A close reading of a chapter of Gellius’ Noctes Atticae (IV 7) on the quantity of prefixes reveals that the two prose quotations from the elder Cato, which seem to be inappropriate in a discussion that otherwise consists of nothing but poetic examples, are in fact not at all out of place, since Cato himself offered poetic material in these quotations. Through this, two fragments of Old Latin poetry can be recovered. The first ( faenoribus copertus or faenoribus copertust ), the ending of a hexameter, is probably taken from a satiric context. The content of the second fragment ( ita nos fert ventus ad primorem Pyrenaeum quo proicit / in altum ), an iambic octonarius, may indicate occasional poetry.

For the occasion of his consulate in AD 379, Ausonius composed inter alia three hexameter Precationes and one Gratiarum actio addressed to the Emperor Gratian. Despite the shared context, in these three texts Ausonius presents entirely different ideas of the divine: on the one hand a polytheistic outlook with Phoebus, Tritonia and Victoria in prec . 1 and Ianus, Annus and Sol in prec. 2, but on the other hand in the Gratiarum actio a god who is clearly characterised as monotheistic (but not explicitly Christian), an aeternus omnium genitor and opifex et causa mundi . Rather than pursue the scholarly debate about Ausonius’ own ambivalent religious outlook, this paper examines the decisive role which the context of speech, the conventions of literary genre and the rhetorical strategy play in the question of which model of god Ausonius presents in each case and how he addresses the god(s).

The poet Henrich Hudemann (c. 1595 - 1628) from Holstein achieved lasting fame through his innovative contributions to German poetry of the Early Baroque period. They have earned him a place in the manuals of literary history, where his work is considered an important stage in the emergence of a refined vernacular poetry. However, like many of his contemporaries, Hudemann also left an oeuvre of sophisticated Latin poems, inspired mainly by Horace’s lyric poetry. The present paper investigates Hudemann’s artistic as well as his more practical aims. By using the poetic forms of classical antiquity for the expression of his religious beliefs, Hudemann created a remarkable specimen of Christian humanism through which he hoped to gain access to the leading intellectual figures of Europe, especially Daniel Heinsius.