Volume 161, Issue 1

In current research, strongly marked by ‘performance studies’, it is often forgotten that there are at least two approaches in literary research that must concentrate on the reading of Aristophanes’ comedies: As his plays were read for centuries and still are, it is legitimate to pose research questions on the aesthetics of reception and of influence which address the reading of his text. The present paper will argue, further, that Aristophanes’ comedies were conceived right from the start as reading texts. Investigations of their reading are therefore all the more desirable as a complement to ‘performance studies’. In the argument presented here, first the conditions of reading in Aristophanes’ time are sketched out (1). Then it is shown how the poet of comedy was himself a reader, who may have expected a read reception of his own poetic compositions (2). The final part of the paper describes Aristophanes’ environment and asks who may have been among his readership.

This article presents two hitherto neglected arguments in favour of the thesis that the philosopher’s immortality described by Diotima in Plato’s Symposium refers exclusively to immortality by means of posterity and not to some sort of personal immortality after death. Both arguments are contained in the words 212a6–7 καὶ εἴπερ τῳ ἄλλῳ ἀνθρώπων ἀθανάτῳ καὶ ἐκείνῳ. The first argument concerns the word ἄνθρωπος, the second the phrase εἴπερ τῳ ἄλλῳ καὶ ἐκείνῳ. There is an appendix on phrases of the type εἴπερ τις (ἄλλος).

In Book 1 of the Argonautica , Apollonios Rhodios counts out the names of 55 heroes who set off to win the Golden Fleece. All the heroes are given genealogical details that often contribute to their characterisation. Only Admetus’ γενεή is passed over in silence by the catalogue. This was noted already by H. Fränkel, who suspected a lacuna in the text. However, there is another solution to the problem. The distinctive relationship of Admetus to his parents is detailed nowhere more clearly and drastically than in Euripides’ Alcestis . In what is perhaps the most bitter agon in Greek tragedy, the father and son quarrel so severely that Admetus throws his parents out of the house and from then on wishes not to be regarded as their son. Apollonios assumes a knowledge of this famous quarrel among his readers or hearers, and he shows the sad consequences of this unreconciled generational conflict by breaking the convention of filiation and silently calling to mind the unresolved problems of the Alcestis .

This article makes two claims. The first is that Archimedes’ On Floating Bodies included a punning reference, in its key diagrammatic figure AΠΟΛ: the precise purpose of the pun may not be recovered by us, but even so it remains a powerful example of the playful in Archimedes’ writing. The second is that Apollonius could have been (contrary to what is now the accepted chronology of Greek mathematics) Archimedes’ younger contemporary. The outcome could be that we find Archimedes addressing a playful, hidden message to Apollonius, providing us with a unique insight into the communication of Greek mathematics.

The demonstrated Greek origins of Latin terms of allusion lead one to consider also a possibly Hellenistic background for the common figure of memory as signal of literary reference in Latin poetry. Tracing the models for terms of literary reminiscence in Republican and Augustan poetry to Callimachus and Apollonius in particular, this article demonstrates that memory as trope for literary allusion occurs in Hellenistic poetry, wherein several features and varieties of it anticipate later imitations. Focalized by the narrator as well as by internal characters, the trope of literary remembrance is employed in Hellenistic poetry to effect complex intertextual relations. The article concludes with two examples from Greek and Latin poetry of late antiquity that demonstrate the longevity of the device.

The transmission of the final book of the Corpus Caesarianum , the pseudo-Caesarian Bellum Hispaniense , is problematic. After countless lacunae and desperately corrupt passages it breaks off abruptly with a speech by Caesar to disloyal provincials. The present article addresses the form and content of the lost ending with an approach that is unusual in present-day scholarship: inspired by the humanist supplements to ancient literature, such as were produced into the eighteenth century, it develops scholarly criteria for a supplement to the Bellum Hispaniense . Taking its orientation from the literary properties of the transmitted text and the parallel historical tradition, the paper argues that an act of clemency under harsh conditions is a plausible ending for Caesar’s speech. The content for a supplement to the narrative of events in the Bellum Hispaniense is argued to be, among other things, the conquest of the city of Urso and the reward and punishment of the provincials by Caesar. The result of the paper is presented in an exemplary application of the criteria developed, in the form of a Latin supplement.

The theory that the first three books of Horace’s Odes were published together is based on arguments which do not stand up to open-minded analysis (§§ 2–3). In particular, the dating of the individual odes, in the few cases that can be established with any sound grounds, far from corroborating this theory rather reveals that three periods can be distinguished quite well for the composition of the three books (§ 3.3). Various elements, notable among them certain consistent evolutions in the metre, demonstrate that the books were in fact composed in series, and various findings of a historical nature provide confirmation of the composition-periods already detected (§§ 4.1–3). The Roman odes, however, demand different years, and their composition, completed at the time of Book III, had already begun and had progressed at least at the time of Book II (§ 4.1.3). Given these results, the hypothesis that the three books were published separately and in sequence is the most economical, best reflects Horace’s habits, and explains or eliminates some anomalies, but it is also supported by various specific indications (§ 4.4–6). We may conclude that Odes I, II and III appeared, respectively, at the end of AD 28, during 25, and in 23 or 22.

In a pivotal article in 1990, P. Hardie illustrated that the Theban narrative of Ovid Metamorphoses 3 and 4 was the first anti- Aeneid . He did not include discussion of the death of Pentheus at the end of Book 3. In this article I show that the depiction of the Theban king’s death is bound up with key Vergilian intertexts which have a profound impact both on reading the pathos of the scene, but more importantly, on Ovid’s reconstruction of the end of the Aeneid and the death of Turnus. A seemingly clichéd simile comparing Pentheus’ sparagmos with the falling of leaves from a tree evokes the famous passage from the underworld in Aeneid 6 in which the souls of those who died prematurely are described. More importantly, in relation to Ovid’s narrative of the Theban ktisis , careful allusions to the final lines of the Aeneid in Pentheus’ death-scene act as a critical commentary on the Aeneid and the actions of Aeneas.

In this paper, I will highlight certain literary characteristics of Seneca the Elder’s excerpt Controversia 6.8 (commonly neglected by modern scholarship), which is about an unnamed Vestal virgin accused of the crimen incesti for having written the following allegedly biographical verse about lucky brides: felices nuptae! moriar nisi nubere dulce est . The anonymous declaimers then argue against and for the Vestal, using biographical criticism and discussing the appropriate behaviour of both a woman priest and a female writer. I will argue that the whole case, the Vestal’s allusive verse and her multilayered persona do not permit a simple (moral) reading, but, rather, possess a remarkable literary, intertextual and intratextual quality. Firstly, the Vestal is connected with the legend of Lucretia. Her character – innocent despite her polluted body – undermines the talis oratio qualis vita argumentused by the Vestal’s prosecutor, who is presented as a second Tarquinius. Secondly, the Vestal’s verse has multiple literary connotations that evoke some of Ovid’s waiting heroines in the Heroides , Sallust’s transgender persona Sempronia in his Bellum Catilinae and Horace’s famous line dulce et decorum est pro patria mori in his Odes . Intratextually, the verse and its interpretation mirror important rhetorical and declamatory precepts given by Seneca the Elder, especially in the preface to Book One. At the same time, the Vestal seems to be the perfect personification of the lamented effeminacy and violation of contemporary rhetoric.