Band 2, Heft 1

The present article attempts to explore some literary aspects of the Derveni papyrus (usually interpreted within a religious, allegorical or exegetical framework), by focusing on the authorial persona dominating the text. If the Derveni document is viewed as a unified whole, it is natural to suppose that its creator assumes the role of the ‘author’ in that he develops an overall strategy for controlling his text and manipulating his audience. The article addresses the question of which devices are employed for this purpose. Labelled ‘authorial strategies’, these devices include: the staging of the theology, the various voices of the author, the devising of the addressees and the relation between the quoter and the quotee.

The paper focuses on the Derveni papyrus and the small corpus of the Bacchic-Orphic gold incised epistomia , both ‘written’ objects associated with burial practices. It examines issues of chronology and topography these written objects raise, as well as the texts themselves and their contexts with emphasis on the areas where the two sets of written objects meet and where they part their ways.

In this article, the textual problems encountered in the Pelinna tablet are revisited. The reading in the text αἶψα is corrected to αἴξ according to the first editors' suggestion, so as to restore the compositional typology of the line required by the typology of its two surrounding lines. The commentary of these lines leads to the proposal, advocated by Dieterich long ago, to understand γάλα as the “galaxy”, and to interpret ταῦρος, αἴξ, and κριóς as the starry constellations, where the souls of the dead return, an idea already encountered in Aristophanes and Plato.

A new reading of P.Oxy. 1011 fol. VI enables a new edition of Callimachus' Ia. 13 revealing, here and there, a different text than the one accepted so far and a number of intriguing interpretation details. The edition is followed by elementary comments, especially on the new text, and two appendices on questions arising also from the new text.

This paper approaches the myth of Theseus' childhood and coming of age as encapsulated in Callimachus' Hecale from the perspective of social psychology in the field of father-child relationships and child development. It explores the significance of the overarching theme of father absence for Theseus' social maturation and appropriation of male (heroic) identity as well as its role in the emergence of matrifocality. The analysis extends to a series of other myths found in the Hecale , which equally address the problem of fatherlessness. The plethora of father absent children brings about diverse repercussions of this socio-mythic phenomenon in non-heroic, heroic and divine family structures.

Cupid morphs into Ascanius in Aeneid 1 and I argue that this transformation invests Ascanius with erotic qualities that are essential to understanding the boy's role in the Aeneid . Vergil deliberately blurs the distinction between Ascanius and Cupid, inviting the readers to draw a parallel between Aeneas' son and Aeneas' brother. Ascanius' Cupid-like features generically enrich Vergil's epic with the language and motifs of elegiac poetry. The intrusion of Cupid, the patron deity of Roman love elegy, into Vergil's epic opens an intriguing dialogue between two genres that are supposedly mutually exclusive.

The following paper focuses on the ‘generic identity’ of Calpurnius Siculus' sixth eclogue; in particular the article examines the ways in which the Neronian poet manages to suggest his ‘generic novelty’, his willingness to expand on the previous pastoral tradition as well as his occasional tendency to perpetuate and further generate ‘generic tensions’ already operating in earlier bucolic poetry. Intertextuality thus appears to function as a major means that Calpurnius makes use of in order to bring out his ‘generic diversity’, for most of the intertexts display a ‘generic interaction’ between various literary genres, further adding to the ‘generic polyphony’ evidenced throughout the Calpurnian pastoral corpus.