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Greek Epigraphy and the Greek Language

Georg Petzl

in Epigraphy and the Historical Sciences

Part I of this chapter reviews its subject historically, showing how inscriptions allow us to see the development of the Greek dialects, the effects on Greek of contact with other languages, ... More

Part I of this chapter reviews its subject historically, showing how inscriptions allow us to see the development of the Greek dialects, the effects on Greek of contact with other languages, especially Latin, and the ways in which styles of utterance and uses of language changed through time. Part II, a brief systematic review, illustrates three modes of language: poetry, with illustrations from funerary epigrams much influenced by Homer and the dramatists; prose, with its range of variations by genre and by degree of rhetorical influence, but also very directly in the form of precise citations of words and phrases used in assemblies; and Kunstprosa, the blend of prose and poetry, illustrated by the style and vocabulary of the inscription of Antiochos I of Commagene on his monument at Nemrud Dagh in South East Turkey.Less

The New Posidippus and Latin Poetry

G. O. Hutchinson

in Talking Books: Readings in Hellenistic and Roman Books of Poetry

This piece was the first to relate the new book of Posidippus' epigrams to Latin poetry. It discusses the nature of the collection, which arranges epigrams in groups with titles. Connections with ... More

This piece was the first to relate the new book of Posidippus' epigrams to Latin poetry. It discusses the nature of the collection, which arranges epigrams in groups with titles. Connections with Latin poetry are investigated: specific allusions, thematic networks, problems of intertextuality with Hellenistic poetry. The relation of elegy to epigram is then discussed; Latin elegy uses its small relative both to separate itself from epic and to mark its own ambitions. Latin poets turn elegy into love-elegy, and then aspire to go further. The structure of Posidippus and the Fasti can be compared and contrasted.Less

The Catullan Corpus, Greek Epigram, and the Poetry of Objects *

G. O. Hutchinson

in Talking Books: Readings in Hellenistic and Roman Books of Poetry

Greek papyri, especially of epigrams, are used to show the connections and problems of the Catullan corpus. It is argued that a three-book collected edition does not fit the ancient material: poems ... More

Greek papyri, especially of epigrams, are used to show the connections and problems of the Catullan corpus. It is argued that a three-book collected edition does not fit the ancient material: poems 61-4 were issued separately; a (1-60) and c (65-116) are the somewhat distorted remains of two simultaneous books, which are to be read together and compared. c falls into two parts (c1 65-68b, c2 69-116) which are themselves to be contrasted, and which between them display Catullus matching the range of Callimachus' elegy. c2, c1, and a are seen to exploit differently the concern of epigram with physical objects. In c2 the objects are parts of the body; this helps c2 create a distinctive world.Less

Ambition to Rise: Horace, Satires 1

S.J. Harrison

in Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace

Horace's first poetic collection presents poems which interact notably with other genres — epic, both mythological and didactic, epigram, Priapean material, etc. This higher poetic material helps ... More

Horace's first poetic collection presents poems which interact notably with other genres — epic, both mythological and didactic, epigram, Priapean material, etc. This higher poetic material helps this book of lowly sermones show poetic ambition and react to other contemporary poets such as Vergil.Less

Lyric Flexibility: Literary Form in Horace's Odes

S.J. Harrison

in Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace

Horace's re-invention of archaic Greek lyric for Augustan Rome raises many issues of generic complexity, which are deliberately foregrounded by the texts. The boundaries of lyric are severely probed ... More

Horace's re-invention of archaic Greek lyric for Augustan Rome raises many issues of generic complexity, which are deliberately foregrounded by the texts. The boundaries of lyric are severely probed and tested by the incorporation and admixture of other literary genres (e.g., epic, epigram, prophecy, and tragedy).Less

Epic Inclusivity: Vergil's Aeneid

S.J. Harrison

in Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace

The Aeneid is not just the culmination of all ancient epic traditions, but also exploits generic complexity to enrich its texture. Apart from the obvious but still underrated interface with tragedy, ... More

The Aeneid is not just the culmination of all ancient epic traditions, but also exploits generic complexity to enrich its texture. Apart from the obvious but still underrated interface with tragedy, e.g., in the Dido-episode, there are encounters with many other non-epic styles (e.g., pastoral, didactic, elegy). As in the Odes, a classic and inimitable text is formed by generic enrichment.Less

Atheism under Cover: Esoteric Communication on Hume's Title Pages

Paul Russell

in The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion

Both the epigrams that Hume uses on the title‐pages of the Treatise of Human Nature are very significant and reveal his freethinking and irreligious aims and intentions.. More specifically, the ... More

Both the epigrams that Hume uses on the title‐pages of the Treatise of Human Nature are very significant and reveal his freethinking and irreligious aims and intentions.. More specifically, the epigram from Tacitus that appears in Books I and II was used not only by Spinoza, but also by his followers in the Collins‐Toland circle to proclaim their bold defense of freethinking. At the same time, the Lucan epigram that appears in Book III also appears prominently in Collins's Freethinking and carries the message of Cato, a model of stoic virtue and the oracle of pantheism, freedom of thought, and anti‐superstition. Beyond this, these two epigrams are also intimately connected with Hume's Hobbist title and plan for his Treatise. In this way, Hume's use of epigrams on the title page of the Treatise is a notable and illuminating example of “esoteric” communication.Less

Introduction: Mammon in the Tudor Common Wealth

David Landreth

in The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature

The Introduction situates the peculiar character of the English Renaissance's “Mammon”—i.e., money that talks— both theoretically and historically. What differentiates this Mammon from the medieval ... More

The Introduction situates the peculiar character of the English Renaissance's “Mammon”—i.e., money that talks— both theoretically and historically. What differentiates this Mammon from the medieval experience of money is the traumatic mid-sixteenth-century upheavals of inflation and monetary debasement. What differentiates it from the modern experience of money is its situation, not in the post-Enlightenment discourse of economics, but in the contemporary discourse of “commonwealth,” which coordinates material values with political, ethical, and theological ones. Landreth argues that straightforwardly economistic analyses are therefore insufficient to fully articulate the Renaissance's Mammon, and turn to the methods of object-oriented “material culture” and of metaphysical ontology.Less

Change and the Donne Generation

Robert Ellrodt

in Seven Metaphysical Poets: A Structural Study of the Unchanging Self

New attitudes and a new style characterized the poetry of John Donne, who often took the lead in innovation and distinctly expressed his own personality as well as the temper and dominant ... More

New attitudes and a new style characterized the poetry of John Donne, who often took the lead in innovation and distinctly expressed his own personality as well as the temper and dominant inclinations of his own generation. The poets of the Donne generation rejected the floridness, mellifluousness, and melodiousness of ‘golden’ verse and ‘sugared’ sonnets. The search for manly attitudes and the ‘manly style’, related to a search for truth and meaning, was, indeed, the dominant trend in the Donne generation. It accounts for the change of mood and expression in love poetry. In literary expression a desire of change for the sake of change (a desire paraded in Donne's elegy so entitled) was a prominent feature of this generation. In their cult of wit the poets of the Donne generation were interested in new forms of wit, displayed in the epigram, the paradox, and the rhetorical figures that create surprise and call for a quick apprehension of thought.Less

Coda: Harington’s ‘Of Moyses’

James Doelman

in The Epigram in England, 1590-1640

The book ends with a brief reflection on a “religious epigram” by Sir John Harington that manifests the typical Martialian tone and approach that dominated the genre in the period1590 to 1640.

Was Black Beautiful in Vandal Africa?

John H. Jr. Starks

in African Athena: New Agendas

This chapter argues that during the Vandal century of rule in Roman Africa (429‐533 CE), a form of racial profiling and racist thinking expressed through skin colour prejudices against black peoples ... More

This chapter argues that during the Vandal century of rule in Roman Africa (429‐533 CE), a form of racial profiling and racist thinking expressed through skin colour prejudices against black peoples emerges in Latin satiric epigrams from the Anthologia Latina as the power centre shifts between white, ‘neutral‐coloured,’ and black ethnic communities. Black stereotypes of fearful demons and darkness and of repulsive filth and ugliness especially mark black Africans as dangerous ‘others’ infringing on Roman‐African interests. Blacks become another act in the Anthologia Latina's cultural ‘freak show’ of exotic animals and disfranchised outcasts, entertainers, sexual deviants, the disabled, the ugly as constructed by a Mediterranean Roman society ‘neutrally’ and normatively self‐realized between white, ‘Germanic’ Vandal power and black, ‘Moorish’ African marginalization.Less

Conclusion

in Martial: The World of the Epigram

Martial's epigram books might appeal to our postmodern sensibilities for their non-organic form; the ideal of organicism, as Richard Terdiman puts it, “registered the necessity, first, of ... More

Martial's epigram books might appeal to our postmodern sensibilities for their non-organic form; the ideal of organicism, as Richard Terdiman puts it, “registered the necessity, first, of representing the world as conflicted, and second, of mastering the contradictions within it which were thereby highlighted.” Martial relishes, rather than masters, the contradictions. His method is juxtaposition rather than subsumption and his books are impossible wholes. The question, “How does one read a book of epigrams?” might be answered quite simply by replying that one cannot. Only the heterogeneous society of the book can be adequate to that paradoxical entity, a book of epigrams, which cannot be taken in by a reading. Martial's Liber spectaculorum has proven to be both a valuable introduction to his oeuvre and an anomaly. In Book 1, Martial juxtaposes commemorative epigrams featuring exempla virtutis of the past with occasional epigrams on dinners and dining.Less

Introduction ‘Skoptic Epigram’

GIDEON NISBET

in Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire: Martial's Forgotten Rivals

This introductory chapter clarifies terminology, outlines the book's scope and rationale, reflects briefly on the state of play in skoptic epigram scholarship, and identifies some key methodological ... More

This introductory chapter clarifies terminology, outlines the book's scope and rationale, reflects briefly on the state of play in skoptic epigram scholarship, and identifies some key methodological concerns: literary and cultural contextualisation (including material culture), political readings, and academic reception history. It flags up the importance of developing a methodologically supple and richly contextualised reading strategy, in response to the characteristic ambiguities which are fundamental to the process of skoptic humour.Less

Performance and Occasion

Andrew Ford

in Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and Its Contexts

This Chapter compares another pair of representations of Hermias, two epigrams in elegiacs. An epigram Aristotle is said to have composed for a memorial at Delphi is read against the mocking response ... More

This Chapter compares another pair of representations of Hermias, two epigrams in elegiacs. An epigram Aristotle is said to have composed for a memorial at Delphi is read against the mocking response to this verse by Theocritus of Chios and the different social functions of elegiacs as opposed to lyric verse are introduced. It emerges that Aristotle’s poetry for his friend necessarily took on a polemical, even propagandistic aspect. The genre of epigram also raises possibility that the occasion projected by a poem for its ostensible performance may be fictive, as in the case of “book epigrams.” Although it declares itself a poem inscribed on stone, Aristotle’s Delphic epigram shows a rhetorical subtlety that suggests that he, like Theocritus, may have anticipated the Hellenistic tradition of literary epigrams.Less

Situating Skoptic Epigram

GIDEON NISBET

in Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire: Martial's Forgotten Rivals

This chapter explores literary and cultural contexts for skoptic epigram. Contemporary sources are silent; the parallel of the ancient novel suggests that Second Sophistic authors did not refer to ... More

This chapter explores literary and cultural contexts for skoptic epigram. Contemporary sources are silent; the parallel of the ancient novel suggests that Second Sophistic authors did not refer to ‘new’ literary forms because their cultural authority was bound up in an inherited classical canon. Positing Loukillios as a founding author, the chapter relates the aggressive misogyny of his epigrams to use at Greek symposia. It thus extends Alan Cameron's characterisation of Hellenistic epigram into the Imperial era. Skoptic humour, based in a stock repertoire of satirical stereotypes, was an ideal sympotic entertainment. The prose prefaces of Book 11 of the Anthology, the main source for skoptic epigram, explicitly identify skoptic epigram as a traditionally favoured sympotic form. The chapter assigns the prefaces to the Imperial period on stylistic grounds. Their claim of symposiac use in earlier periods is probably an attempt to manufacture a classical pedigree for contemporary practice.Less

Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam’s Utopian Anti-Utopianism

Joshua Kotin

in Utopias of One

This chapter concerns two anti-Soviet texts: Osip Mandel'shtam's so-called Stalin epigram and his widow's Nadezhda's memoirs. Here, Mandel'shtam accepts the “lures of liberalism” despite the ... More

This chapter concerns two anti-Soviet texts: Osip Mandel'shtam's so-called Stalin epigram and his widow's Nadezhda's memoirs. Here, Mandel'shtam accepts the “lures of liberalism” despite the antiliberalism of the Soviet Union. He develops the most radical project of all: composing a poem that links his independence to his death. His performance of an epigram mocking Stalin in 1933 anticipates Isaiah Berlin's claim that the “logical culmination of the process of destroying everything through which I can possibly be wounded is suicide.” Mandel'shtam's performance led to his arrest in 1934 and his death in a Gulag transit camp in 1938. “Total liberation in this sense,” Berlin laments, “is conferred only by death.”Less