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Scholars working with the legacies of the ancient Greco-Roman world continually wrestle with the question of what methodology best suits the analysis of material that appears in both colonial and anti-colonial discourses. As the title of my forthcoming monograph advertises, Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature uses the concept of hacking as the lens through which to study how Haitian authors have engaged ancient Greco-Roman material.

Many ancient poems contain bird similes, but very few include a mother-bird losing her chicks. Homer’s Odyssey 16.216-9, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 48-59, and Sophocles’ Antigone 423-5 all have this rare simile. Each simile features characters who are not mothers lamenting their lost chicks. Concerning the Homeric example, scholars such as Merry (1907), Stanford (1948), and Heubeck and Hoekstra (1989) have failed to examine adequately the meaning of the simile. There is a similarly lackluster response in tragic scholarship.

In the parodosof Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the chorus begins by narrating how the Greek expedition to Troy first departed under the leadership of the Atreidae. They compare Agamemnon and Menelaus to vultures grieving for their lost offspring (Ag.48-59). This simile is widely seen as an allusion to a simile likening the reunited Odysseus and Telemachus to bereaved birds of prey whose unfledged young have been captured (Homer Odyssey16.216-18).

Euripides’ Bacchae is οne of Greek drama’s most dedicated meditations on the nature of wisdom. Through staging a debate over the question, “What is σοφία?”, Euripides takes an active part in exploring this concept in the intellectual sphere of the late fifth century. While the question of the meaning of σοφία in philosophical discourse remains open, the term σοφός is pretty much established with various and even ambiguous senses.

Many studies on Greek tragic compounds focus on the constituent parts of compounds (see, for example, Breitenbach (1934) on Euripides and Clay (1960) on all three tragedians); Earp (1948) sorts Aeschylean compounds according to more subjective criteria, such as compounds in which “one or both the elements are unfamiliar” (1948:12); Nuchelmans (1949), in line with historical-linguistic treatments of compounds, sorts Sophoclean compounds in terms of the syntactical relations between the compound constituents, following the Sanskrit grammarian Panini’s classifications.

Through a close reading of Polyphemus’s song at Cyclops 503–10, this paper (1) adds to the long-running discussion of how Euripides revises Homer’s depiction of the Polyphemus episode, (2) corrects recent interpretations of Polyphemus’s song, and (3) deepens our understanding of how sympotic poetry (melic (monody), elegy, and iambos) depicts the body.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ajax and Ulysses advance their claims to Achilles’ arms by enumerating their family histories (Met. 13.22-34 and 140-58). The rhetorical aspects of these speeches have inspired much scholarly debate (Otis 1970, Kennedy 1972, Gross 2000, Hopkinson 2000, Pavlock 2009), especially given the broader engagement of the carmen perpetuum with tragedy (Keith 2002, Gildenhard and Zissos 1999, Dangel 2009, Curley 2013).

The poetic persona of the Tristia, who presents himself as the author of the Amores and Ars Amatoria, finds himself in a state of chaotic reevaluation. The literary constraints of exile introduce a new stage in his poetic career, far distant from the overconfidence of his earlier poetic persona(s) and expectations of perennial glory.

Ovid writes in the Ars Amatoria that dum licet (“while it is allowed”), the prospective lover should tell a girl tu mihi sola places (“you alone please me”) (Ars 1.41-2). The traditional understanding of dum licet, expressed most clearly by Hollis (1977), interprets the phrase to mean “while you are not constrained by love”.

Although Hippocratic experimental procedures and analogies often seem unscientific to modern readers, the demonstrations described in the Hippocratic corpus provide valuable evidence for the development of observation-based reasoning (see von Staden 1975; Longhi 2018). A common line of inquiry is whether the Hippocratic doctors who wrote the treatises performed these proto-experiments, developed them as thought-experiments, or adapted them from earlier sources such as Presocratic texts (Senn 1929; Lloyd 1964, 1966; Lonie 1981; Langholf 1989; Fausti 2010).