TAPA Issue 128

Contents of Volume 128 (1998)

I. The American Philological Association Presidential Address Full text available online

  • Susan Treggiari: "Home and Forum: Cicero between 'Public' and "'Private'" p. 1

II. Textual Criticism

  • M. S. Silk: Pindar's Poetry and the Obligatory Crux: Isthmian 5.56-63, Text and Interpretation p.25
  • A new text and interpretation is proposed for the notoriously difficult passage at the end of I. 5, including:
    1. Elimination of the implausible plural dapÐnai and the meaningless öpin in 58.
    2. Reinterpretation of the reference to Pytheas in 59 and demonstration of the falsity of the traditional supposition that Pytheas acted as trainer for his brother.
    3. Restitution of the manuscript reading FulakÛda (as vocative) in 60.
      The whole passage, 56-63, is given a new and comprehensive reading as a celebration of the aristocratic family.

III. Athenian History and Oratory

  • A. J. Graham: "Thucydides 7.13.2 and the Crews of Athenian Triremes: An Addendum," p. 89

    The inscription IG I3.1032 contains the only extant epigraphical evidence for the composition of the crews of Athenian triremes, and is a very important complement to the information in Thucydides (7.13.2). Only a small proportion of the inscription is preserved in twelve fragments, but the accepted reconstruction, when re-studied, can be shown to be generally correct. A new suggestion is offered for the action celebrated by the inscription and its date. The inscription confirms Thucydides' information that slaves regularly formed a substantial proportion of the rowers on Athenian triremes, and their masters included fellow oarsmen.

  • Ann N. Michelini: "Isocrates' Civic Invective: Acharnians and On the Peace," p. 115

    In Isocrates' On the Peace, allusions to Acharnians parallel the speaker's subversive attack on traditional Athenian patriotic genres-including the symbouleutic speech and the funeral oration. Aristophanes' complex manipulation of internal and external audiences matches the contrast between Isocrates' fictional audience in the Athenian Assembly and his real public. While Isocrates claims for his work the didactic function of the comic poet, his denunciation of the Athenians makes it clear that his "philosophical" moral theorizing could be tolerated only by a more conservative, more cosmopolitan, and more elite audience, his reading public.

IV. Hellenistic Epic

Ingrid E. Holmberg: "Metis and Gender in Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica," p. 135

In the figures of Jason and Medea, the Argonautica considers the intertwined notions of heroism, metis, and gender. The epic traces a movement from the salvational and constructive metis of the Greek heroes through the salvational but destructive metis of Medea. As the poem progresses, metis becomes increasingly necessary to heroic goals; simultaneously, metis and Medea evade the control of Jason and the Argonauts as acts of violence and senselessness are committed in the name of the Argonauts' goals. The poem leaves these questions about metis, gender and heroism disturbingly unresolved.

V. Athenian and Egyptian Women

  • David M. Schaps: "What Was Free about a Free Athenian Woman?," p. 161

    Gender distinctions in Athens differed qualitatively, not merely quantitatively, from the distinction between slave and free. A free Athenian woman could and probably did consider herself entirely free, not partially free, and superior to a slave of either sex, despite the restrictions that were imposed upon her by the gender structure of a highly patriarchal society. These restrictions, whose real sources were in biology, in history, and in ideology, cut across class distinctions, and were considered neither naturally degrading (as slavery was) nor subject to arbitrary change.

  • Jennifer A. Sheridan: "Not at a Loss for Words: The Economic Power of Literate Women in Late Antique Egypt," p. 189

    During the late third and early fourth centuries C.E., a number of literate women from the Egyptian city of Hermopolis appear in the papyri. As the women have a number of things in common, particularly their social class, this appears to be more than a coincidence. This article explores these women through the best-known member of the group, Aurelia Charite, and argues that the women used their literacy to protect their economic interests. This paper is aimed at an audience of classicists rather than specialists in papyrology.

VI. Roman Political Discourses

  • R. Sklenár: "La République des Signes: Caesar, Cato, and the Language of Sallustian Morality," p 205

    A long tradition in Sallustian scholarship has maintained that Sallust sides with Cato against Caesar in the Senatorial debate concerning the fate of the Catilinarian conspirators. More recently, in a detailed analysis of the synkrisis of Cato and Caesar at Cat. 54, W. Batstone ("The Antithesis of Virtue: Sallust's Synkrisis and the Crisis of the Late Republic," CA 7: 1-29 [1988]) has convincingly argued that the two men embody conflicting notions of Sallustian virtus. The present paper extends this line of inquiry into the actual debate in order to show that by compelling both speakers to jettison their own distinctive and verifiable styles in favor of Sallustian moral language, Sallust forces his own normative vocabulary into a logomachy with itself, and thereby exposes its instability. Discussion will focus on two especially illustrative themes: the appeal to reason in Caesar's speech, and Cato's contrast between the ethical certitudes of the mos maiorum and the disintegration, in his own day, of both moral behavior and moral language. The opposing speakers bring the rationalistic and moralistic aspects of the historian's ethical ideal into a conflict so irreconcilable as to validate Cato's diagnosis of linguistic indeterminacy, which serves equally well as Sallust's bitter assessment of his own attempt to frame his convictions within a postlapsarian moral discourse.

  • Hans-Friedrich Mueller: "Vita, Pudicitia, Libertas: Juno, Gender, and Religious Politics in Valerius Maximus," p. 221

    Links between Roman religion and morality may be observed through examination of the role that Juno plays in Facta et dicta memorabilia of Valerius Maximus. Comparison of Valerius' exempla with other authors reveals that Valerius intensifies the classical religious element in order to lend divine support to morality. Valerius' Juno supports conduct that preserves women's pudicitia, men's libertas and the community's existence (vita). This morality conforms to Augustan legislation and Tiberian ideology. Attention to Valerius' voice thus reveals an individual early imperial perspective of Juno, and contributes more generally to illustrating links between Roman religion, law, and morality.

  • Matthew Roller: "Pliny's Catullus: The Politics of Literary Appropriation," p. 265

    This paper examines the younger Pliny's production, consumption, and especially recitation of polymetric poetry modelled on Catullus. Such poetry, valorizing otium over negotium and frequently obscene or erotic, poses ideological difficulties for an engaged public figure like Pliny. Acknowledging these difficulties, he defends himself by restricting his poetic activity to the domain of otium, where (he argues) it does not threaten his public persona. Why bother? Because in reciting polymetric poetry-apparently an innovation-he politicizes it, creating a new arena of aristocratic competition in which he expects to excel. He also thereby realigns the categories negotium/otium, public/private, and political/nonpolitical.

VII. Paragraphoi

  • A. E. Raubitschek: "EKTOROS LUTRA," p. 305
  • Glenn W. Most: "With Fearful Steps Pursuing Hopes of High Talk with the Departed Dead" p. 311
  • Zdeslav Dukat: "More on Yugoslavia as an "Oral Epic Laboratory": A Response to Thérése de Vet , " p.325
  • Thérése de Vet: "A Response to Zdeslav Dukat ," p,. 331