Editor's Note
Everything flows; nothing stands still. My first issue as editor of TAPA comes at an exciting time in the life of our organization. The American Philological Association will soon officially become the Society for Classical Studies, and then Transactions of the American Philological Association will simply become its acronym, TAPA. The mission of this journal, however, has not changed: my goal for the next four years is to continue the longstanding tradition of publishing significant, original research on Greek and Roman antiquity, written in an engaging style for broad appeal to our Association’s membership.
I would like to thank the APA Publications Committee and its chair Michael Gagarin; APA Executive Director Adam Blistein; Information Architect Sam Huskey; Chaden Djalali, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Provost Barry Butler at the University of Iowa for providing financial support and office space; John Finamore, Chair of the Department of Classics at Iowa, for encouraging me to pursue this position and for funding an excellent, keen-eyed editorial assistant, Matthew Horrell; my former chair, Carin Green, for setting me on this path some years ago when she asked me to edit Syllecta Classica; my former co-editor and mentor Peter Green, whose professionalism and judgment as an editor have profoundly influenced my own practice; the numerous anonymous referees (91 and counting), whose expertise and willingness to help their colleagues sharpen their thinking and writing make this journal possible; and my wife and children for their patience and understanding.
Finally, I would like to thank my predecessor Katharina Volk for her superb editorship over the past four years. She has smoothed the transition by generously providing instructions, advice, and prompt answers to questions great and small over the past year. She also accepted four of the six articles in this issue for publication.
Papers
Zoe Stamatopoulou - "Inscribing Performances in Pindar’s Olympian 6"
This Paper Explores the Performances Inscribed in the Text of Olympian 6, thus offering a new perspective to the question surrounding the intended location of the ode’s premiere. A careful consideration of the poem points to a first performance in Stymphalos of Arcadia. I argue, however, that at the same time the ode creates and reiterates the anticipation of a subsequent choral performance in Syracuse. This expectation of a future reperformance is constructed primarily through the poem’s treatment of the visual and the visible.
Athena Kirk - "The Semantics of Showcase in Herodotus’s Histories"
This essay connects inventorying in Herodotus with the verb ἀποδείκνυμι. Analysis reveals that ἀποδείκνυμι in the Histories denotes physical showings but not, as often assumed, verbal demonstrations, unless they are marked by another speech term. Rather, ἀποδείκνυμι used absolutely describes specialized verbal displays made through enumeration, such as the Egyptian priests’ genealogy. Accordingly, we can reanalyze several passages involving this stem, including the prologue and its nuanced reference to ἀπόδεξις. Construed as “enumerative display,” the ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις and the Histories as a whole emerge as a multimedia inventory that verbally conjures the visual realities of everything Herodotus has seen.
Ruth Rothaus Caston - "Reinvention in Terence’s Eunuchus"
The Eunuchus thematizes the problem of not being first and offers a distinctive solution. In the prologue, Terence laments his position as a latecomer to comedy and complains that there is nothing new to say. Characters within the play resent being typecast and fated to repeat the same old part. But through reinvention, these characters alter their standing, asserting both their autonomy and individuality. In the same way, Terence will insist on his agency as a playwright to blend and manipulate familiar comic conventions in order to create something new. What gets called contaminatio is a solution, not a problem.
James Uden - The Smile of Aeneas
The only smile of Aeneas occurs in Aeneid 5. The smile identifies Aeneas with Jupiter and is one indication that he briefly occupies a position analogous to the king of the gods in administering the funeral games for Anchises. But this identification merely sets the stage for the games’ broader examination of how Aeneas differs from Jupiter in the distribution of honors to his men. In its playful conjuring of a world governed by smiling Aeneas, the episode of the games imagines an alternative to the world in which the hero must ordinarily live, which is governed by immutable Fate.
Jarrett T. Welsh - "How to Read a Volcano"
Readings of the Aetna typically celebrate its scientific virtues while diminishing its qualities as poetry. By exploring the literary aspirations, didactic organization, and persistent textualization of enquiry in the Aetna, this paper argues that the poem seeks to be regarded not as “science in verse” but rather as “poetry as science.” That shift throws light on the poem’s empiricism, its relationship to its didactic predecessors, and the coherence of its diverse contents. The resulting explanation suggests that the Aetna has as much to say about conceptions of poetry, artistry, and the organization of knowledge as it does about first-century science.
Robert A Kaster - "The Transmission of Suetonius’s Caesars in the Middle Ages"
The medieval manuscript tradition (9th–13th centuries) of Suetonius’s De vita Caesarum has not been fully understood, and no complete and accurate stemma of the earliest extant witnesses has been drawn. This paper, based upon a fresh collation of the manuscripts, describes in detail the constitution of the tradition’s two main branches, the main lines of contamination that can be traced within and between them, and the “family tree” best suited to reconstructing the archetype from which all extant copies of the work ultimately descend.