I. The American Philological Association Presidential Address
- Helene P. Foley: Modern Performance and Adaptation of Greek Tragedy 1-12
II. Homeric Heroism
- Stephen Fineberg: Blind Rage and Eccentric Vision in Iliad 6 13-41
The Iliad opens with a quarrel about status between Achilles and Agamemnon that leads to the loss of Patroclus by Achilles and Hector by Priam. The poem ends with Achilles and Priam, two enemies, sharing their common grief. In this context, the renewal of ancient ties of guest-friendship in Book 6 between Diomedes and Glaucus, a Greek and a Trojan, marks a moment in which the quest for honor is temporarily set aside and the poem's resolution is foreshadowed. Two distinct forms of madness mark the contrast between the poem's destructive quest for status and the eccentricity that characterizes the renewal of guest-friendship, and this contrast is shown to lie at the thematic center of Iliad 6.
III. Stelae and Spoils
- Carolyn Higbie: Craterus and the Use of Inscriptions in Ancient Scholarship 43-83
Scholars have long debated to what extent historians in ancient Greece used documentary evidence to reconstruct the past. I suggest that, beginning in the late fifth century B.C.E., especially in cities like Athens, researchers learned to use inscriptions as evidence and to ask questions about the past which could be answered by inscriptions. Herodotus, Thucydides, Theopompus, and Philochorus in varying ways and to varying degrees used documentary sources. This approach was expanded by Aristotle and taken to one extreme by Craterus of Macedon, who may have been part of the philosopher's circle. It was then continued by men like Theophrastus and Demetrius of Phaleron, but their work seems to have had only a limited effect on later researchers.
- J. Bradford Churchill: Ex qua quod vellent facerent: Roman Magistrates' Authority over Praeda and Manubiae 85-116
It has for some time been held that booty was, in effect or in fact, property of the Roman general. A re-examination of the evidence will show that praeda was public property. Materials looted by the soldiers from conquered enemies were divided among soldiers and officers as a reward for service. Manubiae were large-scale property confiscated from surrendered and conquered enemies; generals had to use them in the public interest, but they could keep them after the triumph, as long as it was publicly acknowledged that the general had them. Several cases confirm that attempts to evade this requirement were prosecuted.
IV. Saturnian Resoundings
- Jed Parsons: A New Approach to the Saturnian Verse and Its Relation to Latin Prosody 117-137
This article proposes a solution to the Latin Saturnian verse based on rhythmic features inherent in the Latin language itself. The argument draws on recent work in the field of metrics and claims that the quantitative, moraic trochee, which plays an important role in the phonological and morphological systems of the language, is the basis of the meter. The paper claims in conclusion that a shift in accentuation rules, in conjunction with the language's preference for coincidence of word stress and metrical ictus, ultimately rendered the meter unintelligible to the Romans.
V. The Symbolic, the Real, and the Roman Subject
- Eleanor W. Leach: Ciceronian "Bi-Marcus": Correspondence with M. Terentius Varro and L. Papirius Paetus in 46 B.C.E. 139-179
Among the many letters that Cicero wrote during the first months of Caesar's dictatorship in 46 B.C.E., two partially overlapping sequences of eight and of twelve letters that comprise Ad Familiares 9, directed respectively to M. Terentius Varro and to L. Papirius Paetus, stand out from among other correspondence because their motivation for exchange is not any immediate practical business, but a more expansive kind of comparison between Cicero's present modus vivendi and those of the two addressees. The style and composition of these letters places them among the most artful of Cicero's more literary epistles, but their self-conscious artistry appears most significant when viewed from an interpretive perspective focused upon Cicero's anxieties of personal identity amidst the disorienting circumstances of the historical moment. Although the differing personalities and histories of their two recipients unquestionably provide the basis for Cicero's characterizations, yet Cicero has so highlighted these personalities through his selection of subject matter as to make them reflect different images of his own personality. In looking beyond single exchanges to the larger contexts of the letters, I want to bring out in similar fashion how Cicero creates himself in these letters by inscribing the participating presence of the friends to whom he writes. As persons who "know" Cicero, the characters of the addressees enter into his self-representation. Their familiarity is seen in direct relationship to that core of being that is "Ciceronian," or, rather, that desired core of being, because-as I will argue-the events surrounding Caesar's return have made it very difficult to recognize the Ciceronian, save only as an elusive object of desire constructed under the aegis of memory. Approaching this question first through historical context, I find that these letters stand apart amidst a mass of correspondence directed to Republican colleagues still in exile because the more stable post-war circumstances of Varro and Paetus allow for the enjoyment of a different form of relationship that focuses as much upon pastimes as upon politics.
- Paul Allen Miller: The Tibullan Dream Text 181-224
Tibullus' style has often been characterized as dreamlike. This paper takes that characterization seriously and applies the tools psychoanalysis has developed to interpret dreams to these difficult poems. The result is a reading that sees Tibullan poetry as symptomatic of the ideological crisis gripping the Roman polity at the beginning of the empire. More particularly, this paper argues that the Tibullan poetic subject manifests a split between what Lacan labels the Imaginary and the Symbolic and that it is through this split that we can see the emergence of History into the text.
VI. Perspectives upon the Aeneid
- Stephen C. Smith: Remembering the Enemy: Narrative, Focalization, and Vergil's Portrait of Achilles 225-262
In both the Iliad and later tradition, Achilles was the "best of the Achaeans" at Troy and a paradigm of human excellence; yet in the Aeneid, he seems to represent indiscriminate violence. A close reading of the references in Aeneid 1-5, however, shows that Vergil rarely speaks of Achilles in his own voice. Rather, it is his characters who evoke the Greek hero. As a result, each image has a different focus, arising from the speaker's point of view, and taken together they produce a portrait of Achilles that is both more complex and more significant than is usually thought.
- Andrew J. E. Bell: The Popular Poetics and Politics of the Aeneid 263-279
While the allusiveness of the Aeneid is often assumed to speak only to a bookish élite, this essay suggests that there was a potential popular audience for the national epic, for whom the portrait of a powerful individual would deliver readily comprehensible associations with other aesthetic practices of national community, such as display of monuments, games, and gladiators. Like these, the poem (and particularly its ending) should be understood as able to elicit popular judgment.
VII. Satire and Allusivity
- Joshua D. Sosin: Lucretius, Seneca and Persius 1.1-2 281-299
The paper urges a new perspective on literary allusion in the first lines of Persius' first satire. It is widely believed that line 1 echoes a phrase of Lucretius; this paper endorses that view. It is shown, however, that in addition line 2 evokes a passage in Seneca's Epistulae Morales. The paper explores the double allusion and its relationship to the program of Persius' satires, and argues that the allusion to Seneca's letters provides a solution to an old problem in the scholarship on Persius: at line 2 the Commentum Cornuti originally signalled reference to Seneca's Epistulae morales ad Lucilium.
VIII. Presidential Panel 1998
- Helene P. Foley: Classics and Material Culture: A Panel Honoring the 100th Anniversary of the Archaeological Institute of America 301-303 Ian Morris: Household Archaeology and Gender Ideology in Archaic Greece 305-317
In Classical Greece, domestic space helped structure gender ideologies. Multi-room rectilinear houses began to appear around 700 BC. Concentrating on Zagora on Andros, I argue that this indicates a major shift in gender ideologies, away from less structured Dark Age relations toward the rigid hierarchies of archaic and classical times.
- Robin Osborne: Archaeology and the Athenian Empire 319-332
John Cook's claim in the early 1960s that the oppressiveness of the Athenian Empire could be detected in the failure of Ionian cities to build has been widely accepted and extended to the rest of the Athenian empire. This paper re-examines the fifth-century archaeological record both inside and outside the empire and argues that there is no substantial difference between the behaviour of cities with the empire and those outside with regard to monumental building. The interpretation of buildings or their absence depends on an understanding of the circumstances in which cities built, and of the way in which it was not building, rather than building, that was normal.
- Susan E. Alcock: The Pseudo-History of Messenia Unplugged 333-341
Writing the history of Messenia, thanks to the years of Spartan domination, is a problem. This paper suggests both a change in attitude (away from decrying post-liberation traditions as "pseudo-history") and a change in focus (to an emphasis on the region's sacred and memorial landscapes). The Messenian past thus celebrated emerges as an ongoing re-invention-a process seen, if not declared "pseudo," elsewhere in the ancient, and not-so-ancient, world.
- Ann L. Kuttner: Culture and History at Pompey's Museum 343-373
Pompey's Theater-Portico was dedicated to Venus in 55 B.C.E., for the triumphant re-establishment of benevolent Roman hegemony over Asia and Greece. The gardened Portico, dominant in the Urbs and its imagination thereafter, was novel for its landscape focus and for the scale of its pictorial decoration. In that Museum, statues of, e.g., poetesses, Muses and prostitutes, Aesop and Homer's Maro specially posited a landscape of authorship and eros; the significantly large poetic dossier (Catullus, Propertius, Thallus, Antipater, Martial) that helps reconstruct the Portico is intentionally symbiotic with that evoked setting.
- R. Bruce Hitchner: More Italy than Province? Archaeology, Texts, and Culture Change in Roman Provence 375-379
This paper examines the process of culture change and invention in the Roman Empire through two archaeological case studies from Provence (France). It also illustrates the merits of integrating archaeological and textual knowledge for reconstructing regional histories in the ancient world.