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I. The American Philological Association Presidential Address

  • David Konstan: Altruism 1-17

II. Archaic Myths, Folktales, and Realia

  • William Hansen: The Winning of Hippodameia 19-40

    Pelops wins Hippodameia by beating her father Oinomaos in a chariot race, the archetypal athletic contest at Olympia. The Greek legend is found in three irreconcilable versions. Scholars generally assume that one of these, the version recounted by Pindar in his first Olympian ode, according to which Pelops borrows a chariot and winged horses from Poseidon, was invented by the poet himself. The present paper shows, however, that this version as well as the other two agree closely with an international folktale, The Bride Won in a Tournament, so that all three forms of the legend must have developed in oral tradition.

  • Louise Pratt: The Old Women of Ancient Greece and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 41-65

    This article examines evidence from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter on the subject of old women in antiquity. Using evidence from the Hymn together with other ancient sources on women's movement, it argues against the prevailing scholarly opinion that old women experienced significantly greater freedom of movement than younger women did. It also discusses evidence from the Hymn on the social function of old women and characteristic social attitudes toward them. Though this evidence admits of several possible interpretations, on balance it suggests a more positive and varied attitude toward post-menopausal women than the general trend of recent scholarship would advocate.

III. Realia and Textual Readings

  • F. E. Romer: Ocheia, Mules, and Animal Husbandry in a Prometheus Play: Amending LSJ and Unemending Aeschylus fr. 189a R 67-87

    An examination of Aesch. 189a R, both in its own right and in connection with Aesch. PB 462-66, shows that the word ocheia is problematic. It has been translated as "coitus" ("copulations"), "vectiones" ("vehicles"), "stallions," and "offspring." But ocheion "stallion" can exist beside ocheion "offspring, foal" (hitherto unnoticed); both words can be derived separately from ocheuô "mount, mate." At stake are the lexical meaning of ocheia, the right understanding of the fragment, and the poet's precise idea in his intertextual allusion. This argument touches on popular lore and animal husbandry, in addition to literary and linguistic matters.

IV. Lessons from the Attic Historians

  • Susan O. Shapiro: Proverbial Wisdom in Herodotus 89-118

    This paper argues, against recent scholarship, that Herodotus' use of wisdom expressions, particularly contradictory gnomai, contributes to his historical analysis. Defined as a general statement that expresses practical wisdom, a proverb is used to explain a particular situation in light of a generally accepted truth. The ancient Greek gnome is a close parallel to the modern proverb. Contradictory proverbs are generally used to support opposing points of view. Herodotus uses contradictory gnomai not only to explain the motivation of particular historical agents but also to show, in retrospect, that one explanation of events was more accurate than the other.

  • James V. Morrison: Historical Lessons in the Melian Episode 119-148

    This paper argues that the perspective of the reader instructs us in assessing the validity and wisdom of Melian and Athenian argument and action in Thucydides' Melian episode (5.84-116). The Athenians attempt to teach the Melians that cities base their decisions on expediency-something the reader has already learned. In seeking to remain neutral, the Melians must be able to refer to both past action and future possibility--a second lesson of the History being that statesmen must consider the past and speculate about the future. In essence, the Athenian-Melian exchange has become a kind of test case, asking the reader to examine lessons from the rest of the History and apply them in this new context.

  • Charles F. Pazdernik: Procopius and Thucydides on the Labors of War: Belisarius and Brasidas in the Field 149-187

    A sixth-century scholion on Thucydides observes that both the Spartan general Brasidas and Justinian's general Belisarius owed their successes to a particular sort of charismatic leadership. The historian Procopius of Caesarea invites his reader to re-imagine Belisarius as a contemporary Brasidas--the latter a beguiling figure, for whom, however, Thucydides' admiration was tempered by his recognition of a canny opportunism, stemming from Brasidas' failure to match his rhetoric to prevailing contingencies of power. The thematic interplay of liberation and opportunism in Thucydides furnishes Procopius with a conceptual armature upon which comparable issues exposed in the course of Justinian's western wars can be held up to view and animated in the pages of his work.

V. Tragic Heroines and Their Models

  • Edwin Carawan: Deianira's Guilt 189-237

    The protagonist of Trachiniae is treated by modern commentators as an innocent victim, much as Hyllus defends her in the closing scene. Such, indeed, is the character in Bacchylides and contemporary paintings: Deianira receives her cloak of doom ignorant of its power. But the Sophoclean figure devises the fatal robe by her own design and confronts the knowledge that her remedy is dangerous. In the casualties of erotic magic, such knowledge is the measure of guilt. By endowing his protagonist with forgivable intentions but guilty knowledge, Sophocles constructs a moral crisis for the ephebe Hyllus who hastened her death by his curse.

  • Emily A. McDermott: Euripides' Second Thoughts 239-259

    Euripides' extant Hippolytus was a rare "re-production" of an earlier play on the same mythic episode. The play contains a series of metadramatic comments on its partial interchange of Phaedra's and the Nurse's original roles. The Nurse's appearance in the "Stephanias" as seducer of a virtuous Phaedra is presented as a "change of mind." Her "second thoughts" (to corrupt, rather than dissuade, Phaedra) mirror the playwright's decision to amend a shameless Phaedra's character by, conversely, degrading the Nurse's. His covert comments on this strategy of reversal underline the oddity of his decision to correct his first try at the story.

VI. Desiring Socrates

  • Radcliffe G. Edmonds III: Socrates the Beautiful: Role Reversal and Midwifery in Plato's Symposium 261-285

    In Plato's Symposium, the significance of the reversals of the roles of lover and beloved appears if we examine Socrates as both lover and beloved in terms of Diotima's erotic theory and its confusing imagery of spiritual pregnancy and midwifery. While Plato does identify Socrates in the Symposium with the needy lover, his Socrates is also Socrates the beautiful, the beloved whose outward ugliness hides supreme beauty. This beauty serves as midwife to the thoughts of all the young men with whom Socrates consorts, relieving them of the pains of their spiritual pregnancy and helping them actively pursue philosophy.

VII. The Brave New World of the Alexandrian Poet

  • Julie Nishimura-Jensen: Unstable Geographies: The Moving Landscape in Apollonius' Argonautica and Callimachus' Hymn to Delos 287-317

    Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes inherited narratives in which geological formations could move, and both poets chose to emphasize this movement. Their choice suggests a world view in which primordial chaos continues to exist: clashing rocks and floating islands blend the normally disparate elements of sea and earth. The eventual stilling of many of these landmarks, moreover, does not create a sense of evolved order, since rooting is attributed to arbitrary divine action. Such representations of geographic formations reify the poets' fundamental sense of uncertainty about the world, and of their place within that world.

  • Joseph D. Reed: Arsinoe's Adonis and the Poetics of Ptolemaic Imperialism 319-351

    The Adonis festival described in Theocritus' Idyll 15 implies a detailed syncretism, engineered by the court of the Ptolemies, with the Egyptian Osiris cult. This syncretism, which casts Arsinoe II as both champion of Greek religious traditions and upholder of native kingship rituals, promotes her dynasty's bicultural style of monarchy. We should therefore use the poem less for help in reconstructing a general Adonis cult in the ancient world than as a testament to its fluidity and adaptability to different political conditions.

VIII. Rhetorics of Theology and Elegy

  • Brian A. Krostenko: Beyond (Dis)belief: Rhetorical Form and Religious Symbol in Cicero's de Divinatione 353-391

    This article argues that de Divinatione. uses a debate about divination to suggest indirectly a normative definition for religious symbols in Roman culture. The weaknesses of the two approaches to divinatory practice, fideism and skepticism, are illustrated by clear and consistent differences in their rhetorical presentation by Quintus and Marcus. The impasse is resolved by gestures towards an ideal of a "noble lie" promulgated by a cooperative--not competitive--elite. The most notable such gesture is Marcus' apparent rejection of Marius and de Consulatu suo, which represented personal connections between deities and individuals. It is suggested that the "divinizing" of Caesar--exactly contemporaneous with the composition of de Divinatione--occasioned this revisionism.

  • W. Jeffrey Tatum: Aspirations and Divagations: The Poetics of Place in Propertius 2.10 393-410

    Propertius 2.10 is a recusatio in which the prospect of Propertius' turning from elegiac to epic is configured in terms of the poet's failed metaphorical ascent of Mt. Helicon, whereby this poem situates its author in the river Permessus, an elegiac love poet still. That conclusion can hardly be rejected. But perhaps a complication can be introduced, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that, despite the poem's determination to define the genres of epic and elegy in terms of their specific locations in its own poetic landscape, Propertius 2.10 itself eludes fixed installation in Helicon's geography, depending on how one elects to read the poem's final line. This elusiveness, it is here suggested, constitutes a commentary on the resistance to generic stability and definition that is generally regarded as an essential quality of the recusatio.

IX. Authorship and Personal Identity in the Second Sophistic

  • Gregory S. Bucher : The Origins, Program, and Composition of Appian's Roman History 411-458
    • I. Introduction
    • II. The author argues for serial composition
    • III. Appian's program is discussed, and changes in it over time are analyzed using the relative chronology derived in section I
    • IV. Appian's motives for following his program are explored
    • V. Appian is compared with other ancient authors and some modern discussions of Appian and the "second sophistic" are reviewed in the light of the present results
    • VI. Conclusion

X. Paragraphoi

  • Marilyn B. Skinner: Valedictory 459-460
  • Guidelines for Contributors 461-464