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Forthcoming in TAPA 147.1 (Spring 2017)

P. J. Finglass, “Euripides’ Oedipus: A Response to Liapis”
This article examines the hypothesis, recently advanced by Vayos Liapis in this journal (TAPA 144: 307-70), that most of the quotation fragments of Euripides’ Oedipus belong not to that play but to a much later rhetorical exercise. It argues that the overwhelming majority of the faults alleged by Liapis are fully compatible with Euripidean language and style; and that even if the authenticity of one or two fragments can be called into question, there is no evidence to support the view that they come from a work written centuries after Euripides’ death.

Eric Dugdale, “Of This and That: The Recognition Formula in Sophocles’ Electra”
This paper offers an analysis of recognition in Sophocles’ Electra. It identifies a particular verbal element marking many recognitions in tragedy: referred to as the recognition formula, it typically pairs proximal and distal deictics (e.g., ὅδ᾿ ἐστίν ... κεῖνος, Soph. OT 1145), and is mentioned in Aristotle’s discussion of recognition (οὗτος ἐκεῖνος, Poetics 1448b17). Its occurrence at key moments in Sophocles’ Electra highlights the spatial relocation of the returning exile Orestes. It also points to the play’s interest in deception and the implications of this for recognition, and broadens our understanding of what constitutes recognition beyond the single “recognition scene.”

Chun-liong Ng, “Plato’s Defense of Athens”
This paper argues that in the Statesman Plato recognizes a complementary relationship between democracy and law. Reinventing the metaphors involving physicians and pilots, Plato brings the issue of trust back to his theoretical agenda. This radical thought experiment has anti-intellectual implications: the people should put their trust in the body of law drawn up by themselves rather than following the professionals, whose motivations are not always pure. The Statesman incorporates Plato’s experience of post-Socratic Athens. It presents a unique defense of democracy; its anti-intellectual elements do not appear in Plato’s other discussions of democracy, the Protagoras and the Laws.

Brian Walters, “The Circulation and Delivery of Cicero’s Post Reditum ad Populum”
This article calls into question recent suggestions that Cicero circulated but failed to deliver the Post reditum ad populum. Cicero’s own habits, late-Republican practices of publication, and the political necessities of the moment make such claims unlikely. The various contradictions in the surviving oration are easily resolved if we posit an early circulation, that is, of a pre-delivery version of the speech. Suspected omissions in Cicero’s account of the delivery of the speech are shown to be illusory. The speech of thanks to the people was delivered, as Cicero himself tells us, on 7 September 57 BCE.

John M. Oksanish, “Amant Alterna Camenae: Vergil’s Third Eclogue at the Dawn of Roman Literary History”
In Eclogue 3, Vergil flags the rough verses of his quarreling shepherds as alterna, evoking similar songs in aetiologies of early drama in the Georgics, in Livy, and in Horace. These later treatments often set early Italian practices against their foreign (especially Greek) counterparts to interrogate contemporary literary and social concerns. I argue that Eclogue 3—albeit with pastoral obliqueness—does the same, adumbrating a discomfort with indigenous Italian coarseness. My conclusion reassesses the significance of Palaemon’s judgment (e.g., his award of the vitula to both herdsmen) in the context of Roman literary history.

John K. Schafer, “Authorial Pagination in the Eclogues and Georgics”
A meaningful and authorial disposition of these works onto the columns of script (paginae) of a papyrus roll can be recovered from their text: 36 lines per column for the Eclogues, 40 for the Georgics. The pagination is an artistic feature of the works: the text mimetically responds to and comments on its column-breaks, investing the column and margins with various figurative valences. Lines at column-breaks are anomalous in several ways. These phenomena are too frequent and rich to be coincidental; at least some early copies of the text will have borne this arrangement.

Amanda Coles, “Between Patronage and Prejudice: Freedman Magistrates in the Late Roman Republic and Empire”
From the Late Republic to High Empire, inscriptions attest to seventeen freed magistrates, including quaestors, aediles, duoviri, octoviri, and quattuorviri, from colonies, oppida, and municipia in Greece, Macedonia, Illyria, Africa, and Italy. These examples obviate the assumption that freedmen could only hold office in a Caesarian colony before the lex Visellia (24 CE). Rather, individual freedmen were elected thanks to patronage, public benefactions, and a local preference for economic success over traditional, aristocratic hierarchies such as Rome’s. The fact that Roman customs and laws did not govern all colonies or municipia equally demonstrates the flexibility of Roman imperialism.

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