Genre and Style

This paper analyzes three types of enigmatic speech in Pindar’s seventh Nemean: etymologizing, number play, and kenning. I describe these figures as “enigmatic” because, first, each asserts a unity of opposing qualities, a hallmark of archaic enigmatic speech (Kahn 1979), and second, because these types of figures appear frequently in collections of enigmatic material (e.g., the Greek Anthology, q.v., Berra 2008).

“Question-and-answer” texts, variously called problemata, zetemata, and aporemata, have long been a source of scholarly frustration, especially as to their purpose and methodology (Mayhew 2015). In an attempt to clarify certain central features of the problemata genre, as well as its relationship to other ancient technical literature, I compare specific examples from the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata to the Homeric D-Scholia, arguing that they evince remarkably similar modes of inquiry.

Recent scholarly work on Maffeo Vegio’s Supplementum to the Aeneid (1428) argues against the importance (or existence) of Christian allegory that was once thought to suffuse the poem. Building on arguments made by Hijmans (1971) and Ross (1981), Putnam (2004) claims that Vegio “avoids any step that would lead the reader toward any medieval, anagogical interpretation of the hero’s life … Vegio is inexorably classicizing.” (xviii).

This paper investigates a stylistic oddity in several scenes of the Odyssey from a sociological perspective. The scenes in question involve precise manual practices: Polyphemus milks his sheep and goats (Od. 9.244ff., 309ff., 342ff.); sailors equip their ships for sea (Od. 4.783ff., 8.54ff.); and Nestor sacrifices a bull at Pylos (Od. 3.457ff.). Each activity is construed as a sequence of contrasting objects, colors, and directions densely packed into three or four lines.

Scholarship on ancient discussions of the value of poetry tend to focus primarily on Plato and Aristotle, or then jump ahead to later authors such as Philodemus, Longinus, Horace, and Quintilian (see Halliwell 2002, Ford 2002, Porter 2010). The weighty and complicated ideas of these authors have been discussed at length, but little attention has been given to the intervening time period.

ἀλλὰ τὰς ἐξοχάς ὼς <ἂν> εἴποι τις, ἀριστίνδην ἐκκαθήραντες ἐπισυνέθηκαν, οὐδὲν φλοιῶδες ἢ ἄσεμνον ἢ σχολικὸν ἐγκατατάτοντες διὰ μέσου λυμαίνεται γὰρ ταῦτα τὸ ὅλον ὡσανεὶ ψύγματα ἢ ἀραιώματα ἐμποιοῦντα μεγέθη συνοικονομούμενα τῇ πρὸς ἄλληλα σχέσει συντετειχισμένα.