Literature of Empire

“I cringed when I found this word in Favorinus,” says the lexicographer Phrynichus. In the Selection (Ecloga) of Attic Words and Phrases, Phrynichus presents perhaps the most prescriptive articulation of Atticism available, and in some four hundred twenty entries he highlights ostensible flaws in many different authors’ Greek. Not even Plato escapes criticism. Yet Phrynichus directs particular ire at Favorinus and makes him the target of more censure than any other.

This paper analyzes variant readings of Alexander’s Letter to Olympias—an epistolary narrative affixed to the end of book II of the Alexander Romance (2.23-41)—across the Romance’s different recensions, in order to trace a redactional trajectory in which polytheistic details are removed from the Letter while new Christian elements are included. The Letter relates a journey Alexander took to find the end of the world, during which he describes otherworldly creatures, exotic geographical locations, and even a near approach to the afterlife.

This paper addresses the represented performance of Sappho and Anacreon in the early Roman Empire. Despite considerable scholarship on the performative nature of the Second Sophistic (e.g. Gleason 1996, Schmitz 1997, and Whitmarsh 2001), including analyses of theatrical performance and pantomime (Webb 2008, 2017; Lada-Richards 2004, 2013), little attention has been paid to the imperial performance of archaic lyric poets (though see Yatromanolakis 2008: 81-8; Bowie 2006; Rutherford 2012).

In this paper, I examine instances of laughter and joking in the fable collection of Phaedrus, a Latin poet of the first century CE. I argue that causing laughter has two main purposes in Phaedrus: it shames those who act foolishly and it helps shield the joke-teller from retaliation. Both of these purposes are mentioned in Phaedrus’s first prologue, and both of them inform how we interpret instances of laughing throughout Phaedrus’s collection. This paper takes its cue from Beard 2014 and does not attempt to judge what is or is not funny in Phaedrus.

Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica is considered a particularly bad re-hashing of Homer (Lloyd-Jones). This misreading disregards passages alluding to Homer’s epic rival Hesiod (Koning), which serve as a method of defining Quintus’s poetic program. Focusing on Quintus’s Musenanruf where he speaks of himself, I show that his self-portrayal as a shepherd-poet (a Hesiodic conceit) invoking the Muses before reciting a katalogos (a Homeric practice) is emblematic of his project of presenting a reading of the Trojan saga through a Hesiodic lens.

This paper offers a new interpretation of the first half of Lucian’s How to Write History (Quomodo historia conscribenda sit), which is characterized by scathing invective against the supposed historians of the Parthian Wars of the 160s. This first section of the work has traditionally been read as a series of examples of how not to write history (Marincola 1997), but it has likewise been noted that the hyperbolic nature of Lucian’s negative examples suggests that he either exaggerated or fabricated the targets of his invective (Macleod 1991).