Society for Classical Studies American Classical Studies - Böcker

This historical commentary examines books 79(78)-80(80) of Cassius Dio's Roman History, which cover the period from the death of Caracalla in A. D. 217. to the reign of Severus Alexander and Cassius Dio's retirement from political life in 229. Cassius Dio, a Roman Senator, provides a valuable eyewitness account of this turbulent period, which was marked by the assassination of Caracalla, the rise of Macrinus, Rome's first equestrian emperor, and his subsequent overthrow, the tempestuous, and by all accounts peculiar, reign of Elagabalus, and the continuation of the Severan dynasty under the young Severus Alexander.In addition to elucidating important passages from these books, this study assesses Cassius Dio's political life and its relationship to his literary career; his call to history and time of composition; his historical method; and his attitude toward and subsequent presentation of the later Severan dynasty. In its investigation of books 79(78)-80(80), the work assesses an important stretch of Dio's actual text, which for other parts has been preserved largely in epitome and excerpts. Finally, the work aims to fill a gap in scholarship, as no commentary on these books of Cassius Dio's history has been produced since the nineteenth century, and its publication coincides with a renewed interest in the history and historiography of the Severan period.

Professor Reinhold, a distinguished senior classicist, has produced a fascinating and accessible collection of essays devoted to the study of ancient history. Among the articles included are "The Generation Gap," a major survey exploring myths of the uprising of one generation against another; "Augustus' Conception of Himself," a detailed summary and interpretation of Augustus' life and career; and "The Declaration of War against Cleopatra," an investigation of the charge against Cleopatra that she betrayed her pledge to Rome as a client ruler. Taken together, these essays form a unified and coherent survey of ancient history that will appeal to a broad audience.

The subject is Sextus Empiricus, one the chief sources of information on ancient philosophy and one of the most influential authors in the history of skepticism. Sextus' works have had an extraordinary influence on western philosophy, and this book provides the first exhaustive and detailed study of their recovery, transmission, and intellectual influence through Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. This study deals with Sextus' biography, as well as the history of the availability and reception of his works. It also contains an extensive bibliographical section, including editions, translations, and commentaries.

This is an historical commentary on Books 55-56 of Dio's Roman History. These books recount the last half of the reign of the Emperor Augustus, above all his orchestration of the first imperial succession. Addressed to both students and scholars, the new commentary is the first since the eighteenth century to offer full and fresh treatment of this segment of Dio's work.

By the Roman age the traditional stories of Greek myth had long since ceased to reflect popular culture. Mythology had become instead a central element in elite culture. If one did not know the stories one would not understand most of the allusions in the poets and orators, classics and contemporaries alike; nor would one be able to identify the scenes represented on the mosaic floors and wall paintings in your cultivated friends' houses, or on the silverware on their tables at dinner. Mythology was no longer imbibed in the nursery; nor could it be simply picked up from the often oblique allusions in the classics. It had to be learned in school, as illustrated by the extraordinary amount of elementary mythological information in the many surviving ancient commentaries on the classics, notably Servius, who offers a mythical story for almost every person, place, and even plant Vergil mentions. Commentators used the classics as pegs on which to hang stories they thought their students should know. A surprisingly large number of mythographic treatises survive from the early empire, and many papyrus fragments from lost works prove that they were in common use. In addition, author Alan Cameron identifies a hitherto unrecognized type of aid to the reading of Greek and Latin classical and classicizing texts--what might be called mythographic companions to learned poets such as Aratus, Callimachus, Vergil, and Ovid, complete with source references. Much of this book is devoted to an analysis of the importance evidently attached to citing classical sources for mythical stories, the clearest proof that they were now a part of learned culture. So central were these source references that the more unscrupulous faked them, sometimes on the grand scale.

The Virgilian centos anticipate the avant-garde and smash the image of a staid, sober, and centered classical world. This book examines the twelve mythological and secular Virgilian centos that survive from antiquity. The centos, in which authors take non-consecutive lines or segments of lines from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid and reconnect them to produce new poems, have received limited attention. No other book-length study exists of all the centos, which date from ca. 200 to ca. 530. The centos are literary games, and they have a playful shock value that feels very modern. Yet the texts also demand to be taken seriously for what they disclose about late antique literary culture, Virgil's reception, and several important topics in Latin literature and literary studies generally. As radically intertextual works, the centos are particularly valuable sites for pursuing inquiry into allusion. Scrutinizing the peculiarities of the texts' allusive engagements with Virgil requires clarification of the roles of the author and the reader in allusion, the criteria for determining what constitutes an allusion, and the different functions allusion can have. By investigating the centos from these different perspectives and asking what they reveal about a wide range of weighty subjects, this book comes into dialogue with major topics and studies in Latin literature.

Agrippina the Younger ranks as one of the most powerful women in the history of the Roman empire. Judith Ginsburg's book provides a fresh look at both the literary and material representations of Agrippina. Her incisive study exposes both the contrivances of the commissioned artists whose idealized portraits served to buttress the image of the regime and the contrasting designs of the historians whose rhetorical stereotypes and negative depictions aimed to undermine it.

Satirists are social critics, but they are also products of society. Horace, Persius, and Juvenal, the verse satirists of ancient Rome, exploit this double identity to produce their colorful commentaries on social life and behavior. In a fresh comparative study that combines literary and cultural analysis, Catherine Keane reveals how the satirists create such a vivid and incisive portrayal of the Roman social world. Throughout the tradition, the narrating satirist figure does not observe human behavior from a distance, but adopts a range of charged social roles to gain access to his subject matter. In his mission to entertain and moralize, he poses alternately as a theatrical performer and a spectator, a perpetrator and victim of violence, a jurist and criminal, a teacher and student. In these roles the satirist conducts penetrating analyses of Rome's definitive social practices "from the inside." Satire's reputation as the quintessential Roman genre is thus even more justified than previously recognized. As literary artists and social commentators, the satirists rival the grandest authors of the classical canon. They teach their ancient and modern readers two important lessons. First, satire reveals the inherent fragilities and complications, as well as acknowledging the benefits, of Roman society's most treasured institutions. The satiric perspective deepens our understanding of Roman ideologies and their fault lines. As the poets show, no system of judgment, punishment, entertainment, or social organization is without its flaws and failures. At the same time, readers are encouraged to view the satiric genre itself as a composite of these systems, loaded with cultural meaning and highly imperfect. The satirist who functions as both subject and critic trains his readers to develop a critical perspective on every kind of authority, including his own.

Although scholars routinely state that the Iliad is an "oral poem," since very near the time of its composition the great epic has circulated as a text stabilized in writing. Thus whether or not it is in some sense "oral poetry," the Iliad undoubtedly has features that render it quite satisfactory to readers and reading. But the question of what these features might be has been difficult for modern Homeric scholarship even to frame, much less address, within the research paradigm of "oral poetics." In Homer's Cosmic Fabrication Bruce Heiden delineates a new approach aimed at evaluating what the Iliad furnishes to readers that makes it comprehensible and engaging. His program conceptualizes the act of reading as a flexible repertoire of cognitive functions that a reader might deploy in collaboration with the poem's signs. By positing certain functions hypothetically and applying them to the poem, Heiden's experiments uncover the kind and degree of suitable "reading material" the poem provides. These analyses reveal that the trajectory of events in the Iliad manifests the central agency of one character, Zeus, and that the transmitted articulation of the epic into chapter-like "books" conforms to distinct narrative subtrajectories. The analyses also show, however, that the fixed sequence of "books" functions suitably as a design that cues attention to the major crises in the story, as well as to themes that develop its significance. The transmitted arrangement therefore furnishes an implicit cognitive map that both eases comprehension of the storyline and indicates previously unexplored pathways of interpretation. Through Homer's Cosmic Fabrication enthusiasts of the Iliad will gain enhanced understanding of the epic's poetic design and the philosophical rewards it offers to thoughtful study.

Hyperides' Funeral Oration is arguably the most important surviving example of the genre from classical Greece. The speech stands apart from other funeral orations (epitaphioi) in a few key respects. First, we have the actual text as it was delivered in Athens (the other speeches, with the possible expection of Demosthenes 60, are literary compositions). Next, in contrast to other orations that look to the past and make only the vaguest mention of recent events, Hyperides' speech is a valuable source for the military history of the Lamian War as it captures the optimistic mood in Athens after Alexander's death. Finally, the speech has been singled out since Longinus' time for its poetic effects. This volume is a new critical edition and commentary of the speech, written for scholars and graduate students in classics and ancient history. Although Hyperides ranked nearly as high as Demosthenes in the canon of Attic orators and his funeral oration will make the speech much more accessible to a wide range of scholars. The text is based on a full examination of the papyrus and includes an apparatus criticus, with a complete listing of all conjectures in a separate appendix. The translation is clear and accurate and the commentary provides a mixture of historical, cultural, and literary material.

Two Greek cities which in their time were leading states in the Mediterranean world, Selinus in Sicily and Cyrene in Libya, set up inscriptions of the kind called sacred laws, but regulating worship on a larger scale than elsewhere - Selinus in the mid fifth century B.C., Cyrene in the late fourth. In different ways, the content and the format of both inscriptions are so unusual that they have baffled understanding. At Selinus, a large lead tablet with two columns of writing upside down to each other is thought to be a remedy for homicide pollution arising from civil strife, but most of it remains obscure and intractable. The gods who are named and the ritual that is prescribed have been misinterpreted in the light of literary works that dwell on the sensational. Instead, they belong to agrarian religion and follow a regular sequence of devotions, the upside-down columns being reversed midway through the year with magical effect. Gods and ritual were selected because of their appeal to ordinary persons. Selinus was governed by a long enduring oligarchy which made an effort, appearing also in the economic details of sacrifice, to reconcile rich and poor. At Cyrene, a long series of rules were displayed on a marble block in the premier shrine of Apollo. They are extremely diverse - both costly and trivial, customary and novel - and eighty years of disputation have brought no agreement as to the individual meaning or general significance. In fact this mixture of things is carefully arranged to suit a variety of needs, of rich and poor, of citizens of long standing and of new-comers probably of Libyan origin. In one instance the same agrarian deities appear as at Selinus. It is the work once more of a moderate oligarchy, which on other evidence proved its worth during the turbulent events of this period. Religion and Reconciliation in Greek Cities provides a revised text and a secure meaning for both documents, and interprets the gods, the ritual, and the social background in the light of much comparative material from other Greek cities. Noel Robertson's approach rejects the usual assumptions based on moralizing literary works and in doing so restores to us an ancient nature religion which Greek communities adapted to their own practical purposes.

Studies on the Text of Macrobius' Saturnalia is a companion to new editions of Macrobius' encyclopedic dialogue that are to appear in the Loeb Classical Library and the Oxford Classical Texts series. The first chapter reports the results of a new survey of all the extant manuscripts of the work written before the 13th century and provides the first detailed stemma, which allows the early medieval archetype to be reconstructed more reliably than previously. Chapter 2 discusses some of the nearly 300 passages in which the new text differs from the standard edition of James Willis (Teubner 1963); the critical discussions then continue in Chapter 3, which considers some questions of editorial practice posed by a text whose author was not just the author but also, to a very extensive degree, a copyist himself. Three appendixes supplement the arguments in the body of the monograph.

Though often assumed by scholars to be a product of traditional, and perhaps oral, compositional practices comparable to those found in early Greek epic, archaic elegy has not until this point been analyzed in similar detail with respect to such verse-making techniques. This volume is intended to redress some of this imbalance by exploring several issues related to the production of Greek elegiac poetry. By investigating elegy's metrical partitioning and its localizing patterns of repeated phraseology, Traditional Elegy makes clear that the oral-formulaic processes lying at the heart of Homeric epic bear close resemblance to those that also originally made archaic elegy possible. However, the volume's argument is then able to be pressed even further by looking at the most common metrical "anomaly" in early elegy-epic correption-in order to demonstrate that elegiac poets in the Archaic Period were not simply mimicking an earlier productive style but were actively engaging with such traditional techniques in order to produce and reproduce their own poems. Because correption exhibits several patterns of employment that depend upon the meshing and adapting of traditional phraseological units, it becomes clear that in elegy-just as it is in epic-this metrical phenomenon is inextricably entwined with traditional techniques of verse-composition, and we therefore have strong evidence that elegiac poets of the Archaic Period were still making active use of these oral-formulaic techniques, even if actual oral composition itself cannot be proven for any individual author or poetic fragment. The implications of such findings are quite large, as they require a wholesale shift in our modern methods of inquiry into elegy for a wide range of concerns of meter, phraseology, and even the much broader issues of intended meaning and overall aesthetics.

Work in Progress offers an in-depth study of the role of literary revision in the compositional practices and representational strategies of Roman authors at the end of the republic and the beginning of the principate. It focuses on Cicero, Horace, Quintilian, Martial, and Pliny the Younger, but also offers discussions of Isocrates, Plato, and Hellenistic poetry. The book's central argument is that revision made textuality into a medium of social exchange. Revisions were not always made by authors working alone: often, they were the result of conversations between an author and friends or literary contacts, and these conversations exemplified a commitment to collective debate and active collaboration. Revision was thus much more than an unavoidable element in literary genesis: it was one way in which authorship became a form of social agency. Consequently, when we think about revision for authors of the late republic and early empire we should not think solely of painstaking attendance to craft aimed exclusively at the perfection of a literary work. Nor should we think of the resulting texts as closed and invariant statements sent from an author to his reader. So long as an author was still willing to revise, his text served as a temporary platform around and in which a community came into being.The theories of revision that guide the author's study come from the new genetic criticism that has been successfully applied, especially in Europe, to modern authors. While many of the tools of analysis applicable to modern authors (author-written manuscripts, corrected proofs, etc.) are not available for ancient authors, Sean Gurd has amassed a surprising number of passages in ancient texts about revision, its importance to the author, and the circle of critics involved in the process of rewriting.

Eleusis and Athens offers a new text and detailed commentary on two account-inventories for a major panhellenic sanctuary (Demeter) during the final decade of the fifth century BC. In addition to the publication of inscriptions, the accompanying commentary provides a wide array of information regarding the daily operations of a religious sanctuary and argues for a re-dating of the First-Fruits decree and the Epistatai decree to the 430s.

This volume contains testimonia and fragments of Cicero's speeches that circulated in antiquity but which have since been lost. This edition includes the fragmenta incertae sedis and an appendix on falsely identified oratorical fragments.

This bilingual edition, with introduction and brief commentary, makes accessible for the first time in English a text of great importance for the history and interpretation of Homer. Although attributed to Plutarch, the Essay is probably the work of a grammaticus of the second and third century and is the single most valuable source of evidence for the nature of the teaching of Homer in the schools of the Roman Empire. Well represented in the manuscript tradition, the Essay was used as prefatory material by Renaissance editors of Homer, beginning with the editio princeps (1488), and so exercised a powerful influence on Renaissance and early-modern readers, who often refer to "Plutarch" as an authority on Homer. The newly edited Greek text is presented with facing translation.

This unique collaboration between a classicist and physicist at the University of Illinois at Chicago is the first work to combine the evidence from both China and Rome for the spectacular daylight comet of 44 BC, perhaps the most famous comet in antiquity. This investigation, which also examines allusions to this comet in astrological literature from later antiquity, sheds new light on the significance of the comet as a powerful symbol in the political propaganda that launched Augustus' career.

This work aims to show how certain striking features of classical Latin prose style have their roots in forms of expression established in archaic Latin and even beyond that in Indo-European. Some of these forms are to be explained by the origins of complex syntactical constructions, some by cultural conditions, while others are peculiar to the Latin language. These factors are exemplified in texts ranging from about 450 BC (the Twelve Tables) to about 100 BC, which are accompanied by a full commentary not confined to stylistic issues. These texts will be of interest not only to students of literature and linguistics but also of history, law, and religion.