Transactions of the
American Philological
Association
Vol. 129 (1999)
Contents
I. The American Philological Association
Presidential Address
II. Homeric Heroism
III. Stelae and Spoils
IV. Saturnian Resoundings
V. The Symbolic, the Real, and the Roman
Subject
VI. Perspectives upon the
Aeneid
VII. Satire and Allusivity
VIII. Presidential Panel 1998
I. The American Philological
Association Presidential Address
Helene P. Foley: Modern Performance and Adaptation of
Greek Tragedy 1-12
Full text available
online at http://www.APACLASSICS.org
II. Homeric Heroism
Stephen Fineberg: Blind Rage and Eccentric Vision in
Iliad 6 13-41
The Iliad opens with a quarrel about status
between Achilles and Agamemnon that leads to the loss of
Patroclus by Achilles and Hector by Priam. The poem ends
with Achilles and Priam, two enemies, sharing their
common grief. In this context, the renewal of ancient
ties of guest-friendship in Book 6 between Diomedes and
Glaucus, a Greek and a Trojan, marks a moment in which
the quest for honor is temporarily set aside and the
poem's resolution is foreshadowed. Two distinct forms of
madness mark the contrast between the poem's destructive
quest for status and the eccentricity that characterizes
the renewal of guest-friendship, and this contrast is
shown to lie at the thematic center of Iliad
6.
III. Stelae and Spoils
Carolyn Higbie: Craterus and the Use of Inscriptions in
Ancient Scholarship 43-83
Scholars have long debated to what extent historians in
ancient Greece used documentary evidence to reconstruct
the past. I suggest that, beginning in the late fifth
century B.C.E., especially in cities like Athens,
researchers learned to use inscriptions as evidence and
to ask questions about the past which could be answered
by inscriptions. Herodotus, Thucydides, Theopompus, and
Philochorus in varying ways and to varying degrees used
documentary sources. This approach was expanded by
Aristotle and taken to one extreme by Craterus of
Macedon, who may have been part of the philosopher's
circle. It was then continued by men like Theophrastus
and Demetrius of Phaleron, but their work seems to have
had only a limited effect on later researchers.
J. Bradford Churchill: Ex qua quod vellent
facerent: Roman Magistrates' Authority
over Praeda and Manubiae 85-116
It has for some time been held that booty was, in effect
or in fact, property of the Roman general. A
re-examination of the evidence will show that
praeda was public property. Materials looted by
the soldiers from conquered enemies were divided among
soldiers and officers as a reward for service.
Manubiae were large-scale property confiscated
from surrendered and conquered enemies; generals had to
use them in the public interest, but they could keep them
after the triumph, as long as it was publicly
acknowledged that the general had them. Several cases
confirm that attempts to evade this requirement were
prosecuted.
IV. Saturnian Resoundings
Jed Parsons: A New Approach to the Saturnian Verse and
Its Relation to Latin
Prosody 117-137
This article proposes a solution to the Latin Saturnian
verse based on rhythmic features inherent in the Latin
language itself. The argument draws on recent work in the
field of metrics and claims that the quantitative, moraic
trochee, which plays an important role in the
phonological and morphological systems of the language,
is the basis of the meter. The paper claims in conclusion
that a shift in accentuation rules, in conjunction with
the language's preference for coincidence of word stress
and metrical ictus, ultimately rendered the meter
unintelligible to the Romans.
V. The Symbolic, the Real, and the
Roman Subject
Eleanor W. Leach: Ciceronian "Bi-Marcus":
Correspondence with M. Terentius Varro
and L. Papirius Paetus in 46 B.C.E. 139-179
Among the many letters that Cicero wrote during the first
months of Caesar's dictatorship in 46 B.C.E., two
partially overlapping sequences of eight and of twelve
letters that comprise Ad Familiares 9, directed
respectively to M. Terentius Varro and to L. Papirius
Paetus, stand out from among other correspondence because
their motivation for exchange is not any immediate
practical business, but a more expansive kind of
comparison between Cicero's present modus vivendi
and those of the two addressees. The style and
composition of these letters places them among the most
artful of Cicero's more literary epistles, but their
self-conscious artistry appears most significant when
viewed from an interpretive perspective focused upon
Cicero's anxieties of personal identity amidst the
disorienting circumstances of the historical moment.
Although the differing personalities and histories of
their two recipients unquestionably provide the basis for
Cicero's characterizations, yet Cicero has so highlighted
these personalities through his selection of subject
matter as to make them reflect different images of his
own personality. In looking beyond single exchanges to
the larger contexts
of the letters, I want to bring out in similar fashion
how Cicero creates himself in these letters by inscribing
the participating presence of the friends to whom he
writes. As persons who "know" Cicero, the characters of
the addressees enter into his self-representation. Their
familiarity is seen in direct relationship to that core
of being that is "Ciceronian," or, rather, that desired
core of being, because&emdash;as I will argue&emdash;the
events surrounding Caesar's return have made it very
difficult to recognize the Ciceronian, save only as an
elusive object of desire constructed under the aegis of
memory. Approaching this question first through
historical context, I find that these letters stand apart
amidst a mass of correspondence directed to Republican
colleagues still in exile because the more stable
post-war circumstances of Varro and Paetus allow for the
enjoyment of a different form of relationship that
focuses as much upon pastimes as upon politics.
Paul Allen Miller: The Tibullan Dream Text 181-224
Tibullus' style has often been characterized as
dreamlike. This paper takes that characterization
seriously and applies the tools psychoanalysis has
developed to interpret dreams to these difficult poems.
The result is a reading that sees Tibullan poetry as
symptomatic of the ideological crisis gripping the Roman
polity at the beginning of the empire. More particularly,
this paper argues that the Tibullan poetic subject
manifests a split between what Lacan labels the Imaginary
and the Symbolic and that it is through this split that
we can see the emergence of History into the text.
VI. Perspectives upon the
Aeneid
Stephen C. Smith: Remembering the Enemy: Narrative,
Focalization, and Vergil's
Portrait of Achilles 225-262
In both the Iliad and later tradition, Achilles
was the "best of the Achaeans" at Troy and a paradigm of
human excellence; yet in the Aeneid, he seems to
represent indiscriminate violence. A close reading of the
references in Aeneid 1-5, however, shows that
Vergil rarely speaks of Achilles in his own voice.
Rather, it is his characters who evoke the Greek hero. As
a result, each image has a different focus, arising from
the speaker's point of view, and taken together they
produce a portrait of Achilles that is both more complex
and more significant than is usually thought.
Andrew J. E. Bell: The Popular Poetics and Politics of
the Aeneid 263-279
While the allusiveness of the Aeneid is often assumed to
speak only to a bookish élite, this essay suggests
that there was a potential popular audience for the
national epic, for whom the portrait of a powerful
individual would deliver readily comprehensible
associations with other aesthetic practices of national
community, such as display of monuments, games, and
gladiators. Like these, the poem (and particularly its
ending) should be understood as able to elicit popular
judgment.
VII. Satire and Allusivity
Joshua D. Sosin: Lucretius, Seneca and Persius 1.1-2
281-299
The paper urges a new perspective on literary allusion in
the first lines of Persius' first satire. It is widely
believed that line 1 echoes a phrase of Lucretius; this
paper endorses that view. It is shown, however, that in
addition line 2 evokes a passage in Seneca's Epistulae
Morales. The paper explores the double allusion and
its relationship to the program of Persius' satires, and
argues that the allusion to Seneca's letters provides a
solution to an old problem in the scholarship on Persius:
at line 2 the Commentum Cornuti originally
signalled reference to Seneca's Epistulae morales ad
Lucilium.
VIII. Presidential Panel
1998
Helene P. Foley: Classics and Material Culture: A Panel
Honoring the 100th
Anniversary of the Archaeological Institute of America
301-303
Ian Morris: Household Archaeology and Gender Ideology in
Archaic Greece 305-317
In Classical Greece, domestic space helped structure
gender ideologies. Multi-room rectilinear houses began to
appear around 700 BC. Concentrating on Zagora on Andros,
I argue that this indicates a major shift in gender
ideologies, away from less structured Dark Age relations
toward the rigid hierarchies of archaic and classical
times.
Robin Osborne: Archaeology and the Athenian Empire
319-332
John Cook's claim in the early 1960s that the
oppressiveness of the Athenian Empire could be detected
in the failure of Ionian cities to build has been widely
accepted and extended to the rest of the Athenian empire.
This paper re-examines the fifth-century archaeological
record both inside and outside the empire and argues that
there is no substantial difference between the behaviour
of cities with the empire and those outside with regard
to monumental building. The interpretation of buildings
or their absence depends on an understanding of the
circumstances in which cities built, and of the way in
which it was not building, rather than building, that was
normal.
Susan E. Alcock: The Pseudo-History of Messenia
Unplugged 333-341
Writing the history of Messenia, thanks to the years of
Spartan domination, is a problem. This paper suggests
both a change in attitude (away from decrying
post-liberation traditions as "pseudo-history") and a
change in focus (to an emphasis on the region's sacred
and memorial landscapes). The Messenian past thus
celebrated emerges as an ongoing re-invention&emdash;a
process seen, if not declared "pseudo," elsewhere in the
ancient, and not-so-ancient, world.
Ann L. Kuttner: Culture and History at Pompey's Museum
343-373
Pompey's Theater-Portico was dedicated to Venus in 55
B.C.E., for the triumphant re-establishment of benevolent
Roman hegemony over Asia and Greece. The gardened
Portico, dominant in the Urbs and its imagination
thereafter, was novel for its landscape focus and for the
scale of its pictorial decoration. In that Museum,
statues of, e.g., poetesses, Muses and prostitutes, Aesop
and Homer's Maro specially posited a landscape of
authorship and eros; the significantly large
poetic dossier (Catullus, Propertius, Thallus, Antipater,
Martial) that helps reconstruct the Portico is
intentionally symbiotic with that evoked setting.
R. Bruce Hitchner: More Italy than Province?
Archaeology, Texts, and
Culture Change in Roman Provence 375-379
This paper examines the process of culture change and
invention in the Roman Empire through two archaeological
case studies from Provence (France). It also illustrates
the merits of integrating archaeological and textual
knowledge for reconstructing regional histories in the
ancient world.
Guidelines for Contributors 381-384
Home | TAPA
Index