Transactions
of the American Philological Association
Vol.
130 (2000)
Contents
I. The American
Philological Association Presidential
Address
II. Archaic
Myths, Folktales, and Realia
III. Realia and
Textual Readings
IV. Lessons from
the Attic Historians
V. Tragic
Heroines and Their Models
VI. Desiring
Socrates
VII. The Brave
New World of the Alexandrian Poet
VIII. Rhetorics
of Theology and Elegy
IX. Authorship
and Personal Identity in the Second
Sophistic
X.
Paragraphoi
I. The American
Philological Association Presidential Address
David Konstan: Altruism
1-17
Full
text available online
II. Archaic
Myths, Folktales, and Realia
William Hansen: The Winning of
Hippodameia 19-40
Pelops wins
Hippodameia by beating her father Oinomaos in a
chariot race, the archetypal athletic contest at
Olympia. The Greek legend is found in three
irreconcilable versions. Scholars generally assume
that one of these, the version recounted by Pindar in
his first Olympian ode, according to which Pelops
borrows a chariot and winged horses from Poseidon, was
invented by the poet himself. The present paper shows,
however, that this version as well as the other two
agree closely with an international folktale, The
Bride Won in a Tournament, so that all three forms
of the legend must have developed in oral
tradition.
Louise Pratt: The Old Women of
Ancient Greece and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter
41-65
This article
examines evidence from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter on
the subject of old women in antiquity. Using evidence
from the Hymn together with other ancient sources on
women's movement, it argues against the prevailing
scholarly opinion that old women experienced
significantly greater freedom of movement than younger
women did. It also discusses evidence from the Hymn on
the social function of old women and characteristic
social attitudes toward them. Though this evidence
admits of several possible interpretations, on balance
it suggests a more positive and varied attitude toward
post-menopausal women than the general trend of recent
scholarship would advocate.
III. Realia and
Textual Readings
F. E. Romer: Ocheia,
Mules, and Animal Husbandry in a Prometheus Play:
Amending LSJ and Unemending Aeschylus fr. 189a R
67-87
An
examination of Aesch. 189a R, both in its own right
and in connection with Aesch. PB 462-66, shows
that the word ocheia is problematic. It has
been translated as "coitus" ("copulations"),
"vectiones" ("vehicles"), "stallions," and
"offspring." But ocheion "stallion" can exist
beside ocheion "offspring, foal" (hitherto
unnoticed); both words can be derived separately from
ocheuô "mount, mate." At stake are the
lexical meaning of ocheia, the right
understanding of the fragment, and the poet's precise
idea in his intertextual allusion. This argument
touches on popular lore and animal husbandry, in
addition to literary and linguistic matters.
IV. Lessons
from the Attic Historians
Susan O. Shapiro: Proverbial
Wisdom in Herodotus 89-118
This paper
argues, against recent scholarship, that Herodotus'
use of wisdom expressions, particularly contradictory
gnomai, contributes to his historical analysis.
Defined as a general statement that expresses
practical wisdom, a proverb is used to explain a
particular situation in light of a generally accepted
truth. The ancient Greek gnome is a close parallel to
the modern proverb. Contradictory proverbs are
generally used to support opposing points of view.
Herodotus uses contradictory gnomai not only to
explain the motivation of particular historical agents
but also to show, in retrospect, that one explanation
of events was more accurate than the other.
James V. Morrison: Historical
Lessons in the Melian Episode 119-148
This paper
argues that the perspective of the reader instructs us
in assessing the validity and wisdom of Melian and
Athenian argument and action in Thucydides' Melian
episode (5.84-116). The Athenians attempt to teach the
Melians that cities base their decisions on
expediency-something the reader has already learned.
In seeking to remain neutral, the Melians must be able
to refer to both past action and future possibility--a
second lesson of the History being that statesmen must
consider the past and speculate about the future. In
essence, the Athenian-Melian exchange has become a
kind of test case, asking the reader to examine
lessons from the rest of the History and apply them in
this new context.
Charles F. Pazdernik: Procopius
and Thucydides on the Labors of War: Belisarius and
Brasidas in the Field 149-187
A
sixth-century scholion on Thucydides observes that
both the Spartan general Brasidas and Justinian's
general Belisarius owed their successes to a
particular sort of charismatic leadership. The
historian Procopius of Caesarea invites his reader to
re-imagine Belisarius as a contemporary Brasidas--the
latter a beguiling figure, for whom, however,
Thucydides' admiration was tempered by his recognition
of a canny opportunism, stemming from Brasidas'
failure to match his rhetoric to prevailing
contingencies of power. The thematic interplay of
liberation and opportunism in Thucydides furnishes
Procopius with a conceptual armature upon which
comparable issues exposed in the course of Justinian's
western wars can be held up to view and animated in
the pages of his work.
V. Tragic
Heroines and Their Models
Edwin Carawan: Deianira's Guilt
189-237
The
protagonist of Trachiniae is treated by modern
commentators as an innocent victim, much as Hyllus
defends her in the closing scene. Such, indeed, is the
character in Bacchylides and contemporary paintings:
Deianira receives her cloak of doom ignorant of its
power. But the Sophoclean figure devises the fatal
robe by her own design and confronts the knowledge
that her remedy is dangerous. In the casualties of
erotic magic, such knowledge is the measure of guilt.
By endowing his protagonist with forgivable intentions
but guilty knowledge, Sophocles constructs a moral
crisis for the ephebe Hyllus who hastened her death by
his curse.
Emily A. McDermott: Euripides'
Second Thoughts 239-259
Euripides'
extant Hippolytus was a rare "re-production" of
an earlier play on the same mythic episode. The play
contains a series of metadramatic comments on its
partial interchange of Phaedra's and the Nurse's
original roles. The Nurse's appearance in the
"Stephanias" as seducer of a virtuous Phaedra is
presented as a "change of mind." Her "second thoughts"
(to corrupt, rather than dissuade, Phaedra) mirror the
playwright's decision to amend a shameless Phaedra's
character by, conversely, degrading the Nurse's. His
covert comments on this strategy of reversal underline
the oddity of his decision to correct his first try at
the story.
VI. Desiring
Socrates
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III:
Socrates the Beautiful: Role Reversal and Midwifery in
Plato's Symposium 261-285
In Plato's
Symposium, the significance of the reversals of
the roles of lover and beloved appears if we examine
Socrates as both lover and beloved in terms of
Diotima's erotic theory and its confusing imagery of
spiritual pregnancy and midwifery. While Plato does
identify Socrates in the Symposium with the
needy lover, his Socrates is also Socrates the
beautiful, the beloved whose outward ugliness hides
supreme beauty. This beauty serves as midwife to the
thoughts of all the young men with whom Socrates
consorts, relieving them of the pains of their
spiritual pregnancy and helping them actively pursue
philosophy.
VII. The Brave
New World of the Alexandrian Poet
Julie Nishimura-Jensen: Unstable
Geographies: The Moving Landscape in Apollonius'
Argonautica and Callimachus' Hymn to Delos
287-317
Callimachus
and Apollonius of Rhodes inherited narratives in which
geological formations could move, and both poets chose
to emphasize this movement. Their choice suggests a
world view in which primordial chaos continues to
exist: clashing rocks and floating islands blend the
normally disparate elements of sea and earth. The
eventual stilling of many of these landmarks,
moreover, does not create a sense of evolved order,
since rooting is attributed to arbitrary divine
action. Such representations of geographic formations
reify the poets' fundamental sense of uncertainty
about the world, and of their place within that
world.
Joseph D. Reed: Arsinoe's Adonis
and the Poetics of Ptolemaic Imperialism
319-351
The Adonis
festival described in Theocritus' Idyll 15
implies a detailed syncretism, engineered by the court
of the Ptolemies, with the Egyptian Osiris cult. This
syncretism, which casts Arsinoe II as both champion of
Greek religious traditions and upholder of native
kingship rituals, promotes her dynasty's bicultural
style of monarchy. We should therefore use the poem
less for help in reconstructing a general Adonis cult
in the ancient world than as a testament to its
fluidity and adaptability to different political
conditions.
VIII. Rhetorics
of Theology and Elegy
Brian A. Krostenko: Beyond
(Dis)belief: Rhetorical Form and Religious Symbol
in Cicero's de Divinatione 353-391
This article
argues that de Divinatione. uses a debate about
divination to suggest indirectly a normative
definition for religious symbols in Roman culture. The
weaknesses of the two approaches to divinatory
practice, fideism and skepticism, are illustrated by
clear and consistent differences in their rhetorical
presentation by Quintus and Marcus. The impasse is
resolved by gestures towards an ideal of a "noble lie"
promulgated by a cooperative--not competitive--elite.
The most notable such gesture is Marcus' apparent
rejection of Marius and de Consulatu
suo, which represented personal connections
between deities and individuals. It is suggested that
the "divinizing" of Caesar--exactly contemporaneous
with the composition of de
Divinatione--occasioned this revisionism.
W. Jeffrey Tatum: Aspirations
and Divagations: The Poetics of Place in
Propertius 2.10 393-410
Propertius
2.10 is a recusatio in which the prospect of
Propertius' turning from elegiac to epic is configured
in terms of the poet's failed metaphorical ascent of
Mt. Helicon, whereby this poem situates its author in
the river Permessus, an elegiac love poet still. That
conclusion can hardly be rejected. But perhaps a
complication can be introduced, and it is the purpose
of this paper to suggest that, despite the poem's
determination to define the genres of epic and elegy
in terms of their specific locations in its own poetic
landscape, Propertius 2.10 itself eludes fixed
installation in Helicon's geography, depending on how
one elects to read the poem's final line. This
elusiveness, it is here suggested, constitutes a
commentary on the resistance to generic stability and
definition that is generally regarded as an essential
quality of the recusatio.
IX. Authorship
and Personal Identity in the Second Sophistic
Gregory S. Bucher : The Origins,
Program, and Composition of Appian's
Roman History 411-458
I.
Introduction. II. The author argues for serial
composition. III. Appian's program is discussed, and
changes in it over time are analyzed using the
relative chronology derived in section I. IV. Appian's
motives for following his program are explored. V.
Appian is compared with other ancient authors and some
modern discussions of Appian and the "second
sophistic" are reviewed in the light of the present
results. VI. Conclusion.
X.
Paragraphoi
Marilyn B. Skinner: Valedictory
459-460
Guidelines for Contributors
461-464
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