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Reviews the book `Selected Papers in Greek and Near Eastern History,' by David M. Lewis and edited by P.J. Rhodes.

This article proposes a new interpretation of the "sufferings of Daphnis" as they are sung by the shepherd Thyrsis in Theocritus' first Idyll. While the common view is that Daphnis' wasting was caused by a stubborn commitment to fidelity or to chastity, this paper argues that it is rather a symptom of his sexual impairment. The argument rests on two main elements: the connections between Daphnis and other figures acting as Aphrodite's consorts, and the presence of lexical clues pointing to the sexual character of the cowherd's illness. Finally, I argue that Theocritus' enigmatic account of Daphnis' fate in the first Idyll is consistent with the pervading metapoetic discourse of the poem: impotence serves to highlight Daphnis' fecundity as the founder of bucolic song. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Horace's Ode 1.12 is commonly thought to be alluding to the wedding between Augustus' nephew C. Claudius Marcellus and Augustus' daughter Julia in 25 b.c.e. but there are equally good poetic reasons for reading the poem instead as alluding to the young Marcellus' demise in the last quarter of 23 b.c.e. and to see it in direct dialogue with the epicedia for Marcellus composed by Virgil and Propertius. The present paper reviews the evidence for either dating and proposes that the poem actively resists and at the same time engenders historicist interpretations by virtue of lyric's ability to create its own historical temporalities. As a poem touching upon the thorny issue of the acceptability of imperial succession in a period when Augustus' life was in danger, Ode 1.12 can be read as actively engaged in a hermeneutic "conspiratorial" game with its readers, prompting them to question or imagine allusions to contemporary events at a time of utmost political instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three ancient poets—Sappho, Theocritus, and Catullus—provide neglected evidence for Greek wedding poems composed in hexameters. Theocritus, Idyll 18 and Catullus in Carmen 62 are usually thought to reflect Greek wedding songs originally sung in lyric or choral meters; but why did Sappho, herself a lyric poet extraordinaire, compose some of her wedding poems in hexameters, a meter that she hardly uses elsewhere? This paper suggests that the Greeks traditionally performed at least one kind of wedding poem in dactylic hexameters. This in turn leaves open the possibility that when Theocritus and Catullus use hexameters in their wedding poems, they, too, are imitating the content and the form of this neglected genre. This is a circular argument of sorts, but one familiar to scholars seeking to make sense of the earliest fragments of ancient Greek poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a new reading of Sappho's Tithonus Poem as a theory of choreia as (among other things) a distinctive technology of time. It focuses on the way the poem mobilizes animals linked to musical aetiologies to conjure a series of different choral assemblages that enable the dissolution of the individual ego into an impersonal or supra-personal form of immortality or persistence. The evocation of different musical animals (the tortoise of the opening couplet and the dancing fawns of line 6) primes the audience to recognize the likely resonance at the end of Sappho's song of the story that the eternally aging Tithonus became the singing cicada. In the poem's representation, these musical animals are not isolated, but cooperatively entangled with other beings or groups. These ensembles serve, in turn, as models for the conjunction of the aging ego/singer and the chorus of paides addressed, to figure the distinctive ontologies and temporality of the choral collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Horace's relationship with neoteric poetry in the context of Epodes 11 and 12 as signaled by Horace's use of meaningful names. Epode 11 focuses on Latin love elegy, but Epode 12 engages broadly with neoteric poetics through names associated with and references to that earlier poetry. This includes an adaptation of the lament from Calvus' Io. Horace creates a portrait of the mulier in Epode 12 that stands in contrast to the ideal neoteric woman. Horace's sexual failure with her dramatizes the poet's relationship with iambic invective, of which she is an allegorical representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]