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This paper examines the sources and literary function of references to the ancient Greeks and Romans in the Japanese author Natsume Sōseki's first novel, I am a Cat, written and published from 1905 to 1907. It places Sōseki and his work in the context of Meiji Japan and its renewed engagement with the West. The paper shows how Sōseki was uniquely placed to reflect on this engagement, particularly its intellectual and literary aspects. Despite his personal familiarity with Greek and Roman materials as demonstrated in his scholarly works and notes, the references in his novel are mediated, drawn primarily from other (mainly English) texts rather than ancient sources. This reflects the most common manner of encountering this material for Sōseki's contemporary readership and therefore sheds some light on the diffusion of Greek and Roman material among the 'educated elite'. The paper further demonstrates that Sōseki's use of this material has literary and thematic point: it contributes to his satire of the emerging class of intellectuals in the Meiji period by critiquing the social weaponization of such knowledge, especially in instances where it is not backed by true understanding. The mediated nature of the Greek and Roman material in the novel also raises questions about the efficacy of language as a means of communication as it contributes to the destabilization of meaning. This is most noticeable in Sōseki's discussion of Greek and Latin language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to interpret Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as an example of the classical motif of the 'katabasis' or descent into the Underworld, a descensus ad Inferos sui generis, conditioned by having its origin as a fairy tale intended for the entertainment of a child reader (descensus ad Terram Mirabilem): this tale would have as its matrix reference the similar vicissitude of Psyche in the 'tale of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche' from the Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass by the Roman author Apuleius. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memnon, the mythic king of Ethiopia killed by Achilles during the Trojan War, had a double or fused identity in classical antiquity: both Asian and African for Greek and Roman writers because of his parentage and because of the geographical indeterminacy of 'Aithiopia' and of 'India', but definitely black-skinned for Roman writers. How was this figure received in medieval texts and images? This paper tracks Memnon through three textual genres from the twelfth to the fifteenth century – commentaries on Ovid, catalogues of famous men, histories of the Trojan War – and charts the ways in which his classical identity was overlaid and transformed by pro-Trojan sentiment, chivalric heroization and Christian sacrificial thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on classical reception related to the Vietnam War have overlooked the experiences of Vietnamese communities, whether national or diasporic, as they focussed instead on those of American combat veterans. While that scholarship has yielded important insight, it nevertheless has contributed to the disremembering of Vietnamese people that is at the core of the dominant American subjectivity of the Vietnam War, which relegates Vietnamese people to the margins of history as either enemies or victims – or worse, forgotten. To build on this scholarship, this paper closely reads three poems ('Telemachus,' 'Trojan,' and 'Odysseus Redux') in Ocean Vuong's 2017 poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, through the lenses of memory theory and queer of colour critique. I demonstrate how Vuong queers the Homeric Odyssey by subverting the canonical narrative: Odysseus returns home dead, leaving Telemachus to explore his inheritance of war as a queer refugee. Through this queer mythology, Vuong explores the conflicting layers of his intergenerational trauma, which pit refugeehood and queerness not only against each other, but also against Americanness. Overall, this paper argues that Vuong reworks the Homeric Odyssey in order to create his own 'postmemories' of the war that challenge historical erasure by defiantly placing the queer refugee at the centre, rather than the periphery, of an American narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marisela Treviño Orta's Woman on Fire (2016) tells the story of a Chicana U.S. citizen haunted by the ghost of a Mexican woman who demands burial after having died attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border. In this paper, I demonstrate how Treviño Orta's play presents a uniquely Latine Antigone-story through its investigation into the realities of living and dead Chicane and Latine bodies. Woman on Fire's emphasis on bodily physicality and how such mechanisms affect Latine experience situates the drama both among and away from the numerous Latin American adaptations of Sophocles' Antigone noted and studied by scholars. While the play's focus on the crisis surrounding the Latin American dead and disappeared connects Woman on Fire to that greater tradition, both its exploration of an "Antigone" who refuses to participate in an available burial as well as its use of the body to interpret the complexities of Latine identity and experience breaks new ground in the reception of the Antigone-story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anonymous alchemical poetry, which flourished during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England, consisted of laboratory texts mainly concerning recipes and practical notes about the production of the philosophers' stone or elixir. These texts, which are not part of the authoritative writings of the famous alchemists of the time, re-purposed the Opus in a prosaic and pragmatic way. They made use of the same mysterious lexicon of the well-known alchemical treatises, but they often revisited and modified it according to their own needs. Very little attention has been given to this body of writing or to the processes of adaptation of the original Latin figurative alchemical vocabulary during vernacular translation. This paper focuses on a particular lexical item related to a transmutative procedure identifiable in a collection of fifteenth-century English recipes for making the elixir. It highlights the strategy an anonymous writer employed to coin a metaphorical formula to describe cryptically the mysterious aqua mercurialis. This formula was handed down in a corpus of manuscripts without being fully understood by copyists and users. In fact, later translators, in rendering it from English into Latin, turned it into an unsuitable expression, which led to the loss of its semantic implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unique six-page preface to Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews (1742) has generated great acclaim for supplying an adroit analysis of classical genres and the several subspecies of comedy in its proposal that his novel should be considered a 'comic Epic-Poem in Prose'. Judith Frank has suggested that Fielding's preface might be "at once the most assigned and [yet] least analyzed discussion of the aesthetics of the novel in English studies", alluding to both the importance of the preface for undergraduate conceptions of the novel genre and the inimitable vagaries of Fielding's articulate style. Where critical understandings of the preface might therefore be disproportionate to its acclaim, and where only two articles have previously examined Fielding's applications of formal rhetoric in his work, this paper addresses both lacunas by proposing that Fielding made use of Cicero's scheme of topical invention (from his Topica) to assist with the composition of his preface. Cicero's topical scheme is a system of sixteen prescribed loci or 'topics' (places for locating or inventing arguments) and these were promoted as a universal and comprehensive scheme for discovering the best arguments for any subject under consideration. This paper demonstrates that Fielding's preface engages with ten out of sixteen of Cicero's topical terms and displays an informed understanding of the logical processes pertaining to those topics. It also demonstrates that Fielding makes use of a fountain metaphor in much the same way that Cicero used a fountain metaphor in his Topica, and furthermore, that the sequence of topical terms in Fielding's preface run in much the same sequence as promoted by Cicero in the Topica. Where the new logic and rhetoric of the eighteenth century rejected the informal processes of topical invention for their relative focus on probable arguments, the applications of Cicero's topics in the preface to Joseph Andrews helps characterize Fielding as both a dedicated classicist and a Ciceronian rhetor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the history and evolution of humanist re-use of the first couplet of Propertius’s elegy 2, 2, from Gregorio Tifernate’s Poemata to the end of the Quattrocento. Continued re-use of the couplet, or of its constituent elements, make it a veritable commonplace at a time when collections of loci communi were first coming into existence as ordered and consciously prepared works. The attraction of this particular couplet from Propertius was enhanced considerably by a parallel use in the Petrarchan vernacular love poetry tradition. This poetic commonplace became so well established that its very language appears in Christian moral poetry from the period, as evidenced by an example taken from Baptista Mantuanus’s collection of eclogues entitled Adulescentia. The commonplace established by Quattrocento elegiac poets thus became a weapon in the arsenal of edifying Christian poetry, whose authors redeployed elegiac language in their criticism of mankind’s excessive devotion to earthly passions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy's poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy's incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy's homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy's poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy's beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, 'created' using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω ['to make'] in descriptions of 'those made like me') and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called 'Greek desire', placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Martha Graham's Cave of the Heart and her approach to the Medea myth. It focuses especially on Graham's decisions to situate Medea in a gynocentric world, not to include the children, and to make Medea's sexual jealousy the central theme. I examine the similarities and differences between Martha Graham's approach and that of Euripides and show that the two works have a different focus but bring about a similar effect: they both show Medea triumphant at the end, a woman who asserts her power by taking on both subhuman and superhuman features. The similarity of the endings serves in turn to underline basic differences in the two artists' interests and approaches to the myth: Euripides focuses on the characters' intellect and mental experience and questions sexual jealousy as being trivial and insignificant, while Martha Graham examines emotion through complex and unfamiliar movements of the body, showcases the overwhelming power of jealousy, and celebrates its intensity and importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Antología de la literatura fantástica by Borges, Ocampo and Bioy Casares, a work that marked a milestone in the history of the fantasy genre in Argentina due to its great influence, delights us with a series of stories - tales, fragments of novels, plays, fables, etc. - that includes a single text from Greco-Roman antiquity: the encounter with the werewolf narrated by Niceros during the dinner with Trimalchio in Petronius' Satyricon. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to demonstrate that the translation of Petronius' text is based on Tomás Meabe's version, which, in turn, is based on the French translation of Charles Heguin de Guerle, published in 1862. Secondly, to analyze the different ways in which the anthologists manipulated Meabe's version in order to highlight the fantastic aspects of Petronius' tale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Gregorio Correr selected the myth of Procne and Philomela for his c. 1427 adaptation of Seneca's Thyestes, he was altering what is sometimes termed 'a tragedy with no women' into one which largely focuses on female protagonists. Yet he chose to omit the scene where Philomela (or Philomena) weaves a tapestry depicting her rape and mutilation by her sister's husband Tereus. This scene, which is a key feature of Ovid's Metamorphoses and also appears in all other medieval and Renaissance adaptations of the myth, has been interpreted by scholars as Philomena's successful attempt to find an alternative voice for her outrage after Tereus has cut out her tongue. This paper addresses the implications of Correr's omission of this important feature of the myth, analysing its effect on the portrayal of Philomena and the dynamics of her relationship with her avenger Procne. It shows how the agency in this relationship is shifted almost entirely to Procne and how Philomena is transformed into a type of ghost who is brought back by her sister's rage and dreadful act of retribution on her husband. Within this analysis attention will be given to the Christian elements of Correr's reception of the myth, in particular the motif of resurrection which permeates the play and the final scene which culminates in a distortion of the rites of the eucharist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of W. E. B. Du Bois typically emphasize his shift from an elitist devotion to European classics to a more radical promotion of African culture. These essays move beyond this simple dichotomy. We aim to demonstrate that throughout his life, Du Bois used classical ideas to challenge white Americans' exclusive claims to power, even as he recognized and critiqued the role of Classics in sustaining racist hierarchies and institutions. Rather than focus exclusively on explicit citations of Greece and Rome in Du Bois's writing, we use Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s model of Signifyin(g) and Lorna Hardwick's conception of 'fuzzy connections' to trace and interrogate Du Bois's elusive engagement with Classics. We provide detailed studies of three works: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), The Star of Ethiopia (1910s) and 'Of the Ruling of Men' (1920). The concluding essay situates Du Bois's classicism in the wider context of African American literature and at the intersection of debates on education, humanism, and race in America. Throughout these papers, we examine Du Bois's understanding of what is at stake for those who present themselves as the inheritors and interpreters of antiquity. By putting Du Bois back at the centre of ongoing scholarly conversations on black classicism, we hope to show that his inventive and political approach to the past provides a valuable model for reception studies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the myth of the Strand Lane cold bath's Roman origins: it explains how this dream of Rome first emerged in the 1830s and became consolidated in the 1840s, and documents the means by which it was propagated, and the extent to which it was debated, between then and the 1890s. It is suggested that the origins of the idea were heavily indebted to popular awareness of the baths of Pompeii, spread both by archaeological publication and by Bulwer-Lytton's Last Days and its offshoots; that the consolidation was the work of Charles Knight and Charles Dickens; and that the vigorous survival of the mirage for the remainder of the century was down in part to the absence of any other large-scale standing Roman structure in the capital, and in part to the lack of any plausible alternative story of the bath's real origins. The auxiliary myth of the 'Essex' bath is also discussed, and the whole argument illuminates not only the history of the monument itself, but also Victorian engagement with the Roman past and the historical fabric of London more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Jeremy Tanner has published a highly informative review article in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, in which he introduces and advertises 'Sino-Hellenic Studies' as a new and upcoming subfield in academic inquiry. Tanner particularly focuses on what he terms 'Sino-Hellenic comparative philosophy,' while developing his perspective clearly from within contemporary Classicists' academic parameters. In this paper, I approach the matter precisely from the other end, i.e. from within contemporary comparative philosophy, distinguishing four different approaches in comparative philosophy, pointing out some pitfalls in comparison and offering a perhaps provocative conclusion by provincializing and politicizing 'Sino-Hellenic Studies'. The paper not only seeks to supplement Tanner's review, but also and more importantly to introduce some fundamental methodological problems to be dealt with in any comparative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats the articles as represented in A.E. Housman: Classical Scholar. Since Housman wrote on a wide variety of ancient authors, the numerous areas of expertise in which he engaged are noted and examined by a cadre of scholars who are marked by eminence. Each of these papers is summarily critiqued in the following review-essay. Moreover notation of two distinct pathways toward original studies of Housman's rigorous scholarship are then supplied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses an episode in the history of the use of ancient Greek as a language of science. It begins by examining the condemnation of the borrowings from Greek of the botanist Carolus Linnaeus by his older contemporary Johann Jakob Dillenius. An underlying cause of this disagreement was the fact that botanical terminology was imperfectly registered in eighteenth-century dictionaries of ancient Greek, and this point is discussed with general reference to developments in the lexicography of Greek between the Renaissance and 1800, and with specific reference to the treatment of some botanical names. The paper then returns to Linnaeus and his creative response to the imperfections of the lexicographical record as he handled these particular names, and concludes by suggesting a broader context for Dillenius' strongly negative response to this creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses an episode in the history of the use of ancient Greek as a language of science. It begins by examining the condemnation of the borrowings from Greek of the botanist Carolus Linnaeus by his older contemporary Johann Jakob Dillenius. An underlying cause of this disagreement was the fact that botanical terminology was imperfectly registered in eighteenth-century dictionaries of ancient Greek, and this point is discussed with general reference to developments in the lexicography of Greek between the Renaissance and 1800, and with specific reference to the treatment of some botanical names. The paper then returns to Linnaeus and his creative response to the imperfections of the lexicographical record as he handled these particular names, and concludes by suggesting a broader context for Dillenius' strongly negative response to this creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a comparison made by the eleventh-century Byzantine historian Michael Attaleiates between the ancient Romans of the Republic and their descendants, the Byzantines of Attaleiates’ own time. In an effort to explain, during the course of a theological argument, why the ancients were victorious despite being pagans while the Byzantines were losing despite being Christians, Attaleiates draws surprising conclusions. Arguing “between the lines,” he suggests that all religions are equivalent in certain fundamental respects. It is in human virtue that one must trust for victory, and God does not care about our exact theological beliefs. The paper also considers one aspect of the reception of the Roman tradition in Byzantium (a civilization usually cast in terms of its Greek and Christian legacy), arguing that the Republic remained an important source of inspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In antiquity, the idea of myth was fluid enough to accommodate a wide variety of divergent, even contradictory, versions of the same story. This tradition continues in modern times: myths, whether ancient or later, preserve their Protean nature. Striking examples for this flexibility of mythical tales are the adaptations of ancient myths to the screen. Classical antiquity has always played a major part in the history of film (and television), but screenwriters and directors as a rule take great liberties with their source materials. In films based on Greek and Roman literature, especially epic and tragedy, and in films with invented or modern settings, figures familiar to us from classical sources recur with surprising variability. Vittorio Cottafavi, director of several films set in antiquity, coined the term "neo-mythologism" for this phenomenon. The present paper intends to demonstrate the validity of critical examinations of such neo-mythologism by examining one specific topic: the appearances of Apollo and the Muses on the screen. It is the first comprehensive survey of its subject and analyzes the most important films in which Apollo and the Muses play major parts. The paper demonstrates the wide variety of neo-mythological approaches which films on ancient subjects usually exhibit. They range from tragedy to epic, from musical, comedy, and romance to science fiction, from art-house films to commercial products. Although individual works differ considerably in their artistic qualities, they all present noteworthy examples of the continuing vitality of the classical past in today's culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I aim to reintroduce the poetry of Joanne Kyger, a contemporary and intimate of the Beat poets, whose first volume of poetry, The Tapestry and the Web, re-reads classical mythology as a female-centered nontraditional narrative. Kyger eschews traditional definitions of 'epic' in favor of a poetics that allows for the inscription of the female poet as a 'maker' or artisan, who crafts a text like a tapestry, crossing and re-crossing the page in an effort to create an open space for the work of reading. Kyger deliberately employs a mythic cycle to break through limits that constrict one's ability to place oneself in the poetry, either as poet or reader. The use of myth prevents her poetry from becoming personal or confessional, yet, it is a female-centered 'epic,' a category that in and of itself breaks down conventional poetic barriers. Thus, Kyger's poetry transforms the Odyssey into a multi-vocal, transgressive narrative, which de-centers and destabilizes the epic masculine narrating 'I.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lew Wallace's Ben- Hur: A Tale of the Christ was one of the most popular novels ever written, and its portrayal of ancient Rome and Roman institutions (e.g. chariot racing and penal system) influenced millions of people for well more than a century. Yet no one has ever identified Wallace's classical sources or examined his research methodology. After discussing Wallace's lack of formal education, this paper examines his access to and use of primarily Josephus, Plutarch, Homer, and other ancient and secondary sources, especially Gibbon and Pope, several problems (particularly the size of the Antioch Circus and length of the spina), and how subsequent theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the novel assumed, reinterpreted, or ignored the results of Wallace's research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Martyr of Anghiera's De Orbe Novo was the first historical account of the discovery of, and early contacts with, the New World. His successor as chronicler of the Indies, Fernandez de Oviedo, sought to establish his own authority in the wake of a distinguished predecessor by emphasizing that his was an eye-witness account (Martyr had never visited the New World) and defending his use of Spanish rather than the scholarly Latin of Martyr's account. Oviedo also sought to enhance his standing by portraying himself as the emulator of the great natural historian of antiquity, Pliny the Elder. This paper suggests that this ploy, too, may in part have been directed at Martyr. It will be argued that Martyr's writing exhibits deep-seated familiarity and affinity with Pliny's text and modes of thought. Moreover, Pliny, like Martyr, was (ironically for Oviedo), not for the most part an eye-witness. It will be argued that Martyr evolved strategies to overcome any perceived disadvantages of his Plinian position. Moreover, his place at the centre of information-gathering even had its advantages when attempting to obtain an overview, an idea already current 1,500 years before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does political theory gain from tragedy? Recent work by Bonnie Honig, Patchen Markell, Richard Halpern, and Tracy Strong (to name a few) pushes back against instrumentalist claims for art that reduce literary texts into moral lessons in how to be sympathetic to the experience of people unlike oneself. Honig and the rest appeal to Hannah Arendt's suggestions in The Human Condition and elsewhere that the spectacularity, ephemerality, and unpredictability of dramatic performance-and the tragic tendency to showcase human finitude-transform the theater into 'a space of freedom pursued for its own sake' (Richard Halpern, 'Theater and democratic thought: Arendt to Rancière,' Critical Inquiry 27.3 (2011) 545-7, quotation from 571). Embedded in Honig's arguments is the notion that tragedy is exemplary, and experienced as such, in that the characters in tragedy stand for a particular class or political values or problems. She sets the reading of critics who see in Antigone 'a model of dissident politics' against her own interpretation of Antigone performing 'Homeric/elite objections' to Athenian democracy: 'the play airs through its two main characters...concerns about the costs of a particular democratic form of life.' In this paper I read Addison's Cato as a hero who accomplishes an exemplary evasion of his own exemplary history by dodging his own legacy in history and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English-language press and current affairs literature often drew parallels between the modern United States and ancient Rome during a period of robust American military intervention, particularly in the Middle East, between 2000 and 2010. How was the Rome-America parallel deployed in similar literature in western European countries? Did commentators in the major Eurozone nations-in particular, France, Germany, and Italy-use the parallel with different purposes in mind? Was this commentary mostly positive or negative? This paper aims to answer these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In one of the lesser-known novels of Sir Walter Scott, The Betrothed, we clearly observe the direct influence of classical historiography on the literary production of one of the most important Romantic writers. In this paper we will first examine the research done by the Scottish author and the sources he used in creating the character of Eveline Berenger. Second, we will show how Scott's knowledge of classical and especially Roman historiography is evident at the beginning of Chapter VIII where he follows the model of Alexander the Great's epipolesis prior to the Battle of Issus, as reported by Quintus Curtius (3.10). In this passage, the heroine, Eveline Berenger, goes around the walls of the fortress haranguing the different nations that make up her army, as if she were a general in a description of a battle in ancient historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies an unrecognized third Plautine source for The Comedy of Errors. Plautus's Casina provides the dramatic framework for Errors 2.1, a prototype for the character of Luciana, and a variation on the uxor dotata that explains some of the differences between Adriana and the Menaechmi wife. Casina is also the proximate source for the romantic triangle of husband, wife, and female dependent, Adriana's sense of sexual rejection over a missed meal, her 'venom clamors', the complaint that her husband is 'deformed, crooked, old, and sere' at the age of thirty-three, elements of her debate with Luciana, and the punitive nature of the Pinch scene. Recognizing Casina behind Errors shows that a number of Shakespeare's supposed departures from his Roman models actually have a Roman source and provides new evidence of how the playwright handled culturally specific material attached to dramatic elements he adapted, including references to food and dining, marital grievances, and the dowered wife stock type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses upon the anonymous eleventh-century verse epistle, the Deidamia Achilli, purportedly written by Deidamia to her unfaithful husband Achilles at Troy. It examines the work's engagement with two Classical intertexts, Ovid's Heroides and Statius' Achilleid. After first continuing the efforts of Stohlmann (1973) and Hagedorn (2004) in detecting allusions to these texts, it brings to bear on the medieval poem modern critical interpretations which have been applied to the Heroides and Achilleid. The poet, it is suggested, is a sensitive and astute reader of Ovid and Statius, redeploying their strategies at the same time as he asserts his own Deidamia's point of view against the competing voices of the literary tradition. The article is followed by an appendix which contains Stohlmann's 1973 text and a translation of the poem (which has not previously been rendered into English). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

nger's power to reduce men to the level of beasts is a familiar theme in Western thought and literature. The notion that music and poetry can mitigate irrational rage is exemplified in the myth of Orpheus, who tames the savage beasts and the powers of Hell with his song. But can poetry really be a remedy or preventative against anger? And what if that poetry is read, rather than sung? This paper explores both explicit and implicit responses to those questions in an unjustly forgotten Latin poem 'On Anger' by Louvain Jesuit, theologian, and controversialist, Lieven de Meyere (1655-1730). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intends to show that Jerome, in his three biographies of monks ( Lives of Saint Paul, Saint Malchos and Saint Hilarion), written between 376 and 392, 'converts' classical travel narratives to hagiography, borrowing topics from ancient genres such as epos, history, geography or novel. But at the same time the author creates a new literary frame for these christian peregrinationes. Indeed, these short novels offer him the opportunity to think about how difficult it is to understand the eremitic xeniteia. Is it possible to be in touch with a holy man whose holiness comes from the fact that he is always fleeing human society, to get nearer to God? The solution proposed by Jerome belongs to literary art: he paradoxically succeeds in making obvious the holy man's absence, thanks to the rhetorical device of euidentia. The text, which generates mental visions, moves the Christian reader spiritually closer to the holy man, although that figure's holiness depends on a sort of exclusion of every kind of relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the numerous parallels between Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and the Odyssey portray the novel's hero as a Jewish Odysseus. It illustrates how Chabon's work contains episodes, structures and character typologies that correspond to numerous exemplars in the Odyssey, including the Telemachia ( Od. 1-4), Kyklopeia ( Od. 9), Nekuia ( Od. 11), Anagnorismos ( Od. 16), Toxou Thesis / Mnesterophonia ( Od. 21-22), and the 'Wrath of Poseidon.' In addition, the novel's main female character shares similar characteristics with Penelope. A preoccupation with 'escape' is central to the novel, reflecting one of the essential themes of the epic and the specialty of its hero. Chabon himself invites a study of this sort, having recently written that the Odyssey and its hero form the original paradigm for the 'Adventure Story' - especially where Jewish characters are concerned (2007.201-203). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a study of Nerone e Berta, a tale included in Fiabe italiane of Italo Calvino (1923-1985). Its protagonists are the Roman spinner Berta and the Roman emperor Nero. The tale may be studied as an interesting aspect of the modern reception of Nero and an instructive feature of the general project of Calvino’s Fiabe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that major nineteenth-century British novelists promote the novel as the dominant national literary form, in direct competition with classical forms, such as the epic. Because of this agenda, some novelists castrate, cripple, or dehumanize the figure of the scholar of antiquity, as a way of symbolically rejecting ancient genres. The primary focus is on two novels of faith and doubt by women novelists: George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872-3), and Mary Augusta Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), novels which make great capital out of presenting and taming sickly, deathly, impotent, and sinister classicists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have interpreted Pasolini's Edipo Re from a psychoanalytical point of view as the reenactment of Pasolini's own Oedipus complex, in which the famous director identifies himself with the Greek hero. In this paper I argue that this identification has a further dimension. Drawing on the evolution of the Oedipus character in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Pasolini uses the figure of Oedipus as the blind sage as a symbol of his own role as intellectual/seer in the modern world and of his isolation in contemporary 20th century Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have interpreted Pasolini's Edipo Re from a psychoanalytical point of view as the reenactment of Pasolini's own Oedipus complex, in which the famous director identifies himself with the Greek hero. In this paper I argue that this identification has a further dimension. Drawing on the evolution of the Oedipus character in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Pasolini uses the figure of Oedipus as the blind sage as a symbol of his own role as intellectual/seer in the modern world and of his isolation in contemporary 20th century Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about the conference on classics and children's literature held in Lampeter, Wales from July 6-10, 2009 is presented. Deborah Roberts, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Haverford College, discussed on the topic, highlighting a paper "Picturing Antiquity: Visual Narrative in Classical Works for Children." It presented the figure of author Nathaniel Hawthorne whose books "Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood Tales" have influenced the development of children's literature.

For the past 2,000 years, no work of secular Western literature has been so widely read, studied and interpreted as Vergil’s Aeneid. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, exegetes of the poem have focused on its sixth book as the source of ancient pagan wisdom; one of the central images in this book is that of the Golden Bough, which Aeneas plucks in order to gain entry into the underworld. This paper discusses the entire history of the Bough’s interpretation, beginning with Servius and culminating with James Frazer; the Bough is used as an index of the rise and decline of allegorical interpretation, and further hermeneutic developments are studied in some detail. Attention is also given to literary reworkings of the Bough, from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. I conclude with a discussion of modern attitudes towards mediaeval interpretations, and an analysis of the continuity of exegetical methods, as reflected in twentieth-century accounts of the Bough’s meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the depiction of Penelope, the faithful wife in Homer’s Odyssey, in some modern novels from different parts of the world. A brief analysis of Ovid’s hint at a more complex woman in the Heroides is followed by discussion of the versions of Jean Giono, Inge Merkel, Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood and Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela. Whereas the epic focuses on the eponymous hero, these works, which all draw on the Odyssey, move Penelope to the foreground and the adventure story becomes the backdrop for a different kind of adventure that is played out in the marital home. It is notable that the modern novels concentrate on the psychology of the woman and on the marriage relationship and make the epic couple a paradigm for marriage in the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro; M. Camus, 1959) drew on classical myth and ritual to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Yet no one has analyzed the film with reference to its classical background. This paper argues that the film closely follows two narrative patterns (Separation-Liminality-Incorporation and the Heroic Journey) employed by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and related stories. This morphological approach reveals the cinematic Euridice as a “female adolescent initiand” whose loss of virginity and death are foreshadowed from her first scene. The film’s setting of Carnaval promotes Euridice’s adolescent initiation as it duplicates ancient Greek Dionysian festivals. Orfeu emerges as not only a shamanistic hero, but also an associate of Apollo and, antithetically, an avatar of Dionysus and substitute sacrifice for the god. Finally, the film not only replicates but also reinvents the ancient, rural and European myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by resituating it in a modern city of the Africanized “New World.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pindaric nature of Ben Jonson's late ode To the immortal! memorie, and friendship of that noble paire, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison (Underwood 70) has long been recognised. One of the earliest, and most accomplished, examples of the 'Englishing" of Pindar, it has attracted ongoing, if not intense, critical attention. It has, however, always been treated as an isolated example, and without regard for the aesthetic or political implications of Jonson's adoption of a Pindaric mode of praise. In fact, several of Jonson's earliest odes show evidence of sustained Pindaric imitation, in both content and form - a feature which has gone largely unnoticed. In this paper I shall trace Jonson's engagement with, and deployment of, Pindaric material in two very early, ambitious, and largely over-looked odes, Underwood (=UW) 25 and Ungathered Verse (=UV) 6, before returning to the more famous Underwood 70. As I hope to demonstrate, the originality of these poems amounts to a transformation of the genre: Jonson's 'Pindarics' rewrite what is meant by 'victory", emphasising the poet's power to glorify and immortalise - to render 'victorious', like Pindar's triumphant athletes - even the unpromising, unfulfilled or unheroic. Both early and late in his career, Jonson uses Pindar's epinicia as a framework on which to model his own - different, but Pindarically-inflected - mode of poetic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Stuart and early Hanoverian England, Sallust's work was drawn upon in diametrically opposed ways. On the one hand, authoritarian governments using extreme measures to repress Jacobite rebellion could draw on his De Coniuratione Catilinae to give classical precedents for their actions. On the other hand, the civic humanist 'republican' tradition, represented especially by followers of Machiavelli and James Harrington, could point to the emphasis in his works on liberty and on concord between plebs and nobles. The Trite Patriot's Speech to the People of Rome; From Sallust was a politically explosive expression of this latter tradition but has been hitherto ignored. This paper examines how the pamphlet and responses to it exploit classical history in a debate over liberty, corruption and concentration of powers. It explores the political context in 1708, and how the pamphlet situates Sallust as a civic humanist, rather than an anti-jacobite authoritarian. The replies to The True Patriot's Speech do not just attack it politically, but contest the legitimacy of its appropriation of a classical text, and themselves attempt to deploy classical learning against it. The pamphlet and these replies give a fascinating demonstration of the potency of classical history. A transcription of this pamphlet is given in the appendix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a report for the conference "Welche Antike? - Konkurrierende Rezeptionenen des Altertums im Barock," (Which Antiquity? - Competing Receptions of the Ancient World in the Baroque Period). The conference was given by the Wolfenbüttel Committee for Baroque Research, which took place in April 2006. Papers were presented by Mara Wade, "Die Kontroverse im Norden oder die (Re)-Präsentation der Monarchie: Dänemark 1634 als Fallstudie;" Nils Büttner, " Aurei saeculi imago: Konkurrierende Antikebilder im politischen Konflikt;" and Isabella Woldt, "Antikerezeption und Sarmatismus in der Residenzarchitektur des polnisch-litauischen Großreiches im Barockzeitalter," among others.

This paper examines how the Renaissance poet and scholar Angelo Poliziano draws on Ovid's Tris-tia, Ibis, and Epistulae ex Ponto to shape his own experiences as a "poet of exile" during a six-month period of self-imposed absence from Florence in 1479-80. In four Latin epigrams, the Sylva in scabiem, and a lengthy letter of apology from the Gonzaga court in Mantua Poliziano appeals to his patron, Lorenzo de' Medici, to call him back to Florence. Poliziano's appeals to Lorenzo invoke Ovid's appeals from exile to the Roman emperor Augustus, who becomes in turn a model for a Renaissance ruler well aware of the importance of historical precedent. In appealing thus to his patron to have himself restored to Florence, Poliziano also lays claim to a powerful poetical exemplum in the figure of Ovid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to interrogate concepts of the classical tradition through an examination of the visual reception of the sculptural female nude. Praxiteles's fourth-century BCE Aphrodite of Cnidos and her variants are cited as a significant presence in the canon of western art through a discussion of paintings from different art historical periods and styles. Works by Titian, Alma-Tadema and de Chirico present complex commentaries on the relationship between ancient art work and its reception and offer not just comparisons but dialogues between antiquity and modernity. Lacanian concepts of desire are utilized to frame a discussion of the originary erotic meaning of the Greek sculptural nude and the appropriation or negation of this meaning in terms of artistic reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Willa Cather’s famous Virgilian epigraph to My Ántonia alerts the reader to the novel’s deep engagement with the Georgics. This paper advocates a positive interpretation of the relationship between the two by exploring the role of the poem in the life and “memoirs” of Jim Burden, the novel’s narrator. In contrast to currently received notions about the poem’s “pastoralizing” influence, it argues that the Georgics illumines the Nebraska prairie and the farmers who toiled there, enabling Jim to perceive and articulate their vitality and worth. Through Jim’s story of remembrance and return, Cather ultimately presents the literary tradition, and the Georgics in particular, as a beneficent force capable of creating connections among human beings, the natural world, the past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines occurrences of classical literature in selected American and European films about twentieth-century war. Homer's Iliad and Horace's line from Odes 3.2 quoted in the title provide the starting point for an analysis of the influence of the ancient code of heroism on modern education and on attitudes toward war. In the films chosen for discussion, classical models appear as justification for and exhortation to military service or, by contrast, as a means to question blind patriotism and to criticize military irresponsibility. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), rightly regarded as the greatest of all anti-war films, shows the common view of Horace's dulce et decorum to be false, not only in the story it tells but also through quotations from Homer, Ovid, and the Gesta Romanorum. The Dawn Patrol (1930) and Grand Illusion (1937) deal with the end of chivalrous heroism in World War I. Simonides' epitaph on the Spartan dead at Thermopylae is the starting point for an examination of the traditional heroism of World War I in Tell England (1931) and King and Country (1964) and of the American involvement in Vietnam in Go Tell the Spartans (1974). The Thin Red Line (1998), set in World War II, refers to Homer to criticize military elitism and incompetence. But the greatest variety of the use of antiquity in the war film, both verbal and visually, occurs in Patton (1970), illustrating the continuity from ancient to modern warfare. Briefer discussions of classical maxims in connection with two films by Stanley Kubrick (Barry Lyndon, 1975; Full Metal Jacket, 1987) round off the paper. All these films show that, to varying degrees, antiquity is a constant point of reference in the cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a brief critique, in a first part (pp. 507-510), of previous scholars' biographical approach to the politics of translating Virgil, this paper proceeds to offer an alternative approach by looking at the "linguistic ideology" underpinning translations (especially of the Aeneid) (parts II and III [pp. 510-512 and 512-517]). What emerges is a contradictory tension between the idea of a single, unifying national vernacular and competing varieties or kinds of English. Inherent to this tension is the question of whose English (and consequently who) was to be included in the constituency of the "our" in "our English tongue"-a recurring phrase in translators' comments on their work. In a fourth and final part (pp. 517-527), these linguistic--and political--stakes are shown to have accrued around a critique, by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), of Richard Stanyhurst's translation of the opening lines of the Aeneid. Specifically, this critique is taken up in the following decade (the 1590s), and the politics of its hierarchical and exclusive linguistic ideology opposed, on the one hand, by Richard Carew, in an important essay on the English language, and, on the other, by William Shakespeare, in two of his early plays, most importantly, The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play unique in the Shakespearean canon for its focus on "our English tongue," a focus which is here precisely placed in its intertextual relation to contemporary debate surrounding Richard Stanyhurst's translation of Virgil's Aeneid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence over the course of George Eliot's Middlemarch of Dorothea Brooke as a new sort of epic hero clearly has much to do with her character's starting point in an ill-suited marriage to the elderly cleric Edward Casaubon. The present paper argues that Casaubon's unachieved life's work, The Key to All Mythologies, functions very precisely in the novel as a textual, mythic figure against which, and even through which, Dorothea's new character is defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that French poststructuralist theory does not represent a movement antithetical to Classics and the Classical Tradition, but should be read as its extension. Major recurring themes of poststructuralist thought are articulated at the beginning of the 1960's in Lacan's commentaries on Sophocles' Antigone and Plato's Symposium. Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus as well as his citation of the Platonic tradition in his dispute with Foucault over the latter's Histoire de la folie further confirm the importance of the Hellenic tradition to poststructuralism's engagement with occidental philosophy. Finally, Foucault's late turn to Stoicism and the philosophers of the Roman imperial period can be seen as a response to and criticism of the positions established by Lacan and Derrida. The Classics are not only relevant to understanding poststructuralist theory and philosophy, but actually define the terms of its debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the panoramas of Athens to show how a modem audience creatively adapted the notion of Greece to its own purposes. Analyzing the paintings in terms of Picturesque art and of the rhetoric of visual representation, it asks what social and intellectual values underlie them. The results of this analysis show that the panoramas, so far from being merely forerunners in some sense of the photograph, were an expression of Western liberal democratic thought, its disappointment at the existing condition of Greece, and its hopes for revolutionary change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]