Showing papers in "Classical Antiquity in 1997"
TL;DR: The authors explored the relationship between Roman school texts and the socialization of the student into an elite man, arguing that composition and declamation communicated social values; in fact, the rhetorical education of the late republic and the empire was a process of socialization that produced a definite subjectivity in its elite participants.
Abstract: This article explores the relationship between Roman school texts and the socialization of the student into an elite man. I argue that composition and declamation communicated social values; in fact, the rhetorical education of the late republic and the empire was a process of socialization that produced a definite subjectivity in its elite participants. I treat two genres of Roman school texts: the expansions on a set theme known as declamation and the bilingual, Greek and Latin, writing exercises known as the colloquia amid the collections of hermeneumata. This article is more broadly concerned with the attitudes toward language use that are learned along with specific literacy skills. Habits of reading and writing and speaking are learned in scenes and contexts that contribute to concepts of the self and more widely of gender and social roles. The encounters and verbal interactions recurrently plot a deviation from violence or a return to civil and familial order through the proper verbal display of the elite speaker. The student speaker9s assumption of roles, his training in fictio personae, is a strong training in memory and imagination-pretending to be someone else, pretending to talk like someone else, or pretending to talk on behalf of someone else. That someone else is most important as the schoolboy becomes the voice of or for prostitutes, the raped, slaves, freedmen, women. His was not a neutral ventriloquism in the styles of Latin but a training in the master9s mode toward the ready conviction that the speaker can and must speak for others, his subordinates. Roman rhetorical education was a process of persona building, shaping the schoolboy in his future role while excluding others from the very right to become speaking subjects.
93 citations
TL;DR: The concept of the hetaira-porneighbor has been studied in the context of the Attic vase painting as discussed by the authors, where it is argued that it is part of a tension between the aristocratic symposium and the public sphere in archaic Greece.
Abstract: According to Xenophon, the hetaira "gratified" her patron as a philos, participating in an aristocratic network of gift exchange (Xen. Mem. 3.11), while the porne, as her name signified, trafficked in sex as a commodity. Recent writers on Greek prostitution have acknowledged that hetaira vs. porne may be as much a discursive opposition as a real difference in status, but still, very little attention has been paid to the period of the "invention" of this binary. Hetaira meaning "courtesan" first occurs in Herodotus (2.134-35) and does not exist in Homer: hence, the conceptual category of the hetaira is an invention of the archaic period. What needs generated the constitution of this category? And what conceptual "work" was the opposition hetaira-porne doing in Greek culture in the period of its inception? This paper addresses these questions through a reading of fragments of archaic lyric-predominantly those of Anakreon-as well as consideration of Attic vase painting. I suggest that the hetaira-porne opposition participates in the overarching tension between the aristocratic symposium and the public sphere in archaic Greece. Oswyn Murray has suggested that the symposium constitutes itself as a kind of anti-city with its own rules and conventions. Part of the discursive exclusion of the public sphere is the complete suppression of the city9s monetarized economy from the domain of the aristocratic symposium, and it is this impulse to mystify economic relations for sex that generates the category of the hetaira within a framework of gift exchange. But if the motives for this discursive invention are economic, they are also (inextricably) political: the hetaira affirms and embodies the circulation of charis within a privileged elite, while the porne figures the debased and promiscuous exchanges of the agora.
84 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the extended historical range-finder through which the poem requires its readers to view themselves and their inheritors is designed to impose upon them the task of seeking a version of traditional customs that can be made universal, and the task also of regarding present opponents as destined future fellow-Romans.
Abstract: This essay attempts to develop some ideas about national identity as envisioned in the "Aeneid", with two foci: the lack of clarity concerning Aeneas9 own nationality, and the inaccuracies in the descriptions of the foreigners portrayed on Aeneas9 Vulcanian shield. I aim to undermine the notion that Vergil9s own generation and Augustus9 regime should be assumed to be the "climax," "culmination," or "fulfillment" of the historical process as the "Aeneid" imagines it, and to present reasons for thinking that Vergil9s audience was being invited, instead, to imagine a very long-range future-to expand for themselves the scope of the poem and meet its challenge. I discuss the possibility that Vergil himself was not born either Roman or technically Italian and mention also the probable high proportion of his original audience born without the Roman franchise and admitted to it in the 80s or in 49. I argue that the extended historical range-finder through which the poem requires its readers to view themselves and their inheritors is designed to impose upon them the task of seeking a version of mos (civilized traditional customs) that can be made universal, and the task also of regarding present opponents as destined future fellow-Romans.
58 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined the late antique literary evidence (which is predominantly Christian) extending from North Africa in the third century to Constantinople in the ninth century and found that the most common penal tattoo was placed on the face or forehead.
Abstract: The origins of tattooing are very ancient, and the modern fascination with the practice serves to remind us that it has been an enduring fixture in human history. Its functions are many and often overlap, but the particular focus here is on the tattoo as an aspect of punishment. Comparative evidence, however, is welcomed whenever it proves useful. This article first marshals and examines the late antique literary evidence (which is predominantly Christian) extending from North Africa in the third century to Constantinople in the ninth. Then that evidence is put in its legal context. From at least the time of Augustus, the penal tattoo, which was generally placed on the face or forehead, had been associated with degradation. Such remained the case in late antiquity, and it also becomes clear that the tattoo accompanied a sentence of exile and hard labor, usually in mines or quarries. The deeper meaning of the tattoo and its placement on the forehead is considered in the light of modern understandings. There follows a discussion of the actual form taken by the tattoo, which normally displayed the name of the crime, the name of the emperor, or the name of the punishment. Based on the available data, the last option appears to have been the most common penal tattoo in this period. Finally, the article hypothesizes that the Christians effected a transformation of the tattoo and subverted its original intent, so that, rather than being a sign of punishment, it became a sign of glory in which one could take pride. Thus the penal function, in some settings at least, was overtaken by a primarily religious one.
44 citations
TL;DR: The authors provided an alternate definition of authenticity that takes into account the oral transmission of these tales by communities of believers and comments on the nature of the historical evidence these tales provide, concluding that Delphic tales are religious testimonia and should be read for what they tell us about the beliefs, though not necessarily the facts and details, of the communities who circulated them.
Abstract: Much modern scholarship on Delphic oracles has revolved around the question of authenticity, where authenticity implies it is a fact that there was a consultation of the Delphic oracle, that a response was given and that the account of these events reports the occasion of the consultation and the response verbatim. This article challenges the usefulness and validity of this definition on two grounds. First, there is ample evidence that most Delphic oracles circulated orally for at least a generation before being recorded in writing. Therefore, Delphic oracles should be examined through what we know about orality from Homeric studies. Second, all six hundred or so oracles attributed to Delphi are fulfilled. This observation suggests that Delphic tales are religious testimonia and should be read for what they tell us about the beliefs, though not necessarily the facts and details, of the communities who circulated them. This article, then, both provides an alternate definition of authenticity that takes into account the oral transmission of these tales by communities of believers and comments on the nature of the historical evidence these tales provide.
43 citations
TL;DR: In the "Aeneid" as discussed by the authors, Andromache reacts to Aeneas and his companions as if they too were "substitutes," living persons who immediately evoke images of the dead, "doubles" for her lost loved ones.
Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of Aeneas9 visit to the "parva Troia" in Epirus (Vergil, "Aeneid" 3.294ff.), centered on the theme of "substitutes" and "doubles," and beginning with Andromache, the heroine of this encounter. With Helenus as a substitute for her deceased husband, Hector, Andromache is involved in a sort of levirate marriage. Moreover, she reacts to Aeneas and his companions as if they too were "substitutes," living persons who immediately evoke images of the dead, "doubles" for her lost loved ones (Hector first and foremost, and also Creusa and Astyanax). This makes Andromache perfectly at home in "parva Troia", which is itself a "double," a "substitute" for the city destroyed by the Greeks. Except that, like all "doubles," "parva Troia" is an insubstantial illusion, the effigy of something that no longer exists. This city and its landscape can only be "seen," not actually "inhabited." These Trojan exiles are thus victims of a syndrome very similar to "nostalgia" (a Greek word unknown to the ancient Greeks, dating to the early eighteenth century, and beautifully described in a remarkable passage by Chateaubriand). Helenus and his companions are "too faithful" to their vanished city; their destiny, like that of the dead, has been hopelessly fulfilled. Aeneas, however, is not allowed to become a prisoner of the past. Against his will, he must be "unfaithful" to his former city: he will not rebuild Troy. The companions of Helenus and Andromache suffer from an "excess of identity" (one way to define nostalgia). Aeneas, on the other hand, submits to the almost total loss of his own identity: except for the Penates, a highly significant, sacred part of the lost patria, which will contribute to the formation of his identity in a way similar to Helenus and Andromache9s own nostalgic cult of the image of Troy.
39 citations
TL;DR: This paper examined a set of images of a female body whose representation ultimately seems to frustrate the narrative strategies for which its depiction was created, and found that this body propels poetic narrative and gives structure to persuasive argumentation.
Abstract: Certain Greek texts depict Helen in a manner that connects her elusive body with the elusive maneuvers of the persuasive story. Her too-mobile body signals in these texts the obscurity of agency in the seduction scene and serves as a device for tracking the dynamics of desire. In so doing this body propels poetic narrative and gives structure to persuasive argumentation. Although the female figure in traditional texts is always the object of male representation, in this study I examine a set of images of a female body whose representation ultimately seems to frustrate the narrative strategies for which its depiction was created. What emerges in the fifth century as a rhetorical technique begins in Book 3 of the Iliad as a narrative strategy that uses Helen9s cloaked and disappearing body to catalyze plot, and develops in Sappho9s fr. 16 into a logic of desire shaped by the movement of Helen9s and other bodies in the visual field. Gorgias, in the Encomium of Helen, transforms these depictions of Helen into an argument that is structured by Helen9s body, an argument that Helen herself employs in Euripides9 Troades, where her own body serves as the anatomy of her argument. These texts all associate Helen9s body with a type of persuasive narrative that repeatedly invokes the field of vision, describing physical presence in terms that aim at attracting the eye. At the same time this verbal portraiture disrupts the audience9s perspective by depicting bodies as cloaked, mobile, and/or half seen, and by obscuring distinctions between desirer and desired, viewer and viewed. As both subject and object in this viewing process, Helen9s body comes to be associated with the double vision of seduction (i.e., the shunting of her body from desiring eye to desired object) and the distracting power of persuasive images, which seduce the mind9s eye while eluding the mind9s grasp.
34 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the possibility that two historically polarized factions (American Indians and the U.S. government) may come to join forces in the conservation of natural and cultural resources appears at once Utopian.
Abstract: Raising the possibility that two historically polarized factions—American Indians and the U.S. government—may come to join forces in the conservation of natural and cultural resources appears at once Utopian. Similarly, the proposition that anthropology could lend valuable insights to resource management seems at odds with the current of contempt that permeates interactions between American Indians and Western social scientists. Yet, present government emphasis on natural resource conservation and stewardship and increased anthropological awareness of the importance of "native" concerns and categories regarding cultural resource preservation (e.g., Carmichael et al. 1994; Doll 1994; Reeves and Kennedy 1993; Stoffle and Evans 1990; Stoffle, Halmo, and Austin 1997) can lead to the implementation of management strategies that address the needs of all interested parties. Management of natural resources in a broader context, too, should benefit from strategies based on systematic research and detailed knowledge about traditional views of land and resource use.
30 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used one incident, the Athenian efforts to acquire Salamis from Megara during the sixth century BCE, to study what Greeks themselves believed about their own past and why the past was so powerful an argument for them.
Abstract: This article uses one incident, the Athenian efforts to acquire Salamis from Megara during the sixth century BCE, to study what Greeks themselves believed about their own past and why the past was so powerful an argument for them The nature of the evidence is an important part of the discussion, since the written sources (primarily Aristotle, Strabo, Plutarch, and Diogenes Laertius) date from long after the events and Greek authors' approaches to the past differ from our own Although only brief fragments of any Megarian historians survive, they are useful in providing a counterbalance to Athenian sources, since their versions of mythological events and portraits of mythological heroes are very different The archaeological evidence includes inscriptions, vases, and graves; with one possible exception, this material was not exploited either by Solon and the Athenians or by the ancient authors Sources credited both Solon and Athens with having used five different kinds of arguments to make the Athenian case for Salamis, and this variety indicates that Greeks of later centuries did not really know what happened in the struggle over the island Hampered by problems of chronography and influenced by cultural attitudes such as a belief in a culture hero, historians, biographers, and travelers wrote accounts which reveal the importance of the past, especially the Trojan War past, to Greeks
29 citations
26 citations
TL;DR: The Politics of Water: Urban Protest, Gender, and Power in Monterrey, Mexico by Vivienne Bennett as mentioned in this paper is a seminal work in the field of urban protest, gender, and power in Mexico.
Abstract: The Politics of Water: Urban Protest, Gender, and Power in Monterrey, Mexico. Vivienne Bennett. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. $49.95 hardcover, $19.95 paperback.
TL;DR: A votive relief from the late fourth century B.C.E., now in the Louvre (755) provides visual evidence of these interpretations as mentioned in this paper, where Hygieia is represented as resting her right hand on a disc or plaque that lies on top of a pillar.
Abstract: Greek prayers are requests. As such they are speech acts marked off from everyday language by performance conditions on which their effectiveness depends. Inscribed Greek prayers, left in sanctuaries, provide information about these conditions. But inscribed prayers are more than memorials of an original act of praying. When read out loud, they were meant to re-enact and re-perform the prayer to which they refer. Inscriptional and other evidence suggests that eventually inscribed prayers were even meant to be read by the gods to whom they were addressed, who were judged likely to be present in the places where these inscriptions were erected or placed. Votive reliefs are an additional source of information about Greek prayer. They provide visual evidence about the sending of prayers and about their reception by the gods, who are portrayed as attending to the speaker and in that very act, answering his or her prayer. Votive reliefs, that is, are typically representations of successful interchanges with a god, and, as such, are fitting gifts to gods for prayers answered. Like inscribed prayers, subsequent acts of viewing votive reliefs stimulate re-performance of the act of gratitude to which they refer. The gift is on such occasions re-given. A votive relief from the late fourth century B.C.E., now in the Louvre (755), provides visual evidence of these interpretations. In this relief, Hygieia is represented as resting her right hand on a disc or plaque that lies on top of a pillar. I argue that this object is a representation of a votive disc, and that Hygieia9s pose signifies acknowledgment of such a gift-offering.
TL;DR: The authors studied the relationship between consumption and social experience, especially in connection with the consumption of global commodities in rural Kazakstan, and examined how the exchange of goods and labors at wedding feasts helped rural Kazaks maintain invaluable household networks.
Abstract: In recent years, economic anthropologists have become increasingly interested in the relationship between consumption and social experience, especially in connection with the consumption of global commodities (Friedman 1994; Miller 1987,1995; Rutz and Orlove 1989; Tobin 1992) Throughout the world, goods such as food and clothing are used in distinct ways by different social groups and classes (Bourdieu 1984; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Weismantel 1988) The recent anthropological literature on consumption stresses that preferences do not simply reflect social and cultural diversity Rather, consumption is an activity that can create and change social relationships and systems of meaning (Miller 1987; Rutz and Orlove 1989; Wilk 1994) By emphasizing the social component of consumption, scholars have brought attention to the various motives for consuming particular goods and the contested meanings assigned to this behavior And, since local cultural meanings are attached to the consumption of outside goods, they argue that consumption does not signify a naive emulation of Western culture or a loss of local cultural authenticity (Miller 1995; Wilk 1994) In rural Kazakstan, large ceremonial feasts for weddings and circumcisions provide a valuable lens for observing the link between household consumption and social relationships Conspicuous consumption—and conspicuous exchange—are a central part of these feasts Despite the perception and reality of economic hardship during the post-Soviet transition to a market economy, rural Kazaks have continued to spend large portions of their income and resources at frequent, extravagant feasts Most rural Kazaks estimate that over half of their household income is spent on feast gifts Elsewhere I examine how the exchange of gifts and labors at ritual events helps rural Kazaks maintain invaluable household networks (Werner 1997) In this paper, I focus on the meanings behind the consumption and exchange of foods and objects, respectively, at wedding feasts I am particularly interested in the ways rural Kazaks use both local and imported goods to establish social status and identity in the post-Soviet period Examples are taken from the various foods and gifts associated with wedding feasts and festivities In the following section, I provide a brief description of marriage in rural Kazakstan, followed by a more thorough treatment of the foods and gifts exchanged at Kazak weddings
TL;DR: Gremillion et al. as mentioned in this paper presented a study in Paleoethnobotany, focusing on people, plants, and landscapes, with a focus on the relationship between plants and landscapes.
Abstract: People, Plants, and Landscapes: Studies in Paleoethnobotany. Kristen J. Gremillion. ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. $29.95 Paperback.
TL;DR: The Danaids in the Aeschylus-9 "Supplices" play as discussed by the authors were granted sanctuary in terms reflecting mid-fifth-century Athenian μeτοιϰία, a process providing for the partial incorporation of non-citizens into polis life.
Abstract: In Aeschylus9 "Supplices" the Danaids flee their cousins and take refuge at Argos. Scholars have noted similarities between the Argos of the play and contemporary Athens. Yet one such correspondence has generally been overlooked: the Danaids are awarded sanctuary in terms reflecting mid fifth-century Athenian μeτοιϰία, a process providing for the partial incorporation of non-citizens into polis life. Danaus and his daughters are of Argive ancestry and take up residence within the city, yet do not become citizens. Instead, they receive the right μeτοιϰeῖν τῆσδe γῆς (609). As metics they retain control of their person and property, and are not liable to seizure by another. They are not permitted to own immovable property (ἔγϰτησις), but receive rent-free lodgings. Pelasgus and the other Argive citizens serve as their citizen representative (προστάτης). Casting the Danaids as metics highlights the similarities between Pelasgus and his predecessor, Apis. Both leaders were confronted by violent strangers demanding to live among the Argives, and sought to protect the autochthony and territory of Argos. Yet as suppliants the Danaids (unlike the snakes) cannot be forcibly expelled. Pelasgus9 solution is a grant of μeτοιϰία approved by the Argive assembly. The emergence of μeτοιϰία as a formal status at Athens is difficult to date. Most scholars place it between the reforms of Cleisthenes (508/7) and Pericles9 citizenship law (451/0). The "Supplices" provides evidence for a date in the 460s, and functions as a charter myth legitimizing μeτοιϰία, much the way the Eumenides does for the Areopagus. The "Supplices" also fits well within the context of immigration and urban development leading to Pericles9 law. The fact that the Danaid trilogy won first prize may be due to the Athenians9 empathy for Argos as a risk-taking polis committed both to defending its identity and to acknowledging divinely sanctioned claims to refuge.
TL;DR: The work in this article examines the political environment in which the biosphere reserve was conceived and, consequently, the environmental politics accompanying the implementation process. And we assess, again in a preliminary way, since there is no closure to the process, how one small community in the upper gulf is structurally adjusting to the new economic order.
Abstract: From a hilltop overlooking the community of Puerto Penasco, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari decreed a million-hectare biosphere reserve for the upper Gulf of California and the delta of the Colorado River. Assembled with him on the podium in June of 1993 were the governors of Sonora, Baja California, and Arizona, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Luis Donaldo Colosio, then head of the Secretaria de Desarrollo Social (SEDESOL), and Dr. Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, an aide to President Salinas at the time and now his successor. Salinas set the parameters for the reserve's management plan. Resource exploitation was to be prohibited within a nuclear zone at the mouth of the Colorado River, and offshore shrimp trawling was to be outlawed in a larger buffer zone, north of a line traversing the upper Gulf from Puerto Penasco to San Felipe on the coast of Baja California. Within this buffer zone, too, inshore fishermen would be restricted to the use of gillnets with a mesh size of four inches or less. Salinas also called for the active pursuit of economic alternatives for the region, specifically the further development of tourism, sport fishing, and aquaculture. Such pursuits were to be underwritten by a billion dollars in regional assistance from the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (PRONASOL), run by the Sonoran native and heir-apparent to Salinas, Luis Donaldo Colosio. In its conception, then, the biosphere reserve was an amalgam of resource management notions. It called for a strictly protected nuclear zone—although none of its architects specifically addressed the nascent literature on "harvest refugia" as a fisheries enhancement tool (cf. Dugan and Davis 1991a, 1991b; Carr and Reed 1991; Tegner 1991; Roberts and Polunin 1993). It presumed the need for an "integrated conservation and development program" (ICDP) to relieve pressure on endangered species and a fragile environment (cf. Brandon and Wells 1992; Chou et al. 1991; Stycos and Duarte 1995; White 1988). And, at least in the buffer zone, the plan suggested that a "sustainable" fishery could be fostered—primarily through severe restrictions on gear. The Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve thus began as a concerted effort to arrest the deterioration of an ecosystem and to protect several endangered marine species. It is a symbol, too, of Mexico's willingness to respond to international calls for environmental consciousness. Simultaneously, though, Mexico was responding to another international agenda. The neoliberalism of the North urged—indeed, required—Mexico to undertake a multifaceted program of structural adjustment, including, in the case at hand, the privatization of the region's fisheries. The Gulf of California, thus, serves as a crucible for these two agendas, and we here take a midcourse glance at how these agendas are sorting themselves out. We examine the political environment in which the biosphere reserve was conceived and, consequently, the environmental politics accompanying the implementation process. And we assess, again in a preliminary way, since there is no closure to the process, how one small community in the upper gulf is structurally adjusting to the new economic order. These two seemingly disparate agendas are, in El Golfo de Santa Clara at the mouth of the Colorado River, very much intertwined.
TL;DR: Elegies 119 and 215 combine the motifs of loss, desire, and writing in complex ways as mentioned in this paper, and they offer a way of thinking about the limits of love, of representation, and of a writer's control over his text.
Abstract: Elegies 119 and 215 combine the motifs of loss, desire, and writing in complex ways In each poem, the speaker9s attempt to recapture the past-to possess his beloved by writing about her-leads him to confront the imperatives of time and the limits of his own poetic art Furthermore, because Cynthia is so closely identified with Propertius9 project as an elegiac poet, she becomes a focus of literary as well as erotic unease In poem 119, the narrator9s anxiety about Cynthia9s fidelity discloses a deeper anxiety about the reception of his poetry, and about the ability of a text to represent its author faithfully once it enters the public domain In contrast to 119, elegy 215 seems initially to resist the prospect of change and loss In the first ten lines of the poem, the narrator affirms a kind of mastery over time and his beloved, re-creating a scene of pleasure from the past, and presenting Cynthia9s unclothed body as the object of his and the reader9s amorous gaze Yet Cynthia9s active role in the scene-the evidence of "her" desire-leads to the dissolution of the amatory tableau Cynthia brings elements of narrative into the erotic spectacle created by the poet-lover; as in poem 119, she is associated with forces which threaten the text9s stability or closure In both elegies, however, the poet9s fictive encounters with loss are productive as well as unsettling Such fictions permit him to view both love affair and poetic project retrospectively, and to evaluate their significance They give expression to literary anxieties, but also allow these anxieties to be explored and partially mastered Finally, they offer a way of thinking about the limits of love, of representation, and of a writer9s control over his text
TL;DR: Martin this paper discusses collective bargaining in California agriculture and discusses the promise-to-keep bargaining strategy in the field of agriculture and its effect on the state's agricultural productivity and profitability.
Abstract: Promises to Keep: Collective Bargaining in California Agriculture. Philip L. Martin. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Hardcover $49.95.
TL;DR: Sumner et al. as discussed by the authors discuss agricultural policy reform in the United States, and present a survey of the main issues involved in the reform process, including the role of government agencies.
Abstract: Agricultural Policy Reform in the United States. Daniel A. Sumner. ed. Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1995. $39.95 Hardcover, $19.95 Paperback.