Showing papers in "Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies in 1990"

Isidore of Miletus and Hypatia: On the Editing of Mathematical Texts

Abstract: The explicit to the commentary on Book II is identical except for the numeral. And the explicit to his commentary on Archimedes' In dimensionem circuli is identical again except for the title of the work commented. \"Isidore the Engineer\" is the celebrated architect Isidore of Miletus who, jointly with Anthemius of Tralles, was charged with the design of the new S. Sophia by Justinian in 532. The question is: what role did he play in Eutocius' commentaries on Archimedes? According to the first thoughts of J. L. Heiberg, the distinguished editor of so many mathematical texts, Isidore edited the text of Archimedes on which Eutocius' commentary was based.2 But in 1884 P. Tannery offered a different interpretation. 3 First, he argued that the evidence of the explicits did not square with Eutocius' other references to contemporaries. The commentary on De sphaera et cylindro is dedicated

Tiptoeing through the Corpses: Euripides’ Electra , Apollonius, and the Bouphonia

Abstract: EURIPIDES' ELECTRA has become something of a focal point in recent disputes regarding the nature and intent of Euripidean drama. The orthodox reading of the play has found in it, for good or ill, a clear instance of the poet's hostility to received myth and of his aversion to the ethical and religious presuppositions contained therein. In Euripides' treatment of the Orestes story (as opposed to those of Aeschylus and Sophocles) the patina of legend is stripped away and we are presented with ordinary people who perform the acts assigned to them by tradition, but do so in broad daylight, as it were, amid the disconcerting realism, the unglamorous mundaneness of the dramatic world that Euripides sets before us-or so the standard reading of the play would maintain. The uneasiness aroused by this harsh disjunction beween what the characters purport to be and what they are is regarded as an essential element in the work's dynamic and an important clue to its ultimate meaning.t

Dionysus and the Gold Tablets from Pelinna

Abstract: I N 1987 K. TSANTSANOGLOU AND G. M. PARASSOGLOU published the texts inscribed on two ivy-shaped gold leaves found in a woman's sarcophagus in Pelinna, Thessaly.l Both the objects in the burial and the style of the letters suggest a date at the end of the fourth century B.C. The two leaves, labelled a and b by the excavators, have the same text, except that the shorter version (b) omits lines 4 and 7 of a. Despite a few uncertainties the text, for the most part, is fairly clear. The longer form (a) is as follows:

Myesis , Telete , and Mysteria

Abstract: Myesis, Telete, and Mysteria Robert M Simms ll ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES of Demeter and Kore comprised two distinct rites collectively termed n:AE'tll: the Lesser Mysteries in Anthesterion and the Greater in Boedromion The former served as a preparation-if never quite a prerequisite 1-for the latter Initiation in the Mysteries likewise comprised two degrees: JlUll(H~ and £1t01t'tEia, the former required for the latter (Plut Dem 26) The epopteia is known to have been a distinct rite conducted in Boedromion at the Greater Mysteries (Plut Dem 26), while myesis was generally understood as 'initiation' in general, ie, the total experience of a mystes at the Lesser and Greater Mysteries Some scholars, however, have sought to restrict its meaning 2 H PRINGSHEIM, the most influential of these,) argued that myesis was a rite distinct from the telete of the mysteria, constituting a "preinitiation" (Einweihung) conducted individually by members of the two leading priestly gene at Eleusis, the Eumolpidai and Kerykes, at either Athens or Eleusis, and at any time of year This separation of myesis and mysteria has been generally accepted, 4 but without, I think, the close scrutiny it warrants Pringsheim (40f) drew his evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries, but appears to have believed that his thesis applied to the entire history of the cult Kevin Clinton (supra n1: 13 n15), on the other hand, while concurring with Pringsheim for the

The Ancient Tradition on the Identity of Antiphon

Abstract: .N MANY Antiphons known from antiquity, two fifthcentury figures are sometimes thought to be the same person: Antiphon of Rhamnus, an orator and a leader of the oligarchic coup in 411, and 'Antiphon the Sophist', one of Socrates' interlocutors in Xenophon (M em. 1.6) to whom are often attributed the works On Truth, On Concord, and Politicus. 1 The separatist case has usually been based on the papyrus fragments of On Truth, but the most recent separatist argument, by Gerard Pendrick,2 deals almost entirely with the ancient tradition. He concedes that "the majority of ancient opinion is unitarian" (59), but he accords this fact little weight and presents instead a selective discussion of ancient authors who, in his view, support a separatist position. The purpose of this paper is to offer a more comprehensive assessment of the ancient tradition and to show that ancient opinion was more strongly unitarian than Pendrick implies. 3 As far as we can tell, the only separatist views expressed in antiquity were based on stylistic criteria alone, the inadequacy of which is evident, and a unitarian position is taken for granted

Polybius, the Achaeans, and the ‘Freedom of the Greeks’

Abstract: I N THE SPRING OF 196 B.C. the proconsul T. Quinctius Flamininus, victorious in the war against Philip V of Macedon, announced at the Isthmian Games that the outcome of the war would be freedom for the Greeks. Not only would the states and peoples of European Greece be free from Macedonian hegemony and control, but all would be totally free: free from taxes, free from garrisons, free to live under their own ancestral laws-free (in a word) from Rome. Flamininus' announcement was greeted by the assembled Greeks with enormous cheers and explosive enthusiasm. It is a famous scene, made ironic by the subsequent history of Rome's relations with the Greek world.1 The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how Polybius may have emphasized the Achaean contribution to the Isthmian Declaration. It is first necessary, however, to review the evolution of the concept of full freedom, for it has been a topic of intense scholarly debate-both about the specific stages by which the Romans arrived at this policy, and also about the influences that bore upon their ultimate decision. Some scholars believe that the outline of Flamininus' policy was already in place at Rome as early as 200-perhaps even before the war against Philip began. 2 Some maintain that in 199

Envy and the Invisible Roar: Pindar, Pythian 11.30

Abstract: The final verse of this passage remains a source of controversy on three counts: (1) Who or what is 0 bE: XUIlTlA..a 7tV£wv? (2) What is the meaning of the expression acpuvtov ~P£IlEl? (3) How does this line relate to the context? I wish to offer a new resolution of these three interrelated questions. Past scholarship falls into two camps on the indentity of 0 bf XUIlTlA..a 7tV£wv. The preponderant view is that he is the poor man with low ambitions or ineffective results, who in his obscurity escapes all envious notice and is thus an antithetical foil to the OA~OC; of line 29. 1 A minority of scholars, however,

The Gortyn Code and Greek Kinship

Abstract: CIENT GREEK KINSHIP remains a controversial held. The old orthodoxy that Dark Age societies were 'tribal' and evolved into more political systems in Archaic times 1 has now been challenged, and a new consensus is emerging. This view holds that kinship groups larger than the family were relatively unimportant in structuring life in the Dark Age, and that the phylai and gene of Classical Greece were late and 'artificial' developments. 2 This reconstruction, however, has its own problems. One of the chief among them is Ronald Willetts' argument, drawing on Marxian evolutionary theory, that the Gortyn law code reveals a society practicing crosscousin marriage, part of a kinship system where tribes and clans are of the greatest importance. 3 Roussel's refusal (supra n.2:

The Robinson-Cologne Papyrus of Achilles Tatius

Abstract: I N 1968 six larger fragments of a papyrus roll containing on the recto (the verso being uninscribed) parts of chapters 17 to 21, 23 and 24 of Book III of Achilles Tatius' novel Leucippe and Cleitophon were identified among the Cologne papyri (P.Koln inv. 901) and published by Albert Henrichs. 1 These fragments had been bought from a dealer in the mid 1950's. From a different dealer in 1955 the noted archaeologist David M. Robinson acquired a group of some 200 quite small literary fragments in a dozen hands. Half of these were written in a distinct informal bookhand (P.Rob. inv. 35), which a search of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae instantly revealed to derive from the same chapters of Achilles Tatius as the Cologne fragments. On seeing photographs of the Robinson fragments, Ludwig Koenen at once recognized the hand to be the same as that of the Cologne, of which no photographs had been published. Clearly the two sets came from the same roll. As is the case for most literary papyri, its provenience is unknown. But certain of the other fragments mixed in the same lot clearly came from the Thebaid, possibly Panopolis. Again by the aid of the machine readable TLG text, it was relatively easy to align the Robinson fragments on the computer screen so as to determine their relation to one another, and thus to assemble the numerous small pieces into thirty substantial fragments.2 These larger groupings proved in turn to fill many of the gaps between the Cologne fragments, and so to provide an almost continuous running text of Book III chapters 17

Dionysus, Wine, and Tragic Poetry: A Metatheatrical Reading of P.Köln VI 242A= TrGF II F646a

Abstract: ~EW DRAMATIC PAPYRUS 1 confronts interpreters with many puzzling questions. In this paper I shall try to solve some of these by applying a new perspective to the text. I believe that this fragment is connected with a specific literary feature of drama especially prominent in the bnal decades of the bfth century B.C., viz. theatrical self-consciousness and the use of Dionysus, the god of Athenian drama, as a basic symbol for this tendency. 2

Carcinus and the Temple: a Lesson in the Staging of Tragedy

Abstract: ~Et o£ 'tou . 0 yap 'AJ.l

Schliemann on the Excavation of Troy: Three Unpublished Letters

Abstract: Publication de trois lettres adressees par Heinrich Schliemann a l'archeologue anglais John Turtle Wood datees successivement du 16 avril 1872 (du mont Hissarlik dans la plaine de Troie), du 6 aout 1872 (de Pergame) et du 7 avril 1874 (d'Athenes)

The Greek Phonological Phrase

Abstract: R THE PROSODIC' domains' 1 of ancient Greek continues to play an important role in classical philology. The syntactic components of the appositive group,2 as well as its accentual and rhythmic properties, have been analyzed in fine detail, primarily because of the value of metrical bridges in textual criticism. The major phrase-that is, the phonological counterpart of the syntactic clause or simple sentence-has also been the object of study, especially for its importance in defining the domain of the avoidance of hiatus and in the stylistic evolution of enjambement. But little or no progress has been made in reconstructing the accent and rhythm of the minor phonological phrase (hereafter simply the 'phonological phrase'), nor in analyzing its syntactic composition. Almost nothing has been discovered about how the words of even the simplest sentences were joined together into

The Manuscript Tradition of Xenophon’s Apologia Socratis

Abstract: T HALHEIM AND RUEHL'S TEUBNER TEXTS of Xenophon,s opuscula have been available for over fifty years. So too have the texts edited by Gino Pierleoni (Scriptores Graeci et Latini [Rome]) and the complete works of Xenophon edited by E. C. Marchant (Oxford University Press). Recent manuscript studies of Xenophon,s opuscula reveal that many of the individual texts edited by these scholars were based on the sometimes faulty collations of one or two manuscripts or on a misunderstanding of the relationships of all those extant. 1 In this latter respect, in fact, very little was done to create a text based on an assessment of the entire manuscript tradition of a given work. While the longer works of Xenophon await reinvestigation, much has already been done to correct the editorial deficiencies of the opuscula, 2 and with that work continuing apace, I turn my attention to one of the Libri Socratici. The