Showing papers in "Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies in 1999"

Sausage and Meat Preservation in Antiquity

Abstract: Y W I C K E D BELLY always gets me into trouble,” complained Odysseus,1 and indeed our general M impression is that hunger was a frequent companion of the Greeks, Romans, and other peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world. A number of recent works have attempted to quantify the relationship of the Greeks with their food supply, and the picture they draw is one of small farmers leading a marginal existence and city dwellers forced to import grain from abroad.2 It is implied that the ordinary person, unable to afford the dishes described in the cookbooks by Archestratos or Apicius,3 would make do with diet primarily composed of cereal grains––wheat bread or barley cakes— relieved only by legumes, and fruits and vegetables in season. These studies investigate the cereal crops of antiquity, extrapolating the yield of wheat and barley by comparison with yields in modern developing countries, and factoring in rainfall and climate, generally assumed to be virtually the same as

Parenthood in Late Antiquity: The Evidence of Chrysostom

Abstract: F AMILY STRUCTURE in late antiquity is an evolving topic. Evelyn Patlagean, far ahead of the scholarly field, has published extensively on family structure in this period of transition. The topic touches upon other very important issues -religion, asceticism, gender roles, private and public space. While this paper is relevant to some of those tangential issues, its primary purpose is to detail the private relationship between parents and children in late antiquity, drawing upon the abundant writings of John Chrysostom for evidence. Blake Leyerle similarly used Chrysostom to explicate childhood in late antiquity. In separate places she states that Chrysostom indicates on the one hand that parents seem to love their children, but on the other that owing to the use of household slaves, parents did not have much of a relationship with their children. In fact, Chrysostom offers compelling evidence that

Lysias 12 and Lysias 31: Metics and Athenian Citizenship in the Aftermath of the Thirty

Abstract: lK. J. Dover, Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum (Berkeley 1968), holds that most Lysian speeches apart from 12 were products of consultation and collaboration between logographer and client. S. Usher, \"Lysias and His Clients,\" GRBS 17 (1976) 31-40, defends the traditional view of independent composition by Ly:sias. M. Weissenberger, Die Dokimasiereden des Lysias (orr. 16, 25, 26, 31) (Beitr.z.klass.Phil. 182 [Frankfurt 1987]) 149-152, accepts Lysias as the author of 31. S. Usher and M. Najock, \"A Statistical Study of Authorship in the Corpus Lysiacum,\" Computers and the Humanities 16 (1982) 85-105, at 104, are less certain, assigning it \"a marginal position\" in this regard. The rhetorical similarity between speeches 12 and 31 addressed below constitutes another argument for the authenticity of the latter. 2T. Murphy, \"The Vilification of Eratosthenes and Theramenes in Lysias 12,\" AlP 110 (1989) 40-49, at 40, places the speech in the \"twenty-day period following 12 Boedromion, 403.\" 3Weissenberger (supra n.1) 401 argues for a date shortly before 401/0 B.C. \"spatestens zur Dokimasie des Friihjahres 401.\

Post-Colonial Theory and Greek Literature in Rome

Abstract: W: HEN ALEXANDER THE GREAT, after conquering the Persian Empire, had returned from his campaign in India, he turned to the West. He planned, so the ancient biographers tell US, l to subjugate Carthage and make his rule of the world complete. His early death prevented him. Already in antiquity there was occasional speculation what, had Alexander marched to the West, the outcome of a confrontation between Alexander and the Romans would have been. Roman authors? e.g. Livy in his famous digression in Book 9,3 left no room for doubt that the Romans would have been victorious; in Greek literature, on the other hand, Alexander is portrayed as a great man who, if he had not been crushed by fate or mere accident, would have conquered Rome. This opinion, nourished by the tensions that the Roman conquest of the Greek world brought about,4 is found, e.g., in Plutarch's treatise De fortuna Romanorum (13).5 I should like, however, to

Madness on the Comic Stage: Aristophanes’ Wasps and Euripides' Heracles

Abstract: RISTOPHANES’ WASPS ends in a highly unusual way. So far as we know, the final scene is a unicum in Greek Acomic production: one of the main characters of the play, the old juror Philocleon, is portrayed as completely crazy and out of control.1 Philocleon’s folly has something in common with the madness that blinds Heracles in the famous Euripidean tragedy; moreover, the juror’s insanity is a theme that runs through the whole comedy. May we suspect then that there is a connection between Aristophanes’ Wasps and Euripides’ Heracles? The aim of this paper is to underscore the similarities between the two plays and—with due caution—to put forward a hypothesis that could explain this resemblance.

Callirhoe’s Choice: Biological vs Legal Paternity

Abstract: 1 Char. 1.1.1: Xapi'toov 'Acpp08tcrtl:u~, 'AT cf, Bowie, "The Greek Novel," CHCL I (1985) 683-684. Goold (1-2,207 n. e) adheres cautiously to a date of 25 B.C.-A.D. 50.

A Conundrum of Cats: Pards and their Relatives in Byzantium

Abstract: T HE GREEK TERM 1tUpOO<; or 1tUpOaAl<; (the \"pard\") is routinely rendered as \"leopard\" in Classical dictionaries, while Byzantine dictionaries, considering it to have the same meaning in that period, do not define the words distinctly at alP Recent examples with reference to Byzantine texts include Jeffreys' edition of Digenes Akrites and the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. 2 However, it is apparent that in Byzantium, the animal referred to by those terms was primarily understood to be the cheetah, rather than the leopard. It is also apparent that towards the end of Byzantium, some confusion had re-arisen as to the precise nature of the \"pard.\" In what follows, we consider characteristic references in Byzantine and post-Byzantine literature to the pard, and variants of the pard -the A£61tapoo<;/A£OV't61tapoo<; \"lion-pard\" / \"leopard\" and the lw't61tapoo<; \"cat-pard.\

The Agenda of Libanius’ Hypotheses to Demosthenes

Abstract: F SCHOLARLY INTEREST AND ACTIVITY are an accurate indication, Demosthenes was alive and well in late antiquity. By the Itime of Libanius (A.D. 314–ca 393),1 readers of this 700-yearold classic were well served with secondary treatments of all kinds: rhetorical commentaries and handbooks, biographies of the orator, philological and historical commentaries, special literary studies, lexica to individual speeches (both alphabetical and non-alphabetical), and alphabetical lexica to the Attic orators as a whole. But outside the classrooms of the grammarians and rhetoricians, students of Demosthenes had no basic guide to the more than sixty items in this unwieldy corpus. It was to satisfy some such market as this that Libanius composed one of his earliest known works: a set of introductions, or “hypotheses” (Ípoy°seiw), to Demosthenes’ speeches.2

P.Duk.inv. 230, an Erotic Spell

Abstract: lHere I would thank John F. Oates and the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library of Duke University for permission to publish the tablet and Jaime Curbera and the anonymous referee for good advice about its personal names. The following are cited in abbreviated form: "Brashear 1992 = W. M. Brashear, "Ein neues Zauberensemble in Miinchen," Studien zur alt-iigyptischen Kultur 19: 79-109 Brashear 1995 = W. M. Brashear, "The Greek Magical Papyri, an Introduction and Survey: Annotated Bibliography (1928-1994)," ANRW II 18.5: 33803684 DT Aud = A. Audollent, Defixionum tabellae quotquot innotuerunt (Paris 1904) GMPT = H. D. Betz, ed., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation I (Chicago 1986) Moraux 1960 = P. Moraux, Une defixion judicia ire au Musee d'Istanbul (= MemAcadBelg 54.2) NGCT = D. R. Jordan, "New Greek Curse Tablets (1985-2000)," GRBS 41 (2000) 5-37 Preisendanz 1935 = K. Preisendanz, "Nekydaimon," RE 16: 2240-2266 SGD = D. R. Jordan, "A Survey of Greek Defixiones not included in the Special Corpora," GRBS 26 (1985) 151-197 Suppl.Mag. = R. W. Daniel and F. Maltomini, Supplementum Magicum (= Pap. Colon. 16.1-2 [1990-92]) Winkler 1990 = J. J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire (New York/London) Winkler 1991 = J. J. Winkler, "The Constraints of Eros," in C. A. Faraone and D. Obbink, edd., Magika hiera (New York/Oxford) 214-243 I completed the present manuscript before I could see L. LiDonnici, "Burning for It: Erotic Spe1ls for Fever and Compulsion in the Ancient Mediterranean World," GRBS 39 (1998) 63-98, or C. A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Cambridge [Mass.] 1999), to which I refer the reader for further analysis of such spells as this.

The Ancients’ One-Horned Ass: Accuracy and Consistency

Abstract: HIS PAPER explores ancient Greek and Roman accounts of the one-horned ass.1 These narratives have been studied Textensively by literary scholars and historians but have been largely ignored by zoologists and geographers. When the zoological and geographical underpinnings of the accounts are examined, however, it becomes apparent that these ancient writers may have had a more definite notion of the region about which they wrote than hitherto has been assumed. The animals contributing to the descriptions of the one-horned ass by Ctesias, Pliny, and Aelian can be found in the highlands of Central Asia. Indeed, Central Asia appears to be the only place on the Earth’s surface that could have given rise to the corpus of ancient accounts of the unicorned ass and the animals that shared its landscape.

The Byzantine Component of the Relic-hoard of Constantinople

Abstract: At the time in question (A.D. 1203) that city may well have housed even more relics than the phlegmatic Marshall of Champagne allows, for relics were then the greatest treasure of the richest city known to western man. For centuries its relics had been the wonder of the world, drawing people to reverence them from the four corners of Christendom. They provided the city which owned and cherished them with an attraction surpassing that of Jerusalem itself. It has been argued, not implausibly, that it was because of this sacred opulence that Geoffrey de Villehardouin and his companions came to be sitting over against (and visiting) the City of Constantine at the time of this Fourth Crusade, rather than fighting in the Holy Land. The relics (it is alleged), having as it were consecrated Byzantium as a New Jerusalem, deflected the Crusade in their direction like some gravitational force diverting an object travelling through space.2 As we now know, at the time of which Villehardouin wrote, both the city and her riches were doomed. Within a few months,

Bonds and Headless Demons in Greco-roman Magic

Abstract: I N THIS PAPER I wish to discuss the meaning of a gem-stone in black jasper from the Numismatic Museum in Athens that Armand Delatte published in 1914. The stone is inscribed with a headless human figure, its hands bound behind its back and surrounded by seven symbols with the legend BAXYX below it (no. 615).1 The symbolism of the hands bound behind the back will be the first topic dealt with and then the identity of the demon will be considered. Some texts from Late Antiquity or with their roots in Late Antiquity reveal both the significance of the binding and the identity of the demon. The binding of the hands behind the back will represent an attempt at cancelling the harm that the demon may do. The belief that the maleficence of demons is rendered null and void by imposing a bond or 8EO'1l6~ on them runs throughout the submagical text known as the Testament of Solomon. In it one demon after another presents itself to Solomon to tell the king how its power may be annulled. They come before Solomon already in

Gallienus the Genderbender

Abstract: T SOME TIME between A.D. 260 and 268 the emperor Gallienus did an unprecedented and unparalleled thing. A He had himself represented on his coins with the feminine-gender1 Latin legend GALLIENA AVGVSTA.2 The emperor’s head on the obverse (features and hair) is represented in what is described as a feminized (though bearded) form with unusual attributes.3 Though scholars since the Renaissance have variously attempted to account for this unique occurrence, recent postmodern work on gender and its construction, including crossdressing and androgyny, has not been brought to bear on it. Nor have archaeological discoveries of the last thirty years been taken into account. In the present paper I should like to suggest a rationale for this astonishing propaganda gesture by a reigning emperor during the troubled third century.

Eleusis and Solon’s Seisachtheia

Abstract: 1. Solon’s poems and Athenian tradition1 In Book I of his Histories, Herodotus presents Solon as a legislator who, after having made laws for his fellow-citizens, leaves Athens in order not to be obliged to modify his legislation (1.29). Herodotus does not mention the first part of Solon’s political work; for in the iambic trimeters where he gives an account of his achievements, Solon states that he was a liberator before he became a legislator. It was, he said, in order to accomplish the liberation of the “Black Earth” and the men who were enslaved, as she was, that he received the power (kratow) in Athens.2 The very structure of his poem emphasizes the distinction that he signals between this liberation and the legislation that followed: the words taEta ... ¶reja summarizing the liberation correspond to yesmoEw ... ¶graca reminding the audience of the legislation.3 These verbs, each placed at the