Helios 

About: Helios is an academic journal published by Texas Tech University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Poetry & Tragedy. It has an ISSN identifier of 0160-0923. Over the lifetime, 194 publications have been published receiving 1470 citations. The journal is also known as: Helius.

How a Woman Can Be More Like a Man: The Dialogue Between Ischomachus and his Wife in Xenophone's Oeconomicus

Abstract: The dialogue between the model Athenian landowner Ischomachus and his wife recounted in Xenophon's Oeconomicus appears to offer a rare glimpse of the inner workings of an -ordinary Athenian household and a rare portrait of an ordinary Athenian wife. Through Ischomachus's report to Socrates of a series of conversations in which he instructed his wife in her proper activities. the dialogue provides both an account of the occupations of an Athenian wife and observations on her role in the household by both herself and her husband. Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Classics This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/154

Apparitions Apparent: Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus's Imagines

Abstract: sed quemadmodum si litteras pulchras alicubi inspiceremus, non nobis sufficeret laudare scriptoris articulum, quoniam eas pariles, aequales decorasque fecit, nisi etiam legeremus quid nobis per illas indicaverit: ita factum hoc qui tantum inspicit, delectatur pulchritudine facti ut admiretur artificem; qui autem intellegit, quasi legit, aliter enim videtur pictura, aliter videntur litterae. picturam cum videris, hoc est totum vidisse, laudasse: litteras cum videris, non hoc est totum; quoniam commoneris et legere. But if we were looking at beautifully written letters somewhere, it would not suffice for us to praise the hand of the writer--the fact that he has made them uniform, symmetrical, and elegant--unless we were also reading what, through them, he has conveyed to us. In the same way, the person who views this deed [Christ's miracle of the loaves and fishes] might be so pleased with the deed's beauty as to admire the person performing it. Yet the person who understands it is, as it were, the person who reads. For a picture is looked at in one way, and letters are looked at in another. When you have seen a picture, the activity is complete: to have seen is to have praised. When you have seen letters, the thing is not complete, for you are reminded also to read. Augustine, In Evang. Iohan. (Tractatus 24), 2 This volume investigates the many ways in which modes and practices of viewing were conceptualized in the ancient Greek world. The contributors have turned to both archaeological and literary products, and have used these various 'traces' to excavate a lost discourse of seeing, while formulating (according to the conventions of twenty-first-century academic prose) the social, political, and intellectual parameters of viewing in cultural historical perspective. But ancient Greek authors were themselves acutely sensitive to the stakes of theorizing sight in language--of translating visual stimuli, and the act of critically responding to them into spoken or written discourse. How, if at all, can words mediate sight? In what ways do texts function like images, and images like texts? And which medium better represents the hermeneutics of perception: pictures for viewing, or words for reading? Such questions stretch back to the very beginnings of the Greek literary tradition. Indeed, they might be said to have their conceptual origins in the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles (Book 18 of the Iliad). To my mind, Homer was the first to probe, and indeed contest, the respective limits of words and pictures. At the same time, Homers description of Achilles' shield also laid the ground for critical conventions of analogizing visual and verbal modes of representation: by orally invoking pictures that paradoxically talk, sound, and sing, the shield forged by the Homeric Hephaestus itself forged a tradition of theorizing vision in terms of voice, and vice versa. (1) According to Plutarch, it was Simonides who coined the subsequent aphorism that "painting is silent poetry and poetry is talking painting." (2) But this framework for coming to terms with vision remained a literary critical mainstay. If, as Michael Baxandall (1985, 107) diagnosed, viewing is always a "theory-laden" activity, Greek discourses of vision were loaded with an associated ideology of voice: in the Greek cultural imaginary, and across a remarkably long timespan, theorizing viewing meant relating it to the parallel processes of hearing and reading. (3) While this tradition of conceptualizing sight stretches back to the beginnings of Greek literature, it also stretches forwards to the murky transition from late antique to early medieval intellectual thinking. As the opening epigraph wonderfully attests, Augustine (writing between the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE) also theorized the act of seeing in terms of reading. Where classical forebears tended to champion the parallels between words and pictures, however, Augustine exploited the analogy in order to champion the supremacy of language. …

Religion and Gender in Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris

Abstract: The second half of the eighteenth century saw a new impetus in the relationship between Europeans and classical literature. There was a clear move away from what had become perceived as artificial forms of expression based on baroque notions of proper restraint. Preoccupations with history and prose inspired by classical models gave way to a renewed interest in the more emotional genres of art, philosophy, and poetry. The new emphasis was on gaining a deeper understanding of classical models, and this contributed to the success of classically inspired works from the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Highet (1985, 355) goes so far as to say that "most of the European writers of the epoch 1765-1825 knew much more about classical literature than their predecessors, and were more successful in capturing and reproducing its meaning." He remarks that Goethe, for example, "knew more Greek than Klopstock" (Highet 1985, 355). But, of course, the attempt at deeper understanding was nevertheless colored by contemporary subjectivities. When the mostly self-taught cobbler's son J. J. Winckelmann began publishing on Greek art and literature in the mid-eighteenth century, he captured the imaginations of many influential Germans of the period, including Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Humboldt. The classical ideal of Greece was to prove an important inspiration for all these in their writings. Although clearly influenced by the work of men like the Earl of Shaftesbury in England, the publications of Winckelmann are commonly seen as marking the beginning of a new preoccupation with Greece in German thinkers at that time. (1) Winckelmann was primarily concerned with the visual arts, especially sculpture, and he propounded the association of Greece with nature, beauty, and freedom while the contemporary baroque world was shown as unnatural and corrupt. This subjective understanding of Greece is clear in Goethe's Iphigenie. The title character is cast as a pure and moral soul, who can claim that she is "as free as a man" (see below). It is noteworthy also that one of Goethe's sleights of hand in adapting the Euripidean original is to dispense with the statue of Artemis, which Orestes must retrieve from the land in order to be rid of the Furies. In Goethe, Apollo gives the ambiguous oracle to rescue "the sister," which Goethe's "Orest" belatedly understands as meaning his own sister rather than Apollo's. Thus, the statue of Artemis in Euripides has become, in Goethe, the statuesque Iphigenie, a living, breathing, classical ideal of a statue. (2) In a similar vein, the slogan quoted by E. M. Butler in the context of Goethe as disciple of Rousseau "Back to nature; back to the noble savage!" (Butler 1935, 97) admirably suits Goethe's product Iphigenie, in which the "savage" king Thoas is described as "noble" in Iphigenie's prologue speech and is persuaded during the course of the play to abandon violence. In truth, the Iphigenie really marks the first completion of one of Goethe's forays into the adaptation of Greek literature, and one of the earliest classically inspired pieces from the German Renaissance. (3) Goethe's engagement with Greek literature would become more and more apparent throughout his career. Before publishing the Iphigenie in prose form in 1779 (the verse form was published in 1787), he had already begun work on his Prometheus, though this was not published until 1830. Goethe found inspiration in mythical figures, particularly those from epic: Elpenor, Nausicaa, Achilles, Pandora, and Helen. (4) Indeed, Goethe was fascinated by the ambiguous figure of Helen and the combination of her beauty with her propensity to disappear, evident in Euripides' Helen, a play whose plot structure is very similar indeed to his Iphigenia in Tauris. Helen will appear in Goethe's Faust II. Although the hero manages to conjure up Helen and marries her, she disappears, leaving him holding her empty veil. (5) In 1818, in his essay Antik und Modern, Goethe wrote "Jeder sei auf seiner Art eine Grieche! …

Interpretation and Authenticity of the Lucianic Erotes

Abstract: Introduction In Greek literature under the Roman Empire, a number of works debated the merits of women versus boys as objects of desire (Fleury 2007, 776). The Erotes contains such a debate between two characters named Charicles and Callicratidas, framed within a discussion between two others named Lycinus and Theomnestus. This dialogue has come to us among Lucian's works, where Lycinus would, at least initially represent the authorial persona, and Lycinus in this work does seem to have that role. However, the Erotes, regarded as inauthentic, was neglected through most of the twentieth century until Michel Foucault (1984) examined it as a document for the history of sexuality Following Foucault, David M. Halperin (1992) argued that even though Charicles pursues only women and Callicratidas only boys, the argument is about not heterosexuality versus homosexuality, but a difference of taste. (1) To trivialize the ancient debate as a question of taste or, at the other extreme, to denounce the Erotes as simply a defense of pederasty involves a loss of historical perspective. In Charicles' discourse, the issue of same-versus opposite-sex relations does assume serious importance, but the modern obsession over 'intergenerational' sex is strikingly absent in the ancient debate. It is true that Callicratidas and Charicles both assume bisexual attraction. Indeed, Charicles, who represents the 'heterosexual' preference, condemns same-sex relations as overindulgence in pleasure; similarly, Plutarch (Erotikos 766E), who also championed women, felt obliged to assert that women are just as desirable as boys. Still, Charicles wishes to ban all same-sex relations, regardless of age. The only mention of age in the Erotes occurs when he asserts the conventional Greek view that adult males are no longer desirable. Callicratidas envisions man-boy romances as evolving into equal relationships lasting to old age--a less conventional vision that, however, is also evidenced by, e.g., Plato's Symposium and the early Stoic view of eros (love/desire) leading to philia (love/friendship). Whereas Foucault and Halperin were concerned more with sexuality than with a literary interpretation of the Erotes, Simon Goldhill (1995, 102-11) and Michael Klabunde (2001) compared the debate here with women versus boys arguments in Plutarch and Achilles Tatius. While this comparative method is a logical approach to the highly mimetic literature of the Second Sophistic, a full appreciation of the Erotes has actually been impaired by the habitual desire to contextualize it within that debate without first understanding its internal dynamics. Plutarch's Erotikos was an innovative essay, a major station in an apparent shift of Greek sexual interest from boys to women in the imperial age; and the Erotes too certainly was a response to that shift. However, the Erotes does not advance the philosophical debate--Lycinus and Theomnestus share conventional values, and the position that is ultimately affirmed is traditional. Rather, the Erotes is a sophisticated literary composition that must be understood rhetorically and dramatically as well as philosophically. In the present paper I begin with a closer reading of the Erotes in order to isolate what is unique about this work, which turns out to be remarkably Lucianic in content and values. Then I will demonstrate its authenticity by reexamining the key issue of its style. Interpretation As stated above, the debate here is not a philosophical dialogue, it is an amusingly formal rhetorical contest--amusing because it is held in private, as a kind of duel to settle a grudge. Both speakers have some rhetorical background, (2) and they each have one turn to speak. When Lycinus is obliged to pick a winner, he assesses their rhetorical skill, and even credits them for covering all of the topical arguments (50)--which would hardly distinguish them philosophically. Lycinus congratulates Charicles for his brave defense of what Lycinus considers the weaker case (52), praise that a philosopher would not appreciate. …