University of Alberta
Roman medical ideas came in many different forms. Folk remedies, experienced doctors, and religious practices in sanctuaries could easily exist side by side, thereby providing a wide range of healing methods. Thermal-mineral springs offered still another possibility for restoring health. This paper addresses the issue of both the effectiveness of cures and the attitude of the general public towards these springs. The accounts of visits to various spas recorded in the literary sources and the impressive development of places such as Baiae in Italy and Aquae Calidae Carpitanae in Tunisia attest to a clear belief that thermal-mineral springs had certain healing properties. Yet in weighing the benefits provided by thermal-mineral springs, it becomes necessary to consider both the actual success achieved for relief of ailments and the psychological mind-set of a visitor to the spas.
University of Oregon
While many critics have recognized that Horace's Ode 1.17 represents the Sabine Farm as a locus amoenus emblematic of aesthetic creativity, the implications of the central imagine of the cornucopia in a pastoral metaphor for art have not been fully explored.1 As an imagine of pastoral superabundance, the cornucopia appears in the central stanza of the poem, the point of transition from a magic landscape of animal life protected by Faunus in the first half, to the world of Anacreontic lyric, epic, and excluded elegy of the second half. On one level, this symbol of effortless abundance, where nature provides without the expense of labor, complements both the divine epiphany of Faunus as an image of accompanying plerosis, as well as the song which will resound from the smooth rocks when Tyndaris comes. Indeed, the abundance of continuous sound implied by resonuere is articulated in the `song within song' image of Tyndaris' lyric domestication of epic: lyric reduces epic to an elegiac rivalry between Penelope and Circe. The cornucopia thus centers the poem as a symbol whose signifying function of superabundance finds concrete expression in the `narrative events' of the scene.
However, unlike the concrete referential images of animals, geographical detail, states of weather, and symposiastic song, the cornucopia functions on an almost abstract level, referring to no visualisable `thing' in the narrative reality of Horace's poem. Its status as a sign is such that it refers to nothing other than itself. One might say that as a `floating signifier,' it provides the aesthetic supplement to the center of the poem, a center whose signifying `abundance' actually conceals the absence of referent behind its surface. As a pastoral symbol for the riches--material, poetic, spiritual--of the Sabine Farm, the cornucopia provides the same libidinal `excess' that accrues from the passage of a gift in gift-exchange societies.2 Just as the Sabine Farm, a gift from the Augustan regime, becomes a fecund locus of signification in Horace's poetry, so does the cornucopia , in its immediate stanzaic context in the poem, supply an abundance of signs for the elusive and abstract referent of aesthetic creativity:
di me tuentur, dis pietas mea
et musa cordi est. hic tibi copia
manabit ad plenum benigno
ruris honorum opulenta cornu.
(1.17.13-6)
The gods, recalling Faunus' divine epiphany, both symbolize aesthetic talent and reward that talent; pastoral riches issue both in return for the talent, and again, symbolically as the creative source itself. Just as the `spirit' of the gift is such that it creates a collective ego, a libidinal flow that unites in its passage, so the specific separate entities in this stanza all conflate into one: gods, muse, speaker, and pastoral fruit constitute so many different `signs' for the same elusive referent. Given that the `referent' in this case has to do with creativity, the superabundance of signs would be yet another reflection of the nature of the referent: what is creativity but the mysterious production of something out of nothing. Like the libidinal excess produced in gift-exchange, creation differs from simple substitution, direct exchange, or transformation insofar as it produces something extra.
But its central placement within the poem, its immediate stanzaic context, and finally its symbolic status as a signifier of abundance, the cornucopia has a complex threefold function in what the poem says about aesthetic production and how it makes that statement.
1See, for example, Gregson Davis, Polyhymnia. Berkeley, 1991, 199-205, and Michael Putnam, `Structure and Design in Horace's Ode 1.17," Classical World 87: 5, 357-375, and 357 n. 1 for further bibliography.
2See Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York, 1979, 3-24.
University of Victoria
Two types of dreams are found in Herodotus and Homer, the 'dream figure,' an anthropomorphic figure which appears to the sleeper and speaks to or commands him directly (e.g. the figure which appears to Agamemnon, Il. 2:5-16, or which appears repeatedly to Xerxes, Hdts. 7:12-18), and that which represents the future in symbolic terms, like Penelope's dream about the geese (Od. 19:535-553) or Astyages' dreams about his daughter (Hdts 1:107-1:108). Only dreams which are in some way prophetic appear in either author, and in neither can dreams be assumed to be necessarily truthful or well-intentioned towards the dreamer, both the dreams sent to Agamemnon and to Xerxes are deliberately misleading.
A dreamer's response to his dream is in Herodotus a test and an indicator of his piety, his understanding of the proper relationship between humans and the divine. This understanding is however so rarely found that among all the leaders who are sent dreams in Herodotus, only Sabacos, who realises that the proper response to a dream which commands him to commit a grossly impious act, the murder and mutilation of every priest in Egypt (2.139), is to remove from himself the capacity for the crime by resigning the rule of Egypt, profits from the dream and avoids destruction; the rest, despite their attempts to interpret their dreams, lose their families, their rule, or their lives.
University of Alberta
There has been several recent attempts to portray Theramenes as a `moderate' in the modern sense, i.e., as essentially a decent and honourable man, one who was caught up in the turbulence of his times and, since he tried to hold the golden mean, one who was vilified by both extremes. The older interpretation, the one found in the older histories, gives a somewhat different view of him, but still one regarding him as essentially moderate.
This paper attempts to show that he was not a moderate at all, but at the best one pretending to be `moderate' to further his own grab for power. He was essentially a double-dealing, ambitious, immoral scoundrel, whose nature is clearly revealed in his machinations before and during the trial of the generals after the Battle of Arginusae. He is contrasted with his fellow-demesman and fellow-trierarch at Arginusae, Thrasybulus, the great and consistent defender of democracy.
Montana State University
Historians continue to debate the nature and extent of the acculturation of Rome's frontier provinces, a process that seems usually, to be understood to mean the adoption or imitation of Roman ways of thought, behavior, construction and manufacture. It will be argued that the models that are routinely employed to measure Romanization (e.g., the fusion of Roman and native cults, or the distribution of Roman pottery and of Roman styles of pottery) are inadequate, largely because they cannot systematically distinguish between what is Roman and what is not, or between the cross-cultural adoption of things and of the ideas that go with them (they cannot overcome the inferential problems of moving from material culture to meaning).
A more exacting model of acculturation makes the intermarriage of Roman and native both an index and an agent of assimilation, a bridge between the intrusive and indigenous cultures. Its reach in Roman Algeria may be calculated by measuring the frequency of intermarriage attested on the epitaphs of about half a dozen frontier communities, e.g., the civilian settlement at Lambaesis. Admittedly crude techniques of distinguishing between Romans and indigenes yield data which suggest that very few natives married Romans resident in the frontier zone. It will be suggested that a similar pattern might be found on Rome's other (European) frontiers. At the least it can be said that comparative thought which describes the Roman frontiers as zones of social and cultural inter-penetration cannot readily accommodate the Roman experience in Algeria.
University of Washington
During Cleopatra's banquet in the tenth book of Lucan's de bello civili, Caesar asks an Egyptian priest to explain Egyptian history, culture, geography and religion. Most of all, though, Caesar is curious about the floods and the source of the Nile, and he makes the striking claim that if he could see the source of the Nile, he would give up civil war. Combining close attention to literary detail with larger cultural perspectives on Roman interest in the Nile, this paper will investigate three aspects of Caesar's inquiry and the priest's response. First, I briefly compare the description of the Nile and its mysterious nature with the poem's other discussions of rivers. Next, I argue that Lucan designs Caesar's inquiry into the Nile to invite comparison between Caesar and Alexander, who, Lucan says, would have reached the source of the Nile had death not intervened. Then I suggest that Caesar's curiosity establishes a pattern against which Nero's own sponsoring of explorations of the Nile may be measured. At Rome, geographical knowledge is generally a manifestation of military success. Lucan's Nile, with its unknowable source, foreshadows the death of Caesar, and perhaps even hints that Nero too will meet death before learning its secrets.
The University of Winnipeg
In ancient Athens Isocrates established a school that came to rival that of Plato. He boasted (Antidosis 41) that he had more pupils than all other schools put together. In the biographical tradition (Ps.-Plut. 837c; POxy 3543) we are told that his students numbered upward to one hundred and scholars have accepted this figure, whether it meant a hundred in any given year (K. J. Freeman, Schools of Hellas [MacMillan, 1912] 191) or over his whole lifetime (H. I. Marrou, L'histoire de l'education dans l'antiquite (Paris, 1950) 129; R. Johson, "A Note on the Number of Isocrates' Pupils," AJP 78 [1978] 297-300). But the students named in the biographical sources are all literary figures, who left behind some form of writing, whether as historians, poets or orators. Almost without exception, scholars have embraced the biographical tradition and have without hesitation referred to famous historians like Theopompus or Ephorus, as Isocarateans. But the biographical tradition is highly suspect. It goes back to Hermippus (3rd Century B.C.), who wrote a work On the Students of Isocrates. This work was arranged as a diadoche after the pattern of works on philosophical schools. It was common practice for ancient scholars to reconstruct literary history in terms of a succession of teacher-pupils. There is no indication that Hermippus treated any of the actual students named by Isocrates himself (Antidosis 93-4) but only literary figures. What Hermippus has presented is not an actual school of Isocrates but a construct of the literary history of Fourth Century Attic prose. This paper will examine the biographical tradition on the school of Isocrates and Hermippus' role in creating that tradition.
University of Ottawa
The extent to which the series of events comprising what is commonly called the paraclausithyron actually occurred in the ancient world has been the subject of some dispute. Most scholars who have written on the paraclausithyron concede that most of its most common elements really did occur, but only rarely. The consensus view seems to be that expressed by Boucher in his Études sur Properce: Problèmes d'inspiration et d'art [Paris, 1965: 422] that it was "avant tout un thème littéraire" and little rooted in reality.
This paper will argue that the basic paraclausithyric situation of the vigil of the lover outside his beloved's door as well as some of the key topoi associated with the paraclausithyron (such as fighting in the street amongst rival lovers and the violent entry of the lover into the beloved's residence) were more common in reality than usually has been conceded. To this end the paper will present and examine evidence from what may loosely be called "non-fiction" classical prose, principally oratory. Much of this evidence has not, to my knowledge, been presented before in the context of analysis of the paraclausithyron.
University of Alberta
Ovid's Ariadne figure in Heroides 10 has been seen, on the one hand, as a sympathetic psychological study of an abandoned woman, (Jacobson, 1974) and, on the other, as a comic creation, a disfigurement of Catullus' Ariadne in c. 64 (Verducci, 1985). I argue that Ovid's Ariadne is a faceless, undefined woman with no emotional presence: merely a literary cliche. Far from attempting to study and to draw out the emotion of a desperate relicta, Ovid seems, rather, to be creating a clever literary artifice: Ariadne's desperation is expressed in a letter, never to be sent, to a man who will never read it. The letter, purportedly written in a feminine hand, is really the voice of the male author--Ariadne's puppeteer--destined for a sophisticated, primarily male, audience. Ovid's focus is not on the woman in the text; Heroides 10, is a skillful poetic conjuring trick.
This artificiality in Ovid's portrayal of Ariadne is reflected in contemporary painting; in visual art she, too, is a cliche. In the majority of extant wall paintings, she always appears in the same pose. She is not individualized; the focus is her nude or semi-draped body.
I use slides of paintings from Pompeii to illustrate the presentation.
University of Manitoba
Corydon's victory over Thyrsis in the magnum certamen of Eclogue 7 continues to be a matter of scholarly controversy that focuses on the question of just how Corydon's superiority was demonstrated. This paper will attempt to delineate some hitherto overlooked evidence of Corydon's superiority which comes out in the final, and therefore decisive, exchange between the two. The contributions offered here are to be seen as augmenting, not replacing, those explanations previously put forward by such scholars as V. Pöschl in Die Hirtendichtung Virgils (1964) and C. Fantazzi & C. W. Querbach in Phoenix 39 (1985) 355-357.
In essence the argument will be that Thyrsis, after being able to respond successfully to the first five strophes sung by Corydon, falls short in the sixth when he is unable to match Corydon's bilingual paronomasia involving the names of Phyllis and Corydon himself. Phyllis's Greek name, which can mean "almond-tree" provides a connection with the other trees of Corydon's verses, whereas his own name, even as it plays on corylus ("hazel"), has Greek associations with the accomplished song-bird (korydos or korydon). While Thyrsis matches Corydon's trees with trees of his own he does not match Corydon's word-play.
University of Toronto
The Iliad and the Odyssey are Western culture's traditional poems par excellence. This paper is about how these poems insist upon the importance of poetic tradition for human social existence. I argue that the song of the Sirens, despite similarities between the Sirens and the Muses, is dangerous because the Sirens have no poetic tradition to give authority to their song. My arguments will fall into three sections: I examine the Muses and Sirens as performers, particularly with relation to the chorus; here we discover that the Muses and their song and the song of human poet dependent upon them take their authority from Apollo because the Muses are members of the chorus of Apollo and share in his powers, while the song of the Sirens has no chorus to back it up. Second, I examine the contexts in which song occurs in the Homeric poems. We see that song is proper to contexts of peace and inactivity, not to contexts of striving, whether in war or on the sea. In the final section I argue that nostos and tradition are two sides of the same coin in Homer; both create and depend on a certain kind of self-identify and understanding. The Sirens, because their song has no tradition to back it up, and because they sing in the wrong context, perform a dangerous song which Odysseus must not hear. Listening to the song of the Sirens means losing oneself in pleasure and inactivity, losing one's return home.
Queen's University
Inscriptions of the Classical period from Sparta are rare and those that give an indication of Sparta's internal organisation rarer still, hence the interest in I.G.V. (1), 1 and a recently discovered fragment belonging to it. This inscription is a list of the contributors to Spartan funds in cash and in kind from a number of individuals and states, two of which, Chios and Ephesus, are in the eastern Aegean. The date of the inscription is not indicated and discussion has centred on when Sparta could have had contacts with such states. The majority opinion places the inscription around 427 B.C. when , as Thucydides describes, the Spartan admiral Alkidas visited Ionia. According to Thucydides Alkidas led a small Peloponnesian fleet to aid Mitylene to support its proposed revolt against Athens; this fleet arrived too late and Alkidas spent some time sailing along the Ionian coast in order to avoid contact with Athenian ships in the area. In this paper I agree that the date of 427 is the best one for this inscription and that Alkidas' mission was not to help Mytilene but rather to raise contributions for Sparta's fleet, which was suffering by this time from a serious shortage of funds. The important inscription was set up to indicate the success of this mission and to encourage further contributions from other pro-Spartan cities and groups, hitherto reluctant to contribute on a regular basis.
University of Manitoba
The nineteenth century was the Age of the Grand Tour, and Greece was often on that itinerary. The outbreak in 1821, however, of the War of Independence kept travellers at bay for well over a decade. Although the London Protocol of 1830 technically ended hostilities, the last of the Turks were not to leave the Acropolis until 1834, the same year that the government of Greece was transferred from Nauplion to Athens. When peace was finally assured, travellers began arriving back in numbers even greater than before but to an independent Greece and to the new capital of what was now the kingdom of the Hellenes.
Between 1834 and the mid-nineteenth century, there arrived in Athens four interesting women travellers: Mrs. G. L. Dawson Damer (1839); Lady Francis Egerton (summer 1840); Frances Anne Emily Vane, Marchioness of Londonderry (winter 1840-41); and Felicia Mary Frances Skene (1848). The accounts of their visits survive and afford us a glimpse of Athens in the years immediately following the overthrow of the Turks. It was now, however, not the monuments that attracted the attention of these women so much as the people themselves, but on the other hand there are numerous treatments of Athens' antiquities beginning as early as the fifteenth century. The records of these four visitors contribute more, then, to Athens' social than its archaeological history. Moreover, their accounts are among the very few indeed that have come down to us by women in Greece at the time when the Greeks had just reasserted their political independence and were beginning to rediscover their past.
This paper, complemented by slides, attempts to draw a picture of the people (and monuments) of Athens in the first decades of the newly independent nation from the accounts of these mid-eighteenth century women travellers.*
*Damer, the Hon. Mrs. G. L. Dawson, Diary of a Tour in Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land (London, 1841); Egerton, Lady Francis, Journal of a Tour in the Holy Land (London, 1841); Vane, Frances Anne Emily, A Narrative of Travels in Vienna, Constantinople, Athens, Naples &c, [London, 1842(?)]; Skene, Felicia Mary Frances, Wayfaring Sketches Among the Greeks and Turks (London, 1848)
University of Montana
The early urban parks of Rome were introduced to the cityscape by men who were active across the entire territory of Roman military and political control. In this paper, I analyze the relationship between the horti and the culmination of Roman Republican power. The concept of urban parks has never been traced to its origins, but I believe that it was one manifestation of a certain tendency, characteristic of Republican literature, art, and rhetoric, to associate action with topography and to depict action within specific landscape. For purposes of this presentation, I focus on just a few aspects of the times and of individual personalities: the provincial and military experiences of the early owners, the cartographic practices of Roman military surveyors and agrimensores, and the tradition--stretching from the late fourth century down through the time of Caesar--of displaying in triumphs and at various locations in the city painted representations of military victories in a topographical ground. I begin to consider in what specific ways the horti urbani, far from being simply leisure estates, were a product of the growing geographical awareness and ambitions of the Republic and the need of its most powerful individuals for a new and effective kind of gloria.
University of Washington
Cicero operates in Sallust's Bellum Catilinae in essentially two ways, as a participant in the historical events and as an author whose works provide the historian with a rich source of material. Cicero's role in the former capacity has received considerable attention by those concerned with discerning Sallust's attitude toward the orator. The extent to which Sallust alludes to or otherwise engages with Cicero's literary works (especially the speeches), on the other hand, has seldom been examined. In this paper I contend that in fact Sallust's allusions to and dependence on these works form an integral part of both his characterization of the orator and his presentation of Catiline and the conspiracy. When, for instance, Sallust places the words quo usque tandem patiemini into the mouth of Catiline (Cat. 20. 9), he alludes unmistakably to the famous opening lines of Cicero's First Catilinarian (Catil. 1. 1). The allusion, while obvious, is far from otiose. Rather, it prompts the reader to recollect not merely a few well-known words but the entire document together with its author's own point of view on the subject of Sallust's monograph. Though often seen as an insult to Cicero, this allusion--and other, less often remarked allusions to the same speech (cf., e.g., Cat. 26. 4-5 and Catil. 1. 11)--appear instead to foreground Sallust's argument with the Ciceronian perspective on Catiline, an argument conducted throughout the text in a variety of ways. Cicero's function in the monograph is thereby considerably expanded, so that while Cicero's part in the Catilinarian affair itself seems minimized, the considerable influence of his published perspective on the conspiracy (and on Roman society at large) is not allowed to go unchallenged.
University of Washington
This paper will discuss the construction of literary history in ancient Rome and in modern Roman studies. In particular it will consider how various epiphanies of Greek influence in the Roman Republic are evaluated--both by ancient writers and by modern critics. How often, and in what ways, can Greek literature come with the force of a revelation into a literary culture which is already thoroughly Hellenised? How partial and interested are the accounts of literary Hellenisation which we adopt? 'Old' poets versus 'new' poets, narratives of progress versus narratives of repetition, narratives of discontinuity versus narratives of continuity, 'Greek mentorship' in Roman literary culture--these will be among the issues addressed.
In the first half of my talk I shall focus my remarks about Hellenisation on some famous poetic Muse-poems. In the second half I shall seek to use the terms of my inquiry to open up some questions concerning the literary historical relationship between 'neoteric' and pre-'neoteric' poetry at Rome.
University of Calgary
This paper will investigate certain problems in the interpretation of Pausanias' description of the city of Corinth. At Corinth, more of the urban landscape described by Pausanias has been excavated than in any other city. Here, if anywhere, the correlation between Pausanias' text and the physical remains should be a straightforward matter. The fact that significant problems remain reveals much about Pausanias' methods, the way his testimony has been interpreted and misinterpreted, and the difficulties inherent in reconstructing a physical landscape from any written text. The specific problems I will consider include the location of the Kraneion, the monuments of the Corinthian forum and the identification of Temple E. I will approach each of these topics as an illustration of Pausanias' methods and will examine modern interpretations of his text to reveal how questionable assumptions about Pausanias' methods have often produced questionable results. I will then show how the same questionable assumptions have been applied to Pausanias' descriptions of other cities, where archaeological information is not as readily available to confirm or refute hypothetical reconstructions.
Western Washington University
One of the Roman Empire's favorite forms of popular entertainment, the mime leaves a number of traces in Latin literature of the 2nd cen. AD. In the satires of Juvenal, the mime may function as a counter-stage to satire for the display of human foibles (the "adultery mime" in the sixth satire, for example), and as a foil to set off peculiarly vicious behavior. I would like to focus in my paper upon a third way in which Juvenal makes use of the mime and the vocabulary associated especially with the mime stage. My interest here is in the unwilling mime actor, and the implications which he or she creates for the interpretation of Juvenal's satiric vision.
Juvenal had such real-life occurrences as Julius Caesar's humiliation of Decimus Laberius, and Nero's pressure-cooker treatment of impoverished nobility in forcing them onto the stage and into the arena, to suggest the theme. Using the mime's potential for realism as a quality parallel to the realism of satire, Juvenal rings changes upon the image of life as an encompassing mime performance, one from which there is no escape; whether through our own choice of vicious behavior, or through the vicious behavior of those to whom we are necessarily bound, we are trapped and forced to participate willy-nilly in a prewritten script.
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