This is a study of the emergence, development, and florescence of a distinctly 'late Republican' socio-textual culture as recorded in the writings of this period's two most influential authors, ...Catullus and Cicero. It reveals a multi-faceted textual - rather than more traditionally defined 'literary' - world that both defines the intellectual life of the late Republic, and lays the foundations for those authors of the Principate and Empire who identified this period as their literary source and inspiration. By first questioning, and then rejecting, the traditional polarisation of Catullus and Cicero, and by broadening the scope of late Republican socio-literary studies to include intersections of language, social practice, and textual materiality, this book presents a fresh picture of both the socio-textual world of the late Republic and the primary authors through whom this world would gain renown.
In this paper I argue that the sexually active wives of Aristophanes' Lysistrata are progressively "hetairized"—transformed into comic hetairai—by means of distinctly sympotic visual imagery and ...linguistic innuendo. After a brief discussion of the late fifth-century dramatic "problem" inherent in the sex-trading wife, I turn to the pan-Hellenic oath (193-237). The language of this oath, evocative of the imagery of red-figure sympotic vessels, initiates the women into the sphere of sympotic and hetairic activity. Next, I review the transaction scene between Myrrhine and her husband, Kinesias (847-64, 929-34). I argue that this scene, long recognized as "reminiscent" of brothel negotiations, picks up on the innuendo of the oath and puts it to the test with the bawdy language that likely marked a more typical representation of the comic hetaira. Finally, I suggest that both the "hetairization" and the theme of extra-domestic female activity are brought to an end with the coarse physical division of the silent (and "non-wifely") Diallage (1108-21). In a manipulation of the slippage between wife and non-wife—between sex and politics—the sharable Diallage incites her "customers" to transfer their sexual appetites toward a civic goal.
The first half of Aiskhylos' "Agamemnon" presents three crimes of the House of Atreus: the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (184-247), the wasting of young Argive lives at Ilion (355-487) and the treading of ...the materials as the victorious king reenters his palace (810-974). We argue that the sequential presentation of the crimes of the House, which are connected thematically, stylistically, and causally, radically redefines the nature of transgression within contemporary models of the polis community. Crime as defined in relationship to oikos alone is displaced by crime as defined in relationship to both oikos and the broader polis community; transgression moves from an aristocratic (oikos alone) to an isonomic (oikos within polis) context. This redefinition culminates in the "Carpet-Scene." We reread Agamemnon's nostos as a contest of epinikia. The king represents himself as victorious idiôtês, and Klutaimestra strives to figure him as returning tyrant. She succeeds in the stichomythia, where Agamemnon fails to recognize the crucial distinction between φθόνος and ζῆλος. Aristotle differentiates the terms at Rhet. 1387-88, where φθόνος is envy toward a social superior and ζῆλος the emotion one experiences in rivalry between equals; we document the development of the terms from the archaic period onwards, demonstrate that Aristotle's distinction is valid for the late archaic and classical periods, and suggest that it arose in an attempt to outline relationships of appropriate and inappropriate competition among fellow-citizens. Agamemnon's failure to recognize this important distinction betrays his misunderstanding of the dynamics of, and his agreement to walk on the materials is an offense against, isonomic community. The rearticulation of the nature of transgression completed by this crime of Agamemnon against the polis does fundamental ideological work for the rest of the Oresteia, offering an aetiology of the claims of the polis against the aristocratic oikos.
Flavian Poetry Nauta, Ruud R; Smolenaars, Johannes J. L; van Dam, Harm-Jan
2005, Letnik:
270
eBook
This book offers a selection of the papers delivered at the international conference on Flavian poetry held at Groningen in 2003, which brought together leading experts in the field. The poets ...discussed include Valerius Flaccus, Silius Italicus, Statius and Martial.
Cicero not only wrote dialogues (among other genres), but was one of the ancient authors most explicitly and consciously interested in the literary issues thrown up by use of the dialogue form. ...Moreover, his use of, and understanding of, the form developed throughout his literary career. This chapter focusses on the introductions to his dialogues, where Cicero speaks about the literary task of creating and re-creating his authorial voice (or voices). In the earlier works, Cicero presents his dialogues as if they were historical events, keeping his ostensible authorial voice wholly exterior to the ‘conversation’; but the later ones become more theatrical, with Cicero himself participating actively within them, inviting his readers to imagine what it must be like to eavesdrop on a discourse that is both ostensibly private and actively public.
In the first half of Aiskhylos' "Agamemnon," the sequential presentation of the crimes of the House of Atreas radically redefines the nature of transgression within contemporary models of the polis ...community.
For when I open a medieval manuscript, and this is different from opening a printed book, I am conscious not only of the manu-script, the bodily handling of materials in production, writing, ...illumination, but also how in its subsequent reception, the parchment has been penetrated; how it has acquired grease stains, thumb-marks, erasures, drops of sweat; suffered places where images have been kissed away by devout lips or holes from various eating animals.1If Freud's Shoe was never merely a shoe,2 and Marx's Table was never merely a table,3 it is safe to say that, for the late Republic, the patronal-class dedicated text was very rarely merely a patronal-class dedicated text. The phenomenon of a text being, at least potentially, more than just a text – the phenomenon of the received value of the whole (volume) transcending in value the sum of its material and intellectual components – is one likely naturalized by most readers of this text. But as the fact of this naturalization might be considered to be the single most important contribution of the textual community of the late Republic, it will be useful to finish our study with those aspects of the late Republican community that speak most strongly to those periods that follow, from the obsessively textual worlds of the Principate and Empire to the social and intellectual engagement with textual materiality as it continues into our time.
“THE GAZE CRAMPS MY FREEDOM”By the final years of an increasingly display-driven Roman Republic, forensic oratory was the only profession of ritualized and secular public display that was both ...suitable for the privileged classes and fixed within the system of liberal-political and civic hierarchy. As both Edwards and Barton have argued, active participation in theatrical and gladiatorial display – the “pleasure industries” of both the Republic and subsequent years – was in this period confined almost exclusively to foreigners and the lower social strata. These types of display were illiberal by definition and operated at a social, geographical and ideological remove from the discourse of the privileged classes. Members of the cultural elite were allowed to patronize or produce these performances; but they were discouraged from becoming part of a performance itself. They could attend the theater, but only as viewers and not, strictly speaking, as the viewed. There was a problem with liberal performance in the late Republic – this problem is the focus of the following section – whereby the patronal classes were driven to engage in the forms of public display around which the Republic was built, but they did so at the risk of making the status that allowed this display vulnerable to critique or derogation.
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT WRITING Stroup, Sarah Culpepper
Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons,
04/2010
Book Chapter
Cui dono lepidum nouum libellumarida modo pumice expolitum?Corneli, tibi…Cat. 1.1–3To whom do I give this charming, new work–Just now polished up with dry pumice-stone?Cornelius! To you…In his ...dedication of a small collection of poetry – a collection that would mark Catullus' brief career as much as it would ‘make’ the poet for generations of readers to come – Catullus asks a deceptively simple question: To whom do I give this charming new work? Two lines later the poem provides its own answer – the libellus will be dedicated to the historian Cornelius Nepos – but the question and its implications remain for the poet, the recipient, and the readers who have encountered it since. On closer inspection this simplest of inquiries becomes only more complex, more difficult to decipher, and more demonstrative of the anxieties of textual exchange and the author's desire to remain a subject even as he becomes, through his text, an object. Who will understand what the gift of a text means? Who will make sure that the right people read it? Who will be able to read it as it was intended to be read and who will, perhaps, make a gift in kind? What, at last, does it mean to entrust one's text – one's persona – to the care of another, and how does one write about this meaning?
