Robert Cowan
The University of Sydney, Classics and Ancient History, Faculty Member
- Flavian Literature, Lucan, Horatius (Latin Literature), Epic (Classics), Latin Literature, World Literatures, and 77 moreClassics, Epic poetry, Roman Tragedy, Flavian World, Archaic Latin Poetry, Valerius Flaccus, Latin Didactic Poetry, Latin Epic, Silius Italicus, Statius (Classics), Callimachus, Ovid, Augustan Poetry, Hellenistic Literature, Hellenistic poetry, History, Neronian Literature, Ancient Greek and Roman Theatre, Homer, Vergil, Aeneid, Counterfactual History, Roman Metre, Ovid Metamorphoses, Seneca's Tragedies, Lucretius, Greek Tragedy, Satyr Play, Ennius, Archaic Latin Tragedy, Accius, Livius Andronicus, Pacuvius, Fragmentary dramas, Greek Comedy, Catullus, Latin poetry, Fragmentary Latin Poetry, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Papyrology, Roman Comedy, Plautus, Seneca, Apollonius Rhodius, Greek Epic, Homeric poetry, Eclogues, Virgil, Virgil's Georgics, Vergil's Georgics, Georgics, Cicero, Archilochus, Greek Iambic Poetry, Hipponax, Greek Lyric Poetry, Iambic Poetry, Classical Literature, Intertextuality and Allusion, Classical Reception Studies, The Classical Tradition, Postclassical Tragedy, Alfonso Traina, Carmina Priapea, Epigram (Classics), Greek and Latin prosody and metrics, Greek and Roman Sexualities, Greek and Latin Epigram, Hipponax and Greek Iambos, Aristophanic comedy, Greek Literature, Naevius, Roman Historiography, and Latin Language and Literature(Classics, Epic poetry, Roman Tragedy, Flavian World, Archaic Latin Poetry, Valerius Flaccus, Latin Didactic Poetry, Latin Epic, Silius Italicus, Statius (Classics), Callimachus, Ovid, Augustan Poetry, Hellenistic Literature, Hellenistic poetry, History, Neronian Literature, Ancient Greek and Roman Theatre, Homer, Vergil, Aeneid, Counterfactual History, Roman Metre, Ovid Metamorphoses, Seneca's Tragedies, Lucretius, Greek Tragedy, Satyr Play, Ennius, Archaic Latin Tragedy, Accius, Livius Andronicus, Pacuvius, Fragmentary dramas, Greek Comedy, Catullus, Latin poetry, Fragmentary Latin Poetry, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Papyrology, Roman Comedy, Plautus, Seneca, Apollonius Rhodius, Greek Epic, Homeric poetry, Eclogues, Virgil, Virgil's Georgics, Vergil's Georgics, Georgics, Cicero, Archilochus, Greek Iambic Poetry, Hipponax, Greek Lyric Poetry, Iambic Poetry, Classical Literature, Intertextuality and Allusion, Classical Reception Studies, The Classical Tradition, Postclassical Tragedy, Alfonso Traina, Carmina Priapea, Epigram (Classics), Greek and Latin prosody and metrics, Greek and Roman Sexualities, Greek and Latin Epigram, Hipponax and Greek Iambos, Aristophanic comedy, Greek Literature, Naevius, Roman Historiography, and Latin Language and Literature)edit
Some scholars argue that only a change of metre signals the beginning of a new poem in Horace’s Odes. Woodman has objected that, if this were the case, the juxtaposition of poems in the third and second asclepiadic metres, which begin... more
Some scholars argue that only a change of metre signals the beginning of a new poem in Horace’s Odes. Woodman has objected that, if this were the case, the juxtaposition of poems in the third and second asclepiadic metres, which begin with the same two metrical lines, would mislead the reader into thinking that a poem was continuing, only to realize belatedly at the third line that a new poem had begun, ‘a cruel and pointless trick’. This article explores the positive potential of such a trick, which I term false non-closure, to produce pointed, subtle, and complex poetic and thematic effects. The move is situated within Roman poets’ wider practice of springing surprises, twists, and tricks on readers, including Horace’s own use of false closure and shifts of direction. The process of misreading, correcting, and re-reading, always coloured by the initial misreading, forces the reader to reflect on her interpretation of each ode and on the relationships, continuity, and discontinuity, between them, as well as on the very act of reading. The cases of Carm. 1.14–15 and 1.23–24 are examined in detail, and an explanation given for the absence of the trick at 1.5–6 and 4.12–13.
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The character designated by the manuscripts as Senex, who accompanies Andromache and Astyanax in act three of Seneca’s Troades, is problematic in many ways. He is not identified or acknowledged by any other character; his entrance and... more
The character designated by the manuscripts as Senex, who accompanies Andromache and Astyanax in act three of Seneca’s Troades, is problematic in many ways. He is not identified or acknowledged by any other character; his entrance and exit are unannounced; his presence onstage in the first half of the act requires that Astyanax’s two words of dialogue be delivered by a fourth actor or through ventriloquism; his very existence conflicts with the obvious interpretation of at least two sections of Andromache’s dialogue. All of these anomalies can be removed if there is in fact no Senex and the dialogue attributed to him by the manuscripts is spoken by the Chorus leader. This level of involvement in the action by the Chorus would itself be unusual in Senecan tragedy, but it does have parallels and would also fit with the exceptional treatment of the Chorus throughout Troades.
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Diggle has recently noted that the phrase proximus ardet at Aeneid 2.311 alludes to γείτονος αἰθομένοιo at Callimachus Hymn to Delos 180. The intertextuality between the two texts is both more extensive and more significant than Diggle’s... more
Diggle has recently noted that the phrase proximus ardet at Aeneid 2.311 alludes to γείτονος αἰθομένοιo at Callimachus Hymn to Delos 180. The intertextuality between the two texts is both more extensive and more significant than Diggle’s brief note suggests. Virgil’s engagement with Callimachus’ depiction of the sack of Callion enriches and complicates his own depiction of the sack of Troy, as well as adding layers of complexity to the source text. He connects the Gallic sacks of Callion and Rome with the Greek sack of Troy, along with all the ideological associations that Gallomachy, Titanomachy, Gigantomachy, and Pythonomachy carried in Ptolemaic Alexandria and Augustan Rome, while also annotating that Callimachus had already linked Callion and Troy through his allusion to a simile in Iliad 21. Virgil’s inclusion of the figure of Ucalegon from Iliad 3 may also evoke the οὐκ ἀλέγοντες Phlegyans from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, who disturbingly resemble both the Callian and Trojan victims and the Gallic and Greek aggressors. The intertextual relationship(s) can be read as part of a teleological narrative of Rome’s rise from Trojan disaster to Augustan supremacy, but also leaves room to hear some of the Aeneid ’s famous further voices.
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Calchas’ prophecy in Sophocles’ Aias that Athena’s anger will pursue Aias for only “this one day” evokes the Hippocratic concept of the critical day, on which the patient might either die or survive. This is part of the wider engagement... more
Calchas’ prophecy in Sophocles’ Aias that Athena’s anger will pursue Aias for only “this one day” evokes the Hippocratic concept of the critical day, on which the patient might either die or survive. This is part of the wider engagement with Hippocratic ideas in Attic tragedy and has significant implications for the depiction of Aias’ “second”, metaphorical illness in the play. It places divine and physical explanations of illness in tension with each other. It also constructs the second illness as one of alienation that can be cured by reintegration into society, in contrast to Aias’ own interpretation of it as one of shame than can only be cured by death.
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This article considers the intertextual significance of Apollonios’s use on two occasions in the Argonautika of πανύστατος, a Homeric τρὶς λεγόμενον, found twice in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey. Homer applies it to Eumelos’s... more
This article considers the intertextual significance of Apollonios’s use on two occasions in the Argonautika of πανύστατος, a Homeric τρὶς λεγόμενον, found twice in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey. Homer applies it to Eumelos’s finishing position in the chariot race and the emergence of Polyphemos’s ram from the cave, Apollonios to Herakles’s endurance in the rowing contest and Aietes’s equally belated emergence from his palace. πανύστατος in itself simultaneously evokes belatedness and the sense of being the last remaining, in keeping with Apollonios’s epigonal poetics and his archaizing depiction of Herakles and Aietes. Intertextually, Herakles’s impromptu contest and Aietes’s role in the crypto-athletic ἄεθλος he sets Jason resonate with the Homeric funeral games and their exploration of the definition of excellence and how it is measured, through the figure of Eumelos who is both πανύστατος and ἄριστος. Polyphemos’s ram, whose superficially humble lastness conceals Odysseus’s victory, renders the relationship more complex still.
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Ecofeminism has for almost half a century played a large role in activism outside academia and in a range of disciplines within it, including literary criticism. It has had surprisingly little impact on Classics, though many of its... more
Ecofeminism has for almost half a century played a large role in activism outside academia and in a range of disciplines within it, including literary criticism. It has had surprisingly little impact on Classics, though many of its concepts and concerns are shared by scholarship that does not invoke its name. Within ecofeminism, there is a tension between those who embrace the association between women and nature that stands at its heart, and those who argue that that very association is itself a tool of patriarchal domination. Ecofeminist readings can identify textual strategies which either deplore the parallel subordination of women and nature, or give it the valorization usually reserved for men and culture. Alternatively, they can identify and themselves deplore the patriarchal exploitation of the woman-nature association, or celebrate texts which destabilize that essentializing strategy. The Georgics contains passages that can be read in all four ways, so that it is not only illuminated by ecofeminism, but dramatizes ecofeminism’s own tensions and contradictions.
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The four incomplete trimeters in Seneca's tragedies allude to the incomplete hexameters in Virgil’s Aeneid. In two cases, from Thyestes and Troades, the Senecan half-line alludes to a specific Virgilian half-line. The other two examples,... more
The four incomplete trimeters in Seneca's tragedies allude to the incomplete hexameters in Virgil’s Aeneid. In two cases, from Thyestes and Troades, the Senecan half-line alludes to a specific Virgilian half-line. The other two examples, from Phaedra and Phoenissae, may bear a more distant resemblance to specific Virgilian half-lines, but more probably evoke the phenomenon in a more general way.
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Varius’ Thyestes, performed at the Actian Games (or possibly the triple triumph) in 29 BC to celebrate the end of the civil wars and the young Caesar’s attainment of pre-eminence at Rome, depicted a fraternal conflict of horrific violence... more
Varius’ Thyestes, performed at the Actian Games (or possibly the triple triumph) in 29 BC to celebrate the end of the civil wars and the young Caesar’s attainment of pre-eminence at Rome, depicted a fraternal conflict of horrific violence that would have clearly symbolized the recent civil wars to a Roman audience. The figure of Thyestes, aggressive, gluttonous, drunken, bloodthirsty, cannibalistic, lustful, tyrannical, was made to correspond to Antonius, whose depiction as all of these things can be found in Cicero’s Philippics and various other hostile sources. The figure of Atreus corresponded to the young Caesar. Varius did not shy away from the horrors of the civil war or the horrors that the young Caesar had committed in that civil war but, as Virgil was simultaneously doing in the Georgics and would do again in the Aeneid, he represented that terrible violence as, like sacrifice, miraculously productive of positive ends, in short as constructive destruction. While the propagandistic (in the most sophisticated and nuanced sense) aims of the play demanded that the fratricidal/civil war nature of the conflicts and the element of fault on both sides be acknowledged and processed, Varius nevertheless used subtle hints to increase the culpability of Thyestes-Antonius and lessen or at least palliate that of Atreus-young Caesar.
Research Interests: Classics, Latin Literature, Roman History, Propaganda, Roman Drama, and 12 moreCivil Wars (Roman Republic), Roman Empire, Augustan Principate, Roman Tragedy, Augustus, Latin poetry, Marcus Antonius, Octavianus Augustus, Roman and Greek Drama, Mark Antony, The Triumviral Period (43 - 31BC), and Varius
Ovid's description of Morpheus as appearing to kings and generals alludes to Horace Ars Poetica 73 — or perhaps better evokes the Horatian formula for essential epic — and adds a generic dimension to Morpheus’ metapoetic role. Because he... more
Ovid's description of Morpheus as appearing to kings and generals alludes to Horace Ars Poetica 73 — or perhaps better evokes the Horatian formula for essential epic — and adds a generic dimension to Morpheus’ metapoetic role. Because he visits kings and generals, he is a figure of epic composition, though one whose generic status will be challenged, compromised, and complicated by his presence in the generically fluid world of the Metamorphoses. The appearance of his brothers to the people has similar generic implications and could help resolve the textual crux at 11.644–645.
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The mutability of Philokleon’s generational identity in Aristophanes’ Wasps is well established. Critics routinely write of his ‘rejuvenation’ after the first parabasis, but inversions and perversions of generational identity pervade the... more
The mutability of Philokleon’s generational identity in Aristophanes’ Wasps is well established. Critics routinely write of his ‘rejuvenation’ after the first parabasis, but inversions and perversions of generational identity pervade the whole play. Even before Philokleon has undergone his liberating transformation at the symposion, the educational roles of father and son are reversed as Bdelykleon schools him in the proper way to behave in polite society. Bowie has also shown how the three agones in which Philokleon (unsuccessfully) engages during the first half of the play correspond to the three stages of an Athenian male citizen’s life: ephebeia, maturity in the hoplite phalanx, and old age in the jury. However, critics have not observed that Philokleon goes through another, parallel journey from youth through maturity to old age in the three ‘iambic scenes’ where he is confronted by the victims of his outrageous behaviour on his way home from the symposion. Unlike the three defeats in Bowie’s agones, which successively strip him of his three identities, his victories in the iambic scenes enable him to inhabit the roles of νεανίαϲ, ἀνήρ, and γέρων simultaneously, a triple identity that reaches its climax in the exodos.
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Carmen 108 is one of the most neglected and unloved in the Catullan corpus. When it is mentioned in scholarship, it is either as a distastefully extreme instance of iambic invective or the object of a prosopographical exercise in... more
Carmen 108 is one of the most neglected and unloved in the Catullan corpus. When it is mentioned in scholarship, it is either as a distastefully extreme instance of iambic invective or the object of a prosopographical exercise in identifying the addressee, Cominius. Gnilka alone has tried to situate it in the context of late Republican political violence, in particularly public lynching. Instead of isolating these two aspects of the poem from each other, this article argues that c. 108 is a self-conscious exploration of the interaction between poetic form and hors-texte. The terms of the invective situate it firmly within the tradition of Archilochean and Hipponactean iambos and it may even allude directly to a fragment of the latter. Yet the threats of violence are transformed when recontextualized within the world of the late Republic, where such literary violence was very much a reality. The poem performs a symbolic dismemberment of Cominius’ body, but one that cannot be safely separated from acts of mob violence in the period. The pragmatics of Catullan iambos explores the limits of verbal violence as speech-act and the point at which hate-speech becomes indistinguishable from the violence it incites.
Research Interests: Classics, Latin Literature, Violence, Political Violence and Terrorism, Roman Republic, and 11 moreRoman poetry, Literary Representations of Violence, Catullus, Late Roman Republic, Latin poetry, Iambic Poetry, Archilochus, Hipponax, Roman Literature, Greek Iambic Poetry, and Literature and Violence
Born in 39 C.E., the Roman poet Lucan lived during the turbulent reign of the emperor Nero. Prior to his death in 65 c.e., Lucan wrote prolifically, yet beyond some fragments, only his epic poem, the Civil War, has survived. Acclaimed by... more
Born in 39 C.E., the Roman poet Lucan lived during the turbulent reign of the emperor Nero. Prior to his death in 65 c.e., Lucan wrote prolifically, yet beyond some fragments, only his epic poem, the Civil War, has survived. Acclaimed by critics as one of the greatest literary achievements of the Roman Empire, the Civil War is a stirring account of the war between Julius Caesar and the forces of the republican senate led by Pompey the Great. Reading Lucan's Civil War is the first comprehensive guide to this important poem. Accessible to all readers, it is especially well suited for students encountering the work for the first time. Editor Paul Roche places the Civil War's ten extant books in historical and literary contexts. The volume's contributors, all expert scholars, address topics and issues pertaining to the entire work, including religion and ritual, philosophy, gender dynamics, and Lucan's relationships to Vergil and Julius Caesar. The volume is enhanced by a map of Lucan's Roman world and a glossary of key terms.
This chapter examines Lucan's depiction of femininity, masculinity, and other aspects of gender in The Civil War.
This chapter examines Lucan's depiction of femininity, masculinity, and other aspects of gender in The Civil War.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Latin Literature, Masculinity Studies, Gender, Masculinity, and 14 moreRoman poetry, Latin Epic, Lucan, Constructions of femininity, Epic poetry, Femininity, Constructions of masculinity, Latin poetry, Julius Caesar, Roman Literature, Roman Women, Cleopatra VII, Roman Epic, and Feminine Studies
Born in 39 C.E., the Roman poet Lucan lived during the turbulent reign of the emperor Nero. Prior to his death in 65 c.e., Lucan wrote prolifically, yet beyond some fragments, only his epic poem, the Civil War, has survived. Acclaimed by... more
Born in 39 C.E., the Roman poet Lucan lived during the turbulent reign of the emperor Nero. Prior to his death in 65 c.e., Lucan wrote prolifically, yet beyond some fragments, only his epic poem, the Civil War, has survived. Acclaimed by critics as one of the greatest literary achievements of the Roman Empire, the Civil War is a stirring account of the war between Julius Caesar and the forces of the republican senate led by Pompey the Great. Reading Lucan's Civil War is the first comprehensive guide to this important poem. Accessible to all readers, it is especially well suited for students encountering the work for the first time. Editor Paul Roche places the Civil War's ten extant books in historical and literary contexts. The volume's contributors, all expert scholars, address topics and issues pertaining to the entire work, including religion and ritual, philosophy, gender dynamics, and Lucan's relationships to Vergil and Julius Caesar. The volume is enhanced by a map of Lucan's Roman world and a glossary of key terms.
This chapter examines Lucan's intertextual engagement with Vergil, especially his Aeneid.
This chapter examines Lucan's intertextual engagement with Vergil, especially his Aeneid.
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In Aristophanes’ Wasps, Philocleon says that he and his fellow jurors do not acquit Oeagrus until he has recited a speech from the Niobe. Scholars have almost universally assumed that this was the name of a contemporary tragic actor,... more
In Aristophanes’ Wasps, Philocleon says that he and his fellow jurors do not acquit Oeagrus until he has recited a speech from the Niobe. Scholars have almost universally assumed that this was the name of a contemporary tragic actor, despite its extreme rarity. This article argues that the reference is rather to the father of Orpheus. As a figure from the generation before the archetypal bard, ‘an Oeagrus’ represents the old-fashioned poetry to which Philocleon and his fellow jurors are devoted.
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Poet-figures in Ovid’s Metamorphoses have been the object of much study, especially those silenced by the powerful, but little attention has been given to Pyreneus. Immediately before the famous contest of the Muses and Pierides, the... more
Poet-figures in Ovid’s Metamorphoses have been the object of much study, especially those silenced by the powerful, but little attention has been given to Pyreneus. Immediately before the famous contest of the Muses and Pierides, the former briefly narrate their attempted rape by the usurping Thracian tyrant Pyreneus and his precipitous death while trying to fly after them. The few critics who have touched on this episode have tended to focus exclusively on one aspect, be it the poetic, sexual, political, or religious. None has provided a holistic interpretation which does justice to the complex interplay of these four dimensions or to Ovid’s witty and characteristic reification of figurative language.
Pyreneus is simultaneously an invading usurper, an attempted rapist, an impious theomach, and, on the poetic plane, a talentless plagiarist or derivative imitator, who tries to appropriate others’ work but bathetically and disastrously fails. The interrelation of these four roles, each troping the others, throws light on all, and Pyreneus needs to be contextualized among the Met.’s other tyrants, rapists and theomachs, as well as its poet-figures. The episode itself, derivative and overstuffed with Ovidian motifs, is mimetic of the sort of narrative bad (would-be) poets like Pyreneus produce.
Pyreneus is simultaneously an invading usurper, an attempted rapist, an impious theomach, and, on the poetic plane, a talentless plagiarist or derivative imitator, who tries to appropriate others’ work but bathetically and disastrously fails. The interrelation of these four roles, each troping the others, throws light on all, and Pyreneus needs to be contextualized among the Met.’s other tyrants, rapists and theomachs, as well as its poet-figures. The episode itself, derivative and overstuffed with Ovidian motifs, is mimetic of the sort of narrative bad (would-be) poets like Pyreneus produce.
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It is a fact (almost) universally acknowledged that Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica adopts and adapts Virgil’s bold move in the theodicy of Georgics 1 of depicting the shift from the Golden Age to the Iron Age as one of cultural progress... more
It is a fact (almost) universally acknowledged that Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica adopts and adapts Virgil’s bold move in the theodicy of Georgics 1 of depicting the shift from the Golden Age to the Iron Age as one of cultural progress rather than decline, deliberately initiated by a providential Jupiter. Whether the implications of such a cultural shift are ultimately considered as—broadly speaking—optimistic or pessimistic in Virgil, Valerius, both, or neither, is far more controversial and well beyond the scope of this note. Instead, it will argue that a programmatic line in the Argonautica, which is widely recognized as signaling the intertextuality between the two theodicies, contains a further, unrecognized, learned allusion to Georgics 1. This allusion is in turn set in dialogue with another intertextual evocation, just ten lines later, of the same source-text. The two Valerian allusions act together to produce a creative response to Virgil’s theodicy, which has implications for the evaluation of the Iron Age in both poems.
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Bad mothers are a prominent feature of extant Attic tragedy. Whether over- or under-privileging kinship bonds, figures such as the filicidal Medea, the incestuous Jocasta and the quintessential mêtêr amêtôr, Clytemnestra fit into the... more
Bad mothers are a prominent feature of extant Attic tragedy. Whether over- or under-privileging kinship bonds, figures such as the filicidal Medea, the incestuous Jocasta and the quintessential mêtêr amêtôr, Clytemnestra fit into the tragic pattern of violating socio-religious norms, in particular those relating to philia. Tragic mothers have also been situated within the Athenian civic discourse of the maternal ideal. The evidence of the fragmentary tragedies enriches this picture with a category of mother which does not totally invert or deny the maternal ideal, but rather subtly, though no less ruinously, perverts it. A major aspect of the Athenian maternal ideal is the selfless sending of sons to die in war on behalf of the polis. Two characters in the fragmentary tragedies of Sophocles, Eriphyle (in Epigoni) and Astyoche (in Eurypylus) partially fulfil this ideal by sending their sons (and, in Eriphyle’s case, husband) to war, but do so in a perverted fashion. This chapter focuses on Astyoche and the pervesion of her motivation, means, and the result of her actions, privileging natal over marital family, accepting bribes, and failing to ‘save the city’. It will also examine the effect she has on the depiction of the ideal, whether she functions as a purely contrastive antitype, as an exploration of the limits and boundaries of the ideal, or as a more provocative challenge to the ideal itself and figures such as Praxithea.
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The consular dating formula situates a work of historiography in the annalistic tradition (or alludes to it from outside) and evokes a complex of Republican norms. Time becomes Republican time and is organised according to the reassuring... more
The consular dating formula situates a work of historiography in the annalistic tradition (or alludes to it from outside) and evokes a complex of Republican norms. Time becomes Republican time and is organised according to the reassuring rhythms of the regular elections, tenures, and relinquishments of magistracies. Scholars have shown how Livy and Tacitus manipulate the formula’s associations to dramatise the disruption or obsolescence of these constitutional forms. Throughout his three works, Sallust produces an even wider range of effects by ironic deployment and radical deformation of the formula.
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On grounds of sense, style, and practice, the juxtaposition of Assyrio…regi with Cadmi at Phoen. 124-5 is unSenecan and intolerable. The corruption Cadmi can easily be accounted for as an intrusive gloss of Assyrio…regi. Senecan practice... more
On grounds of sense, style, and practice, the juxtaposition of Assyrio…regi with Cadmi at Phoen. 124-5 is unSenecan and intolerable. The corruption Cadmi can easily be accounted for as an intrusive gloss of Assyrio…regi. Senecan practice with ablatives of source of renown suggests that it has displaced either an adjective or a participle. This article offers a conjecture for what that displaced word might have been.
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Tragedy was always political in the Graeco-Roman world, but not always in the same way. It was born under tyranny but flowered under democracy, only to be appropriated by oligarchies and other tyrannies. Scholars disagree radically about... more
Tragedy was always political in the Graeco-Roman world, but not always in the same way. It was born under tyranny but flowered under democracy, only to be appropriated by oligarchies and other tyrannies. Scholars disagree radically about tragic politics even in the period for which we have the most evidence, fifth-century Athens. Some believe that tragedy asserted the values of Athenian democracy, and shared the spirit of questioning and debate that were prominent in the political assembly. Some argue that the political concerns of tragedy are those of any classical Greek polis rather than specific to those of democratic Athens. Others argue that tragedy can, sometimes at least, serve as an apolitical exploration of the human condition. Yet the definition of politics should not be limited to constitutional debates like that in Euripides’ Suppliant Women or the (narrated) dramatizations of an assembly in session, as in his Trojan Women and Orestes. Politics is about how human beings relate to each other within a societal context, and how their ethical values impact upon themselves and their fellows; as such, politics is at the heart of tragedy.
Research Interests: Classics, Greek Literature, Latin Literature, Greek Tragedy, Seneca, and 14 moreAthenian Democracy, Roman Drama, Ennius, Roman political culture, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Roman Tragedy, Ancient Greek Politics, Ancient Greek Literature, Ancient Greek Drama, Accius, Pacuvius, and Roman and Greek Drama
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An introduction to Juvenal for The Conversation.
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Senecan tragedy engages with satire in three interconnecting, overlapping ways. The first is its appropriation of satire' s essentializing, polemical construction of an 'idea' of tragedy as overblown, excessive, transgressive, monstrous... more
Senecan tragedy engages with satire in three interconnecting, overlapping ways. The first is its appropriation of satire' s essentializing, polemical construction of an 'idea' of tragedy as overblown, excessive, transgressive, monstrous and swollen. This satiric idea of tragedy is fundamentally the mainstream classical idea of bad tragedy, and it is precisely that sense of perversion, of the failed sublime, of greatness gone awry which Seneca exploits. He uses the overblown, excessive, transgressive, monstrous passions and bodies, crimes and sufferings of his characters both to trope those generic qualities of 'essential tragedy' and to be troped by them. Form and content, each mimetic of the other, are characterized by a grotesque 'moreness'. Satire's assertion that tragedy is irrelevant to real life is the only part of the idea which Seneca rejects. The second is his incorporation in the tragedies of features which are demarcated as satiric- especially moralizing sections and those dealing with contemporary urban life- and remain self-consciously alien generic intrusions, similar to that of elegiac, epic or pastoral elements. Thirdly, Seneca takes the existing generic affinity between satire and tragedy, both genres of perversion, and accentuates it through an increased focus on bodily and poetic deformation.
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Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.18, in which Scylla throws a tiny pebble against Megara’s famous sounding tower, contains an exact, unique but unnoticed verbal echo of Helenus’ description of the sea-monster Scylla’s lair at Aeneid 3.432:... more
Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.18, in which Scylla throws a tiny pebble against Megara’s famous sounding tower, contains an exact, unique but unnoticed verbal echo of Helenus’ description of the sea-monster Scylla’s lair at Aeneid 3.432: resonantia saxa. The allusion tropes its own intertextual status as an ‘echo’ and contributes to the ludic confusion of the two Scyllas in this episode and elsewhere. The collision of the ‘tiny pebble’ with the Virgilian rocks further tropes the episode’s elegiac and Callimachean recasting of epic material. The childishness of the game is also part of the self-conscious puerility of the Metamorphoses’ poetics.
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This article argues for a parallelism between the figures of Aeolus in book one and Latinus in book seven of the Aeneid. The similarity lies in their shared inability to regulate the disorderly passions of their (potentially) disorderly... more
This article argues for a parallelism between the figures of Aeolus in book one and Latinus in book seven of the Aeneid. The similarity lies in their shared inability to regulate the disorderly passions of their (potentially) disorderly subjects, a divergence from the Hellenistic ideal of the “good king” which constitutes, not the common antitype of the tyrant, but what I term the “weak king.” The parallelism is signalled by its place among the structural replications of book one in book seven, and especially by the reciprocal similes which compare Aeolus’ winds to rioters and Latinus’ rioters to winds. The relationship of these similes also encourages a partially allegorical interpretation of Aeolus as a figurative equivalent of the (more) literal Latinus. The differences between Aeolus’ active unleashing of disorder and Latinus’ passive capitulation to its independent outbreak further illuminate the complexities inherent in the figure of the weak king.
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In Martial’s epigrams, the incongruity between the Latin primary obscenity futuo, with its connotations of recreational sex, and the respectable act of begetting children is on several occasions intensified by a bilingual wordplay with... more
In Martial’s epigrams, the incongruity between the Latin primary obscenity futuo, with its connotations of recreational sex, and the respectable act of begetting children is on several occasions intensified by a bilingual wordplay with the verb’s near-homonym, the Greek verb φυτεύω. The pun is most effectively deployed where it has no expressed object to disambiguate between ‘fucking’ a woman and ‘begetting’ a child. As with the best wordplays, it is not merely a piece of verbal cleverness, but by embodying both concepts in one sound, it constitutes a paradoxical embodiment of the simultaneous contrast and identity between ‘fucking’ and ‘begetting’.
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An exploration of the ways in which Republican tragedy might be considered 'Roman', of the implications of an imported 'national' literature, and the introduction of some new approaches. Approaches adopted include: comparison with recent... more
An exploration of the ways in which Republican tragedy might be considered 'Roman', of the implications of an imported 'national' literature, and the introduction of some new approaches. Approaches adopted include: comparison with recent assessments of how 'Athenian' Attic tragedy was, especially plays written for tyrants and others reperformed outside Athens; Republican tragedy as part of, but distinct from, the diaspora of tragedy throughout the Greek world; postcolonial, transnational, and Weltliteratur approaches; focus on issues of translation (employing notions of domestication and foreignization), aetiology, identity, and performance.
Research Interests: Latin Literature, Greek Tragedy, Translation Studies, Transnationalism, Roman Drama, and 13 moreEnnius, Roman Tragedy, Transnational Literature, Reception of Greek tragedy, Roman theatre, Latin poetry, Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Archaic Latin Tragedy, Accius, Pacuvius, Latin Tragic Drama, and Postcolonialism
This article proposes a unified solution to four of the five puzzles about Catullus 56: why it alludes to Archilochus fr. 168 West, which Cato is being addressed, what precisely is being done by the pupulus either of or to the puella, and... more
This article proposes a unified solution to four of the five puzzles about Catullus 56: why it alludes to Archilochus fr. 168 West, which Cato is being addressed, what precisely is being done by the pupulus either of or to the puella, and why Catullus emphasizes the anecdote’s laughability. Plutarch attests that M. Porcius Cato, when jilted by Lepida, wrote iamboi against his successful rival, Metellus Scipio, “making use of the bitterness of Archilochus, but rejecting his licentiousness and childishness”. Such a selective form of imitation would situate Cato within a long tradition of modified iambos, suppressing aspects which were perceived as being distinctively Archilochean (or Hipponactean) but nevertheless undesirable on aesthetic, ethical or social grounds. Catullus 56 can be seen as a response addressed, not to Cato the prude, but to Cato the iambist, reasserting the importance of “licentiousness” and “childishness” to the art of being Archilochus properly. The reassertion of these qualities is both enacted by the poem’s practice and reified in its literalized imagery.
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Horace’s choice of the word alba at Satires 1.2.124, in spite of its inappropriateness for describing fair skin, evokes both its associations with the white stola of the noble matrona and, in combination with longa, a wordplay on the city... more
Horace’s choice of the word alba at Satires 1.2.124, in spite of its inappropriateness for describing fair skin, evokes both its associations with the white stola of the noble matrona and, in combination with longa, a wordplay on the city of Alba Longa, and its connotations of nobility through ancient ancestry. This in turn accounts for the satirist’s choice of Ilia and Egeria, paragons of nobility rather than beauty, as the figures he imagines he is screwing. The wordplay, by gesturing back, in its literal sense, to Horace’s prescriptions for physical attractiveness, and forward, in its punning sense, to the nobility of Ilia and Egeria, dramatizes the slippage between the satirist’s desire for beauty and for nobility, a slippage which Horace’s intertext, Cercidas, achieved in a different way through the ambiguous figure of Helen.
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Chrysalus' overdetermined assertion that he will set up his master as a Priam to be bought contains a bilingual wordplay on Priamus/Πρίαμος and πρίαμαι. The wordplay is paralleled in learned etymologies of Priam's name from his ransom by... more
Chrysalus' overdetermined assertion that he will set up his master as a Priam to be bought contains a bilingual wordplay on Priamus/Πρίαμος and πρίαμαι. The wordplay is paralleled in learned etymologies of Priam's name from his ransom by Hesione, and in an ad hoc pun in Diphilus' Emporos.
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The only extant choliambic line by Cinna, comparing some action to a Psyllus doing something to an asp, is preserved by Aulus Gellius to illustrate that the adjective somniculosus can have the causative sense ‘sleep-inducing’ as well as... more
The only extant choliambic line by Cinna, comparing some action to a Psyllus doing something to an asp, is preserved by Aulus Gellius to illustrate that the adjective somniculosus can have the causative sense ‘sleep-inducing’ as well as the active one of ‘sleepy’. If Gellius is correct, then the simile’s missing verb is likely to have one of the Psylli, famed for their ability to lull snakes to sleep, doing just that to a ‘sleep-inducing asp’. The situation which would be compared to this must be that of someone receiving a taste of their own medicine. This would also account for the Psyllus’ imprecise epithet Poenus, which would pun on poena. If Gellius is wrong, and somniculosus means ‘sleepy’ as in almost all other instances in Latin, the combination of snake and sleep imagery, which can be paralleled separately in other texts, with the abusive choliambic metre might suggest that what is being compared to the asp is the flaccid penis of an impotent man.
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It is of immense significance for the ideology of an epic whether its antagonists are depicted as morally reprehensible villains, deserving of defeat and destruction at the hands of the protagonist. Such a depiction tends simultaneously... more
It is of immense significance for the ideology of an epic whether its antagonists are depicted as morally reprehensible villains, deserving of defeat and destruction at the hands of the protagonist. Such a depiction tends simultaneously to reflect and construct a worldview based around stark moral polarities whose boundaries justifiably can and indeed positively should be policed by the employment of violent and usually deadly force. Epics where the moral excellence of the protagonist and the moral turpitude of the antagonist are compromised tend to construct and reflect a more complex morality, in which the right and wrong are not absolutes, or at least no one figure or side has a monopoly on them. In a third category, the moral chaos of civil war totally dissolves the distinction between hero and villain.
Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica self-consciously plays with these competing ideologies and their respective types of antagonist. It sets heroic, civilizing Argonauts against monstrous, tyrannical villains in stark moral contrast. Simultaneously, it problematizes this polarity, not to produce the moral complexity of the Iliad or Aeneid, where there is right and wrong on both sides, but to taint his heroes with the villainy of their opponents. This paradox reflects and contributes to the poem’s paradoxical depiction of Jupiter’s Iron-Age Weltplan as civilizing progress and destructive decline. This chapter explores the paradox and its implications, focusing on the themes of tyranny, gigantomachy and civil war, and on the figures of Pelias, Aeetes, Amycus, Laomedon, Perses and Cyzicus.
Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica self-consciously plays with these competing ideologies and their respective types of antagonist. It sets heroic, civilizing Argonauts against monstrous, tyrannical villains in stark moral contrast. Simultaneously, it problematizes this polarity, not to produce the moral complexity of the Iliad or Aeneid, where there is right and wrong on both sides, but to taint his heroes with the villainy of their opponents. This paradox reflects and contributes to the poem’s paradoxical depiction of Jupiter’s Iron-Age Weltplan as civilizing progress and destructive decline. This chapter explores the paradox and its implications, focusing on the themes of tyranny, gigantomachy and civil war, and on the figures of Pelias, Aeetes, Amycus, Laomedon, Perses and Cyzicus.
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Virtually nothing is known for certain about Sophokles’ lost satyr play Salmoneus except that it must have dealt with the eponymous anti-hero’s impious imitation of Zeus. I argue that a reference in fr. 538 Radt to the malodorous quality... more
Virtually nothing is known for certain about Sophokles’ lost satyr play Salmoneus except that it must have dealt with the eponymous anti-hero’s impious imitation of Zeus. I argue that a reference in fr. 538 Radt to the malodorous quality of the thunderbolt draws attention to the gross physicality of the thunder-machine or bronteion which Salmoneus has invented and constructed out of ox-hides. This has both a metatheatrical dimension, since the bronteion was probably part of the stage-machinery of 5th-century drama, and a thematic one, since it emphasizes the low, corporeal nature of Salmoneus’ thunder in contrast to the sublime weapon of Zeus which it imperfectly mimics. The established parallelism between thunder and farting adds another level to the debasing of Salmoneus’ invention and concomitant deflation of his pretensions. Finally, I shall suggest that another fragment, fr. 537, relating to the sympotic game of kottabos may have drawn a similarly deflating parallel between the hurling of the wine-lees and that of the tyrant’s ersatz thunderbolts.
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In his Odes, Horace routinely places a caesura after the fifth syllable of his Alcaic hendecasyllables. Four of the exceptions to this rule have been shown to be expressive, but the fifth, at 4.14.17, has never been adequately accounted... more
In his Odes, Horace routinely places a caesura after the fifth syllable of his Alcaic hendecasyllables. Four of the exceptions to this rule have been shown to be expressive, but the fifth, at 4.14.17, has never been adequately accounted for. The expectation of such a caesura encourages the reader or listener to (mis)hear the word incerta in the phrase in certamine Martio. The shadow of this word may generate a feeling of doubt about the surrounding panegyric, or its disambiguation may dramatize the elimination of such doubt. The word incerta is also a self-reflexive signal of its own ambiguous status.
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Discussions of the Roman reception of Hellenistic Poetry still often end with the Augustan era, sometimes with an explicit statement that later poets are influenced as much by Roman as by Alexandrian poets. In fact, the study of how... more
Discussions of the Roman reception of Hellenistic Poetry still often end with the Augustan era, sometimes with an explicit statement that later poets are influenced as much by Roman as by Alexandrian poets. In fact, the study of how Flavian poets received the Neoteric and Augustan reception of Hellenistic aesthetics offers a fascinating example of large-scale “window-“ or “double-allusion”, as Statius, Martial and others provide creative commentaries on and tendentiously shape their predecessors’ work as responses to Alexandrianism.
This article focuses on the specific example of Martial 1.92. It is widely recognized that this epigram alludes to Catullus 15, 21, 23, and 24. However, it has not been noted that its opening lines also allude to Callimachus’ Aetia prologue, signalling a series of further allusions which not only gives a metapoetic dimension to the triangular relationship between the poet, his deliciae Cestos, and his antagonist Mamurianus, but also tendentiously construct Catullus’ Furius and Aurelius cycle as similarly informed by (anti-)Callimachean aesthetics. This interpretation also relates to Martial’s ludic reification of Callimachean imagery, his depiction of books as beautiful boys and vice versa, his general reception of Catullus, and the division of Catullus’ own persona between Callimachean and Archilochean facets.
This article focuses on the specific example of Martial 1.92. It is widely recognized that this epigram alludes to Catullus 15, 21, 23, and 24. However, it has not been noted that its opening lines also allude to Callimachus’ Aetia prologue, signalling a series of further allusions which not only gives a metapoetic dimension to the triangular relationship between the poet, his deliciae Cestos, and his antagonist Mamurianus, but also tendentiously construct Catullus’ Furius and Aurelius cycle as similarly informed by (anti-)Callimachean aesthetics. This interpretation also relates to Martial’s ludic reification of Callimachean imagery, his depiction of books as beautiful boys and vice versa, his general reception of Catullus, and the division of Catullus’ own persona between Callimachean and Archilochean facets.
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The name of the addressee of Catullus 32, whether Ipsit(h)illa, Ipsimilla or Ipsicilla, contains a bilingual wordplay on the Homeric hapax ἴψ, a woodworm which bores through materials just as Catullus’ unfulfilled erection does at the end... more
The name of the addressee of Catullus 32, whether Ipsit(h)illa, Ipsimilla or Ipsicilla, contains a bilingual wordplay on the Homeric hapax ἴψ, a woodworm which bores through materials just as Catullus’ unfulfilled erection does at the end of the poem. It may also relate to certain conventions of hetaira-names.
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An exploration of the potential for visual as opposed to verbal allusion in ancient drama, surveying possible examples in Attic Comedy and Tragedy, and Roman Comedy, before focusing on Republican Tragedy, especially the Iliona of... more
An exploration of the potential for visual as opposed to verbal allusion in ancient drama, surveying possible examples in Attic Comedy and Tragedy, and Roman Comedy, before focusing on Republican Tragedy, especially the Iliona of Pacuvius..Some reflections on the visual dimension of Republican Tragedy in general are included.
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In his catalogue of contemporary evils caused by the fear of death at the start of DRN 3, Lucretius includes the phenomenon that men ‘hate and fear’ their relatives’ tables. This has widely and correctly been taken as a reference to the... more
In his catalogue of contemporary evils caused by the fear of death at the start of DRN 3, Lucretius includes the phenomenon that men ‘hate and fear’ their relatives’ tables. This has widely and correctly been taken as a reference to the fear of poisoning, despite its echo of Accius’ Atreus and attendant evocation of the mutually exclusive scenario of an unwitting cannibalistic feast. By comparing the generic relationship constructed with tragedy by writers of satire and old comedy, it can be seen that Lucretius partially evokes the Thyestean feast, only to reject its very existence, and with it the validity of the tragic genre. This technique of ‘anti-allusion’ is analogous to Christopher Ricks’ ‘antipun’. There may also be wider tragic anti-allusion in the DRN 3 proem, and the target may be not only tragedy itself but its employment by philosophical and political writers.
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The metrical form of this graffito which was scratched onto a theatre wall at Tarracina and which apparently refers to the death of Clodius, a hexameter followed by a hemiepes, may not be the accidental result of incomplete composition or... more
The metrical form of this graffito which was scratched onto a theatre wall at Tarracina and which apparently refers to the death of Clodius, a hexameter followed by a hemiepes, may not be the accidental result of incomplete composition or transcription. The combination is known as the Second Archilochean and is used by Horace in Odes 4.7. Morgan (Musa Pedestris) has shown how the truncation of the second hexameter expresses the truncation of the lofty aspirations of epic in Odes 4.7, an effect precisely produced by the metrical form of CIL I(2) 3109a.
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The iambist's repeated cries of "heu" in Epode 11 constitute a bilingual wordplay on the Greek cry "io" (alas) and the name Io, which is suggested by that of his former beloved, Inachia. The evocation of Io resonates with the epode's... more
The iambist's repeated cries of "heu" in Epode 11 constitute a bilingual wordplay on the Greek cry "io" (alas) and the name Io, which is suggested by that of his former beloved, Inachia. The evocation of Io resonates with the epode's images of erotic frenzy, of being a "fabula" (subject of gossip/tragedy), and suggests that the iambist's cries at Inachia's threshold might have been both groans and her name.
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Lucan's recitation of a half-line from an epic by Nero while noisily evacuating his bowels, as described in Suetonius' Life of Lucan, constitutes a performance of Roman satire in the tradition of Lucilius, Horace, Persius and (later)... more
Lucan's recitation of a half-line from an epic by Nero while noisily evacuating his bowels, as described in Suetonius' Life of Lucan, constitutes a performance of Roman satire in the tradition of Lucilius, Horace, Persius and (later) Juvenal both in its equation of composition with crepitation and in its reinterpretation of a grandiose epic phrase as referring to the lowest bodily functions.
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The reference in a pentameter by Ticida to Valerius Cato's poem Lydia as maxima cura is a bilingual wordplay and complex allusion to Callimachus' description of a poem by Antimachus, possibly the Lyde as "the large woman" (fr. 1.12 Pf.)
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Sinon famously combines truth with fiction to add verisimilitude to his narrative. The false oracle he gives evokes Achilles’ demand for the sacrifice of Polyxena. The final, enjambed word Argolica, breaks the oracle’s rhetorical symmetry... more
Sinon famously combines truth with fiction to add verisimilitude to his narrative. The false oracle he gives evokes Achilles’ demand for the sacrifice of Polyxena. The final, enjambed word Argolica, breaks the oracle’s rhetorical symmetry and is metrically superfluous to a hexametric response. Virgil thus signals Sinon’s manipulation of the “true” oracle about Polyxena to fit the “false” story about his own attempted sacrifice.
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... | Ayuda. Seneca's Epistolary Responsum: The De Ira As Parody (Book). Autores: Bob Cowan; Localización: Journal of roman studies, ISSN 0075-4358, Nº 93, 2003 , pag. 387. © 2001-2009 Universidad de La Rioja · Todos los derechos... more
... | Ayuda. Seneca's Epistolary Responsum: The De Ira As Parody (Book). Autores: Bob Cowan; Localización: Journal of roman studies, ISSN 0075-4358, Nº 93, 2003 , pag. 387. © 2001-2009 Universidad de La Rioja · Todos los derechos reservados. XHTML 1.0; UTF‑8.
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Do we still need, as Elaine Showalter predicted, ‘even more drastic re-estimations of the old masters?’ Vergil, so-called ‘Father of the West’, has not escaped scrutiny by feminist criticism, yet feminist approaches to Vergil, or readings... more
Do we still need, as Elaine Showalter predicted, ‘even more drastic re-estimations of the old masters?’ Vergil, so-called ‘Father of the West’, has not escaped scrutiny by feminist criticism, yet feminist approaches to Vergil, or readings alert to reading his works through the lens of gender, still represent a tiny portion of modern scholarship. And unlike Homer or Ovid, he has traditionally not been seen as fertile territory for feminist philosophy. This special volume of Vergilius, which has its origins in the Vergilian Society’s Symposium Cumanum 2019 on the same theme, asks how ever-evolving contemporary feminisms might engage in new dialogues with the Aeneid, Eclogues and Georgics, and aims to reassess, through Vergil, the role and potential of feminist modes of reading within classical philology.