Latin Literature

The volume collects thirty-three essays honouring professor Mario Infelise. The variety of topics proposed by the authors shows the range and depth of the discussions that Mario Infelise’s work has provoked over the years: the history of books, printing and publishing, the history of information and censorship, and cultural history, always intertwined with the great history of the Modern Age.

Despite the fact that postmodern aesthetics deny the existence or validity of genres, the tendency nowadays is to assume that there was in Antiquity a homogeneous group of works of narrative prose fiction that, despite their differences, displayed a serious of recurrent, iterative, thematic, and formal characteristics, which allows us to label them novels. The papers assembled in this volume include extended prose narratives of all kind and thereby widen and enrich the scope of the canon. The essays explore a wide variety of texts, crossed genres, and hybrid forms, which transgress the boundaries of the so-called ancient novel, providing an excellent insight into different kinds of narrative prose in antiquity.

Las nupcias de Filología y Mercurio de Marciano Capela, la última obra de carácter enciclopédico de la Latinidad tardía, incluye, en su libro IX, la Música como la última disciplina liberal del número. A lo largo de este libro que cierra la obra, su autor condensa las teorías musicales antiguas que comprenden las técnicas elementales principales y las especulaciones músico-matemáticas de mayor dominio y crédito y añade, aunque en menor medida, ciertas aportaciones propias. Una de ellas es su tratamiento de los pentacordos, calificado por la crítica como «único» en la tratadística antigua y tardoantigua, no habiendo nada parecido en documentos anteriores, griegos y latinos, de teoría musical. Este trabajo presentará brevemente al autor y a su obra y se centrará en la explicación de los pentacordos y de los esquemas pentacordales como parte del engranaje harmónico tratado en paralelo con los tetracordos.

Panaetius of Rhodes. Introduction The existence of few texts about Panaetius is recognized. It is about establishing his biography and thought and discussing his role in the circle of the Scipios and his political position before the Gracchi revolution. Here we will maintain that it maintains an intermediate position, in which it wants to make the reforms within the framework of the law.

Lesser known text by the author of the "Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis" and the "Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz", where he theorises the practical realisation of the sacred Christian Gospel in a utopian city-state, on the model of the "City of the Sun" by Tommaso Campanella .

En la trayectoria del profesor Domingo Yndurain como filologo y, sobre todo, como estudioso de la historia literaria espanola, ocupa un lugar central la publicacion de su magna obra Humanismo y Renacimiento en Espana (Madrid, Catedra, 1994), de la cual se cumplen diez anos. La celebracion de este decenio es motivo mas que suficiente para reconsiderar la significacion del libro mencionado en el panorama bibliografico sobre la cuestion humanista, dentro del marco mas amplio del Renacimiento.

Los siete discursos de Marco Tulio Cicerón reunidos en este volumen están marcados por el exilio del orador (58-57 a. C.). Debido a las pugnas políticas que se producían en el Senado entre la oligarquía (de la que era partidario Cicerón) y la facción democrática (liderada por Julio César), los sucesos precipitaron salida del primero de Roma, tras el éxito de los movimientos para aislarlo de su más acérrimo adversario: Publio Clodio. A su vuelta a la capital, Cicerón volvió a ejercer como letrado y en sus discursos y alegatos la sombra del exilio y de la época turbulenta que estaba viviendo la ciudad está siempre presente. Los seis primeros textos los pronunció entre septiembre del 57 y mayo del 56 a. C. El último, En defensa de T. Anio Milón, del año 52, está íntimamente relacionado con los anteriores, ya que Milón fue el asesino de Clodio.
Publicados originalmente en la BCG con el número 195, este volumen presenta las traducciones de En agradecimiento al Senado, En agradecimiento al pueblo, Sobre la casa, Sobre la respuesta de los arúspices, En defensa de P. Sestio, Contra P. Vatinio, En defensa de T. Anio Milón llevadas a cabo por José Miguel Baños Baños.

In a globalised world in which 68.5 million people are migrants, the representation of borders and border crossers in the media is a controversial issue. This article explores how transcultural literature moves beyond one-dimensional depictions of borders and migrants and instead creates differentiated perspectives. Gazmend Kapllani’s A Short Border Handbook (2009 in Greek, translated into English in 2010) and Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (2017, written in English) both revolve around a “border syndrome”, an illness incorporating a fear of the border and a simultaneous urge to transgress it, as well as a fascination with liminality. This article argues that these literary texts narrate borders as palimpsests of different temporalities and geographies, of external and internal as well as political and metaphysical borders, which accounts for the complexity and ultimate incurability of the “border syndrome”.

Seit Hubert Janitscheks grundlegender Edition führen die Ausgaben von Albertis De pictura Plinius’ Naturgeschichte gut vierzig Mal als Referenz für Sachinformationen und Mikronarrative des zweiten und dritten Buches an, was ihn zum quantitativ bedeutendsten Bezugspunkt des Textes macht.  Diese starke Präsenz ist in der Forschung schon vielfältig diskutiert worden.  Auf dieser Basis sollen hier einige Überlegungen und Thesen darüber formuliert werden, wie Alberti mit dem Pliniustext umging, wie die ihm vorliegende(n) Handschrift(en) beschaffen war(en) und in welcher Weise er die aus Plinius entlehnten Mikronarrative rekontextualisierte.

This review presents a book that might have been more useful if the author had stuck to his original intention to elucidate the intellectual debate that bishop Arethas carried out with Lucian in the scholia which he added to Lucian’s writings; but he does so satisfactorily only in his first chapter.

This book positions Ovid's Metamorphoses as a foundational text in the western history of environmental thought.  The poem is about new bodies. Stones, springs, plants and animals materialize out of human origins to create a world of hybrid objects, which retain varying degrees of human subjectivity while taking on new physical form. In bending the boundaries of known categories of being, these hybrid entities reveal both the porousness of human and other agencies as well as the dangers released by their fusion. Metamorphosis unsettles the category of the human within the complex ecologies that make up the world as we know it.

Drawing on a range of modern environmental theorists and approaches, the contributors to this volume trace how the Metamorphoses models the relationship between humans and other life forms in ways that resonate with the preoccupations of contemporary eco-criticism. They make the case for seeing the worldview depicted in Ovid's poem as an exemplar of the 'premodern' ecological mindset that contemporary environmental thought seeks to approximate. They also highlight critical moments in the history of the poem's ecological reception, including reflections by a contemporary poet, as well as studies of Medieval and Renaissance responses to Ovid.



Francesca Martelli is Associate Professor of Classics at UCLA, USA. She is the author of Ovid's Revisions (2013) and Ovid (2020).

Giulia Sissa is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Classics at UCLA, USA. She is the author of Madre Materia (with S. Campese and P. Manuli, 1983), Greek Virginity (1989), The Daily Life of the Greek Gods (with Marcel Detienne, 2000), Le Plaisir et le mal. Philosophie de la drogue (1997), L'âme est un corps de femme (2000), Sex and Sensuality in the Ancient World (2009), Jealousy. A forbidden passion (2017) and Le Pouvoir des femmes. Un défi pour la démocratie (2021).

At the end of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pythagoras of Samos (570-490 BCE) advocates vegetarianism as a countermeasure to the liquid ontology of a metamorphic world. This eloquent speech is consistent with the vegetarian contrainte of the poem. Metempsychosis creates both morphological dissimilarity and physical consanguinity among living beings. Humanus cruor may run in different bodies.This compels us to ask what blood is. As the vital juice infusing raw meat and human flesh; as the fluid shed in the ritual butchery of sacrifices; as a material incarnation of the migrating soul, blood deserves special attention. This bright-red substance brings together the world. But the effusion of hypothetically human blood can also be a matter of quotidian gore, exactly as it is in what Pythagoras calls 'Thyestes' meals'.

Dining is a potential tragedy.

Pythagoras draws out the consequences of the very possibility of metamorphosis. There is a dark side to the virtual transformation of human beings into other bodies. Changeability makes the world interconnected, but also instable and uncertain. To be sure, change is generative rather than destructive, vital rather that deadly, creative of deceptively alien, seemingly-nonhuman forms rather than obvious monsters. But, precisely for these reasons, we then belong in a network of human/nonhuman/quasihuman/also-human beings. Precisely because a metamorphosis is not a total replacement of human identity, but an imperceptible hybridization, it creates ambiguity, confusion and, worst of all, the potential for cannibalism. Think of Io's father, facing a plump cow. Think of Tereus feeding obliviously on his own son's flesh. Think of your own reaction at Acteon's invisibility in the eyes of his own dogs. The same possibility for error is the effect of metempsychosis. Anything comestible, although apparently nonhuman, could be 'inhabited' by a human soul. Animism, and more precisely, 'anthropogenism' , as Philippe Descola has argued, is the ontological truth of this kind of world.

The dissolution of humanity in the liquid ontology of metamorphosis becomes a cause for perceptual insecurity. The loss of a previous shape prevents an observer from seeing through a new body, and from recognizing the person who is now dwelling in a bovine, meaty frame. The poem creates the virtuality of alimentary violence, but then pursues three intertwined strategies to avoid it. Firstly, it crafts an internal taxonomy, which opposes animals to plants. The former are all inedible. The latter can be either safe food, when they are not the outcome of a transformation; or non-food, whenever they derive from a metamorphosis. Secondly, the poem deploys a critical discourse on bloody sacrifice. Finally, it ends with Pythagoras' normative intervention, which brings together all these threads: a liquid ontology, metempsychosis, metamorphosis and the imperative to abstain, here and now, from blood-shedding and meat-eating.

It is because we are at risk of burdening our own digestive apparatus with something conceivably human, that we must avoid any kind of bloody food. The speech fits both the hybrid outcome of metamorphosis, and the vegetarian logic underlying the poem.

We will start from there...

The crucial knot of Lucrezia Tornabuoni’s Story of Devout Susanna (La istoria della casta Susanna) is the narrative insistence on the reifying eff ects of a gaze gendered as male: Susanna is, as in the apocryphal/deuterocanonical account, represented as an object of voyeurism. It is my aim to show the subtle ways in which Tornabuoni’s depiction of Susanna embraces a series of allusions to other female fi gures such as Dante’s Matelda, Beatrice and Proserpina (Pg XXVIII, XXX, XXXI), Petrarch’s Laura and Danae (RVF 126, 23). Carrying the plurivocal traces of other women represented as visual objects, Tornabuoni’s reinterpretation of the biblical heroine suggests how the objectifying eff ects of the male gaze can slide from exaltation to abasement, from love to rape. After having evoked the equally detrimental repercussions of the female gaze when it reproduces the logic of domination (Medusa), the sacred narrative seems to open up, in its fi nal part, to another account of an allegedl...

The paper examines the presence of the concept of resilience in the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, a leading figure of the Julio-Claudian era and protagonist of Nero's quinquennium aureum, but later forced to retire from political activity. Tacitus (Ann. 15.60-65) criticises the frailty he displayed in the last moments of his life, quite different from the ethical and ethological precepts he had offered to his readers. In an attempt to understand the reasons for this apparent aporia, the texts of the Cordovan are analysed alongside parallel sources and in the light of modern critical literature, in order to draw an overall picture supported by solid textual analysis.

One of the glories of the Greco-Roman classics is the opportunity that they give us to consider a great culture in its entirety; but our ability to do that depends on our ability to work comfortably with very varied fields of scholarship. The Handbook for Classical Research offers guidance to students needing to learn more about the different fields and subfields of classical research, and its methods and resources.

The book is divided into 7 parts: The Basics, Language, The Traditional Fields, The Physical Remains, The Written Word, The Classics and Related Disciplines, The Classics since Antiquity. Topics covered range from history and literature, lexicography and linguistics, epigraphy and palaeography, to archaeology and numismatics, and the study and reception of the classics.

Guidance is given not only to read, for example, an archaeological or papyrological report, but also on how to find such sources when they are relevant to research. Concentrating on "how-to" topics, the Handbook for Classical Research is a much needed resource for both teachers and students.

This paper concerns the comparison of three twelfth-century biblical manuscripts from Plock, namely the so-called The Bible of Plock and The Evangeliary of Princess Anastasia with two Mosan biblical manuscripts: The Evangeliary of Averbode and the Biblia Universa transcribed in the same period. The first three texts: Beatissimo Papae Damaso (Novum opus), Prologus quatuor evangeliorum (Plures fuisse) and Iheronimus Damaso Pape (Sciendum etiam) – the last one is not included in the Bible of Plock - and Evangeliary of Princess Anastasia are of St. Jerome. In contrast, the introductions to the Synoptic Gospels: Argumentum secundum Matheum, Prologus in Marco and Prologus sancti Evangelii secundum Lucam are not the texts of St. Jerome, as is sometimes mistakenly repeated by different scholars, but were written by Sedulius Scottus, an Irish monk and a poet who lived and worked in a school in Leodium in the ninth century, whereas the introduction to the Gospel according to St. John: Prephat...