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The veteran commander Lucius Aemilius Paullus, at the Battle of Pydna in 168 bc, is supposed to have said that he had never seen anything as terrifying as the Macedonian phalanx (Polybius Histories 29.17.1). Nevertheless, he went on to defeat it.
Micaela Janan, The Politics of Desire. Propertius IV, ser. The Joan Palevsky imprint in classical literature, Berkeley and Los Angeles 2001.
William V. Harris, Restraining Rage. The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge, MA, 2001.
Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans. The Gladiator and the Monster, Princeton, NJ, 1993.
Matthew B. Roller, Constructing Autocracy. Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome, Princeton, NJ, 2001.
‘A while ago you came into the senate. Out of this whole crowd, out of so many of your friends and associates, who greeted you?…what about the fact that on your arrival the bench was cleared, that all the men of consular rank who have so often been selected for murder by you, as soon as you sat down left that part of the bench bare and empty—how do you think you can bear this?' (Cicero, Against Catiline I.7.6). ‘Then Catiline replied, maddened with rage, “Since I am surrounded by enemies and driven headlong, I shall extinguish the fires of my fortune with the ruin of all”’ (Sallust, The War with Catiline 31.9).
Also the ‘great gangsters of the dying Republic’ (105).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (3 vols.), trans. Robert Hurley, London 1978–1988 (French original: Histoire de la sexualité, ser. Bibliothèque des histoires, Paris 1976–1984); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York 1990.
Richlin's manifesto for continuity, for example, is to her more interesting ‘because of the practical implications of the unchanged aspects for women’. Richlin, ‘Towards a History of Body History’ in: Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World ed. Mark Golden and Peter Toohey, New York 1997, p. 33.
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in: Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York 1991, pp. 149–181.
Here is where Barton's work can be contrasted with that of Janan, cited above, which engages with Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to put forward a very precise reading of the Roman subject. For Janan's account of the traumas of empire and principate, see pp. 45–50 of The Politics of Desire.
Peter Gay, Freud for Historians, Oxford 1985, p. 189.
Barton's discussions of the episode are placed as follows: p. 81 (Ab Urbe Condita 9.2.10–14); 89 (9.6.10–13—mistyped in Barton as ‘1–13’); 114 (9.4.8–16); 137 (9.4.2–3); 156–7 (9.9.18); 206 (9.5.8, 9.6.8); 208 (9.5.13–14); 254 (9.7.3); 255 (9.6.6–8); 256 (9.6.4)—note that the discussions on pp. 254–6 are not conjoined; 263 (9.7.4, 9.12.1–4).
Calavius' interpretation later is echoed by the Samnites as the Romans renew the war, but the point is that on both occasions the view of Roman shame as a sign of implacable resentment and brewing violence is focalized through the Italian neighbours (allies/enemies) of Rome.
quod ubi est Capuam nuntiatum, evicit miseratio iusta sociorum superbiam ingenitam Campanis (9.6.5).
Lux quaedam adfulsisse civitati visa est (9.10.3). Barton's readings elsewhere on shame and sensitivity to light greatly inform how I have understood this episode.
‘Haec ludibria religionum non pudere in lucem proferre et vix pueris dignas ambages senes ac consulares fallendae fidei exquirere!’ (9.11.2): ‘Are you not ashamed to commit such mockeries of religion in broad daylight and as old men of consular rank to devise evasions of your promises scarcely worthy of boys!’
Though cf. Clifford Ando, ‘Was Rome a polis?, Classical Antiquity 18 (1999) 5–34.
Barton frequently acknowledges the chronological difference (e.g. p. 92, pp. 274–5), but sees the unbalancing of Roman culture as ‘beginning in the civil war period’ (p. 273).
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See my Das Wunderjahr in Jena. Geist und Gesellschaft, 1794/95 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998) and Vorboten der Moderne. Zwischen Berlin und Jena um 1799 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, forthcoming).
Rudolf Haym, Die romantische Schule. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Geistes (1870; rpt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961); Ricarda Huch, Die romantik. Blütezeit, Ausbreitung und Verfall (1899–1902; rpt. Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1951).
Oskar Walzel, German Romanticism, trans. Alma Elise Lussky (New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1932); and H. A. Korff, Geist der Goethezeit, 4 vols. (1940; 2nd ed. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1958).
See Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe. Two Essays, trans. James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945).
Philosophie der Subjektivität. Zur Bestimmung des neuzeitlichen Philosophierens. Akten des 1. Kongresses der Internationalen Schelling-Gesellschaft 1989, ed. Hans Michael Baumgartner and Wilhelm G. Jacobs, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1993).
Manfred Frank, Selbstgefühl (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).
See Dieter Henrich's introduction to his Konstellationen. Probleme und Debatten am Ursprung der idealistischen Philosophie (1789–1795) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991).
This definition would not be news to students of literary Romanticism. As René Wellek observed forty years ago in a review article entitled “Romanticism Re-examined,” all the major studies of European Romanticism agree in that “they all see the implication of imagination, symbol, myth, and organic nature, and see it as part of the great endeavor to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and the unconscious.” See Wellek's Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 199–221; here 220.
Karl Jaspers, Schelling. Größe und Verhängnis (1955; rpt. München: Piper, 1986).
In fact, Schleiermacher is mentioned once in a note (673n9), where Dilthey's Leben Schleiermachers is cited for Schlegel's influence on Schleiermacher. But Beiser does not suggest the equally important influence that Schleiermacher had on Schlegel during the year and a half when the two young men shared an apartment in Berlin while Schlegel was writing his novel Lucinde and Schleiermacher his Reden über die Religion (both 1799).
See my essay “Rhetorik der Revolution in Jena: Schlegels drei Tendenzen,” in: Geist und Gesellschaft. Zur deutschen Rezeption der Französischen Revolution, ed. Eitel Timm (München: Fink, 1990), 83-97.
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BA I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); BA II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers university Press, 1991).
In 1987 Bernal planned to call BA III: “Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and other Studies in Egypto-Greek Mythology” (BA I: 63).
BAWB:1; BAR (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Bernal says that he did not respond to John Coleman because “virtually all the points he makes have been raised by other reviewers” (BAWB:18); he leaves Loring Brace et al. and Frank Snowden to Shomarka Keita in DBA; comment on Kathryn Bard is not needed because “her popular piece does not mention me [sic]”, or on Egyptologist Frank Yurco because he disagrees with him only on technical matters of chronology. He does not consider Mario Liverani and Richard Jenkyns to be “substantial critics”.
J. Blok, “Proof and Persuasion in Black Athena: the Case of K. O. Mueller,” in: Black Athena: Ten Years After=Talanta 28/29 (1996/97): 173–208; S. P. Morris, Daedalus and the Origins of Greek Art (Princeton 1992); W. Burkert, Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechische Religion und Literatur, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Jahrg. 1984, Bericht 1 (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 1984). M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
M. R. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
“The scholarly purpose of Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx [the original title of BA III] is the same as that of the other two volumes: to open up new areas of research to women and men with far better qualifications than I have” (BA I: 73).
Readers of BA I will remember that Bernal believes that classical studies have been corrupted by pervasive anti-Semitism and racism, and that training in classical philology leads to “intellectual passivity” (BA I: 3).
Cf. Bernal's statement “What is anathema for Mary Lefkowitz is the claim made in Black Athena that the ‘Glory that was Greece’ was the result of intercontinental hybridity.” Times Literary Supplement, May 11, 2001, 10.
See, e.g., Times Literary Supplement, June 20, 1997, 15–16. On connections between Egypt and Africa, cf. NOA: 135.
E.g., Wilson J. Moses speaks of me as “an obscure drudge in the academic backwaters of a classics department”: Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.
On Bernal's use of Aryan (where everyone else speaks of Indo-European), see John Coleman, “Did Egypt Shape the Glory that was Greece?” in BAR: 290–1. The designation has caused considerable confusion among critics who do not specialize in ancient studies: one Greek journalist absurdly supposed that in NOA I was trying to argue that the ancient Greeks came from Germany (!).
Stolen Legacy: 92. See esp. Jay Jasanoff, “Stolen Legacy? The Evidence from Language”, in: Were the Achievements of Ancient Greece Borrowed from Africa? eded. Andrea Ross and Anna fnLea (Washington: Society for the Preservation of Hellenic Studies, 1997), 65-66.
Cf. NOA, 22–23. Of course I was not trying to make any comparison between the Greeks and any other Mediterranean people; my discussion of the Minoan frescoes at Avaris was simply meant to show that archaeological evidence could also be used to support the notion of a movement of peoples from the Aegean world into Egypt.
Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 214
Pace Bernal, nitron is not what is now called niter (potassium nitrate, KNO3), but natron or soda ash (sodium carbonate, Na2CO3).
On the use of natron in desiccation, see Eugen Strouhal, Life of the Ancient Egyptians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 261–262.
G. G. M. James, Stolen Legacy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954). For a discussion of James' arguments, see NOA: 134–154, 254.
Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (Dover, Mass.: They Majority Press, 1993), 16.
Erik Hornung, Das Esoterische Ägypten (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), 190.
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O’Gorman, E., Ziolkowski, T. & Lefkowitz, M.R. Review articles. Int class trad 9, 584–603 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-003-0004-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-003-0004-2