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References

  1. See, for example, Walter Burkert, “The Logic of Cosmogony,” in: R. Buxton, ed., From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 101 (repr. in Id. Walter Burkert, Kleine Schriften II. Orientalia, ed. M. L. Gemelli Marciano, et al., Hypomnemata: Supplement-Reihe 2 [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2003], p. 241): “The appearance of man must be the final and decisive part of any cosmogony told by humans. It is a strange omission in Hesiod that anthropogony is missing, although it seems to be announced” (cf. Th. 50).

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  2. Scholia ad Th. 187 in A. Pertusi, ed., Scholia Vetera in Hesiodi Opera et Dies, Pubblicazioni dell’Università Cattolica del S. Cuore: nuova ser. 53 (Milano: Società editrice “Vita e pensiero”, 1955).

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  3. Clay also relies on the narrative position of Hesiod’s account of Eris’ children to support her argument that the poem imagines the creation of humankind from the Meliai. Since Hesiod says that some of Strife’s children “cause the greatest pain for men who inhabit the earth” (Th. 231), Clay argues that man has already been born. But references to humankind are frequently proleptic in the Theogomy and cannot be used to determine chronology, as, for example, in the lines describing the birth of Eros, third born from chaos: “he who dominates the mind in the breast and the sage determination of all gods and of all men” (Th. 121–22).

  4. In Homer, nomoi refers to pasture lands, êthea to animal haunts; in extant Greek literature, the first place said to have laws and to live by manners is Olympus.

  5. For explanatory de, see J. D. Denniston, The Greek Particles, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934) p. 169.

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  6. Edwards describes a Homeric basileus as a Big Man or chief who serves as the community’s leader in warfare, has a hall to entertain a retinue of armed followers and visiting xeinoi, possesses a temenos of prime farmland, and owns extensive herds. He also owns large ships for warfare and perhaps for long-distance trade, and he orchestrates the redistributive economy. He concludes: “Ascra certainly cannot support the equal of the Homeric basileus” (p. 120). At Ascra, trade and risk management are organized at the level of the household. There is no reference to a war leader or a warrior class, luxury goods, arms or horses, or technology—irrigation, terraced plots, ships, roads—organized at the community level. “The only standard of merit” is “success in farming” (p. 121) and there is no indication of a Big Man or chief controlling community affairs. In both of Hesiod’s poems, the sole function of basilêes is to soothe social ills and to judge disputes in the agora.

  7. The most likely port for Ascra was Creusis, thirty kilometers away, reachable by a day’s travel in an ox-drawn cart. Hesiod advises a farmer to praise a small boat but to place his cargo in a large one (W&D 643). Hesiod also discusses the best day for gathering wood to build a boat and the best day for launching one (W&D 80–79 and 817–18). It remains an open question how interested an Ascran farmer would be in such information. How inclined were inland mountain farmers to own their own boats, or did they more commonly take passage along with other traders on a large merchant vessel?

  8. Primary produce is grain, supplemented by viticulture, herding, and, most likely, gardening. There is no discussion of olive production in the Works and Days. The rhythm of the year is regulated by cereal production: intense labor for plowing and sowing from late October to the winter solstice and for harvesting from early May to mid-July. Relatively light work to prune and trench vines from early March to early May and then again from early September to late October to harvest the grapes. Early spring is also the time to plow fallow fields. Mid-July to early September offers few demands on the farm and is a safe time to sail (for “profit”). The winter months from the solstice to early March also demand little from a farmer but Hesiod warns against frequenting the blacksmith’s shop and places where people gather to gossip and hear news.

  9. The names of Zeus’ children with Themis (Law), the Horai (Th. 901–30), and with Eurynome (Wide-Law), the Charites (Th. 90711), reappear in lower case forms in Hesiod’s description of the just city. Two of the Horai, Dike (Justice) and Eirene (Social Peace) are mentioned directly (W&D 225 and 227), and the third child, Eunomia (Good-Governance) is implied throughout the passage. Similarly, one of the Charites, Thalia, appears as a lower case plural noun (W&D 231), and the other two, Aglaia (Splendor/Merriment) and Euphrosune (Well-mindedness) are implied. By contrast, atê, a child of Night, and war and limos, children of Eris, Night’s daughter, are absent from this city.

References

  1. J. Robertson, “The Enlightenments of J.G.A. Pocock,” II, Storia della Storiografia 39 (2001), 140.

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  2. Pocock, 222, Volkerwänderungen should be Völkerwanderungen.

  3. K.M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, ser. Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 13.

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  4. E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. D. Wormersley (London: Penguin, 1995), vol. 1, chapter 15, 482.

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  5. H.J. Berman, Law and Revolution: the Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

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  6. F.L. van Holthoon, State and Civil Society: Theories, Illusions, Realities. A Survey of Political Theories in the 19th century Western World (Maastricht: Shaker, 2003), 17.

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  7. See, to the contrary, D. Hume, History of England, variorum ed., ed. F.L. van Holthoon ( (Charlottesville: InteLex CD ROM, 2000), vol. 2, 520: “But perhaps there was no event, which tended farther the improvement of the age, than one, which has not been much remarked, the accidental finding of a copy of Justinian’s Pandects, about the year 1130 in the town of Amalfi in Italy.” [Reference is to the Liberty Classics reprint, Indianapolis 1985, ed. W.B. Todd].

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  8. Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1978), 2 vols.

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  9. See Hume’s Dialogue at the end of the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.

  10. J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, 499–500.

  11. In my review of the first two volumes (IJCT 8 [2001/02] 667) my complaint was that Gibbon the historian remains out of focus. In the third volume he does so even more.

  12. E. Tortarolo, “Edward Gibbon und die Kulturgeschichte,” Storia della Storiografia 39 (2001), 121. Gibbon often quotes Voltaire however and often with delicate irony: “Voltaire who casts a keen and lively glance over the surface of history…,” vol. 3, ch. 51, 252, note 55.

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  13. E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall, vol. 3, ch. 48, 23.

  14. Ibid., E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall, vol. 3, ch. 48, 25.

  15. He restricts himself to hints. See vol. 1, ch. 2, 84 were he writes, “They [the barbarians] restored a manly spirit of freedom and after the revolution of centuries became the happy parents of taste and science.” See also D. Womersley, The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), “Introduction,” liii and lvii.

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  16. Womersley, —, 133

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  17. E. Gibbon, The History of Decline and Fall, vol. 3, ch. 71, 1085.

  18. Storia della Storiografia 39 (2001), 123–151

References

  1. Bernard Andreae: Odysseus. Mythos und Erinnerung, Katalog zur Ausstellung im Haus der Kunst in München vom 1. Oktober 1999 bis 9. January 2000 (Mainz: Zabern, 1999).

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  2. Robert Harris, Pompeii (New York: Random House, 2003).

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  3. Mary Zimmerman, Metamorphoses. A Play (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002).

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  4. Seneca, Thyestes, trans. Durs Grünbein, ed. Bernd Seidensticker (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2002). See in this connection my article “Seneca: A New German Icon?”, above in this same volume (IJCT 11 [2004–2005], 47–77).

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  5. Volker Riedel, Literarische Antikerezeption. Aufsätze und Vorträge, Jenaer Studien 2 (Jena: Verlag Dr. Bussert & Partner, 1996); “Der Beste der Griechen”—“Achill das Vieh”. Aufsätze und Vorträge zur literarischen Antikerezeption II, Jenaer Studien 5 (Jena: Verlag Dr. Bussert & Stadeler, 2002); Antikerezeption in der deutschen Literatur vom Renaissance-Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart. Eine Einführung (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2000). See my review in International Journal of the Classical Tradition 8 (2001–2002): 603–09.

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  6. In addition to the volume reviewed here, see Michael von Albrecht, Rom, Spiegel Europas. Das Fortwirken antiker Texte und Themen in Europa, 2nd ed., Ad fontes 1 (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998); and Ovid: Werk und Wirkung. Festgabe für Michael von Albrecht zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Werner Schubert, 2 vols., Studien zur Klassischen Philologie 100 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999).

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  7. Two further examples are representative: Werner Frick, “Die mythische Methode”: Komparatistische Studien zur Transformation der griechischen Tragödie im Drama der klassischen Moderne, Hermaea N. F. 86 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998); and Antike Mythen und ihre Rezeption: Ein Lexikon, ed. Lutz Walther (Leipzig: Reclam, 2003). See the extensive (125-page) bibliography of books and articles listed on the website Antikerezeption in der deutschsprachigen Literatur nach 1945, which is maintained by Bernd Seidensticker and his associates at the Free University of Berlin at: http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~antikewa/sek.html

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  8. See Georg von Below, Die Ursachen der Rezeption des Römischen Rechts in Deutschland (München and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1905); and Paul Koschaker, Europa und das Römische Recht (Berlin: Biederstein, 1947).

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  9. E.g., Sir Pierson Dixon, Farewell, Catullus (London: Hollis & Carter, 1953); Tom Holland, Attis (London: Allison & Busby, 1995); and Wanda Menichelli, Catullo: eros e amore (Milano: Camunia, 1995). For further examples see the website bibliography of historical novels with classical themes http://home.t-online.de/home/Stefan.Cramme

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  10. E.g., John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro, Le métier de Zeus: Mythe du tissage et du tissu dans le monde gréco-romain (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1994) (=The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric, tr. Carol Volk, Revealing Antiquity 9 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996]); and Jan Assmann, Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais. Schillers Ballade und ihre griechischen und ägyptischen Hintergründe, Lectio Teubneriana 8 (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner, 1999).

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  11. See, for instance, Wolfgang Bernard Fleischmann, Lucretius and English Literature 1680–1740 (Paris: Nizet, 1964).

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  12. See Theodore Ziolkowski, “Der Hunger nach dem Mythos: zur seelischen Gastronomie der Deutschen in den Zwanziger Jahren,” in: Die sogenannten Zwanziger Jahre: First Wisconsin Workshop, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand, Schriften zur Literatur 13 (Bad Homburg/Berlin/Zürich: Gehlen, 1970), 169–201.

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  13. Goethe in a letter to Knebel of 25 October 1788.

  14. Mythenkorrekturen: Zu einer paradoxalen Form der Mythenrezeption, Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft/Spectrum Literature 3 (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2005).

  15. See Theodore Ziolkowski, Virgil and the Moderns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 231–33.

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  16. See Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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  17. E.g., The Return of Thematic Criticism, ed. Werner Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Horst S. Daemmrich and Ingrid G. Daemmrich, Spirals and Circles: A Key to Thematic Patterns in Classicism and Realism, 2 vols., Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature 7–8 (New York: Peter Lang, 1994); and Thematics Reconsidered. Essays in Honor of Horst S. Daemmrich, ed. Frank Trommler, Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 9 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995).

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  18. Francis Berthelot, La métamorphose généralisée. Du poème mythologique à la science-fiction (Paris: Nathan, 1993).

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  19. In After Ovid: New Metamorphoses, ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 261–63.

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  20. This principle applies a fortiori to the best known works. Our appreciation of Ransmayr’s achievement in Die Letzte Welt is only enhanced by comparison to the finest among the many other fictional treatments of Ovid, such as Vintila Horia’s Dieu est né en exil (1960), Jacek Bochenski’s Nazo poeta (1969; German translation, Der Täter heißt Ovid [1975]), or Marin Mincu’s Il diario di Ovidio (1997). Similarly, it is illuminating to compare the conspicuous popularity of the Prometheus theme in literature of the DDR with the utterly different treatment by such contemporary English poets as Robert Graves, Edwin Muir, and Ted Hughes. See Theodore Ziolkowski, The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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References

  1. It is true that Aristotle does not fulfil his Politics promise (VIII, 7) to give a more detailed account of catharsis in at least the extant Poetics. He does, though, contrast it directly with ‘education’—or, in VIII, 6—with ‘instruction’, and may possibly be separating it from notions of ‘relaxation’ or ‘rest after exertion’ (‘mere’ entertainment, in more modern parlance?) in what he does have to say about it. An element of such importance may have to be investigated in terms of what it is not, if nothing significant is offered in terms of what it is.

  2. The key Cahiers article is probably François Truffaut’s ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma françai’ of 1954. The Cahiers critics’ fascination with personal expression seems to have been augmented by its hostility to what they felt was the outmoded and sterile ‘tradition of quality’ represented by postwar French cinema, but its most startling use may have been to rescue Hollywood from neglect by serious critics thanks to its detection of certain auteurs as producing art works in the setting of the factory. (See further Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School, tr. Richard Neupert [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003], esp. chapter 2, ‘A Critical Concept’ [French orig.: Michel Marie, La nouvelle vague: une école artistique (Paris: Nathan, 1997), esp. chapter 2, “Un concept critique”]).

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  3. Truffaut self-deprecatingly described himself as ‘the least modern and the least intellectual of all the New Wave directors’. Don Allen’s admiration for the director does not prevent him from saying in regard to this that Truffaut never wanted to revolutionise French cinema but to return to the ‘good’ traditions of the 1930s. Writing of 400 Blows, Allen remarks on the paucity of invention in the action of the film and also on the absence of technical experiment or philosophical arguments. (Don Allen, Finally Truffaut [London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1986], pp. 35–36.)

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  4. The general point here is fortuitously illustrated by New Yorker film critic David Denby’s recent reactions to two different new movies in the same week. He says of one, ‘Maria…, the heroine of the superb independent film Maria Full of Grace, arrives early in life at an awful moment of decision: she must either take a big risk with her future or fall into the nullity of routine, perhaps forever… Since we see everything from her point of view, the amoral powers of identification—the complicity that a visual medium is so good at inducing—take over our responses; Maria may be doing something wrong, but we desperately want her not to get caught’, [My emphasis] Talking of Kim Basinger, who plays Marion, the heroine of The Door in the Floor reviewed in the same column the same week, Denby writes that she is ‘so kindly and so beautifully ravaged—age has only increased her loveliness—that we find it hard to judge her harshly for neglecting her little girl or for fooling with this boy, but, by any standard, Marion has become a monster’. [My emphases] (David Denby, ‘Teen Jobs: Maria Full of Grace and The Door in the Floor, Current Cinema’, The New Yorker, July 26, 2004, pp. 96–97)

  5. The American public’s ambivalence about Rudolph Valentino in his lifetime, so that he is at once despised for his ‘feminisation’ and erotic objectification by one section while he is deified for these same aspects of his star persona by another, complicates the picture still more. Valentino is asnalysed in this manner by such films scholars as Miriam Hansen (‘Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship’, in Christine Gledhill [ed.], Stardom: Industry of Desire [London and New York: Routledge, 1991]) and Gaylyn Studlar (‘Discourses of Gender and Ethnicity: The Construction and De[con]struction of Rudolph Valentino as Other’, Film Criticism, vol. 13, no. 2, 1989).

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  6. Kaja Silverman, ‘Masochism and Male Subjectivity’, in Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (eds.), ‘Male Trouble’ special issue, Camera Obscura 17, 1988.

  7. This is an approach advocated by, for instance, Stephen Neale in his Genre (British Film Institute, 1980).

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Scully, S., van Holthoon, F.L., Ziolkowski, T. et al. Review articles. Int class trad 11, 424–455 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-005-0005-4

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