Ursus

Military battles? None. However, I'd love to be a demented emperor and arrange interesting gladiatorial jousts. For instance ... could a phalanx of midgets defeat a legion of lame old men?

The few weeks I played it before I became disgusted with it, I liked the Hellenic faction. Once you get all of Greece and the surrounding lands conquered, with connecting roads and ports, you'll never want for a treasury. And if you build an army of armoured hoplites and Cretan archers, you can take on Roman legions. Plus I liked the fact the Greeks have 4 deities to choose from, whereas the Roman factions only had 3.

Stratis Kyriakidis, Catalogues of Proper Names in Latin Epic Poetry. Lucretius - Virgil - Ovid. Pierides. Studies in Greek and Latin Literature. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Pp. xix, 219. ISBN 978-1-84718-146-6. $69.99. Reviewed by Christopher Francese, Dickinson College (francese@...) Word count: 2274 words ------------------------------- To read a print-formatted version of this review, see http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2009/2009-01-08.html To comment on this review, see http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/01/20090108.html ------------------------------- This book is a new and valuable contribution to the understanding of catalogues of proper names in epic, a subject that has exercised scholars since antiquity and drawn considerable interest in recent years. The big catalogues (Homer's ships, Vergil's Latin allies) are not the focus here. Kyriakidis deals mainly with the smaller ones (of warriors, rivers, and places) that are ubiquitous in classical epic. His central insight is that in poetic catalogues of names it is the density of names, the number of names per line over a span of lines, that matters most in the literary effect. Just count the names per line--a simple idea, but one that yields important dividends in the hands of such a sensitive and skilled reader as Kyriakidis. His watchwords are density, pacing, and tempo. An accumulation of names means a swift pace, and little emphasis on each one. Wider spacing of names gives each name more breathing space and emphasis. Epic poets, starting with Homer, use this simple equation in quite subtle ways to reinforce the meaning at any given moment, to emphasize an emotion or a picture, and as a kind of guide to focus the attention of the reader or listener. Albin Lesky tried this method briefly in a 1970 article about Vergil's catalogues, [[1]] and that article evidently suggested Kyriakidis' trademark technique of enumeration (e.g., a catalogue with ten names in five lines might be analyzed 1-2-3-2-2). But Kyriakidis is far more comprehensive, and economically handles a wealth of examples from Homer to Hellenistic hexameter poetry, Vergil and Ovid. Lucretius plays only a small role. An appendix analyzes all the catalogues in the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses, grouping them in terms of densityeither-- "density in the middle," "spacing in the middle," "ascending mode," "descending mode," "internal balance, " or "erratic pattern." The structure of the book is problematic, but I will discuss that later. First, a few examples to give a sense of Kyriakidis' approach. The catalogue of nymphs who mourn Patroclus in Iliad 18.39-51, he argues, stops the narrative so as to allow us to dwell on Thetis' grief, not to suspend it, as a scholiast on this passage maintains and as modern students have complained.[[2]] The list of nymphs at Georgics 4.334-47, postpones the meeting of Aristaeus and Cyrene and allows the reader time to anticipate it. A catalogue of killings in the Iliad (15.328-42) has spacing in the middle, density at the flanks. At the center is a miniature aristeia for Aeneas, and the lists of several other kills on the flanks helps the reader to focus on Aeneas without interrupting the sequence of the narrative. This is an Iliadic pattern, not found in the Odyssey or in Apollonius of Rhodes; but Vergil uses it in Aeneid 10.123-145. There Ascanius is introduced, with a simile, between two more dense lists, first of Trojans, then of Latins. Kyriakidis deftly notes how the density of the list of Trojans belies their actual sparseness on the wall (rara muros cinxere corona, 10.122). The catalogue indicates the impression they would like to make on the Latins. Ascanius' position in the middle of the catalogue mimics his position in the middle of the scene described. Lists of descending density emphasize the end, as when Agamemnon calls the elders to attend a sacrifice (Il. 2.405-7), and the most prominent name in the list, that of Odysseus, appears alone in the last verse. In a travel catalogue, the list of places Menelaus visited on his homeward journey (Od. 4.83-5), the rhythm of names slows (3-3-1) in tandem with the narrative pace, stressing the last name in the catalogue. Kyriakidis finds a similar pattern at Aen. 6.58-61, where Aeneas describes his wanderings to the Sibyl, saving Italiae for isolation in the last verse. The moral? Oftentimes geographical names "are not there primarily as information to the reader but seem to participate in the process of transforming a visual sequence into a temporal experience for the reader, or, in other instances, to follow an acoustic experience" (p. 28). An illustration of the latter is Vergil's list of names of places filled with lament of the Dryads for the loss of Eurydice (Georgics 4.460-63). It has an ascending tempo (1-2-3) that expresses in textual terms the magnitude and spreading of the lament through the empathy of nature. Kyriakidis often detects efforts to arrange names in the text in such a way that they mimic or reinforce ("mirror" is his favored term) an action or idea. The Pleiades are close together in the sky, and Aratus puts them close together on the page (Phaenomena 262-3). At Iliad 15.328 we hear that "man slew man and the fight was scattered." This is followed by a rather irregular distribution of names, which are scattered over the text.[[3]] Vergil employs a similar technique at Aen. 9.756-77, where the Trojans "scatter" at the sight of Turnus (diffugiunt 9.756), and the density of names that follows shows no particular pattern. Kyriakidis even claims, somewhat less persuasively, that the spacing of the names of the promontories of Sicily that cover the body of the punished giant Typhoeus at Ov. Met. 5.349-53 reflects a posture that suggests crucifixion, "hands stretched and feet close together or one on top of the other . . . head . . . tilted to the right" (p. 56). Kyriakidis is familiar with, yet refreshingly independent of, earlier work. There are three main types of questions in previous criticism of epic catalogues, all of which go back at least to Macrobius. The first might be called logical: on what basis are the names chosen or omitted, on what principle are the names ordered? Do the names in the catalogue appear elsewhere in the narrative, or do they not, and is the poet thus guilty of irrational or confusing cataloguing? Macrobius (Saturnalia 5.15-16) saw Homer as entirely logical and consistent in the Catalogue of Ships, Vergil as lacking in care and jumping around geographically in his analogous large catalogues. Recent critics see more sophisticated principles of organization, and even praise "chaotic" catalogues as stylistically appropriate.[[4]] The second, related, set of questions is literary-historical. How do authors deal with catalogues differently, and what does this say about the evolution of the epic form? When Vergil is being discussed this comes down largely to Homer vs. Vergil. According to Macrobius' pro-Homer analysis, Homer's technique, though simple and repetitive, is more pleasing and appropriate. Vergil's efforts to provide variations of phrasing are mannered. The third type of question asks how authors deal with the potential tedium of the catalogue form, a quality which, while not ascribed to any particular epic catalogue, is narrowly avoided thanks to the superior craft of the author. Homer includes stories in his catalogues as a way of staving off ennui and drawing out pleasure, says Macrobius, and Vergil does the same in imitation of him. The elaborate efforts of Mazzochini,[[5]] though more sympathetic to Vergil, revolve essentially around the same problems: catalogues were an inescapable feature of epic after Homer; Homer's dominance presented a challenge and created anxiety for Vergil, who strives for variety and artful structure within the Homeric mold. Vergil's language tends to be more artful, expressive, and visual than in bare Homeric lists of the slain, a way of avoiding the "potential monotony" of the form (Mazzochini, p. 367). Macrobius too had seen both Homer and Vergil as tied irrevocably to the catalogue by virtue of the genre, but working as hard as possible to remedy the inherent tedium of the enterprise (fastidio narrationum medetur 5.16.4, horrorem satietatis excludant 5.16.12). Similarly, the Homeric scholia suggest that the names in Iliad 16.415-8 are only a representative list, since more would be "mere garrulity." Likewise Janko ad loc. says that a longer catalogue "would be tedious." Kyriakidis addresses the questions of coherence, but not in the traditional way. Rather than worry about ordering principles, he investigates patterns of framing and closure. Careful framing and ring composition are characteristic of Homer and Vergil, though Vergil on average allows individual names more space. Vergil closes with a pause only rarely, Homer more often, and this makes the dead stop after the catalogue of Latin allies, which ends Aeneid Book 7 with Camilla, all the more striking. Kyriakidis highlights the relationship of catalogue and simile, and shows how frequently Homer uses them in tandem to prolong and accentuate a narrative moment. But this is apparently peculiar to war poetry, and not found in the Odyssey or in Apollonius. Vergil uses the Homeric device to excellent and original effect (esp. the Baiae simile at Aen. 9.710-716). As for tedium, Kyriakidis winningly refuses to acknowledge the problem (until a footnote on p. 78, admitting that, "In antiquity as well as nowadays, the catalogue has been considered as times as a handy but at any rate monotonous piece"). This frees him to simply analyze types and effects and instances, and not worry overmuch about defending the whole idea. His key, somewhat unorthodox, premise (unfortunately not stated explicitly until p. 108) is that catalogues function like similes, to "hold the reader's attention to a particular stage of the narrative by delaying its development." Prolonging the reading time accentuates the narrative moment; it does not simply delay forward progress. When it comes to Homer vs. Vergil, Kyriakidis is thankfully free of the impulse to defend one at the expense of the other, or to overdraw the contrasts between the two. Indeed, it is the similarities between the two that are so striking in Kyriakidis' analysis, and the fact that Vergil evidently saw what Kyriakidis sees, namely the musical, rhythmic, but also visual potential of lists of names. Kyriakidis does, however, have a larger literary historical idea, involving the distinctiveness of Ovid, and here the book runs in to some trouble. Kyriakidis argues that catalogues of proper names are not just a misunderstood aspect of ancient epic technique but that they "permit us a glimpse into the poet's perceptions of life and the real world" (p. xiii). How so? Homeric and Vergilian catalogues, he argues, enumerate fully, and see each item as a distinct entity. By contrast Lucretius and then Ovid stress the transience and insubstantiality of names. In the Metamorphoses "a great change is brought about which drastically alters the function and meaning that catalogues traditionally had" (p. 73). Ovid's catalogues of rivers show a prevailing "fluminality" in his attitude to life. "Whereas Virgil attempts to control time and show fixity in nature with the imagery of rivers, Ovid endeavors to show that time can never be under control" (p. 143). This philosophical thesis explains the inclusion in the book of Lucretius, who, as Kyriakidis admits, has little time for catalogues of proper names. The problem is that catalogues of proper names are rather a blunt instrument to deal with the issues of the nature of time and the meaning of life. The contrast between Ovid and other epic writers in dealing with catalogues is real and programmatically significant, as Christiane Reitz has shown.[[6]] But Kyriakidis' version of the contrast is overdrawn and over-interpreted. More seriously, the foundation of Kyriakidis' "musical" approach, which is so fruitful in the first part of the book, is the assumption that the names themselves in epic catalogues do not matter very much as individuals. This is true, especially compared with other types of significant naming in ancient literature, say, in lyric or satire or historiography. But this fact fits awkwardly with the later argument that Vergil uses his catalogues to preserve and immortalize, Ovid to stress transience and mortality; that Vergil and Homer confer prominence on names, but Ovid's framing devices devalue them. In fact, as Kyriakidis shows, the whole genre of the epic catalogue of proper names devalues the names as referents, and that is exactly what makes them poetically useful. The structure of the book is odd, and I found myself annotating the table of contents to make it clearer what was being discussed. The first part deals with density and order, first generally, then in Homer and Vergil, then Ovid. Then there is a section on spatial "mirroring," mainly in Ovid. There follows a section called "The Catalogue Vocabulary," which is really about the individuality and transience of names (mainly Ovid). Then comes a section called "Contents and Context," which deals with formal framing devices, but also distinguishes between "narrative" catalogues (mostly in epic) and "exemplary" catalogues (mostly in didactic). Then comes a section on Lucretius and his destabilization of mythological names, contrasted with Vergil. Finally a long section picks up the earlier discussion of framing devices, adding the points about similes and pauses, and uses these formal devices to elicit a broader interpretation of catalogues first in Vergil, then in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The main problem is the interweaving of the formal analyses and the (separable) philosophical argument. And for some reason there is no overall conclusion. Kyriakidis writes with pleasing concision, but some of the analyses of examples are too brief. One of the strong points of the book is its inclusion of the views of the Homeric scholia and other ancient commentators. But there is no coherent discussion of the approaches ancient commentators typically take; this would be an excellent topic for an article. These structural problems, though, do nothing to diminish the value and freshness of the book as a whole. "The poetry of names and places is one of the bases of Greco-Roman poetics," said Paul Veyne.[[7]] Kyriakidis has gone a considerable way to illuminating the function and, yes, beauty, of one of the more maligned, yet fundamental, features of classical epic poetry. ------------------ Notes: 1. A. Lesky, "Zu den Katalogen der Aeneis," in W. Wimmel, ed., Forschungen zur roemischen Literatur. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Karl Buechner (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1970), 189-196. 2. C. Rowan Beye, "Homeric Battle Narrative and Catalogues," HSCP 68 (1964) 345-373, p. 345. 3. But note that Kyriakidis had earlier used the same passage as an example of "spacing in the middle," p.20, cf. p. 36. 4. E.g., A. Barchiesi, Ovidio: Metamorphosi, vol. 1 (n.p.: Mondadori, 2005), p. 253, note on Met. 2.217-26. 5. Paolo Mazzochini, Forme e significati della narrazione bellica nell'epos virgiliano. I cataloghi degli uccisi e le morti minori dell'Eneide (Fascano: Schena Editore, 2000). Reviewed for BMCR by Andreola Rossi here (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2002/2002-08-20.html'>http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2002/2002-08-20.html) . 6. C. Reitz, "Zur Funktion der Kataloge in Ovids Metamorphosen," in Werner Schubert, ed., Ovid, Werk und Wirkung: Festgabe fuer Michael von Albrecht zum 65. Geburtstag, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999), 359-372. 7. P. Veyne, Roman Erotic Elegy: Love, Poetry and the West, trans. D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 118. ------------------------------- The BMCR website (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/) contains a complete and searchable archive of BMCR reviews since our first issue in 1990. Please do not reply to this email as this is an unmonitored mailbox. You can contact us by sending e-mail to classrev@.... To subscribe to or unsubscribe from this list, visit http://newmailman.brynmawr.edu/mailman/listinfo/bmcr-l. To unsubscribe, you may also send a blank e-mail to bmcr-l-request@... with the word Unsubscribe in the subject line. _______________________________________________ BMCR-L mailing list BMCR-L@... http://newmailman.brynmawr.edu/mailman/listinfo/bmcr-l

2 different lists of top 10 discoveries http://www.archaeology.org/0901/topten/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...rchaeology.html

Simon Swain, Stephen Harrison, Jas Elsner (ed.), Severan Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 569. ISBN 9780521859820. $160.00. Reviewed by Tom Hawkins, Ohio State University (hawkins.312@...) Word count: 3864 words ------------------------------- To read a print-formatted version of this review, see http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2009/2009-01-02.html To comment on this review, see http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/01/20090102.html ------------------------------- Table of Contents (http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0810/2008297064-t.html) This volume honors the career of Ewen Bowie, and it succeeds mightily in this goal. The twenty-six contributions composed by members of what Simon Swain terms "the Bowie clan" (p. 1) are of uniformly high quality, and I have already recommended several chapters to graduate students and colleagues. I will offer a few overarching comments before briefly treating each chapter in turn. My only major frustration with Severan Culture is that, as a whole, it offers little sense of its motivations or intentions and thus leaves one to wonder what to make of Severan culture. Imperial dynasties make easy mileage markers for our interests in periodization, but not all dynasties cause equally deep tectonic shifts. Alexander and Caesar gave us wholly new worlds to digest, but can we say the same of the Severan dynasty? Were the cultural changes equally profound at the appearance and the disappearance of the Severans? Does the use of dynastic periodization gloss over important stories of continuity between dynasties or change within a single dynasty? And is "culture" adequately represented in the volume's three section headings (the first of which is obviously problematic as a subdivision of culture): "Literature and Culture," "Art and Architecture," and "Religion and Philosophy"? We get no clear answers to such questions or explanations of the volume's contours in the introduction. In the last two pages of that section Swain does touch on several critical points, such as the Severans as the first non-Italic dynasty to rule the empire, the importance of Caracalla's citizenship policy, the continued growth of Christianity, etc., but some readers might feel that the twenty-five preceding pages, in which Swain summarizes and discusses the papers to come, could have been compressed in order to provide space for a more general and theoretical foundation for this collection. Moving to the positive, it may well be that the greatest honor Severan Culture pays to Bowie is the way in which his students and colleagues have built upon his seminal work on the Second Sophistic (though we should not forget that he has also made important contributions to many other areas of classical scholarship). The bulk of Bowie's bibliography does not consist of studies of art, architecture and religion, and yet this volume includes ample testimony to the ways in which his teaching, mentorship, and research have influenced students of these fields. This influence is also demonstrated in impressive fashion in the preface, in which Stephen Harrison teams with Swain to provide a narrative overview of Bowie's career, a list of his students (a task that requires eight pages!), and a virtually complete bibliography. In addition to the preface and introduction (already mentioned) and the individual chapters (discussed below), Severan Culture also features two enjoyable curiosities. The first is the cover, which seems to depict a hunter aiming his bow at two copulating wild boars. Some readers will recognize this as part of a larger hunting scene which decorates a manuscript of ps.-Oppian's Cynegetica (the Codex Marcianus Graecus 479), but others might be unsure what to make of this image. I do hope that whoever cropped the scene in this way is not surprised at our enjoyment of it. (I surveyed several colleagues' responses to the cover to ensure that I was not simply being sophomoric with all this, but everyone immediately saw the same basic narrative, though an extremely close look will reveal that the rear boar is, in reality, keeping his hooves to himself.) The second item, found on page xix, is a letter from Philostratus to Longinus in praise of Bowie. The letter appears in Greek without preface or explanation, but the Table of Contents hints that this previously unknown sophistic text may have been "discovered" by Donald Russell. Aside from these two pleasant oddities, the volume is a well-produced collection, though its high price will certainly discourage many from purchasing it. There are copious images in the second section of the book, a comprehensive bibliography, and a full index. Only twice was I distracted by editing errors (once on p. 413 where "and" ought to be something like "as a" and again on p. 457 where an extraneous "not" undermines the author's point.) I will now move to brief overviews of the book's twenty-six chapters, which are all innovative, informative, and deserving of individual comment, though my sketches here must remain extremely brief. Ch. 1: Tim Whitmarsh's chapter, "Prose literature and the Severan dynasty," surveys some large trends in Severan prose literature. For example, Whitmarsh argues against a strong imperial influence on literary production; he demonstrates how the notion of Hellenism was greatly contested because of the growing role of Christianity, through thinking about cultures outside the empire (as with Philostratus' account of Apollonius' trip to India), and as a result of debates within the Hellenic world; and he notes the Severan penchant for "large-scale, synthetic works that attempt to capture and define intellectual traditions" (p. 50). As always, his comments are acute, and into what could have been a dry overview he intersperses such gems as a succinct warning about certain interpretive pitfalls (pp. 37-8) and comments on "the aesthetics of disorder" in texts such as Aelian's Varied History and Clement's Stromateis (p. 46). Ch. 2: Harry Sidebottom offers a guided tour of literary representations of the past in "Severan historiography: evidence, patterns, and arguments." On the Latin side of things there is not much to be said (though Sidebottom does address some of the underlying reasons for the non-existence of Latin historiography), but Greek historiography was flourishing, especially in Sidebottom's flexible understanding of historiography, which allows him to include in his discussion a wide range of texts, many of which eschew the tone and style of their classical historiographical predecessors. Indeed, Sidebottom lists no fewer than ten sub-genres (e.g. various forms of biography, ethnography, and historical fiction) that all approach and re-present the past in significantly different modes. As with so many of the best arguments in this volume, Sidebottom shows that the story of Severan historiography is one of creative re-configurations of received traditions. Ch. 3: John Ma's "The worlds of Nestor the poet" takes us on an amazing journey in search of Nestor, a poet who wrote a lipogrammatic Iliad (i.e. each book was composed without a single instance of the book's letter-number -- thus, no alphas in Book 1, no betas in Book 2, etc.). This fascinating chapter combines a marshalling of scattered fragmentary evidence, savvy analysis of this evidence, and a rare example of the role of scholarly intuition in crafting an argument. The silhouette of Nestor that emerges is of a Hellenistic-style poet in the vein of Nicander and Parthenius whose career reminds us not to forget the role of poetry even in this prose-dominated era (a point that Bowie himself has forcefully made). Ch. 4: Severan poetry is again the focus in Gideon Nisbet's "Sex lives of the sophists: epigrams by Philostratus and Fronto," which unwinds a delightful string of puns and allusions in epigrams by these two authors more famous from work in other genres. Although Severan epigrams are less plentiful than their Antonine predecessors, Nisbet shows that the genre had lost none of its elegance, complexity, and wit. More than this, he demonstrates how these two sophists reinvented epigram "as an important tool of sophistic self-fashioning" (123). Ch. 5: A final contribution to our view of Severan poetry in Greek comes in Mary Whitby's "The Cynegetica attributed to Oppian." As with Ma's work on Nestor, Whitby alerts us to the Alexandrian aspects of ps.-Oppian's poetry (e.g. his four-book poem may be "more pointedly parallel to the four books of Callimachus' Aetia than are the five of Oppian's Halieutica" (p. 126)), and it is from this perspective that she liberates ps.-Oppian somewhat from the shadow of Oppian himself. Her reappraisal works well (including such stylistic matters as the influence of the Hellenistic epyllion and contextual points, such as her suggestion that the poem may have been linked to Julia Domna's visit to the East in 215), and the Cynegetica emerges as a much more interesting text thanks to Whitby's analysis. Ch. 6: Jason Koenig starts from a paradox in his "Greek athletics in the Severan period: literary views": Philostratus claims to have written his Gymnasticus in response to a decline in athletic standards, but athletics was a boom industry under the Severan emperors. Koenig plausibly suggests that the real issue was what Philostratus saw as a decline in the specifically Hellenic quality of the athletes, training regimens, and competitions. Athletics had gotten away from its roots. In building his case, Koenig moves beyond the Gymnasticus and shows how the world of sport had changed in taste and style from the Antonine era. Ch. 7: Judith Mossman follows Whitby in focusing on an allegedly pseudonymous text in her "Heracles, Prometheus, and the play of genres in [Lucian]'s Amores." Fans of Mossman's work on Greek tragedy and Plutarch will not be disappointed here. She opens up the text by excavating a network of allusions to a huge range of traditional genres (as well as the not-so-traditional novel). She places particular emphasis on characters, such as the two in her title, who are familiar from a variety of genres, and it is the resulting ambiguity of generic allusions that propels the text and Mossman's argument well above any mechanistic rut of one-to-one associations. Of particular importance is her demonstration of the way in which allusions to Greek comedy force us to re-evaluate the serious tone of the text's central debate between champions of homosexual and heterosexual expressions of eros. Ch. 8: The shortest chapter of the volume begins from a scene in Heliodorus and quickly explodes into an argument of very general application. Glen Most's "Allegory and narrative in Heliodorus" shows how a given allegorical mode can drive the contour of the narrative. His comments on the difference between allegory, which "tells a story of restoration," and metaphor, which is "in fact the language of exile" (p. 164) and his brief discussion of the similar narrative trajectories of Neoplatonic allegory and the Greek novels make this a richly rewarding essay. Ch. 9: Philip Hardie kicks off a series of three Latin-centered papers with his "Polyphony or Babel? Hosidius Geta's Medea and the poetics of the cento." Geta's poem takes lines of Virgilian epic and weaves them into a tragedy that tells the story of Medea. Hardie focuses on Geta's poem as an extreme test case for intertextual theory, since "the cento is an epiphenomenon of a canonicity that defines itself as the very opposite of the carnivalesque dialogicity of Bakhtin, or the anti-authoritarian intertextuality of Kristeva" (p. 170). In every line we hear Virgil's words and Geta's reorganization of them, fragments of the story of Aeneas re-orchestrated to tell the story of Medea. Hardie's insightful arguments conclude with the delicious possibility (which Hardie himself cautions against accepting too hastily) that this Medea is actually by Ovidius Geta, i.e. that Ovid, in exile at Getan Tomis, constructed a new Medea from a dismembered Virgilian text in the very location where he claims (in Tristia 1.3) she had dismembered her brother. Ch. 10: Jonathon Powell's "Unfair to Caecilius? Ciceronian dialogue techniques in Minucius Felix" parallels Hardie's chapter in examining classical influences on a Severan text. In this case, Powell sees two fragmentary Ciceronian dialogues, the Hortensius and book 3 of De re publica as key to understanding Minucius' intentionally bland (according to Powell) dialogue Octavius. An appreciation of these models suggests that Minucius' literary form was "deliberately adopted to give an impression of civilized and impartial debate and to divert attention from the author's parti pris while archly acknowledging it" (p. 187). Ch. 11: "Cyprian's Ad Donatum" by Michael Winterbottom also addresses certain Ciceronian influences, but this is closer to the beginning than the end of his argument. He goes on to discuss the role of Calpurnius' first eclogue, which, like Cyprian's piece, moves from "intimations of religion...to the consolations of religion" (p. 193) and Cyprian's careful strategy of rhetorical dissimulation. Cyprian rejects overly artful eloquence in place of a strong and lucid case for Christianity, but his declamation "at times mounts to the rostra he rejects" (p. 197). Winterbottom shows that even when it appears that Cyprian is breaking his own stylistic rule this is never actually the case, because for Cyprian the Christian message is by definition always strong, simple and clear. Ch. 12: Zahra Newby introduces the second section of the volume (Art and Architecture) with her "Art at the crossroads? Themes and styles in Severan art," and like the papers by Whitmarsh and Edwards which lead off their respective sections, Newby's contribution does an excellent job of broadly orienting the reader to major issues and themes in preparation for the more narrowly-focused essays to come. Her examinations of state reliefs, portraits and funerary art lead to the conclusion that we might expect from her title: "Whether one sees Severan art as the last great expression of classical art or as the herald of Late Antiquity depends primarily on where one looks" (p. 249). Ch. 13: Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis' "Landscape, transformation, and divine epiphany" argues that the mixture of perspectives in the portrayal of landscapes in Severan art "imitates both the experience of movement and travel...and epiphany..." (p. 254). Her thesis elegantly combines an appreciation of mystic modes of viewing and sensitivity to the prominent role of travel and pilgrimage in this period. In her final case study, dealing with a mosaic from Cos depicting the arrival of Asclepius, she shows the flexibility of her model in incorporating a divine figure as the dynamic mover in something of a reverse pilgrimage narrative. Ch. 14: In "Urban development in the Severan empire" Andrew Wilson adds two elements to his enlightening survey of urban building programs across the empire that make his chapter stand out. First, he is virtually alone in looking in any detail at how issues of Severan culture would play out in the later third century. For example, he shows how Lepcis Magna's annual donation of olive oil in gratitude for Severus' benefactions became a dire burden after the imperial treasury took over land once owned by the local elite (pp. 306-07). Second (and here he has somewhat more company), he is alert to moments when our evidence may conceal what we might today call an abuse of power, as in his suggestion that some North African building projects may be the result of coerced euergetism. Ch. 15: In "Metaphor and identity in Severan architecture: the Septizodium at Rome between 'reality' and 'fantasy'" Edmund Thomas presents a thorough re-reading of the Septizodium and a re-contextualization of it in terms of its regionalist symbolism. Working through all available evidence (including post-antique sketches of the building, which was demolished only in 1588), Thomas argues that this monument must have been quite a bit longer than most scholars have supposed. This elongation, in turn, spurs a reconsideration of the building's function and its relationship to its immediate surroundings. Thomas moves quite effectively from architectural minutiae to much broader matters as he notes that the septizodium was a specifically North African form introduced into Rome by a North African emperor. Ch. 16: After receiving mention in the preceding chapters, the Severan Marble Plan takes center stage in Jennifer Trimble's "Visibility and viewing on the Severan Marble Plan." This 1:240 scale map of Rome, which featured an amazing level of detail down to the level of noting the location of individual doorways, was placed 4 m. above the floor on an inner wall of the Templum Pacis and stretched up to a height of 17 m. How could a viewer see any of it!? Trimble answers this question and more in assessing the map's impact on a viewer. The map boasts a vast amount of knowledge and, because of its placement, also impedes even a well-informed viewer from accessing any but a tiny portion of that knowledge. The emperor, with his unequaled resources, is the sole "ideal viewer" of this map and the rest of us are left to feel over-awed. One chilling implication of Trimble's thesis suggests that Roman viewers found themselves in a symbolic panopticon with the emperor's omniscient gaze bearing down on them and reaching into the seemingly inaccessible recesses of their private lives. Ch. 17: Alison Cooley discusses the "creative emulation" of Rome's first emperor in "Septimius Severus: the Augustan emperor." Her overall argument can be summed up in her statement that Severus "strengthened his own legitimacy as ruler by calling to mind the first princeps, who, like him, had emerged from civil wars as founder of a new dynasty" (p. 385). She gathers support for this thesis from a broad range of evidence including such issues as the manner in which both new rulers related to their predecessors, Severus' use of Augustus' timetable (rather than that of Claudius and Domitian) for celebrating the ludi saeculares, his sponsorship of urban building projects in Rome, his claim to have restored the Republic, and even various points of overlap between the careers of Julia Domna and Livia. Ch. 18: With the first contribution to the volume's final section (Religion and Philosophy), Mark Edwards has put together an outstanding overview of Severan Christianity (also the two-word title for his chapter). In addition to being so clear and readable that it could be assigned to advanced undergraduates, it offers succinct distillations and commentary on many of the recent debates in the field. For example, he highlights some of the problems with recent sociological approaches to the dynamics of conversion to Christianity (pp. 402-03) and gives three tenets that were endorsed by all Gnostic sects, a category which has proven increasingly difficult to delimit (p. 412). Ch. 19: The relationship between charity and piety is treated by Richard Finn, who uses literary analysis to make a doctrinal point in "Almsgiving for the pure of heart: continuity and change in early Christian teaching." Finn shows that Origen, in his treatment of these topics, is clearly engaging with the Shepherd of Hermas and the Book of James (the former receiving more attention in Finn's paper). Yet even as Origen recuperates language and themes from these earlier works he provides a new balance point for the old "faith vs. works" debate. For the author of the Shepherd, purity of heart is within our grasp and almsgiving marks our attainment of that goal; for Origen, purity is more distant and almsgiving is neither the primary marker of nor vehicle toward purity. Ch. 20: Catherine Conybeare's outstanding reading of Tertullian's Ad uxorem in "Tertullian on flesh, spirit, and wives" brings to light a subtle doctrinal point with potentially major social ramifications. She interrogates the relationship between spirit and flesh in this text and comes to the surprising but compelling conclusion that Ad uxorem has more to do with control than it does with marriage. The spirit's need to control the flesh is paralleled by the husband's need to control the wife. Many of Conybeare's excellent points can be summed up in her hypothetical rethinking of Tertullian's letter to his wife: "For the conserva to write back to her husband, to advise him on how to comport himself in her absence, is simply unimaginable: from where would she derive the authority? How could the flesh lead the spirit?" (pp. 437-38). Ch. 21: Be sure to make it to the end of Joseph Geiger's "Sophists and Rabbis: Jews and their past in the Severan age," which highlights many parallels between these two categories of wise men. It is in the last paragraph that his most challenging point emerges: that the Jewish tradition for primarily literary (rather than, say, political) reasons was obsessively focused on the historical era covered by the Bible to the virtual exclusion of other epochs. The Bible provided the perfect and complete canon, and therefore the focus of Rabbinic scholarship had no reason to dwell on post-Biblical eras. (Edwards makes a similar point on p. 417 about Origen: he engaged with pagan philosophy in order to refute it, after which "all books but the Bible may be closed again.") Geiger sets up the parallel with the sophists, but leaves us to sort out for ourselves whether or not the same argument could apply. Did sophists spend so much energy looking at issues from classical Athens as a result of a heavily Athenocentric literary canon? Ch. 22: In "Trouble in Snake Town" (the catchiest title of the bunch) Ian Rutherford reads an oracle from Phrygian Hierapolis dealing with plague. The snake of his title turns out to be a Hierapolitan dragon killed by Apollo, perhaps recalled in a regularized ritual. He teases out a religious relationship between Hierapolis and Claros, "a manifesto setting out a sort of blueprint for how to achieve a reconciliation between Clarian and local traditions" (p. 457). Many of Rutherford's suggestions are necessarily speculative, but his interpretive decisions are always well reasoned and sensible. Ch. 23: Because few magical papyri can confidently be dated to the Severan era, Daniel Ogden is forced to treat the discussions and conceptions of magic (rather than its actual practice) in "Magic in the Severan period." In addition to demonstrating how varied opinions about magic could be, Ogden looks closely at Philostratus' portrayal of Apollonius of Tyana, whose powers typically derived from supportive gods, but who also exhibited enough supernatural power to keep his audience guessing. Ch. 24: Michael Trapp turns to the state of intellectual pursuits in "Philosophy, scholarship, and the world of learning in the Severan period." He shows that there was a significant amount of continuity with the pre-Severan era in terms of the availability of financial support for such activities. After fleshing out what was going on in the most prominent and traditional intellectual disciplines, Trapp concludes his chapter by briefly sketching the role of Christianity, which was just coming onto the intellectual radar of the Mediterranean world, noting that pagan intellectuals of this period show few signs of concern about this new movement's "appropriation of Greek scholarly tradition" (p. 487). Ch. 25: George Boys-Stones presents a savvy and important argument in "Human autonomy and divine revelation in Origen." This piece is complex (a virtual necessity when dealing with Origen) and richly rewarding in showing that for Origen 1) history proves the Bible to be the true font of revelation, 2) revelation reveals the world to be God's contingency plan for dealing with creation's fallen state, and 3) reason allows us to put this all together and to recognize that our limited rational capacity needs supplementing via revelation. Ch. 26: The volume concludes with Christopher Taylor's "Socrates under the Severans," which effectively shows that Christian and pagan writers responded differently to the figure of Socrates. The former tended to be concerned with doctrinal/metaphysical issues, such as the meaning of Socrates' daimonion as either a proof of his proto-Christian status or his deep idolatry. For pagan writers, however, Socrates appears as paradigmatic of all philosophers and is lauded or teased according to a given author's take on the social location of philosophy, rather than for any particular dogmatic position. ------------------------------- The BMCR website (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/) contains a complete and searchable archive of BMCR reviews since our first issue in 1990. Please do not reply to this email as this is an unmonitored mailbox. You can contact us by sending e-mail to classrev@.... To subscribe to or unsubscribe from this list, visit http://newmailman.brynmawr.edu/mailman/listinfo/bmcr-l. To unsubscribe, you may also send a blank e-mail to bmcr-l-request@... with the word Unsubscribe in the subject line. _______________________________________________ BMCR-L mailing list BMCR-L@... http://newmailman.brynmawr.edu/mailman/listinfo/bmcr-l

Happy festive occasion for everyone.

You are not alone. I was in bed at 8pm nursing the remnants of a cold. My throat is still a little sore.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081231/ts_af...at_081231065506

Congratulations, and good luck!

I suspect we're all in for a ride.

Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of rum. May Santa have been good to all nice Romanophiles. And even to the naughty ones like Nephele!

According to Adkins "Dictionary of Roman Religion", the festival seems to have fluctuated between 3 and 7 days by the late Republic. I haven't read all the primary sources but I imagine the varying length is due to the general instability of the late Republic when a lot of traditional religious concerns fell into disuse. Christmas is first attested in 336.

I apparently learned more about Anglo culture than Roman. IO, Saturnalia!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.p...toryId=98389061

What exactly is the "Christmas cracker" she is talking about?

Very interesting indeed. Thanks for the find, GPM.

"Daughters of Isis" by Joyce Tyldesley. A Culture and Daily Life book on Ancient Egypt with a focus on the female experience. Informative, entertaining, well-written, although the editing/arrangement leaves something to be desired.

What?

Another fine addition to the surname research. I think we need to put them all in one place and make it a front page article, or something.

I believe the Celts did build paths, in some cases overladen with wooden planks for the chariots. If this is the case, the Romans would have re-built it with stone after the conquest.

I left the trading post and got stuck - no options. Nice idea, buggy execution.

http://pics.livejournal.com/jfboyd/pic/001pgd4c

Welcoem aboard, Lupercus. Feel free to join the discussions or start a new one.

While I never read Scarrow's works, your attitude is generally the same one I adopt toward historical fiction. So if you found his works less than compelling, I probably wouldn't either.

I brought your question to a Celtic expert I know, and this is what I received: