Classics Commons^™

Sappho’S Flowers: Lyric Ἄνθεσιν And The Aeolic Dative, Jorge Alejandro Wong Medina

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The retention of -ss- in the Aeolic dialects implies that Proto-Aeolic had s-stem dative plurals with -ss- (ἄνθεσ-σι). Yet the Lesbian lyric poets only have forms with a single -s- (ἄνθεσι). In an influential study, Morpurgo Davies argued that the ἄνθεσιν-type is native to Lesbian and used these forms as crucial evidence for the simplification of -ss- in Proto-Aeolic. However, a closer look at the epigraphic and literary evidence strongly suggests that ἄνθεσιν in Lesbian lyric is a poetic borrowing from Ionic and that Proto-Aeolic maintained -ss- in the dative plural of the s-stems. These findings have important implications for …

The Love With A Thousand Faces: Heroism As Embodied Love In Action, Scott T. Allison

Heroism Science

In this article, I argue that heroism is, at its core, embodied love in action -- a morally charged, physically grounded expression of care enacted through selfless deeds, courage, and commitment to others. Rather than reducing love to sentiment or an abstract ideal, I emphasize its embodied dimensions: love as a lived, relational force that motivates people to act bravely and altruistically, often at great personal cost. Drawing on psychological research in empathy, attachment, and prosocial motivation, I show how love undergirds moral courage by activating deep emotional bonds and transforming them into action-oriented commitments that transcend fear and self-interest. …

Musical Evidence For Low Boundary Tones In Ancient Greek, Dieter Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Several scholars have suggested that in ancient Greek there was a low boundary tone at the end of a relatively small prosodic constituent such as a clitic group or maximal prosodic word. The boundary tone may phonologically motivate some puzzling pitch-accentual phenomena in the language. One is the diachronic pitch-peak retraction that led to the circumflex pitch accent (HL) on penultimate syllables (the “sōtêra rule”). Another is the intonational phrase-internal downstepping or deletion of a word-final acute accent (H); that conversion of an acute to a grave accent is known as “lulling” or “koímēsis”. If such a low …

Empire On Trial: The Rise And Fall Of Republican Resistance In Early Augustan Rome, Spencer Yacos

Honors Theses

The ancient historian Cassius Dio recounts that in the year 23 BC, an unprecedented trial occurred within the ancient Roman State. On the defendant’s stand was Marcus Primus, facing the charge of treason against Rome. Primus, during a previous tenure as governor of Macedonia, waged a war on Odryssian Thrace without the order of the Senate. Primus’s defense counsel, Licinius Varro Murena, gives a shocking argument: Augustus Caesar, the leading political figure of Rome, had ordered the war, despite lacking the constitutional authority to do so. Proceedings transpired in such a way that Augustus himself would personally attend the trial. …

[Preface To] The Origins Of Roman Christian Diplomacy: Constantius Ii And John Chrysostom As Innovators, Walter Stevenson

Bookshelf

This book illuminates the origins of Roman Christian diplomacy through two case studies: Constantius II’s imperial strategy in the Red Sea; and John Chrysostom's ecclesiastical strategy in Gothia and Sasanian Persia.

Both men have enjoyed a strong narrative tradition: Constantius as a persecuting, theological fanatic, and Chrysostom as a stubborn, naïve reformer. Yet this tradition has often masked their remarkable innovations. As part of his strategy for conquest, Constantius was forced to focus on Alexandria, demonstrating a carefully orchestrated campaign along the principal eastern trade route. Meanwhile, whilst John Chrysostom' s preaching and social reform have garnered extensive discussion, his …

[Review Of] The Poetics Of Power In Augustan Rome: Latin Poetic Responses To Early Imperial Iconography. Vergilius (2020) By Nandini Pandey, Erika Z. Damer

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Pandey’s study comes in the wake of such landmark studies of texts and monuments as Paul Zanker’s Augustus und die Macht der Bilder (1987), Diane Favro’s The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (1996), and Karl Galinsky’s Augustan Culture (1998). Pandey’s reading decenters the authority of Augustus in creating Augustan moral, literary, and aesthetic ideologies, and instead argues that a multimodel, diachronic process across various media constructed and contested Augustan political, moral, and aesthetic hegemony. Her diffused model allows those hegemonic structures scholars have seen in, particularly, Augustan visual culture, to emerge ad hoc through the agency of contemporary writers, readers, …

[Introduction To] In The Flesh: Embodied Identities In Roman Elegy, Erika Zimmerman Damer

Bookshelf

In the Flesh deeply engages postmodern and new materialist feminist thought in close readings of three significant poets—Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid—writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class. Erika Zimmermann Damer underscores the fluid, dynamic, and contingent nature of identities in Roman elegy, in response to a period of rapid legal, political, and social change.

Recognizing this power of material flesh to shape elegiac poetry, she asserts, grants figures at …

The Classics, Race, And Community-Engaged Or Public Scholarship, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Our discipline has always been at, its core, concerned with language. At its best, The American Journal of Philology has professed to being a forum for those seeking knowledge of the words and worlds of Greece and Rome. It is unreasonable, however, to disentangle the discipline of philology and its allied fields – art history, philosophy, archaeology, and so forth – from the modern realities of slavery, race, and their impacts well after global abolition, emancipation, and any declaration of a post-racial period. That is, we bring a great deal of cultural baggage to what we call the Classics.

Afterlife: Du Bois, Classical Humanism And The Matter Of Black Lives, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

In Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, the protagonist—i.e., the Invisible Man—encounters an ex-doctor at the Golden Day, a bar full of discontents. The former doctor explains to the overwhelmed and confused Mr Norton, who is the white trustee of the Southern black college that the Invisible Man attends, how he sees the protagonist. It is no accident that Ellison models the college in the novel after Tuskegee Normal Institute, the historical black college that Booker T. Washington founded in 1881. After the publication of his autobiography Up From Slavery in 1901, Washington would become W. E. B. Du Bois’s …

Introduction, Dieter Gunkel, Olav Hackstein

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The present volume unites fifteen studies on language and meter. For the most part, the articles began as lectures delivered during the interdisciplinary conference on "Language and Meter in Diachrony and Synchrony," which was hosted in Munich from September 2nd-4th, 2013 by the Department of Historical and Indo-European Linguistics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The study of language and meter has profited from numerous advances over the last several hundred years. Scholars have produced accurate editions of poetic texts, added linguistic theory to description, utilized quantitative methods to test hypotheses, and provided descriptions and analyses of a relatively broad range of …

Epic Performance Through Invenção De Orfeu And ‘An Iliad:’ Two Instantiations Of Epic As Embodiment In The Americas, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The body is a problem for epic performance: as a text, epic absents the body, and such absence is a barrier to the modern audience’s full participation. The modern poet might attempt to resolve this issue in one of two ways, either by using the absence as a rhetorical strategy or, alternatively, by reintroducing the body into performed epic. Jorge de Lima’s Invenção de Orfeu (The Invention of Orpheus) (1952) presents one extreme in addressing the absence of the poet’s body, through textual strategies, in his celebration of the literary condensation of past epics as embodiment. By contrast, …

[Introduction To] Language And Meter, Dieter Gunkel, Olav Hackstein

Bookshelf

In Language and Meter, Dieter Gunkel and Olav Hackstein unite fifteen linguistic studies on a variety of poetic traditions, including the Homeric epics, the hieratic hymns of the Ṛgveda, the Gathas of the Avesta, early Latin and the Sabellic compositions, Germanic alliterative verse, Insular Celtic court poetry, and Tocharian metrical texts. The studies treat a broad range of topics, including the prehistory of the hexameter, the nature of Homeric formulae, the structure of Vedic verse, rhythm in the Gathas, and the relationship between Germanic and Celtic poetic traditions. The volume contributes to our understanding of the relationship between language …

The Greek Stoa.” 2014. Entry For The Springer Encyclopedia Of Global Archaeology, Erika Z. Damer

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Stoa is an ancient Greek term applied to a type of long, narrow, free-standing building with a colonnaded façade. The stoa developed as an architectural form in Archaic Greece, and was most popular from the fifth through first centuries BCE. The stoa should be distinguished from the colonnaded avenues typical of late Hellenistic and Roman cities and from the Roman porticus.

Localizational Evidence For The Restoration Of Rigvedic *Mimihí ‘Measure’.” In Vina Diem Celebrent: Studies In Linguistics And Philology In Honor Of Brent Vine, Dieter Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The purpose of this study is to provide new evidence for the existence of the 2 sg present active imperative *mimihí ‘measure’ in the Rigveda. Controlling to an extent for the effects of morphosyntax, I show that the poets do not localize the forms transmitted as mimihí in the meter similarly to the way that they localize forms of the same metrical/phonological shape, e.g. did¯ıhí ‘shine’, ´si´s¯ıhí ‘sharpen’, gr.n. ¯ıhí ‘sing’. Instead, they localize them like forms of the shape *mimihí , e.g. kr.n. uhí ‘make’, ´sr.n.uhí ‘hear’, tanuhi ‘stretch’. Thus we should restore *mimihí . I then …

Regio I - Latium Et Campania: Fascicolo Iii - Pompeii Et Herculaneum: Graffiti, Rebecca R. Benefiel, Holly Sypniewski, Kyle Helms, Erika Zimmerman Damer

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Dignity In Homer And Classical Greece, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Woven into the distress of Homeric epic, which often laments the terrors of war, the violence of passion, and the desperation of life, are records of ancient customs that hint at a deep respect for culture and human worth. To take but one example, recall Hector's refusal to take wine from his mother when he is bloody from battle. This moment is apt to strike modern readers as trivial. In fact, it reifies important ancient distinctions between war and peace, home and battlefield, and the equally ancient sentiment that to everything, there is a season.

Dignity In Homer And Classical Greece, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Woven into the distress of Homeric epic, which often laments the terrors of war, the violence of passion, and the desperation of life, are records of ancient customs that hint at a deep respect for culture and human worth. To take but one example, recall Hector's refusal to take wine from his mother when he is bloody from battle. This moment is apt to strike modern readers as trivial. In fact, it reifies important ancient distinctions between war and peace, home and battlefield, and the equally ancient sentiment that to everything, there is a season. In this case, no matter …

Iambic Metapoetics In Horace, Epodes 8 And 12, Erika Zimmerman Damer

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

When in Book 1 of his Epistles Horace reflects back upon the beginning of his career in lyric poetry, he celebrates his adaptation of Archilochean iambos to the Latin language. He further states that while he followed the meter and spirit of Archilochus, his own iambi did not follow the matter and attacking words that drove the daughters of Lycambes to commit suicide (Epist. 1.19.23–5, 31).¹ The paired erotic invectives, Epodes 8 and 12, however, thematize the poet’s sexual impotence and his disgust during encounters with a repulsive sexual partner. The tone of these Epodes is unmistakably that of …

The Sanskrit Source Of The Tocharian 4x25-Syllable Meter, Dieter C. Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Were Tocharian meters influenced by Indic meters, and if so, to what extent? Since the outset of Tocharian studies, the prevalent opinion has been that the Tocharian metrical tradition, which is shared by both Tocharian languages, is independent of the Indian tradition. In Sieg and Siegling's original formulation, "Die tocharische Metrik scheint selbständig dazustehen und nicht der indischen entlehnt zu sein" (1921:x).¹ The supposed independence of the metrical form of Tocharian poetry may seem surprising given that the poetic texts are translations and adaptations of Buddhist Sanskrit originals. Furthermore, the Tocharian Buddhists did adopt the form of narration known …

Burial Klinai And Totenmahl?, Elizabeth P. Baughan

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

How can burial furnishings help to clarify the meanings of banqueting imagery in funerary art and the place of banqueting in funerary ideologies? Should tombs furnished with klinai or replicas of banquet couches be understood as representations of banqueting, meant to equip the dead for an eternal ‘Totenmahl’? Or do funeral couches mark their occupants as members of the elite class that enjoyed banqueting and/or luxury furniture while alive? These questions are not so easily answered, because klinai in the ancient Greek world were multifunctional furnishings, used for sleeping and resting as well as for dining and revelry, …

From Anthropophagy To Allegory And Back: A Study Of Classical Myth And The Brazilian Novel, Patrice Rankine

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

“Let it be remembered that events narrated in this chronicle – full of veracity, albeit lacking in brilliance – took place during the worst years of the military dictatorship and the most rigid censorship of the press. There was a hidden reality, a secret country that didn’t get into the news. The newsrooms of newspapers and radio and television stations found themselves restricted to covering generally unexpected events. Their editorial pages were reduced to unconditional praise for the system of government and those who governed.” Jorge Amado

In the epigraph above, the narrator of The War of the Saints, …

[Introduction To] Sahasram Ati Srajas. Indo-Iranian And Indo-European Studies In Honor Of Stephanie W. Jamison, Dieter C. Gunkel, Joshua T. Katz, Brent Vine, Michael Weiss

Bookshelf

The renowned Indologist and Indo-Europeanist Stephanie W. Jamison has now been honored with this extensive collection of essays by colleagues and students from around the world. The contributors represent a virtual who’s-who of Indo-Iranian and Indo-European scholarship and have produced contributions on everything from Vedic (e.g., Joel Brereton, George Cardona, Paul Kiparsky, Thomas Oberlies) to later Sanskrit (e.g. James Fitzgerald, Hans Henrich Hock, Ted Proferes) to Iranian (e.g. Mark Hale, P. Oktor Skjærvø) to other Indo-European languages (e.g. Dieter Gunkel, Martin Joachim Kümmel, Alan Nussbaum, Don Ringe, Michael Weiss). The volume also includes posthumously published articles by Lisi Oliver and …

Discontinuity In Vedic Prose, Dieter Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

What does hyperbaton mean in Vedic prose and under which conditions does it arise?

Investigating Rigvedic Word Order In Metrically Neutral Contexts, Dieter Gunkel, Kevin Ryan

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

1. Swappable bigrams 1.1 We extract all swappable bigrams from the RV

• Both orders are metrically equivalent e.g. dháne hité (7x) ~ hité dháne (2x) "when the stake is set" • Regardless of whether both orders are attested e.g. śárma yaccha (8x) ~ yaccha śárma (0x) "extend shelter"

The Colometry Of Tocharian 4x15-Syllable Verse, Christoph Bross, Dieter C. Gunkel, Kevin M. Ryan

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

We identify the basic colometry of Tocharian 4x15-syllable verse as 4+3+3+5 (traditionally 7+8), but we find no support for the putative alternative colometries of 4x15 often cited in the literature (viz. 6+4+5 and 8+7). In rare cases in which the medial caesura is violated, a word boundary after syllable 6 or 8 is highly probable by chance alone, as we confirm through corpus statistics. If the colometry is indeed invariable, one major argument for the influence of Indic on Tocharian meter is undermined. We further reinforce that the medial caesura after syllable 7 is no stronger than the final one …

Wheeler's Law, Dieter Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

“Wheeler’s Law” refers to a phonologically conditioned accent retraction process reconstructed for an early pandialectal stage of Greek by which oxytone words became paroxytone if they ended in a heavy-light-light syllable sequence (HLL), e.g. *[poi̯ kilós] > [poi̯ kílos] ‘multicolored’, *[dedegmenós] > [dedegménos] ‘awaiting, expecting’ (LHLL). Note that word-final syllables ending in a short vowel followed by one consonant (e.g. [os]) count as light for Wheeler’s Law, just as they do for the Law of Limitation. The accent retraction was originally proposed by Benjamin Ide Wheeler (1854–1927) in 1885; for further insights, analysis, and references, see Probert 2006.

Gender Reversals And Intertextuality In Tibullus, Erika Zimmerman Damer

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

This paper argues that Tibullus’ practice of altering the gender of his intertextual references destabilizes gender as a biological, social, and even grammatical category in his elegies. In 1.8, Tibullus draws on images of women’s adornment from Callimachus, Philitas, and Propertius to create the opening image of the puer Marathus. In 2.6, Tibullus draws from Catullus’ lament for his brother in carmen 101 as he describes Nemesis’ dead young sister and demonstrates his technical skill in manipulating the flexibility of grammatical gender in Latin.

Recent Work On Tibullus, Erika Zimmerman Damer

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

This introduction provides an overview of Tibullus’ life, his poetry, and his style, and offers a bibliographical survey of emerging critical trends in interpreting this relatively neglected Roman elegist.

Caesurae, Bridges, And The Colometry Of Four Tocharian B Meteres, Christoph Bross, Dieter Gunkel, Kevin M. Ryan

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The Tocharians composed verse in hierarchical structures, with the verse dominating major cola, and the major colon in turn dominating one or more minor cola. After providing much-needed descriptive data on Tocharian meter, we assess the evidence for the distinction between major vs. minor caesurae in some of the most popular Tocharian B meters, finding support for the commonly assumed colometries in some but not all cases. Of particular interest is the recurring 4+3 syllable colon, since the violability of its internal (putatively minor) caesurae varies significantly across meters. We argue that this varying strictness is indeed a function of …

Accentuation, Dieter Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The accent marks in modern editions of Ancient Greek texts primarily reflect the accentual system of an educated register of the Koine of the early 2nd c. BCE. In this system, phonological, morphological, and lexical factors conspire to associate a pitch accent with one syllable of each lexical word. The phonology of the language permits limited contrasts in accentual position (λιθοβόλος vs. λιθόβολος = lithobólos vs. lithóbolos) and type (ἰσθμοί vs. ἰσθμοῖ = isthmói ̯ vs. isthmôi)̯; in the latter case, the syllable marked with an acute accent hosts a High tone, and that marked with a circumflex hosts a …