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 …

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 …

[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, …

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, …

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, …

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 …

Law Of Limitation, Dieter Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

The ‘Law of Limitation’ refers to a phonological process that limits how far from the end of a word an accent may be located: if the word-final syllable is light, the accent may be located as far from the end of the word as the antepenult, e.g. εὑρήματα[heu̯ rέːmata] ‘discoveries (nom./acc. neuter plural)’, ἐβούλευε [ebóːleu̯ u̯ e] ‘(s)he was deliberating (impf. 3 sg.)’; if the word-final syllable is heavy, the accent may be located as far from word-end as the penult, e.g. εὑρημάτων [heu̯ rεːmátɔːn] ‘discoveries (gen. n. pl.)’, βουλεύω [boːléu̯ u̯ ɔː] ‘I am deliberating (pres. 1 sg.)’ (Göttling …

[Review Of] Horace's Iambic Criticism: Casting Blame (Iambike Poiesis). By Timothy S. Johnson, Erika Z. Damer

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Although Horace's Epodes were frequently dismissed by earlier genera­tions as an uneven poetic collection of obscenity and juvenalia, more recently critics have begun to seriously engage with his first lyric collec­tion. Johnson's important new study offers the first comprehensive Eng­lish-language monograph on the Epodes since R. W. Carrubba's study of poetic arrangement in 1969. As such,Johnson's study makes a vital new companion to Watson's (2003) Oxford commentary, and his serial reading of Epodes 1-17 provide students and researchers with a novel interpretation of Horace's triumvi­ral collection.

A Bronze Kline From Lydia, Elizabeth P. Baughan, İlknur Özgen

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

In 1982, the J. Paul Getty Museum purchased an ancient kline made mostly of bronze (pl. 9, I)¹. It replicates, at full scale, a wooden couch with lathe-turned legs, comparable to those attested in the Greek world in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E². As one of only four known bronze beds or couches that pre-date the Hellenistic period³, it is an important artifact that can contribute much to our understanding of ancient furniture and metallurgy, and adhering fragments and pseudomorphs of linen cloth add to the corpus of preserved ancient textiles. …

Sculpted Symposiasts Of Ionia, Elizabeth P. Baughan

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

Statues and statuettes of reclining banqueters were dedicated at several Ionian sanctuaries during the sixth century B.C.E., beginning with the Geneleos Group at the Samian Heraion. Though common for small bronze and terracotta sculpture, this figure type is not otherwise attested in monumental dedicatory sculpture and is rare as architectural decoration elsewhere in archaic Greece. This article explores the social implications of this Ionian sculptural tradition, which paired the luxury of the reclining banquet with bodily corpulence, in light of archaic poetry and Samian history. The short-lived trend of reclining banqueter dedications may be understood as a locally specific type …

A Companion To The Ancient Greek Language (Book Review), David M. Goldstein, Dieter C. Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

It has become customary for reviews of handbooks to express misgivings toward the genre and its ever-increasing presence. But whatever one might think of companion volumes, this is a useful book. It boasts a wide range of generally high-quality essays by a parade of eminent scholars. Perhaps its most praiseworthy feature is the clarity and accessibility of many of its contributions, which makes them ideal starting points for the non-specialist. We will no doubt be assigning several of these chapters in our classes.

The Emergence Of Foot Structure As A Factor In The Formation Of Greek Verbal Nouns In -Μα(Τ)-, Dieter C. Gunkel

Classical Studies Faculty Publications

This study is concerned with the relationship between word formation and foot structure in Ancient Greek. Evidence for foot structure in the language has previously been primarily sough in patterns of versification and in accentual phenomena, especially the recessive accent calculus.² Here, I offer an analysis of a change in word formation that affected the productive class of verbal nouns in -μα(τ)I- (§2). I propose that the innovative word formation pattern reflects Trochaic Shortening, a process whereby word-final H(eavy)L(ight) syllable sequences are converted to LL sequences (§3.1). Since Trochaic Shortening is though to be found only in languages with …