Classical Literature and Philology | Open Access Articles

Euripides' Second Thoughts, Emily A. Mcdermott Jan 2000

Euripides' Second Thoughts, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

Euripides' extant Hippolytus was a rare "re-production" of an earlier play on the same mythic episode. The play contains a series of metadramatic comments on its partial interchange of Phaedra's and the Nurse's original roles. The Nurse's appearance in the "Stephanias" as seducer of a virtuous Phaedra is presented as a "change of mind." Her "second thoughts" (to corrupt, rather than dissuade Phaedra) mirror the playwright's decision to amend a shameless Phaedra's character by, conversely, degenerating the Nurse's. His covert comments on this strategy of reversal underline the oddity of his decision to correct his first try at the story.

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Every Man's An Odysseus: An Analysis Of The Nostos-Theme In Corelli's Mandolin, Emily A. Mcdermott Jan 2000

Every Man's An Odysseus: An Analysis Of The Nostos-Theme In Corelli's Mandolin, Emily A. Mcdermott

Classics & Religious Studies Faculty Publication Series

In the sparkling first chapter of Louis de Bernieres's Corelli's Mandolin, the world of Homer's Odysseus is explicitly invoked. This is hardly surprising in a historical novel which will detail the Italian occupation of the Greek island of Cephallonia, near neighbor of Odysseus's Ithaca, during World War II. What is less immediately apparent is that the novel contains a further pattern of inexplicit allusion to the Odyssey, along with a pervasive theme of nostos. Emphasis on "homecoming" helps create the novel's ardent encomium to the Greek homeland that inspires such fierce love of place in its people …

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Perspective And Ideal In Chariton's "Chaireas And Callirhoe", Jean Alvares Jan 2000

Perspective And Ideal In Chariton's "Chaireas And Callirhoe", Jean Alvares

Department of Classics and General Humanities Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Chariton's Aphrodisias celebrated Greek, Roman and even Eastern traditions, as the Greek novelists did generally, and his romance shares many elements of Second Sophistic practice; fittingly, the text's opposition of Greek vs. barbarian is rather nuanced; various passages undercut such ethnocentric presumptions by showing Greeks and Asians relying (mistakenly) on traditional views of each other. The basically happy outcomes enjoyed by Artaxerxes and Chaireas, compared to the relatively sad fate of Dionysios, a character who embodies many of the aspirations of Chariton's readers, is connected to their participation in one of two myths of the ideal state; one of the …

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Farewell To An Idea: Episodes From A History Of Modernism, Alexandra Mullen Jan 2000