Ramus

All drama, indeed all literature, shows people acting on the basis of beliefs and values. We take those values for granted when we watch a play, and observe how the characters negotiate their way within the world as it appears to them. I wish to call attention to some underlying moral and psychological assumptions to which we implicitly assent as a condition for appreciating the story in a couple of Greek tragedies. For sometimes those assumptions are just what the play is really getting across.

The influence of Ramus’s logic on William Ames in particular and the Puritans of New England in general is a known fact. However, Ramus’s theology in his Commentaria de religione Christiana (1576), being part of his technometry or encyclopaedic charting of knowledge highly influenced Ames’s theological works. Ames’sMedullaTheologiae (1623) may be seen as the perfection of the Ramistprogramme of theology, both in matter and in manner or method. In his soteriology as well as eccelesiology Ames appears to be echoing the Ramist idea of a meritocratic scheme of salvation and church polity. In this paper I argue that the New England divines John Cotton and Thomas Hooker carry on in their works the Ramist inspiration of a timocratic theology as earlier initiated by Ames. For this purpose I primarily look at Cotton’s The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared(1648) and The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven(1644) and Hooker’s A Survey of the Sum of Church Discipline(1648).

At the close of Euripides’ Electra, the Dioscuri suddenly appear ‘on high’ to their distraught niece and nephew, who have just killed their mother, the divine twins’ mortal sister. This is in fact the second longest extant deus ex machina (after the final scene in Hippolytus), and the only scene in which a tragedian attempts to resolve directly the aftermath of the matricide. In this article, I argue that Castor's and Polydeuces’ sudden apparition to Orestes and Electra constitutes a specialised point of intersection between the mortal and immortal realms in Greek tragedy: familial epiphany, an appearance by a god who has an especially intimate relationship with those on stage. Euripides’ focus on the familial divine as a category accentuates various contradictions inherent to both ancient Greek theology and dramaturgy. The Dioscuri are a living paradox, ambiguously traversing the space between dead heroes and gods, managing at the same time to occupy both. They oscillate unique...

Over the past two decades, scholars have devoted increasing attention to Roman civil war literature and its poetics, from the vocabulary of nefas, paradox, and hyperbole to the pervasive imagery of the state as a body violated by its citizens. Thebes and especially the civil war between Oedipus’ sons became prominent lenses through which Romans explored their country's strife-ridden past. Seneca's Phoenissae, however, has received comparatively little attention in this regard, often overshadowed by Statius’ epic Thebaid of the next generation. This paper investigates Seneca's contribution to the wider poetics of civil war through his expansion of the theme of incest, which Seneca uses to articulate civil war's most invasive, penetrative, and disintegrative effects. In particular, Seneca capitalizes on both the metaphorical potential of maternal violation and the eroticized imagery of Roman conquest to create disturbing points of contact between two generations of Joc...

When Seneca's Medea flies off in her serpent-drawn chariot, shedding ruin, heartbreak and death and leaving it all behind her on the stage, we are too stunned to wonder where she might be headed. As it turns out, this enterprising exile continued her career with great success in Roman Africa. This essay considers two remarkable Later Roman Medeas: Hosidius Geta's early third (?) century tragedy Medea and Dracontius' late fifth century epyllion Medea. Both were products of the flourishing, experimental, literary culture of Roman Africa that produced such writers as Apuleius, Tertullian, Augustine, Corippus, Martianus and Fulgentius. Although the two poems present radically different heroines, both exhibit the sophisticated allusivity, wordplay and interest in formal structures and rules that characterise Latin literature from Africa. One Medea makes a lethal intervention in Vergilian poetics; the other Medea channels a distinctively Statian Muse. Hosidius Geta's Medea is a short tragedy consisting of eight scenes and three choral songs that recounts the familiar events of Medea's vengeance in an unfamiliar form—it is the first extant example from antiquity of a cento. Mystery shrouds the origins of this Medea—we are unlikely ever to know for certain where, when or by whom it was written. It is probably a late second or very early third century text from Roman Africa. It is first mentioned by Tertullian, who brings it up as an example of the kind of improper manipulation of scripture perpetrated by heretical readers—that is, as a perverted form of reading. Tertullian's digressive expostulation is the first account we have both of Hosidius' Medea and of the cento form, i.e., the creation of poems made entirely from lines or half lines of a master-text. Tertullian's wording, however, implies that his readers will immediately recognise what a cento is, suggesting that this art form had been around for a long time. More interestingly, in light of the later Christian adoption of the cento form, he disapproves of the reading practices their composition implies, and finds Scripture especially vulnerable to such abuse. It is not hard to see why the fundamentalist preacher Tertullian would be alarmed by the poetics of the cento, for centos expose the multivalent nature of language, forcing the reader constantly to focus on the protean ability of words to change their meanings depending on context. To one whose goal is to establish truth according to the authoritative rule of faith, such linguistic play is threatening.

Did Sophocles or Seneca exercise a greater influence on Renaissance drama? While the twenty-first century public might assume the Greek dramatist, in recent decades literary scholars have come to appreciate that the model of tragedy for the Renaissance was the plays of the Roman Seneca rather than those of the Athenian tragedians. In his important essay on Seneca and Shakespeare written in 1932, T.S. Eliot wrote that Senecan sensibility was ‘the most completely absorbed and transmogrified, because it was already the most diffused’ in Shakespeare's world. Tony Boyle, one of the leading rehabilitators of Seneca in recent years, has rightly said, building on the work of Robert Miola and Gordon Braden in particular, that ‘Seneca encodes Renaissance theatre’ from the time that Albertino Mussato wrote his neo-Latin tragedy Ecerinis in 1315 on into the seventeenth century. The present essay offers a complement and supplement to previous scholarship arguing that Seneca enjoyed a status ...

The lively debate about the function of the fable of Cupid and Psyche in theMetamorphosesof Apuleius is continually expanding. On the narrative level, they act like pairs of star-crossed lovers in the Greek Romance tradition, but by designating them ‘Love’ and ‘Soul’ Apuleius has invited philosophical, religious and loosely symbolic interpretations of this inset story. The ambiguity surrounding Cupid and Psyche (characters or concepts) is complicated and enriched by the storyline which concerns the falling in love of Love and the falling in love with Love by Soul (the respective states.of the hero and heroine). By making the Love God suffer the passion he inflicts upon other gods and upon mortals, Apuleius fulfils the sometimes heartfelt but more usually tongue-in-cheek desire of the elegiac poets to punish their tormentor. At the same time, Psyche (Soul) becoming besotted with Love has more serious implications in Platonist doctrine and her actions throughout the story and her ultimate fate have been read both positively and negatively by Apuleian scholars.

The story of Euripides' Cyclops resembles the corresponding episode in the Odyssey, except that in Euripides' version Polyphemus, at the time of Odysseus' landing, is master of Silenus and a band of satyrs who tend his flocks. This circumstance is loosely connected with the tale of Dionysus' abduction by pirates, which is related in one of the Homeric hymns: the satyrs had put to sea in search of the god, and were blown ashore, much like Odysseus, at the Cyclopes' island, which by the time of Euripides had come to be specified as Sicily. A role for the satyrs was, of course, required by the genre of the satyr play — if there were exceptions, they were few — and their captivity in a remote and savage place seems to have been a common theme, especially in Euripides' contributions. Considerations such as these have depressed the interpretation of the Cyclops, which is the only complete specimen of the genre. Homer's narrative looks like the perfect stock upo...

In the conclusion to his ground-breaking study of the relationship between Latin literature and politics in the age of Nero, J.P. Sullivan looked forward to the literature of the Flavian period, offering a broad survey of the leading writers and their political and literary affiliations. His portrait of Statius, written with his typical wit, is distinctly unappealing: But it is to Statius' Silvae and to ten books of Martial's epigrams that the fastidiously curious turn to discover the sort of praise that the latest and last heir of the Flavian house, though not the modern reader, would find congenial. The longest piece of this kind is Statius' ecphrastic poem on the great equestrian statue of Domitian erected in the Forum Romanum. It was, like the statue, a commissioned piece and was dashed off in less than fortyeight hours …. This poem and the Eucharisticon (Silv. 4.2) on the great splendour of Domitian's lavish feast to which the poet was invited are adequate illustrations of how far poets were prepared to go in their presumably acceptable adulation. G.W.E. Russell once remarked to Matthew Arnold, ‘Everyone likes flattery; and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.’ Statius seems to have anticipated the advice.

Insofar as we can know, Medea has always been multiple, existing in many different versions simultaneously. She is never simply a literary construction, a stratified intertextual ensemble made up of all the other literary Medeas that came before her, but a product of the values and fears of each culture that imagines her, recreates her, and uses her to represent meaning. The Middle Ages were no different: Medea could figure as an alchemist's guide, as in the Pretiosa Margarita Novella (the New Pearl of Great Price); as an allegory of God fighting the Antichrist in the Ovide Moralisé; as wronged wife in Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women; or as a nightmare figure that appears like Grendel in Beowulf to destroy Jason's wedding feast in Raoul Lefèvre's History of Jason. The flexibility of the medieval myth of Medea is staggering—even more staggering than that of the Roman period—stretched as it was across a continent of warring kingdoms, with different authors and audiences pressing classical texts to generate new and culturally relevant and acceptable meanings. However, appropriately enough for a volume titled ‘Roman Medea’, there is one multiple of Medea that drops out of the equation as a direct influence: the Greek Medea, the Medea of Euripides and Apollonius. The loss of the Greek tradition did not impede medieval authors, who found more than enough in Latin texts to inspire them. The basic Latin materials upon which the Middle Ages built their Medeas were Ovid's Metamorphoses and Heroides, along with scattered references in other popular authors like Statius, presentations of irrational women in love like Dido in Virgil, descriptions of child murderers such as Procne also taken from the Metamorphoses, and terrifying witches such as Lucan's Erictho. However, some Latin texts which we might have expected to be influential, such as Seneca's Medea, were marginal to the medieval tradition.

One approaches Hesiod's discourse on the two erides—or, if I am correct, the duplicitous nature of eris—with some trepidation, since the scholarship on this passage has been voluminous and rewarding. But the passage, which Hesiod launches into immediately after the formal prologue of the Works and Days (11-26), may yet have more to teach us. It is, as Richard Hamilton has recently shown, programmatic for the entire poem; it may also be a definitive statement on the archaic construction of competition and conflict. In it Hesiod urges his brother explicitly (as he does implicitly throughout the poem) to stop coming after him for their father's patrimony and do some productive work; however this simple message is embedded in traditional allusions, poised between intense ambiguities and (like all good archaic poetry) fraught with the resonance of larger issues. All this has made it difficult to achieve scholarly consensus about the meaning of the passage. A close and helpful par...

The lively debate about the function of the fable of Cupid and Psyche in theMetamorphosesof Apuleius is continually expanding. On the narrative level, they act like pairs of star-crossed lovers in the Greek Romance tradition, but by designating them ‘Love’ and ‘Soul’ Apuleius has invited philosophical, religious and loosely symbolic interpretations of this inset story. The ambiguity surrounding Cupid and Psyche (characters or concepts) is complicated and enriched by the storyline which concerns the falling in love of Love and the falling in love with Love by Soul (the respective states.of the hero and heroine). By making the Love God suffer the passion he inflicts upon other gods and upon mortals, Apuleius fulfils the sometimes heartfelt but more usually tongue-in-cheek desire of the elegiac poets to punish their tormentor. At the same time, Psyche (Soul) becoming besotted with Love has more serious implications in Platonist doctrine and her actions throughout the story and her ulti...

The apparent geographical inaccuracies in Sallust's account of the war with Jugurtha have attracted the attention of many scholars. Several years ago Etienne Tiffou devoted a study to the fact that Sallust's three historical works show a progressively greater interest in geography, but many topographical difficulties in The War with Jugurtha remain unexplained. Others see the geographical excursuses in The War with Jugurtha as simply traditional devices or perhaps structural fillers whose content is purely derivative and whose contribution to the themes of the work is minimal or nil: Sallust does not contribute much more than ‘Greek erudition and fancies’. Yet many of the supposed inaccuracies and thematically empty excursuses can be better understood and appreciated as part of a consistent Sallustian technique of internal allusion. A careful reading of Sallust's references to places in The War with Jugurtha reveals the author's sophisticated use of a ‘textual geogra...

Hellenistic and Roman Imperial prose fiction sprang from the ashes of the Haxāmanišiyan Empire (c.550-330 BCE). The multicultural autonomy that Iranian regents afforded their subject peoples laid the groundwork for social policy under Alexandros, the Diadokhoi, and Roman governance of the Near East. As literary fiction developed over the course of the ‘long’ Hellenistic period, the diversity of languages and cultures not only shaped the kinds of narratives produced: polyglossia became a subject of representation in and of itself, as did the possibilities of translation between one language and another.

The last two decades have seen a renewed emphasis on studies falling within the general area of Ritual and Drama. The majority of extant plays have been scrutinised in the search for ritual schemes and sequences, metaphors and allusions remoulded in their imagery and language, and some of the juiciest discussions of Greek theatre have emerged as a result. Nevertheless, compared to this proliferation of studies on particular aspects of ritual symbolism and ritual patterns, few scholars have attempted to investigate the ways in which ritual and theatre can interrelate and unfold in parallel at the level of dramatic plots. Brilliant, albeit isolated, examples of this type of inquiry can be sought in Froma Zeitlin's unequalled pieces on Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae and Euripides' Ion; in the rewarding work of Foley, Segal, Goldhill on the Bacchae as well as in Bowie's ‘ritual’ reading of Aristophanic plots and Seaford's monumental study of Dionysiac patterns in fifth-century Greek tragedy.

Much has been written about the question of oral poetry in the earliest attested phases of Greek literature, but not enough attention has yet been paid to the existing internal evidence concerning the authority of actual poetic performance. This essay is meant to highlight this authority and its role in authorisation, that is, in the conferring of authorship. Since the first attested identification of an author in Greek literature takes place in the Hesiodic Theogony, where the figure of Hesiod names himself as the poet of this colossal poem (Hēsiodon, Th. 22), it seems fitting that this very act of self-identification should serve as the focus of inquiry. Further, since the poet defines himself in terms of a dramatised encounter with the Muses, who are represented as giving him the two gifts of a sceptre of authority and poetic inspiration itself, it also seems fitting to take with utmost seriousness the actual wording that describes this encounter. The poet's precisely-worded ...

We noted the similarity in mandibular profile between a 27,000-year-old skull from China and a 160-year-old Polynesian skull. Both had a more vertical ramus, a curved inferior border, and no chin. The European mandible has a greater gonial angle, an antegonial notch, and a chin. Is the presence of a chin sufficient to distinguish European mandible from Polynesian? Can the gonial angle and ramus shape do so? A blind study of fifty mandibles of both groups and both sexes revealed that each feature alone can differentiate the sexes, but the combination is required, to differentiate European and Polynesian, and loosely group their provenances.