Ancient Greek and Roman Aesthetics

El presente trabajo se propone analizar el motivo de la inmortalidad del poeta en lassphragídes de Metamorfosis 15 (Ov. Met. 15. 861-879) y de Amores 1.15 (Ov. Am.1.15. 1-42) y el modo en que Ovidio se sirve de su producción literaria parainsertarse conscientemente en el canon grecolatino. El complejo entramado de lasobras y la mención a autores que ya han sido canonizados, así como los correlatoscon otras fuentes, le sirven para anunciar su inmortalidad gracias a la escritura, queserá plasmada en (...) su apoteosis metafórica mediante la lectura por parte delpopulus. (shrink)

El vocablo πέπλος (“peplo”), que designa típicamente la túnica vestida por lasmujeres, se registra un total de once veces en Hécuba de Eurípides. Teniendo encuenta la estructura bipartita de esta tragedia y la importancia de la vestimenta en elmundo griego antiguo, este artículo se propone analizar las apariciones del términoen sus contextos, con la hipótesis de que los peplos ocultan pero a la vez revelan elcarácter de los personajes femeninos: Políxena, el coro de cautivas troyanas yHécuba, como también habilitan la (...) transformación de los dos últimos en una y otraparte de la obra. (shrink)

La autenticidad de la Heroida 15 de Ovidio (Sappho Phaoni) fue objeto de grancontroversia crítica. Sin adentrarnos en la misma, pero a la luz de ella, mostramoslos mecanismos intratextuales, narrativos y estilísticos que instauran esta epístolacomo instancia de transición entre las simples (1-15) y las dobles (16-21).Abordamos fundamentalmente dos aspectos: en qué medida la Heroida 15 seconstruye como un “proemio en el medio” que determina la arquitectura global dela obra, y de qué manera su inscripción en el discurso elegíaco anticipa (...) algunosrasgos del Ars y delimita ciertos ejes de la praxis literaria ovidiana. (shrink)

This paper raises objections to the constitution of these lines in the OCT. The lines are gnomic but they generalize based on an actual sequence of events just described and should contain an allusion to the offence that will cause the Greeks to perish, the outrage against Athena's temple. This, it is argued, stood in a lacuna best marked after 95. The article has three theses: (1) sacking ‘cities, temples, and tombs’ is implausible because the latter two are parts of (...) the first; (2) plundering tombs refers to nothing in the play, nor was this thought of as an offence against the gods; (3) 96–7 do not refer to the offence that causes the fool's death but are a description of his success, the destruction of the hated enemy population. That success stands in ironic contrast with his subsequent death. (shrink)

This article argues for the significance of Euripides’ Bacchae to what Socrates, in Book X of the Republic, refers to as the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’. I argue that the play’s presentation of Dionysus – the god of tragic theatre – amounts to a metapoetic treatment of tragic poetry; it is a tragedy about tragedy. The Bacchae can thus be read as a statement of tragic poetry’s self-understanding of its pedagogical and political goals as well as of its (...) possible limitations. I conclude by arguing that there is in fact a deep kinship between tragic poetry (as presented by Euripides) and Socratic political philosophy (as presented by Plato), especially with respect to their relation to, and understanding of, the polis. Ultimately, through analyzing the Bacchae’s presentation of Dionysus, I aim to allow tragic poetry to speak for itself as well as to clarify its relation to Platonic/Socratic political philosophy. (shrink)

En este artículo, la arquitectura teatral de la Grecia Antigua va a ser considerada como un cuerpo-signo que significa, construido social, cultural y políticamente, como un reflejo y creador del orden social, como un cuerpo que es civilización y, por consiguiente, como un microcosmos de la con­cepción del mundo de los griegos antiguos. Y es que la arquitectura teatral es vista por los helenos como un cuerpo articulador, delimitado, diferenciado y separado y con entradas o salidas que comunican sus funciones (...) interiores con las exteriores, por lo que, a pesar de su autonomía, no está aislado en sí mismo, sino que constituye una auténtica red de relaciones entre el universo teatral, la pólis y el mundo. (shrink)

Este trabajo plantea un análisis métrico de Andria a partir de una ruptura con la manera tradicional de estudiar la obra del africano —que juzga sus comedias a la sombra de los procedimientos compositivos de Plauto— con miras a un estudio integral del fenómeno métrico en Terencio. El análisis de la macroestructura y la microestructura métricas de la obra demuestra una estrecha imbricación entre los componentes métrico-musicales y el significado de los elementos de la trama y arroja nueva luz sobre (...) la composición y las funciones de los cantica. (shrink)

A controversy among ancient geographers about the localisation of the Argonauts’ quest for the golden fleece has deeper methodological implications because it reflects divergent views on how to fill gaps in the account that serves as one’s source. Reconstructing the controversy step by step, the article aims to bring to light these methodological implications. In so doing, it also demonstrates that the extant editions unjustifiably curtail the text of the relevant fragment from Demetrius of Scepsis. And it argues for a (...) new interpretation specifically of how Demetrius assessed Homer’s references to the Argonauts. (shrink)

In this article, jumping off from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s treatment of Aristophanes and the Megarian Decree, I argue that Old Comedy is an underutilised category of evidence for the study of the popular intellectual history of Athens. My particular focus here is the Athenian empire: how does Old Comedy present Athenian power and what does this comic presentation tell us about how at least some ordinary Athenians understood it? Can one popular Athenian imaginary of the empire be constructed through (...) analysis of Aristophanes and his contemporaries? I will argue that Old Comedy, taken as a corpus, presents a very Athenian empire, that is to say one focused on Athens and its exploitation of others. The comic poets, therefore, likely assumed parochialism and myopia on the part of their audience, but also significant topical interest in the mechanisms of Athenian power, particularly those which brought revenue to Athens. This impression of highly topical engagement with the empire is corroborated by bringing Comedy into dialogue with other sources, in particular the epigraphic record. (shrink)

-/- In Plato's work the "Sophist", Socrates, who typically occupies a central position in Plato's dialogues, is assigned a supporting role. This has led some scholars to argue for a shift in Plato's oeuvre, where he distances himself from Socrates and introduces a new main protagonist. However, this new protagonist remains unnamed and is only identified by his social position as Xenos, indicating that he is an outsider and a stranger whose identity is ambiguous. In this article, I argue that (...) Plato's decision to leave the character unnamed serves to raise a first problem: the question of whether this stranger is a friend or an adversary of philosophy. At the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates employs a series of references to Homer to bring into play a second problem: the problem of disguise. The third problem, “What is a sophist?”, is attributed to the Xenos. This is the only problem that is explicitly developed and is, therefore, the most prominent in the dialogue. If we relate these three problems to each other, it becomes clear that they represent contradictory intuitions without providing us with a strict criterion for deciding which of these intuitions is correct. By presenting these problems in their entanglement without providing a way out, Plato invites his readers to think without making explicit what the outcome of this thinking should be. -/- [In Dutch: In de "Sofist" speelt Sokrates, vaak het meest prominente personage in Plato’s dialogen, alleen maar een bijrol. Dit heeft veel interpreten ertoe verleid om een breuk in het oeuvre van Plato te postuleren, waarbij Plato afstand zou nemen van Sokrates ten behoeve van een nieuw personage. Ik zal echter laten zien dat Plato er bewust voor kiest om dit nieuwe personage naamloos te laten en hem alleen aan te duiden via zijn sociale positie als xenos (vreemdeling). Hiermee roept Plato, zo zal ik betogen, impliciet een eerste probleem op: is deze naamlo- ze Xenos een vriend of een vijand van de filosofie? Aan het begin van de dialoog wordt er door Sokrates een tweede probleem in spel gebracht: het probleem van de vermomming. Het derde probleem — ‘wat is een sofist?’ — wordt toegeschreven aan de Xenos. Dit is het enige probleem dat expliciet wordt uitgewerkt en is dan ook het meest prominent aanwezig in de dialoog. Als we deze drie problemen op elkaar betrekken dan wordt duidelijk dat ze tegenstrijdige intuïties vertolken, zonder dat we een strikt criterium krijgen aangereikt om te beslissen welke van deze intuïties de juiste is. Door deze problemen in een nog niet ontwarde kluwen te presenteren, nodigt Plato zijn lezers uit tot denken, zonder expliciet te maken wat de uitkomst van dit denken zou moeten zijn.]. (shrink)

Horace Ars Poetica 317–8 plays pointedly on the transition in the sense of μίμησις from imitation of life to imitation of a literary model, suggesting that the poet should ‘look back’ at times from the latter to the former.

We focus on the question of how expertise as conceived by the Stoics interacts with the content of impressions. In Section 1, we situate the evidence concerning expert perception within the Stoic account of cognitive development. In Section 2, we argue that the content of rational impressions, and notably of expert impressions, is not exhausted by the relevant propositions. In Section 3, we argue that expert impressions are a subtype of kataleptic impressions which achieve their level of clarity and distinctness (...) due to the contribution of expertise. In Section 4, we argue that the expertise in living well not only allows the wise person to assent correctly but also affects the content of her impressions. We suggest that these two models – one’s attitude toward an impression being informed by expertise, and one’s impressions being affected by expertise – might characterize distinct stages of cognitive development. Stoic wisdom is not only a matter of the way one assents to one’s impressions but also a matter of the condition of one’s soul and, consequently, of the kinds of impressions one even entertains. Expertise offers a model of how cognitive and discriminatory improvement through practice and effort can transform the non-wise into the wise. A reading on which the content of impressions is not exclusively propositional illuminates a further aspect of this transformation. If the same propositions are accessible through impressions with different non-propositional content, we can account for cases in which the novice and the expert entertain the same proposition. (shrink)

This essay argues that the Ancient Greek's tales of cannibalism were not really about cannibalism at all, but about more typically Greek issues (such as the transfer of political power, the guest-host relationship, the initiation of youths into adulthood, and so on). Cannibalism is rather the image used to designate the negative extremes of human behavior as conceived by the Hellenic world: social breakdown, barbarism, reversion to animality, and ultimately, the inability to live under the institution of the polis.

This chapter presents several of the dominant ideas and intellectual debates about human beauty from archaic Greece to early Christianity. At issue are ideals of character, ethical ideals of who one should be and how one should live. What constitutes beauty and why beauty matters change alongside conceptions of body and soul, virtue and happiness, and the relationship between human beings and the divine.

In Against the Musicologists (Math. 6), Sextus uses two types of arguments against musicology. Some would argue that a science of music – does not contribute to a happy life, while others deny that such a science has ever been established. Since the respective beliefs that musicology exists and that it benefits those who have mastered it are fine specimens of dogmatism, all Sextus has to do is to set the naysayers and the believers against each other in good Pyrrhonian (...) fashion. If their accounts balance each other out, he can go on to suggest that reasonable inquirers will suspend judgement as to the truth about these matters, while leaving everyday musical practice intact. Against the Musicologists thus lends itself to being read as an attempt to display the Sceptical capacity to motivate suspension of judgement in a specific domain where the Sceptic has detected dogmatic belief. -/- In what follows, I develop a reading of the treatise along these lines. In Section 5.1, I argue that Sextus’ polemical engagement with philosophical musicology sits well with the project of the treatise to which it belongs, and with a plausible understanding of his philosophical position as presented in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Pyr.). Then I turn to the two kinds of arguments that are contrasted by Sextus as being ‘more dogmatic’ and ‘more aporetic’ in spirit. After their brief presentation in Section 5.2, explaining the nature of their contrast by pointing to the diverging agendas that they originally served, I give an overview of both as ultimately aiming at epochē in Sections 5.3 and 5.4. Finally, in Section 5.5, I push back against readings that take the treatise to present a deviation from the suspensive outlook. (shrink)

Many attempts have been made to define the precise philosophical outlook of Ovid's account of cosmogony from the beginning of the Metamorphoses, while numerous different and interconnected influences have been identified including Homer, Hesiod, Empedocles, Apollonius Rhodius, Lucretius and Virgil. This has led some scholars to conclude that Ovid's cosmogony is simply eclectic, a magpie collection of various poetic and philosophical snippets haphazardly jumbled together, and with no significant philosophical dimension whatsoever. A more constructive approach could see Ovid's synthesis of (...) many of the major cosmogonic works in the Graeco-Roman tradition as an attempt to match textually his all-encompassing history of the universe that purports to stretch from the first beginnings of the world up to the present day. Furthermore, if the beginning of the Metamorphoses is designed to be both cosmologically and intertextually all-encompassing, it is surprising that the influence of arguably the major philosophical work on cosmogony from the ancient world, Plato's Timaeus, remains to be evaluated. (shrink)

Review of the first comprehensive companion to the growing scholarship on ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics.

According to an ancient stereotype, prominent in Cicero’s writings, Stoics hated rhetoric and were really bad it. But Horaces’ Satires are populated with lecturing Stoics using colorful, effusive language to cure their audience. The paper asks how “rhetorical” Stoics really were and argues that there was a continued tradition of Stoic rhetoric linking the diatribic speech of the Imperial period to its Hellenistic practitioners. It surveys the evidence for Stoic orators and rhetorical writers in the Hellenistic period and presents evidence (...) that Greek Stoics were more eloquent than their stereotype. The paper also suggests reasons for the wood-cut and sometimes fictitious representation of Stoic rhetoric in ancient accounts, in particular a propensity for classification in rhetorical theory, Cicero's dissatisfaction with Stoic terminology, and Cicero's own agenda in self-fashioning his image as an orator and writer of philosophy. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

The Stoa might be not the first philosophical school that comes to mind when considering the most important ancient contributions to aesthetics, yet multiple extant fragments show that the Stoics had a non-marginal theoretical interest in aesthetic properties. Probably the most important piece of evidence for the Stoic attempts to theorize beauty is the definition of beauty as summetria of parts with each other and with the whole. In the first half of this article, I present and analyse the main (...) evidence for this definition. Then I discuss Plotinus' critique of the definition and argue that it contains some pertinent remarks that, with support of additional evidence, lead to the conclusion that the Stoics conceptualized aesthetic properties as supervening on functional composition. (shrink)

A response to Sider's review of my Hippias Major: An Interpretation.

This strange dialogue becomes intelligible when Socrates is treated as a model of the good man who appears to the Many to be bad talking with a Hippias who is a model of the bad man who appears to the Many to be good. The good and apparently good are dramatized through these models. The good is revealed to be the fitting, while the fine/beautiful (kalon) is revealed to be the apparently fitting (hence the many confusions between the two concepts). (...) Fittingness may be perceived through the senses, but this immediate aesthetic fittingness is confused by the Many with pragmatic fittingness which can actually only be perceived over time and with rational thought. Many associated themes are condensed into this short but brilliant philosophical drama. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider the philosophical purposes served by Seneca’s insistently violent imagery and argue that Seneca appears to provide what I term an “erotica of death.” In the Roman context, a context in which violence and violent death are regular features of popular entertainment, there is a worry that Seneca’s vivid depictions of violent death can only aim at eliciting more of the intoxicating pleasure Romans derived from their spectacles. However, where the spectacle features as a species of (...) death denial, a “pornography” in which death is stripped of its emotive and symbolic content, Seneca provides an “erotica” in which raw physical detail serves to announce and evoke emotive responses to death. He thus works against the Roman taboo on expressing fear and the equation of fear with cowardice in order to court the dismay and disgust necessary as a precondition for a robust therapy for death anxiety. (shrink)