Classical Studies

Supervisory Committee Dr. Gregory D. Rowe, Supervisor (Department of Greek and Roman Studies) Dr. Cedric A. J. Littlewood, Departmental Member (Department of Greek and Roman Studies) The lex Iulia de adulteriis of 18 BCE, which for the first time made adultery a criminal offence and created a standing court, was touted by the Augustan regime as a return to the moral customs of the Republican past. However, the new reform in fact represented a significant shift away from the traditional authority of the Roman paterfamilias to punish transgressions privately at his discretion and towards the legal power of the emperor and Senate to define and regulate morality on a public scale. Using a variety of primary source evidence, I explore the provisions of the adultery law and place the resulting criminal trials within the context of public staging of the Roman aristocracy. In this way, the adultery law forms part of a larger trend of elite moral regulation becoming public spectacle.

This paper seeks to contextualize Lycurgus’ use of the historical example of King Codrus’ self-sacrifice within Athenian social memory and public discourse. In doing so, it offers a solution to the puzzle of Lycurgus’ calling Codrus one of the ἐπώνυμοι τῆς χώρας (Lycurg. 88). I make the case that Codrus was one of the forty-two eponymous age-set heroes (Ath. Pol. 53.4-7) who played an important role in the Athenian military and socio-political system. I contend that devotion to the city’s gods and heroes and knowledge of their mythology were essential parts of the religious and ideological instruction of Athenian ephebes. Consequently, Lycurgus’ citation of the Ephebic Oath, the self-sacrifices of King Codrus and the daughters of Erechtheus, as well as his repeated invocation of the city’s gods and shrines, must be seen as integral elements of his indictment of Leocrates for cowardice and treason, behavior that is diametrically opposed to the hoplite ethos and religious devotion that were instilled into young ephebes. Lycurgus thus brings the jurors’ memories of their own ephebate into the courtroom and taps into emotions and values that lie at the heart of Athenian collective identity.

Against tendencies of viewing the orators’ historical allusions as empty rhetorical phrases or manipulative cover-ups for Realpolitik this study of historical paradigms in the debate over the Peace of Philocrates argues that the past constituted political capital in its own right. Using theories of social memory, it contextualizes Aeschines’ and his opponents’ historical examples within the Athenian memorial framework and thus tries to gauge their ideological and emotive weight. Drawing on family memories, Aeschines effectively challenged the Athenian master narrative by linking the rejection of a reasonable Spartan peace offer to the traumatic memories of total defeat and the terror regime of the Thirty.

This contribution argues for the use of coin types
as a sophisticated means of communication by the
imperial court of Diocletian’s colleague Maximian.
The coin types issued by the imperial mint in Lyon
from AD 286 to 292 (as catalogued by Bastien
1972) are compared with the two Latin Panegyrics
(Pan. 10 [2] and Pan. 11 [3]) delivered at Maximian’s
court in Trier in AD 289 and 291, respectively.
The comparison between Pan. 10 [2] and the
contemporary coinage from Lyon reveals close
correspondences, representing the early stage of
Dyarchic ideology. Both media emphasize the qualitative
difference between the rector caeli Jupiter/
Diocletian and the pacator terrarum Hercules/
Maximian. As a result of Maximian’s naval disaster
in the fight against the usurper Carausius in the
summer of 289, the Herculian imagery is noticeably
reduced in Pan. 11 [3] and the corresponding
coinage. Both media propagate the res publica restituta
and emphasize the concordia and pietas of
the two rulers, which enables the weakened Maximian
to participate in the undamaged prestige of
his colleague Diocletian.

In their analysis of the Athenians' shared image of their past as an essential element of Athenian collective identity, scholars have largely focused on polis-wide commemorative activities such as the Athenian public funeral oration for the war dead. Taking the inherent multipolarity of social memory into account, this paper examines the collective memories of two types of Athenian subgroups , namely demes and tribes, and explores how their shared memories and the 'official' Athenian polis tradition mutually influenced and sustained each other in th-and th-century Athenian public discourse. Im Zentrum der Analyse des Geschichtsbilds der Athener als integralem Element ihrer kol-lektiven Identität standen bisher vornehmlich die polisweiten Formen des öffentlichen Ge-denkens, wie z. B. die öffentliche Leichenrede für die gefallenen Athener. Ausgehend von der dem kollektiven Gedächtnis inhärenten Multipolarität widmet sich dieser Beitrag den in den Demen und Phylen gepflegten Erinnerungen und untersucht, wie diese und die ‚offizielle' athenische Polistradition sich im öffentlichen Diskurs der Athener im. und. Jahrhundert v. Chr. gegenseitig beeinflussten und stützten.

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the memory of Nicias was contested in Athenian public discourse after the failure of the Sicilian expedition. Defending the reliability of Pausanias’ testimony (1.29.11-12), it makes the case that the conspicuous absence of Nicias’ name on the public funeral monument of 412 BC prompted Pausanias to report the story he had read in Philistus (FGrHist 556 F 53). Thucydides’ silence concerning this damnatio memoriae of Nicias stems from the historian’s disapproval of the Athenians’ action; his eulogy of Nicias (7.86.5) is a deliberate correction of the exclusion of Nicias’ name from the Athenian casualty list. By the middle of the 4th century, Nicias played again a positive role in Athenian social memory, as Demosthenes’ positive reference to him in one of his assembly speeches shows (D. 3.21). This restoration of Nicias’ reputation is largely due to the Athenians’ memorial practices: the annual public funeral orations downplayed defeats and integrated them into the idealized version of Athenian history which celebrated all the fallen as manifestations of timeless Athenian excellence. Over the decades, the details of particular campaigns and the failings of individual generals faded from common historical consciousness. This process facilitated the rehabilitation of Nicias’ reputation in the eyes of later generations of Athenians.

KEYWORDS: Social memory; Sicilian expedition; Nicias; logos epitaphios; Pausanias

The first part of this chapter provides a general introduction to the concept of war-induced trauma and discusses three challenges that the application of this modern concept to the ancient Greek world poses, i.e. the problem of retrospective diagnoses of PTSD, the absence of a theoretical concept of combat trauma in ancient Greece, and the question whether combat trauma is a universal or historically and culturally specific phenomenon.
The second part uses Thucydides’ account of the Athenian retreat from Syracuse in 413 BC as a case study to argue that the Athenians and their allies were exposed to extreme war experiences that by far exceeded the hardships of normal military campaigns and therefore likely resulted in psychological trauma for at least some of the survivors.
Drawing on known causes of contemporary war-induced trauma, Ι make the case that the Athenian value system and the particular social, tactical and technological environments during the Sicilian campaign rendered the Athenian soldiers especially susceptible to developing post-traumatic symptoms. In addition to this circumstantial evidence, Thucydides’ vivid depiction of the Athenian soldiers’ anxiety, self-blame and despair (7.75) indicates that the survivors he spoke to in his attempt to record the events of the war as accurately as possible (1.22.2) still suffered greatly under the weight of their traumatic experience in Sicily.

This chapter tests (and largely confirms) Nicole Loraux’s intriguing hypotheses concerning the authenticity of Pericles’ famous funeral oration and Thucydides’ ambivalent attitude towards this genre. It argues that Thucydides’ epitaphios logos of Pericles (2.35-46) owes much to the actual speech that the historical Pericles delivered in 431/0 BC to calm the widespread dissatisfaction with his policy of restraint vis-à-vis the Peloponnesian invaders. To achieve this end, Pericles focused on one of the epitaphic topoi, namely the Athenians’ democracy and way of life as one of the reasons for their exceptional aretē. Considering that Thucydides is highly critical of the epitaphic orators’ distorted version of the Athenian past (1.21.1), the inclusion of this epitaphios logos in his history may seem surprising, but it allowed Thucydides to explore the institutional/cultural reasons for the Athenians’ remarkable war-making ability, which his Corinthians had attributed earlier to the Athenians’ nature (1.70). Thucydides is not uncritical of Pericles’ idealization of Athens, though. By creating deliberate verbal echoes of Pericles’s eulogy in earlier and later passages of his work, Thucydides used the epitaphios logos of Pericles as a crucial point of comparison to illustrate the destructive impact of the war on the Athenians and the growing distance between the Periclean ideal of Athens and the brutal historical reality.

I offer three readings of the Lemnian episode narrated by Hypsipyle in book five of the Thebaid, each based upon an interpretive tension created by textual, intertextual, and cultural factors and resolved by the death of Opheltes, the child nursed by Hypsipyle. In the first reading (chapter two), I suggest that Hypsipyle emphasizes the questionable nature of the evidence for the involvement of Venus and other divinities in the Lemnian massacre, which is on the surface quite obvious, as a subconscious strategy to deal with her fear of divine retribution against her and Opheltes. In the second reading (chapter three), I argue that much of the violence of the massacre is eroticized, primarily by allusions to Augustan elegy and Ovidian poetry, and that this eroticism challenges a straightforward, horrified reaction to the Lemnian episode. In the third reading (chapter four), which continues the argument of the second, I suggest that the reaction of Statius’ audience to the Lemnian massacre was influenced by familiarity with the violent entertainment offered in the Roman arena, and that this encouraged the audience to identify with the perpetrators of the massacre rather than the victims. The problematization of the audience’s reaction and of the divine involvement in the massacre is resolved by the death of Opheltes, which is portrayed as both undeniably supernatural in origin and emphatically tragic in nature. Thus, as the first half of the Thebaid draws to a close, Statius decisively affirms the power of the gods and the horrific tragedy of violence and prepares to embark upon the war in the Thebaid’s second half, which will end ultimately with the double fratricide of the sons of Oedipus and Statius’ prayer for future generations to forget this sin.

Critical discussions of Hor. Carm. I, 36 are rare, and fail adequately to consider two important points. First, although written in honour of the otherwise unknown Numida, the poem’s implied addressee is L. Aelius Lamia,( ) a member of a distinguished family that Horace mentions three times in the Odes (I, 26, 8; I, 36, 7; III, 17, 1; also at Ep. I, 14, 6.), carefully shaping his literary presentation to fit with important thematic concerns of the Odes. Second, and perhaps unexpectedly, Carm. I, 36 shares several unappreciated verbal links with Carm. I, 24 on the death of Quintilius, which can hardly be dismissed as meaningless.

I will address each of these two issues in turn, demonstrating first that literary analyses have misidentified the L. Aelius Lamia of the Odes and have failed to appreciate how Horace constructs his personality, and then that the place of the Numida ode in Horace’s first book—especially its links with the Quintilius ode—involve it in a sustained meditation on the uneasy relationship between the poetic-sympotic realm and the cares and dangers that surround it. I end with a brief reading of the Numida ode that takes these factors into consideration, and show that the effect of the poem lies in the tension between (on the surface) a simple description of a wild homecoming celebration and (more subtly) a reflection on such weighty issues as aging and death, the ephemeral nature of youth and love, and the tension between poetic-sympotic securitas and the vagaries of a world ruled by Fortune and death.

"In this chapter I explore ways of viewing violence in the Thebaid.  Like other authors in this book and elsewhere, I look to film studies for a theoretical framework. I do not, however, work much with psychoanalytical or feminist film theory;  rather, I adopt some ideas from the broad and developing field of cognitive film theory. In particular, I work with Murray Smith’s ideas about ‘character engagement’  and Paul Gormley’s articulation of the relationship between ‘affect’ and ‘meaning’.  But my writing is not primarily theoretical. Instead, I compare three representative scenes of violence from the Thebaid – the battle of Tydeus against the fifty Thebans (2.496-743), Hypsipyle’s account of the Lemnian massacre (5.28-498) and the mutual fratricide of Polynices and Eteocles (11.403-573) – with three scenes from the films of Quentin Tarantino – the ‘Showdown at House of Blue Leaves’ in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), the ‘ear-cutting’ scene in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and the assassination of Hitler in Inglourious Basterds (2009).

While classicists have traditionally confined themselves to the study of films set in the ancient world,  the application of film theory to classical texts implies that modern cinema and classical literature share many preoccupations and can be studied together.  Thus, I do not argue for any ties of reception between the poetry of Statius and the cinema of Tarantino; instead, I suggest that author and auteur  work with violence in similar ways.  Both foreground vision in their presentations of violence.  Both present scenes of extreme violence that provoke affective responses.  And both set against these responses complex intertextual and cultural signifiers.

These last two points shape my arguments throughout the three comparisons in this chapter. First (discussing Thebaid 2 and Kill Bill Vol. 1), I show that the affective power of violence, figured as φαντασία in ancient epic, is blunted by intertextuality, which reminds the audience of its position outside of the fiction on display. Next (Thebaid 5 and Reservoir Dogs), I argue that author and filmmaker exploit affect, intertextuality and cultural knowledge to manipulate the role of the viewer of violence, suggesting in the end that viewing violence is a choice. Finally (Thebaid 11 and Inglourious Basterds) I show how Statius and Tarantino, at the climaxes of their works, remove all internal viewers with whom the audience could easily engage or whose gaze could invest the violent spectacles with meaning.
"

"While Telamon appears in most previous accounts of the Calydonian boar hunt, Ixion never does. Instead we find Ixion’s son, Pirithous. Lactantius explains: Ixiona: Pirithoum significari uidetur, Ixionis filius. Subsequent scholars have not questioned this perverse reading, but the text is clearly corrupt.

Statius wrote iam natum Ixione."