MEDEA: TRANSFORMATIONS OF A GREEK FIGURE IN LATIN LITERATURE

2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gesine Manuwald
Keyword(s):  
Ancient World ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Literary Genres

Latin writers in the ancient world are well known to have been familiar with earlier Greek writings, as well as with the first commentaries on those, and to have taken over literary genres as well as topics and motifs from Greece for their own works. But, as has been recognized in modern scholarship, this engagement with Greek material does not mean that Roman writers typically produced Latin copies of pieces by their Greek predecessors. In the terms of contemporary literary terminology, the connection between Latin and Greek literature is rather to be described as an intertextual relationship, which became increasingly complex, since later Latin authors were also influenced by their Roman predecessors.

Phoenician Literature

2019 ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Carolina López-Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Historical Records ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Great Loss ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Travel Accounts

There was, without a doubt, a Phoenician and Punic literature. Very little of it is extant, but we have enough of it to gauge the great loss. Lacking the advantage of its own manuscript tradition and later cultures devoted to it, Phoenician literature was not systematically preserved, unlike that of the Greeks, Romans, and Israelites. What we have are small pieces that surface among the Classical literary corpus. Despite these unfavorable conditions, an impressive range of literary genres is attested, concentrated in particular genres. Some of this literature aligned with broader ancient Near Eastern tradition: cosmogony, foundation stories, historical records, and other areas that correspond with Phoenician expertise (travel accounts or itineraries, agricultural treatises). Other genres were likely adopted through Greek influence (narrative histories, philosophy). Moreover, from Hellenistic times onward, works by Phoenician authors had to be written and transmitted in Greek in order to survive. Nonetheless, the chapter cautions that we should not lightly categorize them as merely “Greek” literature, at least in the cases in which we know the authors are Phoenicians (including Carthaginians) writing about Phoenician matters.

scholarly journals Greek Literature, the Digital Humanities, and the Shifting Technologies of Reading

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elton Barker ◽  
Melissa Terras
Keyword(s):  
Multispectral Imaging ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Computational Techniques ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Digital Medium ◽  
Digital Text ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
Technological Developments

Contrary perhaps to expectation, Classical studies is at the vanguard of the latest technological developments for using digital tools and computational techniques in research. This article outlines its pioneering adoption of digital tools and methods, and investigates how the digital medium is helping to transform the study of Greek and Latin literature. It discusses the processes and consequences of digitization, explaining how technologies like multispectral imaging are increasing the textual corpus, while examining how annotation, engagement, and reuse are changing the way we think about “the text”. It also considers how the digital turn is reinvigorating textual analysis, by exploring the broader ecosystem, within which the digital text can now be studied, and which provides enriched contexts for understanding that are constantly shifting and expanding. Classical literature in the digital age has the potential to both challenge dominant modes of thinking about antiquity and disrupt traditional ways of doing research.

On Not Being Beautiful

2018 ◽  
pp. 185-204
Author(s):  
G. O. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Logic ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Making Choices ◽  
The Way

‘x is more beautiful than y’ sounds a standard thing to say in Greek and Latin literature; but it raises intricate and interesting issues, not least from the standpoint of y. This chapter draws on symbolic logic to compare the relation between assessing superiority or inferiority in beauty and making choices in love in both Greek and Latin literature. The various dynamics, logics, and rhetorics of desire in the light of inferiority and superiority are subjected to close scrutiny, paving the way for a discussion that addresses not only the complex scenarios that unfold here (paying special attention to the various ways in which the amorous hierarchy is set in relation to other hierarchies) but also the intriguing fact that such questions of relative inferiority and superiority in erotic matters seem to pervade Greek literature more extensively and differently than Latin.

Unknown Latin Literature

1958 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-191
Author(s):  
D. R. Dudley
Keyword(s):  
Latin Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Textual Scholarship ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
Ars Amatoria

One of the features of classical scholarship during the last ten years has been a renewal of interest in Latin literature. In England, at least, this was at a low ebb between the two great wars. The literature of Rome was regarded as derivative and second-rate. Virgil was the unwilling prisoner of the Augustan propaganda machine, Horace the favourite poet of those with no feeling for poetry, Ovid (apart from the Ars Amatoria) no more than a verse-writer of fatal facility, Plautus a knock-about comedian, and Terence a bore. Apart from Catullus, Lucretius, Petronius, and Tacitus, Latin could play no cards that Greek could not instantly trump. I do not think this an unfair picture of the impression of Latin literature I was given as an undergraduate. Why this was so is less easy to say. Partly, perhaps, because Oxford and Cambridge produced a succession of great expositors of Greek literature at a time when many of their Latin colleagues seemed immersed in the more arid forms of textual scholarship. Partly, again, because the iconoclasm of the age found in Latin a profitable and easy target.

Golden Statues in Greek and Latin Literature

1975 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. G. Whitehorne
Keyword(s):  
Ancient World ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
The Dead

Golden statues, either made of gold or gilded—the distinction is not always made clear —were exceptionally popular among many of the peoples of the ancient world and it is not difficult to see why. Easily worked, perennially bright and practically indestructible, gold surely had something of the divine about it. In Egypt for instance gold's qualities made it the flesh of the sungod; just like the sun itself, the hotter the fire, the purer and brighter the metal glowed. In Greece, too, gold had divine associations and by virtue of its indestructibility acquired a symbolical value far beyond its actual worth; practically anything that is worth having and keeping is ‘golden’ as far as Pindar is concerned. Even for such a hard-headed race as the Romans gold seems to have had an aura of magic about it, at least in early times. The clause in the Twelve Tables mentioned by Cicero, prohibiting the burial of any gold with the dead, except for their false teeth, surely springs as much from an instinct for the metal's mysterious properties as from any parsimonious desire to control funerary expenditure.

scholarly journals A Comparative Study in the (myth of Pygmalion) between Bernard Shaw and Sadeq Hedayat

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Many ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
European Renaissance

In our time, not too long ago, the universities of the world have been fast to take care of the study of an innovative type of technical and human studies, called the science of "comparative literature". Comparative research studies have grown and flourished rapidly in response to the demands of both mental and artistic life. This shows the increasing awareness at both the modern national and the international levels in order to develop through connecting with the international intellectual, nental and artistic currents to nurture ethics and originality. Comparative studies show that the beginning of the comparative literature goes back to the time when the Latin literature was connected to the Greek literature and the comparative literature was shaped in the era of European Renaissance. Today, it is one of the most authentic sciences in universities, with complex branches, due to its being an inevitable result of increasing human awareness and the result of the great demand by the conscious public to benefit from the many human and cognitive aspects provided by the comparative literature through its connection with the heritage of the world literature and unity of the human spirit in its past and present. One of the most important factors of the prosperity of any civilization is the degree of contact with and benefit from other civilizations. Long time ago, different cultures were used to enrich each other, and the relationship between cultures took many forms such as imitation, translation, influencing others, as well as the exchange of information between cultures, in addition to intellectual and cultural invasion and domination. It is impossible to imagine that a particular culture evolved without any contact with other cultures. Instead, any isolated culture certainly suffered from deterioration.

The Curse of the Werewolf

2020 ◽  
pp. 18-59
Author(s):  
Daniel Ogden
Keyword(s):  
Ancient World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The One

This chapter traces the persistent association between werewolves on the one hand and witches and sorcerers on the other in the ancient world (and does same, in a brief way, for the earliest medieval werewolf tales). The Homeric Circe’s wolves should be understood as men transformed by the witch. Despite some modern claims, this was the position of the Odyssey itself, as well as the subsequent ancient tradition. Herodotus’ treatment of the Neuri not only asserts that they are sorcerers that turn themselves into wolves, but also implies that transformation into a wolf is a thing more generally characteristic of sorcerers. Like the Neuri, Virgil’s (Egyptian?) Moeris is projected as a sorcerer that specialises in turning himself into a wolf. Imperial Latin literature provides us with examples of individual witch-figures transforming into wolves, notably Tibullus’ bawd-witch and Propertius’ Acanthis, but, beyond this, there seems to have been a set of thematic associations between werewolfism and the terrible strix-witches. It may have been thought, in particular, that they had a propensity to transform themselves not only into child-stealing and child-maiming screech-owls or screech-owl-like creatures, but also into wolves. The notion that werewolfism could sometimes be effected by a divine curse, as in the Arcadian traditions and as in Aesop’s fable, was perhaps a variation or extension of the more typical and established idea that it could proceed from the cursing of a witch or a sorcerer.

The poor's curse: Exodus xxii 20-26 and curse literature in the ancient world

2006 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-451
Author(s):  
Jonathan Ben-Dov
Keyword(s):  
Ancient World ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Violent Acts ◽  
Ancient Greek Literature

AbstractIn the passage Exod. xxii 20-26 the poor man cries to God after he had been mal-treated by a powerful creditor. In response God acts as an avenger against that evil individual. The article first clarifies the background to such violent acts by proprietors in Ancient Near Eastern Laws, and the response to it in the laws of Deuteronomy xxiv. The curse and revenge are then explained in the light of parallel practices from ancient Greek literature, mainly from the Oddesey. Curse practices meant to restore justice are explored on the basis of Greek binding spells and of the corpus of Greek literary curses. The image of the Mesopotamian god "ama" as an avenging god is analyzed according to the famous Babylonian "ama" hymn and to that god's epitheta. Finally, examples of Hebrew curse literature are highlighted in the Book of Job and in Psalm cix.

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