Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 326-330
Author(s):  
Daniel Jolowicz
Keyword(s):  
Latin Poetry ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Achilles Tatius ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
System P ◽  
Literary System

The conclusion offers some final thoughts on the question pursued in this monograph, namely the Greek novelists’ engagement with Latin poetry, and what this means for how we model Graeco-Roman relations in the imperial period. It summarizes the findings of Chapters 1–7 and places them side by side in a way that clarifies how the different novelists approach the institution of Latin literature. At least for the three authors in question (Chariton, Achilles Tatius, Longus), the approach to Latin poetry is systematic rather than piecemeal. Allusion to Latin poetry is often playful, and occasionally ideological and potentially subversive (for example, Longus and the Aeneid). The conclusion also addresses the sociological problem of Greek imperial engagement with Latin literature: Greek literary men of the first two centuries CE were, it is suggested, habituated to practices that ensured the preservation of the Greek literary system as it stood. Failure to acknowledge the existence of a Latin poetic tradition in an overt manner served as one way of controlling the literary system.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Daniel Jolowicz
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Latin Poetry ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
Multiple Parameters ◽  
Imperial Period

This Introduction contextualizes the question of imperial Greek engagement with Latin literature within scholarship on the period often labelled as the ‘Second Sophistic’. It establishes the multiple parameters of ‘Greek biculturality’ in order to soften the traditional dogma according to which Greeks would not read Latin (and certainly not Latin poetry) (Section 0.1). It addresses questions of Greek–Roman bilingualism (0.2), the evidence of Latin papyri (especially Vergil) in the context of education (0.3), and gathers together the scattered literary evidence for Greek awareness of Latin poetry (0.4). It then focuses on two contexts, the festival circuit and libraries, in which Greeks may have engaged with Latin poetry (0.5); the archaeology and epigraphy of cities such as Ephesus and Aphrodisias (cities also associated with the novelists) are called upon in establishing this picture. The following section (0.6) sets up the methodology governing allusion and intertextuality, phenomena that are integral to the argument of the book. The final section (0.7) sounds a note of caution about any attempt to draw homogenizing conclusions about ‘Greeks of the imperial period’, a group of great chronological and geographical diversity.

Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Jolowicz
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Latin Poetry ◽  
Cultural Interaction ◽  
Bellum Civile ◽  
Love Elegy ◽  
Achilles Tatius ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Daphnis And Chloe

This work establishes and explores connections between Greek imperial literature and Latin poetry. As such, it challenges conventional thinking about literary and cultural interaction of the period, which assumes that imperial Greeks are not much interested in Roman cultural products (especially literature). Instead, it argues that Latin poetry is a crucially important frame of reference for Greek imperial literature. This has significant ramifications, bearing on the question of bilingual allusion and intertextuality, as well as on that of cultural interaction during the imperial period more generally. The argument mobilizes the Greek novels—a literary form that flourished under the Roman Empire, offering narratives of love, separation, and eventual reunion in and around the Mediterranean basin—as a series of case studies. Three of these novels in particular—Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius’ Clitophon and Leucippe, and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe—are analysed for the extent to which they allude to Latin poetry, and for the effects (literary and ideological) of such allusion. After an Introduction that establishes the cultural context and parameters of the study, each chapter pursues the strategies of an individual novelist in connection with Latin poetry: Chariton and Latin love elegy (Chapter 1); Chariton and Ovidian epistles and exilic poetry (Chapter 2); Chariton and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 3); Achilles Tatius and Latin love elegy (Chapter 4); Achilles Tatius and Vergil’s Aeneid (Chapter 5); Achilles Tatius and the theme of bodily destruction in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and Seneca’s Phaedra (Chapter 6); Longus and Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid (Chapter 7). The work offers the first book-length study of the role of Latin literature in Greek literary culture under the empire and thus provides fresh perspectives and new approaches to the literature and culture of this period.

Horace's Odes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Tarrant
Keyword(s):  
Subject Matter ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Universal Themes

Horace’s body of lyric poetry, the Odes, is one of the greatest achievements of Latin literature and a foundational text for the Western poetic tradition. These 103 exquisitely crafted poems speak in a distinctive voice—usually detached, often ironic, always humane—reflecting on the changing Roman world that Horace lived in and also on more universal themes of friendship, love, and mortality. This book introduces readers to the Odes by situating them in the context of Horace’s career as a poet and by defining their relationship to earlier literature, Greek and Roman. Several poems have been freshly translated by the author; others appear in versions by Horace’s best modern translators. A number of poems are analyzed in detail, illustrating Horace’s range of subject matter and his characteristic techniques of form and structure. A substantial final chapter traces the reception of the Odes from Horace’s own time to the present. Readers of this book will gain an appreciation for the artistry of one of the finest lyric poets of all time.

scholarly journals Introduction

Ramus ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
A.J. Boyle
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Political Repression ◽  
Adequate Description ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Roman Literature ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ars Amatoria

oratio certam regulam non habet; consuetudo illam ciuitatis, quae numquam in eodem diu stetit, uersat.Style has no fixed rules; the usage of society changes it, which never stays still for long.Seneca Epistle 114.13This is the first of two volumes of critical essays on Latin literature of the imperial period from Ovid to late antiquity. The focus is upon the main postclassical period (A.D. 1-150), especially the authors of the Neronian and Flavian principates (A.D. 54-96), several of whom, though recently the subject of substantial investigation and reassessment, remain largely unread, at best improperly understood. The change which took place in Roman literature between the late republic/early Augustan period and the post-Augustan empire, between the ‘classicism’ of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy and the ‘postclassicism’ of Seneca, Lucan, Persius, Tacitus is conventionally misdescribed (albeit sometimes with qualifications) as the movement from Golden to Silver Latin. The description misleads on many counts, not least because it misconstrues a change in literary and poetic sensibility, in the mental sets of reader and audience, and in the political environment of writing itself, as a change in literary value. What in fact happened awaits adequate description, but it seems clear that the change began with Ovid (43 B.C. to A.D. 17), whose rejection of Augustan classicism (especially its concept of decorum or ‘appropriateness’), cultivation of generic disorder and experimentation (witness, e.g., Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses), love of paradox, absurdity, incongruity, hyperbole, wit, and focus on extreme emotional states, influenced everything that followed. Ovid also witnessed and suffered from the increasing political repression of the principate; he was banished for — among other things — his words, carmen. And political repression seems to have been a signal factor, if difficult to evaluate, in the formation of the postclassical style.

Climate Fiction and the World Literary System

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-74
Author(s):  
Andrew Milner ◽  
J.R. Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Perceived Vulnerability ◽  
System P ◽  
Green Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Climate Fiction ◽  
Literary System ◽  
Structural Determinant

The chapter opens with a discussion of two early instances of global warming cli-fi, Arthur Herzog’s Heat and George Turner’s The Sea and Summer, and argues that both are more or less oblivious to the wider world beyond their respective national frontiers. It proceeds to elaborate an account of the place of SF in the world literary system, understood in Wallerstein and Moretti’s terms as comprising a core, semi-periphery and periphery. This model is then applied more specifically to cli-fi, distinguishing between structural and conjunctural determinants of the evolution of the sub-genre. The main structural determinant, it argues, will be the world SF system. But this may be either countered or reinforced by one or more of three main conjunctural factors: the degree of perceived vulnerability to extreme climate change of any particular national political economy; the salience of Green politics within any particular national polity; and the salience of climate change within broader environmentalist discussions in any particular national culture. The chapter concludes with critical accounts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy, Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Antti Tuomainen’s Parantaja.

THE POETICS OF LATER GREEK ECPHRASIS: CHRISTODORUS COPTUS, THE PALATINE ANTHOLOGY AND THE PERIOCHAE OF NONNUS’ DIONYSIACA

Ramus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fran Middleton
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Latin Poetry ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
To Receive ◽  
The Middle Ages

There is increasing interest in what might be thought ‘special’ about late antique poetry. Two volumes of recent years have focused on Latin poetry of this time, Classics Renewed: Reception and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity edited by Scott McGill and Joseph Pucci (2016) as well as The Poetics of Late Latin Literature edited by Jaś Elsner and Jesús Hernández Lobato (2017), while it has become increasingly acceptable to remark on late antiquity as a cultural period in its own right, rather than a point of transition between high antiquity and the middle ages. Greek poetry of late antiquity has yet to receive the level of attention offered to Latin literature of this time, and so it is to help answer the question of what may be thought special about late antique Greek poetry that I here discuss the poetics of later Greek ecphrasis.

The Examination System

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Magone
Keyword(s):  
Civil Service ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Examination System ◽  
Male Population ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
System P ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Civil Service Examinations

The examination system, also known as “civil service examinations” or “imperial examinations”—and, in Chinese, as keju科舉, keju zhidu科舉制度, gongju貢舉, xuanju選舉 or zhiju制舉—was the imperial Chinese bureaucracy’s central institution for recruiting its officials. Following both real and idealized models from previous times, the system was established at the beginning of the 7th century ce evolving over several dynasties into a complex institution that prevailed for 1,300 years before its abolition in 1905. One of the system’s most salient features, especially in the late imperial period (1400–1900), was its meritocratic structure (at least in principle, if not necessarily in practice): almost anyone from among the empire’s male population could sit for the examinations. Moreover, candidates were selected based on their performance rather than their pedigree. In order to be accessible to candidates anywhere in the empire, the system’s infrastructure spanned the entire territory. In a long sequence of triennial qualifying examinations at the local, provincial, metropolitan, and palace levels candidates were mainly required to write rhetorically complicated essays elucidating passages from the Confucian canon. Most candidates failed at each level, and only a couple of hundred out of a million or often more examinees attained final examination success at the metropolitan and palace levels. Due to its accessibility and ubiquity, the examination system had a decisive impact on the intellectual and social landscapes of imperial China. This impact was reinforced by the rule that candidates were allowed to retake examinations as often as they needed to in order to reach the next level. It was therefore not uncommon for individuals in imperial China to spend the great part of their lives, occasionally even until their last breath, sitting for the competitions. Indeed the extant sources reveal, by their sheer quantity alone, that large parts of the population, not only aspiring candidates, were in fact obsessed with the civil service examinations in the same way that modern societies are fascinated by sports leagues. To a great extent, it was this obsession, along with the system’s centripetal force constantly pulling the population in the different regions toward the political center in the capital, which may have held the large territory of imperial China together, providing it with both coherence and cohesion. Modern Historiography has tended to have a negative view of the examination system, singling it out, and specifically its predominantly literary curriculum, as the major cause for traditional Chinese society’s failure to develop into a modern nation with a strong scientific and technological tradition of its own. In the late 20th and early 21st century, this paradigm has become gradually more nuanced as historians have begun to develop new ways of approaching the extant sources, in particular the large number of examination essays and aids.

Punic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claude Baurain
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Knowledge ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Africa ◽  
Literary Output

This chapter focuses on the Punic literature of the Roman imperial period. Since Punic works have not survived from either the Punic city or the Roman city, investigations on Punic literature can only be based on indirect testimonies—including Neo-Punic epigraphy, a temporary survival of the Neo-Punic language and writing, and fragments in translation attributed to Mago the agronomist—or on a cautious assessment of the cultural mood in the Punic city and the role the neighbouring Numidian population may have played in the conservation of the Punic literary output. From this viewpoint, the fate meted out in 146 bce, just after the fall of Carthage, by the Roman Senate to the Agronomic Treatise written by Mago in Punic and to the libri Punici most probably written in Greek is worth special attention because these works could have been one of the stimuli for the Graeco-Latin literature that flourished in Roman Africa right up to the late imperial period. As for other writings in Punic, kept in the archives of Carthage in Punic times, they probably served primarily to preserve traditional knowledge. The contents and the long and turbulent history of the handwritten archives assembled much later in Timbuktu and elsewhere in Mali provide a glimpse into the diversity of topics treated in the Punic language and writing by Carthaginians who lived before 146 bce. As for the Roman city, there is nothing tangible that would support the idea of a ‘renaissance’ in Punic literary output.

The Modern Arabic Literary System

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reuven Snir
Keyword(s):  
Popular Literature ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Basic Medium ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
System P ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Literary System

This chapter sets out the theoretical framework that underlies the Arabic literary system, outlining the scope of the research subject and the assumptions behind the operative theoretical model. It looks also at the question of how popular literature can be given aesthetic legitimation and refers to the delimiting factors between canonized and non-canonized texts as well as between aesthetic and non-aesthetic objects that are by no means static. The chapter shows how canonicity in Arabic literature generally depends on the language of production: The standard Arabic language (fuṣḥā) is the basic medium of canonized texts, whereas the vernacular language (‘āmmiyya) is that of non-canonized texts.

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