Intertextuality in Early Greek Poetry: The Special Case of Epinician

This paper offers a reappraisal of the role of intertextuality in fifth-century BCE epinician poetry by means of a comparison with the role of intertextuality in all of early Greek hexameter poetry, ‘lyric epic’, and fifth-century BCE tragedy and comedy. By considering the ways in which performance culture as well as the production of written texts affects the prospects for intertextuality, it challenges a scholarly view that would straightforwardly correlate intertextuality in early Greek poetry with an increasing use and dissemination of written texts. Rather, ‘performance rivalry’ (a term understood to encompass both intra- and intergeneric competition between poetic works that were performed either on the same occasion or on closely related occasions) is identified as a plausible catalyst of intertextuality in all of the poetic genres considered, from the eighth or seventh century to the fifth century BCE. It is argued that fifth-century epinician poetry displays frequent, fine-grained, and allusive intertextuality with a range of early hexameter poetry: the Iliad, the poems of the Epic Cycle, and various ‘Hesiodic’ poems – poetry that in all probability featured in the sixth-fifth century BCE rhapsodic repertoire. It is also argued that, contrary to what is maintained in some recent Pindaric scholarship, there is no comparable case to be made for a frequent, significant, and allusive intrageneric intertextuality between epinician poems: in this respect, the case of epinician makes a very striking contrast with epic, tragedy, and comedy – poetic genres to which intrageneric intertextuality was absolutely fundamental. It is suggested that the presence or absence of intrageneric intertextuality in the genres in question is likely to be associated with the presence or absence of performance rivalry. A further factor identified as having the potential to inhibit intrageneric intertextuality in epinician is the undesirability of having one poem appear to be ‘bettered’ by another in a genre were all poems were commissioned to exalt individual patrons. This, again, is a situation that did not arise for epic, tragedy, or comedy, where a kind of competitive or ‘zero-sum’ intertextuality could be (and was) unproblematically embraced. Intertextuality in epinician thus appears to present a special case vis-à-vis the other major poetic genres of early Greece, whose workings can both be illuminated by consideration of the workings of intertextuality in epic, tragedy, and comedy, and can in turn illuminate something of the workings of intertextuality in those genres.

A Triangle in the Law-court: Speakers-Opponents-Audiences and the Use of the Imperative

This paper, focusing on and discussing salient passages from the whole corpus of Attic forensic speeches, examines the use and purposes of imperatives for persuasion. The main argument it puts forward is that imperatives should not be seen as an improper, impolite or abrasive means of communication in the law-court, but rather as a decisive and confident way of sustaining a triangular relation between the speaker, his opponent and the audience. The speaker, through the use of imperatives, talks about, and intermittently to, his opponent and conveys messages to the audience about him. These messages, combined with references to religion, patriotism, ancestral glory and the very existence of the polis, give the potential to orations to influence the verdict of the judges and determine the outcome of trials.

New Epistomia from Eleutherna

Publication of two new gold epistomia unearthed during systematic excavations of a cemetery at the site Mnemata (Graves) in Alphá, near Eleutherna. They belong to category B, the so-called Mnemosyne- or Underworld-Topography-texts: the new epistomion B14 from grave 84 was found folded and is identical to that incised on B3–5, B7–8 and the concise B13, except for one minor misspelling; the other epistomion B15 from grave 56 betrays more similarities with the Cretan epistomia B12 and B6 in the recognition dialogue, and is only the second text from Crete which places the spring in the Underworld topography to the left, as B12.

Classicising ‘Pindar’: Quotation, Canonisation and Early Reception

This essay examines the earliest quotations of Pindar in order to shed light on the social and historical dynamics through which he first emerged as a classic author. Pindaric quotations from the classical period point to his stratified and multi-faceted reception: as a figure within popular memory, as an emblem of elite culture and as an intellectual ancestor. Indeed, a capacity to appeal to different audiences for different but interconnected reasons was integral to his canonisation. The earliest Pindaric quotations already bespeak his culturally privileged status, which was expressed and perpetuated in different ways over the centuries but which was established as a social fact from remarkably early on. A search for the deepest roots of the classicisation of Pindar, it is argued, has to go all the way back to his poetry.

Porphyry and ancient scholarship on Iliad 10.252–253: Edition, translation and discussion

In Iliad 10, Odysseus claims that ‘more night has passed | than two parts, but still a third part remains’ (252–253). This gave rise to a Homeric problem, which received a great deal of attention from ancient scholars: If more than two parts of the night have passed, how can a third part remain? The main source for a variety of solutions to it is a lengthy discussion written along the perimeter of three pages of Venetus B, an important manuscript of the Iliad. The source of this text is almost certainly Porphyry’s Homeric Questions. Porphyry presents six different solutions, including those of Apion, Chrysippus and Aristotle (this last a fragment from his lost Homeric Problems), as well as a discussion of Odysseus as astronomer. The present paper includes: a critical edition of this text based on a fresh inspection of the manuscript, yielding new readings; an English translation; notes to the text; and an interpretive essay. The paper demonstrates the limitations of earlier editors of the text, and the hope is that it will serve as an example of how properly to approach and present the fragments of Porphyry’s Homeric Questions. It also turns out that, for quotations from the Iliad and Odyssey, Porphyry often does not provide the text attributed to him in the recent Homer editions of West.

The Placebo Drama of the Asclepius Cult

Asclepius was one of the most popular healing deities in Graeco-Roman antiquity. Patients suffering from various diseases resorted to his sanctuaries, the so-called asclepieia, looking for cure. Many inscriptions preserve stories of supplicants who slept in the abaton of the temples and claimed that they had been healed or received remedies from the god. The historical study may take into consideration modern (neuro)cognitive research on the placebo effects in order to examine the possibilities of actual healing experiences at the asclepeiea. In this paper, I take into account the theoretical premises of the placebo drama theory suggested by Ted Kaptchuk in order to explore the specific factors, including the personality of Asclepius, his patients’ mindsets, the relationship between them, the nature of the supplicants’ impairments, the employed or prescribed treatments and the ritual settings of the cult, which could have mediated health recovery, and contributed to the phenomenal success of the Asclepian therapies via the activation of patients’ placebo responses.

Placebo factors at healing sanctuaries in pagan and early Christian times

The article analyses possible placebo effects that Late Antique religious healing might have had. It focuses on healings believed to have been sent in dreams to worshippers, both in pagan and Early Christian tradition. It also investigates how possible placebo effects might have served to propagate and spread the particular cults (be it the cult of Asklepios, or the Early Christian cults of martyrs). The paper seeks to integrate modern placebo research with the ancient accounts of healings, answering the following question: is it possible that the placebo effect (above all relief of pain) was activated in ancient times by the same factors as seen in experiments today (e. g. effect of the healer’s persona, ritualized behaviour, and above all belief in the cure)? The scope of the paper is at the end broadened to touch upon the question to what degree ancient religious healing offered a socially well-established method of handling illnesses psychologically and fill the need to act, even if a cure as such was not a probable result.

The vocabulary of care and healing in the Greek private letters of Byzantine Egypt

Amid the corpus of Greek papyri discovered in the sands of Egypt, some fifty letters dated from the end of the 3rd century CE to the 7th century refer to a disease which afflicts an animal or a private individual – either the sender or the recipient of the letter, or to a third party. Seventeen of these also provide details on care and healing. How do these seventeen letters, which ostensibly do not derive from the medical world, describe the evolution of a disease, and especially its outcome when it is fortunate for the sick person? What are the healing strategies implemented by these individuals? These are the questions that I try to answer, while emphasising the contribution of these documents to the history of health and disease in Byzantine Egypt.