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From Grief to Superbia: the Myth of Niobe in Greek and Roman Funerary Art
281-296Views:278The Greek myth of Niobe was known in the ancient world both by literary sources and visual representations. Both in Ancient Greece and in Ancient Rome, the myth was represented, alongside a variety forms of art, in funerary art, but in a different manner during each period of time. In Ancient Greece, the myth was represented on Apulian and South Italian vases, portraying the finale scene of the myth: Niobe’s petrification. In Ancient Rome, a shift is visible: the portrayal of the scene of the killing of Niobe’s children on sarcophagi reliefs. The aim of this paper is to follow the iconography of each culture and to understand the reason for the shift in representation, while comparing the two main media forms.
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The vivo suo formula, as a possible manifestation of the interconnection of the Greek and Latin languages in Moesia Inferior
113–126Views:160The paper focuses on a strange variant of the se vivo expression which can be found mostly in Moesia Inferior: the vivo suo fecit formula. It appears only in twelve inscriptions, but that makes up one third of all the occurrences of the se vivo fecit expression in this region. How can we account for this formula, which cannot be explained by the classical Latin grammar? This intriguing form has attracted the attention of Giovanbattista Galdi, who in 2002 dedicated a paper to the possible origin of the formula. In this paper, he claims that the vivo suo form is the result of the interconnection of the Latin and Greek languages in Moesia Inferior, since the expression usually occurs in areas populated by Greeks. Galdi attributes the emergence of the formula to the fact that the Greek language does not have a possessive pronoun (like the Latin suus), but uses the genitive case of the reflexive pronoun (ἑαυτοῦ) to express the possessive relation. According to this theory the bilingual environment in Moesia Inferior, and more specifically the aforementioned Greek structure caused a confusion in Latin in the use of the possessive pronoun (suus) and the reflexive pronoun (se). The aim of my paper is to examine Galdi’s argument and to point out the problematic elements of this theory.
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Parallel Phrases and Interaction in Greek and Latin Magical Texts.: The Pannonian Set of Curse Tablets
27-36Views:231Magical texts represent an inexhaustible source for the phenomena of an ancient language for special purposes. The scope of this paper is limited to the different kinds of word-borrowings in the Pannonian set of curse tablets. One-language, well written and easily readable magical texts can be difficult to understand while explicit and unambiguous wording is expected in such practical genre like curses which level at definite persons. Harmful curse tablets and protective amulets, however, can be obscure. This study aims to give a comprehensive account of the possible reasons why these texts have a cloudy style, with special outlook of parallel phrases in Greek pieces of evidence.
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King of Kings Ardashir I as Xerxes in the Late Antique Latin Sources
143-153Views:282The last ruler of the Severan dynasty, Emperor Severus Alexander had to face an entirely new threat in Mesopotamia, because in 224 AD the Parthian royal house of the Arsacids, which had ruled in the East for nearly half a millennium, was dethroned by the Neo-Persian Sasanian dynasty and the new rulers of Persia were extremely hostile to the Roman Empire. The vast majority of the late antique Latin sources (Aurelius Victor, Eutropius, Festus, Jerome, Orosius, Cassiodorus, Iordanes) call the first Sasanian monarch, Ardashir I (reigned 224–241 AD), who was at war with Rome between 231 and 233 AD, Xerxes, although the Greek equivalent of the Middle Persian name Ardashir is Artaxerxes, as used by the Greek sources. In the Latin textual tradition we can find the correct Greek name of Ardashir only in the Historia Augusta. The paper seeks answers to the question of why Ardashir was usually called Xerxes by late antique Latin sources.
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Hieroglyphs in Greek Magical Texts?
7-12.Views:215The paper examines hieroglyphs and magic signs resembling hieroglyphs attested in Greek and demotic magical texts.
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Bemerkungen zur öffentlichen Sklaverei in Pannonien
89–99Views:96The monograph of Alexander Weiß on public slavery in the cities of the Roman Empire based on Greek and Latin inscriptions shed light on the role and functions of the public slaves, arguing that they had a much larger role in the administration of the provincial cities than previously thought. Weiß intended to collect all epigraphical data on public slavery, although he could not study some smaller corpora in Pannonia, like IlJug or the Corpus of Greek inscriptions found in Pannonia (CIGP). A new collection of inscriptions from Aquincum (Tituli Aquincenses) and new inscriptions offer a great opportunity to reexamine the epigraphical data of Pannonia on public slavery, and examine whether the public slaves of Pannonia fit into the administrative categories listed by Weiß, or might reveal new functions.
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Die letzte Zeile der phrygischen Inschrift von Veziran
17–30Views:68This paper provides a new grammatical and lexicographical analysis of the last line of the Phrygian inscription from Vezirhan based on its Greek version. As a by-product, the system of the medial verbs in Phrygian is also discussed.
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Tilting Scripts: Incongruence as a Source of Humour in the Parodos of the Frogs
15–28Views:66The purpose of the following study is to decode the semantic layers of ancient Greek texts and scripts introducing the well-defined “General Theory of Verbal Humour”. Classical tragedies, the parodoi of the texts used by Aristophanes and the dialogues following them, are all formed according to a (more or less standardised) script. Via putting frogs on the stage, Aristophanes parodies the patterns of the chorus songs and agons in Greek tragedies. Although the setting – the River Styx – could not be more sublime, and the winner of the debate is Dionysus himself, his adversaries are “only” frogs. The Frog Song reveals that the unity of content and form is not to be broken up without serious damage to the effect, as their separation from each other results in the reverse of the original catharsis. This parody, however, does not only refer to the emptiness and anachronistic quality of certain forms, that is, it does not only ridicule the genre, but can also function as the continual self-correction of Aristotelian mimesis. Aristophanes’ parody of a parodos is a meticulously constructed text, a faithful image of the prototypical scripts functioning as source texts, and abundant in humorous effects. Parody is enjoyable in itself, however as any good parody works with the mechanisms creating the parent text; it can only appear comic if it really reveals the patterns underlying the original, and it can only reach its aim if these patterns really bring the original work of art to the recipient’s mind.
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Notices épigraphiques et onomastiques (Dacie romaine) (I)
89–115Views:133This paper republishes 12 Greek and Latin inscriptions from Roman Dacia, in most cases with illustrations. Previous readings are improved and more ghost-names are removed. These inscribed monuments and objects (some of them, in the category of instrumentum inscriptum) are explained in their series or contexts, pertaining to the military milieu or the cosmopolitan side of the province.
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The date and circumstances of the Heliodoros affair: Considerations on the Seleucus IV dossier from Maresha
9–19Views:80In 2005 and 2006 in the Hellenistic city of Marise (Marisha/Bet Guvrin, Israel) five adjoining fragments of a Greek inscription has been found. The stele contains three letters: an order from Seleucus IV (187-175 B.C.) to his chancellor Heliodoros about a certain Olympiodoros, who was put in charge of the sanctuaries of Koilē Syria and Phoinikē; a letter from Heliodoros to Dorymenes (who was in all probability the strategos of Koilē Syria and Phoinikē at that time); and a letter from Dorymenes to a certain Diophanes (probably the hyparchos of the district of Marise). The letters are dated to the month Gorpiaios of the year 134 S.E. (summer of 178 B.C.). There is no doubt that Heliodoros in the dossier of Marise, and Heliodoros in the Second Book of Maccabees (ch. 3–4) is the same person who attempted to plunder the Temple of Jerusalem, but according to the 2Macc 3:25–27 he has suffered a divine punishment. In this paper I am arguing that the “Heliodoros-affair” happened in the earlier years of Seleucus IV’s reign, probably nine or eight years before Olympiodoros was put in charge of religious affairs in Koilē Syria and Phoinikē. If we accept this chronological order, the known list of four strategoi of Koilē Syria and Phoinikē can be easily put together.
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The Destruction of the City: Loss in the Greek and Roman Memory
19-36Views:198The appearance of the ethnically “Other” naturally has an impact on a society’s own identity. It provokes the confirmation or rephrasing of identity. The loss and destruction caused by an ethnically “Other” group creates an especially deep conflict in the society’s self-definition. This paper focuses on such events and the collective memory concerning these, through the case study of the Persian sack in 490 BC and one hundred years later the Gallic siege of Rome.
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The rules of the game: constructing power in rhizotomic practice
45–68Views:73The growth of contemporary interest in ethnobiology and -botany legitimates an attempt to historicise the activities and claims of ancient rhizotomists, ‘root-cutters’, i.e. individuals who made themselves specially knowledgeable about the medicinal and other values of plants (mainly wild) and animal-parts. These men and women hardly formed a coherent group in fact, but may be treated as such for heuristic purposes. One model for historicising them is to locate them between family or household medicine on the one hand, and the increasingly complex market in health-care that developed in the Greek world from the fifth century BCE, and continued to grow in complexity throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods. We can suggest two ways in which rhizotomists responded to this market pressure: experimentation and the construction of the marvellous through complex rules of collection. These rules covered gathering, body movements, offerings to the herb or the earth, addresses to the herb, and close temporal specifications – these latter lent themselves in turn to exploitation by literate rhizotomists in terms of occult schemes. We may use Searle’s distinction between regulative and constitutive rules to interpret these moves.
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Le navire de la république – le navire de l’amour: L’individualisation d’une allégorie collective. (Sonnet LV de Ronsard)
159–173Views:71Pierre Ronsard’s sonnet constitutes a very creative re-interpretation of an ancient allegory (the sea of Love) which is considered to be one of the more important amatory figures. This allegory featured in both Greek and Latin from earliest until latest times, employed in several genres of verse, which reached an advanced stage of development in the hands of Ronsard. The purpose of this paper is providing a comprehensive and detailed study of the idealized cognitive model of the sea of Love from the archaic period until Renaissance, based on Ronsard’s sonnet.
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Minima Epigraphica Auctionum (2019). La Estela de la Milesia Dafnis
193–198.Views:156This paper presents an unpublished inscription from the antiquities market. This entry pertains to the Milesian woman Daphnis’ gravestone. A new exemplar of a Milesian citizen who lived in Attica gives a novel anthroponym to Roman prosopography. In this brief note, we discuss the textual and iconographical aspects of the new item.
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Hoc nemus ... habitat deus (Verg. Aen. 8, 351-352). : Presence des dieux dans la campagne virgilienne: qui sont les di agrestes?
73–82Views:70In the pastoral landscapes of the Geogics (particularly in this poem’s opening invocation), in the Eclogues, and in some descriptions of the Aeneid, for example when Aeneas visits the site of Rome with Evander (Verg., A. VIII 306-368), gods are present in nature, in the wild space, in the fields ; and the Roman feels the presence of undefined divinities. The pastoral and agricultural themes include many gods of the countryside and of agricultural life; Virgil calls them agrestum praesentia numina (G. I 10). This paper will focus on such divinities as Faunus, Pan and Silvanus. Links have been established between these divinities by way of interpretatio, especially between Faunus and the Greek god Pan. Faunus is present in the religious calendar of Rome (Lupercalia); the worship of Silvanus is also well attested in the Roman world. The concept of di agrestes, well attested in Virgil’s works, helps us to define a special category of gods, living in a special area, between civilization and wild space. Some of these divinities combine human and animal features.
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The Magical Fomula on a Lost Uterine Amulet
111–114Views:75The article tries to reconstruct the inscription of a magical gem found in 1883 in Torontál which went lost by now. For this reconstructive work I used other gem inscriptions and also other magical papyri and lead tablets in order to compare the two types of texts. The inscription contains the Soroor-logos and the Gigantorekta barophita-logos as well. The gem and the inscription together were used for the protection of the uterus.
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Shields dropped
5–16Views:116Ancient sources regarded throwing away one’s shield as a punishable crime in Greek poleis, and their testimony has been accepted by modern scholarship. However, if we read the accounts of actual instances of shield-dropping, we find that the interests of the whole community often took precedence over the demand to penalize shield-droppers.
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Farmacopea de la peonia, la planta de la Luna
143–166.Views:127For the Greeks, the peony plant had exceptional properties. It was used for many medicinal remedies. The most frequent were gynecological, nervous and mental diseases (insanity), as well as other minor, varied uses. This plant becomes visible at night when the moonlight falls on it. For this reason, it soon became associated with astrological and magical superstitions. These beliefs passed into the Latin world. It appears in herbaria and in medical treatises. In the Middle Ages it was still a plant frequently used in rural areas.
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Eine magische Gemme mit Inschriften im Akademischen Kunstmuseum der Universität Bonn
205–216Views:95The magical gem published here belongs to the Akademisches Kunstmuseum der Universität Bonn (Abb. 1–2.; measurements: 33 x 24 x 6 mm). It stems from the collection of Klaus Müller, who acquired it in the 1960th or 1970th. Obverse and reverse of the gem are filled with inscriptions, most of them consisting of unknown voces magicae, and possibly some meaningless letters to fill the space. On the obverse a prominent inscription invokes Eloe, that is Elohim, the Jewish God, who entered the magic pantheon like Greek and Egyptian ones and under the name of Iaō, even got an image in the figure of the cock-headed, snake-legged warrior. Eloe here means the great magic Sun god, as becomes apparent by Semese(ilam) in col. d 6. The reverse names Thoth, the Moon god. Thus the gem was an amulet for day and night, that is for ever. The bevel of the gem is left plain, so it could have been personalizied by an inscription, which was not the case; thus in its present form the gem was an amulet for every owner.
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Sofocle: Magia, Medicina, Religione
53–69.Views:170In Sophocles’ tragedies the interweaving of medicine, religion and magic produces a lot of meanings and concepts that show the complexity of the Greek thought of the Fifth century. In his tragedies, Sophocles shows his interest both in the magical and religious medicine and in the new Hippocratic medical science. The aim of this paper is to analyze the conceptual and lexical intertwining that reflects this interest, focusing on the character of Oedipus. In fact, Oedipus is the hero who best embodies this duplicity. At the beginning of the drama he assumes a rational investigation method through which he tries to discover Laius’ murderer and then to heal Thebes from the plague that afflicts it. However, his responsibility emerges during the tragedy; Oedipus’ fault has divine origin and makes him the first cause of the evil of the city. In the Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus’ body is released from the contamination that had made him the origin of the plague and the hero’s body turns into a sort of magic amulet to protect the polis that will guard it when he will be dead.
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Empire and invention: the Elder Pliny's heurematology ("Nat." VII 191–215)
123–135Views:158This paper focuses on the catalog of inventions and inventors that concludes book VII of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (Nat. VII 191-215). While the list is certainly a fundamental source for the largely lost tradition of Greek invention-catalogs, the literary, rhetorical, and intellectual-historical importance of Pliny’s heurematography has, to date, rarely been appreciated for its own merits. I argue that, in spite of the seemingly irregular and heterogeneous character of the catalog, the underlying rhetorical strategy of Pliny’s heurematography allows the list to become a teleological narrative. As I argue, Pliny’s main goal is to show the Romans’ historical merit in unifying the whole Mediterranean world through the appropriation of its cultural and technological patrimony.
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A Possible Interpretation
17–24Views:120This paper attempts to interpret a gem of uncertain date and questionable origin, with Greek inscriptions and letters, and which is in the National Library of France (BNF inv.58.2220). Based on previous interpretations and the surviving impression and description of a pendant which is very similar to it in material and subject, it can be shown that the gem is original, and Christian, based on the depictions on it and the clearly legible word "ΧΡΙCΤΟC".
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To a beautiful soul. Inscriptions on lead mirrors (Collection of Roman Antiquities, Hungarian National Museum)
101–113Views:117There is a collection of several hundred small Roman lead mirrors (former private collection) in the Hungarian National Museum. Greek or Latin inscriptions can be read on 17 mirrors. The present study publishes these items along with the drawings of the inscriptions. Such mirrors were found mainly in graves of women, functioning as escorts to the souls of the dead and as apotropaic amulets.
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A gold lamella for ‘Blessed’ Abalala
7–20Views:107This article examines a previously unpublished gold lamella of unknown provenance, datable on palaeographical grounds to the 1st century BCE, give-or-take a half century, either side. The tablet preserves three words written in Greek letters that may contain a GrecoPersian formula of protection in the afterlife for its bearer, Abalala, a name of pre-Islamic extraction. The study compares the formula with those on a number of shorter ‘Orphic’ gold lamellae to show that the tiny piece represents a ‘Totenpaß’ for the beneficent dead, rather than a protective charm (phylactery) with the usual voces magicae, although the distinction between magic words and meaningful text is not always clear in such instances.
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The enactment of moderation in Plato's "Charmides"
5–34Views:146Plato’s dialogues are as much literary dramas as philosophical inquiries. In light of the scope and development of σωφροσύνη and the carefully crafted historical resonances of the dialogue’s dramatic date and cast of characters, it is argued here that σωφροσύνη is a foundational virtue, best understood as moderation, moderating one’s behavior, rather than on a par with other virtues. The Charmides is non-dogmatic, rather than skeptical or aporetic, and essentially political rather than ethical or epistemological, as often assumed. Rather than asserting any simple, propositional account of moderation, it enacts a complex moral and political view of moderation that unifies many strands of the term’s meanings in Greek through the persons and words of its characters and operating as much through the reader’s, imagination, and emotions as through reason and purely logical argument.