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• The Haughty Soul of the Avenger: The Myth of Lucius Brutus in the Aeneid (6,817–823)

  55–71.

  Ádám Rung

  Views:

  28

  In Book 6 of the Aeneid, Virgil constructs his own version of an epic Underworld and, innovatively, combines it with a panoply of future Roman heroes. This article focuses on the laconic introduction given to one of these heroes, Lucius Iunius Brutus, the founding father of the Roman Republic. More specifically, it examines the opening lines of a striking passage that, in an act of diction that has puzzled readers since antiquity, applies the adjective superbus to Brutus, rather than to his adversary, Tarquin the Proud, whose cognomen bears precisely this meaning. To interpret these lines, the article will attempt—using other literary versions of the work combined with comparative material from similar narratives—to reconstruct the traditional story of Brutus as it was known to Virgil and his contemporaries to determine, firstly, if this elucidates what such a retelling would have meant to the Augustan reader and, secondly, what its possible political and cultural implications would be if read with the traditional myth in mind.

• From Grief to Superbia: the Myth of Niobe in Greek and Roman Funerary Art

  281-296

  Bar Leshem

  Views:

  421

  The 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.

• Lucius Brutus of Rome and Cypselus of Corinth

  27–44.

  Ádám Rung

  Views:

  255

  The story of Lucius Brutus, the founder of the Roman Republic has often been analysed as a historical story, somewhat mythicised, and embellished by literary tropes; and some have also interpreted it as primarily a myth, historicised by a later Roman culture more interested in the exemplary than in the marvelous. Starting out in the latter tradition, this article explores a connection that has been hinted at from antiquity, and has been analysed from the historical and historiographic perspective to some extent, but has not been interpreted in detail as a connection between two myths: the numerous parallels that the story of Brutus and the Tarquins, as told by Virgil, Livy and Ovid, has to the saga of the aristocratic Bacchiad and the tyrannical Cypselid families of early Corinth, as told by Herodotus and Aristotle. The newly discovered parallels (and the re-examination of the known ones) between these stories also invite the reader to reflect on the ways they might have evolved, their political and cultural functionality and on the complex interplay between myth and history.

• Phaedras Brief an Hippolytus: Ovids Brief (Her. 4) in der römischen bildenden Kunst

  59–75

  Tamás Gesztelyi

  Views:

  157

  Euripides has Paedra write a letter to Theseus in which she accuses Hippolytus of raping her. In the Heroides, Ovid has Phaedra write a letter to Hippolytus which describes her burning love for the young man. In Roman visual arts the story is usually depicted as a nurse handing over a letter to Hippolytus, which he declines. It seems obvious to identify this letter with the one composed by Ovid, i.e., it is this letter that found its way into the visual arts. The contents of the love letter gradually overshadowed the tragic outcome of the story: they represented endless spousal love in sepulchral art.