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• Ennodius und Martial

  195–205

  Tamás Adamik

  Views:

  90

  Magnus Felix Ennodius, the bishop of Ticinum (modern Pavia), died in 521. He has left letters, poems, oratorical pieces, saints’ lives and controversial literature. Ennodius’ writings were composed for specific audiences on particular occasions. His Latinity is very literate, syntactically complex, and difficult to understand. He cultivates the short literary forms: letters, panegyrics, declamatory themes (dictiones), short poems, epithalamium, epigrams, epitaphs, hymns. In the preface of his epithalamium for Maximus, he displays the essential qualities of spring with Martial’s vocabulary. This fact directed my attention to the relation of Ennodius to Martial. Comparing Ennodius’s epigrams with Martial’s, I realized that in his epigrams Ennodius imitated Martial both in topics and expressions.

• When elephants weap.: Plin., Nat. 8, 20-21

  75–88

  Ágnes Darab

  Views:

  131

  The literature of classical antiquity has lost much of its attraction, and the circle of its possible readers has been narrowed significantly. Even in literary criticism that reaches beyond classical philology, its position has dwindled to a source of motifs, topics, archetypes, and we clearly lack such interpretations as would present ancient literature from an angle that would appeal to the readers of our age. This paper is devoted to an analysis of the 20th and the 21st chapters of the zoological part (book 8) of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. Through a comparative interpretation that is attentive to the cultural-medial aspects of the textual locus, the essay provides a paradigm for uncovering the meaning – which would appeal to readers in the 21st century – in ancient texts with the help of different methodological perspectives, in this case the simultaneous application of narratological and comparative approaches.

• A Critique of a Satire - Constantine Acropolites’ Letter on the Timarion

  157–164.

  Tamás Mészáros

  Views:

  45

  The protagonist of the satire Timarion, by an unknown author from the 11th or 12th century, falls into a state of suspended animation on his journey and is carried by two demons into the underworld, where he proves in a court trial that he is not dead and is allowed to return to the living. The aim of this paper is to present and interpret a short letter written two hundred years later by Constantine Acropolites, who sharply criticises the Timarion, without clearly presenting his objections.