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Der Mythos als Ursprache
33–44Views:94After discussing some interpretations of myth (Burkert, Jensen, Jaspers, Eliade), the paper deals with the issue of myth’s appearance in literary works. The essential substance of a myth can appear in several treatments, according to the artist’s intention with regard to several interpretations. After a short survey of allegorical interpretations two myths (Orpheus and Eurydice, the golden age) are discussed in their several variations. In connection with the myth of the golden age Vergil’s works are examined to see whether in the Aeneid in particular he created a new myth or rather recreated the myth. In connection with this problem the distinction made between fable and sujet by the Russian formalists is discussed. In answer to the question whether a myth in its artistical appearance can be expressed verbally, Rilke and Hölderlin are cited.
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From Grief to Superbia: the Myth of Niobe in Greek and Roman Funerary Art
281-296Views:421The 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 Haughty Soul of the Avenger: The Myth of Lucius Brutus in the Aeneid (6,817–823)
55–71.Views:28In 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.
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Lucius Brutus of Rome and Cypselus of Corinth
27–44.Views:255The 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.
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Phaedras Brief an Hippolytus: Ovids Brief (Her. 4) in der römischen bildenden Kunst
59–75Views:157Euripides 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.
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Die Grenzen der Bukolik
179–191.Views:202Szilárd Borbély (1963–2014) wrote long narrative poems in the last years of his life. The poems and the novel Nincstelenek (The Dispossessed, 2013) depict the life of a family in an East Hungarian village during the author's childhood years. In constructing the literary landscape, Borbély draws on ancient myths to paint a hierarchical picture of the village from a socio-economic perspective. Borbély planned to publish the poems under the title Bukolikatájban. Idÿllek (In a Bucolic Land. Idylls), although these are rather a palinody of a pastoral idyll. This essay examines how Borbély uses the word "gods" in the poems. Two poems (The Deucalion Collective Farm, Echo on the Veranda) serve as examples to show the role the reception of myth played in the construction of the "bucolic" world.
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Fleeing Sisters: the Golden Age in Juvenal 6
271-280Views:205The opening of Juvenal’s longest and maybe the most well-known poem, Satire 6, is based on the ancient concept of the “Ages of Man”, starting from the reign of Saturn and ending with the flight of the two sisters, Pudicitia and Astraea. The first part of this 24-line-long passage depicts the Golden Age by making use of two different sources: the idealized Golden Age appearing in Vergil’s poetry among others and the prehistoric primitive world from Book 5 of Lucretius. The Juvenalian Golden Age, presented briefly in a naturalistic way, is a curious amalgam of these two traditions, being the only time in human history according to the poet when marital fidelity was unblemished. However, while reading Satire 6, it seems far from obvious that the lack of adultery should be attributed to higher morals.
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Myth and philosophy: The Great Sinner’s topos in Ovid, Lucretius and Seneca
219–231Views:222In my paper I examine the occurrence of a repeated pattern, namely the catalogue of the so-called Great Sinners, in the work of three Latin authors: Ovid, Lucretius and Seneca. Through the hermeneutical category of (external) intertextuality, the paper explores how the same Leitmotiv is profitably employed by different authors across diverse genres and contexts, changing certain features while retaining the same core. Specifically, it will be shown that these Latin writers drew the list of the Great Sinners from previous sources, but that they also adapted the catalogue to the content and patterns of their own works. Finally, it is noted that these three occurrences of the catalogue should be seen more generally as a specimen for the process of imitatio/aemulatio of previous traditions brought forth by classical writers.
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Waiting for the Sybil (Vergilius: Aeneis 6,14–41)
43–53.Views:54The sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid stands out from the text because it is the crystallization of the structural and allusive procedures that organize the text. The narrative of the founding myth of the Temple of Apollo in Cumae and the description of the reliefs decorating the temple’s gate, with the figure of the mythical architect-inventor-sculptor Daedalus in the center (6,14–41), were placed at a highlighted position within the key sixth book: at the beginning. Aeneid philology interprets the temple scene of the sixth book mostly from the point of view of ekphrasis, more precisely in connection with the other ekphrases in the Aeneid. In my paper, I will not concentrate on the interpretation of Daedalus’ reliefs, but on the entirety of the Cumae scene. Specifically from the perspective of the roles, I shall examine the layers of meaning that can be formed in the textual space of Aeneid around Aeneas’ scrutiny of the image during the time of waiting and around the narrator’s description of the image.