For Stefania

The Amazon's son

Two things distinguish Phaedra's from the other letters in Ovid's Heroides. In the first place, Phaedra's is not a letter without consequences. On the contrary, it will have a decisive effect on the addressee. But above all, Phaedra's letter is important just as a letter. The very fact of Phaedra's writing a letter touches a fundamental point in the story, and a controversial one. In the Heroides problems of communication are important in themselves, but, after the gratuitous letters by Penelope, Phyllis and Briseis, this is the first (and it will remain the only one) in which the complication always caused by an epistolary intrusion into the body of the story is superimposed on a pre-existent problem. Phaedra's declaration of her love to Hippolytus is a crucial point, a turning-point for the various tragic treatments of the history. Ovid adds problem to problem.

Theocritus' treatment of myth has been discussed many times in the last few decades, particularly in connection with the non-bucolic ‘epyllia’. In this paper I will consider whether anything like what has been called the ‘Destruktion der Tradition’ applies to the bucolic idylls as well; my litmus test will be above all Theocritus' exploitation of mythological paradigms, because almost all the mythological stories which enter the shepherds' world are exempla. All these exempla will turn out to display either a certain or a possible ‘collapse of exemplarity’, because Theocritus more or less expressly focuses both on their exemplary and their opposite, non-exemplary aspects, which complicate and destroy the univocality usually typical of paradigms.

felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas 490

atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum

subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis auari.

fortunatus et ille deos qui nouit agrestis

Panaque Siluanumque senem Nymphasque sorores. (Geo. 2.490–4)

[Happy is he who has been able to learn the causes of things, and

has trampled underfoot every fear, and unyielding Fate, and the din

of greedy Acheron. Fortunate, too, is he who knows the rustic gods,

Pan and old Silvanus and the sister Nymphs.]

In these famous words, Virgil expresses his ambivalent relationship with his great didactic model, Lucretius. The double makarismos suggests a declaration of allegiance to two incompatible views of the world: the rationalist philosophy of Epicurus and a nostalgic longing for the simple rustic piety which the Romans of the late Republic and early Empire were so fond of attributing to the farmer and the countryman.

It is often said that amicitia, so prominent in the love poetry of Catullus, plays a negligible role in the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid: the elegists avoid the vocabulary of amicitia and prefer to describe the relationships with their beloveds in terms of militia and seruitium amoris. In this paper, however, I shall show that this is mistaken. While the elegists do not use the vocabulary of amicitia systematically, they clearly do continue to appeal to its protocols and moral code – Ovid above all. It will be seen that Catullus and the elegists share the use of the ideology of amicitia to pressurize their beloveds to accept or make a return on the benefacta which they as lovers bestow.

The subject of ethnic identity in antiquity has a long-established – if somewhat dubious – pedigree. From as early as the end of the eighteenth century, scholars such as Friedrich von Schlegel were applying themselves to the art, customs and political forms which were thought to characterise Greek Stämme such as the Dorians, Ionians, Aeolians and Athenians. It was the nineteenth century, however, which witnessed a more systematic treatment of ancient ethnicity, as scholarly intuitions were subjected to the rigorous interrogation that was demanded by the newly-established discipline of Altertumswissenschaft. Typical of the new breed of professional scholars was Karl Otfried Müller, who devoted himself to analysing the Volksgeist of groups such as the Etruscans, the Minyans and – most famously – the Dorians.

At once Juvenal's reader is performing the ego of his text aloud, and the book's charge is on: semper ego auditor tantum? (1: ‘Forever just in the audience, that's me?’)

In this, the founding moment of his project, Juvenal finds a way to go ‘back’ through the writing/reading process to cue an entrée he can ‘share’ with his reader; he gets in before readers can decide, as they must, what relations they mean to adopt with the utterant constructed by the text. For he sets his start ‘before his performance begins’ – when he had it in common with the audience of a literary performance that all are there to give a hearing, lend silence, play the perpetual part of addressee. He finds a ‘bubble’ to write for everyone in every audience, necessarily implied in their repression, self-control and accommodation to the performer's ego. This writer must trade on exactly the same dynamics as any other, but his act presumes to capture his audience's thoughts, to speak them, and so have the reader of his text voice the presumptions which silently structure each and every scenario of reading.

Professor J. B. Hall has been kind enough to include some conjectures of mine in the apparatus of his forthcoming Teubner edition of Ovid's Tristia. The notes that follow (bar one – the discussion of 4.2) give some explanation and defence of these proposals.

Tristia 1.6.19–26

nec probitate tua prior est aut Hectoris uxor,
aut comes extincto Laodamia uiro.    20
tu si Maeonium uatem sortita fuisses,
Penelopes esset fama secunda tuae;    22
prima locum sanctas heroidas inter haberes,   33
prima bonis animi conspicerere tui.    34
siue tibi hoc debes, nullo pia facta magistro,   23
cumque noua mores sunt tibi luce dati,
femina seu princeps omnes tibi culta per annos   25
te docet exemplum coniugis esse bonae …
33–4 post 22 ed. Ven. 1486

It is a commonplace of textbook treatments of mood and modality to point out that many languages employ ‘past tense’ forms to express not only temporal but also modal remoteness (i.e. unreality or potentiality) from the ‘here-and-now’, e.g. Lyons (1977: 809–23), Palmer (1986: 208–15). The same observation, mutatis mutandis, may apply to certain modal forms, which, given an appropriate context, can also refer to the past. The verb forms in English conditional sentences such as that in (1):

(1) If Mary went to the bar, she would drink too much.

provide an excellent example of both types of ‘extended’ usage; cf. the two possible readings of (1) given in (2):

(2)(a) If (ever) Mary went to the bar, she used to drink too much.

(b) If Mary were (ever) to go to the bar, she would drink too much.

Modernism, as a phenomenon in the study of the ancient world, has shown miraculous powers of recuperation from repeated and apparently fatal blows, and the appearance in 1992 of Edward Cohen's book Athenian economy and society: a banking perspective is a reminder of the fact. Modernism's apparent capacity to postpone terminal decline obviously has something to do with the subject of economics, but the connections are unclear.

It might be imagined that modernism began with the first appearance of economics as an independent science in the eighteenth century. But in fact the classical political economists did not seek to universalize political economy backwards in time to cover the whole of human history in the way that today's modernists try to universalize economics. Adam Smith distinguished four stages in the development of mankind from the ‘rude’ to the ‘civilized’ state. He was perfectly aware that what he called ‘the stage of commerce’ was historically recent, that earlier forms of society had been quite different in character, and that the new science of political economy described only the operations of the last stage, that of commerce.

For Dionysius of Halicarnassus, an important part of the historian's task is the gathering and analysis of material. The present article is concerned with one particular aspect of this, namely, the investigation of chronology. It has two aims: first, to defend the accuracy of Dionysius' chronological system against the sometimes unfair criticisms of modern scholars; second, to assess how, in his perception, the role of chronographical research related to a historical work on a noncontemporary subject.

The research qualities Dionysius singled out for praise in the writings of Theopompus – a historian he much admired – were care, effort, preparation, and autoptic investigation. Not all of these were applicable to a historian who chose a non-contemporary theme. However, within the limits determined by his subject – Rome's origins and history to 264 B.C. – Dionysius similarly attempted preparatory work and investigation of data for his history.