AntichthonPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1017/ann.2021.3
James Uden
{"title":"Egnatius the Epicurean: The Banalization of Philosophy in Catullus","authors":"James Uden","doi":"10.1017/ann.2021.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ann.2021.3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article offers a new examination of the place of philosophy in Catullus’ Carmina. It focuses on Egnatius, the ‘smiling Spaniard’ of poems 37 and 39, and argues that Catullus’ attacks on this character make use of many standard invective tropes against Epicureans in the late Republic. More than merely an opportunity to show off his whitened teeth, Egnatius’ smile may well have been proof of his philosophical detachment and ataraxia. Yet Catullus maliciously misrepresents this mark of Epicurean virtue as a social gaffe, and an unflattering reminder of Egnatius’ provincial origins. I then reinterpret poems 37, 38, and 39 as a poetic series unified by the ‘banalization’ of philosophical ideas. Ultimately, Catullus creates his own singular voice – the arbiter of style and taste – by representing aspects of other people's behaviour as trite and ordinary. To banalize is an act of power, and it is a weapon that Catullus wields to articulate a sense of difference from other poets and thinkers in his intellectual world.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"55 1","pages":"94 - 115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56966416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AntichthonPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1017/ann.2021.6
Maxine Lewis, Christina Robertson
{"title":"Shameful Kisses: A History of the Reception – and Rejection – of Homoeroticism in Catullus","authors":"Maxine Lewis, Christina Robertson","doi":"10.1017/ann.2021.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ann.2021.6","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The history of Catullus’ reception has been one of exclusion as much as inclusion. Since the seventeenth century, many Anglophone writers have used Catullus as inspiration for their translations, poetic adaptations, and novels. A great deal of these works occluded the role that male homoeroticism played in the Latin poems, especially by omitting Catullus’ male love object, Juventius. Writers have employed various techniques to deal with Catullus’ ‘problematic’ pagan mores: choosing to ignore the suite of poems associated with homoeroticism (for example, Wilder 1948); bowdlerising homoerotic language (such as Nott 1795, Cranstoun 1867, and Macnaghten 1899); and performing ‘gender swaps’ to portray male-male relationships as male-female (a technique employed to memorable effect by de La Chapelle in 1680, and later by Lamb in 1821). Excision of whole poems or bowdlerisation of obscene terms was also often used to deal with Catullus’ depictions of male-on-male sexual violence, a topic regularly entwined with the gentler homoerotic content. This article surveys, analyses, and explains this aspect of Catullus’ reception in English from 1659–1915.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"55 1","pages":"172 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56966881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AntichthonPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1017/ann.2021.5
Leah O'Hearn
{"title":"Conquering Ida: An Ecofeminist Reading of Catullus’ Poem 63","authors":"Leah O'Hearn","doi":"10.1017/ann.2021.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ann.2021.5","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Many have recognised poem 63 as a study in contrasts – light versus darkness, masculine versus feminine, rationality versus madness, animal versus human, culture versus nature. Caught between these polarities is the figure of Attis, removed from everything bright, male, sane, human, and civilised by one impassioned act. The poem suggests that it is partly the nature of the place, its quasi-Hippocratic airs, waters, and places, that emasculates Attis, making him like a notha mulier, iuvenca, and famula. This article will use ecofeminist theory – in particular, Val Plumwood's Feminism and the Mastery of Nature – to investigate the logic of domination running between the poem's polarities and to show how a foreign ‘Eastern’ wilderness effeminises Greek Attis. Moreover, it will be shown that the characterisation of Attis and the galli as a dux and his comites associates the story with the Roman imperial endeavour, suggesting that we can read the poem alongside others that portray conquest (11, 29) and the experience of young men abroad on provincial cohorts (10, 28, 47). In this way, Catullus implies that the imperial project is also made weak and feminine by its very contact with foreign places.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"1198 1","pages":"116 - 135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56966560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AntichthonPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1017/ann.2021.9
J. Wallis
{"title":"Masculine Redemption in Carl Orff's Catulli Carmina (1943)","authors":"J. Wallis","doi":"10.1017/ann.2021.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ann.2021.9","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article argues that Carl Orff's Catulli Carmina – a five-movement cantata comprising a selection of Catullus’ Latin poems framed by neo-Latin text written by Orff himself – occupies an ambiguous space within the cultural environment of National Socialism, especially in portraying ideals of contemporary masculinity. In its overt theatrical displays of male and female sexuality, Catulli Carmina invites association with the perceived ‘decadence’ of pre-war cabaret in France and Germany's Weimar Republic. Yet, through tendentious selection and ordering of the poems, Orff's cantata also ‘corrects’ Catullus’ emblematic triviality and erotic abjection in an era which prized productive masculinity as a symbol of the good health of the nation. Orff's motivations in engaging with Roman culture were very different from Nazism's own fetishising of Greco-Roman antiquity, yet in this chapter Catullus provides a surprising case study for demonstrating how Orff's artistic values were often ‘compatible’ with those of the Nazi regime.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"55 1","pages":"155 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56967353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AntichthonPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1017/ann.2021.4
Robert Cowan
{"title":"Dismembering Cominius: Political Violence and Iambic Aggression in Catullus 108","authors":"Robert Cowan","doi":"10.1017/ann.2021.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ann.2021.4","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Carmen 108 is one of the most neglected and unloved in the Catullan corpus. When it is mentioned in scholarship, it is either as a distastefully extreme instance of iambic invective or the object of a prosopographical exercise in identifying the addressee, Cominius. Gnilka alone has tried to situate it in the context of late Republican political violence, in particularly public lynching. Instead of isolating these two aspects of the poem from each other, this article argues that c. 108 is a self-conscious exploration of the interaction between poetic form and hors-texte. The terms of the invective situate it firmly within the tradition of Archilochean and Hipponactean iambos and it may even allude directly to a fragment of the latter. Yet the threats of violence are transformed when recontextualized within the world of the late Republic, where such literary violence was very much a reality. The poem performs a symbolic dismemberment of Cominius’ body, but one that cannot be safely separated from acts of mob violence in the period. The pragmatics of Catullan iambos explores the limits of verbal violence as speech-act and the point at which hate-speech becomes indistinguishable from the violence it incites.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"55 1","pages":"53 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56966487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AntichthonPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1017/ann.2021.8
Marguerite Johnson
{"title":"Catullus’ Fantastical Memories – Poem 68 and Writing Trauma","authors":"Marguerite Johnson","doi":"10.1017/ann.2021.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ann.2021.8","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the many evocations of memory in the Catullan corpus, fantasy plays a significant, albeit discrete role. Fantasy embellishes memories in Catullus’ poems, not necessarily making them bearable but enabling them to be understood, in part. I argue that in poem 68 there are two different approaches to fantastical memories: the intense and vivid memories of his brother's death, and the memories of Lesbia that move both towards, and away from, overt fantasy. In this sense, and in the context of poem 68, fantasy communicates the memory of trauma in a way that includes vivid, hyperbolic, symbolic and metaphoric modes of expression. In the case of the fantasy embedded in the memory of Lesbia, it also entails wish fulfilment.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"55 1","pages":"136 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56967073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AntichthonPub Date : 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1017/ann.2021.10
Lindsay C. Watson
{"title":"Catullus’ Priapean Poem (c. 17)","authors":"Lindsay C. Watson","doi":"10.1017/ann.2021.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ann.2021.10","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Catullus 17 poses a host of interpretational difficulties. The thorniest of these concerns its unity. How can the initial lines on the rickety state of Colonia's ponticulus be reconciled with the real focus of the poem, the precipitation from the bridge of a husband who is blind to his bride's erotic needs, in the hope of bringing him to his senses? Many attempts have been made to resolve the problem, but few persuade to any degree. This paper proposes that the key to the unity-question lies in Catullus’ adoption of the rare priapean metre. This manoeuvre expresses itself in two ways: first, by infusing the poem as a whole with the thematic colours ascribed to priapeans by ancient metricians, that is to say a ludic, countrified but also mock-epic ethos: second, and crucially, by constructing the doltish maritus, the thematic locus of the poem, as an alter ego of the eponymous deity of Priapean literature; for just like the god of that corpus, the husband of the poem is a conspicuous sexual under-achiever, the butt of mocking laughter, inurbane, and little more than an insensate block of wood. In sum, by reading c. 17 through a specifically Priapean lens it is possible to discover in it an otherwise elusive unity.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"55 1","pages":"35 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56966746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AntichthonPub Date : 2020-10-27DOI: 10.1017/S0066477400004627
N. Horsfall
{"title":"Virgil and the Conquest of Chaos","authors":"N. Horsfall","doi":"10.1017/S0066477400004627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0066477400004627","url":null,"abstract":"The hunt for Virgil’s sources has been, by unspoken agreement among Latinists, largely abandoned. This regrettable development may in part have been a by-product of the justifiable revulsion against the excesses of Quellenforschung as practised c. 1880-c. 1930 (everyone read Posidonius and Varro; no-one else was read), in part by the opening of alluring new vistas in Virgilian studies, where apparent progress might be made without the need of painstaking consultation of HRR,GRF,FGH,FHG and similar collections. It has therefore escaped notice that just as the detailed examination of Virgil’s use of Homer (Knauer, Die Aeneis und Homer) or even of the Homer scholia (Schlunk, Virgil and the Homeric Scholia) can lead to immensely valuable advances in our understanding of the poet’s compositional techniques, so the survey of Virgil’s prose sources and the analysis of how he handles the material available to him can be employed to precisely comparable ends. It is the purpose of this paper to indicate some ways in which such a survey may be put into effect.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"15 1","pages":"141 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0066477400004627","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46012497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AntichthonPub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1017/ann.2020.3
George C. Paraskeviotis
{"title":"Women and Genre in Calpurnius Siculus’ Eclogues","authors":"George C. Paraskeviotis","doi":"10.1017/ann.2020.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ann.2020.3","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article aims to examine the ways in which the Calpurnian text converses with the earlier pastoral tradition focusing on the women identified in the collection. Leaving aside the mythical female figures who are also traced in the collection (e.g. Pales and Venus), this study focuses on all the female characters mentioned by male figures, trying to show that women in the Eclogues, among other elements (such as subjects, motifs, intertexts, language and style), constitute a significant means by which Calpurnius shows originality and generic evolution. It is argued that the female characters in Calpurnian pastoral are the erotic objects of the herdsmen and the recipients of their songs and in that sense they recall the pastoral tradition (Greek and Roman) that Calpurnius inherited. What is more, they are central metapoetic elements which show Calpurnius’ metaliterary engagement with gender in a collection that stresses the originality of the Neronian pastoral. Most importantly, however, they incorporate features and elements from other literary genres (mostly from Roman comedy and love elegy) and in that sense they constitute a significant means by which Calpurnius maintains the generic tensions employed by his literary antecedents (i.e. Vergil) and broadens the limits of pastoral.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"43 1","pages":"103 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/ann.2020.3","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56966660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
AntichthonPub Date : 2020-01-01DOI: 10.1017/ann.2020.1
W. Tatum
{"title":"Cherchez la femme? Fadia in Plutarch's Life of Antony","authors":"W. Tatum","doi":"10.1017/ann.2020.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/ann.2020.1","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In his Philippics Cicero more than once refers to Fadia, whom he depicts as Antony's wife, and to the children she bore him. He also discusses Fadia in his correspondence with Atticus. Plutarch was aware of the Philippics and much of Cicero's correspondence, and therefore of Fadia, and yet, in his Life of Antony, he says nothing about her. This paper examines three possible explanations for the biographer's silence: (i) an informed sensibility regarding the historical value of invective; (ii) the narrative design of this Life and its contribution to Plutarch's characterisation of Antony; (iii) Plutarch's (disturbing by contemporary standards) disapproval of an aristocrat's siring children on women of the lower orders – even by way of legitimate marriage or concubinage. It is, it appears, the ensemble of these factors which excludes Fadia from Plutarch's biography, and the pertinence of each adds to our appreciation of Plutarch's biographical principles.","PeriodicalId":41516,"journal":{"name":"Antichthon","volume":"15 1","pages":"127 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/ann.2020.1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"56966625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}