HELIOSPub Date : 2017-09-22DOI: 10.1353/HEL.2017.0000
Rachel H. Lesser
{"title":"The Pandareids and Pandora: Defining Penelope's Subjectivity in the Odyssey","authors":"Rachel H. Lesser","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2017.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2017.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Early in Book 20 of the Odyssey, on the eve of the bow contest for her hand in marriage, Penelope wakes from sleep, cries until she is sated, and then prays to Artemis for death. She asks Artemis either to shoot her with an arrow at once or to send a storm wind that will snatch her up and cast her into the streams of Oceanus, just as the storm winds carried off the daughters of Pandareus (20.61–66). Penelope then elaborates on the Pandareids’ story, describing how, after the gods killed their parents, a quartet of Olympian goddesses reared these orphaned sisters, gave them all the qualities of desirable womanhood, and then sought to arrange their marriages until Harpies snatched the maidens away and made them servants of the Erinyes (20.67–78). After offering this brief narrative as a paradigm, Penelope renews her earlier prayer, explaining that she would rather disappear or die than please a man inferior to Odysseus. Penelope’s prayer to replicate the Pandareids’ demise has received only sparing critical attention,1 but represents, as I will argue, an important avenue for interpreting Penelope’s character and narrative role in the Odyssey. Since the 1980s, feminist scholars have been debating to what degree Penelope is presented as an autonomous and actantial subject.2 Does she shrewdly influence the epic’s plot to her own ends, or is she helplessly subordinated to male interests and constrained by patriarchal structures in an androcentric narrative? If she indeed has a hand in directing the plot, why does the (male) poet accord her this agency?3 Central to any answer are the corollary and long-disputed questions of what Penelope is thinking and what she desires, and also the degree to which this interiority is (and is intended by the poet to be) coherent or knowable. When does she recognize Odysseus, how does she feel about his return, does she really hate the suitors, and can any of this be determined?","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2017.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46542059","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}
HELIOSPub Date : 2017-09-22DOI: 10.1353/HEL.2017.0001
B. Clayton
{"title":"Heracles, Hylas, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in Apollonius's Argonautica","authors":"B. Clayton","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2017.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2017.0001","url":null,"abstract":"The last episode of Book 1 of Apollonius’s Argonautica (1.1187–1357) tells the story of Heracles’ loss of his beloved Hylas, snatched away by a spring nymph as he was fetching water to prepare dinner.1 The episode is a key component in the story of Jason and the Argonauts, because it explains why Heracles was not present when they reached Colchis and successfully (with Medea’s help) captured the Golden Fleece. An outline of the story goes as follows. The Argonauts stop in Mysia for the night, and Heracles wanders off in search of a suitable tree to make a replacement oar, having just broken one in an overly exuberant display of rowing. Hylas goes to a spring to fetch water and is drawn into it by a nymph who is overcome by his beauty; he is never seen again. The Argonaut Polyphemus hears Hylas’s cry and runs to tell Heracles what has happened. Heracles, mad with grief, searches frantically, but in vain. The next morning the Argonauts inadvertently set sail without them, leaving in haste to take advantage of a favorable wind. Only later do they notice that three members of their crew are missing. Numerous details in this story suggest that Apollonius is deliberately linking the disappearance of Hylas with the rape of Persephone in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Richard Hunter (1993, 40–41) lists the following as parallels and contrasts: both rapes happen with Zeus’s “‘consent’”; Persephone is taken when her mother is not there, and Hylas is away from a father substitute, Heracles; Persephone bends to pick the flower, Hylas bends to fill his pitcher at the spring; both Persephone and Hylas cry out, and are heard by someone not their parent; Demeter tears her veil, Heracles throws away his tree (Hunter identifies this parallel as tentative and humorous); Demeter is described as a bird speeding over land and sea, Heracles is compared to a bull stung by a gadfly; Polyphemus and Hecate serve as messengers to tell the parent what has happened—in both cases the reaction is swift; the daughters of Celeus encounter Demeter at a well where they have come to fetch water (as Hylas was doing); they do not recognize Demeter whereas Polyphemus does recognize Heracles (eu dev min e[gnw, 1.1254); Demeter tells a story of","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2017.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45421361","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}
HELIOSPub Date : 2017-03-22DOI: 10.1353/HEL.2017.0006
Brian V. Lush
{"title":"Simulation, Violence, and Resistance in Euripides' Helen","authors":"Brian V. Lush","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2017.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2017.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Euripides’ “new Helen,” as Aristophanes (Thesm. 850) identifies her, occupies a tenuous position between the aggressive imposition of power (divine, political, and erotic) and resistance. In Hera’s replication of Helen, the goddess would nullify Helen’s identity in order to remove the stakes of a military conflict predicated upon Helen’s singular beauty. Although Helen’s eponymous heroine seeks to differentiate herself from her divinely fabricated clone, she nevertheless re-enacts a pattern of abduction, duplicity, and martial violence which has always haunted her story. Paradoxically, her efforts at resistance, both to human coercion and to the threat posed by her double, come to simulate the irony, deception, and seduction that characterize the eidôlon (and, by extension, the prior tradition around Helen that the eidôlon embodies).1 Accordingly, as Jean Baudrillard suggests in the quotation that introduces this essay, Helen’s universal mythic embodiment of beauty, seductive allure, and disarming cleverness should give us pause in assigning authenticity or priority to any of her instantiations, since each Helen is always “the simultaneous equivalent of all the others.” The tension between Helen’s struggle to assert her unique personhood and the weight of a mythic tradition that places her at the center of war, retribution, and abduction emerges powerfully in Euripides’ Helen. At stake, then, are the mythic explanation and justification of a primeval war fought repeatedly","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2017.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43193840","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}
HELIOSPub Date : 2017-03-22DOI: 10.1353/HEL.2017.0007
Krishni Burns
{"title":"Constructing a New Woman for the Body Politic: The Creation of Claudia Quinta","authors":"Krishni Burns","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2017.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2017.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Rome’s legendary historical narrative is an excellent source for the defining characteristics of self-constructed Roman identity.1 While this identity naturally centers on the masculine military/political realm, women do play a role in the construction of Romanitas. Rhea Silvia is raped to bear Rome’s founders; the kidnapped Sabine women form a human shield between their men folk to meld two peoples into one; and women like Tullia Minor and Tarpeia serve as negative examples of correct behavior. The positive portrayals of individual women usually end in their sacrifice to the greater good of the Roman state. In particular, the tragedies of Lucretia and Verginia mark major turning points in the sociopolitical Roman landscape. To quote Sandra Joshel’s introduction to her landmark article “The Female Body and the Body Politic,” “raped, dead, or disappeared women litter the pages” of Livy’s comprehensive history (Joshel 1992, 112). There is another way that legendary women can contribute to the mos maiorum, however. Although Roman women’s social position limited their political roles to inspirational victims, in the religious sphere women had the potential to contribute substantially to the construction of Roman identity and bolster the safety of the state without becoming a sacrifice. One such woman is Claudia Quinta, who performs a miracle in the service of the Magna Mater and thereby, at least according to legend, saves Rome from Hannibal’s invading Punic armies. Joshel suggests that positive portrayals of active women appear in the literary records only when events force Roman historians to admit them. Yet Claudia Quinta’s act of superhuman strength in the service of the Magna Mater cannot have been an unavoidable fact of history. Evidence suggests that not only the miracle but the woman herself were fabricated in order to serve a socio-religious goal. That moment in Rome’s self-fashioning was defined by a purely legendary event where a female character was created, given a voice and the power to act both on her own behalf and in the best interests of the state. Claudia Quinta represents a different way","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2017-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2017.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44634710","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}
HELIOSPub Date : 2016-09-22DOI: 10.1353/HEL.2016.0006
J. Weiner
{"title":"Transcending Lucretius: Vitruvius, Atomism, and the Rhetoric of Monumental Permanence","authors":"J. Weiner","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2016.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2016.0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2016.0006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66419694","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}
HELIOSPub Date : 2016-09-22DOI: 10.1353/HEL.2016.0007
Shreyaa Bhatt
{"title":"Rhetoric and Truth: Tacitus's Percennius and Democratic Historiography","authors":"Shreyaa Bhatt","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2016.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2016.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Democracy is not the parliamentary system or the legitimate state. it is not a state of the social either, the reign of individualism or the masses . . . Democracy is the name of a singular interruption of this order of the distribution of bodies in a community that i have suggested should be conceptualised as police. it is the name of that which interrupts the smooth functioning of this order through a singular process of subjectivization. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2016.0007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66419711","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}
HELIOSPub Date : 2016-09-22DOI: 10.1353/HEL.2016.0004
Mark Payne
{"title":"Aetna and Aetnaism: Schiller, Vibrant Matter, and the Phenomenal Regimes of Ancient Poetry","authors":"Mark Payne","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2016.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2016.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The past decade or so has seen a transformation of the landscape of speculative theory by various forms of new materialism which have sought to overturn the object relations of Kantian \"correlationism,\" according to which we know neither things nor thinking in themselves, but only the relation between them. (1) Among the cognitive projects of speculative realism, object oriented ontology, and vibrant materialism, it is the latter that, in its advocacy of a fine grained attention to the agency of objects with which human beings share their life world, would seem to afford a new opportunity for the practice of literary scholarship. One may cleave closely to a Kantian epistemology or be indifferent to it one way or another, and yet be willing to admit that the objects of ancient poetry are livelier than we have been accustomed to acknowledge, and that there has been insufficient attention to the ways in which they constitute the field of agency in the poems in which they appear. Alex Purves (2015) takes the vibrant materialism of Jane Bennett and Sara Ahmed as her point of departure for a reexamination of Ajax and his weapons, and the ways in which they constitute a single field of activity and resistance in the Iliad which is not yet constituted as soul, body, and its prostheses, but is still an aggregate of separate, self-moving parts actuated by their participation in material assemblages: the hand in action is one with the shield, for example, and does not belong more primordially to a body that is, as yet, still notional. Indeed, as Purves argues, new materialism might even be understood as a rediscovery of the pre-human being in the world of the Homeric hero, as it was controversially characterized by Bruno Snell--a project for investigation in the present that awaits its own chronicles of thick description. (2) One way in which we have never been modern is that we have not separated ourselves any more decisively than the Homeric heroes from the array of material presences among which we find ourselves. In this paper I respond to the possibility of a renewed attention to the material regimes of ancient poetry in three ways. First, I show how Snell's characterization of the object world of Homeric poetry has its roots in Schiller's account of the modalities of subjectification in his Letters on Aesthetic Education. Second, I demonstrate how a material regime with abortive subjectivity as its outcome, which Schiller calls \"the empire of the Titans,\" is continuously, if intermittently, explored in the tradition of classical poetry devoted to the representation of Etna and culminating in the first century Latin hexameter poem Aetna. And third, I suggest that the failure of a human observer to reduce its phenomenal experience to the terms of its own knowledge--the signature experience of the Etna tradition that I here call phenomenalization--exceeds the possibility of its recuperation by vibrant materialism, or other contemporary ontologies, precis","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2016.0004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66419670","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}
HELIOSPub Date : 2016-03-22DOI: 10.1353/HEL.2016.0000
R. Mccutcheon
{"title":"Cicero’s Textual Relations: The Gendered Circulation of De finibus","authors":"R. Mccutcheon","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2016.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2016.0000","url":null,"abstract":"I. How Do You Solve a Problem like Caerellia? In a pair of letters to Atticus from late June and early July 45 BCE, Cicero complains about what is usually considered to be a decidedly modern problem: the unauthorized circulation of media on a peer-to-peer network. At the start of the first of these letters to Atticus, whom he blames for this 'leak,' Cicero writes: die mihi, placetne tibi primum edere iniussu meo? hoc ne Hermodorus quidem faciebat, is qui Platonis libros solitus est divulgare, ex quo '[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].' quid illud? rectumne existimas cuiquam Bruto, cui te auctore [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]? scripsit enim Balbus ad me se a te quintum de finibus librum descripsisse; in quo non sane multa mutavi, sed tamen quaedam. tu autem commode feceris si reliquos continueris, ne et [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] habeat Balbus et '[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Brutus, sed haec hactenus, ne videar [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. etsi nunc quidem maxima mihi sunt haec. ... quo modo autem fugit me tibi dicere? mirifice Caerellia studio videlicet philosophiae flagrans describit a tuis: istos ipsos de finibus habet. ego autem tibi confirmo (possum falli ut homo) a meis earn non habere; numquam enim ab oculis meis afuerunt. tantum porro aberat ut binos scriberent, vix singulos confecerunt. tuorum tamen ego nullum delictum arbitrar itemque te volo existimare; a me enim praetermissum est ut dicerem me eos exire nondum velle. hui, quam diu de nugis! de re enim nihil habeo quod loquar. (Att. 13.21a.1-2 = 327 SB) Tell me, in the first place, do you think it right to publish without my consent? Not even Hermodorus used to do that, a man who was accustomed to circulate Plato's books, from where the phrase comes, \"Hermodorus trades in tracts.\" What of this: Do you think it appropriate to give a copy of this text to anyone before Brutus, to whom I dedicated it at your suggestion? Balbus wrote me that he had obtained from you a copy of Book 5 of On Divine Ends. In this book, I didn't make many changes, to be sure, but nevertheless a few. You, however, will do well if you keep a lid on the other books, lest Balbus has an unrevised copy and Brutus a stale one. But enough about these affairs, lest I seem to make a big deal of small things, although they do appear all-important to me at this moment ... How did it escape me to tell you? Caerellia, evidently inflamed wondrously by her passion for philosophy, makes copies from yours; she has On Moral Ends in its entirety. I guarantee this to you--I am human, however, and can be mistaken-that she does not have them from mine. For never were they absent from my eyes; so far from my men having made two copies, they scarcely completed one copy of each book. Nevertheless, I do not think that any wrong was committed by your men and I wish you to think likewise; for I neglected to say that I did not wish these to go public yet. Dear me, how long about nonsense! For I have nothing to say about busi","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2016.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66419621","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}
HELIOSPub Date : 2016-03-22DOI: 10.1353/HEL.2016.0001
Erika Zimmermann Damer
{"title":"Iambic Metapoetics in Horace, Epodes 8 and 12","authors":"Erika Zimmermann Damer","doi":"10.1353/HEL.2016.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/HEL.2016.0001","url":null,"abstract":"When in Book 1 of his Epistles Horace reflects back upon the beginning of his career in lyric poetry, he celebrates his adaptation of Archilochean iambos to the Latin language. He further states that while he followed the meter and spirit of Archilochus, his own iambi did not follow the matter and attacking words that drove the daughters of Lycambes to commit suicide (Epist. 1.19.23-5, 31). (1) The paired erotic invectives, Epodes 8 and 12, however, thematize the poet's sexual impotence and his disgust during encounters with a repulsive sexual partner. The tone of these Epodes is unmistakably that of harsh invective, and the virulent targeting of the mulieres' revolting bodies is precisely in line with an Archilochean poetics that uses sexually-explicit, graphic obscenities as well as animal comparisons for the sake of a poetic attack. Epodes 8 and 12 may, in fact, offer Roman culture's most overtly misogynistic tone. (2) In spite of the vehemence in the speaker's verbal assaults, he is reacting to his own perceived sexual weakness. In fact, Horatian iambic continually notes the unmartial status and weakness of the speaker's body. He is programmatically imbellis acfirmas parum (Epod. 1.16) and his final appearance is that of an enervated old man: he is jaundiced, breathless, feverish, and aged on account of Canidia's powers (Epod. 17.21-6, 31-4). (3) Accordingly, I posit here that bodily invective in Epodes 8 and 12 functions metapoetically. I call attention to the repetition of stylistic terms--mollitia, inertia, and rabies--within Epodes 8 and 12, and show how these two poems can be seen as part of Horace's ongoing project to distinguish his own emerging iambic project from the incipient genre of Roman love elegy. (4) To these two elegiac terms, mollitia and inertia, the Horatian iambic speaker adds the quintessentially iambic rabies, a term that the poet Horace himself will later call the emotion that first generated iambic poetry. My reading thus suggests that Horace was well aware not only of the tropes and topoi of Roman love elegy, (5) but also of its vocabulary of style that routinely associates the human bodies of its characters with the central stylistic qualities of the poetic genre. While critics have disputed the chronology, (6) most agree that Horace's Epodes were published soon after Actium, in approximately 31/30 BCE, and were followed by the publication of Propertius's Monobiblos and Tibullus's Book 1 in 28 and 27 BCE, respectively. (7) We thus have evidence in the intergeneric dialogue that I draw out of Epocies 8 and 12 for the existence of two-way influence between the poets of Roman iambic and elegiac erotic poetry, what Peter Heslin (2011, 60) has aptly called \"an extended process in which each poet defined himself against the other[s].\" Furthermore, Horace's poems articulate an iambic refusal to valorize these terms that generally characterized effeminacy or other failings of normative Roman masculinity in broader Roman dis","PeriodicalId":43032,"journal":{"name":"HELIOS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2016-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/HEL.2016.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66419634","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}