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Abstract: Abstract The study retraces Nietzsche’s 1875 notes for the planned but never published Unfashionable Observation, We Philologists, through a specific focus on the topics of science, life and art in their close and seldom discussed interrelation. The questions that the investigation addresses are: what is the significance of Nietzsche’s problematisation of science in We Philologists for our interpretation of the topic in his later works' How should we interpret these notebooks in relation to his previous writings, on the one hand, and to his later treatment of themes like the deconstruction of Christianity, the critique of eudemonism or the historical genesis of the genius on the other' Framing the notebooks as unwittingly experimental precursors of Nietzsche’s aphoristic books, the article interprets the unique nuance of the notes as an opportunity to start shedding a different light on the discussion of these questions in Nietzsche’s later works. Science, life and art become thus the focal points of a more specific and circumscribed analysis of his early thought – reconnecting these topics to their tangible origins, and tracking their early development in the context of Nietzsche’s acclaimed switch from philology to philosophy and cultural criticism. PubDate: 2024-08-19
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Abstract: Abstract Near the end of his career, Dante wrote two eclogues, instigating a literary fashion which was to outlast the Renaissance. These poems—Dante's only known compositions in Latin verse—were prompted by a verse epistle from Giovanni ‘del Virgilio’, in which the humanist scholar goaded Dante to compose a martial epic in Latin celebrating contemporary Italian military victories, which would prove him a worthy successor to the author of the Aeneid. Dante’s response is an elaborate bucolic recusatio, which engages in a rich and intricate intertextual dialogue both with Virgil and with his correspondent. Through a pattern of allusions emphasizing the theme of land-confiscation and dispossession in Virgil’s Bucolica and his denunciation of the avarice and violence of contemporary Rome in the Georgics, Dante makes the case that his own career has fulfilled the noble aspirations which Virgil himself compromised, when he abandoned the idea of a cosmological epic, entertained in the second Georgic and chose instead to glorify war and the emperor in the Aeneid. PubDate: 2024-07-29
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Abstract: Abstract This article explores the use of Greek mythology in current ecological discourse. In Classical Studies, specifically in Classical Tradition studies, the ecocritical revision of Greco-Latin texts and their survival is still in its infancy. The ecological question is usually approached as a reconstruction of notions and uses of nature, with little reference to the contemporary philosophical and cultural discourse that revolves around the cultural causes of the climate crisis, its historical paradoxes, and its future projections. This has led to a situation in which ancient mythology, especially Greek mythology, is used by ecological discourse representatives for argumentative, explanatory, or informative purposes without the required textual criticism and scientific rigor. This paper insists on the need to critically review the ecological readings of Greek mythology to avoid contradictions, paradoxes, or biased interpretations that could weaken the ecocritical debate. Specifically, two predominant tendencies are analyzed: the argumentative use of myth (e.g., in the case of the adamantine chains of Prometheus or the use of Platonic myths) and its resemanticization for a specific discursive purpose (e.g., the reductionist interpretations of Gaia and Medusa) in authors such as Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Ursula Heise, or Donna Haraway. The results show that the treatment of Greek myths in the ecological discourse is often subordinated to argumentative needs, avoiding alternative mythographic sources that relativize what has been exposed or venturing into biased interpretations that can lead to undesired contradictions concerning the postulates of the ecological discourse itself. PubDate: 2024-07-22
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Abstract: Abstract Aristophanes’s plays, unknown to the Latin Middle Ages, were recovered in Renaissance Italy at the dawn of the Quattrocento. Latin versions were the principal form in which Aristophanes was introduced into the high Latin culture of the Western world. Thanks to the humanist Latin translations of the plays, scholars gained access to the Greek text of Aristophanes, who figured prominently in the educational curriculum of the time. This study focuses on an unpublished and little-known Latin version of Aristophanes’s Nubes (‘The Clouds’), which is preserved in MS Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, philos. et philol. gr. 204, of the mid-fifteenth century. The Greek text is accompanied by an interlinear translation into Latin, made by the Dominican friar and Professor of theology Alessandro da Otranto (1458). This previously neglected manuscript is especially interesting because of the Latin version it contains, since it appears to be among the first ever made of Aristophanes’s Nubes. In this paper, I examine and discuss the various translational strategies employed by Alessandro to make Aristophanes’s fifth-century BC text accessible to a fifteenth-century Latin readership. I also offer a semi-diplomatic edition of the unpublished Latin text. PubDate: 2024-07-16
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Abstract: Abstract Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book (2009) is a literary record of a period of self-experimentation Jung carried out between 1913 and 1916 by means of a technique he would later call ‘active imagination’: Jung would allow himself to ‘drop’ into a fantasizing state and then observe the images that emerged from the unconscious. If he happened to encounter a talking figure, he would try and interact with them. One of such figures was Philemon, an intriguing reinvention of the models from both Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Goethe’s Faust. Jung’s refiguration of Philemon illustrates Jung’s engagement not only with these two works, but also with late antique magical, alchemical and Hermetic writings, as well as classical scholarship dedicated to them. Even though it is widely recognized that Philemon played a central role in Jung’s psychological formulations after his break from Freud in 1912, this figure seems to have received no sustained attention in the scholarship on the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in depth psychology. This article offers an investigation of how Jung’s refiguration of Philemon relates both to Jung’s psychological research prior to his first encounter with this character and to the path it followed after this encounter took place with regard to the archetype of the ‘wise old man’. PubDate: 2024-07-03
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Abstract: Abstract This article puts on trial the assumed authorship of a sixteenth-century manuscript poem reminiscent of Ovid’s Heroides, currently ascribed to Lady Elizabeth Dacre. After establishing a revised edition of the text, it provides arguments based on historical, material, literary and textual analyses of the source, strongly indicating the unlikeliness of its supposed attribution to this English noblewoman. The arguments suggest that, while Dacre was probably the scribe of the manuscript, the author of the text was most likely her husband, Sir Thomas Dacre. This outcome is used as an example evincing the fundamental importance of usable and informative text editions for historians and literary scholars alike, increasingly calling for close collaboration across disciplines, as well as a renewed appreciation of textual editing. PubDate: 2024-07-01
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Abstract: Abstract Memnon, the mythic king of Ethiopia killed by Achilles during the Trojan War, had a double or fused identity in classical antiquity: both Asian and African for Greek and Roman writers because of his parentage and because of the geographical indeterminacy of ‘Aithiopia’ and of ‘India’, but definitely black-skinned for Roman writers. How was this figure received in medieval texts and images' This paper tracks Memnon through three textual genres from the twelfth to the fifteenth century – commentaries on Ovid, catalogues of famous men, histories of the Trojan War – and charts the ways in which his classical identity was overlaid and transformed by pro-Trojan sentiment, chivalric heroization and Christian sacrificial thinking. PubDate: 2024-06-01 DOI: 10.1007/s12138-023-00640-2
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Abstract: Abstract This paper examines the sources and literary function of references to the ancient Greeks and Romans in the Japanese author Natsume Sōseki’s first novel, I am a Cat, written and published from 1905 to 1907. It places Sōseki and his work in the context of Meiji Japan and its renewed engagement with the West. The paper shows how Sōseki was uniquely placed to reflect on this engagement, particularly its intellectual and literary aspects. Despite his personal familiarity with Greek and Roman materials as demonstrated in his scholarly works and notes, the references in his novel are mediated, drawn primarily from other (mainly English) texts rather than ancient sources. This reflects the most common manner of encountering this material for Sōseki’s contemporary readership and therefore sheds some light on the diffusion of Greek and Roman material among the ‘educated elite’. The paper further demonstrates that Sōseki’s use of this material has literary and thematic point: it contributes to his satire of the emerging class of intellectuals in the Meiji period by critiquing the social weaponization of such knowledge, especially in instances where it is not backed by true understanding. The mediated nature of the Greek and Roman material in the novel also raises questions about the efficacy of language as a means of communication as it contributes to the destabilization of meaning. This is most noticeable in Sōseki’s discussion of Greek and Latin language. PubDate: 2024-06-01 DOI: 10.1007/s12138-023-00648-8
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Abstract: Abstract This paper attempts to interpret Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as an example of the classical motif of the ‘katabasis’ or descent into the Underworld, a descensus ad Inferos sui generis, conditioned by having its origin as a fairy tale intended for the entertainment of a child reader (descensus ad Terram Mirabilem): this tale would have as its matrix reference the similar vicissitude of Psyche in the ‘tale of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche’ from the Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass by the Roman author Apuleius. PubDate: 2024-05-22 DOI: 10.1007/s12138-024-00660-6
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Abstract: Abstract Aristotle and utopia may seem an odd combination. Anthologies of utopian texts do not contain passages from Aristotle’s writings. He also typically does not feature in histories of utopia. Nonetheless, a close reading of the Politics reveals that Aristotle had an extensive and rather distinctive interest in the enterprise of imagining utopias or ideal cities. The peculiarity of his exploration of utopia lies in its multifaceted approach. He combines critical assessments of some of his predecessors’ ideal cities with the creation of several of his own. This article explores the hypothesis that Aristotle’s lengthy and varied analysis of ideal cities plays a crucial, though not obvious, role in the history of utopia. The relevance of his speculation lies in identifying (i) distinct ways of conceptualizing the activity of imagining a utopia and (ii) themes and concerns fundamental to designing it. However, the importance of Aristotle’s place in the history of utopia is not primarily due to his direct impact on later utopists – his major influence is limited to a handful of Renaissance authors. Instead, his significance lies predominantly in the fact that he was one of the very first thinkers to recognize and articulate key elements of the utopian endeavour. This study examines the points of contact between Aristotle’s utopias and representative modern/contemporary utopias and dystopias. It aims not to institute strict parallelisms between these works and the Politics but to show how they share some of the ‘essential ingredients’ of utopian literature. PubDate: 2024-05-22 DOI: 10.1007/s12138-024-00666-0
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Abstract: Abstract This paper traces the history and evolution of humanist re-use of the first couplet of Propertius’s elegy 2, 2, from Gregorio Tifernate’s Poemata to the end of the Quattrocento. Continued re-use of the couplet, or of its constituent elements, make it a veritable commonplace at a time when collections of loci communi were first coming into existence as ordered and consciously prepared works. The attraction of this particular couplet from Propertius was enhanced considerably by a parallel use in the Petrarchan vernacular love poetry tradition. This poetic commonplace became so well established that its very language appears in Christian moral poetry from the period, as evidenced by an example taken from Baptista Mantuanus’s collection of eclogues entitled Adulescentia. The commonplace established by Quattrocento elegiac poets thus became a weapon in the arsenal of edifying Christian poetry, whose authors redeployed elegiac language in their criticism of mankind’s excessive devotion to earthly passions. PubDate: 2024-05-13 DOI: 10.1007/s12138-024-00662-4
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Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
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