International Journal of the Classical Tradition

The passage discussed in this article has two kinds of Hellenistic subtext, one pictorial and the other poetic. The pictorial is represented by the fresco in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii depicting Bacchus reclining on the bosom of a woman. The peotic subtext is the kind of Hellenistic epigram that describes the male lover as lying in the lap or on the bosom of the female beloved. Meleager and Philodemus provide examples. These, with the fresco, show that a Hellenistic model for the erotic schema of Mars and Venus was available to Lucretius. On this understanding, it becomes easier to explain the phrase tereti cervice (35), borrowed from Cicero's translation of the Phaenomena of Aratus. The conclusions to be drawn from this passage go counter to the prevailing view of a “sublime” Empedoclean Lucretius who had nothing in common with Hellenistic poetry.

In the second half of the 11th century, a humanist circle of clerical poets, living around the central valley of the Loire, was writing poetry in classical language and metre. Baudriu of Bougueil, who wrote an impressive corpus of Latin poems, was an expert in the language, style, verse, motifs and genres of the classical and later antique pagan and Christian poetry, and treated theological as well as profane and explicitly ancient topics. About 1107, when he was urged to become bishop and to abandon, his personal independence and quiet monastic life, he gave voice to his disgust of the new ecclesiastical burden by a long poem in elegiac distichs. This paper tries to show the ancient genres Baudri has used and transformed and even inverted in order to describe his special situation. Therefore, in imitating the ancient genres, far from showing only his literary colture, he was rather using ther in a very specific and personal way. This use of literary traditions can best be analyzed, in terms of intertetextuality.

Michael Psellos, a prolific and versatile Byzantine scholar of the 11th century, deals with questions of literary aesthetics in a number of his works, often drawing a comparison between ancient and Christian writers. In his treatise on John Chrysostom's style his aim is to show that Chrysostom is not at all inferior to most of the ancient orators and that it is unjust to accuse him of not following the laws of rhetoric. While on the whole Psellos's judgment is essentially based on the criteria established by ancient theorists, especially Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Hermogenes, some light can be thrown on his specific personal approach by the analysis of this hitherto rather neglected treatise.

Travel, it has been argued, confronted the wisdom and truth long ascribed to the texts of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even before the Age of Discovery, humanists were already employing personal experience and direct observation as a guide to knowledge. Paolo Marsi (1444–84), professor of rhetoric in Rome and member of Pomponio Leto's Roman Academy, represents the humanist caught between conflicting testimonies of verba and res. His 1468 versified travelogue of his journey to Spain and his 1482 published commentary on Ovid's Fasti on the one hand betray his belief and trust in the cultural and linguistic hegemony of the classical Roman past. However, they also reveal the renegotiation with auctoritas which takes place through firsthand encounters with the physical world. Paolo Marsi merits the distinction of being a truly liminal figure, a humanist open to historical awareness and new methods of learning.

In addition to imitating ancient Latin like Aulus Gellius, Suetonius Tranquillus, and the poet Horace in his writings, the Florentine Petrus Crinitus (1474–1507) also composed Latin poems ex Graeco, taking as his models poems from the Greek Anthology and prose texts from the Apophthegmata Laconica of Ps. Plutarch. Crinitus, however, produced serious and even melancholy adaptations, downplaying the humor present in the Greek models. His poems ex Graeco thereby reflect the serious tone and didactic themes of his other poems. Crinitus' selective handling of his Greek models is evident when his poems ex Graeco are compared with their Greek sources and with other poems in his extant collection to which they are thematically related.

The focus of this article is the mind of a young French botanist who visits the islands of the Aegean Sea in 1547. Although he is not a professional classicist, he is on the alert for survivals of classical culture among the Greek-speaking natives on Crete, Chios and Lemnos. His chief concern, as a patented Renaissance intellectual, is to find an explanation for the total absence of learning in the Greek world, which appears to him as an antique setting filled with ruined marble and ruined minds. Not given to nostalgia or pathos, he observes the flora and fauna described by Galen and Dioscorides: Nature, at least, remains constant.

Anger’s power to reduce men to the level of beasts is a familiar theme in Western thought and literature. The notion that music and poetry can mitigate irrational rage is exemplified in the myth of Orpheus, who tames the savage beasts and the powers of Hell with his song. But can poetry really be a remedy or preventative against anger? And what if that poetry is read, rather than sung? This paper explores both explicit and implicit responses to those questions in an unjustly forgotten Latin poem ‘On Anger’ by Louvain Jesuit, theologian, and controversialist, Lieven de Meyere (1655–1730).

This essay examines the relationship between sixteenth-century critical texts that define the stylistic accomplishments of Renaissance painters and the evidence of the paintings themselves. Central to this relationship was the synthesis of past and present in the formation of a new style, where ancient visual models and theoretical principles were creatively blended with modern cultural ideals within an atmosphere of political and religious change. Two historical frescoes by the Florentine painter, Franceso Salviati (1510–1563) are discussed in detail along with selected passages from the texts of Giorgio Vasari, Franceso Bocchi, Antonfrancesco Doni, Ludovico Domenichi, and Giovan Battista Armenini, among others.

In 1987, Drs. Isabel and Alfred Bader of Milwaukee presented Queen's University at Kingston with a picture now catalogued, “Anonymous Dutch Landscape with Allegorical Figures (c.1630, oil on panel, 60×81.4 cm).” Its two central figures are a white-haired, bearded nude male with wings, and a seated traveller, to whom the former holds out a crown with his right hand, a sceptre in his left. The proposed identification of this winged figure with Zeus-Fortuna is suggested by twoOdes of Horace. 3.29 offers a Stoic parallel to the choice the traveller must make betweenvita activa (power and peril) andvita contemplativa (peace in the countryside). 1.34 offers a Stoic syncresis of Diespiter and Fortuna, whose wings signify the fleeting and variable nature of the deity's gifts. Some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century emblems and book illustrations also help to support this interpretation.

With regard to the diffusion and the reception of antique sculpture the English collections of antiquities hold a key position. The sculptures of Newby Hall (North Yorkshire) collected by William Weddell occupy a special rank among these collections, on account not only of the number and the quality of these sculptures but also of the fact that the original arrangement was preserved to a high extent. It was in 1764/65 that William Weddell purchased 19 boxes with antique sculptures in Rome. After his return from Italy he had his own gallery built by the architect Robert Adam. The present article will illustrate the significance of this ensemble by comparing the past and the contemporary concepts of placement.

In the second half of the 18th century German authors turned to the almost entirely neglected early Greek tradition. In the process of establishing a national identity, Germans renounced the community of the paneuropean Romanitas: the “Original Genius” of Homer replaced Vergil. At that time the poets of the “Sturm und Drang” movement viewed what was perceived as the relatively primitive state of German literature as the very proof of its close inner relationship with Homer's time. One who brought about the change from the prevailing aesthetic toward a natural, enthousiastic poetry, was Klopstock. At a later point in time, in 1767/68, Klopstock modified the theory of the “Naturgenie” by changing its poetological conception with its intrinsic enthusiams into a political and national one. He was followed by the poets of the “Goettingen Grove”, who were attracted by his idea of a new patriotic poetry.

During Britain’s ‘imperial century’ (1815–1914) the curriculum of the typical upper-class education was dominated by classics (liberal education). Commonly perceived at the time as a ‘general’ subject with no application to any profession, and, by extension, with no worldly or political ramifications, classics was, in fact, as argued in this piece, intimately connected with both access to and validation of imperial power during this period. As the hallmark of an elite a classical education provided access to positions in imperial administration where recruitment operated through patronage. Following reforms of the Indian Civil Service in the 1850’s, which abolished the patronage system in favor of competitive examination, a classical education continued nonetheless to be vital to success since knowl-edge of Latin and Greek was favorably weighted in the marking scheme. Throughout the imperial century, and increasingly self-consciously towards the end, analogies between the Roman empire and the British were made in a variety of ways to validate the British imperial enterprise and provide it with venerable precedents.

The 1828 Report of the Course of Instruction in Yale College, a reaffirmation of the classical curriculum in American college teaching, is recognized as the definitive expression of the philosophy of liberal arts education as seen by nineteenth-century American scholars. Based on the theory of faculty psychology, the Report declared mental discipline to be the prime objective of a college education. While often interpreted as a defensive, conservative declaration, the Report nonetheless left room for the modernization of the college curriculum in an age of growing industrialization. This essay adds to the existing literature by pointing out how, in addressing the particular conditions of the new republican United States, the Yale authors went beyond the similar case argued in 1810 by Professor Edward Copleston of England’s Oxford University.