Michael Squire

Reciprocal chromosome painting illuminates the history of genome evolution of the domestic cat, dog and human

Domestic cats and dogs are important companion animals and model animals in biomedical research. The cat has a highly conserved karyotype, closely resembling the ancestral karyotype of mammals, while the dog has one of the most extensively rearranged mammalian karyotypes investigated so far. We have constructed the first detailed comparative chromosome map of the domestic dog and cat by reciprocal chromosome painting. Dog paints specific for the 38 autosomes and the X chromosomes delineated 68 conserved chromosomal segments in the cat, while reverse painting of cat probes onto red fox and dog chromosomes revealed 65 conserved segments. Most conserved segments on cat chromosomes also show a high degree of conservation in G-banding patterns compared with their canine counterparts. At least 47 chromosomal fissions (breaks), 25 fusions and one inversion are needed to convert the cat karyotype to that of the dog, confirming that extensive chromosome rearrangements differentiate the karyotypes of the cat and dog. Comparative analysis of the distribution patterns of conserved segments defined by dog paints on cat and human chromosomes has refined the human/cat comparative genome map and, most importantly, has revealed 15 cryptic inversions in seven large chromosomal regions of conserved synteny between humans and cats.

Reading a View: Poem and Picture in the Greek Anthology

The way in which Greek poets used imagery as a figure for exploring the collaborative and competing qualities of poetry is discussed. Several case studies are highlighted to demonstrate how the verbalization of viwwing becomes central to the poetic visualization of reading.

Ekphrasis at the forge and the forging of ekphrasis: the ‘shield of Achilles’ in Graeco-Roman word and image

The Homeric description of the shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.478–608) is Western literatures earliest and most influential attempt to evoke images in words. This article examines the passage anew, demonstrating not only its paradigmatic concern with the collaborative and competing resources of word and picture, but also its significance in forging ideas about ekphrasis in the ancient world. By revisiting the passage and subsequent Graeco-Roman responses to it, the study analyses the complex ways in which Homeric epic figured and described image–text relations. At the same time, the article uses the reception of the passage among subsequent writers and artists to showcase the sophistication with which ancient critical traditions theorised ekphrasis at large.

The integration of canine genetic maps with the canine karyotype using specific gene amplification of chromosome‐specific DNA

We have used a rapid approach to place markers that are already represented in current genetic maps onto individual chromosomes in species for which chromosome paints exist. PCR-based techniques are used to look for the presence of individual marker genes within each chromosome-specific DNA pool. The presence of a given marker within a DNA pool allows assignment of the complete radiation hybrid group, or linkage group from which the marker is drawn, to an individual chromosome. We have used this method with a new set of canine chromosome paints (Yang et al., 1999). In this way, we have assigned 39 of 44 published RH or syntenic RH groups to canine chromosomes, together with 33 of 40 canine linkage groups in a recently published map (Neff et al., 1999).

'Counterfeit in character but persuasive in appearance': Reviewing the ainigma of the Tabula Cebetis

T he tabula cebetis (Πίναξ Κέβητος) is one of those texts that have dropped off the professional classicist’s radar. 1 Once—and not so long ago—this short early Imperial dialogue, acted out before a purported allegorical picture, was standard pedagogical fare. In his 1644 treatise “Of Education,” for example, John Milton recommended the work alongside Plutarch and “other Socratic discourses” as a way of making pupils “expert in the usefullest points of Grammar, and withall to season them, and win them early to the love of vertue and true labour”; 2 in similar vein, albeit within a rather different intellectual context, Gotthold Wilhelm Leibniz could cite this “popular” text as a shorthand example of using diagrams to elucidate philosophical thought. 3 The nineteenth century witnessed a slow but sure reversal in critical perspective. By the time Rudolf Hirzel came to pass judgment in 1895 (some four hundred years after Lorenzo de Alopa’s Florentine editio princeps in c. 1494–96), he dismissed the Tabula Cebetis as “ein Erzeugniss der plattesten Popularphilosophie ohne Geist und ohne Empfindung.” 4 Despite the run on Imperial Greek “Second Sophistic” literature over the last three decades, the pejorative tone has very much continued. Comparatively little has

'How to Read a Roman Portrait'? Optatian Porfyry, Constantine and the Vvltvs Avgvsti

This article takes its lead from research into the ‘language’ of Roman portraiture. More specifically, it explores a work that literalizes the idea of ‘reading’ a Roman portrait (to quote Sheldon Nodelmans classic phrase): a picture-poem by Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius — a much maligned poet active in the first decades of the fourth century ad — that purports, through its iconotextual form, to visualize the countenance of the emperor Constantine ( uultus Augusti ). After a brief introduction to Optatian and his œuvre , the article offers a close reading of his third poem, demonstrating the sophisticated ways in which it probes the latent iconic potential of written script. What particularly interests me about this case study is its underlying paradox: on the one hand, Optatian boasts that his painted page will outstrip antiquitys most celebrated painter (it ‘will dare outdo the waxes of Apelles’, uincere Apelleas audebit pagina ceras ); on the other, the actual form of the picture seems to eschew mimetic modes of representation, rendering Constantines ‘portrait’ a geometric pattern. So how should we make sense of this image? What does the poem reveal about ideas of portraiture in the fourth century? And how might we contextualize Optatians abiding fascination with the limits of ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’?

Corpus imperii: verbal and visual figurations of the Roman ‘body politic’

This article examines the political metaphor of the body in ancient Roman words and images. The verbal metaphor of the ‘body of state’ (corpus rei publicae) gained particular rhetorical currency in the late Roman Republic; likewise, following Augustus’ rise to power in the later first century bc, related ideas about the corpus imperii (‘body of empire’) played a critical role in legitimising a system of effective one-man imperial rule. But how did this discursive verbal figure relate to the material bodies of Roman visual culture? The recourse to the body as political metaphor, it is argued, revolutionised the workings of Roman figurative imagery; by extension, the search for appropriate visual forms in which to render Augustus’ own body fleshed out discursive political ideas concerning the Augustan figurative corpus imperii. To understand how the figure of the body was rendered into political metaphor in Late Republican/ Early Imperial Rome, no less than how that political metaphor was turned back into iconic figurative form, therefore requires working across visual and verbal categories. No less importantly, it means tackling larger questions about how words and images construct ideas about the body in at once related and different ways.

Truly Beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios, by Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis

Publius Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales have long been something of an academic embarrassment. Here was a second-century AD orator and rhetorician exceptionally well versed in the Greek literary tradition. At the same time, however, Aristides made no secret of his religious fervour, as a devout (obsessive?) follower of the Greek god Asklepios and the various healing cults associated with him. Byzantine Christian commentators duly despaired: ‘what is the need, Aristides, of such a never-ending business? Of such a waste of time? Of dreaming hallucination?’ Twentieth-century critics have been only marginally less derogatory. Even Charles Behr, who lovingly edited and translated all of Aristides’ many works in the 1970s and 1980s, felt the need to apologise for the author’s degrading paganism: the Sacred Tales are duly deemed ‘the mental processes of a deeply neurotic, deeply superstitious, vainglorious man’. This academic backdrop provides the grist to Petsalis-Diomidis’ mill in her groundbreaking, ambitious and truly interdisciplinary study: ‘when seen in the right context’, Petsalis-Diomidis argues, ‘what can appear as a bizarre private text emerges as an eloquent public expression of religious experience with significant ramifications for our understanding of the religion and culture of the Second Sophistic’ (2). Not only does the monograph promise to take ‘this fascinating text seriously and with a sense of respect’ (4); it also uses it as a springboard for exploring the larger cultural horizons of the secondcentury, Roman-controlled Greek world. The many insights provided along the way gravitate around two overarching conclusions. First, the book demonstrates how discourses of religion and personal devotion intersect with much larger cultural ideas – not only about travel, pilgrimage and landscape, but also about gender, display and the body. If Petsalis-Diomidis tackles head-on the marginalised role of religion within Second Sophistic studies, she also corrects the long-standing assumption that religious fervour was polarised along class-lines: ‘here . . . is . . . an educated intellectual member of the social elite, who actually took GraecoRoman religion intensely seriously’ (3). Knowing one’s Plato, in other words, was not mutually exclusive with (‘vulgar’, ‘uneducated’, ‘naive’) acts of personal devotion: ‘my argument is not that such areas of culture did not appeal to non-elites, but that they also appealed to the social and intellectual elite, and that there was no clear distinction between the two’ (5). The book’s five-part structure bears the tell-tale signs of the PhD thesis from which it stems. After an introduction laying out the scholarly field, the first chapter uses the cult of Asklepios Glykon at Abonouteichos to introduce the various rhetorical associations of religion in the second century AD (‘Pilgrimage polemics: ‘‘Neos Asklepios Glykon’’ in image and text’). This self-contained analysis pitches material and iconographic evidence for the cult against Lucian’s famous lampooning in his Alexander: rather than confirm the popular vs elite model of Second Sophistic devotion, the case study is used to demonstrate