Ralph M. Rosen

Homer and Hesiod

One of the most frustrating aspects of Homeric studies is that so little literary material outside the Homeric corpus itself survives to enhance our understanding of the cultural landscape of the period. There are many reasons, beyond chronological proximity, to draw connections between Homer and Hesiod. Since antiquity, scholars have debated the absolute and relative dating of Homer and Hesiod and the chronology of their works. The format of the contest of Homer and Hesiod in the Certamen certainly reveals a complex and puzzling agenda. This chapter considers more recent strategies for understanding the specifically literary relationship between Homer and Hesiod in their own time. Recently, in fact, a number of scholars have been arguing that, well beyond matters of diction, meter, and formula, the Works and Days was perhaps even more profoundly engaged in the Homeric tradition than the Theogony.Keywords: Certamen ; Hesiod; Homer; Theogony; Works and Days

Hipponax and His Enemies in Ovid's Ibis

Among the many textual difficulties that beset Ovids Ibis are two passages that allude, in an oblique fashion typical of the whole poem, to the iambographer Hipponax: (1) et quae Pytheides fecit de fratre Medusae, eveniant capiti vota sinistra tuo, (447–8 La Penna) (2) utque parum stabili qui carmine laesit Athenin, invisus pereas deficiente cibo. (523–4 La Penna)

Performance and Textuality in Aristophanes' Clouds

During the 5th century BCE Athenians honored the god Dionysus at two public events with ritual activity, political business and public spectacle. The smaller of the two, the Leneaen festival, took place in the winter, and the city Dionysia a few months later in the spring.2 These festivals featured a number of musical and poetic events, but they are best known to us as the occasions for the performance of Greek tragedy and comedy.3 Comments Reprinted from The Yale Journal of Criticism, Volume 10, Issue 2, 1997, pages 397-421. The author has asserted his right to include this material in ScholarlyCommons@Penn. This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/classics_papers/27

Towards a Hippocratic Anthropology: On Ancient Medicine and the Origins of Humans.

The Hippocratic On Ancient Medicine (VM) is one of the earliest treatises in the corpus and, as such, offers a valuable glimpse at an otherwise poorly documented period of intellectual history. What makes this text so intriguing is that, on the one hand, it sits comfortably within the familiar philosophical and scientific debates of late fifth-century Greece, but, on the other, offers what seem to be idiosyncratic approaches to them. At its most fundamental level, On Ancient Medicine offers a polemic against speculative philosophy that relies on ‘newfangled hypothesis’1 (καινὴ ὑπόθεσις at 1.3) to account for disease and formulate treatment, and argues for a method that instead combines empirical research and analogical reasoning. What is distinct about the work, however, is the author’s focus on food and dietary regimen as the foundation of medical τέχνη and the steps in his thinking that lead him to this position. To reach this conclusion, the author deploys in a famous section of the work (ch. 3) his own form of hypothesizing about the condition of the human species in an imagined prehistorical state of primitivity. That chapter is, in part, a self-promotional argument for the antiquity and validity of medicine as a τέχνη, but it also deserves a place, as many have observed, alongside other works of the period that took an interest in what we would call cultural anthropology. It would serve the theme of this volume well if I could argue that On Ancient Medicine’s particular foray into cultural anthropology was distinctly ‘Hippocratic’, and that any ancient doctor aligning himself with Hippocratic medicine would have been familiar with, and sympathetic to, On Ancient Medicine’s anthropological explanation of the origins of medicine. In fact, however, the available evidence does not allow us to say much

SUPPLEMENTS TO MNEMOSYNE

This volume examines issues of courage and manliness in the ancient world. Taking the Greek concept of Andreia as its starting-point, it sheds new light on the contruction of cultural identity, and the use of value terms in that process.