"Mystic River: Ausonius' Mosella as an Epistemological Revelation", Ramus 45.2, 2016: 231-266. (original) (raw)

Alluvium and Interlude: The Dynamics of Relationality in Ausonius' Mosella

Arethusa, 2021

Ausonius' Mosella represents a river that is a matrix of multi-species relationalities--spatial, legal, sympathetic, antipathetic, cosmological, economic, and filial. Reading the river as relational unlocks new perspectives on the alluvial nature of late antique intertextuality, broadening our hermeneutic horizons from other texts to the wider living world.

The dissemblance of the constructed landscape in Ausonius' Mosella

Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, 2017

It seems that few poems of Late Antiquity have received the level of attention that has been heaped upon the Mosella of Decimus Magnus Ausonius. Characterized (some might say stigmatized) as an hodoeporikon from at least the 1930s, the poem is commonly believed to describe Ausonius' return to Trier with the emperor Valentinian I, following a campaign against encroaching Germanic warbands. The earliest commentators on Ausonius' Mosella tended to concentrate on the structure of the poem itself, but, from the 1960s, there was a shift in academic focus towards an analysis of the specific language used in the poem and, in particular, its intertextuality. In 1984 Michael Roberts identified one of the dominant themes of the poem as the " violation of boundaries " and elucidated Ausonius' " negative evaluation of the products of culture as opposed to nature ". It is in this vein that this paper will precede, but arguing also that we see in Ausonius the beginning of a Christian and late antique rejection of the man made.

An Embodied Reading of Epiphanies in Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales, Ramus 45.2 (2016).

This article focuses on the Sacred Tales (henceforth ST), Aelius Aristides' first-person account of his terrible diseases and subsequent healing brought about by Asclepius, and sheds new light on this text with the help of the notion of embodiment. In recent decades the ST has received a great deal of attention: 1 scholars have offered two main readings of this work, oscillating between the poles of religion and rhetoric. Some have read the ST as an aretalogy 2 while others have emphasised the rhetorical aims of this text and its connection with Second Sophistic literature. 3 My article focuses on Aristides' epiphanic dreams of Asclepius. Previous studies have considered these passages to be part of the traditional Greek epiphanic discourse, one in which, as argued by Verity Platt, 'the visual sense tends to predominate'. 4 This focus on sight in the epiphanic tradition matches the importance of seeing in the Greek religious practice: in ancient Greece sacred sites were visited in order to see the god. 5 My study, however, argues that these passages, by focusing on the narrator's interactive and multisensorial perception of Asclepius, are especially vivid because they present Aristides' perception of the god as embodied and enactive rather than purely visual (I explain these terms below). In the second part of this article, I turn my attention to the ancient readers of the ST: although the linguistic mediation prevents any literary account of epiphany from conveying a full experience of the divine, with the help of narratorial comments Aristides' dreams of Asclepius bring readers close to gaining it. Overall, this article confirms from a new angle the relevance of religion and rhetoric to the understanding of the ST, as well as suggesting that the body might play a more important role than usually thought in the ancient response to epiphanies.

Mythological References in Ausonius' Epistolary

Classica et Mediaevalia, 2023

Ausonius' letters constitute a specimen of the way he employs references to Greek mythology. The process by which Ausonius reworks mythological material follows patterns that were already well established in the Latin literary tradition of reworking Greek sources. The recycling of such material is not only proof of his technical prowess, but also demonstrates his ability to perform precise thematic choices. Frequently, the use of mythology is part of the metaliterary and metapoetic discourses tackled by Ausonius while addressing his friends as recipients of letters. The analysis of individual letters reveals how the poet used mythological references for two main purposes. The first is to elevate the tone and content of the discourse, employing a series of artificial comparisons with mythical characters and events. Brief mythological references used to formulate playful numerical periphrases are also worth noting here. The second aim is encomiastic, namely the celebration of his friends, the recipients of his letters, who are transferred from everyday reality to the higher level of the mythical dimension and the superhuman sphere.

Poetry and Philosophy in Empedocles : two poems, one project

Museum Sinicum, 2018

I argue that Empedocles’s philosophical thought and his choice to compose poetry participate in a unified and consistent project, which is both aesthetic and intellectual. The medium Empedocles chose is part of his philosophical message, and the relationship that he constructs between poetry and philosophy is by nature one of necessity. Empedocles reforms the conception of poetry, by intertwining it with his original theories on cosmology, biology, and on the divine. He thus draws an essential connection between poetry and the philosophical thought that is expressed in his poem. This has effects on how he adapts traditional composition techniques of dactylic poetry to his original intent. He thus corrects the earlier dactylic poetic tradition from the inside. Furthermore, Empedocles reflects on the role of his philosophical knowledge in the Greek world, which is apparent from a study of his addressees (both internal and external). I argue, finally, that Empedocles’s project is unified through the poems On nature and the Purifications: the latter interprets the former as a counterpart to the crime that was committed by the daimon when he put his trust in Strife—at the expense of all the other gods or divine principles.

Epiphany. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in the light of Homer’s and Ovid’s poems

2012

Establishing inter-textual links between the so-called “epiphany” segment of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the epiphany patterns in the classical poetic opera: Homeric epics and Ovidian poems Ars amandi and Metamorphoses, this paper aims to develop a sequence of analogies which will bring to a better understanding of the meta-poetic meaning of Joyce’s famous text. The Joycean epiphany echoes the Homeric one, but omits the key-point: the revelation of an Olympic god or goddess, instead of whom a diff erent kind of divinity, the intrapsychical Daedalus, artifex, is revealed. This transformation of the actual divine beings into the divinity of art and artistic self-consciousness echoes Ovid’s version of the Daedalus-Icarus myth, taken by the Latin poet as a parabola of the artistic eff ort and creation. The Homeric proto-text enables a reader of Joyce to seize the metaphorically divine status of the artifex in the modern world, and to interpret Joyce’s works in the contex...

Exemplarity and Narrative in the Greek Tradition (abridged)

This discussion starts from the encounter between Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24, and especially Achilles’ remarks on the jars of Zeus (525-35), the seminal expression of a characteristic Greek attitude towards the mutability of fortune and the instability of happiness. Such ideas can be readily paralleled in other cultures, literatures and narrative forms, both ancient and more recent, Greek and non-Greek. Their expression in language, symbol, and art (both verbal and visual) illustrates the way that the condensation of such complexes of thought and feeling in typical and traditional forms makes a particular ethical or emotional perspective tangible, tractable and transferable. These recurrent forms capture important aspects of a culture’s emotional and normative repertoire in a way that allows them to be reconstituted and applied in the mind of each recipient or audience member. The paper considers some of the implications of this in the Greek narrative tradition, from Homer, through archaic poetry, tragedy and Aristotle’s theory of tragedy to a detailed examination of the persistence of the phenomenon and its extensive influence on narrative shape in Plutarch’s Life of Aemilius Paullus, a splendid example of how later Greek narratives return explicitly to the most authoritative of all Greek narrative sources as a way of locating themselves in what their authors clearly regard as a distinctive Greek tradition.