GABRIEL ESTRADA SAN JUAN (2022), History and Fantasy on Acholius, the Biographer, Schole 16, 2, pp. 482-492. (original) (raw)
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Valerius Flaccus, Historian: The Ends of Ovid and Lucan in the Argonautica
Throughout his epic, Valerius Flaccus comments on the Julio-Claudian dynasty’s exercise of power and the civil war that followed its demise, giving to posterity an authentic Flavian – and probably Vespasianic – voice constructing a history of Rome under, and after, its first imperial family. Although the Argonautica’s content is obviously mythological, in this paper I argue that several of its departures from Apollonius’ version align with events from Roman history. In particular, I explore how Valerius’ treatment of Aeson and Alcimede’s suicide and Phineus’ exile responds critically to the fates of the poets Lucan and Ovid, respectively. Both historical episodes address poetry’s relationship with imperial power, and the Argonautica’s fictional rendition of them illuminates Valerius’ practice of transforming history into mythic poetry. I briefly survey further instances history translated into myth in my conclusion. More than merely reflecting incidents from the early empire, Valerius uses myth to write a history of poetry under the principate. Jessica Dietrich has successfully shown that Aeson and Alcimede’s suicides owe more to Julio-Claudian suicides than to their epic predecessors. Building on her analysis, I argue that the Lucanian allusions underpinning the episode implicate Lucan’s death and draw his fate into the text. Similarly, I show that Valerius’ revised Phineus – an exiled prophet/priest wretchedly eking out life near the Black Sea’s shores – evokes Ovid in Tomis. By casting these poets as actors in his epic, Valerius Flaccus both acknowledges the historical reality of imperial power and also rebukes its deployment by Nero and Augustus. By connecting Lucan with the suicides Aeson and Alcimede, Valerius aligns Nero with his myth’s archetypical villain, the tyrant Pelias. In showing clemency towards the suffering Phineus, the Argonautica’s Jupiter proves a wiser ruler than Ovid’s Jupiter-Augustus. The associations that Valerius establishes between Roman poets from the (not-so-distant) past and these suffering figures of epic create strong critiques of Julio-Claudian policy and also model behaviors for a new dynasty of principes who might break the mold of governing. The implications of these arguments for reading the Argonautica as a text that writes and performs history are significant. The universe of Valerius’ epic is full of tyrannical figures similar to Pelias, pointing to a critique of the historical principate as an institution populated with unjust and abusive rulers. The unalloyed optimism that attends his Jupiter’s clemency towards Phineus supports the interpretation that Valerius advocated for greater artistic license and imperial leniency through his text. The poem’s many non-traditional passages, moreover, recreate several episodes from Rome’s recent civil war: Lemnos revisits the burning of the Captiolium; the completely invented civil war in Book 6 replays the Battle of Bedriacum. These passages explore recent societal traumas, taking moral and pragmatic stands on each while simultaneously lamenting the basic cruelty of civil war. By reading Valerius as fundamentally engaged with imperial history, we gain a valuable witness to the aftermath of the Julio-Claudian dynasty’s dissolution and the first, albeit veiled, histories to emerge therefrom.
Apologist Arnobius, a Christian rhetorician from Sicca Veneria
Hypothekai , 2023
The article is devoted to one of the most interesting Christian apologists of the turn of the 3rd and 4th centuries from the Afri-can city of Sicca Veneria — Arnobius. Being a pagan and a teacher of rhetoric, he converted to Christianity after the Great Persecution of Diocletian and wrote an extensive work in defense of the Christian faith as confirmation of his new views, known as “Seven Books Against the Pagans”. This Christian apology is a unique example of an essay composed independently of the pre-ceding Christian tradition. Apparently, Arnobius did not have ac-cess to the texts of Sacred Scripture when he wrote it and could not fully rely on the works of preceding Christian authors. The apology is largely devoted to a systematic exposition of the cri-tique of classical paganism, which was characteristic not only of ecclesiastical but also philosophical works. The aim of this arti-cle is to reconstruct Arnobius' worldview, based on which one can judge what he taught as a teacher of rhetoric at the beginning of the 4th century. This allows us to recreate the picture of the educational environment in the Roman provincial town of that time. Arnobius actively uses the writings of Greek and Roman authors, which, as it seems, were his main teaching material. The article raises the question of the relationship between the rhetori-cal school and the Christian community in an ancient city. Tradi-tionally, Arnobius' acquaintance with Christianity is considered from the moment of his conversion to the new faith, but the anal-ysis of his apology suggests that the version of Christianity he proposed was not born by chance and was the product of deep creative search, which allows us to reassess the teaching of rheto-ric in provincial urban spaces. Moreover, it is evident that the conflict between Arnobius and the church initially went beyond the line of paganism-Christianity, and the apologist was closer to the Eastern idealistic model of church doctrine, which was not typical for Roman North Africa.
Demosthenes’ On the Crown oration was a masterpiece in Antiquity. This success is testified by the great number of findings. I have notice of 30 papyri containing passages from this work. The enquiry of these specimina and their lessons could be useful in order to reconstruct the demosthenic text, the origin and nature of the public documents quoted, the circulation of this oration in ancient world. Another interesting point is the relation between these papyri and the medieval manuscripts. Usually, no medieval codex is a perfect representative of an ancient line of transmission, as cross-contamination intervened during both ancient times and Middle Ages. From this point of view, P.Oxy. IV 700 gives us many interesting cases of reflection. This specimen, dated II-III century AD, contains §§ 17-19, but it’s incomplete and fragmentary. The integration of gaps sometimes is difficult, above all at lines 22-23, where the text is shorter than the one attested in the medieval witnesses. Moreover, with reference to this passage, probably the same hand added a textual integration on the lower margin (Ἕλληϲι). This entry seems the same which recurs on the upper margin of page 159 verso of S codex (Paris.gr. 2934), the oldest medieval manuscript of Demosthenes. We are dealing with a particular case of conjunctive error? The situation could be, perhaps, more complex. The paradigmatic and difficult case of this papyrus compels us to search a right scientific method to use, in order to critically reconstruct the text. We have to ask ourselves if in the S codex too the addition of Ἕλληϲι on the margin could be the result of a simple omission. We have to reconsider reasons why the most part of critical editors have ever preferred thinking of Ἕλληϲι like an interlinear note that should be eliminated. This idea derives surely from the authority of codex S that, despite its excellence, should be released from the reductive etiquette of codex optimus.
THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE HISTORIA AUGUSTA: TWO NEW COMPUTATIONAL STUDIES
The Historia Augusta (henceforth HA) is a collection of biographies of Roman emperors stretching from Hadrian (AD 117-138) to Carus (AD 282-283) and his sons Carinus (AD 283-285) and Numerian (AD 283-284). 1 The lives purport to be written by six different authors, Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Vulcacius Gallicanus, Aelius Lampridius, Trebellius Pollio, and Flavius Vopiscus, working under the Emperors Diocletian (AD 284-305) and Constantine (AD 306-337). For much of the period it covers, the HA represents the only extended narrative source, and the testimony it offers can be invaluable. Unfortunately, the HA is also famous for its bizarre details and puzzling omissions, as well as its lurid focus on emperors' peccadilloes and personal habits to the detriment of their political accomplishments. It also notoriously includes documents-speeches, letters, laws-which are almost certainly fabricated by the author(s), and cites a whole host of authors nowhere else attested, and probably invented. 2 But the problem of the HA is not only its unreliability as an historical source: it also includes throughout troubling anachronisms, mentions of office and titles that only came into being in the middle of the fourth century, decades after the supposed dates of its composition. In 1889, Hermann Dessau put forth the provocative thesis that the HA was in fact the work of a single author working under the reign of Theodosius (AD 379-395), and that division of the lives between six authors and their dedications to Diocletian and Constantine were merely a literary ploy. 3 Ronald Syme-the most influential exponent of the Dessau thesis-would famously term the author 'a rogue grammaticus'. 4 1. A computational solution? As early as the late 1970s, it was realized that this question of single or multiple authorship in a corpus offered a perfect test case for statistical methods of authorship attribution. Ian Marriott conducted a groundbreaking analysis, published in the Journal of Roman Studies in 1979, which suggested that computational analysis indicated single authorship of the corpus. 5 This was a seminal application of forensic stylometry, as developed by Mosteller 1 Justin Stover would like to thank George Woudhuysen for helpful suggestions. We are both grateful to the editors for accepting this paper and the anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions. The code and texts for this paper can be found in the following repository: https://github.com/mikekestemont/ruzicka.