Illinois Classical Studies
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NOTICE: Return or renew a I Library MatoriatsI The Minimum Fm for each Lost Book is $50.00. The person charging this material is responsible for us return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below ""* ""<'eriining of books are reasons for discipli- naryI-«";T**"*'*!r'action and may result in dismissal from the To ''""">^'^-University renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 1 ILLINOIS CLASSICAL STUDIES VOLUME XII. 1 Spring 1987 J. K. Newman, Editor Patet omnibus Veritas; nondum est occupata; multum ex ilia etiamfuturis relictum est. Sen. Epp. 33. 1 SCHOLARS PRESS ISSN 0363-1923 ILLINOIS CLASSICAL STUDIES VOLUME XII.l ©1987 The Board of Trustees University of Illinois Copies of the journal may be ordered from: Scholars Press Customer Services P. O. Box 6525 Ithaca, New York 14851 Printed in the U.S.A. ADVISORY EDITORIAL COMMITTEE John J. Bateman David F. Bright Howard Jacobson Miroslav Marcovich Responsible Editor: J. K. Newman The Editor welcomes contributions, which should not normally exceed twenty double-spaced type4 pages, on any topic relevant to the elucidation of classical antiquity, its transmission or influence. Consistent with the mamtenance of scholarly rigor, contributions are especially appropriate which deal with major questions of interpretation, or which are likely to interest a wider academic audience. Care should be taken in presentation to avoid technical jargon, and the trans-rational use of acronyms. Homines cum hominibus loquimur. Contributions should be addressed to: The Editor, Illinois Classical Studies, Deparunent of the Classics, 4072 Foreign Languages Building, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, Illinois 61801 Each contributor receives twenty-five offprints. Preface The University of Illinois was founded in 1867 in the twin cities of Urbana and Champaign. The following item appeared in the Champaign -Urbana News-Gazette earlier this year: Robert W. Mayer, professor emeritus of finance at UI, supplies an interesting sidelight on the series devoted to choice of Urbana-Champaign as site for the institution. He writes, "Back in the 1920s and 1930s, William Abbott Oldfather was professor and head of the department of Classics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Like all his LAS colleagues, he smarted at the way in which the various departments in the College of Agriculture and Engineering invariably enjoyed de facto priority over his at budget-making time. "A man of incisive wit, however, he had the satisfaction, from time to time, of reminding the assembled University Senate that his was the only department explicitly cited in the University's Charter. Then, as now. Agriculture and Education were colleges, not departments, and there was no department of 'mechanic arts'; and all the 1867 Charter said about the institution's mission was that it should 'provide education in agriculture and the mechanic arts, not to exclude the classics'." Little changes over the years. Professor Oldfather's experience—and his consolation—^are ours today. Once again grateful thanks are due to Mrs. Mary Ellen Fryer for her painstaking care with our contributors' texts and the problems of "desk-top" publishing. Frances Slickney Newman has exercised her usual unceasing vigilance over both form and matter. J. K. Newman (Lii^^^i^ . Contents 1 An Unnoticed Allusion in Theocritus and Callimachus 1 SIMON GOLDHILL, King's College. Cambridge 2. Circe and the Poets: Theocritus IX. 35-36 7 HUGH PARRY. York University. Ontario 3. ApoWonius' Argonautica: Euphemus, a Clod and a Tripod 23 STEVEN JACKSON, Trinity College. Dublin 4. Heteros lis eimi: On the Language of Menander's Young Lovers 31 FREDERICK E. BRENK, S.J., Pontifical Biblical Institute. Rome 5. Reconstructing the Beginning of Menander's Ade/p/io/ (B) 67 MARK DAMEN, Indiana University 6. Polybadiscus and the Astraba of Plautus: New Observations on a Plautine Fragment 85 RADD EHRMAN. Kent State University 7. The Weapons of Love and War: A Note on Propertius IV. 3 93 MICHAEL B. POUAKOFF. Hillsdale College 8. From Separation to Song: Horace, Carm/Vw IV 97 DAVID H. PORTER. Skidmore College 9. Ovidian Shakespeare: Wit and the Iconography of the Passions 121 JUDITH DUNDAS. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1 0. The Psychology of Uncertainty in Senecan Tragedy 135 VICTORIA TIETZE. Westminster College. Pennsylvania 11. De Sublimitate 30. 1 : An Overlooked Pointer to a Date? 143 J. K. NEWMAN, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 12. M. Minucius Felix as a Christian Humanist 157 MICHAEL VON ALBRECHT, University of Heidelberg 13. The Miracles of Cyrus and John: New Old Readings from the Manuscript 169 JOHN DUFFY, University of Maryland 14. A Note on Diogmitae 179 C. P. JONES, University of Toronto 15. Where Did the Emperor Lurk? HA, Hadrian 16. 3 181 BARRY BALDWIN. University of Calgary 1 6. Vainglorious Menippus In Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead 185 JOEL C. RELIHAN, University of Dlinois at Urbana-Champaign An Unnoticed Allusion in Theocritus and Callimachus SIMON GOLDHILL The relative chronology of the major Hellenistic poets and also of poems within each poet's corpus is a subject where modem scholarship is forced to admit considerable uncertainty. Although it is a generally—and, in my view, rightly—held opinion that there is an extremely important degree of cross reference or significant interaction between different texts and poets of the period, it has proved highly problematic to use the perceived relationships between particular texts to demonstrate with any certainty influence between poets or respective dates of composition (as, for example, the disagreement of scholars on the priority of Theocritus' or Apollonius Rhodius' treatment of the Hylas story shows).^ In this short article, I \yant to point to what seems a significant echo between passages in Callimachus' Aitia prologue and Theocritus' first and seventh Idylls not commented on in the editions of either poet. It has become a communis opinio that the prologue of the Aitia was composed late in Callimachus' life, perhaps even as a prologue to a collected edition of his work (and thus later than Theocritus' Idylls)? Since the evidence is far from certain on this matter, as with other aspects of dating, I shall consider the relationship between the passages in question in two ways, first as a Callimachean echo in Theocritus and then as an echo of Theocritus in Callimachus. This primarily heuristic method of argumentation is not put forward with the expectation of finally clarifying the question of dating; but rather with the aim first of pointing out this unnoticed interplay, and second of showing the constant difficulties of using such echoes to prove priority or influence. Indeed, when the allusion, as here, can be brought under the rubric of ^ For a recent study of our knowledge on Callimachus and Apollonius, see M. Lefkowitz, Zeitschriftfiir Papyrologie und Epigraphik 40 (1980), 1-19. On Apollonius and Theocritus, see especially A. Kohnken, Apollonios und Theokrit (Gotlingen 1965). For a general, traditional view on chronology see T. B. L. Webster, Wiener Studien 76 (1963), 68-78. 2 See e.g. R. Pfeiffer, Callimachus U (Oxford 1949), pp. xxxiii-xliii; E. Eichgrun, KalUmachos und Apollonios Rhodios (Berlin 1961), pp. 64 ff.; and, especially, P. Parsons, Zeitschriftfiir Papyrologie und Epigraphik 25 (1977). 49-50. 2 Illinois Classical Studies, XII. 1 Umkehrung, it might seem the very nature of the allusive technique that allows it to be read in this double manner. It has often been argued that the description of the cup in Theocritus' Idyll 1 has a certain programmatic value for Theocritus' pastoral poetry .^ As with the shield of Achilles in the Iliad (with which the cup is often compared and contrasted), we are offered a particular sort of picture of a particular sort of world."* Each of the scenes on the cup has been thought indicative both of the nature of the pastoral world described by Theocritus and of the Xenxoc, style of his Hellenistic poetry—especially in the way that the depiction of the cup (in contrast wi^ the shield of Achilles) offers a series of small-scale, unheroic fragments with no pretensions to a holistic picture of the world. The third picture of the small boy is especially interesting with regard to a "poetic program. "^ The scene of the vineyard itself echoes descriptions of vineyards at vintage time on the shield of Achilles and the Hesiodic Scutum,^ but is turned from any heroic associations to a picture of a light- hearted robbery of the child guard's grapes. It is of course the figure of the boy which has attracted most attention in terms of the programmatic nature of the ecphrasis. Callimachus writes that the Telchines say that he composes his verse naXc, axe {Aitia fr. 1. 6). This idea of writing like a child, coupled with the poetic associations of the verb tCKzkzi' (like other words of weaving^), and the "grasshopper" (which has been seen as a version of the famous Callimachean desire to be in his verse a cicada rather than an ass') have led critics to see in the picture of the boy weaving a grasshopper cage^° a typically allusive Hellenisl Callimachus in parallel poetic interests. ' Most recently, D. Halperin, Before Pastoral (Yale 1983); e.g. "The ivy cup is not only an emblem for the range of subjects in the Idylls in general but for the thematic structure of bucolic poetry in particular" (p. 182). See also G. Lawall, Theocritus' Coan Pastorals (Washington 1967), pp. 28 ff.; S. Walker. Theocritus (Boston 1980), pp. 30 ff.; C. P. Segal, Poetry and Myth in Ancient Pastoral (Princeton 1981), pp. 25-46. ^ On the ecphrasis as a world picture, see P. du Bois, History, Rhetorical Description and the Epic: from Homer to Spenser (Cambridge, Mass.