In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Commentary on Virgil, EcloguesJames J. O’HaraWendell Clausen. A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xxx + 328 pp. Paper, $27.95, Cloth, $60.00.This “first full-scale scholarly commentary on the complete book of poems known as the Eclogues to appear in English,” as the dust jacket proclaims, is a deeply learned, elegant, helpful, affectionate, humane and judicious guide to the language, style, text, plain meaning, and literary (...) antecedents of what are among the most elusive of ancient works. A sixteen-page introduction discusses “Pastoral Poetry,” “The Book of Eclogues” as a collection of carefully interrelated poems, and “The Composition of a Landscape” (mostly on trees and plants in Theocritus and Vergil). C. prints Mynors’ 1972 Oxford text, but at 3.102 argues for emending his certe neque amor causa est; vix ossibus haerent to hi certe (neque amor causa est), and would delete the refrain at 8.28a and 76. The volume is dedicated to Mynors; the Preface says that it was originally intended as a companion to his Georgics, published posthumously in 1990. C. offers a concise and original Introduction to each poem, focusing on major problems or features and presenting a modest bibliography, with more references to secondary works to come line by line, but the bibliography is highly selective. The commentary’s strengths lie in the discussion of textual problems and the interpretation of difficult Latin, in the remarks on style, diction, tone, rhetoric, and structure, and in the information on Vergil’s use of models, especially Hellenistic sources like Theocritus (extensive and helpful comments), Callimachus (C. naturally has more to say than earlier commentators), and Aratus, but also Roman sources like Lucretius or Plautus (more prominent here than in earlier commentaries, to good effect). Greek is translated in the notes; thus the commentary, like C.’s Virgil’s “Aeneid” and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1987), is at the same time both supremely learned, and accessible to highly literate non-specialists.Comments on specific poems:Eclogue 1: C. suggests that “the principal difficulty” here is that in alluding to Tityrus’ status Vergil has “deliberately confused” the private sense of libertas as freedom from slavery with its public or political sense as “the slogan of Octavian and his party.” The goal is to praise Octavian subtly and indirectly, and for more than just a personal favor, despite what the allegorical tradition has alleged. [End Page 332] On Tityrus’ planned offerings to the iuvenis in 42–43, C. champions Wissowa’s 1902 demonstration that Vergil alludes to once-monthly Hellenistic ruler cult, and points to honors decreed Octavian in 36 after the defeat of Sextus Pompey (but of course this depends on down-dating the collection; see below).Eclogues 3 and 7: The Introductions to the two amoebaean singing contests discuss the poetic problem of competitions in which neither singer may falter or fail, “for then the poem would be ruined.” C. argues that Vergil avoids this problem in 3 by having the contest end in a draw, and in 7 by having the poem describing the defeat of Thyrsis by Corydon be “dramatic—the imperfect recollection, that is, of a witness to an event and not, like the Third Eclogue, an omniscient poet’s description of it.” On 3.84 C. offers surprisingly little comment on the startling mention of Pollio; he is more helpful in the Introduction (xxi) but provides no cross-reference here; by contrast, on 9.35 he explains how “the pastoral illusion is momentarily shattered” by the mention of L. Varius Rufus.Eclogue 4: In an Introduction adapted from C.’s essay in J. L. Kugel, ed., Poetry and Prophecy (Ithaca 1990), C. focuses on a pre-collection version of the poem, which he suggests lacked the “brief pastoral apology” of 1–3 and “the emphatic—the rather too emphatic—reference to Pan and Arcadia near the end.” “To contemporary readers” of that poem, circulated during or soon after Pollio’s consulship, “the vexed question ‘Who is the boy?’ would not have occurred. They knew well enough who was meant: the expected son of Antony and Octavia and heir to... (shrink)

This paper finds its origin in a debate between Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and Octavio Paz (1914-1998) on what is central to the idea of eroticism. Bataille posits that violence and transgression are fundamental to eroticism, and without prohibition, eroticism would cease to exist. Paz, however, views violence and transgression as merely intersecting with, rather than being intrinsic to, eroticism. Paz places focus on imagination, and transforms eroticism from a transgressive, to a ritualistic act. Eroticism thus functions as an intermediary, turning (...) animal sexuality into ceremony and rite. In this paper, I argue that Paz and Bataille are not fundamentally at odds in their conceptualisation of eroticism. Instead, Paz redefines the locus of eroticism by subverting its unsettling aspects. His conception of eroticism gives precedence to the imagination, which in itself is an act of violation. Imagination transgresses normal life, but this transgression – the violation of the habitual world – also introduces a glimpse of the numinous that Paz associates with belongingness. The paper further explores eroticism, as this is perceived today, and argues that it ultimately eliminates the threshold marked by transgression. The rise of the contemporary pornographic society is marked by a loss of imagination and transcendence, which ultimately reduces the subject into a mere automaton that demands instant gratification. (shrink)

1. The Spanish Muhammadans. The romance of Hayy. Transmission of romance. Some aspects of Hayy's view of the world. Appendix: Extracts from the Quaker version of the romance [Keith's translation of Pocock's Latin version].

Erasmo fue un gran re- novador de la teología a partir del estu- dio de la Sagrada Escritura y de los Pa- dres de la Iglesia mediante su redditio ad fontes. Esta tarea tiene una fecha de partida —la de preparación fue al me- nos de quince años— el annus mirabilis 1516 en el que publica su primera edi- ción del Nuevo Testamento o Novum Instrumentum y su hercúlea edición en nueve tomos de las obras completas u Opera omnia de (...) san Jerónimo. Dos hi- tos en su proyecto bíblico y patrístico que continuará a lo largo de sus últimos veinte años con la edición de más de una docena de Padres tanto griegos como latinos. No menos impor- tante es su labor de traductor —al latín obviamente— de Padres griegos como Crisóstomo, Basilio y Orígenes —aquí estudiados bles bien por ser las primeras en el pa- norama humanístico del siglo xvi bien por la calidad de su latín, que han me- recido figurar —el caso de Juan Crisós- tomo— aún bajo su nombre en la Pa- trología griega de Migne. En este ar- tículo asistimos a la búsqueda apasio- nada por parte de Erasmo de manuscri- tos para editar o traducir, al intercam- bio epistolar con humanistas e impreso- res, y al trabajo bien hecho hasta los úl- timos días de sus vida en su querida ciudad de Basilea, la de los impresores Froben, con la edición de Orígenes que preparaba para la Feria del Libro de Fráncfort —en otoño de 1536— a la que él no llegó —falleció el 12 de ju- lio— pero sí sus dos gruesos volúme- nes, hermoso legado póstumo. (shrink)

Based on the analysis of primary documentation from interrogation manuals from both the United States and the countries of the South American cone -Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile-, as well as reports issued by the different countries, the aim of the article is to analyse the common patterns in the detention and torture process suffered by guerrillas and insurgents belonging to violent organisations. We also seek to highlight the importance of the US model and the mutual influences between the dictatorships (...) that developed in these Latin American countries in the 1960s and 1970s, and to draw a comparative line in the methodology used by the police and military forces. (shrink)

The Cold War, extended from the popularization of its name in 1947 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, functioned a bipolar order in which the White House and the Kremlin set the pace of events. In accordance with the decentralization of the axis of the shock [1], both superpowers chose to avoid direct confrontation and based their strategy on a kind of tactical movements carried out by third parties. The direct consequence was the creation of a breeding (...) ground in developing countries, victims of the competitiveness of both executives and in the specific case of Latin America, in a succession of political disorders that alternated the birth of revolutionary movements and the imposition of military dictatorships. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of AllusionMichael C. J. PutnamJeffrey Wills. Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xvi 1 506 pp. Cloth, $90.Wills offers the first fully systematic codification of repetition in Latin poetry. The introduction deals with the various means, such as morphological or lexical markings, word order, position and the like, that can help the reader distinguish allusion (...) in an act of repetition, and there follow several detailed examples of practice built on theory. But the main body of the book consists of a “grammar” of repetition.The first major segment is devoted to gemination, the repetition of identical forms within the same sense unit. This in turn is divided between a cataloguing of simple gemination, either in nominal form or of verbs and adverbs, and of expanded gemination, where one of the elements repeated is qualified with further detail. Four chapters are devoted to the next rubric, polyptoton and its elaborations, the repetitions of different forms within a simple clause. Then follow detailed discussions of the same phenomena but located across units, entitled “parallelism” where, as in the case of gemination, the forms are the same; and “modification,” akin to polyptoton in that the forms are different. The book concludes with three more general chapters devoted to a detailed analysis of the positional patterns repetition most regularly takes, of compounds as part of repetition, and to prosody and semantic variations in repetition.Such a bald summary does scant justice not only to the sheer quantity of material Wills gathers—a monumental accomplishment in itself—but also to the learning, intelligence and critical sophistication that characterize the undertaking. At the start Wills lays claim only to illustrating the process whereby allusion is generated through repetition, but throughout the whole enterprise, whether in theoretical discussions or in the practical criticism that emanates from his compendia, the results are equally valuable, for the investigation of individual poems and authors as well as for a deeper understanding of the development of Latin modes of imaginative expression, often as analyzed against their Greek intellectual background. If I were to focus on one single accomplishment beyond the mere careful, discrete amassing of material, it would be the stress not only on diction, that is, on the iteration of words, but on such categories [End Page 295] as form, syntax, and word placement in the creation of allusion through repetition. But the main value of this rich work will be as much in the detailed analyses of countless specific instances as in the manifold possibilities for referencing, and cross-referencing, across the history of classical poetry that now become readily available to its scholars.A good example of Wills’s methodology is his initial illustration (26–28), tracing how Virgil adopts and adapts Catullus’ repetitions of perfide, at the opening of Ariadne’s lament (64.132–33) and later (174), through the central reaches of Aeneid 4, from 305 to 421. But there are a myriad others of which I may single out only a few brief samples: on the connection of Cat. 62.20–24 and Vir. Ecl. 8.47–50 where chiasmus and parallel stanzaic structure reinforce repetition’s allusiveness (p. 181); on the repetition of acies at Aen. 10.360 in what Wills calls “battle polyptoton” (194); on the assumed communality of clashing horses (Aen. 11.614–15) and wrestling humans (Ov. Met. 6.243) that allusion from one text to another brings (199); on the connection between Aen. 3.156 and 10.670–72 and the resulting linkage of Aeneas and Turnus at moments of loss (267); on Virgil’s melding of Homeric syntax with Lucretian diction in the impressive phrase gravis graviterque (Aen. 5.447) (239); on the resulting combination of form as well as diction as Propertius borrows from both Ecl. 7.44 and Ecl. 6.55–58 to describe the cattle of Hercules (4.9.16–19) (101–2).From time to time Wills seems swept along by the fact of repetition to the neglect of counterevidence which would be useful to the reader in weighing the value of an exemplum. A case in point is the... (shrink)

Resumen El artículo se sitúa ante los nuevos contextos que los jóvenes viven en América Latina, especialmente, considerando las estructuras de corrupción ante lo cual los jóvenes son más vulnerables por su condición de búsqueda de espacios de desarrollo y crecimiento social. Esta situación, plantea nuevos retos para la Pastoral Juvenil latinoamericana teniendo en cuenta que la misma institución eclesial no ha estado ajena a situaciones de corrupción. A través de un análisis documental, desde las Escrituras, pasando por cuatro (...) de las Conferencias Episcopales Latinoamericanas, el artículo pretende desarrollar la tensión entre jóvenes, sociedad y pastoral juvenil, para finalmente presentar una propuesta que se fundamenta en un proceso juvenil de cinco décadas que transita desde una pastoral liberadora a una pastoral regeneradora, donde los sujetos jóvenes rotos buscan renacer en nuestra América Latina.s The article is set against the new contexts that young people live in Latin America, especially considering the structures of corruption lo which young people are more vulnerable because oj their search for spaces of development and social growth. This situation poses new challenges for Latin American Youth Ministry bearing in mind that the Church institution itself has not been unaware of situations of corruption. Through a documentary analysis, from the Scriptures, through four of the Latin American Episcopal Conferences, the article aims to develop the tension between young people, socieíy and youth pastoral, lo finally present a proposal thal is based on a youth process of five decades that It goes from a liberating pastoral to a regenerative pasloral, where the broken young subjects seek to be reborn in our Latin America. (shrink)

The elegy flared into existence, commanded the cultural stage for several decades, then went extinct. This book accounts for the swift rise and sudden decline of a genre whose life span was incredibly brief relative to its impact. Examining every major poet from Catullus to Ovid, Subjecting Verses presents the first comprehensive history of Latin erotic elegy since Georg Luck's. Paul Allen Miller harmoniously weds close readings of the poetry with insights from theoreticians as diverse as Jameson, Foucault, Lacan, (...) and Zizek. In welcome contrast to previous, thematic studies of elegy--efforts that have become bogged down in determining whether particular themes and poets were pro- or anti-Augustan--Miller offers a new, "symptomatic" history. He asks two obvious but rarely posed questions: what historical conditions were necessary to produce elegy, and what provoked its decline? Ultimately, he argues that elegiac poetry arose from a fundamental split in the nature of subjectivity that occurred in the late first century--a split symptomatic of the historical changes taking place at the time. Subjecting Verses is a major interpretive feat whose influence will reach across classics and literary studies. Linking the rise of elegy with changes in how Romans imagined themselves within a rapidly changing society, it offers a new model of literary theory that neither reduces the poems to a reflection of their context nor examines them in a vacuum. (shrink)

Ancient Poetry in general makes the claim of divine inspiration, thus deriving authority from a supernatural source. Accordingly, it bases the validity of its message on a foundation beyond argument, which has consequences both for the relationship between poets and their poems, as well as between poems and their readers. In Christian Late Antiquity the divine foundation of poetry had to be renegotiated, and as a consequence authorities and arguments had to be given a new role in the Christian poetic (...) discourse. This paper will analyse the various possibilities and their consequences, also looking at the issue in terms of how far pagan poetry already foreshadowed such a development. The poets taken into consideration include Commodianus, Prudentius, the Carmen adversus Marcionitas, Prosper of Aquitaine, and Venantius Fortunatus. (shrink)

Although it is now fifteen years since G. Williams' thorough-going criticism of B. Axelson's Unpoetische Wörter, his discussion has failed to elicit the adverse response which might have been expected in view of the widespread influence exerted by the earlier work. The reason for this may be that Axelson's theory is so widely accepted that any refutation thereof may be disregarded. Yet surely Williams was right to point to the dangers of total reliance on statistics and to the necessity of (...) considering the contexts in which words occur in Latin poetry. In this respect, he was not so much rejecting Axelson's work as pointing to its inadequacies: whereas Axelson would be content to label a word that occurs only rarely in poetry as ‘unpoetisch’, it is necessary, as Williams demonstrates, to take the further step of determining the effect that such a word has in a given context. This approach will be particularly helpful, for example, in the case of parvulus at Virg. Aen. 4.328, where the heightened pathos achieved by Virgil's use of a diminutive is better appreciated by the reader who is aware of the scarcity of diminutive adjectives in poetry and in epic above all. To recognise parvulus as an ‘unpoetic word’, with Axelson, is the essential first step, but we should proceed a stage further to inquire what effect was intended by the employment of a form not normally found in elevated poetry. Of greater importance is Williams' rejection of the ‘hierarchy of genres’ theory, taken for granted by Axelson, that is, that Latin poetry may be divided into a number of higher- or lower-ranking genres and that the more elevated a genre the less unpoetic vocabulary it is liable to employ. (shrink)

From the scholarly activity of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. stem several collections of scholia to the poems of Virgil, most of which make copious reference to prose and verse composed in Latin before Virgil's time. The authors of these scholia were the last of a long line of commentators whose labours began soon after Virgil's death. Just as Virgil walked in the tracks of Theocritus, Hesiod, Aratus, Nicander, Homer, and Apollonius, so did his students in the tracks (...) of the great Alexandrian expositors of the Greek poets. They sought to explain Virgil not only through Virgil himself, but also through the poets and prose writers, Greek and Latin, whom they imagined Virgil to have read. Thus we have scholia citing early republican literature in order to parallel words uncommon in or absent from the fourth-century classical syllabus, as well as unclassical usages, inflections, and constructions; in order to demonstrate ‘imitations’ on the part of Virgil; and in order to elucidate the structure of episodes of the three poems where Virgil appears to depart from the most commonly known versions of myth and history. Argument concerning the text or interpretation of a disputed passage is frequently based on appeal to the usage of Virgil's Latin predecessors. (shrink)

Although many historians of science acknowledge the extent to which Greek and Roman ideals framed eighteenth-century thought, many classical references in the texts they study remain obscure. Poems played an important role not only in spreading ideas about natural philosophy, but also in changing people’s perceptions of its value; they contributed to Newton’s swelling reputation as an English hero. By writing about Latin poetry, we focus on the intersection of two literary genres that were significant for eighteenth-century natural philosophy, (...) but seem alien to modern science. We classify Augustan Latinate scientific poetry by considering the audiences for whom the poems were intended. We distinguish three broad categories. One type of poetry was circulated amongst gentlemanly scholars. A second group comprised poetry written specifically to promote or criticise Newton and his books, particularly the Principia. After Newton’s death, a third type of poetry became increasingly significant, included in collections of poems rather than in texts of natural philosophy. Overall, we show how the classical past was vital for creating the scientific future.Author Keywords: Isaac Newton; Neo-Latin; Lucretius; Oxford and Cambridge verse; Edmond Halley; Queen Caroline. (shrink)

The employment of mythological language and imagery by an Epicurean poet - an adherent of a system not only materialist, but overtly hostile to myth and poetry - is highly paradoxical. This apparent contradiction has often been ascribed to a conflict in the poet between reason and intellect, or to a desire to enliven his philosophical material with mythological digressions. This book attempts to provide a more positive assessment of Lucretius' aims and methodology by considering the poet's attitude to myth, (...) and the role which it plays in the De Rerum Natura, against the background of earlier and contemporary views. The author suggests that Lucretius was not only aware of the tension between his two roles as philosopher and poet, but attempted to resolve it by developing his own, Epicurean poetic, together with a bold and innovative theory of the origins and meaning of myth. (shrink)

Ce bouquet d’articles est un cadeau offert à Jenny Strauss Clay par de « vieux amis » qui connaissent aussi bien son travail que sa personne. Les thèmes choisis pour honorer celle qui fut professeure à l’Université de Virginie à Charlottesville, créent un jeu de miroir avec les intérêts scientifiques qu’elle a déployés tout au long d’une riche carrière d’enseignante et de chercheuse : les dieux et les mortels, la poésie, qu’elle soit grecque ou latine. Au-delà de réflexions personnelles (la (...) t... (shrink)