Los objetivos principales de este trabajo son, por una parte, plantear una propuesta metodológica para el estudio del cambio lingüístico en árabe clásico y, por otra, explorar las particularidades de los procesos de gramaticalización y el cambio lingüístico en esta lengua semítica. Para ello, hemos analizado los procesos de cambio y gramaticalización experimentados por la partícula ḥattā (‘hasta’, ‘incluso’) en árabe clásico desde el siglo VII hasta el XX. Se han analizado 731 ejemplos de ḥattā extraídos de uno de los (...) más completos corpus históricos del árabe, el HADC, todavía inédito. El estudio ha tenido en cuenta 30 variables diferentes que se han recogido en fichas recopiladas en una base de datos relacional. Los resultados se han organizado en un esquema conceptual que presenta la vinculación semántica de cada uno de los cinco valores de ḥattā así como las trayectorias evolutivas de esta partícula en árabe clásico. Las conclusiones más relevantes son que, por descontado, sí hay cambio lingüístico en árabe clásico, si bien sus trayectorias evolutivas se ven constreñidas tanto por la presión de la norma coránica como por su naturaleza de lengua esencialmente escrita. Los resultados también revelan que existe una marcada estratificación, persistencia y divergencia en los procesos y apuntan, a su vez, la relevancia de incluir variables como el origen del autor o los tipos de texto cuando se analiza el cambio lingüístico. (shrink)

The present article inquires into the uses of Medea’s tragedy as a representation of political sedition in the XVII century, especially in Hobbes’ works who introduces the myth with few variations three times in his work. We are interested in the semantic shifts in the use of a tragedy that, for multiple reasons –to which we will later return– works as an epochal catalyzer of the political and moral dangers with which regicide is symbolically burdened. This constant role, identifiable (...) in the versions of Euripides, Seneca, and Corneille, combines differently -through history- the pairing of seduction and sedition that we try to reconstruct as a convergent element of the tragic vision of politics that runs through Hobbes work. Finally, we explore how classic tragedy is used by Bramhall in his debate with Hobbes, highlighting the connection between tragic and heretical readings of the philosopher. (shrink)

No speech in Attic tragedy has made a stronger impression on later generations than Medea's farewell to her children. Four changes of mind and two displays of maternal affection lay bare the depths of a tortured soul; ‘there, in a short space, arelove and hatred, firmness and hesitation, fierce joy and unfathomable sorrow’.

En este artículo, nos preguntamos si es pertinente un análisis del personaje de Medea de Eurípides, y más concretamente, de su filicidio, a la luz de la doctrina aristotélica de la acción. Resulta dudoso, y quizás equívoco, hablar de "responsabilidad" (en sentido aristotélico) en el caso de la heroína, ya que sus motivaciones, como las de todo héroe trágico, tienen un doble signo: enfrentado a una ἀνάγκη superior, también desea lo que está forzado a hacer. Además, Medea no (...) es una mujer común: es un personaje ontológicamente complejo que participa, más de lo que frecuentemente se ha enfatizado, del plano divino. In this article we wonder if it is pertinent to analyse the character of Euripides' Medea and, more precisely, her filicide, in the light of Aristotle's doctrine of action. With regard to the heroine, it is doubtful and perhaps confusing to talk about "responsibility" (in Aristotelian terms) because her motivations, as all tragic heroes', are two-sided: faced to a superior ἀνάγκη he wants what he is forced to do as well. In addition, Medea is not an ordinary woman: she is an ontologically complex character that has a share in the divine level, a share which is more crucial than what has usually been emphasized. (shrink)

So Diggle's recent text and apparatus criticus; so too its predecessor in the Oxford series . Advocates of πντα δ' ξελον βον have, however, been in a considerable majority, and include Porson, Elmsley, Bothe, Weil, Wecklein, Nauck, Paley, Verrall, Meridier, and, more recently, Schiassi and Ebener . But Page's objection cannot be lightly dismissed: ‘With βον here, σο must be understood; and the ellipse seems intolerable.’ To this I would add what appears to have been largely disregarded, namely that the (...) contextual and thematic significance of δμον is an even stronger argument in its favour. Medea is πολις , having lost not only her home in Colchis but also her new home in Corinth . In a sense the fate cruelly forced upon the daughters of Pelias by Medea is now visited upon Medea herself, who finds herself deserted and alone . This isolation brings with it the realization that to those to whom she should be ίλη she is now χθρ , while those whom she should be able to regard as λoι are now χθρ . Her response? As Medea had done in Iolcus, so δμον τε πντα συγχασʼ ονος | ξετιτι γαας κτλ. (shrink)

The topic of this essay is akrasia in its most paradoxical kind, as it appears to us in the emblem of Medea. The argument starts with the claim that the problem with akrasia is especially a problem of rational potentiality: to understand it philosophically, we are forced to embrace the idea that its possibility is immanent to the rational capacity of action. By discussing elements of Plato's, Aristotle's, and Davidson's explanations of practical irrationality, the argument proceeds to demonstrate that (...) the reasons a practical capacity provides exist as „forces,“ that rational forces are structurally in excess with respect to their normative statuses, and that Medea is the mythical figure par excellence of such an immanent excess of rational agency. On account of these insights, we can begin to understand that akrasia is not only a kind of failure, or incapacity, but entails the very possibility of a „metamorphosis“ of the subject. (shrink)

This article expands upon the range of options and methods of some of my earlier studies on Euripides and the Old Testament. These studies have sought to discover similar linguistic features and concepts in the texts of Euripides and the Old Testament, and to discuss how Euripidean tragedies can be read as Greek responses to Hebrew anthropological beliefs, more specifically as poetic-philosophical approaches to the anthropo-theological narratives of Genesis 2–4 and related biblical texts. These biblical texts probably transmitted through improvised (...) oral or written Greek translations preceding the Septuagint (LXX), reorganise and transform the meaning of Hebrew expressions. This article presents the basic problems and aspects of a cultural-critical and comparative analysis and illustrates them with shared motifs from Medea, one of the eight Euripidean tragedies named after a female protagonist, and the Old Testament, thus expanding the boundaries of the traditional historic-critical exegesis.Contribution: The article contributes to the investigation of the background of the Septuagint from a cultural critical perspective with special reference to the Euripidean tragedies. (shrink)

After an opening of the elegiac epistle which recalls the Euripidean-Ennian Medea-prologue, Ovid's heroine thus states her purpose : est aliqua ingrato meritum exprobrare voluptas; hac fruar, haec de te gaudia sola feram.

Much has been written about the problematic passage towards the end of the Medea prologue-speech, in which the Nurse expresses fear concerning the intention of her mistress; problematic both in itself, especially as to the interpretation of lines 40–2, and in relation to lines 379–80, which are almost the same as 40–1; a most suspicious circumstance.

This essay reads The Argonauts against a preceding literature of queer and trans parenting, specifically by women of colour, to account for absences and evasions in Maggie Nelson's relation to queer feminist literary history. Resituating her quotation about “kinship systems” from Judith Butler into Butler's discussion of house mothers in ball culture, it calls attention to the erasure of queer racialized embodiment and intellection from Nelson's account, emblematized by Cherríe Moraga's Medea and – as embodied site of “shit and (...) labor” – the perineum, figuring the work of connection. (shrink)

Modern interpretation tends to take E. Med. 639, ‘driving from the senses over a second bed’ , found within the petition of the chorus that ‘dread Cypris never…inflict angry arguments and insatiate quarrels’ , as referring to a second bed that might allure these women themselves rather than one that might allure their husbands. None the less, the latter interpretation seems to be recommended by both the contents and the context of the line; it is also consistent with Euripidean idiom. (...) As to the context, v. 639 is found in the second stasimon. An examination of the attitude of the chorus toward Medea up to this point may guide us towards a fuller understanding of the phrase. In her opening speech in the first episode Medea, who was betrayed by the husband for whom she left family and country , persuades the already sympathetic chorus to side with her as underprivileged women in a world dominated by egocentric men . In the first pair of strophes of the following stasimon they accept Medea's division of human beings into ‘the female stock’ and ‘the race of males’ and sing of male perfidy and discrimination against women. They stress their own personal involvement by replacing ‘women’ with ‘I’ and ‘we’ in five of the seven references to the second sex. (shrink)

If, as I propose, Hecuba represents fate and Medea contingency, taken together they constitute as well as reveal the tragic within the tension between the ontological and empirical status of man as it is embodied in the clash between necessity and freedom. Viewing this tension within the perspective of the unconditional status of the love of the mother, I will show how both narratives belong to the realm of possibilities and cause, what Ricoeur calls “suffering for the sake of (...) understanding”. I will argue that the phenomenon of the unconditional love of the mother is in itself tragic and open to both the appearance of both Medea and Hecuba. (shrink)

La figura de Medea, mujer y extranjera, es el hilo conductor que trata de ofrecer un análisis sobre la pasión de la ira desde la tradición clásica, que la rechaza como pasión destructiva, hasta la apropiación realizada por el feminismo negro norteamericano de Lorde. Ambas iras tendrán algo en común: Audre Lorde hablará de la rabia por la misoginia, homofobia y racismo sufrido y en Medea habrá ira por la misoginia y xenofobia de la época. Para ello en (...) primer lugar el artículo analiza el vocabulario relacionado con la cólera y la ira tanto en griego y en latín. A partir de ahí desarrollan dos hilos. En el primero se ofrece la lectura tradicional del mito de la Medea infanticida que es la que se encuentra en la tragedia de Séneca y que se relacionada con su tratado filosófico _Sobre la ira_. De ese modo se convierte a Medea en _exemplum e contrario_ y contraimagen del sabio estoico. En el segundo se recupera la otra tradición del mito según la cual Medea no fue la que mató a sus hijos sino los corintios. Este segundo hilo del enfoque clásico de la ira para mostrar su validez como herramienta de cambio. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:...

The above is the text of Medea 922–33 and a selection of the critical apparatus from the Oxford text edited by J. Diggle. In his discussion of the variant readings at 926 Diggle leaves open the choice between θήσομαι and θήσω. It seems to me worth noticing that an old proposal of Theodor Ladewig to transpose 926–8 and 929–31, which has in any case much to commend it, has a bearing on the solution of this problem.

In his new text of Euripides James Diggle shows that he has the courage of his convictions: he deletes the last twenty-five lines of Medea's great monologue. He is to be applauded for following ratio et res ipsa where it leads him and being undaunted by the sight of so much blood. No editor of Euripides before him, as far as I am aware, has ever been courageous enough to put these lines in square brackets, although their deletion had (...) been a subject of discussion for exactly one hundred years at the time Diggle's edition appeared. But though Diggle is to be praised for his courage in following reason, I believe he is mistaken. The arguments for excision are far from negligible, and defenders of the passage show a regrettable tendency to underestimate their force. But while I shall give these objections as much weight as any of those who urge deletion, I shall argue that there is a much more economical way of dealing with them than large-scale amputation. I shall accordingly pay close attention to the problems for which excision is the proposed solution, with inevitable repetition of earlier scholars' arguments. Since I have myself recommended athetesis of long passages on several occasions, I do not think I will be regarded as insufficiently alive to the possibility of interpolation or overly reluctant to wield the knife. In this instance, however, there are strong stylistic grounds for believing in the genuineness of most of the passage in question. (shrink)

The story of Medea has exerted a powerful influence on creative artists since the time of Euripides. It is a tale that has been told in many ways and in several genres. This article offers a discussion of Christa Wolf's 1996 novel, Medea.Stimmen (Medea. Voices), a modern retelling through the voices, and conflicting perspectives, of the major characters involved with Medea, including Jason, Agameda, Akamas, Leukon, Glauce and Medea herself.Medea's role within feminist literary reception (...) and women's literature cannot be overlooked because of the crucial archetype she represents. One task of Feminist criticism has been to expose, deconstruct and rectify prevalent male (mis) interpretations of female archetypes, such as Medea, Medusa and others, and the patriarchal distortions they introduced through 3 000 years of male literature. In the patriarchal realm, Medea represents the Witch, the black Sorceress, and the archetype of the Negative Mother. These negative interpretations or archetypes may be attributed to misogynist perceptions of Medea as the vilest of women, because she committed the most despicable of all crimes — killing her children, the patriarchy's heirs — to take revenge on Jason, the husband who abandons her in Corinth (her place of exile) to marry Glauce, King Creon of Corinth's daughter, for reasons of political expedience.As a writer with her roots in the former East-German regime, Wolf perceives the Medea story as an account of a woman with both extraordinary powers and human shortcomings, who is misunderstood by the Colchians and the Corinthians alike. Wolf explores the distorted patriarchal motives for their loathing of Medea and Medea's ultimate powerlessness to do anything more than accept her tragic destiny. In doing so, Wolf does not attempt to manipulate the Medea story to suit the one-sidedness of some more radical feminist ideologies. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the presumed existence of two versions of Medea and Heracles in the Euripidean corpus that circulated in antiquity. After a brief review of the main papyrological evidence, namely P.Oxy. LXXVI 5093 for the Medea and P.Hibeh II 179 for the Heracles, I discuss the implications of adding another Medea and another Heracles to the Euripidean corpus in the light of the extant ancient testimonies on the number of works in Euripides’ oeuvre. Moreover, I (...) examine the clues provided by the headings of the hypotheses of the extant Medea and the extant Heracles as preserved in P.IFAO inv. PSP 248 and P.Oxy. LXXXI 5284. On these grounds, I argue that the supposed evidence for the existence of two distinct Medea and two distinct Heracles plays should not be interpreted as evidence of double authorial versions. (shrink)

The text and apparatus below are Diggle's. At the end of the article I give, for the sake of the curious, an expanded version, for 11ff., of Wecklein's ‘Appendix coniecturas minus probabiles continens’, with references where they are known to me.

I try to show that Seneca’s Medea provides us with two elements -which, as far as I am aware, have not received proper attention- that complement his approach to the phenomenon of anger, and which can improve our understanding of the Stoic psychology of action defended in De ira. The first element is linked to the question of whether the angry person is responsive to reasons or not; the second one concerns the question of indifference, tolerance and forgiveness, and (...) addresses the issue of Medea's inability to conceive of a more appropriate or desirable reaction to Jason’s offense than anger. (shrink)

Euripides, Medea 11–13 :12 πολιτν codd. et Σbv; πολίταις V3, sicut coni. Barnes 13 ατ Sakorrphos; ατή codd. et gE et Stob. 4.23.30In his recent discussion of this passage , Diggle has convincingly argued for πολίταις and ατ, the latter of which he places in his new Oxford text, but recognises that υγ remains highly problematic : ‘The truth, I think, is still to seek’. It is to this last difficulty that I should like to suggest a solution.The problems (...) of υγ are syntactical, as Diggle clearly demonstrates : ‘With which verb is υγ to be constructed?’ Of these νδάνουσα is more likely for position, ίκετο for sense; but the former construction produces an obscurity, the latter an unacceptable hyperbaton. Another complicating element is the juxtaposition υγ πολιτν. it is clearly significant, and by its intervention appears to prevent taking υγ as π κοινο with both verbs, the third possible construction.As a solution I should like to revive a forgotten conjecture of Pierson's, made in his Verisimilia . His υγς πολίταις appears both to solve all the syntactical problems and to give appropriate point to the juxtaposition of ‘exile’ and ‘citizen’. υγάς would then go with νδάνουσα and bear a concessive sense: ‘pleasing, though an exile, the citizens to whose land she came’, a nuance found already in Wecklein's paraphrase of his text υγ πολιτν. ‘Sie gefällt denen, in deren Land sie gekommen ist, obwohl sie die Bürgerschaft als eine fremde, landesflüchtige Person gegenübersteht’. This contrast between citizen and exile and the necessity for the latter to please the former are naturally important themes in the dramatic situation of the Medea — cf. Medea's words at 222 χρ δ ξένον μν κάρτα προσχωρεν πόλει, with Page's note. (shrink)

Uma leitura do verso 179 da Medeia de Sêneca sob o enfoque processual do Direito Romano, vinculado às diversas disposições legais relativas às actiones noxalis , permite o alargamento da compreensão do estatuto da protagonista trágica. Nessa nova possibilidade tradutória, Medeia adquiriu, de modo claro, a feição de injustiçada, com o realce da perfídia de Jasão e da tirania de Creonte. Por outro lado, essa leitura processual do texto literário senequiano ainda permite a percepção da prática da contaminatio efetuada pelo (...) autor, que atualizou a narrativa grega para a realidade latina por meio de sua adequação jurídica à realidade romana. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 469-471 [Access article in PDF] Warner and Shaw's Medea Ruth Scodel What should we, as classicists, want from contemporary productions of ancient dramas? As scholars, we tend to be historicists: whether or not we locate the basis for interpretation in an author, we usually locate it in the original context, if only because that is our expertise and the basis for our (...) authority. The study of tragedy has in recent years been dominated by new historicism, which places the plays firmly within the discursive world of fifth-century Athens. Typically, however, the more embedded the plays are in their own cultural discourse, the less immediately they speak within ours. Simultaneously, reception studies have flowered but do not provide much help in thinking about how our scholarly reception might or should interact with the theater. What do we hope productions will offer the broader public? What do we hope to learn from them for ourselves?A recent high-profile production of Medea invites such questions. 1 Warner and Shaw's Medea is filtered not through new historicism or even old historicism but through the miseries of contemporary divorce. (In a panel discussion at the University of Michigan, Shaw told anecdotes of divorcing couples who chopped up antique beds or gave away their spouse's wine cellars.) Generally favorably received by critics and audiences, it was severely criticized by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books. He calls it "vulgar, noisy, and uncomprehending" for its focus on the personal rather on the political. 2 Insisting that tragic women do not represent real women (or not just real women) but are "rather symbolic entities representing everything 'other' to that smoothly coherent citizen identity," Mendelsohn argues that "Warner's Euripides fails because it mistakes 'our' women for Euripides' women." As a [End Page 469] historicist, he objects that a production that ignores the political in the play thereby reduces it to domestic melodrama.There are at least two questions here. Whatever else Euripides' women were, Aristophanes shows plainly that members of the original audience thought they were representatives of real women. This Medea assumes that Euripides' women are near enough to our women. That is an acceptable working assumption. More troublesome is the other side of Mendelsohn's objection: that this production develops only one aspect of a complex play and is therefore reductive. That is undeniably true. Indeed, the reading of Euripides behind this production is in some ways perverse. Inevitably, as a scholar I feel troubled at having it offered to an audience as Euripides ("a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer").And yet: the set (with the pool of water that has become so frequent in recent theater) is littered with concrete blocks, as if Jason and Medea were in the middle of a remodeling project when Jason left. We classicists are used to prior knowledge of our plays, but this production fights our tendency to see tragedy as enacting the already known. Just as the set is not finished, Medea is uncertain, and her ignorance of what she is going to do allows even the professional to indulge in the illusion of not knowing the outcome. (Whether or not Euripides invented the murder of the children, the original audience did not know exactly what would happen.) The first half is very funny. Medea herself seems intensely aware that there is something fundamentally ridiculous about passion and revenge. Shaw delivers lines, especially gnomes, with ironic distance, as if they were already clichés and she were already tired of them. Hence her Medea is not the one familiar to Classicists, the adherent of a typical male heroic code, but rather a woman who says these things because they are available, exhausted by the banality of her own suffering. Her self-consciousness is reminiscent of Seneca's Medea; however, she is not working towards a self that already exists, but hunting for an acceptable role to play. Educated moderns surely often have this experience of feeling trapped in situations where our emotions... (shrink)

Since it is only natural that lovers of a great poet's work should seek to defend their favourite from the charge of plagiarism, most of the scholars who have discussed the problem of the relationship between the Medeas of Neophron and Euripides have, whether consciously or unconsciously, approached their task in no very impartial spirit. Yet the prejudice against acknowledging Euripides' indebtedness to his predecessor is an unreasonable one, for a great tragedy or a great work of art of any (...) kind must be aesthetically judged without regard to its forerunners. For instance, we do not think any the worse of Antony and Cleopatra or of its author when we notice that ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne’, etc., and many other fine passages in that play are taken almost verbatim from Sir Thomas North. If we bear in mind then that whatever the result of our inquiry it will not affect adversely the reputation of Euripides' great work, we cannot fail to be impressed by the tenuous nature of the arguments by which scholars have convinced themselves of the chronological priority of Euripides' Medea as against Neophron's. (shrink)